Events

The Rest is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death
Joanna Stalnaker in conversation with Elisabeth Ladenson, Charly Coleman, and Deidre Lynch 
New Books in the Arts and Sciences series

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What would the Enlightenment look like if we viewed it through the eyes of the philosophers as they were facing death? In The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death, Joanna Stalnaker discusses works written at the end of the Old Regime and at the end of their authors’ lives. These works, all written before the French Revolution, cast a retrospective glance over the intellectual movement their authors participated in, and over the authors’ own lives and works. 

Stalnaker shows that the beauty of these works stem from their authors’ efforts to give literary form to the fragility of their dying bodies. As they reflected on writing as a means of reaching posterity, Enlightenment philosophers embraced the possibility that neither their names nor their writings would survive long beyond the decomposition of their bodies. They inscribed the silence and nothingness of death into their last works, capturing their sense of an ending rather than the confidence in a glowing future so often attributed to them.

This book panel is featured in the New Books in the Arts and Sciences series organized by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.
This event is the third in a series of three panel discussions about “The Long Shadow of the Enlightenment” held at the Maison Française this fall, featuring new books on the ideas, history, and legacy of the Enlightenment and Revolution. Written by distinguished specialists of eighteenth-century French literature, history, and political thought, these books shed new light on the ways enlightened and revolutionary ideals have shaped our modern world, while also interrogating their limits and fragility. Such discussions have never been more critical, at a time when the ideals of democracy, equality, freedom of speech and thought, rationality, and scientific knowledge are under attack.