Asja Szafraniec
Research Projects
2000-2004 I worked on the question of the venues open for philosophical discourse to approach literary works and assess their value. The setting of the project was a fictive encounter between the philosopher Jacques Derrida and the (play)writer Samuel Beckett. Derrida, known among other things for his innovative approaches to literature, on many occasions indicated his inability (despite both his commitment to the idea and ample opportunity to engage with it) to take stand with respect to Beckett’s work. The initial question I posed was what this receptive (or expressive) limitation entails both for the particular scope and definition of Derrida’s approach to literature and for the better understanding of the specificity ofBeckett’s artistic project. This was the topic of my PhD dissertation in philosophy (defended cum laude in 2004); In 2007 I published a book based on this research, Beckett, Derrida and the Event of Literature (with Stanford University Press). The major topic of this book (discussing, next to the mentioned authors also the relevant insights by Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze and Franz Kafka among others) is the way in which the value of a literary work (its claim on the audience, not merely in terms of uniqueness and universality but above all in terms of the more fluid categories of interest and desire of the audience) comes to be established. (See below for the book and reviews)
Present. The originating impulse of my current project on religion, funded by the NWO, with the working title “Redemptions and Conversions in Stanley Cavell” was the question of the problematic contemporeaneity of religion and its relation to secularism, in view of the fact that, contrary to predictions about the progressive secularization of cultures, those issues became in the last decennium more and more prominent. I am investigating philosophical approaches to religion associated with the so-called “ordinary language philosophy” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell) in which secularism and religion (both conceived in a particular way) appear to vanish into each other, focusing on the way the fundamental element of religion -- the human necessity to rely on what the adepts of Wittgenstein call the “doxastic attitudes” -- is prevalent in our secular culture. (See below for more detailed description)Present research project in detail
My present research examines the religious motives underlying Stanley Cavell’s philosophical project, in particular the nature and the degree of Cavell’s endorsement of what, in the face of oncoming secularism, and long before the present discussion about the return of religion, he called the “necessity of recovering or replacing religion.” Cavell’s preoccupation with the questions of rationality and skepticism through the focus of the relation between individual and community has received recently a lot of attention, unlike the characteristically Cavellian perception of what he regards as a human, normative antidote to skepticism: (aspects of) religion. Religion is here conceived as the individual expression indispensable for shaping the ethical realm and protecting it from deteriorating into a myth. It is clear that for Cavell, those religious forms of attunement have not ceased to take place with the arrival of secularism, but are redirected at the other and at the world. Cavell is not supporting secularism but neither is he advocating a return to any traditional form of religiosity: on the contrary, a genuine relation to God, if there is one, must include a possibility of dissent, including the possibility of severing the relation itself. Cavell calls this variant of the struggle for recognition “a quarrel with God.” (A somewhat similar stand valorizing dissent in human relation to God without dismissing the value of religion makes a short and far from conclusive appearance in Charles Taylor’s Secular Age (637).) The real adversary of Cavell’s discourse is neither religion nor non-religion but the condition of myth of which all forms of our discourse, both religious and secular, partake: an authoritative but unfounded (because not “lived”) image or representation of the world. My research aims at forging a link between religion and non-religion by showing that simultaneously with advocating a “quarrel with God” Cavell insists on the needof recoveringforethics of certain grammatical (or logical) aspects of religion indispensable for the exercise of our subjective freedom.
Reviews
“Those who live by the word have unfinished business with the achievement of Samuel Beckett. Asja Szafraniec’s ambitious study, taking Derrida’s elaborations as measures in turn measured by Beckett’s corpus, is as clear andcomprehensive and illuminating a progress with the complex of these performers as one might ask for. Near initiates of this region of crisscross between what is called philosophy and what literature, as well as experienced warriors within it, should find cause to be grateful for Asja Szafraniec’s sure hand and expansive connections.” —Stanley Cavell, Harvard University
"This is a remarkable and valuable work in many respects, in particular because it is not only the first, to myknowledge, to systematically explore the relation between Derrida and Beckett, but also because it puts Derrida's vision of literature to the test in the context of a corpus of writings that does not belongto the canon of literature with which hehas beeninvolved." —Rodolphe Gasché, SUNY Buffalo
“I know of no author who brings to the page such a deep understanding of Derrida's philosophy along with such a delicate, piercing awareness of the singularity of Beckett's text and its place in the literary institution.”—Peter T. Connor, Barnard College