Living on After Failure

Irving Goh is Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University and Associate Professor of English at the National University of Singapore, coauthor of The Deconstruction of Sex, also published by Duke University Press, and author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject.

“Drawing on a number of philosophical works to create his own convincing vocabulary of failure, Irving Goh dwells in the impasse of failure itself, embodying or attuning to a specific state that can seem to be everywhere and nowhere at once. Failure is thus a ‘sense,’ difficult to capture, something irreducible. In this way, Living On After Failure has special value as a study of contemporaneity. It captures the zeitgeist.” - Gavin Jones, author of Failure and the American Writer: A Literary History “Living On After Failure is a bold work that goes against the stream and forces us to take failure for what it is: a dark abyss. It is truly refreshing to come across such a work in today’s academic humanities, dominated as they largely are by a reluctance to engage with controversial topics and perspectives.” - Costica Bradatan, author of In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction. The Affective Structure of Failure1. Flopping to Sleep: The Failures of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation2. Drifting in a World of Failures: From Roland Barthes’s Neutral to Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy3. Exscribing a Dark Care of the Self of Failed Existence: Eve Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love and Édouard LevÉ’s Suicide4. The Melodrama of Failure’s Shared Unshareability, Suicidal Ideation Included: Yijun Li’s Dear Friend, Where Reasons End, and Must I GoConclusion. Postscripting in Kate Zambreno and Afterthoughts on Form and MethodNotesBibliographyIndex