The Haunted Present

The grand finale to Wolfram Eilenberger’s epic narrative of philosophy in the twentieth century, The Haunted Present follows the footsteps of Theodor W. Adorno, Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, and Paul K. Feyerabend, to reveal the true fault lines of our era

It is the winter 1949: Theodor W. Adorno returns from the USA to Frankfurt, a city devastated by bombing; Paul K. Feyerabend arrives back in Vienna, disabled and suffering from chronic pain, having been shot in the final months of the war; the child prodigy Susan Sontag visits Thomas Mann in Los Angeles; and, a young Michel Foucault attempts suicide, again, in Paris. The aftermath of the Second World War calls for the world to be remade, and this quartet of wildly independent and original thinkers are seeking ways into a new philosophy. Over the coming decades, they will revolutionize how we think about society, culture, and science.

Eilenberger presents readers once again with a narrative tour de force that, through the example of four courageous minds, testifies to the power of philosophy to escape the constraints of the present. Critical theory, aesthetic rebellion, scientific skepticism, and political disillusionment collided violently in the wake of the war to shape our fractious, hyper-mediated reality today. Have the ideals of the Enlightenment been lost forever? Do science, art, and democracy still hold any promise? Or, has the time come to say goodbye to the very idea of humanity? 

Shifting and jumping mercurially from Frankfurt to Paris, London to Berkeley and New York to take in a kaleidoscopic world seething with change, Eilenberger’s daring narrative unmasks the competing intellectual impulses that emerged to produce our era of crisis.