Call for Papers: Alain Badiou’s Ethics

An announcement from the International Journal of Badiou Studies

Alain Badiou

A CFP (Call for Papers) from the International Journal of Badiou Studies [www.badioustudies.org]:

Badiou’s Ethics

“Rather than link the word [‘ethics’] to abstract categories, it should be referred back to particular situations. Rather than reduce it to an aspect of pity for the victims, it should become the enduring maxim of singular processes. Rather than make it merely the province of conservatism with a good conscience, it should concern the destiny of truths, in the plural”

– Alain Badiou

The focus of the third issue of Badiou Studies will be Badiou’s ethics. Ethics is paramount to Badiou’s political theory and his materialist dialectics, and is evident throughout his philosophy. Moreover, Badiou’s small book on ethics remains one of the most important points of entry into Badiou’s thought since it is not only widely read across disciplines but is also one of the most widely translated of all of his works.

Badiou’s theory of ethics and his book on the subject are easily approachable. Yet, under this beguiling transparency, there lies an explosive and radical affront to popular ethics of mainstream society, media, academia and politics in the capitalist world. We welcome articles and other works that explore this complicated, confrontational and foundational aspect of Badiou’s thinking.

Prospective articles should be in the range of 5,000-8,000 words, prepared for blind review, and accompanied by an abstract of approximately 250 words. Abstracts for proposed articles should be sent by the 30th of September 2013, with full papers to be submitted by the 1st of December 2013.

We warmly invite discussions about ongoing circumstances of struggle and revolution, as well as book reviews and reports of conferences, symposia, lectures, masterclasses and other pertinent events.

Authors should follow the standard guidelines for online submission.

In line with the ethos of the Badiou Studies we will accept articles in supported world languages, although an English abstract is required for all submissions.

L’etica in Alain Badiou

Il fulcro del terzo volume di Badiou Studies sarà il problema dell’etica nel pensiero di Badiou. L’etica, infatti, rappresenta un’istanza fondamentale del pensiero politico e della dialettica materialistica dell’autore, ed è in effetti un aspetto pregnante di tutta la sua filosofia nella.

Inoltre, il testo sull’etica di Badiou è una delle principali porte di accesso al pensiero del filosofo, non solo per la sua portata interdisciplinare ma anche per la sua ampia diffusione internazionale. La teoria dell’etica di Badiou appare piuttosto semplice da affrontare; tuttavia, al di sotto di questa ingannevole linearità essi rivelano, all’interno del mondo capitalistico, una radicale ed esplosiva capacità critica nei confronti dell’etica del senso comune, sia essa quella delle convenzioni sociali, dei media, delle istituzioni accademiche o della politica. Si invitano articoli ed altri lavori che indaghino questo complesso aspetto del pensiero di Badiou, il suo valore fondativo e la sua capacità di aprire discussioni e confronti con altre problematiche e posizioni teoriche.

Gli articoli proposti dovranno avere una lunghezza compresa tra le 5000 e le 8000 parole, essere preparati per il processo di blind review ed essere accompagnati da un abstract di 250 parole. Gli abstract dovranno essere inviati entro il 30 Settembre 2013, gli articoli entro il 1° Dicembre 2013.

Saranno inoltre accolti anche testi di natura differente, quali discussioni sulle proteste e rivoluzioni tutt’ora in corso nel mondo, recensioni di libri, e resoconti di conferenze, convegni, lezioni, corsi e altri eventi significativi.

Gli autori dovranno seguire la procedura standard per la stesura e l’invio degli articoli, che è possibile trovare sul sito della rivista.

In linea con l’ethos di Badiou Studies si accettano lavori nelle principali lingue della comunità accademica, anche se è necessaria la presenza di un abstract in lingua inglese.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Alain Badiou, The Incident at Antioch
• Alain Badiou on Krapp's Last Tape
• Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy
• Nina Power on Protest and Alain Badiou
• Alain Badiou on Slavoj Žižek

Bloomsbury Revelations: Reissue Series

A series of major works from the fields of philosophy, politics, religion and critical theory

Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

Karl Barth, On Religion

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Martin Buber, I and Thou

Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be?

Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image

Jacques Ranciére, The Politics of Aesthetics

Mohandas K. Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers

Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther, Discourse on Free Will

Roland Barthes, Language of Fashion

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Movement-Image

Alain Badiou, Being and Event

Erich Fromm & Karl Marx, Marx's Concept of Man
including 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts'

Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real

Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred

Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth

Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil
Or The Lucidity Pact

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution

Bernhard Crick, In Defence of Politics

Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness

For more information on the Bloomsbury Revelations series, visit their official website. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Christopher King on Book Cover Design
• Philosophers: Jacques Derrida
• The Book Cover Club
• 20 Most Iconic Book Cover Designs?
• Book Cover Archive
• Judging a book...
• The Great Gatsby: Re-Covered
• Peter Mendelsund in Design Bureau

Alain Badiou, The Incident at Antioch

A new play published by Columbia University Press

Alain Badiou, The Incident at Antioch: A Tragedy in Three Acts

Columbia University Press:
The Incident at Antioch: A Tragedy in Three Acts, a new play by Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer with an introduction by Kenneth Reinhard.

The Incident at Antioch is a key play marking Alain Badiou’s transition from classical Marxism to a “politics of subtraction” far removed from party and state. Written with striking eloquence and extraordinary poetic richness, and shifting from highly serious emotional and intellectual drama to surreal comic interlude, the work features statesmen, workers, and revolutionaries struggling to reconcile the nature and practice of politics.

