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Living On After Failure

Affective Structures of Modern Life

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Book

Pages: 224

Published: September 2025

Author: Irving Goh

In Living On After Failure, Irving Goh dwells with failure and all of its negative affects. Goh does not seek a theorization of failure as something to overcome or turn into a recuperative philosophy or progress narrative. Rather, he engages with the ontological condition of failure as a process of staying with the impasse that failure brings. Drawing on the thought of Berlant, Derrida, Foucault, and Nancy, Goh examines works by contemporary writers like Ottessa Moshfegh, Rachel Cusk, Édouard Levé, Yiyun Li, and Kate Zambreno. He guides readers through stages of reckoning with failure as an immersive impasse: flopping, drifting itself, a dark care of the self, melodrama, and postscripting. By unsettling the failure/success binary, Goh provides those who cannot shake off their sense of failure, or who refuse the narratives of progress or success and their ideologies of grit and resilience, with discursive and affective spaces in which to attend to their desire to be attached to their failures.

Praise

“Drawing on a number of philosophical works to create his own convincing vocabulary of failure, Irving Goh dwells in the impasse of failure itself, embodying or attuning to a specific state that can seem to be everywhere and nowhere at once. Failure is thus a ‘sense,’ difficult to capture, something irreducible. In this way, Living On After Failure has special value as a study of contemporaneity. It captures the zeitgeist.” - Gavin Jones, author of Failure and the American Writer: A Literary History

“Living On After Failure is a bold work that goes against the stream and forces us to take failure for what it is: a dark abyss. It is truly refreshing to come across such a work in today’s academic humanities, dominated as they largely are by a reluctance to engage with controversial topics and perspectives.” - Costica Bradatan, author of In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

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Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

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Irving Goh is Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University and Associate Professor of English at the National University of Singapore, coauthor of The Deconstruction of Sex, also published by Duke University Press, and author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion After the Subject.

Table Of Contents

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Acknowledgments
Introduction. The Affective Structure of Failure
1. Flopping to Sleep: The Failures of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation
2. Drifting in a World of Failures: From Roland Barthes’s Neutral to Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy
3. Exscribing a Dark Care of the Self of Failed Existence: Eve Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love and Édouard Levé’s Suicide
4. The Melodrama of Failure’s Shared Unshareability, Suicidal Ideation Included: Yijun Li’s Dear Friend, Where Reasons End, and Must I Go
Conclusion. Postscripting in Kate Zambreno and Afterthoughts on Form and Method
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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Additional Information

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Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3224-3 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-2899-4 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6120-5 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478061205