Weakness: A Literary and Philosophical History

by O'Sullivan, Michael

• ISBN13: 9781441162991
• ISBN10: 1441162992
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-08-02
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
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Summary

Examining the nature of weakness has inspired some of the most influential aesthetic andphilosophical portraits of the human condition. By reading a selection of canonical literary and philosophical texts, Michael O'Sullivan charts a historyof responses to the experience and exploration of weakness. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, this first book-length study of the conceptexplores weakness as it is interpreted by Lao Tzu, Nietzsche, Derrida, theRomantics, Dickens and the Modernists. It examines what feminist writers Simonede Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray have made of the gendered biomythologyconstructed around the figure of the "weaker vessel" and it considers relatednotions such as im-potentiality, a "syntax of weakness" and human vulnerabilityin the work of Agamben, Beckett and Coetzee. Through analysis of these differing versions of weakness, O'Sullivan's studychallenges the popular myth that aligns masculine identity with strength andforce and presents a humane weakness as a guiding motif for debates in ethics.

Table of Contents

Introduction \ Part I: Philosophy \ 1. Akrasia and Weakness of the Will \ 2. The Flesh is Weak: Incarnating the Word \ 3. Daoism and Weakness: "Weakness is the means dao employs": \ 4. Kierkegaard's "despair of weakness" - Nietzsche's "metaphysics of weakness" \ 5. Gender theory and weakness: is there a "weaker vessel"? \ 6. Why is Derrida's sign violent? Radical passivity and givenness \ Part II: Literature \ 7. Negative Capability and Romantic Indolence \ 8. Dickens and the "experience of the common" \ 9. Modernist Impotence in Joyce and Eliot: "Words of Silent Power"\ 10. The Beckettian body: "The authentic weakness of being" \ 10. Vulnerability and "the animal" in J. M. Coetzee \ Conclusion - Humane Weakness\ Bibliography \ Index