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


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