Bloomsbury Literary Studies

Dust Specks

Guest post by Michael Marder

Note: The small fragments on dust gathered here are based on my nearly daily tweets on the subject @michael_marder. Besides their belatedness, there is no reason why they could not have been a part of my book Dust (Object Lessons).

Prelude

Twitter generates and spreads the dust of thought: dispersed, inessential, fine shreds covering everything.

The book

I love the cover of DUST. In it, on it, my name seems buried under dust, the word and the thing.

DUST is now a material thing in the world! That is: It can gather and release dust.

...the dust of thought and that of matter... My DUST is the point where their vectors intersect...

In my book, I show how dust itself urges us to think, what it gives to thought, and what thought can dispense back to it.

One substance

Spinoza was right about the one substance. Its name is dust. The body and the mind are its two, not-so-different, modes.

In dust, the difference between ‘who’ and ‘what’ is abolished.

Dust is both verb and noun—a perfect, complete word for the imperfection and incompletion of existence.

Insignificance

Dust is the insignificant almost-not-a-thing reminding us of our own insignificance. 

Try to see the world from the perspective of dust, and all your problems will reveal their relative triviality. 

Paraphrasing Freud: Where there was world, there will be dust.

From dust to dust, our lives are a circle of the elements’ relation to themselves.

Nonidentity

Dust is a lesson in unlearning the rules of identity.

“Dust is” says in equal measure “Dust is not.”

In dust, the gruesomeness of death has been already neutralized—the products of decay desiccated, made subtle…

Dust is the indifference of difference.

Gathering-dispersal

Dust is posthumous dissemination, its origin (including immediate life) erased.

Till dust do us part? (and, in parting, bring us together anew).

Dust flies, settles, gathers, spreads in the finest parody of Aristotle's unmoved mover I know of.

Dust is the event of the thing.

 

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His most recent monographs include The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (2014), Pyropolitics: When the World Is Ablaze (2015), and Dust, recently released in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series. He is now completing a book, co-authored with Luce Irigaray and titled Through Vegetal Being.

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To dust, or not to dust?

Guest post by Michael Marder

To dust, or not to dust? That is not the question. We have no other choice but to do both things at the same time: dusting as in tidying up our dwellings—an arduous and infinite task—and as in spreading the dust of our bodies and clothes around. A key lesson of my book Dust (Object Lessons) is that this powdery substance envelops and levels crude oppositions that follow the model of “X or not X,” on which the logical principle of non-contradiction is based. It decides us into finite existence before we have a chance to decide what to do with it.

You realize, of course, that the question I have playfully posed in this blog entry is a variation on Hamlet’s ponderous “To be, or not to be?” Herein lies another hint as to what I am after in my text. Dust is not so much what remains of being, but the substitute for being in our age, which Nietzsche poetically and prophetically called “the twilight of the idols.” Being, impregnated by time, is dust. Space, filled with dust, is extended time. The unequal amount of time it takes to grind a book’s cover, your skin, tree pollen, a metal doorknob, and fibers of wool into dust are the unique signatures of all these finite beings.

So, when I selected dust as an “object” to draw lessons from, I chose nothing less than a figure of being, appropriate for the end of metaphysics, that is, for the end of grand, totalizing narratives about the most essential makeup of what is. We live and breathe in the dust, and increasingly so day by day. Why not learn to think in the dust as well, instead of forcing our thoughts into the oxygen- and reality-free realm of pure ideas, divine substances, or absolute spirit? That is what postmetaphysics feels, looks, and smells like.

We might read the “to” of “to dust” not only as the (rather obvious) marker of the verb’s infinitive form, but also as a preposition followed by a noun and indicating a certain destination. Together with other animate and inanimate entities, we are invariably on our way to it. To dust! is the unwitting slogan of everything that is. For this reason, too, the question of my entry title is not in earnest. Needless to say, this pen, this hand holding the pen, this body to which the hand with the pen is attached, and this inimitable world holding (otherwise, “existentially”) the body with the hand clasping the pen are destined to dust. Exactly when each reaches it—is only a matter of time.

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His most recent monographs include The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (2014), Pyropolitics: When the World Is Ablaze (2015), and Dust, recently released in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series. He is now completing a book, co-authored with Luce Irigaray and titled Through Vegetal Being.

Guest Post: The Transformative Humanities: What, Why and How to Transform by Mikhail Epstein

Guest Post by Mikhail Epstein, Author of

The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto

The Transformative Humanities: What, Why and How to Transform?

