Ludwig Wittgenstein

This reflexive book on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s life and thought challenges the meaning and form of biography and subject as much as it launches radical new treatments of Wittgenstein’s sexuality and religious thinking. From first to last, Wittgenstein’s philosophy sought to demonstrate that certainty is a function of the method it employs, rather than a knowledge of the existence or nonexistence of its objects. A devastating insight that appears to make the natural and the supernatural into equally useless examples of each other. This biography proceeds in the same way. Scattered in every direction by this challenge to meaning, it attempts to retrieve itself around the spirit of the man who could say such things. This act of recovery thus performs what could not otherwise be explained; which is something like Wittgenstein’s private conversation with God. This conversation is then allowed to talk back to the story that might have been told, to remonstrate with its facts, and finally, to show them to have been all along what Wittgenstein meant by ‘the despotic moment’, or ‘the hardness of the logical must’.