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Nenhuma Paixão Desperdiçada

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Nesta obra, George Steiner – um dos mais celebrados críticos literários do mundo – volta-se à linguagem, à sua relação com a literatura, e também à religião. Através de três cânones da literatura ocidental – a Bíblia, Homero e Shakespeare –, o autor analisa formas de “leitura aplicada”. Em uma de suas aulas em Oxford, transcrita na obra, responde, por exemplo, a “O que é literatura comparada?”. E ainda examina as obras de Freud, Kierkegaard, Kafka e Simone Weil, além de percorrer os circuitos da herança helênica no ensaio “A tragédia absoluta”, em que retoma Macbeth, Hamlet, Fausto e Fedra. Em uma era em que a arte da leitura e o status do texto têm sido confrontados por movimentos literários e pelas novas tecnologias da informação, os 21 ensaios de Nenhuma paixão desperdiçada exploram e reorientam as análises da leitura e da literatura nos formatos tradicionais, celebrando a primazia da arte de ler, em seu sentido clássico.

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First published January 1, 1995

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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
Profile Image for Jonfaith.
2,167 reviews1,760 followers
May 28, 2021
If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.

These essays, crammed with such insights and erudition-- they are the source, the core.
Allow them to change your life.
I undoubtedly think about literacy and silence differently than before I read this tome.
I find myself considering Kafka and listening in the dark for the cock to crow.
As much as I want to not believe it, perhaps when Judas walked off stage, the door was left open for the Shoah?
Perhaps?

It made sense to package the two lectures on Jesus and Socrates together but ending the volume in such a way was a departure from the earlier themes and in the process something was lost as initially sculpted, to use a lapidary rule. Somehow Derrida chides from the wings, his comedic stance behind the curtain veils his honest tears. Beckett understood.
Profile Image for Steve.
907 reviews281 followers
May 2, 2009
George Steiner is a serious guy. So serious that, when first encountering his essays, the reader of say "Harpers" or "Vanity Fair" will be taken aback with the realization that what he or she had been consuming up to that reading point were mental potato chips. In his 1996 collection of essays, No Passion Spent, Steiner covers (with great erudition) an incredible range of subjects: Homer, the Hebrew Bible, Simone Weil, Socrates, Christ, the Holocaust, Kafka, Comparative Literature, etc. In all of Steiner's writings, there is an intense interest in moral truth and folded into this moral stance is the religious act of reading itself. In the collection's opening essay, "The Uncommon Reader," Steiner examines Chardin's 1794 portrait, "Le Philosophe lisant." In this essay, Steiner sees the reader in the portrait as representative of a code and system of values quite out of line with our own time:

Consider first the reader's garb. It is unmistakably formal, even ceremonious. The furred coat and hat suggest brocade, a suggestion borne out by the matt but aureate sheen of the coloration. Though clearly at home, the reader is 'coiffed' — an archaic word which does convey the requisite note of almost heraldic ceremony (that the shape and treatment of the furred bonnet most likely derive from Rembrandt is a point of mainly art-historical interest). What matters is the emphatic elegance, the sartorial deliberation of the moment. The reader does not meet the book casually or in disarray. He is dressed for the occasion, a proceeding which directs our attention to the construct of values and sensibility which includes both 'vestment' and 'investment'. The primary quality of the act, of the reader's 'self-investiture before the act of reading, is one of cortesia, a term rendered only imperfectly by 'courtesy'. Reading, here, is no haphazard, unpremeditated motion. It is courteous, almost a courtly encounter, between a private person and one of those 'high guests' whose entrance into mortal houses is evoked by Holderlin in his hymn 'As on a festive day' and by Coleridge in one of his most enigmatic glosses he appended to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The reader meets the book with a courtliness, a scruple of welcome and entertainment of which the russet sleeve, possibly of velvet or velveteen, and the furred cloak and bonnet are the external symbols.


Even though I often read in slovenly attire (T-shirt and gym shorts), I am ready to concede the power of Steiner's image (and its attendant responsibility ) of the reader as thinker, contemplator, and to some limited extent, channel for the word (Logos) — particularly in this, our Age of Iron. Steiner is not a prig -- his concern is for truth. On occasion this can seem cramped, as found in his essays upon the French poet Péguy ("Drumming on the Doors -- Péguy"), and the French philosopher Simone Weil ("Sainte Simone"). In these two essays (as in so many of Steiner's essays), the question is: how does the western non-Jew (read: intellectual) react towards the Jew? In Péguy's case, we have a mystical Catholic poet who was a fierce defender of Dreyfuss. So fierce, that he (Péguy) felt Dreyfuss sold out by accepting amnesty, when in fact he was completely innocent. Steiner thus sees Péguy as a good Christian whose writing and thinking "burns to the touch." No doubt it was Péguy's drive for truth that so deeply impressed Steiner. With Steiner, this uncompromising desire for truth can indeed be like religious conviction -- which is certainly true in the case of Péguy.