The current crisis of the humanities is caused by their intellectual autism, characterised by impaired social interaction. The humanities have lost the ability and desire to communicate with humans as spiritual beings; instead, they choose to deal with the texts of the past, mostly for the sake of criticism and deconstruction. The humanities are caught in the old dogma of specification as advanced in the 1920s by Russian Formalism and in the 1930s and 1940s by American New Criticism: everything in literature is reduced to pure literariness, and literariness is further reduced to textuality. There is no metaphysics, no biography, no psychology, and no living people: only texts conversing with other texts. This tenet was further exacerbated by structuralism and poststructuralism.  The humanities of today are hypercritical, hypertextual, and hyperpasseist.  

In order to overturn this tendency, I propose a program for developing the innovative, transformative and future oriented humanities.  Here are three key questions:

What to transform?

The humanities have the goal of studying and transforming their subjects, i.e. humans, in all their cultural manifestations.  The humanities can be defined as the self–transformation of the human species by the force of its self–awareness and self–exploration. Even while researching the past, the humanities aim to shape human future. 

Why to transform?

Without transformative practices and applications, the humanities are what botany would be without cultivation of plants, forestry and gardening, or cosmology without practical exploration of outer space. Scholarship becomes scholastic. All sciences need their own technologies to increase knowledge through experimentation with objects of knowledge. What impact does cultural theory have on contemporary culture, or poetics on living poetry?  It should be the task of literary scholarship to project new practices of writing; the task of linguistics should be to create new systems of signs, lexical units and grammatical models that would expand the richness and expressive power of language; and the task of philosophy should be to project new universals and universes, the alternative worlds that may become more and more palpable and habitable through the advance of technologies. Every humanistic discipline needs its practical extension in order to convert knowledge into constructive thinking and creative action.  

How to transform?

 The system of priorities in the humanities needs radical revision. Today, it encourages the proliferation of overly detailed and highly specialised descriptions rather than genuine new ideas. In order to survive and prosper in the 21st c., the humanities must shift their focus from descriptive scholarship to creative thinking capable of producing new intellectual movements, spiritual practices and socio–cultural institutions. Such a shift in focus would enable the humanities to shape the future on par, and in interaction with, sciences and technologies.  The humanities need a transition from their autistic concentration on "close reading" to socially engaged "open reading" and "open writing": open to humans beyond texts and to methods beyond criticism and deconstruction.  The humanities must learn how to concentrate and disseminate intellectual energy through concise genres, such as aphorisms, manifestos, programs, theses and thought provoking fragments and drafts. These are  genres that would grasp the spirit of creative thinking  and resonate with the surging noosphere and technosphere of the 21st century.

Einstein famously stated, "Imagination is more powerful than knowledge." Indeed, knowledge merely reproduces the existing world, whereas imagination creates the world that never existed before. This type of innovation is in short supply in the humanities. Our disciplines must recapture the intellectual initiative and imaginative powers that in the 20th century were appropriated by sciences and technologies.

In the past, the humanities, through philosophical vision, moral imperatives, socio–utopian projections and aesthetic manifestos, led the humankind into the future. Will their sole role in the future be to lead us back into the past?

 The Transhumanities as Practical Extensions of Scholarship          

The Transformative Humanities are the future-oriented humanities that do not limit themselves to scholarship, but rather seek to create their own ways of changing what they study. We know that technology serves as the practical extension (“application”) of the natural sciences, and politics as the extension of the social sciences: both technology and politics are designed to transform what their respective disciplines study objectively: nature and society. Is there any activity in the humanities that would correspond to this transformative status of technology and politics?

Nature	–	natural sciences	–	technology	–	transformation of nature
Society	–	social sciences	–	politics	–	transformation of society
Culture	–	the  humanities	–	the transhumanities	–	transformation of culture

The transformative humanities encompass all humanistic technologies and all practical applications of cultural theories. When offering a certain theory, we need to ask ourselves if it can inaugurate a new cultural practice, a new artistic movement, a new disciplinary field, a new institution, a new life-style, or a new intellectual community.

