Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has written or edited more than thirty-five books on modernism, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.

• Introduction 1. How to Think Like a Pig 2. The Worth and Girth of an Italian Hoagie 3. The Posthuman, or the Humility of the Earth 4. Burned Toasts and Boiled Lobsters 5. "Porca Madonna!": Moving Descartes toward Geulincx and Proust 6. From an Aesthetics of Nonrelation to an Ethics of Negation 7. Beckett's Kantian Critiques 8. Dialectics of Enlittlement 9. Bathetic Jokes, Animal Slapstick, and Ethical Laughter 10. Strength to Deny: Beckett between Adorno and Badiou 11. Lessons in Pigsty Latin: The Duty to Speak 12. An Irish Paris Peasant 13. The Morality of Form-A French Story Coda: Minima Beckettiana Acknowledgments Notes Index

"Very few critics have all the qualities and competencies required to engage fully with the entirety Beckett's work in all genres: a detailed familiarity with Beckett's texts in both English and French; a sensitivity to his linguistic, stylistic and thematic manoeuvres; an encyclopaedic knowledge of his intellectual context; an awareness of the range and detail of Beckett studies; and an ability to write with refinement and wit. It is clear from this remarkable book that Jean-Michel Rabate is one of those few."--Derek Attridge, University of York

Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has written or edited more than thirty-five books on modernism, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.

• Introduction 1. How to Think Like a Pig 2. The Worth and Girth of an Italian Hoagie 3. The Posthuman, or the Humility of the Earth 4. Burned Toasts and Boiled Lobsters 5. "Porca Madonna!": Moving Descartes toward Geulincx and Proust 6. From an Aesthetics of Nonrelation to an Ethics of Negation 7. Beckett's Kantian Critiques 8. Dialectics of Enlittlement 9. Bathetic Jokes, Animal Slapstick, and Ethical Laughter 10. Strength to Deny: Beckett between Adorno and Badiou 11. Lessons in Pigsty Latin: The Duty to Speak 12. An Irish Paris Peasant 13. The Morality of Form-A French Story Coda: Minima Beckettiana Acknowledgments Notes Index

"Very few critics have all the qualities and competencies required to engage fully with the entirety Beckett's work in all genres: a detailed familiarity with Beckett's texts in both English and French; a sensitivity to his linguistic, stylistic and thematic manoeuvres; an encyclopaedic knowledge of his intellectual context; an awareness of the range and detail of Beckett studies; and an ability to write with refinement and wit. It is clear from this remarkable book that Jean-Michel Rabate is one of those few."--Derek Attridge, University of York

Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has written or edited more than thirty-five books on modernism, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.

• Introduction 1. How to Think Like a Pig 2. The Worth and Girth of an Italian Hoagie 3. The Posthuman, or the Humility of the Earth 4. Burned Toasts and Boiled Lobsters 5. "Porca Madonna!": Moving Descartes toward Geulincx and Proust 6. From an Aesthetics of Nonrelation to an Ethics of Negation 7. Beckett's Kantian Critiques 8. Dialectics of Enlittlement 9. Bathetic Jokes, Animal Slapstick, and Ethical Laughter 10. Strength to Deny: Beckett between Adorno and Badiou 11. Lessons in Pigsty Latin: The Duty to Speak 12. An Irish Paris Peasant 13. The Morality of Form-A French Story Coda: Minima Beckettiana Acknowledgments Notes Index

"Very few critics have all the qualities and competencies required to engage fully with the entirety Beckett's work in all genres: a detailed familiarity with Beckett's texts in both English and French; a sensitivity to his linguistic, stylistic and thematic manoeuvres; an encyclopaedic knowledge of his intellectual context; an awareness of the range and detail of Beckett studies; and an ability to write with refinement and wit. It is clear from this remarkable book that Jean-Michel Rabate is one of those few."--Derek Attridge, University of York