This bilingual edition presents L’Incident d’Antioche in its original French and, on facing pages, an expertly executed English translation. Badiou adds a special preface, and an introduction by the scholar Kenneth Reinhard connects the play to Paul Claudel’s The City, Saint Paul and the early history of the Church, and the innovative mathematical thinking of Paul Cohen. The translation includes Susan Spitzer’s extensive notes clarifying allusions and quotations and hinting at Badiou’s intentions. An interview with Badiou encompasses the play’s settings, themes, and events, as well as his ongoing literary and conceptual experimentation on stage and off. [Read More]

Praise for the book

Badiou resembles Sartre in the versatility, creativity, and energy that make them major literary authors as well as philosophers. It is a measure of Spitzer's talent as a translator that she manages to preserve the literariness of Badiou's language—its difficulty, strangeness, and beauty—while making it vivid and fluid and consistent with the syntactical and grammatical demands of English.

— Joseph Litvak, Tufts University

Badiou is one of very few writers for the theater to reflect explicitly on the contemporary possibilities and limits of political theater.

— Peter Hallward, Kingston University

Between three Pauls, the apostle, Claudel, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Badiou revives the tradition of political theater. In language of unprecedented beauty, he portrays a city--both archaic and ultra-contemporary--whose prince is, or will be, a woman.

— Catherine Malabou, University of Kingston

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Alain Badiou on Krapp's Last Tape
• Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy
• Nina Power on Protest and Alain Badiou
• Alain Badiou on Slavoj Žižek

Simon Critchley on Religion and Philosophy

An interview with Religious Dispatches

Simon Critchley

Beatrice Marovich (Religious Dispatches) interviews Simon Critchley about his recent work, The Faith of the Faithless: 'What can an atheist do with theology? Quite a lot, as it turns out. The philosopher Simon Critchley is clear about the fact that, while he doesn’t believe in any gods, neither does he find it necessary to give up on theology.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Political Theology talks to Simon Critchley
• Simon Critchley Interview: The Faith of the Faithless
• Simon Critchley discusses The Faith of the Faithless
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

CFP: The International Journal of Badiou Studies (IJBS)

The IJBS is looking for contributions for its second issue

Alain Badiou

About The International Journal of Badiou Studies (IJBS)

The International Journal for Badiou Studies is an international, peer-reviewed, open-source journal dedicated to the philosophy and thought of, and surrounding, the French philosopher Alain Badiou. The IJBS is dedicated to original and critical arguments that directly engage with the works of Badiou, as well as pertinent intellectual colleagues and related concepts. The aim of the IJBS is to develop a clear and transparent site for scholars interested in these ideas to come together from around the world to share their research and develop productive dialogues.

Second Issue: Call for Papers

You could almost say my entire enterprise is one giant confrontation [démêlé] with the dialectic.

Alain Badiou

The second issue of The International Journal of Badiou Studies will be dedicated to the dialectic. What are the consequences of the dialectic for Alain Badiou’s thought? What are the effects of Badiou’s thought on dialectics? The editors are soliciting papers that interrogate the dialectic in Badiou’s thought and the implications of this thinking to disciplines across the humanities and the sciences. Although our interest is in keeping the ambit for response as wide as possible, it would be particularly interesting to consider:

• The relationship between materialist dialectics and dialectical materialism.
• Dialectics from the 19th century to the 21st century.
• The development of dialectics in Badiou’s work from Théorie de la contradiction and Théorie du sujet to Logiques des Mondes and the Circonstances.
• The relationship between the dialectical, the non-dialectical and disjunctive synthesis to Badiou’s reading of Le Siècle. What are the consequences for our own ‘Circumstances’?
• How are we to define the term dialectics in the wake of Badiou’s work?

We welcome articles that examine the conditions of Badiou’s thought, and papers that use Badiou’s thought as a catalyst for considering the circumstances – whether scientific, amorous, political or artistic – in which we live.

Prospective articles should be in the range of 6,000-8,000 words, prepared for blind review, and accompanied by an abstract of not more than 250 words. Full articles should be sent by the 30 September 2012.

Authors should follow the standard guidelines for online submission.

In line with the ethos of the IJBS, we will accept articles in supported world languages, although an English abstract is required for all submissions.

Contact

Michael J. Kelly: hymjk@leeds.ac.uk
Arthur James Rose: enajr@leeds.ac.uk

Website

The International Journal of Badiou Studies: www.badioustudies.org

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Nina Power on Protest and Alain Badiou
• Alain Badiou on discovering Beckett
• Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy
• Alain Badiou on Slavoj Žižek

Nina Power on Protest and Alain Badiou

Radio Free Everybody talks to philosopher and activist Nina Power

Nina Power

Stir to Action has posted a new edition of its interview series, Radio Free Everybody (RFE). In the second episode, which includes a transcript, Matt Callahan talks to philosopher and activist Nina Power about the work of Alain Badiou, her thoughts on Defend the Right to Protest, and her book One-Dimensional Woman:

Matt Callahan: Ok, that’s sufficient. Well then, let’s go right into this, the first question that I wanted to ask you is how do you distinguish philosophy from science, art and politics?

Nina Power: Ok, well I think, well the way you pose the question is obviously very Badiouian, in the sense that these are his distinctions, although you missed out love. [Laughs]

Matt Callahan: That’s true.

Nina Power: But yeah, in that sense I would say to Badiou when he says that philosophy in a sense is empty, and actually what distinguishes philosophy is not it’s particular subject matter or its content, but its function in the way that it sort of weaves all these other disciplines and talks about them in a certain kind of meta-way. You know, that it can hold together certain kinds of abstractions or truths that are generated by these other disciplines, but it doesn’t generate any truths of its own. So in a way, for me, philosophy is not a particular method or a particular set of questions as you might be taught as an undergraduate, you know, let’s say it’s all these different ways of thinking about ethics or politics or epistemology or metaphysics or something like that. I think it seems to be more humble or more interesting to say that philosophy has no content of its own, it generates no questions that are specific to it, but it can, nevertheless, have this sort of capturing or compossibilizing function, you know, that it can draw things out of other disciplines.

