In the tradition of James Frazer, Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, Thierry Hentsch retells, with new urgency and a keen critical eye, the story of the West” that shapes our perception of the world. Yet, the story of the West” does not exist. Only a reading of its most seminal textsfrom Ulysses to Hamlet, from the Torah to the Gospels, from Plato to Descartescan bring it alive. His tale turns on a startling discovery: The Christian message of immortality is conditional. To overcome deaththe touchstone of the human conditionthe believer must accept the Truth of salvation. Western civilization, by replacing God with technoscience, offers the universal promise that salvation may now be gained on earth. Yet, as a condition, it would impose its own absolute morality on the world. Truth or Death: the Biblical injunction is ours as well.

Truth or Death: The Quest for Immortality in the Western Narrative Tradition

Literature & Fiction

HENTSCH, THIERRY

History & Criticism

Talonbooks

Empire of Desire, the second volume of Thierry Hentsch’s epic survey of the formative texts of the Western narrative tradition, completes the work he began in the first: Truth or Death. It traces western civilization’s quest for immortality across a further four centuriesfrom Molière to Proust, by way of Voltaire and Rousseau, Goethe and Hegel, Melville and Joyceending in 1922, coincidentally the year Ulysses was published and Marcel Proust breathed his last.Truth or Death had revealed how the Biblical imperative of salvation gradually and systematically transferred the quest for immortality from the religious to the profane, as technoscience came to supplant God in the age of reason.”Now, in Empire of Desire, Thierry Hentsch presents modern man”freed from the imperative of transcendenceas a creature who desires to desire, moving without cease from one object to another, in a state of self-imposed oblivion,” the Western narrative tradition reaching its apotheosis with the work of Marcel Proust, in whose exquisitely crafted prose, desire has become the artist’s instrument of choicethe vivisectionist’s scalpel.Thierry Hentsch’s untimely death in 2005 has left us, as his generous bequest, a vivid, multi-faceted literary testament. Proust, foreshadowing the title of the mortal bargain, Raconter et Mourir to tell the tale, and to diebrings Hentsch’s reading of the Western literary tradition full circle. Proust, in whose company despair can find no finger-hold, in whose company I learn with every passing day that literature is nothing more than life reflected upon, recaptured; that it is the expressionan expression that takes one’s breath awayof those simple instants that poets have sought after since time out of mind, and whose fleeting yet powerful pleasure give us, for a spark of eternity, the feeling that we ourselves partake of the abolition of time.”

Empire of Desire: The Abolition of Time

Examines how Western perceptions of the Middle East were formed and how we have used them as a rationalization for setting policies and determining actions.

Imagining the Middle East

Business & Money

Economics

Black Rose Books

INTRODUCTION AUX FONDEMENTS DU POLITIQUE

Reference

Foreign Language Study & Reference

PU QUEBEC

La mort est la grande affaire de l'humanité et le récit est la forme que prend dans presque toutes les cultures le désir de se continuer. Se raconter, c'est ne pas mourir. Parce que les hommes se savent mortels, ils racontent pour nourrir la mémoire de ceux qui prendront le relais. Ils racontent et meurent apaisés d'avoir vécu et transmis. À travers la lecture des grands récits qui marquent l'imaginaire occidental, ce livre s'attache aux thèmes et aux moments clés de cette transmission: des voyages d'Ulysse aux aventures de Don Quichotte en passant par la Bible, la Divine Comédie, ou la quête du Graal.

Raconter et mourir. Aux sources narratives de l'imaginaire occidental

Montréal : Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 2002

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