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The Self and its Shadows
A Book of Essays on Individuality as Negation in Philosophy and the Arts
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Book Presentation:
• An ambitious work ranging across philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the arts
• Original in form as well as content
• Presents new readings of key texts in modern philosophy
• Offers philosophical readings of Wagner's Ring, modern novels, Hollywood melodramas, and spy movies
• Combines philosophical rigour and literary imagination
Stephen Mulhall presents a series of multiply interrelated essays which together make up an original study of selfhood (subjectivity or personal identity). He explores a variety of articulations (in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the arts) of the idea that selfhood is best conceived as a matter of non-self-identity—for example, as becoming or self-overcoming, or as being what one is not and not being what one is, or as being doubled or divided. Philosophically, a sustained reading of the work of Nietzsche and Sartre is central to this project, although Wittgenstein is also fundamental to its concerns; Mulhall therefore draws extensively on texts usually associated with 'Continental' philosophical traditions, primarily in order to test the feasibility of a non-elitist form of moral perfectionism. Within the arts, several essays examine various films whose themes intersect with those of the philosophers under study (including Hollywood melodramas, recent spy movies such as the Bourne trilogy and the latest incarnation of James Bond, and David Fincher's 'Benjamin Button'); Wagner's Ring cycle is a recurrent concern; and the novels of Kingsley Amis, J. M. Coetzee and David Foster Wallace are also prominent.
About the Author:
Stephen Mulhall, New College, Oxford Stephen Mulhall is a Professor of Philosophy, and a Tutorial Fellow of New College, Oxford. He was previously a Prize Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Essex.
Press Reviews:
In this brilliant collection of essays, Mulhall uncovers core concerns of philosophical writers . . . Readers interested in philosophy, literature, and film will benefit greatly from the guidance and verve of Britain's finest philosopher writing today. - Joshua Furnal, Church of England Newspaper
a philosophical-cum-literary tour de force. - Daniel D. Hutto, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
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