Dark Academe: Capitalism, Theory, and the Death Drive in Higher Education Hardback - 2024

"It has become difficult to separate the attack on higher education from a frontal attack on democracy itself. Jeffrey Di Leo takes up this theme with unparalleled insight while providing a broad and brilliant context and theoretical framework for understanding and addressing it. And he does so with a prose that is lyrical, poetic, and engagingly disarming. Dark Academe is a brilliant and urgent book that could not appear at a more important time in our history. Every educator, student, cultural worker, and anyone concerned about the fate of the academy in dark times should read this book."

--Henry A. Giroux, Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy, McMaster University, Canada

This book argues that a critical understanding of dark academe is vital to the futures of democracy and education. Drawing upon contemporary literary and cultural theory, particularly, affect theory, queer epistemology, and critical race theory as well as critiques of capitalism and accounts of the death drive, it builds a case for identifying dark academe as anything that prohibits the pursuit of democratic education and critical citizenship. It also argues that dark times require a reassessment of the ways theory and knowledge are approached in the humanities. This is necessary if the aim is to truly understand the darkness at the heart of the higher education today. Dark academe works to negate education and learning by continuously telling us that the quest for knowledge is empty, and the pursuit of critique is blind. In this educational darkness, the death drive of neoliberal academe becomes a force that works against intellectual transformation and the deepening of critical sights.

Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria, USA. His books include Corporate Humanities in Higher Education: Moving Beyond the Neoliberal Academy (2014), The New Public Intellectual: Politics, Theory, and the Public Space (2016, co-edited with Peter Hitchcock), Higher Education under Late Capitalism: Identity, Conduct, and the Neoliberal Condition (2017), and Catastrophe and Higher Education: Neoliberalism, Theory, and the Future of the Humanities (2020).