Reinterpreting Badiou’s philosophy in light of his persistent, reverent invocations of the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan and his long-term engagement with Samuel Beckett, this book offers analyses of Badiou’s radical departure from the legacy of Martin Heidegger.
For Badiou, both Beckett and Celan affirm novel conceptions of subjectivity capable of transcending the historical conditions of literary modernism; in particular Celan’s collective and ephemeral subject of anabasis, and Beckett’s disjunctive ‘Two’ of love. The poem is of fundamental importance to Badiou and his continuing influence in debates concerning the relationship between philosophy and politics.
In contrast to enquiries into Badiou’s thought that emphasize his relationship to politics, Tom Betteridge argues that Badiou’s innovative readings of Celan’s poetry and the ‘latent poem’ in Beckett’s late prose are crucial to understanding his significance in the history of 20th-century French philosophy, and its German heritage. Blending close textual analysis with critical, theoretical reflections on Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe and Adorno, among others, this is the first book to present interdisciplinary reflections on Badiou’s engagement with Celan and Beckett, offering a significant contribution to the growing field of interest in Badiou’s relationship to literature and the tradition of philosophical aesthetics.