Ivory Towers

In this book, Vaskos revisits the modern dream of an autonomous heroic subject that can rise to band with others into a unified people as a downfall. Exercising the 19th-century Baudelairian notion of flanerie -“to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world”- in this age of displacements, Vaskos inhabits the world through wasteful paths and naked bodies; journeying from the beaches of Cascais to Dresden’s Grimes Gewolbe (Green Vault) treasury, Vaskos creates a new, complex cartography of reterritorialization; one where illusion is a revolutionary road to another sociality that is already and always present. (From the publisher)