Beckett Deleuze And Performance

This book draws on the theatrical thinking of Samuel Beckett and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to propose a method for research undertaken at the borders of performance and philosophy. Exploring how Beckett fabricates encounters with the impossible and the unthinkable in performance, it asks how philosophy can approach what cannot be thought while honouring and preserving its alterity. Employing its method, it creates a series of encounters between aspects of Beckett’s theatrical practice and a range of concepts drawn from Deleuze’s philosophy. Through the force of these encounters, a new range of concepts is invented. These provide novel ways of thinking affect and the body in performance; the possibility of theatrical automation; and the importance of failure and invention in our attempts to respond to performance encounters. Further, this book includes new approaches to Beckett’s later theatrical work and provides an overview of Deleuze’s conception of philosophical practice as an ongoing struggle to think with immanence.

Was performance important to Deleuze? Is Deleuze important to performance; to its practical, as well as theoretical, research? What are the implications of Deleuze's philosophy of difference, process and becoming, for Performance Studies, a field in which many continue to privilege the notion of performance as representation, as anchored by its imitation of an identity: 'the world', 'the play', 'the self'?Deleuze and Performance is a collection of new essays dedicated to Deleuze's writing on theatre and to the productivity of his philosophy for (re)thinking performance. This book provides rigorous analyses of Deleuze's writings on theatre practitioners such as Artaud, Beckett and Carmelo Bene, as well as offering innovative readings of historical and contemporary performance including performance art, dance, new media performance, theatre and opera, which use Deleuze's concepts in exciting new ways. Can philosophy follow Deleuze in overcoming the antitheatrical tradition embedded in its history, perhaps even reconsidering what it means to think in the light of the embodied insights of performance's practitioners? Experts from the fields of Performance Studies and Deleuze Studies come together in this volume and strive to examine these and other issues in a manner that will be challenging, yet accessible to students and established scholars alike.

Deleuze and Beckett is a collection of essays on specific aspects of the Deleuze and Beckett interface. Some of the world's leading Beckett and Deleuze specialists apply different concepts of Deleuzian philosophy to a wide range of Beckett's oeuvre, including his novels, short stories, and stage, film and television work.

Representing a profound engagement with the work of Samuel Beckett, this volume gathers the very best of Stan Gontarski's Beckett criticism on practical, theoretical and critical levels. Such a range suggests a multiplicity of approaches to a body of work itself multiple, produced by an artist who underwent any number of transformations and reinventions over his long writing career.a Many of the essays collected here explore Beckett's debt to his age, Beckett very much a product of a culture in transition, which change he would help foster. But much of Beckett's creative struggle was to find a new way, his own way.a Most of the essays that comprise this volume detail that struggle, toward a way we now call Beckettian.

Creative Involution: Bergson, Beckett Deleuze focuses on a philosophical trajectory that not only had a profound impact on critical thought of the 20th and now 21st centuries, but on cosmopolitan, contemporary culture more broadly and on artistic experiment and expression in particular.

An expressive dialogue between Deleuze's philosophical writings on cinema and Beckett's innovative film and television work, the book explores the relationship between the birth of the event – itself a simultaneous invention and erasure - and Beckett's attempts to create an incommensurable space within the interstices of language as a (W)hole.

Explores the relationship between Beckett and post-war French philosophy.

Beckett’s Intuitive Spectator: Me to Play investigates how audience discomfort, instead of a side effect of a Beckett pedagogy, is a key spectatorial experience which arises from an everyman intuition of loss. With reference to selected works by Henri Bergson, Immanuel Kant and Gilles Deleuze, this book charts the processes of how an audience member’s habitual way of understanding could be frustrated by Beckett’s film, radio, stage and television plays. Michelle Chiang explores the ways in which Beckett exploited these mediums to reconstitute an audience response derived from intuition.