Introduction -- Part One. Philosophy. 1. Fragile goodness and weakness of the will -- 2. "Weakness is the means dao employs": daoism and weakness -- 3. The flesh is weak: incarnating the word -- 4. Nietzsche's revaluation of power and Kierkegaard's despair of weakness -- 5. Why is Derrida's sign violent? grammatology and a "force of weakness" -- 6. Is there a "weaker vessel?": reshaping "phallic identity" with "womb vision" -- Part Two. Literature. 7. Recognizing limits: Keats's "weak mortality" and Wordsworth's "frailties of the world" -- 8. A sentimental man: Dickens, involuntary narration and the "experience of the common" -- 9. "Words of silent power": Joyce, kindness and life's "high carnage of semperidentity" -- 10. Beckett and "the authentic weakness of being" -- 11. Vulnerability, narrative authority and "the animal" in the work of J.M. Coetzee -- Conclusion: humane weakness
"Examining the nature of weakness has inspired some of the most influential aesthetic and philosophical portraits of the human condition. By reading a selection of canonical literary and philosophical texts, Michael O'Sullivan charts a history of responses to the experience and exploration of weakness. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, this first book-length study of the concept explores weakness as it is interpreted by Lao Tzu, Nietzsche, Derrida, the Romantics, Dickens and the Modernists. It examines what feminist writers Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray have made of the gendered biomythology constructed around the figure of the 'weaker vessel' and it considers related notions such as im-potentiality, a 'syntax of weakness' and human vulnerability in the work of Agamben, Beckett and Coetzee. Through analysis of these differing versions of weakness, O'Sullivan's study challenges the popular myth that aligns masculine identity with strength and force and presents a humane weakness as a guiding motif for debates in ethics"--Provided by publisher
Weakness
a literary and philosophical history
Published:
2012
Publisher:
Continuum, London
"Examining the nature of weakness has inspired some of the most influential aesthetic and philosophical portraits of the human condition. By reading a selection of canonical literary and philosophical texts, Michael O'Sullivan charts a history of...
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Universitätsbibliothek der Eberhard Karls Universität
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"Examining the nature of weakness has inspired some of the most influential aesthetic and philosophical portraits of the human condition. By reading a selection of canonical literary and philosophical texts, Michael O'Sullivan charts a history of responses to the experience and exploration of weakness. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, this first book-length study of the concept explores weakness as it is interpreted by Lao Tzu, Nietzsche, Derrida, the Romantics, Dickens and the Modernists. It examines what feminist writers Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray have made of the gendered biomythology constructed around the figure of the 'weaker vessel' and it considers related notions such as im-potentiality, a 'syntax of weakness' and human vulnerability in the work of Agamben, Beckett and Coetzee. Through analysis of these differing versions of weakness, O'Sullivan's study challenges the popular myth that aligns masculine identity with strength and force and presents a humane weakness as a guiding motif for debates in ethics"--Provided by publisher
