Reviews for Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature

The average rating for Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-04-14 00:00:00 Dave Legend the author never really expands on any ideas, never gets in to the depth of Beckett. very soul-less reading of Beckett. Loads of academic jargon that doesn't really lead anywhere. Also, loads of sentences in brackets, shortcuts, never really explained properly. It's like the author wanted to explore all of those linguistic relations between Derrida, Beckett, Heidegger, Hegel, Deleuze (among MANY others) but never really did, since it was just too much one one plate. Wouldn't it be better to focus on one notion and really develop it? For example, the most important notion in Beckett's writing is, in my opinion, the notion of subjectivity, which was more or less ignored and not given enough attention, rather than, "the use of ordinary language", or the constant masturbation over singularity vs universality in Derrida and Beckett. It's a pretty good source of many interesting references, that's for sure.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-02-04 00:00:00 James Van horne The Publishers' Weekly described it as an 'impenetrable rhapsody to the apotheosis of French intellectualism... overflowing with fawning endearments.' Well I couldnt get through it in the month Wellington public library let me keep it and I had to wait two more months to get it out again to finish it, so readers in Wellington at least evidently want a book about Sartre that isnt more interested in Simone de Beauvoir. "The Beaver" is in fact a rare visitor to these pages, perhaps because Levy's book wants to locate Sartre in the sequence of thinkers whose investigations, it is contended, he brought to a satisfactory conclusion before heading off into the political error -Stalinism- that destroyed his credibility. An error, we understand, which brought such disgrace on the enterprise of asking the really big questions that philosophy since S has cautiously reduced itself to a sort of cultural achaeology. These days we get technicians, not these reckless exponents of philosophy as the urge to write. This might explain why the best thing about Levy's book, his own extravagant language, has been the thing its critics have most resented. OK, we have to tread carefully now that linguistics is the new intellectual black. We know that thought is only as accurate as the words available to the thinker, and words are slippery beasts. But I for one welcome any efforts to rescue 'existentialism' from journalists who use it in such constructions as 'Israel is an existential threat to Palestine.' Philosophy as the urge to write. Plato, Descartes, Berkley, Sartre, Camus. All wrong, probably, but what good reads they gave us. Add Levy to the list.