Abstract:In this essay, I situate Beckett’s effort to translate numerous documents of and around the Marquis de Sade for the seventh volume of Transition in the context of his contemporary experiments with an aesthetics of failure. What catches his attention concerning the renewal of Sade in France after the Second World War, I argue, is a form of literature animated by the impossible – that is, weakness, dispossession, and inoperativity –, which undermines the logic of representation at the basis of anthropocentric an… Show more
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