MULTITUDE OF BLOGS None of the PDFs are my own productions. I've collected them from web (e-mule, avax, libreremo, socialist bros, cross-x, gigapedia..) What I did was thematizing. This blog's project is to create an e-library for a Heideggerian philosophy and Bourdieuan sociology Φ market-created inequalities must be overthrown in order to close knowledge gap. this is an uprising, do ya punk?

Monday, January 19, 2009

Have We Arrived? (Beckett there somewhere)



At that time when the dawn star passes across earth, harbinger
of light, and after him dawn of the saffron mantle is scattered
across the sea, the fire died down and the flames were over.
The winds took their way back toward home again, crossing
the Thracian water, and it boiled with a moaning swell as they crossed it.

- Iliad, book 23, 226-30 (trans. lattimore)

After him, remembrance of a saintliness, which "derives from a theorem, that is, from pain. Such is the act"(1), blooms "and of a sudden he is off again, on his wanderings, passing from light to shadow, from shadow to light, unheedingly"(2). They crossing the channel heard "I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patinece without end, to shine it on the empty shadows. I was a solid in the midst of other solids"(3). One of them wrote a letter:

"Would like to address myself, in a straight line, directly, without courrier only to you, but I can't manage to arrive, and that is the worst of it. A tragedy, my love, of destination" (4).

In this transhumance "without habitat" (5), "you are lost in the forests of high threshing ferns or whirled far out on the face of wind-swept wastes, till you being to wonder if you have not died without knowing and gone to hell or been born again into an even worse place than before"(6). He tried to respond this friend: "of that life too I shall tell you perhaps one day, the day I know that when I thought I knew I was merely existing and that passion without form or stations will have devoured me down to the rotting flesh itself itself and that when I know that I know nothing, am only more or less openly (7)... I listen and the voice is of a world collapsing endlessly, a frozen world, under a faint untroubled sky, enough to see by, yes, and frozen too (8)".

No one knows. Someone survived, effaced the traces (derrida), remembering them said in the end "In finitude, therefore, a thought does not complete the meaning (of what) it thinks, and thus lets this 'object'-the thingitself- have the weight that carries away from completed, presentified, or signified meaning... that which constitutes meaning by exceeding all meaning. The existence of the slightest pebble already overflows; however light overflows; however light it may be, it already weighs this excessive weight... We need an art -if it is an 'art'- of thickness, of gravity. We need figures that weigh upon the bottom rather than extracting themselves from it. That stave it in and expose it. We need a thought what would be like a mass out of true, the fall and the creation of the world"(9).


Bibliography
(1) Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe (2005 [1995]) "Pasolini, an improvisation (OF A SAINTLINESS)" in Umbr(a): The Dark God, p.92
(2) Beckett, Malone Dies, grove, p. 206
(3) Molloy. p. 107-8
(4) Derrida & Malabou, Counterpath, sup, p.193
(5) ibid. p.166
(6) malone dies p.226-7
(7) molloy p.25
(8) ibid. 40
(9) Jean-Luc Nancy, The gravity of a Thought, p. 84.

painting by Cy Twombly "The Fire that Consumes All before It"
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I know I promised for Brennan and Bourdieu, yet noticing that 1953, Jan 19th is the premier of Waiting for Godot at Théâtre de Babylon, I decided to make up a Beckett issue.

see you next month.
unutmadan güle güle simit.

To link all Beckett at one time:
http://farkyaralari.blogspot.com/search/label/beckett

Understanding Samuel Beckett


Understanding Samuel Beckett
(Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature)
by Alan Astro

# Hardcover: 240 pages
# Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Pr (September 1990)

Presents an overview of the work of Samuel Beckett. Discussing his famous as well as lesser known texts, the book shows how his characters incorporate silence in their speech to narrate their deaths. Finally it examines "Stirring Still", his last text, which evokes his own imminent death.

link

Tragedy and Irish Literature: Synge, O'Casey, Beckett


Tragedy and Irish Literature: Synge, O'Casey, Beckett
by Ronan McDonald

In Tragedy and Irish Writing McDonald considers the culture of suffering, loss, and guilt in the work of Synge, O'Casey, and Beckett. He applies external ideas of tragedy to the three dramatists and also discerns particular sorts of tragedy within their own work. While alert to the real differences among the three, the book also traces common themes and preoccupations. It identifies a conflict between form and content, between heightened language and debased reality, as the hallmark of Irish tragedy.

