HOW TO BE A FAILURE AND STILL LIVE WELL

A lively and instructive challenge to contemporary constructions of success and failure which suggests that
richer accounts of what it means to live well can emerge with engaging with the inevitability of loss.

In western consumer economies, success has increasingly been defined in terms of material attainment and the achievement of status. This model of ‘the good life' avoids recognising the shadow that haunts success: that is, the possibility that one may not succeed and as a result be deemed ‘a failure'. How to be a Failure and Still Live Well explores that often neglected theme of failure, not just as the opposite of achievement, but also, and more importantly, how it has been conflated with loss: that which haunts all transient, mortal human experience.
Understanding loss as a form of failure affects our ability to cope with the everyday losses that permeate
existence as a result of the natural processes of ageing, death and decay. Engaging with loss, thinking about what it inevitability means for our lives and commitments, allows different values to emerge than those connected to success as attainment. Relationship, spontaneity and generosity are explored as qualities which arise from taking seriously our vulnerability and which form the basis for richer accounts of what it might mean to ‘live well'.

Beverley Clack is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She is author of Philosophy of Religion: A Critical Introduction (2nd edition 2008), Sex and Death (2002), Freud on the Couch (2013) and editor of Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings (2004).