In the Presence of Schopenhauer

Name: In the Presence of Schopenhauer
Author: Unknown Author
ISBN: 9781509543243

by Unknown Author

100 pages2020Polity PressISBN 9781509543243

Philosophy

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About this book

The work of Michel Houellebecq – one of the most widely read and controversial novelists of our time – is marked by the thought of Schopenhauer. When Houellebecq came across a copy of Schopenhauer's Aphorisms in a library in his mid-twenties, he was bowled over by it and he hunted down a copy of his major philosophical work, The World as Will and Representation. Houellebecq found in Schopenhauer – the radical pessimist, the chronicler of human suffering, the lonely misanthrope – a powerful conception of the human condition and of the future that awaits us, and when Houellebecq’s first writings appeared in the early 1990s, the influence of Schopenhauer was everywhere apparent. But it was only much later, in 2005, that Houellebecq began to translate and write a commentary on Schopenhauer’s work. He thought of turning it into a book but soon abandoned the idea and the text remained unpublished until 2017. Now available in English for the first time, In the Presence of Schopenhauer is the story of a remarkable encounter between a novelist and a philosopher and a testimony to the deep and enduring impact of Schopenhauer’s philosophy on one of France’s greatest living writers.

Publication Details

Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2020
Pages: 100
ISBN: 9781509543243

About Unknown Author

Michel Thomas, dit Michel Houellebecq est un écrivain, poète, essayiste et acteur français né le 26 février 1956 à Saint-Pierre (La Réunion). Il est révélé par les romans *Extension du domaine de la lutte* (1994) et surtout *Les Particules élémentaires* (1998), qui le fait connaître d'un large public. Ce dernier roman et son livre suivant *Plateforme* (2001) sont considérés comme précurseurs dans la littérature française, notamment pour leur description de la misère affective et sexuelle de l'homme occidental dans les années 1990 et 2000. Avec *La Carte et le Territoire,* Michel Houellebecq reçoit le prix Goncourt en 2010, après avoir été plusieurs fois pressenti pour ce prix. Son œuvre est traduite en plus de 40 langues. ---------- Michel Thomas, known as Michel Houellebecq, is a French writer, poet, essayist, and actor born on February 26, 1956, in Saint-Pierre, Réunion. He rose to prominence with the novels *Whatever* *(Extension du domaine de la lutte,* 1994) and especially *The Elementary Particles* *(Les Particules élémentaires,* 1998), which brought him to the attention of a wide audience. The latter novel and his subsequent book, *Platform* (2001), are considered groundbreaking in French literature, particularly for their depiction of the emotional and sexual deprivation of Western man in the 1990s and 2000s. With *The Map and the Territory* *(La Carte et le Territoire),* Michel Houellebecq received the Prix Goncourt in 2010, after having been a contender several times. His work has been translated into more than 40 languages.