This important book explores the condition of modernity - alienation, melancholy, nostalgia - through the works of writers and philosophers, and with particular reference to the social and aesthetic philosophy of Walter Benjamin. Christine Buci-Glucksmann addresses modernity through the notion of the other, and shows how the feminine is used as one of the main sources of allegorical interpretation, standing for the miraculous, the utopian, the dangerous and the androgynous.

The author also examines Baudelaire's haunting image of the city and its profound effect on conceptions of modernity. She goes on to consider how such influential figures as Nietzsche, Adorno, Musil, Barthes and Lacan constitute a baroque paradigm, united by their allegorical style, their conflation of aesthetics with ethics and their subject matter - death, catastrophe, sexuality, myth, the female.

In her exegesis of these fundamental themes Buci-Glucksmann proposes an epistemology beyond postmodernism.

This extraordinary exposition of a baroque reason for modernity sheds new light on a number of themes central to modern social theory: the critique of instrumental rationality; the political crisis of socialism; the loss of community and of innocence since the growth of industrialization; and the impact of relativism on realist theories of knowledge. This powerful book is essential reading for all those interested in cultural, social, feminist and literary theory and philosophy and urban studies.

This edition was translated by Patrick Camiller and includes an Introduction by Bryan S. Turner, Deakin University, Australia.