A01=Rebecca Comay
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Author_Rebecca Comay
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criticaltheoryessays
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Product details
- ISBN 9781803096476
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 06 Jul 2026
- Publisher: Seagull Books London Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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A bold meditation on endurance as interruption rather than progress, offering a radical rethinking of time, agency, and survival.
On Persistence is an exploration into the elusive, unruly force of endurance—not as moral virtue or capitalist work ethic, but as a temporal and affective structure that resists assimilation. In these wide-ranging philosophical and literary essays, Rebecca Comay interrogates what it means to persist when progress stalls and resolution fails to arrive. Engaging figures from Freud to Beckett, Proust to Benjamin, Hamlet to Niobe, Comay tracks the strange temporality of suspended life: interminable mourning, unfinished projects, the persistence of the past, the undead stirrings of the death drive. What emerges is a radically different model of time—neither static nor teleological, but a form of interruption that opens space for rethinking agency, grief, resistance, and repair.
On Persistence offers a profound meditation on what it means to endure—and to endure differently—in a time that demands something else of us.
On Persistence is an exploration into the elusive, unruly force of endurance—not as moral virtue or capitalist work ethic, but as a temporal and affective structure that resists assimilation. In these wide-ranging philosophical and literary essays, Rebecca Comay interrogates what it means to persist when progress stalls and resolution fails to arrive. Engaging figures from Freud to Beckett, Proust to Benjamin, Hamlet to Niobe, Comay tracks the strange temporality of suspended life: interminable mourning, unfinished projects, the persistence of the past, the undead stirrings of the death drive. What emerges is a radically different model of time—neither static nor teleological, but a form of interruption that opens space for rethinking agency, grief, resistance, and repair.
On Persistence offers a profound meditation on what it means to endure—and to endure differently—in a time that demands something else of us.
Rebecca Comay is a professor of philosophy and comparative literature at the University of Toronto. She is a core member of the Literature and Critical Theory Program and affiliated with the Germanic Languages and Literatures Department and the Centre for Jewish Studies.
