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Sommario
1. Preface: Staying Woke and Staying Awake
2. Introduction: Athens and Jerusalem
3. Chapter 1- Philosophy and Antiphilosophy: Shestov’s Life and Thought
4. Chapter 2 - Angel of History and Angel of Death: Shestov, Bataille, Benjamin
5. Chapter 3 - The Garden and the Wasteland: The Art of Gethsemane
6. Chapter 4 - Sleep and the Sleepless: Pascal and the Night of Gethsemane
7. Conclusion: Auschwitz and the End of the World
Info autore
Matthew Beaumont is Senior Lecturer in English, University College London, UK. His previous books include The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue.
Riassunto
The Jewish philosopher Lev Shestov (1866-1938) is perhaps the great forgotten thinker of the twentieth century, but one whose revival seems timely and urgent in the twenty-first century. An important influence on Georges Bataille, Albert Camus, Gilles Deleuze and many others, Shestov developed a fascinating anti-Enlightenment philosophy that critiqued the limits of reason and triumphantly affirmed an ethics of hope in the face of hopelessness.
In a wide-ranging reappraisal of his life and thought, which explores his ideas in relation to the history of literature and painting as well as philosophy, Matthew Beaumont restores Shestov to prominence as a thinker for turbulent times. In reconstructing Shestov’s thought and asserting its continued relevance, the book’s central theme is wakefulness. It argues that for Shestov, escape from the limits of rationalist Enlightenment thought comes from maintaining an insomniac vigilance in the face of the spiritual night to which his century appeared condemned. Shestov’s engagement with the image of Christ remaining awake in the Garden of Gethsemane then, is at the core of his inspiring understanding of our ethical responsibilities after the horrors of the twentieth century.
Prefazione
In a wide-ranging, inter-disciplinary reappraisal of Lev Shestov, the influential but neglected early twentieth-century Russian philosopher, Matthew Beaumont restores him to prominence as a thinker for what Hannah Arendt called ‘dark times’.
Testo aggiuntivo
Matthew Beaumont’s book on Shestov weaves the thread of sleeplessness into a gripping reconstruction of the philosopher’s journey across some of the defining Gethsemane moments of the twentieth-century with a political commentator’s sense of momentous encounters.
