The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975

An NYRB Classics Original, edited by Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven

We Have Only This Life to Live: 
The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975

From NYRB:

Jean-Paul Sartre was a man of staggering gifts, whose accomplishments as philosopher, novelist, playwright, biographer, and activist still command attention and inspire debate. Sartre’s restless intelligence may have found its most characteristic outlet in the open-ended form of the essay. For Sartre the essay was an essentially dramatic form, the record of an encounter, the framing of a choice. Whether writing about literature, art, politics, or his own life, he seizes our attention and drives us to grapple with the living issues that are at stake.

We Have Only This Life to Live is the first gathering of Sartre’s essays in English to draw on all ten volumes of Situations, the title under which Sartre collected his essays during his life, while also featuring previously uncollected work, including the reports Sartre filed during his 1945 trip to America. Here Sartre writes about Faulkner, Bataille, Giacometti, Fanon, the liberation of France, torture in Algeria, existentialism and Marxism, friends lost and found, and much else. We Have Only This Life to Live provides an indispensable, panoramic view of the world of Jean-Paul Sartre. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in New York
• Jacques Derrida on Jean-Paul Sartre
• Sartre: 'Adventures are in books'
• Albert Camus' The Outsider: Illustrated
• On Albert Camus

Christopher Fynsk on Maurice Blanchot

An online video from the European Graduate School

From the European Graduate School (link via Lee Rourke): ‘Christopher Fynsk, contemporary philosopher, discusses Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, the double relation or imperative, language, speech, writing, literature, politics, ’ [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Photographs of Maurice Blanchot
• Maurice Blanchot: Thomas Reads a Book
• Maurice Blanchot on Giacometti and Writing
• 10 Years Since Blanchot

Simon Critchley on Contemporary Art

An article for The Brooklyn Rail

Al Held, 'The Big A' (1962)

Philosopher Simon Critchley shares his thoughts on contemporary art: '[...] despite such confusions of reference and the horrors of the contemporary art business model—or perhaps even because of it—I want to defend contemporary art, up to a point. It is simply a fact that contemporary art has become the central placeholder for the articulation of cultural meanings—good, bad, or indifferent. I am middle-aged enough to remember when literature, especially the novel, played this role and when cultural gatekeepers were literary critics, or social critics, often from literary backgrounds. That world is gone. The novel has become a quaint, emotively life-changing, and utterly marginal phenomenon. The heroic critics of the past are no more. I watched this change happen slowly when I still lived in England in the sensation-soaked 1990s and recall, as a kind of cultural marker, the opening of Tate Modern in 2000 and immensely long lines queuing up to see a vast spider by Louise Bourgeois in the Turbine Hall. It was clear that something had shifted in the culture.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Philosophers: Simon Critchley
• Francis Bacon: Five Decades
• Damien Hirst on Francis Bacon
• David Lynch on BBC's The Culture Show

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

Stuart Kendall translates Gilgamesh

First publication from the Contra Mundum Press

Gilgamesh, translated by Stuart Kendall

Contra Mundum Press is announcing that their first publication, Gilgamesh, should be entering online databases by the end of this month. The text was translated by Stuart Kendall, who has also translated Baudrillard, Bataille, Blanchot, Éluard and others. Aside from his many translations of Bataille, Kendall’s most recent book is Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy (Continuum). 'Announcing the inaugural publication of Contra Mundum Press, a new translation by Stuart Kendall of the ancient Mesopotamian epic poem, Gilgamesh. The story of a visionary journey beyond the limits of human experience, Gilgamesh is a tale of friendship, adventure, mortality, and loss. The legends it collects ultimately informed Greek and Egyptian myths, Hebrew Scriptures, and Islamic literature.'

Critical Responses

As Gilgamesh enters the domain of the classical—as it has for several decades now—each new generation looks for a way to bring it from its ur-world into the living present. Toward this end Stuart Kendall’s is the exemplary version for our time, a reading that allows the mind to see what had been too long lost to us and what we so much need to make us fully human. This is the place to go for further sustenance.

