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  • Essays on Boredom and Modernity
  • Brendan J. Balint (bio)
Essays on Boredom and Modernity. Edited by Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. 232 pp. $71.30.

In the introduction to Essays on Boredom and Modernity, editors Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani argue that the invention of the term "boredom" in the seventeenth century signals "the emergence of a new rhetoric of experience" in nascent modernity. With the appearance of a vast number of novel stimuli and a general shift in the individual's relation to time, modernity's industrialization, urbanization, and mass communication allow for the incorporation of boredom as a factor in the construction of experience and the construction of the experiencing self. Providing an insightful historical account of the topic by rehearsing the etymological connections between ennui, acedia, melancholy, spleen, and taedium vitae, among others, Dalle Pezze and Salzani make clear that describing boredom as inherently linked to modernity is of primary importance: "This connection must be made explicit," they tell us, "especially because boredom's nihilism tends to see itself as a timeless feature of the human soul and to efface its historicity" (7). This historical contextualizing of boredom is necessary because the term only appears when it does to describe a shift in epistemology: "The 'invention' of the new concept of boredom in the eighteenth century allowed for the articulation of new ways of understanding the world" (11). At issue here is a historicizing of the modern subject and the constitutive role of boredom in this process. We are prepared to read the essays that follow as arguments for apprehending the significance of boredom for a modern worldview.

Following this line of inquiry, several essays in the collection provide particularly insightful commentary on the function of boredom in various moments of modernity. In his "Metaphysics and the Mood of Deep Boredom," Matthew Boss provides an impressively clear description of Heidegger's use of the concept of boredom in his phenomenology of time. Though more far-reaching connections to fields beyond philosophy are not specified, Heidegger's extensive influence on twentieth-century thought [End Page 129] implies an important cultural function for boredom and other "moods," in contrast to the more traditional emphasis on logic as the grounds of metaphysics. Salzani's "The Atrophy of Experience" provides a similarly rigorous analysis of Walter Benjamin's division of experience into the premodern sense of Erfahrung and the more fragmented immediacy of Erlebnis, a symptom of modern society and a condition in which boredom becomes inescapable. For Benjamin, Salzani contends, boredom in modernity takes on "a redemptive potentiality that makes of it an instrument of revolution" (144). Here, the symptom of boredom as ineluctable passivity in modernity becomes a means of individual agency. This gesture toward a more broadly affective description of boredom is carried over in Marco van Leeuwen's "The Digital Void," which extends Benjamin's discussion of aura to the mass digitization of contemporary culture. In contrast to the often readily accepted notion that the aura is dead, van Leeuwen suggests that auratic experience is both subjective and constructed rather than essential or "authentic." Like Isis I. Leslie's "From Idleness to Boredom," which convincingly links boredom to the contemporary loss of political, public selfhood, van Leeuwen's essay treats boredom as an "ailment" in direct contrast to Salzani's and Boss's essays. Though the essay relies perhaps too heavily on essential distinctions (real/virtual, authentic/inauthentic) in a context that has called into question the value of such distinctions, van Leeuwen's investigation of aura as persistently evolving in contemporary culture establishes an important line of interrogation.

Taking a term such as boredom as the focus of what the editors describe as a "multidisciplinary" and "heterogeneous" collection (though five of the nine contributors work in the field of philosophy) poses a number of problems, not the least of which is the difficulty in defining the term in a way that provides a viable interpretive figure. Several essays here rely on seemingly incommensurable definitions; this is telling, particularly as nearly all the essays discuss boredom in some implicit or explicit connection to metaphysics. Rachel June Torbett's "The Quick...

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