Garin Dowd

Extract: [...] Badiou himself seems however, by turns, relatively modest and occasionally self-congratulatory as regards any claim to make a major intervention in the field. His entertaining and informative account of his largely solitary cinéphilia of the 1950s and 1960s, as a ‘young provincial’ frequenting the Cinémathèque (a few doors away at that time from the École Normale Supérieure on the rue d’Ulm), through to his work as a ‘heathen’ iniltrating the Catholic journal Vin nouveau, and on to his engagement with cinema through politics, contains both moments of self-regarding comedy as well as statements which identify several of the key tropes that will recur throughout the volume [...]

This chapter takes as its point of departure the frequent injunction in Beckett’s late prose works to build or construct an environment for a character to inhabit. It is proposed that this instruction is central to the textual operations of the late prose. Making use of the work of Philippe Hamon on text and architecture, and through a close reading of Beckett’s short prose piece (originally written as a libretto for Morton Feldman), it is argued that, despite its sparse nature, ‘Neither’ can, in large part, still be read as exemplifying Hamon’s insights into the operations of the textual and the architectural as these were manifest in the classic realist novel. The specific challenges which Beckett’s late prose present, however, require a supplementary critical vocabulary in order to account for the manner in which the textual and the architectural interpenetrate and expose each other in the twentieth century.

This chapter explores the rather striking manner in which at key moments in the history of philosophy, in the discipline’s attempts at self-definition, the genre or literary form of poetry plays a key role. Philosophy, at these moments, has been defined, inter alia, as the enemy of poetry, the guiding light for the philosopher who can only try and inevitably fail to emulate its brilliance, or as the anomalous guest at the philosophical table with whom the host discipline has relations which result in either generative or degenerative effects. Insofar as it lays claim to or liaises with philosophy – as we have come to know it today – poetry has thus played a part in the self-definition of genre theory. The aim of this chapter is to capture a very specific set of transfers, transpositions, metonymies and other modes of reversible relations of substitution and surrogacy between philosophy and poetry, and along the way between genre-theory-as-philosophy and poetry.