Matt Callahan: How does that relate to Marx’s famous statement that philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point however it is to change it? Is Badiou’s use of the term or what you are referring to as the Badiouian view of philosophy related to that?

Nina Power: You can’t force something, you can’t say, well alright, we’ve got to stop thinking, let’s just do something, ok, without knowing what you’re doing. Obviously there’s lots of kind of wasted action, if you like, there’s no sense in wasting time either, thinking through problems that are irrelevant, but at the same time it’s also, you’ve got to know what you are doing, you’ve got to understand enough of the situation in order to be able to act. When Badiou talks about the event and there are lots of questions that follow from this but it’s about saying something happened that you may not be able to exactly describe in the political situation but what truth might be is your fidelity to whatever’s happened. So, let’s say you’re involved in a political action and something is revealed about the relationship between the state and the way in which, people figured in this state and you see something and you don’t know what to call it, you see something that seems to you true, but isn’t what the state generally tells you is true and you hold true to this so you think about the way in which immigrants are excluded from the way in which the state figures itself or a certain way of seeing the world differently in terms of how you can organise it or maybe without money or something and you hold true to that.

Matt Callahan: I was asking it more, you might say, rhetorically it seems that Badiou is responding to a number of different contradictions. One of which is the original critique of philosophy as such by in Marx’s thesis on Feurbach and on the other hand, he was referring to the fact that all through the 20th century he talks about the destitution of philosophy, referring to Heidegger’s The End of Philosophy of 1969, where he’s offering over philosophy to science on the one hand, and the poet on the other. I mean you can look as these figures as just philosophers or whatever name you want to give them, but there’s really a question of well, does philosophy really have a role at all?

Nina Power: Yeah, I mean this is why the emptiness of philosophy’s really important. So, with ontology, Badiou basically hands over ontological questions concerning multiplicity and so on to mathematics. He says, look, I mean why is philosophy still trying to answer these with this useless language, that mathematics does far better? And that’s to say, well if we can pass that over to mathematics then philosophy has more time, if you like, to think about how we combine events, how we discuss subjects, so what are the subjects of these events? So, instead of spending all of our time coming up with yet another ontology you actually try to think much more about precisely the more practical questions. So what are the truths that are generated in these other areas, in politics, in love, you know, and what philosophy do to put them together to think through different kinds of subjects: the faithful subjects, the loyal subjects, the loving subject, the scientific subject, the collective subject. So in that way, I think he’s paring down philosophy, so although there’s something rather grandiose about Badiou’s system, I think at the end of the day it’s actually really minimal in a certain sense and quite humble, oddly.

Matt Callahan: The last few years, renewed inquiry into what Badiou called the communist hypothesis and really whether or not this was just because of the financial crisis. Is this only amongst philosophers and what does it have to do with communist parties and so on and so forth?

Nina Power: Well, I guess that I think the communist hypothesis idea and the return of it was actually floated before the economic crisis so I don’t think it was really responding to that just chronologically. But, I think there is something slightly problematic about it for me because it retains this kind of idealist element. I think on the one hand it’s very brave how people want to be talking about communism again-”have we left enough time after the horrors etc.” But, I think that it’s a very interesting kind of project, let’s say there’s this idea of invariance so that certain kinds of movements and certain kinds of political situations retain or maintain a kind of similarity that you can point to across the ages. Say, this is where in the Paris commune, May ’68, there’s something similar about that kind of… [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Alain Badiou on discovering Beckett
• Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy
• Alain Badiou on Slavoj Žižek

Beyond Historicism: Resituating Samuel Beckett

The University of New South Wales, Kensington, Sydney · 7-8 December, 2012

Trilogy images courtesy of Neven Udovičić

A call for papers (see below) has been distributed for an upcoming conference at The University of New South Wales in Sydney. Thank you to Laura Foster for getting in touch about the event.

About the Conference

When Samuel Beckett's novel Molloy first appeared in France, in May 1951, Georges Bataille called it an "extravagant, fantastic, sordid" tale that precipitated a "monstrous myth". The two novels that succeeded Molloy - Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953) - have, despite their author's resistance, collectively come to be known as the Trilogy. Yet if Bataille (and other French critics) initially saw these works as contributions to the European avant-garde, subsequent critical responses have been more wide-ranging, considering them as, for example, psychoanalytical case-studies, violations of generic forms (detective novel, memoir-cum-confession, domestic comedy, novel of ideas) and as fictional demonstrations of what will later be theorised as deconstruction. But perhaps the most telling indicator of the Trilogy's enduring influence is that, even as it affirmed the death of the novel as a viable narrative form, it also inspired at least two other fictional trilogies: Paul Auster's New York Trilogy and John Banville's Frames Trilogy.

Following Faber's recent re-publication of the three novels, this conference seeks to re-examine how these and other works can be read now, at this particular moment in Beckett studies. Responding to or even reacting against the theoretical turn of the mid-1980s, the so-called 'archival' turn of the past fifteen years has sought to place Beckett's works on a more empirical and evidential footing. Driven by two biographies, scholarly annotations of Beckett's notebooks, and, most recently, two volumes of the Letters, this orientation has developed a critical apparatus that often works to foreclose on or at least proscribe more speculative, exploratory engagements with the Beckett oeuvre.

