Cover -- Table of contents -- Preface -- I. WEAK THOUGHT: PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS -- Introduction -- Noica: The Romanian Fragility of Being -- Vattimo: Nihilism, Hermeneutics, Art -- Weak Thought in the Context of Philosophical and Cultural Tradition -- The Weakening of Nietzsche -- Nietzsche, Marx, Emancipation -- Between Dialectical Reason and Hermeneutical Reason -- Nietzsche, Heidegger, Hermeneutics -- Weak Thought and Post-Structuralism -- A Lexicon of Weak Thought: Verwindung, Andenken, pietas -- Nihilism and Hermeneutics -- The Death of Art, Death in Art -- The Abyss of Language -- II. THE WEAK ONTOLOGY OF THE LITERARY WORK -- Introduction -- Imitating as Tracing the World -- The Three Forms of Mimesis in Plato's Philosophy -- The Republic: The Mimesis of Participation -- The Sophist: The Mimesis of Similarity -- The Theaetetus: The Mimesis of the Trace -- The Ethics of the Trace -- The Three Versions of the Trace in Contemporary Philosophy -- Appendix: Plato's Mimetic Triangle -- Sketching the Author -- The Crisis of the Subject: Difference, Interpretation, Critical Point -- The "Unfortunate Contradiction" of Modern Subjectivity - A Provisional Diagnosis -- The Author's Traits: The Trace as a New Formula for the Presence of the Subject in a Text -- III. MODERN LITERATURE AND TRACES -- Introduction -- "Tracing the Traces": An Overview of Weak Ontology in Polish Literature of the Twentieth Century -- "Nothing Comes Before Something": Nihilism before Nihilism -- "Impoverishment, Weakening, Disintegration": Weak Form in Twentieth-Century Art -- "The Disappearance of the Contents of the World" -- "Tracing the Traces" -- "The Generosity of the Trace": On Leśmian's "Snow" -- Gombrowicz and Weak Thought -- Weakness and the Trace in the Poetry of Tadeusz Różewicz -- "The Poet Weakens, Images Lose Their Strength": Różewicz's Weak form.

"The traits destroyed by time / portray our common face": Traces of the Subject, Subject as Trace -- IV. OTHER FORMS OF IMITATION/ TRACING: DANCE, MIME, ORNAMENT -- "Only in dance do I know how to speak the parables of the highest things": The Metaphor of Dance in the Modernist Tradition -- Mime and Mimesis: Mime and Pantomime in Modern Literary Consciousness -- The Language of Movement: Mime and Pantomime in the Conceptions of the Framers of the Great Theater Reform -- Norwid, Mallarmé, Leśmian: Mime as the Representation of a Representation -- Creating Presence: Mime and the Phenomenon of Representation -- The Metaphor of the Ornament in PhilosophicalDiscourse: From Kant to Vattimo.