Think, Pig!: Beckett at the Limit of the Human

by Jean-Michel Rabaté

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823270873
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	07/01/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has written or edited more than thirty-five books on modernism, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: How on this earth one ought to live
1. Think, 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 towards Geulincx and Proust
6. From an aesthetics of non-relation to an ethics of negation
7. Beckett's Kantian Critiques
8. Dialectics of Enlittlement: Rats in Watt
9. Bathetic jokes, animal slapstick, and ethical laughter
10. Courage, or strength to deny? Beckett between Adorno and Badiou
11. Lessons in pigsty Latin: the duty to speak well
12. An Irish Paris Peasant
13. The morality of form, a French story
Coda: Minima Beckettiana

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Very few critics have all the qualities and competencies required to engage fully with the entirety Beckett's work in all genres: a detailed familiarity with Beckett's texts in both English and French; a sensitivity to his linguistic, stylistic and thematic manoeuvres; an encyclopaedic knowledge of his intellectual context; an awareness of the range and detail of Beckett studies; and an ability to write with refinement and wit. It is clear from this remarkable book that Jean-Michel Rabaté is one of those few."—Derek Attridge, University of York

"Think, Pig! is a playful and incisive guide to Beckett's work and is sure to be of interest to newcomers and seasoned scholars alike. Rabaté demonstrates an encyclopedic grasp of scholarship in the field, while bringing a personal touch through related anecdotes and an accessible style...It is as fresh, meaty and loaded with ethical predicament as one of Beckett's carefully folded ham sandwiches."-Rhys Tranter, Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher

"Think, Pig!" In Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Pozzo fires this command at Lucky, his tethered slave, who responds with an outburst of logorrhea that reduces Western philosophy to gobbledygook. Pozzo's command raises many of the questions that Jean-Michel Rabaté investigates in this learned and inventive study of Beckett among the philosophers.

Modern Philology

Very few critics have all the qualities and competencies required to engage fully with the entirety Beckett’s work in all genres: a detailed familiarity with Beckett’s texts in both English and French; a sensitivity to his linguistic, stylistic and thematic manoeuvres; an encyclopaedic knowledge of his intellectual context; an awareness of the range and detail of Beckett studies; and an ability to write with refinement and wit. It is clear from this remarkable book that Jean-Michel Rabaté is one of those few.

Derek Attridge

Think, Pig! is a playful and incisive guide to Beckett’s work and is sure to be of interest to newcomers and seasoned scholars alike. Rabaté demonstrates an encyclopedic grasp of scholarship in the field, while bringing a personal touch through related anecdotes and an accessible style…It is as fresh, meaty and loaded with ethical predicament as one of Beckett’s carefully folded ham sandwiches.

Times Literary Supplement - Rhys Tranter