One of the aims of this conference is to resituate the Trilogy at the heart of Beckett's prose corpus. To that effect, there will be at least two panels based on re-examinations of the three novels. However, we also invite papers that address any other part of Beckett's writing - fictional, dramatic, cinematic or critical - and consider how it might be read and understood in the wake of the historicist-empirical emphasis of the last fifteen years. How does Beckett's work appear to us now, when put into dialogue with more recent critical and philosophical approaches to literature, such as (but not limited to) cognitive literary studies, neuoroaesthetics, thing theory, the 'new' narratology, eco-poetics, theories of affect, cybercriticism, technics, trauma theory, swarm theory, biopolitics, network ecologies, the new aestheticism, literary-legal studies, and so on? And how does Beckett's work seem when confronted with the doyens of 'post-theory', both evident already in Beckett studies (Badiou, Agamben) and less visible (Rancière, Žižek, Stiegler, Nancy, Latour)? Or when set alongside other, more idiosyncratic thinkers - Kittler, Sloterdijk, Meillassoux?

Confirmed keynote speakers

Professor Derek Attridge (University of York, UK)
Assoc. Professor Anthony Uhlmann (University of Western Sydney)

Conference venue

The University of New South Wales, Kensington, Sydney

All enquiries

resituating.beckett@gmail.com

Call for papers

Potential papers should address the Trilogy, or any other part of Beckett's work, in its textual, historical, theoretical and / or formal dimensions, and consider how any of these might be recast or rethought in light of the debates outlined above.

Abstracts should be no more than 250 words, and submitted via email, to: resituating.beckett@gmail.com Please include the paper title, and a brief biography and contact details of the presenting author.

Submission deadline: 31 October 2012, at 5pm.

Please note: authors of successful submissions will have 20 minutes to present their paper.

Registration

Academic / salaried $250
Academic / non-salaried $130
Payment options available soon.

Website

Beyond Historicism: Resituating Samuel Beckett - Macquarie University

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Laura Salisbury, Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing

Beckett's comic timing as part of a post-war ethics of representation

About the book

Samuel Beckett is a funny writer. He is also an author whose work is taken to respond ethically to the unspeakable seriousness of the post-Holocaust situation. How can these two statements sit together? Ranging widely over Beckett's fiction, drama, and critical writings, and including readings of Murphy, the Trilogy, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, the late prose, and the late plays, the book demonstrates that it is through Beckett's comic timing that we can understand the double gesture of his art: the ethical obligation to represent the world how it is while, at the same time, opening up a space for how it ought to be.

Key Features

• Presents innovative readings of the comedy found in Beckett's fiction, drama and critical writings
• Spans Beckett's entire oeuvre, using published and unpublished sources
• Engages with recent and contemporary philosophical approaches to literature, including work by Derrida, Badiou, Levinas, and Adorno
• Makes a unique contribution to theoretical work on comedy and laughter
• Provides a rigorous introduction to the theoretical debates surrounding the relationship between modernist literature and a post-war ethics of representation

Publication details

Publication date: April 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7486-4748-4
Format: Hardback
Price: £70
Edinburgh University Press website

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy

Badiou dissects the work of the towering twentieth century philosopher

Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy

Verso has published Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, a new book by Alain Badiou, translated with an introduction by Bruno Bosteels.

“A figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us!” — Slavoj Žižek

“An heir to Jean-­Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser” — New Statesman

About the book

• Alain Badiou is one of France’s most influential radical thinkers – one of the ‘last men standing’ out of the great generation who witnessed the revolution of 1968. Best known for his political philosophy, he has recently been engaged with re-orientating the radical left with his Communist Hypothesis. He has also written several plays and a novel, and various volumes of cultural criticism, the latest of which is Five Lessons on Wagner.
• Now he turns his attention to Ludwig Wittgenstein, legendary maverick thinker and one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. He was part of Bertrand Russell’s Cambridge circle in the early 20th century and became one of the key figures of analytic philosophy and standard-bearer of the “linguistic turn”. His work was hailed by many as ‘the end of philosophy’ and indeed he referred to himself as the ‘last philosopher’.
• Wittgenstein’s great work was Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Written in his twenties, it had a huge impact on modern thought, and in particular the use of language and logic in analytic philosophy. Badiou dissects the Tractacus, and finds Wittgenstein to be an exemplar of antiphilosophy.
• Antiphilosophy is defined by Badiou as a way of doing philosophy which questions or attacks the very basis of philosophy itself. Other key antiphilosophers would include Nietszche, Kierkegaard and Lacan.
• Badiou addresses the crucial seventh proposition in Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus where Wittgenstein argues that “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”. Badiou argues that this mystical act reduces logic to rhetoric, truth to an effect of language games, and philosophy to a set of esoteric aphorisms.
• In the course of his interrogation of Wittgenstein’s antiphilosophy, Badiou sets out and refines his own definitions of the universal truths that condition philosophy. Antiphilosophy shows the philosopher what he is: a political militant, hated by the powers that be and their servants; an aesthete; a lover, whose life is capable of capsizing for a woman or a man; and a savant. It is in this effervescent rebellion that philosophers produce their ideas.
• Bruno Bosteels’ introduction shows that this encounter with Wittgenstein is central to Badiou’s overall project – and that a dialogue with the exemplar of antiphilosophy is crucial to the continuing development of modern thought.

Praise for Alain Badiou

Scarcely any other moral thinker of our day is as politically clear sighted and courageously polemical, so prepared to put notions of truth and universality back on the agenda… Badiou has launched a transformative new intervention, which deserves to provoke a persisting response.

Terry Eagleton

Badiou is at his strongest in pointing to the inconsistencies of a facile multiculturalism, the pluralism of the food court and the shopping mall, which wilts in the face of any genuine expression of cultural hostility to liberal values.

Radical Philosophy

Alain Badiou could be the most important philosopher alive today

Irish Left Review

Badiou is by turns speculative, provocative…and droll.