Manifesto as a Transhumanistic Genre

    The main insights of literary theory, as we study its innovative ideas and peak achievements, are found not in scholarly monographs or articles, but in various genres of the transhumanities, in particular, literary manifestos, which are products of theoretical imagination, rather than of empirical study and scholarly scrutiny. The manifestos of Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Naturalism, Symbolism, Futurism, or Surrealism proclaim new literary movements and cultural epochs, and they trigger these movements by the very act of their proclamation. Manifestos are performative rather than descriptive speech acts; they implement what they pronounce. Those who found new literary movements typically are not scholars, but a separate breed of creators of ideas and theories. They are transformative thinkers and humanistic inventors.

    Manifestos are neither factual nor fictional—they are formative. The proper place of manifestos is precisely in the as yet unmarked domain of theoretical inventions, or the transhumanities. The transhumanities embrace both modes of cognitive advancement recognized by the sciences: the discovery of some existing principles and facts, and the invention of those tools and ideas that can transform a given area of study. Inventorship, as a mode of creativity, is as indispensable a companion to scholarship in the humanities as technology is to science. The transhumanities can be defined in Mikhail Bakhtin’s words as “the co-creativity of those who understand [culture]”, as the constructive and transformative potential of cultural theories.                              

 The Transhumanities and the University

Our academic institutions, however, currently have no place for such avenues of conceptual creativity. There are departments of literary theory and scholarship (“comparative literature”); departments or programs of fiction and creative writing; but there are no departments of constructive writing in “practical theory”, no transhumanities departments.

    Is there any institution in contemporary academy in which such literary inventors and builders as Friedrich Schlegel, Vissarion Belinsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, André Breton, or Walter Benjamin, could flourish as professionals? Imagine Friedrich Nietzsche applying for the position of assistant professor in a department of philosophy and bringing his book Thus Spake Zarathustra as confirmation of his credentials—a book without a single reference, with no list of sources, devoid of scholarly apparatus, and full of pompous metaphysical declarations voiced by an arrogant author in the guise of an ancient Persian prophet. Most likely Nietzsche would be denied even the position of an instructor, while, following his death, dozens of distinguished professors of philosophy have made their careers studying Nietzsche’s oeuvre. The contemporary academy dismisses humanistic inventorship, while retrospectively holding it in such high esteem.

The academy’s failure to recognize the cognitive status of the transhumanities raises the question of whether various intellectual capacities are adequately represented at our universities. According to Alfred North Whitehead, one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, “the task of a University is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought, and civilized modes of appreciation, can affect the issue.” Humanistic inventorship, even more directly than humanistic scholarship, shapes our future. For the humanities to survive and to enhance their intellectual impact on society, their transformative branches need to be recognized in contemporary universities by establishing programs in creative thinking and humanistic inventions. The academy needs creative minds in these fields no less than they need the academy.

 

Mikhail Epstein is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University, USA, and Professor of Russian and Cultural Theory at Durham University, UK. He has authored 20 books and approximately 600 essays and articles, translated into 16 languages. Professor Epstein has won national and international awards, including The Andrei Bely Prize (S.-Petersburg, 1991); The Social Innovations Award 1995 from the Institute for Social Inventions (London); the International Essay Contest set up by Lettre International and Weimar - Cultural City of Europe, 1999; and The Liberty Prize, awarded annually for "the outstanding contribution to the development of Russian - U.S. cultural relations" (New York, 2000).

Learn more about The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto here

The Greatest Literary Moustaches!

It’s Movember and we love a good literary moustache. So much so, we’ve put together a collection of our all-time favourites! From the Walrus to the Mexican, and the Handlebar to the Horseshoe, it seems there is no end to the amount of creative facial topiary in the literary world… Something tells me Shakespeare set a trend.

Mark Twain

‘There has been nothing as good since’ said Ernest Hemingway about Mark Twain’s legendary book Huckleberry Finn. But, he could just as well have been talking about Twain’s famous moustache.

Mark Twain wasn’t without opinion when it came to facial hair, directing the following vitriol towards the beard: ‘it performs no useful function; it is a nuisance and a discomfort; all nations hate it; all nations persecute it with the razor’. Must have been why he plumped for this rather impressive looking moustache. And with matching eyebrows too.

Read our Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair guide to Mark Twain. It reveals all sorts of fantastic facts about this intriguing writer... did you know that he started smoking at 7 and often smoked 40 cigars a day? Nope, me neither. Pretty impressive shocking.

Rudyard Kipling

‘Being kissed by a man who didn’t wax his moustache was like eating an egg without salt’. We couldn't agree more Rudyard Kipling.

