1. Introduction : Deconstruction of skepticism, reinvention of modernism --
2. Stanley Cavell and the economy of skepticism: Cavell reading Wittgenstein : linguistic games and the threat of skepticism ; Revision of skepticism : acknowledgment, community and the aesthetics of ordinary speech ; Moments of excess : alterity, metaphor, modernism --
3. Rhetoric of failure and deconstruction: Unmasking deconstruction :skepticism in disguise? ; Levinas and Derrida : skepticism and the signification of alterity ; Community and communication ; "Hear say yes" : rhetoric, skepticism, modernism --
4. "The beauty of failure" : Kafka and Benjamin on the task of transmission and translation: "On parables" : exemplarity, transmissibility, figuration ; "The pit of Babel" : translation as the limit of formalism and of linguistic community ; "The ground under our feet" : "The great wall of China" --
5. The paratactic prose of Samuel Beckett : How it is: The remains of aesthetics : failure, task, obligation ; Impossible invention : aesthetics and the signification of alterity ; Inventions of the possible : Beckett's couples and nightmare of communicative reason ; "The inevitable number" : calculation, community and the divine --
6. Witold Gombrowicz : forms of life as disfigurement: Rethinking the parameters of modern aesthetics : form, "immaturity," "the interhuman" ; Between philosophy and art : the double articulation of form in Cosmos.
