Anthony Uhlmann
Autore di Arnold Geulincx Ethics: With Samuel Beckett's Notes (Brill's Studies in Intellectual History)
Sull'Autore
Anthony Uhlmann is Director of the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University, Australia. He is the author of three books, including Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (2006) and Thinking in Literature (Bloomsbury, 2011).
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In Beckett and Poststructuralism, Anthony Uhlmann offers a reading of Beckett in relation to French philosophy, particularly the work of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Levinas, and Derrida. Uhlmann offers a work of literary criticism that is also a piece of intellectual history, emphasizing how Beckett develops a kind of critical thinking which differs from yet is just as powerful as that of philosophers who, along with Beckett, found themselves faced with sets of ethical problems which were thrown into sharp relief in post-war France. Uhlmann explores the links between ethics and physical existence in Beckett, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, and between ethics and language in Beckett, Derrida and Levinas, showing how post-war French philosophy was powerfully affected by Beckett's work. Literature is not reduced to philosophy or vice versa; rather Uhlmann considers how they interrelate and overlap, informing and deforming one another, and how both encounter history.… (altro)
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The author, Anthony Uhlmann, is an academic who writes books like Beckett and Poststructuralism, so it’s not surprising that the structure of this novel is unconventional. It begins with a faux introduction (credited to the author), which purports to explain how an unusual manuscript came into his hands. He claims to have received a bundle of papers, with a covering letter from a nurse in Alice Springs, who explains that the papers belonged to Antony Elm, a defrocked priest who had died under her care. This priest, for unexplained reasons, had made a pilgrimage to the desert beyond Alice Springs for forty days and forty nights, and while there, waiting for some kind of redemption, he had written two narratives: one, a sort of coming-of-age story about two guileless young men having their first weekend in Sinful Sydney; and the other, a much more cerebral account of a meeting in Paris between the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein and the celebrated philosopher Henry Bergson. The introduction also tells us that he, the author, claiming not to be an expert but only someone with a strong interest in juxtaposition and non-relation in literature, has chosen to weave together these three narratives – of the weekend in Sydney, of the meeting in Paris, and of the priest’s disordered thoughts – into one continuous text as a whole, mercifully in different fonts so that the reader can always tell which is which.
The website at the University of Western Sydney also tells me that Uhlmann’s work focuses on the exchanges that take place between literature and philosophy and the way in which literature itself is a kind of thinking about the world.
Sam Atkinson’s The Philosophy Book explains succinctly why Bergman and Einstein (who was in Paris to talk about his theory of relativity and its concept of time as a fourth dimension) were destined not to get along.
Bosh, says Bergman, (or however you say that in French). There are two kinds of knowledge: (1) that which we know from our own unique particular perspective and (2) that which is absolute knowledge, which is knowing things as they actually are. He says we know the first kind of knowledge from analysis or intellect, and en garde, M. Einstein! the second from intuition, linked to our life-force (vitalism) that interprets the flux of experience in terms of time rather than space. (p. 227) See what I mean? Science ≠ intuition. In the novel, this stoush between two great men is identified as a crisis of reason:
(The existential angst this causes, it seems to me, is akin to the stoush between Darwinism (science) and the Bible (faith) half a century before.)
Are you still with me? I hope so. Reading these different narratives is an adventure, not least because the introduction reminds the reader about the Ern Malley affair!
Yes, we are in the hands of someone making mischief, but also a clever author who is exploring different versions of reality.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/07/29/saint-antony-in-his-desert-by-anthony-uhlman...… (altro)