Very Little ... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy and Literature

by Critchley,Simon

• ISBN13: 9780415340489
• ISBN10: 0415340489
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-07-21
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Very Little ... Almost Nothing puts the question of the meaning of life back at the centre of intellectual debate. Its central concern is how we can find a meaning to human finitude without recourse to anything that transcends that finitude. A profound but secular meditation on the theme of death, Critchley traces the idea of nihilism through Blanchot, Levinas, Jena Romanticism and Cavell, culminating in a reading of Beckett, in many ways the hero of the book.In this second edition, Simon Critchley has added a revealing and extended new preface, and a new chapter on Wallace Stevens which reflects on the idea of poetry as philosophy.

Author Biography

Simon Critchley is Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York and at the University of Essex, and Directeur de Programme, College International de Philosophie, Paris. He is author and editor of many books

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	xi
Preface to Second Edition: As my father, I have already died	xv
Preamble: Travels in Nihilon	1	(34)
(a) Philosophy begins in disappointment	2	(2)
(b) Pre-Nietzschean nihilism	4	(4)
(c) Nietzschean nihilism	8	(3)
(d) Responding to nihilism: five possibilities	11	(4)
(e) Heidegger's transformation of Nietzschean nihilism	15	(3)
(f) Heidegger contra Junger	18	(3)
(g) Impossible redemption: Adorno on nihilism	21	(8)
(h) Learning how to die the argument	29	(6)
Lecture 1: Il y a	35	(64)
(a) Reading Blanchot	35	(5)
(b) How is literature possible?	40	(8)
(c) Orpheus, or the law of desire	48	(4)
(d) Blanchot's genealogy of morals: exteriority as desire, exteriority as law	52	(4)
(e) 11 y a the origin of the artwork	56	(21)
(i) first slope Hegel avec Sade	57	(6)
(ii) second slope - a fate worse than death	63	(8)
(iii) ambiguity -B1anchot's secret	71	(6)
(f) The (im)possibility of death -- or, how would Blanchot read Blanchot if he were not Blanchot?	77	(8)
(g) Holding Levinas's hand to Blanchot's fire	85	(14)
(i) a dying future	85	(4)
(ii) atheist transcendence	89	(10)
Lecture 2: Unworking romanticism	99	(66)
(a) Our naivete	99	(15)
(i) Kantian fragmentation	102	(3)
(ii) deepest naivete - political romanticism	105	(5)
(iii) Hegel, Schlegel	110	(3)
(iv) romantic modernity	113	(1)
(b) Digression I: Imagination as resistance (Wallace Stevens)	114	(9)
(c) Romantic ambiguity	123	(15)
(i) the fragment	125	(6)
(ii) wit and irony	131	(4)
(iii) the non-romantic essence of romanticism	135	(3)
(d) Cavell's `romanticism'	138	(9)
(i) the romanticization of everyday life	138	(3)
(ii) Emerson as the literary absolute	141	(6)
(e) Digression II: Why Stanley loves America and why we should too	147	(7)
(f) Cavell's romanticism	154	(11)
(i) I live my scepticism	155	(2)
(ii) Cavell's tragic wisdom	157	(4)
(iii) finiteness, limitedness	161	(4)
Lecture 3: Know happiness - on Beckett	165	(50)
(a) Beckett and philosophical interpretation	165	(4)
(b) The dredging machine (Derrida)	169	(3)
(c) The meaning of meaninglessness and the paradoxical task of interpretation (Adorno I)	172	(9)
(d) Hope against hope the elevation of social criticism to the level of form (Adorno II)	181	(3)
(e) Nothing is funnier than unhappiness Beckett's laughter (Adorno III)	184	(4)
(f) Storytime, time of death (Molloy, Malone Dies)	188	(7)
(g) My old aporetics the syntax of weakness (The Unnameable)	195	(7)
(h) Who speaks? Not I (Blanchot)	202	(5)
(i) No happiness? (Cavell)	207	(8)
Lecture 4: The philosophical significance of a poem - on Wallace Stevens	215	(22)
Notes	237	(33)
Acknowledgements	270	(3)
Index	273