link

The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett


The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett
by Lee Oser

# Hardcover: 196 pages
# Publisher: Cambridge University Press (January 29, 2007)

"Oser's book would be of most interest to philosophers, religious studies and literary scholars exploring the intersection of art and ethics, religion and culture."
-Alyda Faber, Atlantic School of Theology, Studies in Religion

link (I can't understand these backcover stupidities)

The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett


The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett
(Cambridge Introductions to Literature)
by Ronan McDonald

150 pages

'... it is an excellent book: it does exactly what it says on the tin. ... The greatest strength of the book is in McDonald's ability to articulate a shapely overview while maintaining a sharp sense of the distinctions ...' Irish Studies Review


what there

Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett's Later Drama


Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett's Later Drama
by Anna McMullan

# Library Binding: 176 pages
# Publisher: Routledge (July 1993)

Theatre on Trial is the first full-length analysis of Samuel Beckett's later drama in the context of contemporary theatre. Audrey McMullan employs a close, textual examination of the later plays as a springboard for exploring ideas around authority, voyeurism, gender, and the ideology of stage and TV space. Recent work in the field of critical theory has suggested new ways of looking at performance practice. And, argues McMullan, what makes an understanding of Beckett crucial to these debates is that his theatrical practice foreground processes which are central to much current thinking in the area. Beckett's Stages will be of vital interest to students and teachers of performance studies. The author's application of theories of deconstruction and psychoanalytic feminism to Beckett's work will break new ground in theatre studies.

link

Samuel Beckett's New Worlds: Style in Metafiction

Samuel Beckett's New Worlds: Style in Metafiction
by Susan D. Brienza

# Hardcover: 290 pages
# Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press (March 1987)

Beckett's fiction since The Unnamable (1958) abandons complete sentences for repeated phrases and a "midget grammar." Brienza has undertaken the first stylistic analysis of Beckett's condensed prose, 12 pieces altogether in which "style and content reflect each other endlessly as in a fun house mirror." Since Beckett rarely uses the same stratagem twice, each work is treated separately, and the French original is often compared with the author's English version for clues to his meaning. Brienza is asking readers to do no less than create a vocabulary and syntax before they can begin to read Beckett's new fiction. This intellectual deciphering may or may not be emotionally satisfying, but it does yield a highly readable study of Beckett's impenetrable prose. Recommended for academic libraries. Lisa Mullenneaux

link

Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism



Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body: The Organs and Senses in Modernism
by Yoshiki Tajiri

Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body is a study of the representation of the body in Samuel Beckett's work (both novels and plays), specifically focused on the 'prosthetic' aspect of the organs and senses. While making use of the theoretical potential of the concept of 'prosthesis', this book aims to resituate Beckett in the broad cultural context of modernism in which the impact of new media and technologies was variously registered.

...

Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of Love


Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of Love
by John Keller

# Hardcover: 272 pages
# Publisher: Manchester University Press (March 7, 2003)

"John Keller has written a book that threw more light onto the Beckettian murk...for this reader...than has been available before. The readings...are highly convincing and in places quite stunning. Beckett Studies...will never be quite the same again." -- Lance Butler, Universite de Pau

"Keller utterly convinces the reader of his basic, fundamental premise that Beckett’s work is ‘primarily about love’. This is an astounding conclusion which will change the nature of Beckett Studies. [This book] is a significant intervention and a work of true originality." -- Shane Murphy, Co-ordinator, Irish and Scottish Studies Programme, University of Aberdeen

link

Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image


Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image
by Anthony Uhlmann

# Hardcover: 198 pages
# Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (January 15, 2007)

Beckett often made use of images from the visual arts and readapted them, staging them in his plays, or using them in his fiction. Anthony Uhlmann sets out to explain how an image differs from other terms, like 'metaphor' or 'representation', and, in the process, to analyse Beckett's use of images borrowed from philosophy and aesthetics. This is the first study to carefully examine Beckett's thoughts on the image in his literary works and his extensive notes to the philosopher Arnold Geulincx. Uhlmann considers how images might allow one kind of interaction between philosophy and literature, and how Beckett makes use of images which are borrowed from, or drawn into dialogue with, philosophical images from Geulincx, Berkeley, Bergson, and the ancient Stoics. Uhlmann's reading of Beckett's aesthetic and philosophical interests provides a revolutionary new reading of the importance of the image in his work.

