Introduction

Failure is a loose concept, covering everything from small mistakes in ordinary life to major catastrophes in society, nature, and history. Its ubiquity and universality lend to it the sense that failure is akin to a self-evident or natural fact. Yet the most important thing about failure is that it is not a fact but a judgment. And given that it is a human judgment, we are obliged to ask how the judgment is made, who is authorized to make it, who is forced to accept it, and what the relationship is between the imperfections of human life and the decision to declare some of them as constituting failures. It further follows that failure is not seen in the same way at all times and in all places. Thus failure is a volatile and variable concept, and the essays in this volume testify to the many guises in which it appears. Some of this variability is a matter of history and culture, while other parts are owed to differences between fields, disciplines, and forms of knowledge. This disciplinary variability is one reason the essays gathered here cover such varied terrain.