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Should we feel inadequate when we fail to be healthy, balanced, and well-adjusted? Is it realistic or even desirable to strive for such an existential equilibrium? Condemning our current cultural obsession with cheerfulness and "positive thinking," Mari Ruti calls for a resurrection of character that honors our more eccentric frequencies and argues that sometimes a tormented and anxiety-ridden life can also be rewarding.
Ruti critiques the search for personal meaning and pragmatic attempts to normalize human beings' unruly and idiosyncratic natures. Exposing the tragic banality of a happy life commonly lived, she instead emphasizes the advantages of a lopsided life rich in passion and fortitude. She also shows what matters is not our ability to evade existential uncertainty but our courage to meet adversity in such a way that we do not become irrevocably broken.
We are in danger of losing the capacity to cope with complexity, ambiguity, melancholia, disorientation, and disappointment, Ruti warns, leaving us feeling less "real" and less connected and unable to process a full range of emotions. Heeding the call of our character means acknowledging the marginalized, chaotic aspects of our being, and it is precisely these creative qualities that make us inimitable and irreplaceable.
List of contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I. The Art of Self-Fashioning1. The Call of Character
2. The Process of Becoming
3. The Specificity of Desire
Part II. The Art of Self-Responsibility4. The Blueprints of Behavior
5. The Alchemy of Relationality
6. The Ethics of Responsibility
Part III. The Art of Self-Surrender7. The Swerve of Passion
8. The Upside of Anxiety
9. The Erotics of Being
Notes
Index
About the author
Mari Ruti is professor of critical theory at the University of Toronto and visiting professor and director of graduate studies in the Program for Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her Columbia University Press books are
Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics (2015) and
The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living (2013).