Times Literary Supplement

Heidegger Kitsch

Graham Harman on imitated mannerisms of the German philosopher

Mark Thwaite of Ready Steady Book has drawn my attention to a recent post by Graham Harman at Object Oriented Philosophy: 'By now most people are familiar with the concept of Heidegger Kitsch: the aping of Heidegger’s verbal mannerisms without the soul of the thing being there. At times Heidegger himself even seems to lapse into this, such as in portions of the Beiträge and even more in lesser texts in the same vein such as Besinnung.' Harman also singles out the verbal and physical mannerisms of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Human, All Too Human: BBC's Martin Heidegger Documentary
• Heidegger and the Nazism Debate
• Simon Critchley on Martin Heidegger's Being and Time

Alain Badiou on Slavoj Žižek

One modern philosopher reflects on another

Slavoj Žižek (left) and Alain Badiou (right)

Ready Steady Book quotes philosopher Alain Badiou speaking to Slavoj Žižek in an interview from Universal Truths & the Question of Religion, conducted (and translated) by Adam S. Miller, Journal of Philosophy and Scripture (2006). [Read more]

Also at A Piece of Monologue

• Alain Badiou on discovering Beckett
• Alain Badiou on Krapp's Last Tape
• Slavoj Žižek on Ridley Scott's Alien
• Slavoj Žižek on life, happiness and Hegel
• Slavoj Žižek on Samuel Beckett

Beckett Seminar 2011: Philosophy and Literature

April 7-10, 2011

Call for Papers
Seminar: Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature
Conference Date: April 7-10, 2011

Conference Venue: Hyatt New Brunswick, New
Brunswick, New Jersey
Conference Organizer: Arka Chattopadhyay

Selection of Confirmed Speakers:

Jean-Michel Rabate (The University of Pennsylvania)
Bataille and Beckett: from the Impossible to Unknowing.

James Martell (University of Notre Dame)
Derrida Beckettian specter

Richard Marshall (Institute of Education: London University)
The Illusory Nothing of Endon's Affence

Christopher Langlois (University of Western Ontario)
Approaching Beckettian Being: Badiou, Deleuze, and the Onto-Aesthetics of Worstward Ho

Sean F. Ward (Duke University)
Watt Subject: Beckett Reads “Bare” and “Creaturely Life”

Matthieu Protin (Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Samuel Beckett’s Drama: A Philosophical Theatre between Denial and Philosophy in Action

H. Peter Steeves (DePaul University)
The Space of a Door: Mourning, Memory, Madness, Beckett

Arka Chattopadhyay (Jadavpur University)
'Profounds of Mind': Thinking the Thought in Thought and Beckett's Locus of Stirrings

Deadline for Abstract Submission: Sept. 30, 2010
(300-500 words)

Notification of acceptance of papers by 5th of October, 2010.

Deadline for Final Paper Submission: March 15, 2011

Length of Full Papers: 4000-5000 words (The full papers are to be mutually exchanged and read well before the seminar and shortened 10 minute presentations, consisting of four double-spaced pages, are to be made in the session)

Seminar Description

The seminar seeks to explore the complex and paradoxical relationship between the discourses of philosophy and literature focusing on the works of Samuel Beckett. Beckett has had a long standing dialogue with philosophy. From comments like ‘I am not a philosopher’ and ‘I do not understand philosophy’ to his love of Democritus, Arnold Geulincx and Arthur Schopenhauer, from a rich texture of philosophical allusions in early works like Murphy to a more resistant non-allusive (or allusive in a very subterranean way) later prose like Worstward Ho, Beckett’s work has always been seen in relation to philosophy, from championing a certain kind of Cartesianism to reviving the latent philosophical discourses of the Atomists, from positing existentialism to parodying it and so on.

In the 20th century, Beckett’s oeuvre has attracted a handsome amount of philosophical attention with almost all major philosophers responding to his work in vastly different ways. From early readings of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot to the responses of the poststructuralists like Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, reactions from Adorno, Stanley Cavell, Julia Kristeva, Irigaray, Martha Nussbaum and in more recent times perhaps in the most extensive fashion in the writings of Alain Badiou, Simon Critchley and a host of others, Beckett has commanded a rigorous attention of the philosophers. They have sometimes cited Beckett by way of exemplifying their own philosophical conceptualization and problematization while on other occasions they have seen his work as a genuine philosophical repository, generating issues and debates, intrinsic to the discipline of philosophy.

Eminent Beckett Scholars like Ruby Cohn, Stanley Gontarski, Anthony Uhlmann, Garin Dowd and others have been sensitive to what we can call a ‘philosophical turn’ in the field known as Beckett Studies. Apart from dealing with the philosopher’s influence on Beckett from a biographical point of view and Beckett’s influence on 20th century philosophy, the seminar also encourages papers that see Beckett’s work as a topos where different and often contesting ways of conceiving the philosophy-literature interface meet each other. Beckett’s interest in classical philosophy and the supposed representational relation between philosophy and literature is on the one hand while on the other is the poststructuralist and postmodernist appropriation of his canon which tends to locate his body of work at the margin of philosophical thought. Samuel Beckett thus remains the fascinating literary icon that he is with Derrida defining an auto-deconstructive margin of philosophy in literature with Beckett and Badiou drawing on Beckett as an original philosophical thinker, who is instrumental in his discourse of a return to philosophy.

Therefore, the thrust-areas are (the abstracts may include these perspectives but need not be limited to these at all):

• Philosophy as influence on Beckett.
• Philosophy as intertextual cultural memory or a textual principle in Beckett.
• Beckett as an influence on 20th century Philosophy.
• Beckett’s texts as philosophy.
• Beckett’s texts as an anti-philosophical discourse.
• Beckett and the cognitive philosophical tradition.
• The politics of philosophical appropriation in and of Beckett texts.
• The philosophical categorization of Beckett as a Modernist polemic of canonization.
• The philosophical status of Beckett and its contribution in a supposed undermining of the pragmatics of his theatrical practice as a playwright and stage-artist.

(Audio/Visual requirements include a $10 handling fee with registration.)

