Weakness: A Literary and Philosophical History

Examining the
nature of weakness has inspired some of the most influential aesthetic and
philosophical portraits of the human condition. By reading a selection of
canonical literary and philosophical texts, Michael O'Sullivan charts a history
of responses to the experience and exploration of weakness.

Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, this first book-length study of the concept
explores weakness as it is interpreted by Lao Tzu, Nietzsche, Derrida, the
Romantics, Dickens and the Modernists. It examines what feminist writers Simone
de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray have made of the gendered biomythology
constructed around the figure of the "weaker vessel" and it considers related
notions such as im-potentiality, a "syntax of weakness" and human vulnerability
in the work of Agamben, Beckett and Coetzee.

Through analysis of these differing versions of weakness, O'Sullivan's study
challenges the popular myth that aligns masculine identity with strength and
force and presents a humane weakness as a guiding motif for debates in ethics.