Authored Books
Please find below a selection of Professor Andrew Gibson's Authored Books to date, in chronological order:
J.M. COETZEE AND NEOLIBERAL CULTURE
(Oxford University Press, 2022)
This book presents J. M. Coetzee’s work as a complex, nuanced counterblast to contemporary, global, neoliberal economics and its societies. Not surprisingly, given his many years in South Africa and Australia, Coetzee writes from a ‘global-Southern’ perspective. Drawing on a wealth of literature, philosophy, and theory, the book reads Coetzee’s writings as a discreet, oblique but devastating engagement with neoliberal presumptions. It identifies and focuses on various key features of neoliberal culture: its obsession with self-enrichment, mastery, growth; its belief in plenitude, endless resources; its hubris and obsession with (self)-promotion; its desire for ease and easiness, ‘well-being’, euphoria; its fetishization of managerial reason and the culture of security; its unrelenting positivity, its belief in illusory goods and trivial progressivisms. By contrast, Coetzee’s writings explore the virtues of irony and self-reduction. He commits himself to difficulty, discomfort, patient and austere if bleak inquiry, rigorous questioning, and radical doubt. Destitution and failure come to look like a serious, dignified form of life and thought. The very tones of Coetzee’s books run counter to those of our neoliberal democracies. They point in a different direction to a world that has gone astray.
J.M. Coetzee and Neoliberal Culture is available to order online and can be found here:
J.M. Coetzee and Neoliberal Culture – Oxford University Press
J.M. Coetzee and Neoliberal Culture - Amazon
MODERNITY AND THE POLITICAL FIX
(Bloomsbury, 2019)
Professor Andrew Gibson’s Modernity and the Political Fix was published in April 2019 by Bloomsbury in its Political Theologies series. It both follows on from his boos on Misanthropy and his book Intermittency and brings together the political themes of his work since 1999, including his writings on Joyce and Beckett. The thesis it tests and explores is as follows: whatever its roots in Hume and the Enlightenment, and even in Hobbes, modernity proper and in any fully serious sense begins in 1789 with the French Revolution, the experience (and not merely the conviction) of groundlessness and political and social renewability, and therefore a concept of the worldly incarnation of justice and the good. However, modern politics, understood as a politics of justice and the good, is haunted from the start by historical irony, an irony those working on behalf of modern politics prove unable to countenance, think through or keep pace with, let alone resolve (hence `the political fix’). Renovation produces reaction which produces renovation. Renovation and reaction anticipate, compromise, reverse, need and bleed into, borrow from each other, seemingly interminably. It is significant that the word `modern’ considerably predates the word `conservative’. Modern politics continually implodes, threatens to slide or collapse into its opposite, breeds its own opposition as an aspect of modernity itself. With the end of the Cold War, however, the long struggle of modern politics to extricate itself from its problematic entanglements comes to an end. Whether redefined as postmodernism, globalization, neo-liberal democracy or `total capital’, the scene of implosion promotes itself as reinterpreting or indeed replacing politics.
Modern politics, then, is presently chronically in retreat and on the defensive, even on the wane. But this by no means necessarily spells its death. The task now becomes the rescue of key modern political concepts, their preservation and transmission, but according to an altogether different conception of political temporality, political causality, political subjectivity and fidelity. The concepts chiefly at stake in the book (as in its chapter titles) are Historicity, the Event, the Remainder, the People Untransformed and Transmission. Literature and the arts are key in this context. After decades of political explications of literature which in effect always elevated the political above the aesthetic, it is now time to rethink modern politics with modern literature (and art, music and theory) as one’s starting-point, not least because modern literature, theory and art repeatedly understood historical irony, grasped it and pursued its implications to intellectual conclusions, as modern philosophy and political thought did seldom or not at all. The significant figures in the book in this respect include Byron, Goya, early Foucault, Joyce, Woolf, Wagner, Joseph Roth, Gabriele Tergit, Döblin, Canetti and Lacan. The book ends by considering how far, in the light of its argument, certain theologians, and radical poets influenced by theology (R.S. Thomas, Norman Nicholson), can assist in revising our modern models of political thought.
