In this first podcast Conor Carville, co-Director of the Samuel Beckett Research Centre and author of Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts, talks about Beckett’s repeated return to the vexed question of life, as animating force, as drive, as resource, as mystery. In doing so he considers Beckett’s play Endgame and the novels Murphy, Watt and Malone Dies, taking in Beckett’s philosophical influences Schopenhauer and Bergson along the way. There is also some discussion of Giorgio Agamben’s notion of bare life and its bearing on twentieth-century history.

Intro and Outro Music: 'Median Strip' from Concrete Island, by The Heartwood Institute and Hawksmoor. https://spunoutofcontrol.bandcamp.com/album/concrete-island

Bibliography

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998).

Samuel Beckett Murphy (1936)

Samuel Beckett Watt (1953)

Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies (1956)

Samuel Beckett, Endgame (1957)

Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1958)

Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1992)

Stan Gontarski, Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze (Edinburgh University Press, 2015)

Ulrich Pothast, The Metaphysical Vision: Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Art and Life and Samuel Beckett’s Own Way to Make Use of It (2008)