Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency

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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 of contemporary French philosophers. His devotion to Beckett's work has been lifelong. Yet for Badiou philosophy must be integrally affirmative, whilst Beckett apparently commits his art to a work of negation. Beckett and Badiou explores the coherences, contradictions, and extreme complexities of the intellectual relationship between the two oeuvres. It examines Badiou's philosophy of being, the event, truth, and the subject and the importance of mathematics within his system. It considers the major features of his politics, ethics, and aesthetics and provides an explanation, interpretation, critique, and radical revision of his work on Beckett. It argues that, once revised, Badiou's version 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 and value are occasional and rare. 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 Abbreviations Introduction Beginnings Actual Infinity Intermittency Old Extinguisher 1. Badiou (i): Being, Event, Subject, Truth Being Event Subject Truth 2. Badiou (ii): Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics State and Doxa Politics Ethics Aesthetics and the ‘Waiting Subject’ 3. Badiou, Beckett, and Contemporary Criticism Some Critical Positions Ethics (ii): Beckett Differences and Repetitions Événementialité 4. The Break with Doxa: Murphy, Watt Murphy and the Big World Incidents of Note The Logic of Melancholy 5. The Event of the Event: The Unnamable Logics of Appearance Objects and Inexistents The Siren and the Rock The Irrepressible Ephemeral 6. The Thought of the Good: Enough, The Lost Ones, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho Plato and Lacan Love, Enough The Use in Going Up: The Lost Ones Absence Supreme Good and Yet: Ill Seen Ill Said A Grace without Concept: Worstward Ho 7. The Sparkle Hid in Ashes: Beckett’s Plays The Precious Margaret Remains Onstage Nuancing the Event Conclusion: The Pathos of Intermittency The Ends of Jouissance Modernity and the Event Actual Eclipse Another Field of Thought Beckett’s Threshold Bibliography Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z