Jean-Michel Rabaté’s research while affiliated with University of Pennsylvania and other places

My point of departure is the dissertation Beckett never wrote, the thesis on Unanimism he planned to write before going to Paris in 1928. Beckett was less inspired by Jules Romains’ dogmatic theses than by the work of Pierre-Jean Jouve. This appears clearly when one compares “Assumption” with Jouve’s Paulina 1880. But there is more than a limited stylistic influence. Unanimism believed that individuals cannot be abstracted from the group, and that human energy vibrates more intensely in a crowd. Such a position remained present in Beckett but it was negated or inverted in the name of the individualism exhibited by most of his heroes. It may sound counter-intuitive to claim that Beckett was marked by Unanimisme, a literary movement whose doctrine was that the individual has to dissolve in the crowd, given the numerous instances of quasi-solipsist narrators in his fiction. However, if we consider later works like How It Is, The Lost Ones, or Quad, the principle of multiplicity reappears: the serial mourners moving up and down in the cylinder, the almost infinite numbers of torturers and victims crawling in the mud, the anonymous dancers who avoid a central square, all testify to the resilience of an opposite principle, the insight that life is experienced more fully when stylized as a collective gesture than stemming from individual subjectivity. Unanimist logics of the crowd attack the pre-Copernican anthropocentrism that Beckett always debunked mercilessly. Following a parallel evolution, Jouve refined the rhetoric of Romains’s universalism to respond creatively to the mass slaughter of the trenches of WWI, while Beckett refined a Dantean sadism so as to cope with the scandalous news of the death camps and the moral absurdity of modern wars.

Starting from a recent book on Derrida and psychoanalysis, I return to the controversy between Lacan and Derrida in the 1970s. Its focus was the letter as interpreted by Lacan in a commentary of Poe’s “Purloined Letter”. While agreeing with some of Derrida’s objections, I conclude that Lacan makes stronger points about the destination of the letter. I give my own example, Kafka’s “Letter to the Father” in order to argue that one can state that “a letter always reaches its destination” even if it has not been delivered.

Derrida has asserted that the main problem encountered by psychoanalysis is the existence of cruelty, a question that has never been solved. Touria Mignotte has responded to these criticisms and queries in Cruelty, Sexuality, and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis by deploying a concept of cruelty that is not simply cultural but psychoanalytical. Following Mignotte’s lead, I attempt to situate the investigation at a foundational level that looks at the body. Derrida’s argument about psychoanalysis is compared with Deleuze’s essay on sadism and masochism, after which I outline points of convergence in their approaches, which leads to discussions of texts by Freud, Nietzsche and Hegel. I conclude by tackling Kafka’s rethinking of cruelty via a short text on Prometheus.

Paradoxically, Lacan’s “return to Freud” led to important revisions of the main tenets of psychoanalysis. Looking at their parallel readings of Hamlet and their divergent interpretations of the Schreber case, one grasps how Lacan rethought the Freudian myth of the Father, either by positioning of the desire of the Mother as a key to an understanding of the subject’s desire or by insisting on the Father’s role as a purely symbolic function.

The meaning of decadence varies with context, depending on what (or who) is understood to have declined, decayed, or degenerated. These negative meanings are familiar from history (the decline and fall of Rome), sociology (the decay of communities), morality (the degeneration of values), and more, including such popular conceptions of decadence as excess and corruption. At the same time, all of this negative decadence has found positive cultural expression, principally in literature, through the work of such celebrated nineteenth-century decadents as Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and many others. This volume explores the kind of literary expression Baudelaire gave to decadence in the mid-nineteenth century and Wilde at the fin de siècle by focusing on additional critical periods, such as classical antiquity, various ages of empire, the interwar era in the twentieth century, and contemporary times, as well as by examining key places—France, Belgium, Britain, Italy, Germany, the Nordic nations, Russia and Ukraine, the Ottoman Empire, and Japan—and such genres as the novel, the short story, drama, the essay, prose poetry, and film. The volume also considers decadence more broadly as a culture not limited to literature by considering its manifestations in such material forms as book design, fashion, interior decoration, and architecture, as well as through the experiential register of the senses: decadent vision, sound, smell, taste, and touch are all reflected, respectively, in painting, music, perfume, cuisine, and feeling. Finally, the volume explores the theoretical resonance of decadence in such fields as theology, science, ecology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and politics.

Much has been written on Beckett and Sade, yet nothing systematic has been produced. This Element is systematic by adopting a chronological order, which is necessary given the complexity of Beckett's varying assessments of Sade. Beckett mentioned Sade early in his career, with Proust as a first guide. His other sources were Guillaume Apollinaire and Mario Praz's book, La Carne, La morte e il Diavolo Nella Letteratura Romantica (1930), from which he took notes about sadism for his Dream Notebook. Dante's meditation on the absurdity of justice provides closure facing Beckett's wonder at the pervasive presence of sadism in humans.

The meaning of decadence varies depending on what or who is understood to have declined, decayed, or degenerated. These negative meanings are familiar from history (the fall of Rome), sociology (the decay of communities), morality (the degeneration of values), and more, including popular conceptions of decadence as excess and corruption. At the same time, negative decadence has found positive cultural expression, principally in literature, through the work of such celebrated nineteenth-century decadents as Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and others. This volume takes the study of decadence beyond the literary canon to explore the phenomenon in broader historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. In thirty-five interdisciplinary chapters, The Oxford Handbook of Decadence addresses different periods, such as classical antiquity, various ages of empire, the interwar era in the twentieth century, and contemporary times, as well as key places—France, Belgium, Britain, Italy, Germany, the Nordic nations, Russia and Ukraine, the Ottoman Empire, and Japan—and such genres as the novel, the short story, drama, the essay, prose poetry, and film. The volume traces decadence’s manifestations in such material forms as book design, fashion, interior decoration, and architecture, as well as through the senses: vision, sound, smell, taste, and touch are reflected, respectively, in painting, music, perfume, cuisine, and feeling. Finally, the chapters explore the theoretical resonance of decadence in theology, science, ecology, politics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. By illuminating the various ways decadence can be construed, the Handbook offers an in-depth, original exploration into the paradox of decadence: a culture that draws creative energy from the idea of decline.

Eight thematic clusters are used to draw parallels between texts by Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes that focus on Marquis de Sade and sadism. By examining places like Roussillon and La Coste and themes like Machines, Screams, Order and Reason, the Family, the Law, Class and Lit bodies, one can see better how both writers have worked with Sade’s images and concepts. If Barthes’s theses throw new light on Beckett’s texts like Watt, How It Is and Catastrophe , conversely Beckett’s skepticism facing Reason and narrative forms highlights Barthes’s main writerly strategies.