Richard Boothby

[Available for preorders. Shipping 26 October.] 

Twenty Shadows tells of a man’s spiritual change following the suicide of his son after a long addiction. Haunted by this loss and the unknown desire of his only child, thinking and writing with a new emptiness, he finds a form of expression that was previously impossible. 

This singular book brings together the reflections of one of our greatest living philosophers with a father’s grief. —Todd McGowan 

Taking its title from Shakespeare’s Richard II—“Each substance of grief hath twenty shadows”—this book follows personal tragedy into the murky place where memory and interpretation become indistinguishable. What lies at its heart is a meditation on the unknowability of the other. —Charlotte Northall 

Richard Boothby is right that no amount of intellect curbs the impulses of real experience, but that doesn’t mean you have to remain in a state of ignorance. Composed from the leftovers of terrible, unassimilable events, this book gives us bracing indications of ways to live on in a diminished aftermath. —Justin Clemens 

Richard Boothby is professor emeritus of philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. Boothby’s books include Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud (1991), Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology after Lacan (2001), Sex on the Couch: What Freud Still Has to Teach Us about Sex and Gender (2006), and Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred (2023). He lives in Baltimore.