For a long time, analysis of the work of Samuel Beckett has been dominated by existentialist and post-structuralist interpretations. This new volume instead raises the question of how to understand Beckett via the dialectics underpinning his work. The different chapters explore how Beckett exposes and challenges essential dialectical concepts such as objectivity, subjectivity, exteriority, interiority, immanence, transcendence, and most crucially: negativity. With contributions from prominent scholars such as Alain Badiou, Mladen Dolar, and Rebecca Comay, Beckett and Dialectics not only sheds new light on how Beckett investigates the shapes, types, and forms of negation – as in the all-pervasive figures of 'nothing', 'no', 'null', and 'not' – but also examines how several phenomena that occur throughout Beckett's work are structured in their use of negativity. These include the relationships between voice and silence, space and void, movement and stasis, the finite and the infinite and repetition and transformation. This original analysis lends an important new perspective to Beckett studies, and even more fundamentally, to dialectics itself.

Samuel Beckett's works have spawned a great variety of critical - sometimes contradictory - interpretations, most recently ones stemming from postmodern theories of literature. In keeping with this trend, this book probes the relationship between Beckett's fiction and the work of a number of contemporary French thinkers, such as Maurice Blanchot and Gilles Deleuze, which demonstrates how concepts such as «the thought of the outside» and «the simulacrum» also generate Beckett's transgressive narrative. Beckett and French Theory provides valuable new knowledge and understanding to teachers and students of both Beckett's fiction and recent French critical theory.

Extends critical discussion of Adorno to works by Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, and Amiri Baraka, arguing that Adorno's work can best be assessed in terms of its relevance in specific localized contexts.

This book offers a radical reappraisal of the intellectual affinities between Theodor W. Adorno and Samuel Beckett, in particular with regard to freedom and its reconceptualization by Adorno.