Journal Articles by Shane Weller
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2000
Kritikos: An International Journal of Postmodern Cultural Sound, Text and Image, 2006
Between the early 1960s and his death in October 2004, Derrida published over seventy books, not ... more Between the early 1960s and his death in October 2004, Derrida published over seventy books, not to mention the many articles, chapters, forewords, afterwords, and other forms of textual intervention for which he was responsible during those years. No less astounding than the sheer number of texts, however, is the diversity of their subjects: Derrida's range is, to say the least, formidable, extending from Plato to Jean-Luc Nancy, from philosophy to literature, from political writings to psychoanalysis and beyond. Few writers, let alone philosophers, have ranged so widely, while also reading so closely. And this virtual textual panopticon is constructed not simply through a multiplication of volumes, but also through the multiplicity characterizing many of those volumes. To take, for instance, the 1994 volume Politics of Friendship-the range of authors covered in this text is daunting, to say the least: Aristotle, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Schmitt, Heidegger, Levinas, Blanchot, to name only a few. however, to reflect upon the reasons for such non-encounters. Those reasons are no doubt various in nature, and of distinctly variable value in the light they might throw upon Derrida's own work and, indeed, upon deconstruction more generally. Instead, I would like to comment briefly, and in a very preliminary fashion, upon Derrida's relation to two figures on whom he did not write, or on whom he wrote very little, not because they were too alien to his own thinking, not because there was no conceivable point of intersection between his work and theirs, not even because he proved to be mortal and thus lacked the time, but precisely (and this is what interests me) because those two figures were, in his opinion, too familiar or too close to him. The figures that I have in mind are, rightly or wrongly, and for all their differences, often taken together; they might even be described as a kind of literary-philosophical couple or, perhaps more accurately, a literary-philosophical pseudocouple. That they met, in person, on more than one occasion, first in France and then in Germany, is arguably of more than anecdotal significance. That they both failed in a certain respect to listen to, or at least to hear, each other, is another story, for another occasion. Their names? Samuel Beckett and Theodor Adorno.
Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, 2008
This essay re-examines Beckett's relation to nihilism in the light of his 1930s reading notes on ... more This essay re-examines Beckett's relation to nihilism in the light of his 1930s reading notes on pre-Socratic philosophy, in particular Democritus, Gorgias and Thrasymachos.
Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, 2008
This essay examines Beckett's treatment of the distinction between human and animal, a distinctio... more This essay examines Beckett's treatment of the distinction between human and animal, a distinction that is certainly not one among others, since it arguably founds an entire philosophico-religious tradition running from Aristotle to Levinas, and including Descartes, Malebranche, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. I focus in particular on the impact on Beckett of his reading about Wolfgang Köhler's experiments on chimpanzees during the First World War and aim to show that Beckett submits the human/animal distinction to a double pressure, thereby producing a new conception of the so-called 'political animal.'
Journal of Beckett Studies, 2010
Forum for Modern Language Studies, 2008
Although it plays a decisive role in Maurice Blanchot's theorisation of the literary, the concept... more Although it plays a decisive role in Maurice Blanchot's theorisation of the literary, the concept of nihilism has received surprisingly little critical attention. In this article, I chart Blanchot's deployment of the term "nihilisme" from the early 1940s to the early 1980s, and aim to show the manner in which nihilism as Blanchot conceives it haunts his work as what Nietzsche, in an 1885-86 notebook, describes as "dieser unheimlichste aller Gäste". At the heart of Blanchot theorisation of the literary as that which he takes to be the only genuine resistance to nihilism, this uncanniness takes the form of a resistance of nihilism, a phrase in which both the subjective and the objective genitive are operative. 90 95 100 105 110 115 120 125
Modernism/Modernity, 2007
Weller / nietzsche among the modernists 625 Shane Weller is reader in Comparative literature in t... more Weller / nietzsche among the modernists 625 Shane Weller is reader in Comparative literature in the School of european Culture and languages at the University of Kent, UK. His recent publications include: A Taste for the Negative: Beckett and Nihilism (2005); Beckett, Literature, and the Ethics of Alterity (2006); and (co-ed.), The Flesh in the Text (2007). Lewis and Nietzsche: Antithetical Views modernism / modernity volume fourteen, number four, pp 625-643.
Forum for Modern Language Studies, 2008
From Adorno to Deleuze and beyond, commentators on Samuel Beckett's oeuvre have repeatedly argued... more From Adorno to Deleuze and beyond, commentators on Samuel Beckett's oeuvre have repeatedly argued that his works express a "schizophrenic" condition. These commentators rarely operate, however, with a shared conception of the meaning of the terms "schizophrenic" and "schizoid"; and, in some cases, the commentator's conception of schizophrenia is itself derived in no small part from a reading of Beckett without the implications of this hermeneutic circularity being taken into account. In this article, my aim is not to add one more contribution to such an approach but rather, on the basis of both published and archival evidence, to consider the extent to which Beckett may be said deliberately to have set out to produce a language of derangement that he himself understood to be "schizophrenic". In order to achieve this, I seek to take as full an account as possible of his own readings in psychology and psychoanalysis.
Comparative Critical Studies, 2008
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2005
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2003
Books by Shane Weller
University Press Antwerp / Bloomsbury Academic, 2018
University Press Antwerp / Bloomsbury Academic, 2014
Book Reviews by Shane Weller
Translation and Literature, 2012
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Journal Articles by Shane Weller
Books by Shane Weller
Book Reviews by Shane Weller