Oeil Fauve

Au cours des sept années d'existence de notre revue, nous avons pu être témoins d'un bon nombre de controverses concernant l'oeuvre de Beckett, que ce soit au sujet des publications posthumes ou bien par rapport aux représentations de ses pièces. Plus généralement, il existe aussi quantité de controverses portant sur la genèse et la transmission de ses textes, ses propres traductions inclus. Enfin, dans la recherche beckettienne récente, on peut repérer diverses controverses sur les rapports qu'entretient cette oeuvre avec les perspectives et les stratégies postmodernes entre autres. Nous publions dans notre 'numéro sept' 31 approches fort variées de cette problématique par autant de beckettiens chevronnés.

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.

Architectural discourse and practice are dominated by a false dichotomy between design and chance, and governed by the belief that the architect’s role is to defend against the indeterminate. In Architectures of Chance Yeoryia Manolopoulou challenges this position, arguing for the need to develop a more creative understanding of chance as aesthetic experience and critical method, and as a design practice in its own right. Examining the role of experimental chance across film, psychoanalysis, philosophy, fine art and performance, this is the first book to comprehensively discuss the idea of chance in architecture and bring a rich array of innovative practices of chance to the attention of architects. Wide-ranging and through a symbiotic interplay of drawing and text, Architectures of Chance makes illuminating reading for those interested in the process and experience of design, and the poetics and ethics of chance and space in the overlapping fields of architecture and the aleatoric arts.

A collection of original essays by a team of leading Beckett scholars and two of his biographers, Companion to Samuel Beckett provides a comprehensive critical reappraisal of the literary works of Samuel Beckett. Builds on the resurgence of international Beckett scholarship since the centenary of his birth, and reflects the wealth of newly released archival sources Informed by the latest in scholarly, critical, and theoretical debates A valuable addition to contemporary Beckett scholarship, and testament to the enduring influence of Beckett’s work and his position as one of the most important literary figures of our time

This major new study of Baudelaire is a journey into the secret language of Les Fleurs du Mal: the expressive pliabilities of its verse-forms and syntax, the fluctuations of its rhythms, its significant sonorities, its metaphorical figures and dynamic image-patterns, its network of nerves and trigger-points, its shifting underground of parallels and contrasts, analogies and antitheses. Through a strategic selection of poems constituting a 'constellation', a formal pattern of mutually illuminating parts, the analysis aims to show that form and theme are indissoluble: that each movement in the texture of the verse, each pulse, each rise and fall, each intensification or release, not only aids and abets the thrust of the poet's inspiration but is moulding and, in the end, creating the subtleties of sense, which cannot exist but in the weft and web of the breathing, evolving text. It is a study which prioritizes the individual poem, then the poem within an expanding formation of poems, then Baudelaire within and beyond that formation: an infini dans le fini. It is also an enquiry into what makes poetry, as well as a provocative contribution to the ongoing debate on the nature of criticism.

Forming a pair with the voice, the gaze is a central structuring element of Samuel Beckett’s creation. And yet it takes the form of a strangely impersonal visual dimension testifying to the absence of an original exchange of gazes capable of founding personal identity and opening up the world to desire. The collapse of conventional reality and the highlighting of seeing devices—eyes, mirrors, windows—point to the absence of a unified representation. While masks and closed spaces show the visible to be opaque and devoid of any beyond, light and darkness, spectres—manifestations without origin—reveal a realm beyond the confines of identity, where nothing provides a mediation with the seen, or sets it within perspective. Finally, Beckett’s use of the audio-visual media deepens his exploration of the irreducibly real part of existence that escapes seeing. This study systematically examines these essential aspects of the visual in Beckett’s creation. The theoretical elaborations of Jacques Lacan—in relation with corresponding developments in the history and philosophy of the visual arts—offer an indispensible framework to understand the imaginary not as representation, but as rooted in the fundamental opacity of existence.