This book examines Samuel Becketts unique lesson in courage in the wake of humanisms postwar crisisthe courage to go on living even after experiencing life as a series of catastrophes.
Rabate, a former president of the Samuel Beckett Society and a leading scholar of modernism, explores the whole range of Becketts 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 Becketts inimitable sense of metaphysical comedy.
Foregrounding Becketts decision to write in French, Rabate inscribes him in a continental context marked by a writing degree zero while showing the prescience and ethical import of Becketts tendency to subvert the human through the theme of the animal. Becketts declaration of inhuman rights, he argues, offers the funniest mode of expression available to us today.