Beyond the Suffering of Being: Desire in Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett

This book challenges critical approaches that argue for Giacomo Leopardi's and Samuel Beckett's pessimism and nihilism. Such approaches stem from the quotation of Leopardi in Beckett's monograph Proust, as part of a discussion about the removal of desire. Nonetheless, in contrast to ataraxia as a form of ablation of desire, the desire of and for the Other is here presented as central in the two authors' oeuvres. Desire in Leopardi and Beckett is read as lying at the cusp between the theorie...