link

Proust, Beckett, and Narration


Proust, Beckett, and Narration
by James H. Reid

# Hardcover: 206 pages
# Publisher: Cambridge University Press (October 13, 2003)

"Proust, Beckett and Narration is a welcome addition to the literature on novelistic self-consciousness." - Derek Schilling, Rutgers University

link

Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies

Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies
by Lois Oppenheim (Editor)

# Paperback: 288 pages
# Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (September 4, 2004)

Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies explores the evolution of critical approaches to Beckett's writing. It will appeal to graduate students and advanced undergraduates as well as scholars, as it offers both an overview of Beckett studies and investigates current debates within the interdisciplinary critical arena. Each of the contributors is an eminent Beckett specialist who has published widely in the field.

link

Images of Beckett


Images of Beckett
by James Knowlson (Author), John Haynes (Photographer)

'... these theatre photos are among the most resonant of the past century ... Haynes doesn't so much snap a production as x-ray its heart ... Biographer Knowlson examines Beckett's character ... visual influences and directorial working method in three beautiful essays that go well beyond the merely dutiful in this tremendous picture book.' Plays International 'A stunning collection ...' London Review of Books

Review
"This is a worthy volume, fascinating, not heavy-handed, and the pictures from Beckett's various plays, not to say his astonishing face, are a trip."
L.W. Milam, The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities

"For those interested in Beckett's complex dialogue with art, Images of Beckett is richly rewarding."
American Theatre

"It offers a fresh look at a writer about whom much has already been written."
Irish America

"...a major contribution to the way we see modernism... the photos show us not only what Beckett's plays looked like in their original production, but also what Beckett had wanted them to look like. They are the closest we can get to seeing the plays realized in the way he had envisaged them today."
James Joyce Literary Supplement


destory, destroy

How It Was - A memoir of Samuel Beckett


How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett
by Anne Atik

faber and faber edition

2006 marks the 100th anniversary of Samuel Beckett’s birth. To most, he was a brilliant artist who shied away from celebrity and photographers, but to the distinguished painter Avigdor Arikha and his wife, author Anne Atik, Beckett was the close friend with whom they shared countless drinks, meals, and rich conversations. As intimates and artists, they interacted with him several times a week for over four decades. In 1970, Atik began jotting down notes on her relationship with Beckett. "After fifteen years of memorable conversations with Beckett," she writes, "I realized that I could not depend on my memory. The unforgettable was becoming the irretrievable." The three could just as easily discuss their personal lives as ponder the state of art. This book documents not only Beckett’s passions, but is filled with drawings by Arikha, snapshots, and letters. There are also drafts in Beckett’s own handwriting that would eventually become part of his formidable canon, covering the breadth of his knowledge of literature by detailing his opinions and influences. An intimate collage, How It Was offers a unique insider’s portrait and gives the reader a chance to sit down with one of the great literary masters of the twentieth century.

LINK

Beckett's Eighteenth Century


Beckett's Eighteenth Century
by Frederik N. Smith

# Hardcover: 231 pages
# Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (March 20, 2002)

Beckett's Eighteenth Century is the first book-length study of Samuel Beckett's affinity with the British eighteenth century and of the influence of its writers on his work. Reading Swift, Pope, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, Johnson, Gray, and other writers of this period, this study demonstrates how he was not only influenced by them, but interprets them for us in quite a modern way.

link

Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity


Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity
by Shane Weller

# Hardcover: 232 pages
# Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (July 21, 2006)

If there is one trait common to almost all post-Holocaust theories of literature, it is arguably the notion that the literary event constitutes the affirmation of an alterity that resists all dialectical mastery and makes possible a post-metaphysical ethics. Beckett's oeuvre in particular has repeatedly been deployed as exemplary of just such an affirmation. In Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity, however, Weller argues through an analysis of the interrelated topics of translation, comedy, and gender that to read Beckett in this way is to miss the strangely 'anethical' nature of his work.

take five!

Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency


Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency
by Andrew Gibson

# Hardcover: 336 pages
# Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (March 8, 2007)

The book is impeccably researched...Badiou's reading of the author has hitherto been less influential in the Anglo-Saxon (empirical) context than it has in le monde francophone. Gibson's book constitutes the first sustained study of the subject. In its depth of analysis, it will be difficult to surpass. Ulrika Maude, Modernism/Modernity Gibson's book, with its intricate layers of theoretical complexity and its vast ambition, is certainly a formidable feat of scholarship. The book is a testimony to its author's intense participation in in a set of intellectual debates and exchanges which are - or at least should be - of the greatest significance in literary studies. English Gibson is masterful in his grasp of Badiou's system (even its more knotty mathematical formulae, and he effortlessly weaves his argument from Badiou's theorems to Beckett's literary texts...By suggesting that Beckett's work describes a waiting for something (the event) as well as an aimless, anxious, endlessly postponed process (of intermittency), Gibson provides an absorbing account of the hesitant expectancy of Beckett's writing. Benjamin Keatinge, Irish University Review scrupulous, immensely well-read Leslie Hill, French Studies Beckett and Badiou is all the better for its inherent difficulties, and even uncertainties, for its ultimate twisting and turning on itself...a nuance and rigour that make it a richly satisfying and productive account of Beckett's oeuvre. Gibson probably takes us further than any other recent reader of Beckett, in the direction of grasping the full social and critical form of his art. David Cunningham, Radical Philosophy Gibson's book, with its intricate layers of theoretical complexity and its vast ambition, is certainly a formidable feat of scholarship [and is] also hugely enjoyable The Journal of the English Association


link

Samuel Becket the Critical Heritage



Samuel Beckett the Critical Heritage
(The Critical heritage series)
by Lawrence Graver (Editor), Raymond Federman (Editor)

# Hardcover: 372 pages
# Publisher: Routledge Kegan & Paul (June 1978)

The Critical Heritage series gathers together a large body of critical figures in literature. These carefully selected sources include: * contemporary reviews from both popular and literary media. In these students can read about how Lady Chatterly's Lover shocked contemporary reviewers or what Ibsen's Doll's House meant to the early women's movement * little-published documentary material such as diaries and correspondence - often between authors and their publishers and critics * significant pieces of criticism from later periods to demonstrate how an author's reputation changed over time

link

Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Cliche



Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Cliche
by Elizabeth Barry

The book covers Beckett's early fiction, mature fiction, theatre and his spare late prose works, situating Beckett in a philosophical tradition and literary tradition that has argued for the creative value of stupidity; a key concept in the thinking of philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Deleuze, and central to the practice of writers such as Wordsworth, Flaubert, Baudelaire and Joyce. The book investigates the relationship between verbal cliché, memory and authority in Beckett's prose and drama, arguing that by consciously manipulating the language of cliché, Beckett can interrogate the assumptions made in the discourses of social and intellectual authority without assuming a superior and complacent authority of his own.

link

Sunday, January 11, 2009

The Tarnac Affair: Symptomatic of a Psychotic Social Order


this piece appeared at
Telos Press Blog (Jan 11, '09)

Jean-Claude Paye, a sociologist, is the author of Global War on Liberty, available from Telos Press. This essay was translated from the French by Henry Crapo.


The Tarnac Affair:
Symptomatic of a Psychotic Social Order

by Jean-Claude Paye


On November 11, 2008, within the framework of Operation "TAIGA" [1], one hundred and fifty police encircled the small village of Tarnac, in Corrèze (southwest France). Simultaneously, evidence was seized in Rouen, Paris, Limoges, and Metz. An arrest of young people was made, above all as a spectacle to incite fear. Their arrest was said to be in connection with the sabotage of the train lines of the SNCF [2], which on November 8 caused delays for certain TGVs on the Paris-Lille line [3]. These malevolent acts, which knocked down several overhead wires, were characterized as terrorist in nature, despite the fact that they never, at any moment, put human lives in danger. The prosecution, which says it possesses several clues, recognizes that it has no material evidence or proof.

