Description
A bold meditation on endurance as interruption rather than progress, offering a radical rethinking of time, agency, and survival.
On Persistence is an exploration into the elusive, unruly force of endurance-not as moral virtue or capitalist work ethic, but as a temporal and affective structure that resists assimilation. In these wide-ranging philosophical and literary essays, Rebecca Comay interrogates what it means to persist when progress stalls and resolution fails to arrive. Engaging figures from Freud to Beckett, Proust to Benjamin, Hamlet to Niobe, Comay tracks the strange temporality of suspended life: interminable mourning, unfinished projects, the persistence of the past, the undead stirrings of the death drive. What emerges is a radically different model of time-neither static nor teleological, but a form of interruption that opens space for rethinking agency, grief, resistance, and repair.
On Persistence offers a profound meditation on what it means to endure-and to endure differently-in a time that demands something else of us.
About the Author
Rebecca Comay is a professor of philosophy and comparative literature at the University of Toronto. She is a core member of the Literature and Critical Theory Program and affiliated with the Germanic Languages and Literatures Department and the Centre for Jewish Studies.
Reviews
"Comay's grasp of a broad range of the literature of the time is impressive . . . Recommended." -- Choice * Praise for "Mourning Sickness" *
Book Information
ISBN 9781803096360
Author Rebecca Comay
Format Paperback
Page Count 244
Imprint Seagull Books London Ltd
Publisher Seagull Books London Ltd
Weight(grams) 399g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 20mm
On Persistence is an exploration into the elusive, unruly force of endurance-not as moral virtue or capitalist work ethic, but as a temporal and affective structure that resists assimilation. In these wide-ranging philosophical and literary essays, Rebecca Comay interrogates what it means to persist when progress stalls and resolution fails to arrive. Engaging figures from Freud to Beckett, Proust to Benjamin, Hamlet to Niobe, Comay tracks the strange temporality of suspended life: interminable mourning, unfinished projects, the persistence of the past, the undead stirrings of the death drive. What emerges is a radically different model of time-neither static nor teleological, but a form of interruption that opens space for rethinking agency, grief, resistance, and repair.
On Persistence offers a profound meditation on what it means to endure-and to endure differently-in a time that demands something else of us.
About the Author
Rebecca Comay is a professor of philosophy and comparative literature at the University of Toronto. She is a core member of the Literature and Critical Theory Program and affiliated with the Germanic Languages and Literatures Department and the Centre for Jewish Studies.
Reviews
"Comay's grasp of a broad range of the literature of the time is impressive . . . Recommended." -- Choice * Praise for "Mourning Sickness" *
Book Information
ISBN 9781803096360
Author Rebecca Comay
Format Paperback
Page Count 244
Imprint Seagull Books London Ltd
Publisher Seagull Books London Ltd
Weight(grams) 399g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 20mm
