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"Jean-Michel Rabat uses Nietzsche's image of a "pathos of distance," the notion that values are created by a few gifted and lofty individuals, as the basis for a wide-ranging investigation into the ethics of the moderns. Revealing overlooked connections between Nietzsche's and Benjamin's ideas of history and ethics, Rabat provides an original genealogy for modernist thought, moving through figures and moments as varied as Yeats and the birth of Irish Modernism, the ethics of courage in Virginia Woolf, Rilke, Apollinaire, and others in 1910, T. S. Eliot's post-war despair, Jean Cocteau's formidable selfmythology in his first film The Blood of a Poet, Siri Hustvedt's novel of American trauma, and J. M. Coetzee's dystopia portraying an affectless future haunted by a messianic promise."--Bloomsbury Publishing Formations of pathos: Nietzsche, Benjamin, Warburg -- Pathos of distance: Huneker and Barthes reading Nietzsche -- Hard modernism: Alfred Jarry -- The birth of Irish modernism from the spirit of Nietzscheism (Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett) -- Ethos vs. pathos of the new in 1910 -- Affect effects affects: Deleuzian affect vs. Lacanian pathos -- Playing possum: war, death, and distance in Eliot's poetry -- Let the lips of the wound speak: Cocteau's pathosformel -- The pathos of history: trauma in Siri Hustvedt's the sorrows of an American -- Pathos of the future: nihilism and hospitality in the childhood of Jesus -- When is a door not a door?
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