Beckett and Dialectics: Be it Something or Nothing [Hardcover]

For a long time, analysis of the work of Samuel Beckett has been dominated by existentialist and post-structuralist interpretations. This new volume instead raises the question of how to understand Beckett via the dialectics underpinning his work. The different chapters explore how Beckett exposes and challenges essential dialectical concepts such as objectivity, subjectivity, exteriority, interiority, immanence, transcendence, and most crucially: negativity.

With contributions from prominent scholars such as Alain Badiou, Mladen Dolar, and Rebecca Comay,Beckett and Dialecticsnot only sheds new light on how Beckett investigates the shapes, types, and forms of negation  as in the all-pervasive figures of 'nothing', 'no', 'null', and 'not'  but also examines how several phenomena that occur throughout Beckett's work are structured in their use of negativity. These include the relationships between voice and silence, space and void, movement and stasis, the finite and the infinite and repetition and transformation.

This original analysis lends an important new perspective to Beckett studies, and even more fundamentally, to dialectics itself.

Eva Heubachis a Visiting Assistant at the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences (Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures) at Yale University, USA. She is also a fellow at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School, Freie Universit?t Berlin, Germany and a doctoral candidate at the Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin, Germany.

The Unnamablebegins with questions of method:'How proceed ? By aporia pure and simple ? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered& ?'. Accordingly, the contributors of this lively collection proceed by moving between pseudo-couples like Hegel and Adorno exchanging their negativities and Beckett's quasi-dialectics of non-relation. Jean-Michel Rabat?, University of Pennsylvania, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, USA

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