Envisioned as a psychoanalytic reading of Beckett (...) through a literary reading of Lacan (193), the book manages to analyze one of modernism's most essential and complex authors while illuminating Lacanian psychoanalysis' own intricate knots with literary modernism, which according to Chattopadhyay cannot not have mathematical form. * Journal of Modern Literature *
An ambitious, distinctive, and rich study. * The Review of English Studies *
Arka Chattopadhyay's superb Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real zooms in on the deep complicity between the later Beckett and the later Lacan. Offering cogent close-readings and displaying an impressive theoretical culture, Chattopadhyay formalizes the paradoxes inherent in the Real in both corpuses. In this radically new approach to literature, Lacanian psychoanalysis demonstrates its agency not only as an interpretive technique but also as a practice of writing. * Jean-Michel Rabate, Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences *
Samuel Beckett and Jacques Lacan are two great European writer-thinkers of the twentieth century who really should have crossed paths: stylistically radical, scripturally innovative, and conceptually decisive, they shared friends, interests, and themes. Yet their work, and the studies of their work, have to date been marked by a peculiar non-relation. Arka Chattopadhyay's remarkable book sets out to re-examine this odd state of affairs, with intelligence, erudition, and brio. Along the way, Chattopadhyay not only manages to give strong new interpretations of the sense and import of Beckett and Lacan's writings, but resituates their work along new lines, most notably according to a problematic of mathematical formalisation in the Real. Anybody interested in modernist literature and psychoanalysis will learn from this superb book. * Justin Clemens, Associate Professor in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Australia *
Opening up fundamentally new ground, Arka Chattopadhyay combines sophisticated close readings of both Beckett and Lacan with a profound theoretical ambition. His book explores the turn to mathematics in both writers not as an attempt to underpin the rational, Enlightenment subject as it comes under threat in the twentieth century, but as an invocation of the structures of paradox, aporia, impasse and incompleteness that emerge as human experience and practices of writing meet the materiality of the world. * Laura Salisbury, Professor of Modern Literature and Medical Humanities, University of Exeter, UK, and author of Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (2012) *
Noting that Lacan and Beckett share a common birthday if not birth year, Arka Chattopadhyay collides the late Beckett against the late Lacan in a book which arrives right on time. Always intriguing and often brilliant, this work not only makes a notable contribution to scholarship on both of its subjects but also shows how, with regard to modernism and its inability not to go on, the 1970s could begin to be mapped. * Daniel Katz, Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, UK *
For Lacanian enthusiasts, this book offers an ambitious addition to Beckett scholarship; perhaps its esoteric prose is an unavoidable consequence of exposing the limits of language to probe the immaterial realities of human mathematics. * Joanne Brueton, French Studies *
This book invites us to reread Beckett and put his analyzes to work... penetrating. * La Revue des Lettres Modernes (Bloomsbury Translation) *
