Joyful Cruelty: Toward a Philosophy of the Real.

This book combines two shorter works by Rosset, Le Principe de Cruaute and La Force Majeure, dating respectively from 1983 and 1988. The two works provide essential and highly topical illustrations of Rosset's central thesis of acceptance of real. Rosset formulates a philosophical practice that refuses to turn away from world and thus accepts a confrontation with reality (termed the real) whose immediacy comprises equal parts of violence and of or approbation of real. Beginning with this notion of joy, Rosset offers a reinterpretation of Nietzsche that, rather than treating philosopher as a nihilist, underscores his quest for experience without illusion.