Lecture by Jean-Michel Rabaté ‘Think, Pig! And the Pathos of the Moderns’

For many recent and contemporary writers, among whom Samuel Beckett, the motto of the 17th-century Flemish philosopher Arnold Geulincx’s has held true: "Where your value is nothing, you will want nothing.” But how can this "nothing" be made productive? Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, will try to answer this question, referring to his two forthcoming books: one on Beckett, philosophy, and the limits of the human; the other on the concept of distance and its consequences for the affects of modernism.