French Literature Reviews - 2026

A. Gibson, Beckett and Badiou. The Pathos of Intermittency
Literary Theory, Linguistics and Stylistics

GIBSON, Andrew, Beckett and Badiou. The Pathos of Intermittency, Oxford University Press, 2007, 336 pp.

ISBN-10: 0-19-920775-5

Beckett and Badiou offers a provocative new reading of Samuel Beckett's work on the basis of a full, critical account of the thought of Alain Badiou. Badiou is the most eminent of contemporary French philosophers. His devotion to Beckett's work has been lifelong. Yet for Badiou philosophy must be integrally affirmative, whilst Beckett apparently commits his art to a work of negation. Beckett and Badiou explores the coherences, contradictions, and extreme complexities of the intellectual relationship between the two oeuvres . It examines Badiou's philosophy of being, the event, truth, and the subject and the importance of mathematics within his system. It considers the major features of his politics, ethics, and aesthetics and provides an explanation, interpretation, critique, and radical revision of his work on Beckett. It argues that, once revised, Badiou's version of Beckett offers an extraordinarily powerful tool for understanding his work.

Badiou and Beckett are instances of a vestigial or melancholic modernism; that is, in the teeth of a contemporary culture that dreams ever more ambitiously of plenitude, they commit themselves to a rigorous concept of limit and intermittency. Truth and value are occasional and rare. It is seldom that the chance event arrives to disturb the inertia of the world. For Badiou, however, it is the event and its consequences alone that matter. Beckett rather insists on the common experience of intermittency as destitution. His art is a series of limit-figures, exquisitely subtle and nuanced forms for a world whose state of seemingly rigid paralysis is also always volatile, delicately balanced.

Andrew Gibson, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory, Royal Holloway, University of London

CONTENTS:

Introduction

1. Badiou (i): Being, Event, Subject, Truth

2. Badiou (ii): Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics

3. Badiou, Beckett, and Contemporary Criticism

4. The Break with Doxa: Murphy, Watt

5. The Event of the Event: The Unnamable

6. The Thought of the Good: Enough, The Lost Ones, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho

7. The Sparkle Hid in Ashes: Beckett's Plays

Conclusion: The Pathos of Intermittency

This study belongs to the fields of modern literary theory and contemporary philosophy, bridging the gap between literary criticism and continental thought. Andrew Gibson examines how Alain Badiou, a prominent contemporary French philosopher, engages with the notoriously negative and minimalist art of Samuel Beckett. The book places both figures within the tradition of a vestigial or melancholic modernism, confronting an era obsessed with plenitude by championing a rigorous focus on limits, rarity, and the intermittent nature of truth and value.

Readers interested in twentieth-century avant-garde literature, modernism, and the intersection of philosophy and aesthetics will find this volume particularly useful. It offers valuable tools for scholars navigating complex theoretical concepts such as being, the event, and the subject. By revising Badiou's framework, Gibson provides a rigorous methodology for interpreting major texts including Murphy, Watt, and The Unnamable, making it an essential resource for advanced students of modern literature and theory.