Professor Shane Weller

This book analyses the genesis of one of Beckett's most important works, the novel 'L'Innommable'/'The Unnamable', written in French in 1949-50 and translated into English by Beckett in 1956-8. Through an examination of the surviving manuscripts and typescripts, as well as the the French and English pre-book-publication extracts, this study locates the novel within Beckett's developing aesthetic, especially his interest in Fritz Mauthner's 'critique of language' ('Sprachkritik'). It aims to show that the compositional processes of both the original French version and the English translation of L'Innommable reflect, in their different ways, Beckett's attempt to achieve what he famously described as a 'literature of the unword' ('Literatur des Unworts'). This volume is part of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP), a collaboration between the Centre for Manuscript Genetics (University of Antwerp, Belgium), the Beckett International Foundation (University of Reading, UK) and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre (University of Texas at Austin, USA), with the support of the Estate of Samuel Beckett.

At the heart of some of the most influential strands of philosophical, political, and aesthetic modernism lies the conviction that modernity is fundamentally nihilistic. This book offers a wide-ranging critical history of the concept of nihilism from its origins in French Revolutionary discourse to its place in recent theorizations of the postmodern. Key moments in that history include the concept's appropriation by political activists in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, by Nietzsche in the 1880s, by the European avant-garde and 'high' modernists in the early decades of the twentieth century, by conservative revolutionaries in Germany in the interwar years, and by major theorists in the post-Holocaust period. Focusing in particular on the abiding impact of Nietzsche's claim that art is the 'only superior counterforce' to nihilism, I argue that an understanding of modernism (and, indeed, of postmodernism) is impossible without a reflection upon the decisive role played by the concept of nihilism therein.

Since Nietzsche's appropriation of the term in his later work, the concept of nihilism hasplayed a decisive role in the thinking of both modernity and postmodernity. This book charts the deployment of that concept by some of the most influential philosophers and literary theorists of the modern period, including Heidegger, Adorno, Blanchot, Derrida, Agamben, Vattimo, and Badiou. Focusing in particular on the ways in which each of these deployments involves both a countering redetermination of nihilism and a privileging of a certain concept of the literary for what is taken to be its power of resistance to it, this book proposes neither a critique nor a revalorisation of nihilism; rather, it explores through an historical, conceptual, and philological anaysis the various ways in which nihilism, as what Nietzsche terms the 'uncanniest of all guests', returns to haunt the thought of those who would counter it.

If there is one trait common to almost all post-Holocaust theories of literature, it is arguably the notion that the literary event constitutes the affirmation of an alterity that resists all dialectical mastery and makes possible a post-metaphysical ethics. Beckett's oeuvre in particular has repeatedly been deployed as exemplary of just such an affirmation. In Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity, however, Weller argues through an analysis of the interrelated topics of translation, comedy, and gender that to read Beckett in this way is to miss the strangely 'anethical' nature of his work.

Since the mid-1950s, when the works of Samuel Beckett began to attract sustained critical attention, commentators have tended either to dismiss his oeuvre as nihilist or to defend it as anti-nihilist. On the one side are figures such as Georg Lukács; on the other some of the most influential philosophers and literary theorists of the post-war era, from Theodor Adorno to Alain Badiou. Taking as my point of departure Nietzsche's description of nihilism as the 'uncanniest of all guests' (unheimlichste aller Gäste), in A Taste for the Negative I call this entire critical tradition into question, arguing that the complex relationship between Beckett's texts and nihilism will always be missed by those who are simply for or against Beckett.

At the heart of European literary modernism lies a concern with the erotic, and in particular with various forms of what Freud saw as 'sexual aberration', including sadism, masochism, homosexuality, fetishism and necrophilia. Modernist Eroticisms explores the impact of sexological and early psychoanalytic conceptions of sexual perversion on the representation of the erotic in modernist literature: writers whose work is discussed include Djuna Barnes, Georges Bataille, Édouard Dujardin, Hans Henny Jahnn, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Maurice Maeterlinck, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry, Frank Wedekind and Oscar Wilde. Taken together, the essays in this volume explore not only the specificities of the modernist writing of the erotic, but also its decisive role in the shift from conceptions of sexual deviance to those of sexual difference.

The impetus behind this collection of essays was a curiosity shared by the editors concerning the relation between the flesh and the text in French and francophone literature. This curiosity took the form of a number of specific questions. For which writers has the flesh been a central concern? Might one distinguish between those writers who attempt to represent the flesh textually and those who emphasise the difficulty or even the impossibility of such a project? How is the subject's relation to his/her own flesh, and to the flesh of others, determined? In which ways do psychoanalysis and other influential theoretical approaches such as phenomenology and deconstruction address the flesh as distinct from the body? These questions are explored here in readings of works by, among others, Rabelais, Diderot, Sade, Proust, Beckett, Djebar, Nothomb, Delvig and Nobécourt. The principal philosophers and theorists upon whom the contributors draw include Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben, Nancy and Anzieu. The essays will be of interest to readers from a wide range of disciplines, including literary studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, gender studies, aesthetics and religious studies.

