Cover image: Cartoon Bowie © Paul Breen.
We’re Nobody’s Children: David Bowie and Existentialism
Alex Sharpe
B & W 229 x 152 mm | Perfect Bound on White w/Gloss Laminate | Paperback ISBN 9978-1-910761-25-0 | 228 Pages | E-book (ePDF) 978-1-910761-26-7 | 12 May 2026
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description
This book brings existentialist philosophy (atheistic and Christian) to life through the artistic life of David Bowie. Working with Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone Weil, it both explains different existentialist themes and ideas (authenticity, anxiety, ethics, spirituality and death) and applies them to Bowie. In doing so, it sharpens our understanding of existentialism and of tensions both within existentialism and between it and some other philosophical approaches. In particular, it explores what it means to live an existentially authentic life, and it makes the case that Bowie, while he certainly ‘fell’ at times, can be understood as an exemplar of such a life. For David Bowie’s life and work can be read as a meditation on themes of alienation, loneliness, abandonment, fear, anxiety, meaninglessness, freedom and mortality.
If ever there was an artist in whose work we can hear the resonances of existentialism, it was David Bowie. Therefore, Alex Sharpe’s book is extremely welcome. This is an excellent book that also has much of interest to say about Bowie’s lifelong passion for spirituality and what his demise can teach us about our mortality. Highly recommended.
— Simon Critchley
(Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research)
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Existentialist Philosophy
1: Laying Some Existentialist Ground: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger
2: Building on an Existentialist Past: Sartre, Camus, and Weil
Authenticity and Ethics
3: Really You and Really Me: Living an Existentially Authentic Life
4: Oh, I’ll be Free: Bowie’s Radical Freedom
Spirituality and Death
5: Growing Heart and Soul: Bowie and Spirituality
6: My Death Waits: Bowie and Mortality
Conclusion
References
Discography
Index
Alex Sharpe is a Professor of Law at the University of Warwick. Her research interests lie in the areas of social and legal theory; law, ethics, and aesthetics; legal history; gender, sexuality and law; and law and popular culture. She is the author of David Bowie Outlaw: Essays on Difference, Authenticity, Ethics, Art & Love (Routledge, 2022), Sexual Intimacy and Gender Identity ‘Fraud’: Reframing the Legal & Ethical Debate (Routledge, 2018), Foucault’s Monsters and the Challenge of Law (Routledge, 2010), and Transgender Jurisprudence: Dysphoric Bodies of Law (Cavendish, 2002). We’re Nobody’s Children is her second book using the figure of David Bowie to bring philosophical ideas to life for academic and wider public audiences.
Example using Chicago Manual of Style:
Footnote/Endnote:
Alex Sharpe, We’re Nobody’s Children: David Bowie and Existentialism (Coventry: Counterpress, 2026).
Bibliography:
Sharpe, Alex. We’re Nobody’s Children: David Bowie and Existentialism. Coventry: Counterpress, 2026.