Beckett's Proust/Deleuze's Proust


Book Description

An encounter between Deleuze the philosopher, Proust the novelist, and Beckett the writer creating interdisciplinary and inter-aesthetic bridges between them, covering textual, visual, sonic and performative phenomena, including provocative speculation about how Proust might have responded to Deleuze and Beckett.




Proust as Philosopher


Book Description

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time has long fascinated philosophers for its complex accounts of time, personal identity and narrative, amongst many other themes. Proust as Philosopher is the first book to properly explore Proust from a philosophical angle and argues that the key to understanding Proust is the concept of experience.




Deleuze and Beckett


Book Description

Deleuze and Beckett is a collection of essays on specific aspects of the Deleuze and Beckett interface. Some of the world's leading Beckett and Deleuze specialists apply different concepts of Deleuzian philosophy to a wide range of Beckett's oeuvre, including his novels, short stories, and stage, film and television work.




Proust, Beckett, and Narration


Book Description

This a comprehensive comparison of the narrative techniques of two of the twentieth century's most important writers of prose. Using a combination of theoretical analysis and close readings of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, James H. Reid compares the two novelists' use of first-person narration in constructing and demystifying fictions of consciousness. Reid focuses on the narrator's search to represent the voice that speaks the novel, a search, he argues, that structures first-person narration in the works of both novelists. He examines in detail the significant impact of Proust's writing on Beckett's own work as well as Beckett's subtle reworkings of Proust's themes and strategies. This study is an important contribution to critical literature, and offers fresh perspectives on the crucial importance of the Recherche and the trilogy in the context of the twentieth-century novel.




Picture as Spectre in Diderot, Proust, and Deleuze


Book Description

"The possibility of ekphrasis, the verbal representation of visual imagery, is fundamental to all writing about art, be it art criticism, theory or a passage in a novel. But there is no consensus concerning how such representation works. Some take it for granted that writing about art can result in a precise match between words and visual images. For others, ekphrasis amounts to a kind of virtuoso rivalry, in which the writer aims to outdo the pictorial image that is being described. In close readings of Diderot, Proust and Deleuze, Thomas Baldwin shows how ekphrasis can create a spectral effect. In other words, ekphrastic spectres do not function as fully present stand-ins for given works of art; nor can they be reduced to the status of passive and absent others. Baldwin also explores the ways in which the works of Diderot, Proust and Deleuze inhabit each other as ghostly influences."




Deleuze and Art


Book Description

In Deleuze and Art Anne Sauvagnargues, one of the world's most renowned Deleuze scholars, offers a unique insight into the constitutive role played by art in the formation of Deleuze's thought. By reproducing Deleuze's social and intellectual references, Sauvagnargues is able to construct a precise map of the totality of Deleuze's work, pinpointing where key Deleuzian concepts first emerge and eventually disappear. This innovative methodology, which Sauvagnargues calls "periodization", provides a systematic historiography of Deleuze's philosophy that remains faithful to his affirmation of the principle of exteriority. By analyzing the external relations between Deleuze's self-proclaimed three philosophical periods, Sauvagnargues gives the reader an inside look into the conceptual and artistic landscape that surrounded Deleuze and the creation of his philosophy. With extreme clarity and precision, Sauvagnargues provides an important glimpse into Deleuze's philosophy by reconstructing the social and intellectual contexts that contributed to the trajectory of his thought. This book is the product of insightful and careful research, which has not been made available to English readers of Deleuze before now.




Beckett, Deleuze and Performance


Book Description

This book draws on the theatrical thinking of Samuel Beckett and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to propose a method for research undertaken at the borders of performance and philosophy. Exploring how Beckett fabricates encounters with the impossible and the unthinkable in performance, it asks how philosophy can approach what cannot be thought while honouring and preserving its alterity. Employing its method, it creates a series of encounters between aspects of Beckett’s theatrical practice and a range of concepts drawn from Deleuze’s philosophy. Through the force of these encounters, a new range of concepts is invented. These provide novel ways of thinking affect and the body in performance; the possibility of theatrical automation; and the importance of failure and invention in our attempts to respond to performance encounters. Further, this book includes new approaches to Beckett’s later theatrical work and provides an overview of Deleuze’s conception of philosophical practice as an ongoing struggle to think with immanence.




French XX Bibliography, Issue #62


Book Description




Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature


Book Description

The late Jacques Derrida’s notion of literature is explored in this new study. Starting with Derrida’s self-professed inability to comment on the work of Samuel Beckett, whom Derrida nevertheless considered one of the most interesting and exemplary writers of our time, Asja Szafraniec argues that the shared feature of literary works as Derrida understands them is a double, juridical-economical gesture, and that one aspect of this notion (the juridical) is more hospitable to Beckett’s oeuvre than the other. She then discusses other contemporary philosophical approaches to Beckett, including those of Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, and Alain Badiou. The book offers an innovative analysis of Derrida’s approach to literature, as well as an overview of current philosophical approaches to contemporary literature, and a number of innovative readings of Beckett’s work.




Abstract Machines


Book Description

What can philosophy bring to the reading of Beckett? Combining intertextual analysis with a ‘schizoanalytic genealogy’ derived from the authors of L’Anti-Œdipe, Garin Dowd’s Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari offers an innovative response to this much debated question. The author focuses on zones of encounter and thresholds of engagement between Beckett’s writing and a range of philosophers (among them Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant) and philosophical concepts. Beckett’s writing impacts in a variety of ways on Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, and, in particular, resonates with Deleuze’s contributions to the history of philosophy (in books such as Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque), and his ‘critical and clinical’ approach to literature. Furthermore, the books co-written with Guattari, concerned as they are with the ‘molecularization’ of the discipline of philosophy in the name of ‘thinking otherwise’, reveal themselves in a new light when explored in conjunction with Beckett’s œuvre. With its arresting perspectives on a wide range of Beckett’s works, Abstract Machines will appeal to academics and postgraduate students interested in the philosophical aspects of his writing. Its engagement with alternative contributions to the question of Beckett and philosophy, including that of Alain Badiou, renders it a timely and provocative intervention in contemporary debates on the relationship between literature and philosophy, both within the field of Beckett studies and beyond.