This chapter discusses Heidegger’s concept of authenticity and the extent to which it entails an individualism incompatible with his social ontological holism. I argue that Heidegger’s notion of authenticity does not refer to a process of individualisation in which individuals come to rely mostly or solely on their own abilities. Rather, it amounts to what I call an emphatic individuation in which Dasein ontically comes to understand its own nature. Rather than prescribing a set of beliefs or actions, I argue that authenticity requires Dasein to adopt a set of ontologically transparent second-order attitudes on its own existence. This solves two problems inherent to Heidegger’s conception of the self, namely, its lack of constancy (the capacity of the self to remain itself in changing situations) and autonomy (the capacity to commit to some possibilities rather than others). These problems are solved by the analysis of being-towards-death and conscience, respectively. I then consider what the demand for authenticity entails for Heidegger’s conception of face-to-face relations and his conception of historical communities and how it differs from moral obligations.

In this chapter, I explore the representation of affect in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005) and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). These texts, on first sight, seem to reflect a notably affectless narration, yet here I argue that this absence of affect is itself felt to be a crisis, one which the character or narrator struggles to recognise or articulate. In these comparable invocations of emotional removal, disregard and isolation, set in a contemporary context of high speed connection, these writers thus facilitate a new articulation of crisis within the global neoliberal order, making visible a return to elapsed and displaced actualities. They contribute, in this way, to what has been called a ‘new sincerity’ within twenty-first century writing, though their understandings of this project often highlight an ironic affective separation from immediate surroundings.

Very brief prelude in lieu of an introduction, surveying the two main scholarly approaches to the collection: one focused Ovid’s literary artistry, allusive complexity, etc., the other on his exposé (whether serious or simply amusing) of the morally problematic character of the lover; proposes to resist the temptation of intertextuality along with the distancing strategy of moral critique.