The Rest is silence

 The Voltaire Foundation publishes a post by Joanna Stalnaker, Professor of French at Columbia University on her book The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death, which was published on 14th October 2025.

Voltaire’s Adieu | Voltaire Foundation (27th February 2026)

The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death, by Joanna Stalnaker.  Published 14th October 2025.

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.

The Rest Is Silence (Yale University Press)

Preview on  Google Books