Anthony Uhlmann

Beckett's Proust/Deleuze's Proust

The problem of the image of thought occurs at important moments within Deleuze’s works, yet it is not always at the forefront of his ideas. In Negotiations, Deleuze indicates that Difference and Repetition ‘is really about the nature of the postulates of the image of thought’, and that he ‘comes back to it in Proust and Signs, because Proust confronts the Greek image with all the power of signs’.1 The chronology is somewhat distorted in these comments: the concept, in fact, is first mentioned in Nietzsche et la Philosophie (1962), then again in the shorter first edition of Proust and Signs, Proust et les Signes (1964), before appearing in Difference et Repetition (1968). Yet the concept is more fully developed in Difference and Repetition and Proust and Signs, which both have chapters entitled ‘The Image of Thought’.

J.M. Coetzee and the uses of anachronism in Summertime

In this essay I develop a reading of J. M. Coetzees most recent work, Summertime, examining the use Coetzee makes of anachronism in particular, but also arguing that anachronism forms part of a larger formal strategy. By drawing on ideas that Coetzee outlines in the collection of interviews and critical essays entitled Doubling the Point, I show how this formal strategy involves the use of deliberate error or inconsistency – that it is inconsistency, in effect, that is being used to get as close as possible to an ideal of ‘truth’. As he has shown in what he calls his ‘autrebiographies’, and in his idea of what it means to write autobiography or confession in general, a central problem occurs: how can one express the truth of the self? I argue that Coetzee develops an original response to the somewhat prosaic claim that “in a larger sense all writing is autobiography”: by using error and anachrony as a formal strategy for generating the truth. I consider the way in which Coetzees understanding of writing – an understanding that involves an intense and carefully considered analysis of the forms of language – is based on an ongoing relation between truth and lies.

Ideas in Beckett and Deleuze

In the 1994 Preface to the English translation of Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze, returning to a theme that had long haunted his works, sets out how philosophy and art might be drawn together to allow us to continue to think differently: to allow us to escape formal and conventional constraints on what we are allowed to think. He states: The time is coming when it will hardly be possible to write a book of philosophy as it has been done for so long: ‘Ah! the old style…’. The search for new means of philosophical expression was begun by Nietzsche and must be pursued today in relation to the renewal of certain other arts, such as the theatre or the cinema. (Deleuze, 1994, p. xxi) The statement involves a sense of pessimism with regard to the discipline of philosophy and a sense of optimism with regard to the potentials of art. Writing in 2012 one might glance askew at his optimism with regard to form in art. The ‘time image’ in Cinema, for example, which Deleuze saw emerging in the works of the French New Wave and elsewhere in the postwar European film tradition, has now receded in prominence, with ‘movement image’ cinema, which it seemed to supersede as a means of expression in Deleuze’s cinema books, becoming ever more forcefully the dominant mode of expression in cinema (see Deleuze, 1986; 1989). Experimental theatre also struggles to survive, with the more popular forms dominating to the extent that the momentum of avant-garde theatre is difficult to discern and exists (like time image cinema), very much at the margins. So too, the kind of serial form contemporary fiction that he lauds (in the Logic of Sense for example) is marginal.

New writing in an aged care setting

ABSTRACT To investigate the health benefits of participating in creative writing workshops, in 2015 and 2016 a group of academics from Western Sydney University ran an intervention in two retirement homes. Asked to participate in both ‘life writing’ and ‘experimental’ writing exercises rather than purely in life writing alone, participants showed an ability to write in ways they had not done previously, with the two modes of writing practice proving complementary. Two case studies, Skipper and Brydon, show how participants engaged in ‘new writing’ in different ways. A study of the data on the continuing independently run workshops between the two interventions and after the second one reveals that the participants continued to write in ‘new ways’ even after the academic facilitators had ceased being involved.

Denaturing Knowledge in Texts for Nothing

This paper looks at Texts for Nothing, which Beckett attempts as a way to go on after the conceptual aporias he confronts in The Unnamable. It examines Beckett’s own comments with regard to this attempt to go on, set out in an interview with Israel Shenker and seeks to unpack these comments and the assertion that Texts for Nothing was a failure. In doing so it examines Beckett’s relation to knowing, being, having, and acting, in relation to concepts drawn from Spinoza and Deleuze and to the various literary tropes Beckett works with that traditionally generate meaning in relation to these concepts.

Dusklands and the meaning of method

This essay develops a reading of J. M. Coetzees first novel, Dusklands that considers questions of method. In the first instance, drawing on archival sources and secondary sources, it traces some elements of the methods used in the process of composition of the novel. It begins with Coetzees interests in the work of Beckett and Nabokov, before turning to methods of juxtaposition developed in Dusklands. The nature of the relation between history and fiction and the nature of the relation between literature and politics and literature and its own form have provided much of the focus of the existing criticism of Dusklands. Connecting these problems is that of the relation between literature and its purpose: that is, the extent to which literature might be thought to enable an understanding or insight into what Coetzee has called the ‘truth’ that can inhere within fiction. From here the essay considers the question of method itself and how Coetzees novel interrogates such methods, which determine what can and cannot be said about events, and what can and cannot be understood in relation to them.

Negative Allegory: Buning on Allegory and the

This essay will discuss two areas of interest developed by Marius Buning that point towards doorways within Beckett studies: the idea of allegory, and the idea of the . It will consider how these two ideas might be thought to interrelate and open new insights in the field.

IMAGE AND DISPOSITION IN BECKETT'S LATE PLAYS

This paper has two parts: in the first, I summarise elements of my conclusions with regard to the nature of the image and the aesthetic of nonrelation in Becketts works, which I develop at length in my recent book . In the second, I draw on these ideas in offering readings of the nature of the image as disposition in Becketts late plays and television plays.

L'image De La Pensée :

Once we understand the Geulincx and his interpretation of the of Descartes, it is evident that, although Beckett plays also with the system of Descartes, the Geulincx system is much nearer the image of thinking as presents it and that so the chiaro oscuro of playing with knowledge and ignorance in Becketts art becomes much more clear.

Representation and presentation : the Deleuzian image

A few works have now been dedicated to Deleuze’s cinema books and have discussed the relation between Bergson and Deleuze. While there are inevitably points of overlap, this is a complex problem, and my point of focus differs from studies that have appeared so far. That is, nothing has yet been written concerning the pairing of the concepts of representation and presentation in relation to the image in Deleuze, yet this is crucial to my argument here. The purpose of this essay is to look at the role of the image, from a cognitive perspective, as an interaction between notions of “presentation” and “representation,” and to use this distinction in order to begin to develop an understanding of how the image might work in art. In The Logic of Affect, Paul Redding traces points of correspondence between eighteenthand nineteenth-century German idealism and contemporary theories of cognition. Redding underlines how a key distinction, or point of contention, in both nineteenthand twentiethcentury debates about the nature of cognition concerned the problem of whether sensations should be considered “presentations” or “representations.” “Direct Realists” consider that sensations are impressed upon us (in the manner of the famous metaphor of the signet ring in wax) and directly perceived by the nervous system. Such presentations are understood to have being in their own right (and therefore one looks to ontology when considering their nature). Others, including idealists such as Fichte and Schelling, argue that what occurs in our experience of the world is the production of “representations.” That is, they contend that the immediate process of sensation is always lost and out of reach, and that what remains is the interpretation of the sensation and such interpretations or representations involve or produce knowledge (and so one looks to epistemology when considering their nature) (Redding 90–123).