“On Persistence is a thrilling read and a conceptually dazzling tour de force. Excavating the unruly resources of persistence—it is stubborn, brittle, stony, impatient, inefficient, irritating, insistent—Rebecca Comay upsets received ideas about the latent temporal structures at work in politics, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literature. Throughout the essays in this book, Comay pushes the thinking of language and the language of thinking to its limits. Here, as always, Comay exhibits the grace of a dancer, the dexterity of a tightrope walker, and the urgency of a political activist. Her inventive and counterintuitive readings are astonishing, explosive, original, and consequential.”

Elissa Marder

“It begins with what persistence is not—and that includes ‘cruel optimism’. Its narration experiments with philosophical idiom, critical process, and gerundive sentences connecting Kant and Kafka, Hegel and Proust, Benjamin and Freud. Its rhythm is push and pull, ebb and flow, contra vitalism, alongside existence. This is a must-read book for the times—a moving meditation on how persistence rises from devastating political violence, readymade dreams, brain fog, disorganization, fear, drag, thwart, resistance, negation, medication, standstill, therapy, disbelief, chronic restlessness, overstaying one’s welcome, disinheritance, and the great unravelling of life’s timelines. This book is mind-blowing, seriously: nothing like it.”

Emily Apter

“Persistence is placed on a thin red line: there is, on the one hand, persistence as heroic endurance, resistance, resilience, perseverance, inspiring hope, offering a prospect of redemption; there is, on the other hand, persistence as perseveration, pathological repetition, time without progress, standstill, being in the grip of grief or trauma, stuckness. Persistence can be both resistant and oppressive, a stubborn insistence of what will not end, beyond hope and despair. Rebecca Comay adamantly and passionately persists on this impossible edge. From Kant and Hegel to Freud, from Proust to Beckett, from Niobe to Hamlet, from revolution to necropolitics—the same and always shifting edge, disrupting the narratives of progress, damnation, and salvation, but offering a precarious hold most dearly needed to confront the predicament of our dire times. Brilliant and overwhelming.”

Mladen Dolar

“With her new book, Comay has created a new genre of philosophical writing— one in which conceptual rigor, philological precision, historical specificity, and political commitment gather into a feverish stream that thematizes, enacts, and demands persistence. In Comay’s writing, thinking acquires the pulsive, relentless force of a drive that encircles, in ever-new variations, the most difficult conflicts and impasses of contemporary society. On Persistence reads as if it had been written by Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History.”

Eric Santner

“The effects of this exquisite constellation of essays persist, above all as unheard-of ways of looking at worn-out notions of weariness. Proust’s belatedness, Beckettian fatigue, Kant’s rituals of old age, and Freudian resistance—all contain a crystal of revolutionary slowness that was waiting to be awakened. To begin anew, one learns admiringly, is sometimes what happens through persisting.”

Peter Szendy

“Comay’s grasp of a broad range of the literature of the time is impressive . . . Recommended.”

Choice | Praise for “Mourning Sickness”