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I Want to Die, I Hate My Life: Three Essays on Tragedy and One on Beckett

By (author) Simon Critchley

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normal price: R 737.95

Price: R 663.95

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| book description |

â€œThere is a common fallacy that is oddly and sadly even more widespread amongst non-philosophers than philosophers, that art is somehow explained by philosophy. It is not.â€ The philosopher Simon Critchley has long been drawn to the distinctive questions raised by tragedy. In this major new work, conceived as a sequel to his Tragedy, the Greeks and Us (2019), he describes the power of tragic drama as deriving from its depictions of 'stuckness': of the inescapable situation of being oneself. In readings of Jean Racine, Henrik Ibsen, and Samuel Beckett, Critchley offers an exceptionally perceptive account of how tragedy dramatises this irreducibly absurd condition. I Want to Die, I Hate My Life is at once a searching philosophical engagement with tragedy and a bracing argument against the widespread tendency to reduce literary texts to mere illustrations of philosophical ideas. Critchleyâ€™s exposition of the ambiguities that lie at the heart of tragic dramaâ€”of tragedyâ€™s resistance to the kind of rational explanations that philosophers have sought to impose upon itâ€”doesnâ€™t just enhance our understanding of literature; it also points towards a wiser, more subtle, and more dynamic way of doing philosophy.