Peter Fifield, Late Modernist Style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas

A recent title from Palgrave Macmillan

From Palgrave Macmillan: ‘Beckett and Levinas are of central importance to critical debates about literary ethics. Rather than suggest the presence of literary and ethical value in the wake of the Second World War, this book argues that both thinkers waged a sustained attack on the principles of literature, weaving narrative and descriptive doubt through phenomenology, prose, and drama. Peter Fifield uses conceptual and rhetorical figures shared by Beckett and Levinas - such as the face, the trace, re-commencement, hyperbole, the saying and the said - to address a wide range of texts by both authors, arguing for a Levinasian manner of reading that is distinctly non-ethical. ’ [Read More]

You can read an online sample of Fifield's monograph here.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Conversations with Emmanuel Levinas, 1983-1994
• Laura Salisbury, Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing
• Blanchot and Beckett's Letters

Photographs of Maurice Blanchot

Louis Kaplan discusses images of the French critic, writer and theorist

Blanchot (upper right), Lévinas (middle), and friends, ca. 1925, on their way to dine at the home of Charles Blondel, professor of psychology at the University of Strasbourg where Blanchot and Lévinas were enrolled.

Louis Kaplan Cabinet: ‘The first image of Blanchot is to be placed among the countless snapshots of everyday life that are taken and passed around among friends and that serve as mementos of the space-time they have shared. The image features Blanchot as a man in his twenties in dandyish attire seated on a car and surrounded by companions. The dark-haired man is none other than Blanchot’s lifelong friend, the philosopher of alterity, Emmanuel Lévinas. As far as the facts go, the group is on their way to Charles Blondel’s home for a dinner party in Strasbourg. It is as if Blanchot in his exposure to the camera and in his being posed in exteriority has yielded to the etiquette required by the ethical philosopher who believed so strongly in faciality—in the indebtedness of the face as it turns itself toward the Other.’ [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Maurice Blanchot: Thomas Reads a Book
• Maurice Blanchot on Giacometti and Writing
• 10 Years Since Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot: Corrected Proofs
• Michel Foucault on Maurice Blanchot

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

Lars Iyer on Blanchot's Vigilance

Philosophical essay available on Spurious

In a 2005 article originally published in Parallax, Lars Iyer summarises his book on Maurice Blanchot, Blanchot's Vigilance: Literature, Phenomenology and the Ethical:

'For Blanchot, like the early Levinas, the world of things is a dead world, but it is one that is not inert. It is a dead world, but one possessed of a strange kind of life – a dying that is active, a force of becoming that is the experience of the being of things. How can being be brought together with becoming? The difference between beings and being, as Levinas and Blanchot will present it, is given in the relation between the thing and its image. As readers will know, for Levinas and Blanchot it as though, for them, the image was the condition of possibility of the thing and not the other way round. Broadly speaking, the image is what gives itself in the relation to the thing when it is turned from the tasks and projects to which we subordinate it, resisting the very impulse of our existence to create meaning, to, as it were, ‘exist’ things by bringing them towards us as potential tools or as potential raw material. It gives itself as what ‘in’ the thing exists over and above our interests. But even as it does so, its resistance captures my attention and struggles with it, escaping me even as it seems to offer itself to me. Yet I am not indifferent to it, and this is the point. The image of the thing no longer exists at any distance from me at all; fascinated, I am as though pressed by the thing against its image, as though the heart of the thing held me at what one commentator calls ‘its distance’.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lars Iyer on Literature's Antagonistic Couples
• Extracts from Lars Iyer's Dogma available online
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking
• Literary Influences on Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer, Spurious

Assuming Gender Special Issue: Bodies

New issue of free online academic journal now available

Assuming Gender is a Cardiff University project, comprising a journal, seminar, and lecture series. This interdisciplinary project is dedicated to the timely analysis of constructions of gendered texts, practices, and subjectivities and seeks to engage with contemporary conceptions of gender, while participating in the dialogues and tensions that maintain the urgency of such conversations. The new issue consists of the following articles and reviews, all free to download online as PDF files:

Articles

• Susanne Wegener, 'Forget Modesty – Here Comes the Tail: Abject Bodies, Post-Humanistic Philosophy and Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl'
• David Andrew Griffiths, 'Evolution, Bodies and Pleasures, and a Monstrous Queer Future'
• Virgil W. Brower, 'Ethics is a Gustics: Phenomenology, Gender, and Oral Sexuality (from ‘Entre Nous’ to ‘Lèvres Nous’)'
• Anindya Raychaudhuri, 'The Tragic Woman: Female Victimhood in the Cinema of the Spanish Civil War'

Reviews

• Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction and Women’s Health in the Second Wave (Review: Angie Dell)
• Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (Review: Kat Deerfield

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Assuming Gender: Issue 2

Simon Critchley: Style in Theory

Malta, November 2009

James Corby (University of Malta) interviews Simon Critchley (New School) by video link during the Style in Theory / Styling Theory conference in Malta in November 2009 (link via Continental Philosophy). Topics under discussion included the writing of Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, Wallace Stevens, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Tom McCarthy, Michel de Montaigne, and American president Barack Obama. Attendees included Jean-Michel Rabaté, Laurent Milesi and Catherine Belsey. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• How to Stop Living and Start Worrying

Conversations with Emmanuel Levinas, 1983-1994

Joshua Shaw reflects on a new collection of essays and interviews

Michaël de Saint Cheron, Conversations with Emmanuel Levinas, 1983-1994
Translated by Gary D. Mole

The excellent Continental Philosophy has drawn my attention to a recent piece in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Joshua Shaw of Penn State Erie weighs in on Michaël de Saint Cheron's Conversations with Emmanuel Levinas, 1983-1994, and discovers that, despite a somewhat misleading title, it has 'several qualities to recommend it':

Michaël de Saint Cheron’s Conversations with Emmanuel Levinas, 1983-1994 (hereafter Conversations), is a somewhat misleadingly titled new publication from Duquesne University Press. The book’s title makes it sound as though it is a collection of interviews between Levinas and Saint Cheron, a scholar who has published works on Augustin Malroux and Elie Wiesel and who participated in Levinas’s lessons at the École normal israélite orientale from 1983 onward. However, Saint Cheron’s interviews compose only a small part of the book, which also contains four essays on Levinas and an extended essay on Yom Kippur, atonement, and forgiveness. The fact that these interviews constitute a small part of the book will be a disappointment for some. However, Conversations has several qualities to recommend it, both as a study of Levinas’s philosophy as well as a work of Jewish philosophy in its own right. [Read more]

Joshua Shaw, 'Michaël de Saint Cheron, Conversations with Emmanuel Levinas, 1983-1994'

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 04 January 2011