Beckett, Deleuze and the Televisual Event—Peephole Art

An expressive dialogue between Gilles Deleuze's philosophical writings on cinema and Samuel Beckett's innovative film and television work, the book explores the relationship between the birth of the event – itself a simultaneous invention and erasure - and Beckett's attempts to create an unrepresentable space within the interstices of language as a (W)hole. While focusing specifically on Film (1964), the television adaptations of dramatic works such as Play, Not I and What Where, as well as the made-for-TV productions of Eh Joe, …but the clouds…, Ghost Trio, Quad I & II and Nacht und Traume, this book is more than an exploration of Beckett's TV work through a specific Deleuzean filter. More importantly, it is also an opportunity to re-examine Deleuze's Cinema 1 and 2 – specifically the affect- and time-images – through Beckett's specific audio-visual "peephole." Given Beckett's obvious compatibility with Kafka and minor literature, this study contextualizes his television work in relation to Deleuze's writings on cinema as a whole, and by extension, the ontology and semiotics of film and televisual language.

COLIN GARDNER is a professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. His publications include critical studies of the blacklisted film director Joseph Losey (2004) and the Czech-born pioneer of Free Cinema, Karel Reisz (2006) for Manchester University Press's "British Film Makers Series," the co-edited book (and accompanying exhibition), Damaged Romanticism (D. Giles, London), and a chapter on three Beckett teleplays in Continuum's recent Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text. He is currently co-editing, with Felicity Colman (Manchester Metropolitan University) a two-volume handbook on Film & Philosophy for Acumen (to be published 2012).