Celebrating Recent Work by Joanna Stalnaker | The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death

Location: Buell Hall, East Gallery (Maison Française), Columbia University

A moving, intimate portrait of the Enlightenment philosophers as they faced the end of their lives and their historical moment.

What would the Enlightenment look like if we viewed it through the eyes of the philosophers as they were facing death? Joanna Stalnaker turns our usual perspective on the Enlightenment on its head, bringing to light a set of 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 stems from their authors’ efforts to give literary form to the materiality and 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.

Stalnaker’s book unsettles reigning interpretations of the Enlightenment as a precursor to our modernity and shows its protagonists at their moments of fragility and doubt, capturing their sense of an ending rather than the confidence in a glowing future so often attributed to them.

About the Author

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.

About the Speakers

Bruno Bosteels is Dean of Humanities and Jesse and George Siegel Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, with a joint appointment in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Prior to returning to Columbia in 2016, he taught for many years at Harvard and Cornell University. His research covers a wide range of topics in literature, culture, and politics in modern Latin America as well as contemporary philosophy and political theory.

Charly Coleman is a Professor of History at Columbia. His work explores the intersections between theology, philosophy, and political economy during the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution. He is the author of The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment (Stanford, 2014), which was awarded the Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies, and The Spirit of French Capitalism: Economic Theology in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford, 2021), which was short-listed for the Kenshur Prize. His current projects include a sequel to The Spirit of French Capitalism, tentatively entitled Money and Martyrs, that extends the history of economic theology to debates over ecclesiastical property, paper currency, civil religion, and social rights during the French Revolution. He is also writing the volume on the Enlightenment for The Oxford History of Political Thought alongside a more specialized monograph on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

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.

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.