Joyce or Beckett?: On Žižek's Choice
Abstract
We are used to hearing Žižek respond to a proposed choice between two options with the replies “yes please!” or “no thanks!” – this answer amounting to a refusal of choice that maintains the productive antagonism between the presented options or a refutation that one offers a better solution than the other (“both are worse!”). However, when it comes to the question “Joyce or Beckett?” Žižek unequivocally responds “Beckett, please!” Through a close reading of Žižek’s scattered references to and reflections on both writers, this paper sets out the theoretical stakes of such a response whilst also addressing other matters such as Žižek’s remarks on the “Joycean” Lacan.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Beckett, S. (1966) Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, London: John Calder.
Beckett, S. (1983) Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, R. Cohn (ed.), London: John Calder.
Beckett, S. (1992) Nohow On, London: John Calder.
Beckett, S. (2003a) Not I in The Complete Dramatic Works London: Faber.
Beckett, S. (2003b) Waiting for Godot in The Complete Dramatic Works London: Faber.
Brivic, S. (2008) Joyce through Lacan and Zizek, New York: Palgrave.
Derrida, J. (1992) “Ulysses Grammophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce” in Acts of Literature, London: Routledge.
Ellman, R. (1982) James Joyce, New York: Oxford University Press.
Felman, S. (2003) Writing and Madness (Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis), Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Gibson, A. (2012) Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Recent French Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hallward, P. (2003) Badiou: A Subject to Truth, London: University of Minnesota Press.
James, H. (2010) The Turn of the Screw. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Joyce, J. (1939) Finnegans Wake, London: Faber.
Lacan, J. (1968-69) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVI: From an other to the Other, 1968-1969, unofficial trans. from unedited manuscripts by C. Gallagher, London: Karnac.
Lacan, J. (1998) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: Encore, 1972-1973, J-A. Miller (ed.), trans. by B. Fink, New York: Norton.
Lacan, J. (2011) Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XIX, …ou pire, 1971-72, J-A. Miller (ed.), Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, J. (2016a) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXIII: The Sinthome, 1975-1976, J-A. Miller (ed.), trans. by A. Price, Cambridge: Polity.
Lacan, J. (2016b) “Joyce the Symptom” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXIII: The Sinthome, 1975-1976, J-A. Miller (ed.), trans. by A. Price, Cambridge: Polity.
Lecercle, J-J. (2010) Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Miller, J-A. (1990) “Microscopia: An Introduction to the Reading of Television” in J. Lacan, Television/ A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, New York: Norton.
Taylor, A director (2005) Žižek!, New York: Zeitgeist Films.
Thurston, L. (2010) “Googling Blazes: Review of Sheldon Brivic, Joyce through Lacan and Žižek” in James Joyce Quarterly vol. 47, no. 2, 305-307.
Žižek, S. (1992) Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, London: MIT Press.
Žižek, S. (1997) “From Joyce-the-Symptom to the Symptom of Power” in J. Ayerza (ed.) Lacanian Ink 11: 13-25.
Žižek, S. (2000) “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please!” in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, London: Verso.
Žižek, S. (2009) First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, London: Verso.
Žižek, S. (2012a) “Cogito in Literature: Descartes with Beckett” in S. Biswas (ed.) The Literary Lacan: From Literature to Lituraterre and Beyond, London: Seagull Books.
Žižek, S. (2012b) Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, London: Verso.
Žižek, S. (2014) “Slavoj Žižek webchat”. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2014/oct/06/slavoj-zizek-webchat-absolute-recoil. Accessed January 20th 2017.
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
Copyright (c) 2017 Will Greenshields
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
IJŽS - 2007 & 2016