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The usefulness of the useless / Nuccio Ordine ; translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwen.

by Ordine, Nuccio, 1958- author.

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Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : Paul Dry Books, Inc., 2017.

176 pages ; 18 cm

First Paul Dry books edition.

Machine generated contents note: pt. ONE Useful Uselessness of Literature -- 1. "He who acquires not, exists not" -- 2. Knowledge without profit is useless! -- 3. What's water? An anecdote from David Foster Wallace -- 4. Colonel Buendia's little gold fish -- 5. Dante and Petrarch: literature should not be subservient to profit -- 6. Literature of utopia and golden chamber pots -- 7. Jim Hawkins: treasure hunter or numismatist? -- 8. Merchant of Venice: the pound of flesh, the Kingdom of Belmont, and the hermeneutics of Socrates -- 9. Aristotle: learning has no practical usefulness -- 10. Pure theorist or philosopher-king? Plato's contradictions -- 11. Kant: the pleasure of beauty is disinterested -- 12. Ovid: nothing is more useful than the useless arts -- 13. Montaigne: "nothing is useless," "not even uselessness itself" -- 14. Leopardi the flaneur: the choice of the useless against the utilitarianism of a "proud and foolish age" -- 15. Theophile Gautier: "what is useful is ugly" as "the jakes" -- 16. Baudelaire: a useful man is a squalid one -- 17. John Locke against poetry -- 18. Boccaccio: "bread" and poetry -- 19. Garcia Lorca: it is unwise to live without the madness of poetry -- 20. Madness of Don Quixote, the hero of the useless and the gratuitous -- 21. Facts of Coketown: Dickens's criticism of utilitarianism -- 22. Heidegger: it is hard to understand the useless -- 23. Uselessness and the essence of life: Zhuang-zi and Kakuzo Okakura -- 24. Eugene Ionesco: the useful is a useless burden -- 25. Italo Calvino: the gratuitous is revealed to be essential -- 26. Emil Cioran and Socrates' flute -- pt. TWO University as Company, the Student as Client -- 1. Disengagement of the state -- 2. Student as client -- 3. Universities as companies and teachers as bureaucrats -- 4. Hugo: the crisis can be beaten not by cutting the culture budget but by doubling it -- 5. Tocqueville: "easy beauties" and the perils of commercial democracies -- 6. Herzen: timeless merchants -- 7. Bataille: the limits of utility and the vitality of the superfluous -- 8. Against the professionalizing university: John Henry Newman -- 9. What is the use of dead languages? John Locke and Antonio Gramsci -- 10. Planned disappearance of the classics -- 11. Encounter with a classic can change your life -- 12. Libraries at risk: the sensational case of the Warburg Institute -- 13. Disappearance of historic bookstores -- 14. Unexpected utility of the useless sciences -- 15. What do you get from a theorem? From Euclid to Archimedes -- 16. Poincare: "science does not study nature" to look for "utility" -- 17. "Knowledge is an asset that can be transmitted without becoming poor" -- pt. THREE Possession Kills: Dignitas Hominis, Love, Truth -- 1. Voice of the classics -- 2. Dignitas hominis: the illusion of wealth and the prostitution of knowledge -- 3. Loving in order to possess is the death of love -- 4. Possession of truth is the death of truth.

Translated from the Italian.

Available Copies:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : Paul Dry Books, Inc., 2017.

Horizon Information Portal 3.25_9807

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