Repetition, Difference, and Knowledge dialogues with novels, theatre, philosophy, and literary theory in order to explore how three thinkers - Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze - employ repetition as a means with which to radically unsettle some of the most fundamental notions of the human experience (among them, time, presence, originality, and being). Due to its interdisciplinary scope and its focus on repetition as an epistemological concept, this book will attract a broad audience of academic specialists across the humanities from the fields of literary criticism, philosophy, French studies, and poststructural studies. Its simplicity of style, deliberate avoidance of complex jargon, and clarity of argument - particularly when dealing with complicated theoretical ideas and texts - also makes it an invaluable tool for use in both graduate- and undergraduate-level literature and philosophy courses. Repetition, Difference, and Knowledge provides experienced and beginning scholars alike with greater insight into the works of Beckett, Derrida, and Deleuze and into the role that repetition has played and continues to play in determining how we read our world and come to meaning.

This book explores repetition in contemporary performance and spectatorship. It offers an impassioned account of the ways in which speech, movement and structures repeat in performances by Pina Bausch, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Lone Twin Theatre, Haranczak/Navarre and Marco Berrettini. It addresses repetition in relation to processes of desire and draws attention to the forces that repetition captures and makes visible. What is it in performances of repetition that persuades us to return to them again and again? How might we unpack their complexities and come to terms with their demands upon us? While considering repetition in relation to the difficult pleasures we derive from the theatre, this book explores ways of accounting for such experiences of theatre in memory and writing.

Acts of repetition abound in international law. Security Council Resolutions typically start by recalling, recollecting, recognising or reaffirming previous resolutions. Expert committees present restatements of international law. Students and staff extensively rehearse fictitious cases in presentations for moot court competitions. Customary law exists by virtue of repeated behaviour and restatements about the existence of rules. When sources of international law are deployed, historically contingent events are turned into manifestations of pre-given and repeatable categories. This book studies the workings of repetition across six discourses and practices in international law. It links acts of repetition to similar practices in religion, theatre, film and commerce. Building on the dialectics of repetition as set out by Søren Kierkegaard, it examines how repetition in international law is used to connect concrete practices to something that is bound to remain absent, unspeakable or unimaginable.

Samuel Beckett’s work is littered with ironic self-reflexive comments on presumed audience expectations that it should ultimately make explicable sense. An ample store of letters and anecdotes suggests Beckett’s own preoccupation with and resistance to similar interpretive mindsets. Yet until now such concerns have remained the stuff of scholarly footnotes and asides. Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism addresses these issues head-on and investigates how Beckett’s ideas about who he writes for affect what he writes. What it finds speaks to current understandings not only of Beckett’s techniques and ambitions, but also of modernism’s experiments as fundamentally compromised challenges to enshrined ways of understanding and organizing the social world. Beckett’s uniquely anxious audience-targeting brings out similarly self-doubting strategies in the work of other experimental twentieth-century writers and artists in whom he is interested: his corpus proves emblematic of a modernism that understands its inability to achieve transformative social effects all at once, but that nevertheless judiciously complicates too-neat distinctions drawn within ongoing culture wars. For its re-evaluations of four key points of orientation for understanding Beckett’s artistic ambitions—his arch critical pronouncements, his postwar conflations of value and valuelessness, his often-ambiguous self-commentary, and his sardonic metatheatrical play—as well as for its running dialogue with wider debates around modernism as a social phenomenon, this book is of interest to students and researchers interested in Beckett, modernism, and the relations between modern and contemporary artistic and social developments.