This 'tash is so impressive that we've opted for a side portrait shot so you can really see the full depth of this impressive literary bush. Look out for our new book on Rudyard Kipling and Japan - no other leading English literary figure of his day spent so long in that country or wrote so fully about it.

George Orwell

George Orwell said, in his famous 6 Rules for Writing, ‘Never use a long word where a short one will do’. It would seem he had the same approach to moustaches. I’m calling this one... modest yet confident.

George Orwell also wrote an essay in the Evening Standard in 1946 about his rules for drinking tea. Whilst not related in any way to moustaches, I still think it deserves a special mention. Orwell employed the essay as a tool to entertain, illuminate and provoke readers as well as help him fashion his distinctive 'literary' voice. George Orwell the Essayist by Peter Marks gives these compelling pieces the critical attention they merit.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

What can we say about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s moustache? It’s a wonder he had any time to write considering the hours he must have put in taming and trimming this sublime example of facial topiary.  I know what you must be thinking, ‘I WISH I could get my hands on some of his moustache trimmings’. Well, I’m afraid the opportunity has been and passed, with one moustache & ACD fan purchasing his moustache trimmings. They came neatly packaged up in the original envelope they were kept in for so many years with the following inscription: ‘My beloved moustache hairs’. I'm sure the new owner feels the same.

Walt Whitman

Is it a moustache or a beard? Are there side-burns in there? We can't quite figure it out. And that's what makes Walt Whitman's contributions to facial topiary so impressive.

In Whitman’s Queer Children, Catherine Davies looks at 'the anxious relationship between the homosexual and his American home'  in the work of four gay twentieth-century poets - Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, James Merrill and John Ashbery. Dwelling on the nurturing adaptable heritage of Walt Whitman, she considers Whitman’s renegotiation of the dialectic between the public and the private as a context for the project of the homosexual epic.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche sports the unique looking walrus-handlebar moustache. Otherwise known as the moustache that launched a thousand philosophical arguments (and its own facebook page). 

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche posits the Übermensch as a goal that humanity can set for itself. Did he set this goal for his own facial hair? There is one thing we can be sure of – he set the philosophical world alight with this revolutionary 'tash.

Still a bit confused? Nietzsche: A Guide for the Perplexed will tell you everything you need to know.

Edgar Allen Poe

It's fair to say that EAP employed his moustache in a rather gothic manner. An article in Scribner’s Magazine in 1878 reveals that 'He wore a dark mustache, scrupulously kept, but not entirely concealing a slightly contracted expression of the mouth and an occasional twitching of the upper lip, resembling a sneer. This sneer, indeed, was easily excited — a motion of the lip, scarcely perceptible, and yet intensely expressive. There was in it nothing of ill-nature, but much of sarcasm … '

So impressive was his moustache that is spawned this imaginative looking t-shirt. If anyone could let me know where to buy it, I’d really appreciate it.

An inescapable black pit, an innocent buried alive, and the deranged hallucinations of a murderer all haunt Tales of Mystery and Imagination - a collection of Edgar Allan Poe's most celebrated chilling stories.

Ernest Hemingway

All hail Ernest Hemingway's contribution to the moustache world! We know that he loved hunting in Africa, bullfighting in Spain, deep-sea fishing in Florida and this is the perfect moustache to match. Hemingway married four times, often falling for one woman while still married to another. With this dashing moustache I think we can see why he was so irresistible to women.

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez once characterised common European perceptions of Latin America as ‘a man with a moustache and a guitar and a revolver’. He might have kept the moustache, but he certainly broke other pre-existing stereotypes by putting Latin American writing on the literary map.

If a moustache could ever be described as ‘friendly’ then this is certainly it. You can find out more about this compelling man by reading our biography by Gerald Martin and literary guide to Love in the Time of Cholera by Tom Fahy.

Stefan Zweig

Born in Vienna in 1881, Stefan Zweig was one of the most respected authors of his time. And not just for his epic looking moustache. The Economist hailed him as a 'Secret Superstar' and the New Yorker called him an 'Escape Artist' earlier this year.

Foreseeing Nazi Germany's domination of Europe, Zweig and his wife left Austria in 1933. Despairing at Europe's future and feeling increasingly isolated, they committed suicide together in 1942. As Zweig's correspondence all but ceased with the outbreak of World War II, little is known about his final years. Stefan and Lotte Zweig's South American Letters, edited by Darién J. Davis and Oliver Marshall, reproduces personal letters written by the couple during this time and creates a fascinating picture of the last years of this famed author, cast adrift by the rise of Nazism and enforced exile.