With Weil, Steiner is not so expansive. Weil is something of a darling with certain Catholics due to her flirtation with the Church. But she ultimately rejected joining the Church because she thought it was too Jewish! Like Steiner, I'm suspicious of her, and he accuses her of a kind of holy anorexia, which ultimately led to her early death. Her fascination with the dualistic Cathars is a clear clue to her hatred of this world, but he carries it further, seeing her as in fact hating her own Jewishness, which of course places her in a historical continuum of Steiner's own devising. Maybe so. But I think he does make a case for her being somewhat mad by showing just how inarticulate a thinker she really was and not whether she loathed herself because she was a Jew.

Nevertheless, Steiner is often at his best when discussing God, history, Jews, and Christians. He asks tough questions, forces the reader to think, squirm. In a similar, but more developed vein, Steiner lays out his thinking on these subjects in the essay, "Through That Glass Darkly":

Whatever the reasons, Judaic inattention to the New Testament, to patristic literature, to Augustan and Aquinan propositions, comports a consequential void. For it is in these writings that the record of Jewish suffering among the gentiles and of the Shoah is, as 'through a glass darkly', writ large. Let me be absolutely clear on this. Positivist examinations of the roots of the Shoah and of modern anti-Semitism are of self-evident weight. Political history, sociology, the history of economic and class-conflicts, the study, rudimentary as it is, of mass behavior and collective fantasies, have contributed much. But the sum of empirical understanding falls drastically short of any fundamental insight. We will not, cannot, of this I am persuaded, be capable of 'thinking of the Shoah', albeit inadequately, if we divorce its genesis and its radical enormity from theological origins. More specifically, we will not achieve penetration into the persistent psychosis of Christianity which is that of Jew-hatred (even where there are hardly any Jews left) unless we come to discern in this dynamic pathology the unhealed scars left by the Jew's 'No' to the crucified Messiah. It is to these unhealing scars or stigmata that we may apply, in a dread sense, Kierkagaard's injunction that the 'wounds of possibility' must be kept open.


Whether one agrees with this line of thought seems somewhat irrelevant, what you do have to admire is the intellectual gusto with which Steiner swings for the fences, along with the incredible precision of his language. But Steiner doesn't stop with these radical statements, but like a dog running ahead with his well-chewed stick, he writes of Paul:

No volume, and it is never ending, of commentary, of hermeneutic 'gentling', however subtle, can blunt the terrible edge of relegation in Romans 10-11 or 1 Thessalonians. Now that the Son and Deliverer has come, 'ungodliness' is taken away from Jacob' and Israel is redeemed, but only in so far and exactly in so far as it ceases to be itself. Only if it understands that wilful self-exclusion from the new dispensation will make of it an 'un-people', a vestigial absurdity and lamentable scandal. But why should the existence, so obviously marginal and pitiful, of this obdurate remnant so trouble the Apostle? Why should it be a fierce vexation to a Christendom already on the way to its Constantine triumph?


There is much to find fault with in the above passage, not least of which is Steiner's confidence that Paul's first century letter writing efforts will somehow determine the coming of Constantine (and a triumphant Christendom) a few hundred years later. This sentiment, for me at least, betrays Steiner's own classical leanings, and how some of his understandings spring not from his awe of the burning bush, but rather his deep appreciation for Greek Tragedy. This can be jarring, when later in the essay, Steiner faults the Roman Church for its Hellenistic and gnostic compromises. By essay's end, Steiner suggests there can be no rapprochement among Jews and Christians, because we (Jew and Christian) have perhaps reached an historical point – in this postmodern twilight – where men and women concerned with the truth must be content to pick through the blackened shards, resigned to the failure of language. Here Steiner sounds more like a resigned Jewish classicist than a Jewish religious thinker. Nevertheless, and whether you agree with him or not, it is Steiner's scrupulous honesty in the essay that most impresses the reader.

