Beckett and Badiou : the pathos of intermittency / Andrew Gibson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gibson, Andrew, 1949-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Badiou, Alain--Criticism and interpretation.

Badiou, Alain.

Beckett, Samuel, 1906-1989--Criticism and interpretation.

Beckett, Samuel.

Beckett, Samuel, 1906-1989--Influence.

Beckett, Samuel, 1906-1989.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

xiii, 322 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2006.

Summary:

Beckett and Badiou offers a provocative new reading of Samuel Beckett's work on the basis of a full, critical account of the thought of Alain Badiou. Badiou is the most eminent French philosopher alive today. His devotion to Beckett's work has been lifelong. Yet for Badiou philosophy must be integrally affirmative, whilst Beckett appears to commit his art to a work of negation. Andrew Gibson explores the coherences, contradictions, and extreme complexities of the intellectual relationship between the two writers' oeuvres. He examines Badiou's philosophy of being, the event, truth and the subject, and the importance of mathematics within his philosophical system. He considers the major features of his politics, ethics, and aesthetics and provides an explanation, interpretation, critique, and radical revision of his version of Beckett. Finally, through a set of extended readings of Beckett's fiction and drama, he argues that, in revised form, Badiou's account of Beckett offers an extraordinarily powerful tool for understanding his work.

Badiou and Beckett are instances of a vestigial or melancholic modernism; that is, in the teeth of a contemporary culture that dreams ever more ambitiously of plenitude, they commit themselves to a rigorous concept of limit and intermittency. Truth is rare. Modernity itself is an occasional condition. It is seldom that the chance event arrives to disturb the inertia of the world. For Badiou, however, it is the event and its consequences alone that matter. Beckett rather insists on the common experience of intermittency as destitution. His art is a series of limit-figures, exquisitely subtle and nuanced forms for a world whose state of seemingly rigid paralysis is also always volatile, delicately balanced.

Contents:

Beginnings 1

Actual Infinity 6

Intermittency 16

Old Extinguisher 25

1 Badiou (i): Being, Event, Subject, Truth 41

Being 41

Event 53

Subject 58

Truth 67

2 Badiou (ii): Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics 76

State and Doxa 76

Politics 81

Ethics 90

Aesthetics and the 'Waiting Subject' 101

3 Badiou, Beckett, and Contemporary Criticism 117

Some Critical Positions 117

Ethics (ii): Beckett 129

Differences and Repetitions 133

Evenementialite 138

4 The Break with Doxa: Murphy, Watt 143

Murphy and the Big World 143

Incidents of Note 155

The Logic of Melancholy 162

5 The Event of the Event: The Unnamable 172

Logics of Appearance 172

Objects and Inexistents 179

The Siren and the Rock 182

The Irrepressible Ephemeral 186

6 The Thought of the Good: Enough, The Lost Ones, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho 198

Plato and Lacan 198

Love, Enough 205

The Use in Going Up: The Lost Ones 211

Absence Supreme Good and Yet: Ill Seen Ill Said 217

A Grace without Concept: Worstward Ho 220

7 The Sparkle Hid in Ashes: Beckett's Plays 229

The Precious Margaret 229

Remains Onstage 233

Nuancing the Event 241

Conclusion: The Pathos of Intermittency 254

The Ends of Jouissance 254

Modernity and the Event 257

Actual Eclipse 268

Another Field of Thought 273

Beckett's Threshold 279.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [291]-312) and index.

ISBN:

0199207755

9780199207756

OCLC:

71163816