The Rest is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death

Joanna Stalnaker in conversation with Elisabeth Ladenson, Charly Coleman, and Deidre Lynch

What would the Enlightenment look like if we viewed it through the eyes of the philosophers as they were facing death? In The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death, Joanna Stalnaker discusses works written at the end of the Old Regime and at the end of their authors’ lives. These works, all written before the French Revolution, cast a retrospective glance over the intellectual movement their authors participated in, and over the authors’ own lives and works.

Stalnaker shows that the beauty of these works stem from their authors’ efforts to give literary form to the fragility of their dying bodies. As they reflected on writing as a means of reaching posterity, Enlightenment philosophers embraced the possibility that neither their names nor their writings would survive long beyond the decomposition of their bodies. They inscribed the silence and nothingness of death into their last works, capturing their sense of an ending rather than the confidence in a glowing future so often attributed to them.

This book panel is featured in the New Books in the Arts and Sciences series organized by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.

This event is the third in a series of three panel discussions about “The Long Shadow of the Enlightenment” held at the Maison Française this fall, featuring new books on the ideas, history, and legacy of the Enlightenment and Revolution. Written by distinguished specialists of eighteenth-century French literature, history, and political thought, these books shed new light on the ways enlightened and revolutionary ideals have shaped our modern world, while also interrogating their limits and fragility. Such discussions have never been more critical, at a time when the ideals of democracy, equality, freedom of speech and thought, rationality, and scientific knowledge are under attack.

Joanna Stalnaker is Professor of French at Columbia. Her work on the French Enlightenment lies at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and the history of ideas. Her research interests include women writers, death and last works, and the theory and practice of description. She is the author of a prize-winning first book, The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia (Cornell, 2010). Her new book, The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death (Yale, 2025), is a moving, intimate portrait of the Enlightenment philosophers—notably a brilliant and unjustly neglected woman—as they were facing death.

Elisabeth Ladenson is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia. Her main teaching and research interests are in 19th-and 20th-century French and comparative literature; gender studies; cultural history and historiography. She is the author of Proust's Lesbianism and Dirt for Art's Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita.

Charly Coleman is Associate Professor of History at Columbia University. He specializes in the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution, with an emphasis on the intersections between religion, philosophy, and political economy. He is the author of The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment (2014) and The Spirit of French Capitalism: Economic Theology in the Age of Enlightenment (2021).

Deidre Lynch is Harvard College Professor and Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature in the Department of English at Harvard University. She is the author of Loving Literature: A Cultural History and The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. She is the editor of several books including The Unfinished Book: Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature; The Romantic Period, vol. D of The Norton Anthology of English Literature; and Jane Austen, Mansfield Park: An Annotated Edition.

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