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)