All enquiries and abstracts are to be directly sent to:

Arka Chattopadhyay
M.Phil Scholar
Department of English
Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

Address:
Krishna, Flat-105
75, J.K. Street
Uttarpara, Hooghly
Pin-712258
Ph: 033-2663-8270
91-9231536815

Contact email:

Arka Chattopadhyay: arkaless@gmail.com

Andrew Gibson on Samuel Beckett

George Hunka reviews Gibson's Samuel Beckett

George Hunka takes a look at Andrew Gibson's monograph, Samuel Beckett, and suggests ways of reading his work that diverge from the dominant 'comical' interpretations:

In his recent short biography of the writer, Samuel Beckett, Andrew Gibson makes the essential attempt to restore to the dramatist and his characters the difficult and thankless nobility of the compassionate view. Coming nearly fifteen years after the monumental biographies by Anthony Cronin and James Knowlson, Gibson's 200-page monograph seeks to offer something of a corrective to the academic and cultural hagiography of the writer. "It is impossible to ignore this self-deprecating, reticent, disciplined, conscientious, diligent, implacably well-mannered, dauntingly forbearing person, not least because he appears to have been the origin of the myth of 'Saint Sam' amongst a generation of scholars who made his acquaintance," Gibson writes (and bearing in mind the emphasis on the comedy, not the tragedy, that these scholars found in his work: The subtitle of Ruby Cohn's first book on Beckett was "The Comic Gamut," and Hugh Kenner included him in a study entitled The Stoic Comedians). "Look straight at the works themselves," he continues, "and there is a great deal of material that — even insisting on the detachment of writer from narrator or character — simply does not square with the myth at all: the superciliousness and arrogance perceptible in the early writings, for example; the hysterical rage of the Trilogy; the extreme and sometimes murderous forms of violence from Molloy to All That Fall to How It Is and beyond."

Gibson performs this rescue by balancing Beckett's work between what he calls melancholia ("the conviction that there is 'nothing to be done'") and misericordia (which "assumes that one cannot remain indifferent to the plight of others astray in the labyrinth"). He emphasises that this corrective is not meant to undermine Beckett's clear caritas — "goodness to others" — but to establish the difficulty of maintaining that compassion in a twentieth-century historical culture which encourages quite the opposite. In the eight chapters of his biography, Gibson traces this historical culture and Beckett's response to it in Ireland of the 1920s, Europe of the 1930s (Gibson is very good on the viciousness of fascist governments in suppressing and demonizing Modernism), postwar France, and the more international globalized culture of the Cold War and after. In doing so, Gibson draws upon recent revisionist histories of Vichy France (in which Beckett's career with the resistance formed the background to the great trilogy of novels), Mark Nixon's fine examination of Beckett's German diaries (which were discovered posthumously) over the past ten years or so, and the views of Foucault, Badiou and Adorno towards Beckett's work in an administered society. [Read the article]

George Hunka, 'Samuel Beckett: "Fuck Life"'

Superfluidities Redux, 07 April 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Alain Badiou on Krapp's Last Tape

French philosopher shares his thoughts on Beckett's play

French philosopher Alain Badiou discusses the work of Samuel Beckett in relation to theatre, poetry and philosophy. (Thank you to Lee Rourke for drawing my attention to this footage.)

More at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Alain Badiou on discovering Beckett

A Companion to Samuel Beckett

A new collection of academic essays on the European writer's work

I'm very excited to announce a new collection of essays on Samuel Beckett, edited by S. E. Gontarski. A Companion to Samuel Beckett is published by Wiley-Blackwell in the UK and the United States, and includes a rich and diverse selection of scholarly and theoretical approaches. The first part of the collection, 'A Life in Letters', follows the recent publication of Beckett's personal correspondence; among the essays are accounts from official biographer James Knowlson, and Beckett's Grove publisher, Barney Rosset.

The second part broadly addresses new theoretical and philosophical approaches to Beckett's writing, and includes work by distinguished scholar Jean-Michel Rabaté and Beckett and Postructuralism author Anthony Uhlmann. But there's more. Mark Nixon's work at the Reading archive uncovers new insights into Beckett's time in Germany during the 1930s. Shane Weller moves toward an ethical understanding of the Irish writer's work - while  C. J. Ackerley and Brett Stevens survey the influence of science and mathematics respectively.

Marjorie Perloff analyses Beckett's poetry in the third part of the collection, 'Acts of Fiction', and is complimented by work from S. E. Gontarski, C. J. Ackerley and Dirk Van Hulle. I'm particularly interested by some of the issues raised by Susan Mooney's essay, 'Malone Dies: Postmodern Masculinity', which stresses the continuing relevance of Beckett's writing to new cultural ideas of identity and culture.

The fourth and final part of the book addresses Samuel Beckett's theatrical work and issues of performance, from Mary Bryden's 'Clowning with Beckett' to Enoch Brater's survey of the 'Seated Figure' and David Bradby on Beckett's German production of Waiting for Godot. There is also an intriguing survey of Beckett's works for television, which has been under-represented in much academic criticism.

In short, A Companion to Samuel Beckett promises to be a significant contribution to contemporary academic debates on his work. The contents page (see below), is a veritable Who's Who of the last 40 years of Beckett scholarship, with just a few key names missing from the roster. Its resourceful use of the most recent archival materials make the Companion a relevant and important contribution to international Beckett scholarship. In fact, I would not be surprised if Gontarski's clever and expansive collection becomes one of the go-to texts for distinguished scholars and newcomers alike.

