Weakness: A Literary and Philosophical History

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Examining thenature of weakness has inspired some of the most influential aesthetic andphilosophical portraits of the human condition. By reading a selection ofcanonical literary and philosophical texts, Michael O'Sullivan charts a historyof responses to the experience and exploration of weakness. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, this first book-length study of the conceptexplores weakness as it is interpreted by Lao Tzu, Nietzsche, Derrida, theRomantics, Dickens and the Modernists. It examines what feminist writers Simonede Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray have made of the gendered biomythologyconstructed around the figure of the "weaker vessel" and it considers relatednotions such as im-potentiality, a "syntax of weakness" and human vulnerabilityin the work of Agamben, Beckett and Coetzee. Through analysis of these differing versions of weakness, O'Sullivan's studychallenges the popular myth that aligns masculine identity with strength andforce and presents a humane weakness as a guiding motif for debates in ethics.