It is the character profile of the arrested youths that justifies their being held for questioning. They were arrested because "they used radical language and had relations with foreign groups," and because a number of them had "participated on a regular basis in political demonstrations"—for example, in "marches held in opposition to the Edvige [Exploitation documentaire et valorisation de l'information générale] file system [4] and against the reinforcement of measures against immigration." As for their residence, it was described as "a meeting place for indoctrination, a base camp for violent action."

Although accused of constituting a "hardcore cell that had armed struggle as its purpose," they were rapidly set free, some conditionally so, while others were confined to their residence. Only the "chief" and his companion would be held in jail. On December 26, the appeals court in Paris had, at the request of the prosecution, cancelled an order that Julien Coupat be released. The request for release of his companion had been previously refused.

The discourse of the government illustrates a kind of double displacement: first, simple acts of sabotage, such as those one might find in any social movement, are qualified as "terrorist," and these acts are attributed to the youths of Tarnac, despite the fact that the police admit to the absence of any material element of proof. The image of terrorism construed by the State creates a reality that is a substitute for the facts. The facts are not denied, but they are denied any explanatory capacity. The acts of sabotage cannot be other than the acts of persons designated as terrorists. The act of naming, prior to any procedure of objective evaluation, trumps the latter and seals it in an empty form.

The absence of material elements that would permit the pursuit of the incriminated persons is not denied, but the necessary prevalence of facts is overturned, in the interests of the primacy of the image constructed by the State. The position of the Minister of the Interior, Madame Alliot-Marie, is particularly interesting: "They have adopted underground methods. They never use mobile telephones, and they live in areas where it is very difficult for the police to gather information without being spotted. They have managed to have, in the village of Tarnac, friendly relations with people who can warn them of the presence of strangers." But, the minister admits, "there have been no indications of attacks against persons."

These declarations nicely sum up the affair. What makes these young people terrorists is their way of life, the fact that they attempt to escape the economic machine and that they do not adopt a "proactively" submissive attitude with respect to procedures of control. Not to have a cellphone is proof of terrorist intentions. Participating in a social network is also incriminating behavior, because this practice permits the construction of a protective shield against the deployment of unrestricted power by the State.

In its declarations, the reference to acts, in the absence of any convincing material elements of proof, cannot be rationally assimilated, and induces a phase of aberration, a reconstruction of reality with the image of terrorism as support. This process is equally visible in the police reports, which utilize, from a purely semantic point of view, an entirely phantasmagorical reconstruction of reality. Thus, the police, as if referring to material proof of the culpability of the accused, speak of "documents noting the times of passage of trains, village by village, with the times of arrival and departure from the stations." An SNCF timetable thus becomes a particularly troubling document, and its possession necessarily implies participation in the material destruction of railway equipment.

The staging of these arrests and the bringing of charges against the "autonomous youth of Tarnac" is a phenomenon that reveals a profound mutation of the symbolic order of the society. The State has the ability to create a new reality, a virtual reality that does not suppress, but rather supplants, the facts. The weakness of the social movement and the failure of the symbolic function explain the absence of constraints on the domination of the State, which exhibits itself as an all-inclusive entity in the guise of a maternal image. Where a social order reveals itself to be contradictory, a psychotic structure takes its place, an order that suppresses all conflict and all possibility of confrontation with reality.

Notes

1. TAIGA (traitement automatique de l'information géopolitique d'actualité) is French spyware, developed in 1987, which uses somewhat outmoded computer technology based on the semantic analysis of information intended for the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE). (The DGSE, which is subordinate to the Ministry of the Defense, is responsible for military intelligence as well as for strategic information, electronic intelligence. It is also responsible for the counterespionage outside the borders of the national territory.) TAIGA technology was used by the FBI to gather information on Julien Coupat's supposed subversive activities in the United States, whence the operations code name "EAL."

2. The French National Railway Company (SNCF) is a French public enterprise.

3. The TGV (train à grande vitesse) is the French high-speed train.

4. French revolt over Edvige-Sarkozy's Big Brother computer, which will spy on citizens.