Maria Balaska's Books

Anxiety and Wonder

On Being Human

By: Maria Balaska

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At times, we find ourselves unexpectedly immersed in a mood that lacks any clear object or identifiable cause. These uncanny moments tend to be hastily dismissed as inconsequential, left without explanation. Maria Balaska examines two such cases: wonder and anxiety what it means to prepare for them, what life may look like after experiencing them, and what insights we can take from those experiences. For Kierkegaard anxiety is a door to freedom, for Heidegger wonder is a distress that opens us to the truth of Being, and for Wittgenstein wonder and anxiety are deeply connected to the ethical. Drawing on themes from these thinkers and bringing them into dialogue, Balaska argues that in our encounters with nothing we encounter the very potential of our existence. Most importantly, we confront what is most inconspicuous and fundamental about the human condition and what makes it possible to encounter anything at all: our distinct capacity for making sense of things.

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Page Count

137

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1350302953

ISBN 13

9781350302952

Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit

Meaning and Astonishment

By: Maria Balaska

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Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit

Meaning and Astonishment

By: Maria Balaska

This book brings together the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Lacan around their treatments of ‘astonishment,’ an experience of being struck by something that appears to be extraordinarily significant. Both thinkers have a central interest in the dissatisfaction with meaning that these experiences generate when we attempt to articulate them, to bring language to bear on them. Maria Balaska argues that this frustration and difficulty with meaning reveals a more fundamental characteristic of our sense-making capacities –namely, their groundlessness. Instead of disappointment with language’s sense-making capacities, Balaska argues that Wittgenstein and Lacan can help us find in this revelation of meaning’s groundlessness an opportunity to acknowledge our own involvement in meaning, to creatively participate in it and thereby to enrich our forms of life with language.

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