Think, Pig!

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.