Joseph Conrad

Some critics have commented that Joseph Conrad was known for his pessimistic writing style and stark presentation of the human condition. I don’t think he helped matters with this harsh looking moustache. There is one thing that the critics certainly agree upon - Heart of Darkness is a landmark text of 20th century literature that continues to resonate to this day. We certainly love it. One of our latest books, Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Contemporary Thought by Nidesh Lawtoo brings this book into philosophical dialogue and includes the first publication in English of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's essay, 'The Horror of the West', described by J. Hillis Miller as 'a major essay on Conrad's novel, one of the best ever written'.

That's it for our literary moustache round up! Of course we couldn't include everyone - Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Gustave Flaubert... the list could go on and on. It would also be impossible to choose a favourite. But we want to hear from you -  who would get your vote for the most impressive literary moustache? Who can't you believe that we have left out? Is there any obscure Russian writer with a more impressive offering than Nietzsche (probably)?  Let us know so we can add it to our literary moustache hall of fame.

In the meantime, good luck to anyone still plugging away at their Movember efforts. The crowd above would be very proud.

Jenny Tighe

Beckett and Death in the Journal of Beckett Studies

The Journal of Beckett Studies have been very kind to us lately - first, this review of Beckett and Phenomenology, and now this excellent article and review of Beckett and Death:

As Barfield and Tew note in their insightful critical foreword to Beckett and Death, it is almost unbelievable, given the central place of death in Beckett’s work, that such a volume has not appeared before. Beckett and Death addresses an underexplored area in Beckett criticism, or at least one which, despite its inescapability, has received few booklength treatments. Noting the exceptional status of Critchley’s and Ricks’s work in this context, Barfield and Tew go on to observe that death is ‘so uncannily, so uniquely productive in such different ways in Beckett’s texts, that it almost seems pointless to talk of it as a mere preoccupation’. The volume goes on to document a dizzying range of the modes of deathly production in Beckett, ranging from All That Fall and More Pricks than Kicks to the legacy of Jung, Mauthner and Augustine within Beckett’s work.

Augustine is the subject of Elizabeth Barry’s rich essay on the rhetoric of dying, and Barry aptly notes the ongoing enigma which Augustine represents within Beckett criticism, ‘often cited but not yet completely understood’. In particular, Barry’s analysis highlights the crucial but so far underdocumented correspondence between the imaginative use of narrative voice in their work. There are fascinating insights here into the parallel between Augustine’s circuire and the Unnamable’s journey back to the fold, both of which involve rhetorical, as well as spatial, round-aboutness. Most telling of all, though, is the material on the figure of distentio in Augustine, and Augustine’s perplexity with the verb moritur itself. As Barry says, there follows a pun worthy of Beckett: ‘as the thing it signifies [death] cannot be declined in fact, so the word itself [ie, the verb] cannot be declined in speech’. One has the sense here of new territory opening up, as Augustine continues to shed important light on the physical decline which so dominates the Beckett oeuvre and the rhetorical declensions through which it is articulated. Augustine is revisited in Paul Stewart’s essay on ‘Sterile Reproduction’, which focuses on the hope in All that Fall that suffering can be brought to an end by not renewing the species. Dan Rooney’s desire to kill some ‘young doom’ is recontextualised by reference to Schopenhauer and, via Jonathan Dollimore, the early Christian fathers and Augustine. For Julie Campbell, meanwhile, All That Fall exemplifies the specific connection between the omnipresence of death and the possibilities of radio drama. Campbell links the ‘dark comedy’ of the play to another form of darkness, that of the listener who, alone in the dark, constructs the fictive world of All that Fall from a soundscape with no form of visual corroboration. As she argues, ‘sound has the ability to portray a truth hidden by the “mask” of the visual, physical image’. That ability has significant implications for our reading of the play which, as Campbell notes, also contains the first unmistakable reference to the lecture by Jung attended by Beckett in 1935. Peter Fifield’s essay turns from Jung to neuropsychology, providing important evidence of Beckett’s knowledge of specific forms of clinical memory loss. Noting the status of ‘confabulation’ as a clinical term, Fifield links Beckett’s amnesiacs to ‘temporal morbidity’ and the imaginary creation of the past as a response to amnesia. The result is an original reading of the Trilogy, and new parallels are drawn with Korsakoff’s syndrome and A.R. Luria’s The Man with a Shattered World.

