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Think, Pig!: Beckett at the Limit of the Human
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.
Rabaté, 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, Rabaté 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.
Rabaté, 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, Rabaté 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.
248 pages, Hardcover
Published July 1, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 24, 2022
Really, I think this is the best book on Beckett available. The emphasis on Kant, made explicit in the aesthetics, taken through Watt, and to the rest of the oeuvre is most illuminating. Written in 2016 and yet with an almost incomparable command of the archive.
August 23, 2017
Great cover, and I do have a soft spot for pigs, but I think I reached the limit of being human on page 40 by which point Rabate have managed to commit every sin lampooned by David Stove in “What is wrong with our thoughts”. I tried picking the book up again a couple of times, but the following alternate ending to Beckett’s masterpiece kept playing in my head: Vladimir and Estragon in a barren room, in front of a bookcase, holding “Think Pig” opened a few pages in…
Vladimir: Well? Shall we continue?
Estragon: Don’t be ridiculous.
They do not move.
Vladimir: Well? Shall we continue?
Estragon: Don’t be ridiculous.
They do not move.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews