Failure

Calling someone a failure is the greatest possible insult, as it is rooted in the judgment that something that could not be avoided anyway has broken through in the failure of the person being addressed: someone who has failed has missed out on their own life, someone who has failed is incapable of achieving what all other people seem to succeed at effortlessly. In addition to the social judgment that others pass on you, there is also the self-accusation: I have failed. But there are no precise criteria as to when one speaks of failure.

Nora Weinelt traces the ways in which the concept of failure, which originates from mechanics, finds its way into common parlance and shows that it is only in our postmodern society, in which every failure has to be described retrospectively as a stage towards success, that it fully unfolds its utterly devastating power.