The Pathos of Distance

Jean-Michel Rabat uses Nietzsches image of a pathos of distance, the notion that values are created by a few gifted and lofty individuals, as the basis for a wide-ranging investigation into the ethics of the moderns. Revealing overlooked connections between Nietzsches and Benjamins ideas of history and ethics, Rabat provides an original genealogy for modernist thought, moving through figures and moments as varied as Yeats and the birth of Irish Modernism, the ethics of courage in Virginia Woolf, Rilke, Apollinaire, and others in 1910, T. S. Eliots post-war despair, Jean Cocteaus formidable selfmythology in his first film The Blood of a Poet, Siri Hustvedts novel of American trauma, and J. M. Coetzees dystopia portraying an affectless future haunted by a messianic promise.