Jean-Michel Rabaté uses Nietzsche's image of a “pathos of distance,” the notion that values are created by a few gifted and lofty individuals, as the basis for a wide-ranging investigation into the ethics of the moderns. Revealing overlooked connections between Nietzsche's and Benjamin's ideas of history and ethics, Rabaté provides an original genealogy for modernist thought, moving through figures and moments as varied as Yeats and the birth of Irish Modernism, the ethics of courage in Virginia Woolf, Rilke, Apollinaire, and others in 1910, T. S. Eliot's post-war despair, Jean Cocteau's formidable self mythology in his first film The Blood of a Poet, Siri Hustvedt's novel of American trauma, and J. M. Coetzee's dystopia portraying an affectless future haunted by a messianic promise.

Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He is the author or editor of more than thirty books, including Crimes of the Future (2014), The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis (2014), the edited volume 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics, and Think, Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the Human (2016).