When the “liberal subject” shows up in the pages of a work of literary history, it is almost always as a foil: a self-deluding cartoon against which the author positions the texts that interest her. Jennifer Fleissner’s long-awaited Maladies of the Will shows us how little we actually know about that subject, how hard-won and precarious its self-mastery was, and, most of all, how conscious it was of its own frailty. With staggering erudition, Fleissner whisks the reader from Augustine to Arendt, Spinoza to Spillers, with stops along the way in eighteenth-century embryology, nineteenth-century psychiatry, and twentieth-century economics. Maladies of the Will offers a crucial corrective to the status quo, demonstrating that the most sophisticated theories of the internal divisions and inconsistencies characteristic of subjectivity have come from inside the “liberal subject” itself. The book also—in the spirit of Nietzsche’s call for “a history of love, of avarice, of conscience,...

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