Think, Pig!

Beckett at the Limit of the Human

Jean-Michel Rabaté

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780823270866
  9780823270859
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823270873
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• 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