Contents:

Part 1: A Life in Letters

A Writer's Homes - A Writer's Life
James Knowlson

Within a Budding Grove: Publishing Beckett in America
S. E. Gontarski

Samuel Beckett and Waiting for Godot
Lois Gordon

Beginning to End: Publishing and Producing Beckett
Barney Rosset


Part II: Charting Territories

A Critique of Aesthetic Judgment: Beckett's "Dissonance of Ends and Means"
John Pilling

The Legacy of Samuel Beckett: An Anatomy
H. Porter Abbott

Beckett and Philosophy
Anthony Uhlmann

Philosophizing with Beckett: Adorno and Badiou
Jean-Michel Rabaté

Beckett and Ethics
Shane Weller

Beckett and Germany in the 1930s: The Development of a Poetics
Mark Nixon

Samuel Beckett and Science
C. J. Ackerley

A Purgatorial Calculus: Beckett's Mathematics in "Quad"
Brett Stevens

Beckett and Obsessional Ireland
David Pattie

Beckett in French and English
Sinéad Mooney


Part III: Acts of Fiction

Beckett the Poet
Marjorie Perloff

The "Dream" Poems: Poems in Personae
Sean Lawlor

Figures of Script: The Development of Beckett's Short Prose and the "Aesthetic of Inaudibilities"
Dirk Van Hulle

Molloy, or Life without a Chambermaid
Patrick A. McCarthy

Malone Dies: Postmodernist Masculinity
Susan Mooney

"The Knowing Non-Exister": Thirteen Ways of Reading Texts for Nothing
S. E. Gontarski and C. J. Ackerley

What We Are Given to Mean: Endgame
Paul Shields

"In the Old Style," Yet Anew: Happy Days in the "AfterBeckett"
William Hutchings


Part IV: Acts of Performance

Beckett's Production of Waiting for Godot (Warten auf Godot)
David Bradby

The Seated Figure on Beckett's Stage
Enoch Brater

Clowning with Beckett
Mary Bryden

"Down, all going down ...": The Spiral Structure of Beckett's Theater
Xerxes Mehta

Beckett on Television
Graley Herren

Staging Beckett in Spain: Theater and Politics
Antonia Rodríguez-Gago


Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett

Franz Kafka and Philosophy Workshop: 2010

A Call for Papers

A call for papers has been announced for an upcoming academic workshop on philosophy in the work of Franz Kafka, to be held in August 2010. The workshop is part of a larger conference on 'Thought in Science and Fiction' organized by Cankaya University in Turkey, and aims to consider 'various conceptions of the relationship of literature and philosophy'.

The workshop on Franz Kafka aims to prompt a discussion and debate of the latest theoretical and philosophical approaches in contemporary critical theory. The call for papers has been split into seven sections, each dealing with a possible interpretive approach to Kafka's work, and ranges from existing studies, to biography, to philosophical 'affinities' and themes.

The deadline for submissions is set for 15 December 2009.

CFP Philosophy and Kafka August 2-6, 2010
International Society for the Study of European Ideas

Contact email:
bmoran@ucalgary.ca

CALL FOR PAPERS
for a Workshop on “Philosophy and Kafka” to be held at the 12th international conference of ISSEI (International Society for the Study of European Ideas) at Cankaya University, Ankara, Turkey on August 2-6, 2010. The theme of the conference is “Thought in Science and Fiction.”

It is sometimes said that Franz Kafka’s novels and stories defy philosophic extrapolation. Conversely, it has also been suggested that precisely the tendency of Kafka’s writings to elude discursive solution is itself a philosophical tendency, one that is somehow contributing to a wiser relationship of human beings with language.

The workshop on “Philosophy and Kafka” will explore such questions about the relationship of Kafka’s stories and novels with philosophy. A principal supplementary purpose will be to consider various conceptions of the relationship of literature and philosophy.

Possible approaches include the following.

1. Focus on specific philosophical commentaries on Kafka, such as those by T.W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Günther Anders, or Hannah Arendt.

2. Consider the possible relevance or helpfulness of certain outlooks for examining Kafka’s writings, outlooks such as those of Taoism, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Albert Camus, or existentialism.

3. Examine Kafka’s writings through certain views of the relationship of literature or poetry with philosophy. Relevant views would include those for which poetry might involve a thinking that philosophy might not be able to achieve (Heidegger). Also of possible relevance in this context would be Kafka-commentaries by Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Hélène Cixous, and others.

4. Kafka’s writings could be assessed from the perspective of a specific conception of the relationship of philosophy and art – outlooks such as those of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, the early German Romantics, Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Louis Althusser, Emmanuel Lévinas, Hans Blumenberg, Sarah Kofman, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou, or Jacques Rancière.

5. Consider the relationship of Kafka’s stories and novels with those aspects of his Nachlass, diaries, and letters that might more readily lend themselves to philosophical extrapolation.

6. Focus on “philosophical” affinities or divergences between Kafka’s writings and writings by other authors (such as Heinrich von Kleist, Lewis Carroll, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the surrealists, Robert Walser, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Shmuel Agnon, Georges Bataille, Samuel Beckett, Julien Green, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, Ingeborg Bachmann, Maurice Blanchot, Wole Soyinka, Elfriede Jelinek, Orhan Pamuk).

7. Consider Kafka’s writings in terms of a specific philosophical theme. Kafka’s writings could be discussed in relation to ethics, aesthetics, love, sex, the sexes, political philosophy, legal theory, pragmatism, wisdom, thinking, myth, prophecy, the death penalty, or punishment.

These are only some of the possible approaches and topics. A principal criterion for selection will be the clear relevance of the proposal to some aspect of the topic “Philosophy and Kafka.”

Proposals of approximately 500 words or entire papers of no more than 3000 words (including notes) may be sent to Brendan Moran at bmoran@ucalgary.ca until December 15, 2009. Decisions concerning the final composition of the four hour session (of eight to ten papers) will be made within a month to six weeks following the submission deadline.

