Ideas about quantities, magnitudes and frequencies shape and give texture to almost everything we feel, say, dream and do. In Living by Numbers, now available in paperback, Steven Connor explores the many ways in which we live in, and by, a world of numbers. The book opens up for the first time the richness, variety and subtlety of how we do things with numbers and, just as importantly, how they do things with us.

Few creatures live in such close and intimate contact with human beings as flies. As ‘the constant, immemorial witnesses to the human comedy’, flies accompany human beings wherever they go, even beyond (or at least into) the grave. Almost one tenth of all the species known to science are flies.For centuries, flies have been seen as mankind's enemy, blamed for plagues, subject to public excommunication in the Middle Ages and campaigns of extermination during the early years of the t...

Dreamwork is a book about the ideas, dreams, dreads and ideals we have regarding work. Its central argument is that, although we depend on the idea of work for our identity as humans, we feel we must disguise from ourselves the fact that we do not know what work is. There is no example of work that nobody might under some circumstances do for fun. All work is imaginary – which is not to say that it is simply illusory, but rather that, in order to count as work, it must be imagined...

This is the first English biography of Gaston Bachelard, a philosopher who bridged the worlds of science and imagination. Raised in rural France, Bachelard served in the First World War, worked for the post office and pursued degrees in science and philosophy while teaching in his local school. His journey led to a professorship at the Sorbonne, where he influenced many prominent postwar French thinkers. Known as both a philosopher of science and author of works on the imagination inspired...

In A Philosophy of Sport Steven Connor offers a new philosophical understanding of sport in its own terms, in distinction to previous writing on the philosophy of sport that has tended to see sport as a kind of testing ground for philosophical theories devised to deal with other kinds of problems – of ethics, aesthetics or logical categorization. In order to define what sport essentially is and means, Connor presents a complete grammar of sport, isolating and describing its essent...

In a world that promotes assertion, agency, and empowerment, this book challenges us to revalue a range of actions and attitudes that have come to be disregarded or dismissed as merely passive. Mercy, resignation, politeness, restraint, gratitude, abstinence, losing well, apologizing, taking care: today, such behaviors are associated with negativity or lack. But the capacity to give way is better understood as positive action, at once intricate and demanding. Moving from intra-human common...

Aristotle defined voice as ‘a particular sound made by something with a soul; for nothing which does not have a soul has a voice’. Beyond Words encompasses human language outside words, the realm of the sounds of the mouth, controlled and automatic, which bring depth, meaning and confusion in equal measure to our communication as humans. Steven Connor takes in the phantasmal life of excitements, identifications and recoils associated with particular groups of vocal utterances – th...

Being serious demands serious kinds of work. In Styles of Seriousness, Steven Connor reflects on the surprisingly various ways in which a sense of the serious is made and maintained, revealing that while seriousness is the most powerful feeling, it is also the most poignantly indeterminate, perhaps because of the impossibility of being completely serious.In colloquy with philosophers such as Aristotle, Nietzsche, James, Sartre, Austin, Agamben and Sloterdijk, and writers l...

Without it, life on earth would cease to exist. Air is invisible and yet always present in one way or another, and people have long associated air with flight, spirit, transcendence and optimism. But as humans have progressively taken control of air through communications, warfare, travel and scientific exploration, the perception of air has changed. No longer is air a completely reliable part of our daily life but is instead another piece of the environment that must be watched closely fo...

Many human beings have considered the powers and the limits of human knowledge, but few have wondered about the power that the idea of knowledge has over us. The Madness of Knowledge is the first book to investigate this emotional inner life of knowledge – the lusts, fantasies, dreams and fears that the idea of knowing provokes. There are in-depth discussions of the imperious will to know, of Freud’s epistemophilia, or love of knowledge, and the curiously insistent links between m...

Steven Connor, one of the most influential critics of twentieth-century literature and culture, has spent much of his career writing and thinking about Samuel Beckett. This book presents Connor's finest published work on Beckett alongside fresh essays that explore how Beckett has shaped major themes in modernism and twentieth-century literature. Through discussions of sport, nausea, slowness, flies, the radio switch, religion and academic life, Connor shows how Beckett's writing is charact...

The Book of Skin explores the amazingly elaborate and varied functions, roles and meanings of human skin within Western culture. Skin, Steven Connor argues, has never been more visible. He examines a wide range of sources, including literature, non-fiction and medical texts; art, photography and film; folklore, popular song and language. The book covers all aspects of skin’s cultural history, including the chromatics of skin colour and pigmentation, blushing, suntanning, paleness,...