Think, Pig!

How to explain Beckett's decision to write in French? This book tackles a program in which form resists and leads to a writing of the generic, while a paradoxical ethics of failure, impotence, and humility displaces avant-garde art and modernism. Bataille, Adorno and Badiou here account for Beckett's enduring appeal. Beckett never flattered his public and yet gives reasons to keep on living even facing nihilism and despair. His inscription in a French context marked by a "writing degree zero" is not a pretext to minimize his genius-on the contrary, Beckett shines because he went further than his contemporaries in an anti-humanist program playing on the theme of the animal in order to subvert the "human." His "declaration of inhuman rights" still rings true-and offers the most funny mode of expression available to us today.