Beckett and Dialectics: Be it Something or Nothing

For a long time, analysis of the work of Samuel Beckett has been dominated by existentialist and post-structuralist interpretations. This new volume instead raises the question of how to understand Beckett via the dialectics underpinning his work. The different chapters explore how Beckett exposes and challenges essential dialectical concepts such as objectivity, subjectivity, exteriority, interiority, immanence, transcendence, and most crucially: negativity. With contributions from prominent scholars such as Alain Badiou, Mladen Dolar, and Rebecca Comay, Beckett and Dialectics not only sheds new light on how Beckett investigates the shapes, types, and forms of negation – as in the all-pervasive figures of 'nothing', 'no', 'null', and 'not' – but also examines how several phenomena that occur throughout Beckett's work are structured in their use of negativity. These include the relationships between voice and silence, space and void, movement and stasis, the finite and the infinite and repetition and transformation. This original analysis lends an important new perspective to Beckett studies, and even more fundamentally, to dialectics itself.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction, Eva Heubach (Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany) 2. Beckett's Method, Alain Badiou (The European Graduate School, Paris) 3. Two Shades of Grey, Mladen Dolar (The European Graduate School, Paris) 4. Senile Dialectic, Rebecca Comay (University of Toronto, Canada) 5. The Real of Realism: Beckett's Unnamable, Eva Heubach (Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany) 6. No Louder: Beckett and the Dynamics of Monotony, Tadej Troha (Institute of Philosophy, Ljubljana, Slovenia) 7. Watt Forms Life, Philipp Weber (Ruhr University Bochum, Germany) 8. Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Eva Heubach is a Visiting Assistant at the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences (Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures) at Yale University, USA. She is also a fellow at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany and a doctoral candidate at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany.

Review :
The Unnamable begins with questions of method: 'How proceed ? By aporia pure and simple ? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered… ?'. Accordingly, the contributors of this lively collection proceed by moving between “pseudo-couples” like Hegel and Adorno exchanging their negativities and Beckett's quasi-dialectics of “non-relation.” Beckett and Dialectics is an outstanding collection of essays on Beckett, driven not simply by scholarly interest in the literary giant, but by genuine philosophical encounters with his work, resulting in true passion and necessity of engaging with it. This makes the volume a particularly vivid and exciting read.