For information concerning the conference, see http://issei2010.haifa.ac.il

University of Pennsylvania, Call for Papers website

Alain Badiou on discovering Beckett

French philosopher relates the influence of Samuel Beckett on his life and work

From Alain Badiou, 'On Beckett' (edited by Nina Power and Alberto Toscano):

'I discovered the work of Beckett in the mid-fifties. It was a real encounter, a subjective blow of sorts that left an indelible mark. So that forty years later, I can say, with Rimbaud: "I'm here, I'm always there" [j'y suis, j'y suis toujours]. This is the principal task of youth: to encounter the incalculable, and thereby to convince oneself, against the disillusioned, that the thesis "nothing is, nothing is valuable" is both false and oppressive.

'But youth is also that fragment of existence when one easily imagines oneself to be quite singular, when really what one is thinking or doing is what will later be retained as the typical trait of a generation. Being young is a source of power, a time of decisive encounters, but these are strained by their all too easy capture by repetition and imitation. Thought only subtracts itself from the spirit of the age by means of a constant and delicate labour. It is easy to want to change the world - in youth these seems the least that one could do. It is more difficult to notice the fact that this very wish could end up as the material for the forms of perpetuation of this very world. This is why all youth, as stirring as its promise may be, is always also the youth of a "young cretin". Bearing this in mind, in later years, keeps us from nostalgia.

'When I discovered Beckett, some years after the beginning of his French oeuvre (that is, around 1956), I was a complete and total Sartrean, though I was possessed by a question whose importance I thought I had personally discovered to have been underestimated by Sartre. I had yet to realise that it was already, and was going to be for a long while, the abiding obsession of my generation and of the ones to follow: the question of language. From such a makeshift observatory, I could only see in Beckett what everybody else did. A writer of the absurd, of despair, of empty skies, of also a 'modern' writer, in that the destiny of writing, the relationship between the endless recapitulation of speech and the original silence - the simultaneously sublime and derisory function of words - was entirely captured by the prose at a distant remove from any realist or representational intention. In such 'modern' writing, fiction is both the appearance of a story and the reality of a reflection on the work of the writer, on its misery and its grandeur. [...]'

'Basically, my stupidity lay in unquestioningly upholding the caricature which was then - and still is - widespread: a pitiless awareness of the nothingness of sense, extended by the resources of art to cover the nothingness of writing, a nothingness that would be materialised, as it were, by means of increasingly tight and increasingly dense prose pieces that abandoned all narrative principle. The caricature of Beckett meditating upon death and finitude, the dereliction of sick bodies, the waiting in vain for the divine and the derision of any enterprise directed towards others. A Beckett convinced that beyond the obstinacy of words there is nothing but darkness and void.

'It took me many years to rid myself of this stereotype and at last to take Beckett at his word. No, what Beckett offers to thought through his art, theatre, prose, poetry, cinema, radio, television, and criticism, is not this gloomy corporeal immersion into an abandoned existence, into hopeless relinquishment. Neither is it the contrary, as some have tried to argue: farce, derision, a concrete flavour, a "thin Rabelais". Neither existentialism nor a modern baroque. The lesson of Beckett is a lesson in measure, exactitude and courage. That is what I would like to establish in these few pages [...]'

Slavoj Žižek on Samuel Beckett

Cultural theorist analyses the work of the experimental Irish writer

'If there ever was a kenotic writer, the writer of the utter self-emptying of subjectivity, of its reduction to a minimal difference, it is Beckett.'

Slavoj Žižek, 'Beckett with Lacan'

Lacan.com is currently featuring two parts of an article by Slavoj Žižek on Samuel Beckett's work in relation to psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan. Simply entitled 'Beckett with Lacan', it begins by classifying the Irish writer's artistic relation to James Joyce, reformulating the stylistic and aesthetic move from intellectual excess to impoverishment via a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework:

'[...] the “true” Becket [sic.] constituted himself through a true ethical act, a CUT, a rejection of the Joycean wealth of enjoy-meant, and the ascetic turn towards a “minimal difference,” towards a minimalization, “subtraction,” of the narrative content and of language itself [...]'

Slavoj Žižek, 'Beckett with Lacan'

I often have the impression that Žižek writes his academic papers and journal articles in much the same way that many of us write (or read!) blog postings: in-between busy work commitments, and sometimes in a haphazard and rushed manner. He misspells, misquotes and makes a hash of some of the simplest of names - even Beckett's on one occasion. His style is often sloppy and slapdash. But the momentum of his writing still has the ability to hold a reader's attention, and it isn't long before Žižek is back on track exploring Beckett's work in the context of contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou. (I say 'exploring', but perhaps 'lightly skimming the surface' is closer to the truth.)

Žižek perceives Beckett's Texts for Nothing as a kind of postscript to the Three Novels (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable), whilst simultaneously breaking free from the influence of their somewhat self-contained literary project; while he raises some interesting points, it is not a particularly original idea. Žižek asks 'what do Texts for Nothing register, a possibility or a contingency? A possibility, definitely – a possibility to “cease writing,” to betray fidelity, to cease going on,' and concludes they 'are an optimistic work – their message is that one cannot but “go on” as an immortal bodiless drive, as a subject without subjectivity'.

The article touches upon issues of the subject existing without subjectivity, draws on the critical approaches of Jonathan Boulter, before lunging into an analysis of Beckett's Not I read through Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytical work. It's not recommended over a morning cup of coffee, but it certainly has its moments - and although hectic and chaotic, Slavoj Žižek certainly has a gift for adapting critical theoretical texts to popular culture in a generally accessible way. (It's not surprising, for instance, that he manages to weave a reference to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds into part 2.)

You can read both parts of the text at Lacan.com, or find them directly by selecting the links below.

• Slavoj Žižek, 'Beckett with Lacan', Part 1.
  
• Slavoj Žižek, 'Beckett with Lacan', Part 2.