Moving beyond the religious (though with Steiner, questions about God are always present in his writing) you will find that Steiner is not afraid to take on various cultural idols. In his essay "A Reading Against Shakespeare," Steiner takes on the biggest literary idol of all and scores some points worth considering. He does this by following Dr. Johnson's lead and then jumping on the backs of previous arguments put forth by Tolstoy and Wittgenstein but, as always, following his own sense of truth. Ultimately, Steiner finds the fault with Shakespeare to be that he is not a truth-seeker but a magician:

Where is there a Shakespearian philosophy or intelligible ethic? Both Cordelia and Iago, Richard III and Hermione are instinct with the same uncanny trick of life. The shaping imagination which animates their 'spectacular' presence is beyond good and evil. It has the dispassionate neutrality of sunlight or of wind. Can a man or woman conduct their lives by the example or precepts of Shakespeare as they can, say, of Tolstoy? Is the 'creation of words', even at a pitch of beauty, musicality, suggestive and metaphoric originality scarcely accessible to our analysis, really enough? Are Shakespeare's characters, at the last, more than Magellanic clouds of verbal energy turning around a void, around an absence of moral substance?


These are tough questions, all posed with intelligence and an awareness
that Shakespeare is indeed great – but that Shakespeare's greatness requires scales that weigh also the moral truth in the Bard's writings, which is the kind of probing Steiner feels has been largely ignored since Dr. Johnson's day. It is this kind of devotion to truth that the reader can expect in all of Steiner's twenty-one essays. For Steiner, this devotion is the essential requirement we as humans should always insist upon in our writing, reading, and thinking. (A slightly different version of this review appeared in the Avatar Review.)
Profile Image for Szplug.
466 reviews1,528 followers
intermittently-reading
November 16, 2012
Steiner's simply a genius who writes in honeyed text. Even where I haven't read and/or viewed the works or been familiar with the personages under discussion, I'm content to be swept along in the buoyant current of his deep and richly learned stream of thought.
Profile Image for Eric Byrd.
631 reviews1,200 followers
Want to read
July 15, 2008
The reflections on Chardin's 'philosophe listant' are why I could read him all day.
Profile Image for Edmundo Mantilla.
128 reviews
September 7, 2019
No es un libro de lectura rápida. Sería inmerecido y mezquino entregar a Steiner los residuos del tiempo que sentimos propio cuando él es tan generoso y nos brinda siglos de escritura, filosofía y espíritu, aunque a veces sean regalos dolosos. Por sobre todo, Steiner es un lector enamorado de los libros y de la vida del espíritu. Su imaginación interpretativa captura de inmediato nuestra propia inteligencia y nos libera de la comodidad con que olvidamos aquello que creemos recordar tan bien, los Evangelios, los diálogos platónicos, el teatro de Shakespeare, todas aquellas obras que, de tan conocidas, tanto desconocemos. Estos ensayos no son, sin embargo, amables con sus lectores. Exigen de ellos una entrega que suspende la noche. Exigen de nosotros el rigor de preguntas incómodas que preferiríamos no haber leído. Nos conduce, en momentos, a eso odio que tan bien describe en algunas de sus reflexiones: aquel que sentimos por quienes nos demandan una versión mejor de nosotros mismos y a quienes condenamos a la vez que nos autocondenamos. Esa claridad que nos ciega y nos puede abocar a la locura, puesto que la miel de los dioses no es para la boca de los mortales, pude sentirla en "Dos cenas", el último de los ensayos, que enlaza en una lectura personal y reveladora "El banquete" de Platón con la Última cena, relatada por San Juan. Difícilmente se pueden hallar palabras que acaricien de manera igual de dulce momentos jamás vividos.
Profile Image for Talya.
18 reviews10 followers
October 26, 2015
Leí por ahí que a la mayoría de los lectores este libro les hará sentir que todo lo que leyeron antes eran papas fritas mentales. Es así, de cierta manera. Pero es bueno. Sólo espero no terminar hablando como él (seré deliberadamente hiperbólica jajaja)quiero terminarlo ya
Profile Image for Nuno R..
Author 6 books72 followers
March 15, 2018
The first essays I read from Steiner. And immediately a favorite. This is where hope is forged, in works like this, that knowledge both the beauty and the horror and do not settle for anything less than finding purpose and meaning.
Profile Image for Muaz Jalil.
368 reviews10 followers
June 8, 2021
I was impressed by Steiner's interviews. He is extremely erudite and cerebral. However I did not enjoy these essays as much, far too elitist and religious for my taste. However two essays I really enjoyed were : Archives of Eden and Two Cocks. In Archives he argues that generator and appreciators of great art were always the minority. Furthermore mass education will neither increase the number of geniuses nor the reading class( second part might be up to a point). Stability and prosperity may not always translate to production of geniuses , e.g. Latin America and Russia produced best art during worst censorship, because then literature matters. US due to its focus on democracy and civic good is a custodian of art rather than producer. In two cocks he talks about similarity between death of Socrates and Jesus and how it shaped modern Western world.
Profile Image for Martin.
126 reviews10 followers
May 17, 2017
Steiner teeters between pessimistic socialist and fascism. His atheistic readings of texts is rooted in linguistics and theology, which make for enlightening scholarship, but his opinions are also presented as scholarly when often times they veer into the fantastical. That's not to say he's not a delightful read; he is. When he's *really* on his game, he's one of the most engaging philologists and grammatologists one could hope to read. His linguistic studies challenge and also build on Chomsky's work. However, when Steiner focuses his vitriol on class and things like, y'know, race...one wonders how a refugee Jew can sound so much like Ernst Rüdin. His essay on Chardin's 'philosophe listant' is Steiner at his finest: sentimental, anachronistic, unapologetically erudite, and delightfully lulling.
Profile Image for James.
85 reviews
February 14, 2026
I have only just realized that Steiner (like Wittgenstein) responds to Shakespeare with something like—if such a posture is even possible—disturbed outrage. Shakespeare never once misses the mark, never experiences a moment of linguistic embarrassment; this perfection and self-sufficiency of language is almost provocative. With an unanswerable positivity, Shakespeare negates the very limits of language; with verbal abundance he invalidates the notion of being “at a loss for words.” He creates an absolute world and, in doing so, annihilates all other alternative but-for worlds. This power is terrifying—and at the same time morally cold.

