The Pathos of Distance ─ Affects of the Moderns

Jean-Michel Rabaté uses Nietzsche's image of a "pathos of distance," the notion that certain values cannot originate in a community but are created by a few gifted and lofty individuals, as the basis for a wide-ranging investigation into the ethics of the moderns.

The expression of "pathos of distance" impressed would-be modernists like the American James Huneker and the Irish poet W. B. Yeats as they confronted the new in the arts. Later, it helped Deleuze and Barthes make sense of modernity when they tried to tease out all the implications of "distance." Despite Benjamin criticism of Nietzsche's doctrine of the "eternal return of the same" in the Arcades Project, in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" Benjamin envisions a redeemed history that follows Nietzsche's basic intuition about the need to make every moment count for history. By first establishing this unlikely meeting of Nietzsche and Benjamin through their ideas of history and ethics, Rabaté is able then to provide an original genealogy for the ethics of the modern, moving through figures and moments as varied as Yeats and the birth of Irish Modernism, the ethics of courage in Virginia Woolf, Rilke, Apollinaire, and others in 1910, Gide and Genet's ethical impulse to combine erotic liberation with the motivation for political revolution, and Derrida's reading of Joyce's Ulysses and a modern mode of writing that sought to get closer to the senses. The result is a fascinating critique of Nietzsche, Benjamin, affect theory, and the origins of the ethics of modernism.

Jean-Michel Rabate is one of the world's foremost literary theorists. He is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Rabate has authored or edited more than thirty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, philosophy, and writers like Beckett, Pound and Joyce. Recent books includeCrimes of the Future (2014), 1913: The cradle of modernism (2007) andThe Ethic of the Lie (2008). He is of the founders and curators of the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia (slought.org) and the Managing Editor of theJournal of Modern Literature. Since 2008, he has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently the president of the American Samuel Beckett Studies Association.