Joanna Stalnaker is professor of French at Columbia University. She is the author of a prizewinning first book, The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia. She lives in New York City.

"Original and beautifully written."--Ruth Scurr, Wall Street Journal

"This is a stunningly original, beautifully written, and morally serious book. It makes us think of an Enlightenment less sure that posterity would look back on it happily and more open to the possibility that it would, like our lives, vanish into nothingness."--Thomas W. Laqueur, author of The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains

"With this beautiful, profound study of how eighteenth-century men and women met their ends, Stalnaker breathes new life into received accounts of the Enlightenment. She also models a new and vital way of working between literature and philosophy."--Deidre Lynch, Harvard University

"While the Enlightenment has been charged with attempting to bring heaven down to earth, Joanna Stalnaker shows in this beautiful and memorable book that it also revolutionized our sense of human transience. How eighteenth-century philosophers--including, crucially, a brilliant woman--contemplated death and embraced nothingness gives their living heirs much to ponder in the time that remains to them."--Samuel Moyn, Yale University

"In this highly original and rewarding study, Joanna Stalnaker offers a masterful reading of the last written words of Enlightenment philosophes (and some fellow travelers). Stalnaker, one of the best close readers in the field, makes a most compelling case for the importance of literary analysis in Enlightenment studies. Listening to what Enlightenment writers had to say on their way out leads to surprising and transformative revelations about their views on this world and the next.--Dan Edelstein, author of The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin

Publisher: Yale University Press

Pub date: 2025-10-14

Length: 304 pages