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.
Rabate, 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, Rabate 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.

About the Author
Jean-Michel Rabate 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.

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 Rabate is one of those few."--Derek Attridge, University of York



Book Information
ISBN 9780823270866
Author Jean-Michel Rabate
Format Paperback
Page Count 248
Imprint Fordham University Press
Publisher Fordham University Press