Joanna Stalnaker, "The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death" (Yale UP, 2025)

About this episode

Joanna Stalnaker discusses her book on Enlightenment philosophers' reflections on death and their literary contributions at the end of their lives.

What would the Enlightenment look like if we viewed it through the eyes of the philosophers as they were facing death? Joanna Stalnaker turns our usual perspective on the Enlightenment on its head, bringing to light a set of 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 stems from their authors’ efforts to give literary form to the materiality and 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. Stalnaker’s book The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death (Yale UP, 2025) unsettles reigning interpretations of the Enlightenment as a precursor to our modernity and shows its protagonists at their moments of fragility and…

People in this episode

Host: Marshall Poe

Guest: Joanna Stalnaker

Topics covered

• Enlightenment philosophy
• death and mortality
• literary analysis
• historical perspective
• fragility of life
• intellectual history

Keywords

• Enlightenment
• philosophers
• death
• literature
• French Revolution
• intellectual movement
• fragility
• posterity

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Columbia University, Yale UP

Books & works: The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death, The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia

More episodes of New Books in Critical Theory

• Jeffrey R. Di Leo et al. eds., "Theory as World Literature" (Bloomsbury, 2025) · June 12, 2026 · 32 min
• Don Thomas Deere, "The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space" (Duke UP, 2026) · June 11, 2026 · 46 min
• Natalia Rogach Alexander, "Growing People: The Enduring Legacy of John Dewey" (Columbia UP, 2025) · June 10, 2026 · 52 min
• Arlene W. Saxonhouse, "Athenian Democracy: Modern Mythmakers and Ancient Theorists" (U Notre Dame Press, 2026) · June 10, 2026 · 58 min
• Javier Arbona-Homar, "Explosivity: Following What Remains" (U Minnesota Press, 2025) · June 8, 2026 · 1h 6m
• Christina Lord, "Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction" (Liverpool UP, 2023) · June 7, 2026 · 44 min