The contributions by Mark Nixon, Seán Lawlor and Steven Matthews address the place of death in Beckett’s body of work as a whole. Nixon’s essay links the advertisedly uncertain textual status of many works, such as From an Abandoned Work, to the troubled thematics of dying: ‘Beckett’s attempts to “fail better” as he puts it, are thus signposted by titles such as “For to End Yet Again”, so that it is now quite common to view Beckett’s entire oeuvre as a work in progress’. These are important questions in discussions of Beckett’s body of work, which continue to be dogged by Beckett’s reflexive titles and emphasis on the oeuvre as serial (one might add the bodily thematics of the titles and their imperfect correspondence between languages). For Nixon, ‘Beckett viewed the act of writing as comparable, even concomitant with, the process of living’, hence the textual instability which accompanied Beckett’s search for means of expression for declining life. The corpus as a whole is also at stake in Seán Lawlor’s essay, ‘ “O Death where is thy sting?” Finding words for the big ideas’, albeit in a different sense. Lawlor is concerned with More Pricks than Kicks, a corpus which both reflects the thematics of death and itself poses questions of life and corporeality.

Steven Matthews, meanwhile, is concerned with Beckett’s ‘late style’, applying the framework of Edward Said’s On Late Style to Beckett’s late work. Said’s is an appropriately subtle model, identifying in some authors a reconciliation between ‘bodily condition and aesthetic style’ and in others a refusal of harmony and resolution. Beckett, for Matthews, is of the latter camp, producing a late phase whose emphasis on speaking of and to the dead produces singular dilemmas of voice: ‘in these late works, to speak is to become posthumous to oneself, to become “no longer oneself”. The act of speaking, especially when speaking “close to death”, opens the self, andwords themselves, to repetition as a plurality of deaths, to the inability to speak of the dead as single and unique at the very moment when it is necessary and responsible to do so’. The analysis is an important one, and produces further parallels between Beckett and Derrida’s analysis of mourning.Matthews refers in detail to the Sottisier Notebook, and there are rich ‘late’ pickings here, although one sometimeswonders whether the problematic of voice and death in fact stretches back to earlier phases of Beckett’s career too. Shane Weller’s essay considers the ‘politics of death’ in Beckett’s work, revisiting Adorno’s reading of Beckettian suffering and its later consideration by Terry Eagleton and H. Porter Abbott. For Adorno’s Beckett, Weller argues, death takes on a radical political charge, as it comes to represent the dream of a world without suffering: ‘through his “pictures” of death, through his making of death a condition devoutly to be wished, Beckett would offer us the only tenable critique of both totalitarianism and capitalism’. Following this critique, Eagleton becomes an advocate of a ‘Beckett of the Left’, while Porter Abbott sees in Beckettian death a form of utopia, so that death’s political charge is countered by a metaphysical charge. Weller’s conclusion transcends the dichotomy, linking Beckett’s work to that of Sade via the conception of the ‘republic’, and a radical reconfiguration of the relation between suffering, pleasure and freedom. This, then, is an important volume which boldly tackles the near-omnipresence of death in Beckett, and sensitively accounts for the multiple forms it takes. One senses, inevitably, that Beckett’s dead still have much to say.

- Beckett and Death, edited by Steven Barfield, Matthew Feldman and Philip Tew, analyses a number of Beckett's poems, plays and short stories through consideration of mortality and death. It is now available to buy in paperback - you can find out more by visiting our website.

Beckett and Phenomenology reviewed in Journal of Beckett Studies

We are delighted with this excellent book review for Beckett and Phenomenology (and all-round excellent piece of writing on Beckett and Philosophy) by Russell Smith in the Journal of Beckett Studies:

It’s easy to see why Beckett looked like a phenomenologist to earlier generations of critics: many of his characteristic preoccupations – the nature of consciousness, sensory perception and embodied experience – mirror phenomenological themes, while Waiting for Godot was virtually a case study of the existentialists’ problem of meaningful action in a meaningless world. Then again, it’s easy enough to see why the generations reared on deconstruction developed an intolerance to even minute traces of phenomenology: in their passion to construct a deconstructionist Beckett, phenomenology –with its subject-centredness and its neglect of language – seemed incapable of accounting for Beckett’s decentred subjects adrift among self-reflexive linguistic aporias.