At the end of another essay, George Steiner writes that the only future form tragedy can take is nocturnal slapstick. Exactly right—wait until 1996 and see Infinite Jest.
184 reviews6 followers
November 9, 2025
360 σελίδες μετά, καλύτερος αναγνώστης, ευγνώμων άνθρωπος. (Όπου κι αν παίζεις πάντα θα σε ακολουθώ, είσαι το πιο σκληρό ναρκωτικό - και λοιπά γηπεδικά για πάρτη σου αθάνατε θείε Στάινερ)
Author 24 books74 followers
July 28, 2016
George Steiner's essays are arduous and demanding, but the reward they offer is more than commensurate with the effort required. Every essay in No Passion Spent offers not only ample matter for reflection and incentive to new learning, but also gem-like sentences that ring in the memory like lines from the best poems.
The irreducibility of language, the mystery of words, and the near impossibility of faithful and final translation are a repeated focus in these essays. He laments the vitiation of linguistic vitality in a modern environment of “cancerous loquacity.”
In his "Preface to the Hebrew Bible" (1996) he says of Job, "It towers above language as it does above the 'commonwealth' (in the root and composite sense) of our understanding"--a large claim with echoes in each paragraph as he traces in sequential English renditions of Hebrew scripture a history of awe and immensely fruitful failure. Finally, he insists, Hebrew scripture is untranslatable, not only because of the radical ambiguities of ancient Hebrew itself, but perhaps because of some fundamental relationship we have lost with the God who spoke in the whirlwind. "Homer in English" complements the essay on the Hebrew Bible with a similar treatment of what other foundational texts.
"The Historicity of Dreams" considers the status of dreams from David to Freud, suggesting that though our dreams participate in universal archetypes and mythic structures, they are informed by the cultures we inhabit. The point in insisting on the historicity of dreams is to consider the cost entailed in forfeiting the prophetic in favor of the psychological understanding of dreams offered by Freud.
The search for the prophetic voice seems to inform much of Steiner's probing reflection on Judaism and Christianity. The question of prophecy haunts the Jew in a particular way--a matter he explores in "Through a Glass Darkly." The focus on Jewish history and identity continues in "A Note on Kafka's 'Trial."
I return to this superb collection of essays periodically for intellectual stimulation and inspiration of a kind I've found in only a handful of writers and thinkers. Most of the essays focus in some way on text. "Our Homeland, the Text" relates Kafka's tales to the Talmud, considering how reading is a process of "teasing out the abyss, of circling the unnameable, of weaving meaning on meaning . . . ." In another essay he considers the Dreyfus Affair and Hitler’s rise to power in relation to semitic history.
The essay that provides a foundation stone or capstone to the collection is the first, "The Uncommon Reader," which leads us to reconsider the act of reading as a quasi-sacred act. The ideal reader, Steiner reflects, is one who enters into such active inner dialogue with the writer that his or her primary impulse in reading is to write a book in response. The essay is a heartfelt admonition to read with care in a culture where the leisure and silence required to do so are hard to attain. Insistently, Steiner reminds us of what we have lost in a culture of paperbacks, white noise, and digest journalism and holds up for close, careful, and even loving scrutiny an image of the deep repose of the contemplative moment. Even as he reminds us what it is to read well, Steiner gives us, in prose that demands responsible response, instruction, incentive and means to do so.
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