Jerome Rothenberg

This new translation of the Gilgamesh tale ventures outside the straitjackets that have often constrained the text, understanding its complicated transmission-history in the Sumerian and East Semitic languages of the ancient Near East and the way it evades modern ideas of ‘epic’ and ‘fiction’ often foisted upon it. In sharp, imagistic prose, Kendall shows how Gilgamesh’s story is not just an instructive yarn but a concerted act of ontological investigation. A needed provisioning of a much-discussed but little understood work

Nicholas Birns, Eugene Lang College, the New School

Website

• Contra Mundum Press

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Contra Mundum Press
• Rainer J. Hanshe, The Acolytes
• Rainer J. Hanshe on The Acolytes

Contra Mundum Press

A new publishing venture

Announcing the launch of a new publisher: Contra Mundum Press. Their first publication, due in October 2011, will be Gilgamesh in a new translation by Stuart Kendall, who has also translated Baudrillard, Bataille, Blanchot, Éluard and others. Aside from his many translations of Bataille, Kendall’s most recent book is Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy (Continuum). Their next publication, due in December 2011, will be Paul Bishop’s translation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Greek Music Drama, translated into English for the first time (link via Superfluities Redux):

Contra Mundum Press is a new publishing venture dedicated to the value and the indispensable importance of the individual voice. Through the publication of new texts by distinctive contemporary thinkers from all fields of the life of the mind as well as out-of-print titles from innovators of the past, Contra Mundum Press has been organized to demonstrate that the foundation of thought, and of the freedom and the efficacy of thinking, is not in the mash-up of the mob or the eviscerated diversion of social media but in the personal vision, and in the courage required to create it and to put it forth. [Read More]

contramundum.net

Forthcoming Titles

• Gilgamesh. Translated with an introduction by Stuart Kendall 
• Friedrich Nietzsche, Greek Music Drama. Translated with an introduction by Paul Bishop 
• W. J. Bate, Negative Capability: On the Intuitive Approach in Keats 
• Richard Foreman, Plays with Films: Zomboid!, Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead!, and Deep Trance Behavior in Potato Land. Introduction by George Hunka. 
• Georg Trakl, Poems. Translated by Mark Daniel Cohen
• Louis Auguste Blanqui, Eternity for the Stars. Translated with an introduction by Frank Chouraqui

Contact

Contra Mundum Press
P.O. Box 1326
New York, NY
10276

Email: info (at) contramundum.net

Website

• Contra Mundum Press

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Rainer J. Hanshe, The Acolytes
• Rainer J. Hanshe on The Acolytes

Samuel Beckett Research Day Seminar: 2011

University of Reading, 7 May 2011

The Beckett International Foundation is pleased to announce that the next Beckett Research Seminar will take place on Saturday, 7 May 2011.

The event will be held in the Conference Room of Special Collections at the University of Reading. As in previous years, our speakers represent a mixture of both local and international research students as well as established scholars, reflecting the current research into Beckett's writing. It is our hope that the quality of the papers will, as in the past, attract a wide and varied audience. The charge for the day is £20 per participant (£15 unwaged), which includes lunch and refreshments throughout the day. Please note that parking facilities are available at the venue.

Timetable

Date: Saturday, 7 May 2011
Time: 10.30 to 16.30
Venue: Conference Room, Special Collections, The University of Reading

10.30 - 11.00	Coffee
11.00 - 11.30	Peter Fifield, St John’s College, Oxford ‘“Loss and limitless degradation”: Beckett and Bataille’
11.30 - 12.00	Discussion
12.00 - 12.30	John Pilling, University of Reading ‘“A faded kaleidoscope”: Beckett and Sainte-Beuve’s Volupté’
12.30 - 13.00	Discussion
13.00 - 14.30	Lunch
14.30 - 15.00	Derval Tubridy, Goldsmiths College ‘Bun-Ching Lam’s and Beckett’s Quatre Poèmes/Four Songs: Music, Image, Text’’
15.30 - 16.00	Sean Kennedy, St Mary’s University, Halifax ‘Edmund Spenser, famine memory and the discontents of humanism in Endgame’
16.00 - 16.30	Discussion

Contact

For further information, please contact:
Dr Mark Nixon
E: m.nixon@reading.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 118 378 7010
By Post: The Beckett International Foundation
Department of English, University of Reading, Whiteknights
PO Box 218, Reading RG6 6AA

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive
• Samuel Beckett and the 'State' of Ireland Conference
• Samuel Beckett Summer School: July 2011
• Samuel Beckett Seminar: 2011: Philosophy and Literature

Beckett, Blanchot, Philosophy

A day conference

Design: Rhys Tranter

Beckett, Blanchot and Philosophy

Day Conference

University of Sussex

Arts B 155,

4th June 2010

1st Session: 1.00 - 2:25
Chair: Dr. Katerina Deligiorgi.
Student Beckett papers: 20 minute papers, 10 minute discussion.

