Beyond the Suffering of Being: Desire in Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett
This book challenges critical approaches that argue for Giacomo Leopardi's and Samuel Beckett's pessimism and nihilism. Such approaches stem from the quotation of Leopardi in Beckett's monograph Proust, as part of a discussion about the removal of desire. Nonetheless, in contrast to a...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Book Chapter |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Florence
Firenze University Press
2016
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| Series: | Studi e saggi
157 |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | OAPEN Library: download the publication OAPEN Library: description of the publication |
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| Summary: | This book challenges critical approaches that argue for Giacomo Leopardi's and Samuel Beckett's pessimism and nihilism. Such approaches stem from the quotation of Leopardi in Beckett's monograph Proust, as part of a discussion about the removal of desire. Nonetheless, in contrast to ataraxia as a form of ablation of desire, the desire of and for the Other is here presented as central in the two authors' oeuvres. Desire in Leopardi and Beckett is read as lying at the cusp between the theories of Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas, a desire that splits as much as it moulds the subject when called to address the Other (inspiring what Levinas terms 'infinity' as opposed to 'totality,' an infinity pitted against the nothingness crucial to pessimist and nihilist readings). |
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| Physical Description: | 1 electronic resource (176 p.) |
| ISBN: | 978-88-6453-406-0 9788864534060 9788864534053 9788864534077 9788892732315 |
| Access: | Open Access |