Garin Dowd: Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari (2007)

Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari is an innovative approach to the relationship of the work of Samuel Beckett to philosophy. The study seeks to combine intertextual analysis and a ‘schizoanalytic genealogy’ derived from the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari to explore a ‘becoming-philosophy’ of Beckett’s literary writing. The author focuses on zones of encounter and confrontation – spaces and times of ‘becoming’ – between Beckett, selected philosophers and Deleuze and Guattari. In the retrospective glance occasioned by that part of Deleuze and Guattari’s complex legacy which embraces their interest in the author, Beckett’s writing in particular effectuates a threshold hesitation which can be seen directly to impact on their approach to the history of philosophy and on their contribution to its ‘molecularization’ in the name of experimentation. “Abstract Machines,” with its arresting perspectives on a wide range of Beckett’s work, will appeal to academics and postgraduate students interested in the philosophical echoes so evident in his writing. The extent of its recourse to philosophers aside from Deleuze and Guattari, including, notably, Alain Badiou, renders it a timely and provocative intervention in contemporary debates concerning the relationship of literature to philosophy, both within Beckett studies and beyond.

Publisher Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York, 2007
ISBN 904202206X, 9789042022065
319 pages

Keywords and phrases
Leibniz, abstract machine, Worstward Ho, plane of immanence, Samuel Beckett, monad, Mille Plateaux, body without organs, Plotinus, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, deterritorialization, Spinoza, Malone Dies, schizoanalysis, phenomenology, Monadology, negative theology, Mengue, Deleuze and Guattari

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2013-2-7)