Overview

A moving, intimate portrait of the Enlightenment philosophers as they faced the end of their lives and their historical moment What would the Enlightenment look like if we viewed it through the eyes of the philosophers as they were facing death? Joanna Stalnaker turns our habitual perspective on the Enlightenment on its head, bringing to light a set of works written at the end of the Old Regime and at the end of their authors' lives. These works, all written before the French Revolution, cast a retrospective glance over the intellectual movement their authors participated in, and over the authors' own lives and works. Stalnaker shows that the inventiveness and beauty of these works stem from their authors' efforts to give literary form to the materiality and fragility of their dying bodies. As they reflected on writing as a means of reaching posterity, Enlightenment philosophers embraced the possibility that neither their names nor their writings would survive long beyond the decomposition of their bodies. They inscribed the silence and nothingness of death into their last works. Stalnaker's book unsettles reigning interpretations of the Enlightenment as a precursor to our modernity and shows its protagonists at their moments of fragility and doubt, capturing their sense of an ending rather than the confidence in a glowing future so often attributed to them.

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9780300181340

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Reviews

“This is a stunningly original, beautifully written, and morally serious book. It makes us think of an Enlightenment less sure that posterity would look back on it happily and more open to the possibility that it would, like our lives, vanish into nothingness.”—Thomas W. Laqueur, author of The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains “With this beautiful, profound study of how eighteenth-century men and women met their ends, Stalnaker breathes new life into received accounts of the Enlightenment. She also models a new and vital way of working between literature and philosophy.”—Deidre Lynch, Harvard University “While the Enlightenment has been charged with attempting to bring heaven down to earth, Joanna Stalnaker shows in this beautiful and memorable book that it also revolutionized our sense of human transience. How eighteenth-century philosophers—including, crucially, a brilliant woman—contemplated death and embraced nothingness gives their living heirs much to ponder in the time that remains to them.”—Samuel Moyn, Yale University “In this highly original and rewarding study, Joanna Stalnaker offers a masterful reading of the last written words of Enlightenment philosophes (and some fellow travelers). Stalnaker, one of the best close readers in the field, makes a most compelling case for the importance of literary analysis in Enlightenment studies. Listening to what Enlightenment writers had to say on their way out leads to surprising and transformative revelations about their views on this world and the next.—Dan Edelstein, author of The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin

Author Information

Joanna Stalnaker is professor of French at Columbia University. She is the author of a prizewinning first book, The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia. She lives in New York City.

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