Garin Dowd

While positioning and contextualising the short story ‘Green Tea’ by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu in relation to existing Le Fanu scholarship, this article seeks to explore further the textual reflexivity for which it is renowned. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of regimes in the audio and the visual, in particular, through an attention to the interrelationship of the scopic, auditory and textual regimes of ‘Green Tea’, and to the manner in which writing is explicitly figured as both the source of disjunction and the site of interpenetration of the regimes, it is suggested, in conclusion, that a specific understanding of allegory can provide a fresh perspective on ‘Green Tea’ as an archive of the regimes of language and light of its time.

Samuel Beckett’s choice of the title Ohio Impromptu to name the play first performed to an audience of academics and scholars at Columbus Ohio in 1981 is one manifestation of its author’s interest in the question of literary genre; more generally, in Beckett’s dramatic works one encounters a meticulous attention to the activity of categorisation, even if the energy is often directed toward the creation of phantom genres for spectral exemplars. This essay concerns itself with Ohio Impromptu in particular because by means of elements specific to this play (including the context in which it was first performed) it comments upon its own very failure to occupy its designated genre co-ordinates (these include its identity both as a play and as an ‘impromptu’). This play, which is so apt to incorporate other genres, however, is presided over by a stage direction which locates it firmly in the theatrical context. It is in its deliberate failure to attend to this stage direction that the Beckett on Film version of the play goes beyond the mere treacherous fidelity that is inevitably a feature of any adaptation. In arguing this, the essay analyses the foregrounding in the play of questions that can be said to pertain to genre (in several senses). Its more specific intention is to suggest that, via a combination of casting and special effects, the adaptation succeeds not only in cancelling the critical reflection on the ‘genre gesture’ that is lodged in Ohio Impromptu, but also in eradicating the very disjunction between Reader and Listener upon which the play depends.

This is a version of a paper delivered at the Beckett centenary conference held at University College Cork, May 26-27, 2006. It was subsequently published under the title ‘Stellar Separation orMachine? Badiou and Deleuze and Guattari on Beckett’ in Beckett Re-Membered: After the Centenary, edited by James Carney,Mi chael O’Sullivan, Leonard Madden and Karl White, pp. 92-107, ISBN 1443835005. This is a pre-publication version of the paper as it appeared in the latter publication. OPENING PARAGRAPH: In the most important study to date of the respective use of Beckett’s writings in the work of Deleuze and Badiou, Jean-Jacques Lecercle concludes by surmising that “Perhaps the close proximity, in the French edition, of Deleuze’s essay, ‘The Exhausted’, to Beckett’s own text, is indeed more than a fortunate coincidence: perhaps it is a symptom”.1 For, Lecercle, despite his long-term support for Deleuze and indeed despite his misgivings concerning Badiou’s characteristically strong reading of Beckett, decides that there may be, after all, something more compelling in the Badiou than in the less consistent Deleuze. This may also be, he suggests, attributable to Deleuze’s own modernism as a writer, which, though it gives him greater access to, and understanding of, the materiality of Beckett’s writing, also in the final analysis, renders his reading of Beckett somewhat orthodox. By contrast, the defiantly declarative and unhesitatingly dogmatic reading advanced by Badiou, is able to disclose strikingly original insights, not least because of the co-implication and reversibility of the readings of Badiou-Beckett and Beckett-Badiou. This essay seeks to examine the symptomatology of one text in particular as it operates and produces or is indicative of symptoms in the work of Badiou and Deleuze respectively.

This essay examines Gilles Deleuze’s employment of the concept of the ‘pedagogy of the image’ which was first developed by the film critic Serge Daney in two seminal essays in the mid 1970s in Cahiers du cinéma. It will seek to foreground the ‘Daney effect’ (Bellour 2004) in the second half of Cinema 2: The Time-Image where the influence of Daney, along with Bonitzer, Bergala and other film theorists is most pronounced. It will examine the ‘traffic’ of the image and of ideas of the image between Deleuze and Daney as each, in the course of the 1980s, sought to address mutations in the scopic regime. Thus the essay proposes the trope ‘pedagogies of the image between Daney and Deleuze’