Garin Dowd

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’

What can philosophy bring to the reading of Beckett? Combining intertextual analysis with a ‘schizoanalytic genealogy’ derived from the authors of L’Anti-Œdipe, Garin Dowd’s Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari offers an innovative response to this much debated question. The author focuses on zones of encounter and thresholds of engagement between Beckett’s writing and a range of philosophers (among them Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant) and philosophical concepts. Beckett’s writing impacts in a variety of ways on Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, and, in particular, resonates with Deleuze’s contributions to the history of philosophy (in books such as Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque), and his ‘critical and clinical’ approach to literature. Furthermore, the books co-written with Guattari, concerned as they are with the ‘molecularization’ of the discipline of philosophy in the name of ‘thinking otherwise’, reveal themselves in a new light when explored in conjunction with Beckett’s œuvre. With its arresting perspectives on a wide range of Beckett’s works, Abstract Machines will appeal to academics and postgraduate students interested in the philosophical aspects of his writing. Its engagement with alternative contributions to the question of Beckett and philosophy, including that of Alain Badiou, renders it a timely and provocative intervention in contemporary debates on the relationship between literature and philosophy, both within the field of Beckett studies and beyond.

There are many points of contact between Deleuze’s spatial concepts, in their variegated forms, and the prose work of Samuel Beckett. With particular emphasis on the concept of any-space-whatever, it is shown that Beckett’s interrogation of spatiality in the work immediately following the Second World War can be seen to anticipate the very qualities of his late work which would lead Deleuze to make such extensive use of the concept in ‘The Exhausted’. For the purposes of this chapter Beckett’s novella ‘The Expelled’ is explored. In addition to the direct links between the any-space-whatever and Beckett in ‘The Exhausted’, reference is made to the two distinct but related formulations of the concept in the Cinema books.

Serge Daney is widely recognised in his homeland as the most important French film critic after André Bazin. In a career devoted to criticism for Cahiers du cinéma and later Libération, including a key period as editor during the transition from the journal’s PCF and then Maoist phase beginning in 1973, Daney also held a lecturing position for a spell at the University of Paris, Paris III, La Censure. He was a significant public intellectual and featured in several documentaries, including Claire Denis’ film Jacques Rivette – Le veilleur. From 1985 to 1990 Daney presented a programme on cinema on the radio station France Culture. Following the publication of a book on Haitian politics in 1973 under the assumed name Raymond Sapène, Daney’s journalism was collected in several volumes. He left Libération in 1981 to establish Trafic, a journal which, since his death from Aids in 1992, has continued his legacy. The only book-length English translation of Daney’s writings to date – Postcards from the Cinema – is of the posthumously published Persévérances.

This essay sets out from the premise that the films of Jacques Rivette merit sustained reconsideration in the framework provided by Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time-Image. In particular it explores the concepts of ‘the powers of the false’ and ‘fabulation’ as ways of engaging with Rivette's cinematic oeuvre, with a particular focus on his Paris-set films. On this basis the article seeks to add to the readings undertaken by Deleuze himself and, in the light of Rivette's cine-thinking, to examine in tandem both films to which Deleuze directly responded, such as Le Pont du nord, and later post-Deleuze renegotiations of the city such as Secret défense.