Active Philology: Barthes and Nietzsche

While the importance of Nietzsche to Barthes has long been recognized, with Barthes himself being the first to acknowledge it, this essay argues that Nietzsche’s influence lies behind almost all of the major aspects of Barthes’s mode of reading and writing in the 1970s, a mode that Barthes describes as ‘active philology’. At the heart of this active philology is a cancellation of meaning that makes of Barthes’s later critical practice a form of active nihilism in the Nietzschean sense. Exploring the various facets of this active philology in order to highlight the ways in which Barthes both follows and deviates from Nietzsche, this essay proposes an understanding of Barthes the active philologist as the incarnation of what Nietzsche terms the ‘last nihilist’ — and, crucially, one for whom any kind of Nietzschean overcoming of nihilism is anathema

Negative Anthropology: Beckett and Humanism

This essay charts Beckett’s engagement with the concept of the human from the 1930s to the 1980s. Considering in particular his rethinking of what he terms “true humanity” (vraie humanité) in his 1945 essay on the work of the Van Velde brothers, his remarks on “humanity in ruins” in “The Capital of the Ruins” (1946), and his response in early 1949 to Francis Ponge’s claims regarding a humanity to come in an essay on the painter Georges Braque, the essay argues that Beckett not only challenges various forms of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, but undertakes a ‘negative anthropology’ that weakens the distinctions between the human and other animate and inanimate forms of being

For a Migrant Art: Samuel Beckett and Cultural Nationalism

This essay charts Samuel Beckett’s linguistic migration from English to French at the end of the Second World War, locating this within the context of other twentieth-century literary migrations. It then proceeds to identify some of the principal ways in which Beckett seeks to resist forms of cultural nationalism (Irish, French and German). The distance that Beckett takes from these European forms of cultural nationalism is reflected not only in the migrant status of his characters, but also in the way in which he deploys national-cultural references. The essay argues that Beckett’s aim in this respect bears comparison with that of the ‘good European’ as defined by Nietzsche. An important difference, however, is that in Beckett’s case the emphasis falls not upon cosmopolitanism but rather upon a perpetual migrancy that is captured above all in his movement between languages