1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910815687103321

Autore

Rabate Jean-Michel <1949->

Titolo

Think, pig! : Beckett at the limit of the human / / Jean-Michel Rabate

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York : , : Fordham University Press, , 2016

2016

ISBN

0-8232-7088-2

Edizione

[First edition.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (249 p.)

Disciplina

848/91409

Soggetti

Literature - Philosophy

Theater - Philosophy

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1. How to Think Like a Pig -- 2. The Worth and Girth of an Italian Hoagie -- 3. The Posthuman, or the Humility of the Earth -- 4. Burned Toasts and Boiled Lobsters -- 5. “Porca Madonna!”: Moving Descartes toward Geulincx and Proust -- 6. From an Aesthetics of Nonrelation to an Ethics of Negation -- 7. Beckett’s Kantian Critiques -- 8. Dialectics of Enlittlement -- 9. Bathetic Jokes, Animal Slapstick, and Ethical Laughter -- 10. Strength to Deny: Beckett between Adorno and Badiou -- 11. Lessons in Pigsty Latin: The Duty to Speak -- 12. An Irish Paris Peasant -- 13. The Morality of Form—A French Story -- Coda: Minima Beckettiana -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

This book examines Samuel Beckett’s unique lesson in courage in the wake of humanism’s postwar crisis—the courage to go on living even after experiencing life as a series of catastrophes. Rabaté, a former president of the Samuel Beckett Society and a leading scholar of modernism, explores the whole range of Beckett’s plays, novels, and essays. He places Beckett in a vital philosophical conversation that runs from Bataille to Adorno, from Kant and Sade to Badiou. At the same time, he stresses Beckett’s inimitable sense of metaphysical comedy. Foregrounding Beckett’s decision to write in French, Rabaté inscribes him in a continental context marked by a “writing degree zero” while showing the prescience and ethical import of Beckett’s tendency to



subvert the “human” through the theme of the animal. Beckett’s “declaration of inhuman rights,” he argues, offers the funniest mode of expression available to us today.