ABOUT THIS BOOK

A deeply contemplative work devoted to thinking from one of the foremost literary figures of contemporary France.

Dying of Thinking is the ninth volume of Pascal Quignard’s Last Kingdom series. It explores three themes: how thought and death coincide, how thought is close to melancholy, and how thought takes shelter near traumatism. One who thinks, Quignard shows us, “compensates” for a very ancient abandonment. Even as a dream is a meaning whose disorderly, condensed, paradoxical images intuit something which has preceded sleep and which returns in them, thought is a meaning which uses words that are written, re-transcribed, dissected, etymologized and neologized. Throughout the Last Kingdom series, Quignard has sought to experience another way of thinking, one that has nothing to do with philosophy, a way of attaching himself “literally” to texts and of progressing by decomposing the imagery of dreams. Dying of Thinking is the heart of this quest.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Pascal Quignard is the author of more than sixty books and is widely regarded as one of the foremost literary French writers today. In 2002, he won France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, with The Roving Shadows, the first work of nonfiction to win the prize.

REVIEWS

“Quignard’s thinking progresses in circles of associations. [. . .] [D]ense to the point of being arcane. [. . .] For although it introduces notions that will make sense within the three volumes or will be meaningful to readers already familiar with Quignard’s work, the text is problematic and elliptical.”—Henriette Korthals Altes, Times Literary Supplement

Praise for The Roving Shadows:
“Here is a book that requires readers to be open to it—one that almost demands (or certainly at least wishes) that readers don’t come to it with specific expectations. It certainly offers ample—if not necessarily always easy—rewards.”—Complete Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1
Chapter 2: One can die of thinking (1)
Chapter 3: One can die of thinking (2)
Chapter 4: Nagasena and King Menander
Chapter 5: The path of thought
Chapter 6: On the train taking Poincaré to Coutances
Chapter 7
Chapter 8: Marcel Granet’s death during the month of November 1940
Chapter 9: Thomas Aquinas’ nervous breakdown during the month of December 1273
Chapter 10: Introversive Trance
Chapter 11: Sun
Chapter 12: Ariadne’s thread
Chapter 13: Ariadne’s death
Chapter 14: The boomerang
Chapter 15: Theoretic and cynegetic
Chapter 16: Fundamental Noetics
Chapter 17: On the Greek crisis
Chapter 18: Apuleius on the road to Alexandria
Chapter 19: Socrates’ death in Athens
Chapter 20: Biography and history
Chapter 21
Chapter 22: Pythagoras at Metapontum
Chapter 23: The imaginary companion of the maternal voice
Chapter 24: The aphantos of the word
Chapter 25: The sylph
Chapter 26
Chapter 27: De deo ignoto
Chapter 28: The invention of conscience
Chapter 29: The crossroads
Chapter 30: About concepts of things
Chapter 31: The aesthetics of thought
Chapter 32: On the radiation of thought
Chapter 33: Aseitas
Chapter 34: Refugium
Chapter 35: The stove
Chapter 36: Locronan