But as Maude and Feldman point out, this dismissal of phenomenology ‘has often stemmed from misreadings of deconstructive theory’ which have misconstrued the influence of Husserl on Derrida and overlooked later developments of phenomenology itself. Husserl’s ‘transcendental phenomenology’ sought, through the famous epoché, to establish the a priori conditions under which phenomena appear to the consciousness of a perceiving subject. But long before Derrida launched his critique of Husserl’s ‘phenomenology of presence’, the ‘big three’ post-Husserlian phenomenologists had begun to address these blind-spots: Heidegger on the temporality and ‘enworldedness’ of the subject, Sartre on the ethicality of the subject as both in-itself and for-itself, and Merleau- Ponty on the embodied nature of subjectivity and the many ways in which the body fails to be present at its own experiences.

This volume (Beckett and Phenomenology) is divided into two parts. The first four essays consider Beckett’s work in the light of each of the ‘big four’, while the remaining seven essays consider various phenomenological themes in relation to Beckett’s work, both in terms of its internal thematics (such as Paul Sheehan’s fascinating essay on the paradoxes of the Beckettian ‘phenomenology of sleep’), and in terms of the theoretical elaboration of a ‘phenomenology of reading’ (via Ingarden, Iser and Hirsch) capable of dealing with the unique interpretive challenges of Beckett’s prose...

Of the many excellent pieces in the second part of the book, two in particular stand out. Daniel Katz’s ‘What Remains of Beckett: Evasion and History’ returns to a topic that has received sustained attention in recent years: the relation of texts such as Endgame and The Lost Ones to the historical event of the Nazi genocide, and in particular to Adorno’s notion of an ‘image ban’ governing its representation. Following David Houston Jones’s excellent recent work, Katz draws out affinities between Giorgio Agamben’s elaboration of Primo Levi’s ‘paradox of the witness’ – the true witness cannot bear witness – and Beckett’s own sense of the impossible obligation of expression. Katz shows how Beckett responds ‘through a not-saying, although such a not-saying implies a pointing not only to the place where the image does not appear, but to the ban which prohibits it’. What is most productive in Katz’s essay is his rigorous interrogation of the more slippery moves in Agamben’s reasoning, especially its use of Levinas’s account of shame, and Katz ends by opening up questions for further work concerning Beckett’s bilingualism, the ethics of speaking by proxy, and the shameful impossibility of escaping one’s own subjectivation.

Finally, Chris Ackerley’s essay provides a fascinating introduction to the ‘phenomenology of annotation’ and the grounds by which, according to E.D. Hirsch, an annotator determines the ‘validity’ of an interpretation based on ‘a distinct context of relevant knowledge’. Ackerley is, of course, the pre-eminent annotator of Beckett’s works, and this engaging account offers a behind-the-scenes look at the annotator’s work, both the invisible hosts of factual minutiae that crowd the margins of the text, and the annotator’s triage of validity and relevance, in working towards, not a ‘correct’, but a ‘better’ interpretation. Ackerley stresses in particular its essential relation to ‘ordinary reading practice’, shuttling between a ‘divinatory moment’ or ‘imaginative guess’, and a critical activity of ‘raising interpretive guesses to the level of knowledge’.

Beckett and Phenomenology inevitably returns us to the indispensable chestnut of ‘Beckett and Philosophy’, and what that particular ‘and’ might mean. I would argue, along with some of the contributors here, that Beckett’s writing is most interesting in the ways that it refuses philosophy, keeps it at arm’s length where it provides material but never method. But when Beckett told interviewer Tom Driver in 1961 ‘I am not a philosopher’, he made it clear that the particular kind of philosopher that he was not was a Sartre or a Heidegger. Phenomenology has a special status in this refusal, and as Shane Weller points out here, Beckett knew their work well enough to insist on its categorical difference from his own project. This ‘not’ is a useful counterbalance to the implied intimacy of the ‘and’ in Beckett and Phenomenology. The nec tecum nec sine te of Beckett’s relation to philosophy, and phenomenology in particular, remains an open question to which this book makes, after all these years, an inaugural contribution.

- Edited by Ulrika Maude and Matthew Feldman, Beckett and Phenomenology compares and contrasts Beckett’s work with key figures in phenomenology and analyses phenomenological themes and their dramatization in his work. It is now available to buy in paperback. You can read the first 30 pages of the book for free here!