Overview

Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real proposes writing as a mathematical and logical operation to build a bridge between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Samuel Beckett’s prose works. Arka Chattopadhyay studies aspects such as the fundamental operational logic of a text, use of mathematical forms like geometry and arithmetic, the human obsession with counting, the moving body as an act of writing and love, and sexuality as a challenge to the limits of what can be written through logic and mathematics. Chattopadhyay reads Beckett’s prose works, including How It Is, Company, Worstward Ho, Malone Dies and Enough to highlight this terminal writing, which halts endless meanings with the material body of the word and gives Beckett a medium to inscribe what cannot be written otherwise.

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9781501341168

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An ambitious, distinctive, and rich study. * The Review of English Studies * Arka Chattopadhyay's superb Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real zooms in on the deep complicity between the later Beckett and the later Lacan. Offering cogent close-readings and displaying an impressive theoretical culture, Chattopadhyay formalizes the paradoxes inherent in the Real in both corpuses. In this radically new approach to literature, Lacanian psychoanalysis demonstrates its agency not only as an interpretive technique but also as a practice of writing. * Jean-Michel Rabate, Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences * Samuel Beckett and Jacques Lacan are two great European writer-thinkers of the twentieth century who really should have crossed paths: stylistically radical, scripturally innovative, and conceptually decisive, they shared friends, interests, and themes. Yet their work, and the studies of their work, have to date been marked by a peculiar non-relation. Arka Chattopadhyay's remarkable book sets out to re-examine this odd state of affairs, with intelligence, erudition, and brio. Along the way, Chattopadhyay not only manages to give strong new interpretations of the sense and import of Beckett and Lacan's writings, but resituates their work along new lines, most notably according to a problematic of mathematical formalisation in the Real. Anybody interested in modernist literature and psychoanalysis will learn from this superb book. * Justin Clemens, Associate Professor in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Australia * Opening up fundamentally new ground, Arka Chattopadhyay combines sophisticated close readings of both Beckett and Lacan with a profound theoretical ambition. His book explores the turn to mathematics in both writers not as an attempt to underpin the rational, Enlightenment subject as it comes under threat in the twentieth century, but as an invocation of the structures of paradox, aporia, impasse and incompleteness that emerge as human experience and practices of writing meet the materiality of the world. * Laura Salisbury, Professor of Modern Literature and Medical Humanities, University of Exeter, UK, and author of Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (2012) * Noting that Lacan and Beckett share a common birthday if not birth year, Arka Chattopadhyay collides the late Beckett against the late Lacan in a book which arrives right on time. Always intriguing and often brilliant, this work not only makes a notable contribution to scholarship on both of its subjects but also shows how, with regard to modernism and its inability not to go on, the 1970s could begin to be mapped. * Daniel Katz, Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, UK * For Lacanian enthusiasts, this book offers an ambitious addition to Beckett scholarship; perhaps its esoteric prose is an unavoidable consequence of exposing the limits of language to probe the immaterial realities of human mathematics. * Joanne Brueton, French Studies *

Arka Chattopadhyay's superb Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real zooms in on the deep complicity between the later Beckett and the later Lacan. Offering cogent close-readings and displaying an impressive theoretical culture, Chattopadhyay formalizes the paradoxes inherent in the Real in both corpuses. In this radically new approach to literature, Lacanian psychoanalysis demonstrates its agency not only as an interpretive technique but also as a practice of writing. * Jean-Michel Rabate, Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences * Samuel Beckett and Jacques Lacan are two great European writer-thinkers of the twentieth century who really should have crossed paths: stylistically radical, scripturally innovative, and conceptually decisive, they shared friends, interests, and themes. Yet their work, and the studies of their work, have to date been marked by a peculiar non-relation. Arka Chattopadhyay's remarkable book sets out to re-examine this odd state of affairs, with intelligence, erudition, and brio. Along the way, Chattopadhyay not only manages to give strong new interpretations of the sense and import of Beckett and Lacan's writings, but resituates their work along new lines, most notably according to a problematic of mathematical formalisation in the Real. Anybody interested in modernist literature and psychoanalysis will learn from this superb book. * Justin Clemens, Associate Professor in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Australia * Opening up fundamentally new ground, Arka Chattopadhyay combines sophisticated close readings of both Beckett and Lacan with a profound theoretical ambition. His book explores the turn to mathematics in both writers not as an attempt to underpin the rational, Enlightenment subject as it comes under threat in the twentieth century, but as an invocation of the structures of paradox, aporia, impasse and incompleteness that emerge as human experience and practices of writing meet the materiality of the world. * Laura Salisbury, Professor of Modern Literature and Medical Humanities, University of Exeter, UK, and author of Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing (2012) * Noting that Lacan and Beckett share a common birthday if not birth year, Arka Chattopadhyay collides the late Beckett against the late Lacan in a book which arrives right on time. Always intriguing and often brilliant, this work not only makes a notable contribution to scholarship on both of its subjects but also shows how, with regard to modernism and its inability not to go on, the 1970s could begin to be mapped. * Daniel Katz, Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, UK *

Arka Chattopadhyay's superb Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real zooms in on the deep complicity between the later Beckett and the later Lacan. Offering cogent close-readings and displaying an impressive theoretical culture, Chattopadhyay formalizes the paradoxes inherent in the Real in both corpuses. In this radically new approach to literature, Lacanian psychoanalysis demonstrates its agency not only as an interpretive technique but also as a practice of writing. * Jean-Michel Rabate, Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences * Samuel Beckett and Jacques Lacan are two great European writer-thinkers of the twentieth century who really should have crossed paths: stylistically radical, scripturally innovative, and conceptually decisive, they shared friends, interests, and themes. Yet their work, and the studies of their work, have to date been marked by a peculiar non-relation. Arka Chattopadhyay's remarkable book sets out to re-examine this odd state of affairs, with intelligence, erudition, and brio. Along the way, Chattopadhyay not only manages to give strong new interpretations of the sense and import of Beckett and Lacan's writings, but resituates their work along new lines, most notably according to a problematic of mathematical formalisation in the Real. Anybody interested in modernist literature and psychoanalysis will learn from this superb book. * Justin Clemens, Associate Professor in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Australia *

Author Information

Arka Chattopadhyay is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, India. He co-editor of Samuel Beckett and the Encounter of Philosophy and Literature (with James Martell, 2013) and Endlessness of Ending: Samuel Beckett and the Extensions of Mind (with Dirk Van Hulle et al, 2017). He is co-editor of the journal Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry (with Sourit Bhattacharya).

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