Living On After Failure

Affective Structures of Modern Life

Irving Goh

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9781478032243
  9781478028994
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478061205
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

In Living On After Failure, Irving Goh dwells with failure and all of its negative affects. Goh does not seek a theorization of failure as something to overcome or turn into a recuperative philosophy or progress narrative. Rather, he engages with the ontological condition of failure as a process of staying with the impasse that failure brings. Drawing on the thought of Berlant, Derrida, Foucault, and Nancy, Goh examines works by contemporary writers like Ottessa Moshfegh, Rachel Cusk, Édouard Levé, Yiyun Li, and Kate Zambreno. He guides readers through stages of reckoning with failure as an immersive impasse: flopping, drifting itself, a dark care of the self, melodrama, and postscripting. By unsettling the failure/success binary, Goh provides those who cannot shake off their sense of failure, or who refuse the narratives of progress or success and their ideologies of grit and resilience, with discursive and affective spaces in which to attend to their desire to be attached to their failures.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Affective Structure of Failure
• 1. Flopping to Sleep: The Failures of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation
• 2. Drifting in a World of Failures: From Roland Barthes’s Neutral to Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy
• 3. Exscribing a Dark Care of the Self of Failed Existence: Eve Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love and Édouard Levé’s Suicide
• 4. The Melodrama of Failure’s Shared Unshareability, Suicidal Ideation Included: Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, Where Reasons End, and Must I Go
• Conclusion: Postscripting in Kate Zambreno and Afterthoughts on Form and Method
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index