1.00 – 1.20 - David Tucker - 'a far seeing man [...] in shocking disorder': Arnold Geulincx in Suite / La Fin / The End.’
1.20 – 1.30 plenary discussion.
1.30 - 1.50 - Silvia Panizza ‘Beckett, Coetzee & Silence’.
1.50 - 2.00 plenary discussion.
2.00 - 2.20 - Steve Watts - ‘Reading Endgame: Adorno, Thinking & Modernity/Modernism.’
2.20 – 2.30 plenary discussion.

[5 minute break.]

2nd Session: 2:35 – 3.50.
Chair: Dr. Keston Sutherland.
Keynote paper: Dr. Derval Tubridy, ‘Keeping Company with Beckett & Blanchot’.
Respondent: Professor Peter Boxall.

[10 minute break.]

Chair: Dr. Adrianna Bontea.
4.00 – 5.00 Student Blanchot papers: 20 minuet papers, 10 minute discussion.
4.00 – 4.20 - Tom Allen - 'Blanchot, Levinas and the Presence of Beaurocracy.'
4.20 – 4.30 plenary discussion.
4.30 – 4.50 - Simon Bull – ‘What is Human About the Excessive?’ [Bataille & Blanchot].
4.50 – 5.50 plenary discussion.

[5 minute break]

5.05– 6.20
Chair: Dr. Adriana Bontea.
Keynote paper: Professor Leslie Hill, ‘The Disappearance of Literature’.
Respondent: Dr. Paul Davies.

Conference Dinner: 7:00 – 9:30.

If you are interested in attending, please contact Steve Watt in advance at the following email address: steve_hotdog@hotmail.com.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: 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

Disjecta: This week's links

A Piece of Monologue wins 3:AM Magazine's Blog of the Year 2009.
(Image: New Vintage editions of Michel Foucault's work.)

Literature:

Paul Auster: On Stealing Books
J. G. Ballard: Nic Clear's design tribute to Ballard
Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Uncovering Céline's 'tireless' antisemitism
Knut Hamsun: On 'the dark side of literary brilliance'
Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Diurnal versus nocturnal writers
Anaïs Nin: seduction in the diaries
George Orwell: Birthplace to be restored
F. Scott Fitzgerald: Short film of Fitzgerald writing
Haruki Murakami: Quotes the influence of jazz music on his work
E-Books/Kindle: Amazon electronic book sales outsell print for the first time
3:AM Magazine Awards 2009
The Existence Machine: Books Read in 2009
This Space: Books of the Year 2009

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Michel Foucault: New Vintage editions of Michel Foucault's work
George Bataille: An interview on literature and evil

Roger Scruton: A review of a philosophy of wine, I Drink, Therefore I Am
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Why Wittgenstein rejected theories

Music:

Nat Hentoff: A provocative piece on the use of music as a torture method
Jazz: The Nation on a new Thelonious Monk biography
Jazz: Audio interviews with tenor saxophonist John Coltrane

Film:

Werner Herzog: An interview with Slate
Alfred Hitchcock: Hitchcock's influence on the aestheticization of violence
Robin Wood 1931-2009: Hitchcock film critic passes away
100 Best Films of the Decade: The Guardian's pick
10 Underrated Films of the Decade: The Guardian's pick

Television:

The South Bank Show: Melvyn Bragg bows out
David Lynch: Twin Peaks Season 2 to be released in the UK in March 2010

Radio:

Samuel Beckett: The Whole Thing's Coming Out of the Dark

Art:

Mark Glazebrook 1936-2009

Etc.:

Critical Cookie: Now on Twitter
John F. Kennedy: Abraham Zapruder's camera

Walter Benjamin's Library Card

Rare document that belonged to the German cultural theorist

Walter Benjamin’s library card, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, 1940. (Image via pieto the media ecologist.)

See also:

• pieto the media ecologist: Georges Bataille's identity card