Book Launch: On Persistence by Rebecca Comay
About this Event
Book Launch: On Persistence by Rebecca Comay
Rebecca Comay will be in conversation with Eric Cazdyn, Sarah Dowling, and John Ricco
Wednesday, November 11, 2026, 4–6 p.m.
Room NF119, Northrop Frye Hall
73 Queen’s Park Cres E, Toronto
Reception Follows
On Persistence is an exploration of the elusive, unruly force of persistence—not as the heroic overcoming of obstacles, not as stoicism, capitalist work ethic, habit, inertia, or resilience, but as a temporal and affective structure that refuses assimilation. In these wide-ranging philosophical and literary essays, Rebecca Comay reflects on what it means to go on when progress stalls and resolution fails to arrive. Engaging figures from Freud to Beckett, Proust to Benjamin, Kant to Hegel, Hamlet to Niobe, Comay tracks the strange temporality of suspended life: interminable mourning, unfinished projects, the insistent pressure of the past, the undead stirrings of the death drive, the slow burn of revolutionary upheaval. What emerges is a startlingly new model of time—neither continuous nor atomized, neither progressive nor static, but a form of disturbance that opens a space for rethinking survival, resistance, grief, and (maybe) repair. Essential reading for these calamitous times.
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