Theory in the Post Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons

Theory in the Post Era brings together the work and perspectives of a group of Romanian theorists who discuss the morphings of contemporary theory in what the editors call the post era. Since the Cold War’s end and especially in the third millennium, theorists have been exploring the aftermath - and sometimes just the after - of whole paradigms, the crisis or passing of anthropocentrism, the twilight of an entire ontological and cultural condition, as well as the corresponding rise of an antagonist model, of an anti,
meta, or neo alternative, with examples ranging from posthumanism and post-postmodernism to post-aesthetics,
postanalog interpretation or digicriticism,
post-presentism,
post-memory,
post- or neo-critique, and so forth.

It is no coincidence, the contributors to this volume argue, that this post moment is also a time when theory is practiced as a world genre. If theory has always been a worlded enterprise, a quintessentially communal, cross-cultural and international project, this is truer at present than ever. Perhaps more than other humanist constituencies, today’s theorists work and belong in a theory commons that is transnational if still uneven economically, politically, and otherwise. Theory in the Post Era reports the results of Romanian theory experiments that join efforts made in other places to foster a theory for the post age.