Franz Kafka's response to late nineteenth-century language scepticism sets his work apart from the high modernism of the 1920s. Rather than seeking to achieve linguistic renewal in the manner of Joyce, Proust, or Pound, Kafka increasingly commits himself to forms of linguistic negativism that anticipate post-Second World War late modernist attempts to produce what Samuel Beckett describes as a 'Literatur des Unworts'. This article charts the development of Kafka's linguistic negativism between 1904 and 1924, and seeks to identify the principal ways in which his 'unwording' was crucial for the emergence of European late modernism from Beckett to Sebald.

This article charts the shifting patterns of linguistic negativism in Maurice Blanchot's fiction, from his early works of the mid-1930s, through the novels of the 1940s, to the major récits from 'L'Arrêt de mort' (1948) to 'L'Instant de ma mort' (1994). Particular attention is paid to Blanchot's deployment of negative affixes and negative modifiers. This stylistic analysis provides the groundwork for my exploration of the 'voidance' of the semantic in Blanchot's fiction, achieved through an epanorthotic retraction of the said that becomes ever more prevalent, reaching its most extreme form in 'L'Attente, l'oubli' (1962). This voidance serves as a form of resistance to semantic hypostatization and reification, but at the risk of an evacuation of sense. Through a charting of these patterns of linguistic negativism, and an appreciation of their function as a form of voidance, it becomes possible to detect a trajectory away from a prose that recalls Mallarmé, through one that recalls Kafka, to one akin to Beckett's. Analysing this trajectory, this article aims to situate Blanchot's writing of the negative within a broader, language-sceptical tradition that achieves its literary flowering in European late modernism.

This essay aims to show that, when composing Endgame in the mid-1950s, Beckett proceeded in a strikingly systematic manner to include the principal traits of the anal-sadistic personality as outlined in Ernest Jones's chapter on "Anal-Erotic Character Traits" in his Papers on Psycho-Analysis (1912), a work read by Beckett in early 1934. Once this intertextual relation is taken into account, not only do many of the details in the play become intelligible, but its very form and rhythm can be seen to be indebted to the Freudian theory of the anal-sadistic phase.

From Adorno to Deleuze and beyond, commentators on Samuel Beckett's oeuvre have repeatedly argued that his works express a "schizophrenic" condition. These commentators rarely operate, however, with a shared conception of the meaning of the terms "schizophrenic" and "schizoid"; and, in some cases, the commentator's conception of schizophrenia is itself derived in no small part from a reading of Beckett without the implications of this hermeneutic circularity being taken into account. In this article, my aim is not to add one more contribution to such an approach but rather, on the basis of both published and archival evidence, to consider the extent to which Beckett may be said deliberately to have set out to produce a language of derangement that he himself understood to be "schizophrenic". In order to achieve this, I seek to take as full an account as possible of his own readings in psychology and psychoanalysis.

Although it plays a decisive role in Maurice Blanchot's theorisation of the literary, the concept of nihilism has received surprisingly little critical attention. In this article, I chart Blanchot's deployment of the term "nihilisme" from the early 1940s to the early 1980s, and aim to show the manner in which nihilism as Blanchot conceives it haunts his work as what Nietzsche, in an 1885-86 notebook, describes as "dieser unheimlichste aller Gaste". At the heart of Blanchot's theorisation of the literary as that which he takes to be the only genuine resistance to nihilism, this uncanniness takes the form of a resistance of nihilism, a phrase in which both the subjective and the objective genitive are operative.

One of the most significant ways in which much late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and philosophy may be distinguished from their predecessors is in their reliance upon the notion of 'inexpressibility' and the limits of the sayable. In this article, I seek not only to chart the history of this tradition, but also to reflect critically upon the use it makes of the concept of 'the nothing'. For all their differences, in both Wittgenstein and Heidegger one encounters deployments of this concept in ways that determine these thinkers' conceptions of language and literature. My aim here is to initiate a new critical reflection upon the fate of the concept of 'the nothing' in modern philosophy and literary theory.

Molloy is Samuel Beckett's most celebrated novel, and his first published work to be written in French, ushering in a period of concentrated creativity in the late 1940s and early 1950s which included the companion novels Malone Dies and The Unnamable. The tale of Molloy, old and ill, remembering and forgetting, scarcely human, begets a double plot involving the spinsterish Moran, a private detective sent to search him out, whose own deterioration during the quest shadows that of the hero. Above all, the eponymous narrator of Molloy calls into being a world and its tribulations at the end of a pencil, with finicking and irresistible certainty, while trading larger uncertainties with the reader.

This essay re-examines Beckett's relation to nihilism in the light of his 1930s reading notes on pre-Socratic philosophy, in particular Democritus, Gorgias and Thrasymachos. Focusing on the distinction between "cosmological nihilism" and "ethical nihilism" in John Burnet's Greek Philosophy, I chart Beckett's abiding concern with the "nothing" conceived both ontologically and ethically, and assess the importance for him of Archibald Alexander's phrasing of the atomist paradox and the cosmological nihilism of Gorgias