This essay offers up a provocative new theoretical tack on the topic area of the dialectic of capital, the dialectic of cruelty, and the dialectic of power and of their intricate and self-differential inter-relationships and forms of being, under late capitalism, as delineated in selected narratives of two major Occidental novelists, Henry James and his key paper friend, Honore de Balzac; it does so from a genuinely inter-disciplinary perspective that draws from heterogeneous waves of critical theory broadly conceived, having thus something to say to contemporary culture both of general and of academic interest alike. Key concepts elucidated and fleshed out in the work for the first time in a volume-length and systematic way in the study of the humanities, in order to get the show on the road, include the theoretical notions and arguments of true power and capital as 'un-power', 'non-power', 'un-capital', and 'non-capital'; other suchlike examples punctuate the essay that attempt to meet precise theoretical and practical requirements for a twenty-first century increasingly submitted to the logic of capitalist power. The present study also thus offers new ways of thinking about the enormous and age-long subject of big power and capital that would, in the final tally, want to align itself with such prophetic traditions of thought as what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, for example, have termed 'the New Earth'.
About the Author: Erik Sherman Roraback teaches critical theory, international cinema, James Joyce and U.S. literature in Charles University (est. 1348) and in F.A.M.U. (The Academy of Performing Arts, Film and TV School) at Prague. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford (D.Phil.) and from Pomona College (B.A.) and has been Visiting Professor at the Universite de Provence. He has published scholarly articles on such subjects as Michelangelo Antonioni and Spinoza, Orson Welles's Mr. Arkadin/Confidential Report, buildings of St. Petersburg, Inter-cultural Studies, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Deleuze and Leibniz, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Modernity and the Baroque, Jean-Luc Nancy and Community, the 120-year Czech and Slovak reception of Henry James, Thomas Pynchon, and on U.S. Literature in scholarly journals such as Pynchon Notes and in scholarly presses such as The Continuum Publishing Company. The author has also given invited lectures at The Evergreen State College, Kansas State University, University College-Cork, Universitat Konstanz, University of Oxford and Universitat Wien.