Critique of Bored Reason: On the Confinement of the Modern Condition

Most of the core concepts of the Western philosophical tradition originate in antiquity. Yet boredom is strikingly absent from classical thought. In this philosophical study, Dmitri Nikulin explores the concept’s genealogy to argue that boredom is the mark of modernity.

Nikulin contends that boredom is a specifically modern phenomenon. He provides a critical reconstruction of the concept of the modern subject as universal, rational, autonomous, and self-sufficient. Understanding itself in th...