"This book is the first examination of the cliché as a philosophical concept. Challenging the idea that clichés are lazy or spurious opposites to genuine thinking, it instead locates them as a dynamic and contestable boundary between 'thought' and 'non-thought'"--.

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: Facing Clichés
  • The Boy with the Cliché on His Face
  • The Big Idea
  • Mere Typologies
  • Facing the Front
  • Notes
• Chapter 1: The Meaning of Clichés
  • Sites of Displacement
  • The Anti-Philosophy of the Cliché
  • The Case of the Commonplace
  • Into the Archive
  • Undead Spaces
  • Notes
• Chapter 2: Dead Spaces: Arendt, Orwell and the Morbidity of Political Clichés
  • Arendt: Banality, Evil and Aesthetics
  • Orwell: Making Language Matter
  • Eichmann’s Last Cliché
  • ‘The Process Is Reversible’
  • The Undead Cliché
  • Notes
• Chapter 3: Cynical Modernity from Nietzsche to Sloterdijk
  • A History of Forgetting
  • The Egyptian Spectacle
  • Nietzsche’s Clichés
  • Repetition Reconsidered
  • Cynical Reason
  • Weaponizing Banality
  • Notes
• Chapter 4: Saying It with Flowers: Jean Paulhan’s Inappropriate Metaphors
  • Saying It with Flowers
  • Civic Duties
  • Metaphor and Usury
  • Radical Sacrifice
  • Lest We Forget…
  • Notes
• Chapter 5: The Shock of the Same: Boris Groys and the Metanoia of the Cliché 
  • On the New
  • Archival Logic and the Hegemony of Critique
  • Difference with a Difference
  • ‘The Most Profound Things Are Inexpressible’
  • Afterthought: the Cliché as Anti-archive
  • Notes
• Chapter 6: On the Problem of Saying Something New: Kierkegaard’s Archetypes, McLuhan’s Clichés
  • Difference and the New
  • Archival Impulses and Concerns for Propriety
  • The Banal Art of Retrieval
  • Quidam’s Guilt/Non-guilt
  • Cliché on the Threshold
  • Notes
• Chapter 7: Stock Images of Madness: Rhetoric and Cliché in Video Games
  • The Limits of Insanity
  • Rhetorics of Suffering and Darkness: monstrous doubles and reaching tentacles
  • Immersion, Representation and Commonplace Procedures
  • Heroism Re-objectified
  • Notes
• Chapter 8: ‘This Will All Make Sense When I Am Older’: Rebooting Clichés
  • A Crisis of Infinite Reboots
  • Bringing the Past into the Problematic Present
  • The Dark Knight Returns, Again
  • Disavowal, Forgetting and Remembering Again
  • A Return to Narrative
  • Notes
• Chapter 9: Gatekeeping the ‘Noise’: Expertise, Open-Mindedness and Public Debate
  • We Have Had Enough of Having Enough of Experts
  • Conflict and Resonance
  • Kant’s Archaic Idyll
  • The Procedures of Expertise
  • Noisy Clichés
  • Notes
• Bibliography
• Index