Intermittency

Andrew Gibson is Research Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a member of the Conseil scientifique of the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. He is the author of Beckett and Badious: The Pathos of Intermittenccy (Oxford University Press, 2006), James Joyce: A Critical Life (Reaktion, 2006) and Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (EUP, 1996).

• Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Preface, Jean-Jacques Lecercle; Introduction; Kojève's Hegel; An Anti-Schematics of Historical Reason; Sartre: History and Hysteresis; The Example of Orwell; 1. The Logic of Intermittency: Alain Badiou; The Structure of Intermittency; Inexistents; Custos, Quid Noctis?; The Example of Flaubert; 2. Sporadic Modernity: Françoise Proust; The Beginnings of Modernity; Catastrophe in Permanence; Explosions of Justice; The Example of Wordsworth; 3. A Counter-Phenomenology of Spirit: Christian Jambet; The Great Resurrection of Alamut; The Paradoxical One; The Dark Event; The Example of Rimbaud; 4. Alternances Indépassables: Guy Lardreau; The Remains of History; Kanto-Lacanianism; Art and the Moment of Spirit; The Example of Kleist; 5. Intermittency and Melancholy: Jacques Rancière; Egalitarian and Democratic Events; Historical Decompositions; Aesthetics and Partage; The Example of Rossellini; Conclusion: Prolegomena for a Critical Synthesis; Badiou and Speculative Realism; The Question of Rarity; The Unerasable Conviction; The Necessity of Literature; The Example of Sebald; Appendix: Lardreau: Philosophization, Negation and Veracity; Bibliography; Index.

This book is to my knowledge the most subtle and original study of a crucial orientation in French philosophy that took place after the heyday of the best-known great masters, now dead (Althusser, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan etc.), but which refused to ally itself with the nouvelle philosophie (Lévy, Finkielkraut and their followers). Gibson clarifies what the principal representatives of this orientation have in common, what separates them, and why thought must set out from them today, even if it preserves – as Gibson does – a real critical distance from them. The book is without equal or rival anywhere, including France.