Modernity and the Political Fix is available to order online and can be found here:
Modernity and the Political Fix - Bloomsbury
Modernity and the Political Fix - Amazon
Misanthropy: The Critique of Humanity
(Bloomsbury, 2017)
This book is the first major study of the theme of misanthropy, its history, arguments both for and against it, and its significance for us today. Misanthropy is not strictly a philosophy. It is an inconsistent thought, and so has often been mocked. But from Timon of Athens to Motorhead it has had a very long life, vast historical purchase and is seemingly indomitable and unignorable. Human beings have always nursed a profound distrust of who and what they are. This book does not seek to rationalize that distrust, but asks how far misanthropy might have a reason on its side, if a confused reason. There are obvious arguments against misanthropy. It is often born of a hatred of physical being. It can be historically explained. It particularly appears in undemocratic cultures. But what of the misanthropy of terminally defeated and disempowered peoples? Or born of progressivisms? Or the misanthropy that quarrels with specious or easy positivities (from Pelagius to Leibniz to the corporate cheer of contemporary 'total capital')? From the Greek Cynics to Roman satire, St Augustine to Jacobean drama, the misanthropy of the French Ancien Regime to Swift, Smollett and Johnson, Hobbes, Schopenhauer and Rousseau, from the Irish and American misanthropic traditions to modern women's misanthropy, the book explores such questions. It ends with a debate about contemporary culture that ranges from the 'dark radicalisms', queer misanthropy, posthumanism and eco-misanthropy to Houellebecq, punk rock and gangsta rap.
"Gibson's new book is astonishing. Misanthropy - as mood, as logic - yields brilliant readings of the cultural and historical circumstances in which a specific attitude or misanthropic moment changes and turns the order of things. The book offers, with a magisterial command of a remarkable range of literary and cultural history, a brilliant engagement with the literary modulations of modernity. It is among the most original books I have read."
Thomas Docherty, Professor of English and of Comparative Literature, University of Warwick, UK
"Misanthropy is elegant, irresistibly humorous, and genuinely informative, on a subject which has a most fascinating history and, as Gibson shows, is also pressingly relevant for the here and now. Accessibly written and eminently readable Gibson's is a mature critical voice, learned, intelligent and lucid, provoking and enlightening the reader at every turn."
Jonathan Dollimore, Former Professor of English and Related Literature, University of York, UK, now independent scholar and writer
Misanthropy is available to order online and can be found here:
Misanthropy - Bloomsbury
Misanthropy - Amazon
THE STRONG SPIRIT: HISTORY, POLITICS AND AESTHETICS IN THE WRITINGS OF JAMES JOYCE 1898-1915
(Oxford University Press, 2013)
The Strong Spirit provides the first comprehensive account of Joyce`s writings 1898-1915 in the context both of the distinct phases and shifting currents of British-Irish history during the period, and the sometimes rather different phases important in the works. The young Joyce emerges, in an arresting and original intellectual portrait, as a very particular, modern kind of `strong spirit` (to use his terms), a late-colonial artist committed to the cause of freedom and justice for Ireland, yet also an ironical and radical doubter, intransigently sceptical about the chances of success. At the turn of the century, with a concept of national resurgence much in the Irish air, Joyce meditates on art as a particular form of emancipatory and anti-colonial project. His early essays espouse a principle of autonomy at a specific moment within colonial Irish history. However, the crises surrounding the Land Act, the United Irish League and Devolution, the election of 1906 and the Third Home Rule Bill call the emancipatory project ever more sharply into question. From Dubliners and Stephen Hero to the `Triestine Writings` and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Exiles, Joyce responds to the problematic of Irish emancipation by examining recent Irish history and the place within it of the artist and intellectual. The result is a set of varied, complex, extremely subtle, labyrinthine structures of thought that build towards the extraordinary aesthetic practices apparent in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
The Strong Spirit is available to order online and can be found here:
The Strong Spirit
INTERMITTENCY: THE CONCEPT OF HISTORICAL REASON IN RECENT FRENCH PHILOSOPHY
(Edinburgh University Press, 2012)
Intermittency attempts to articulate and explain a post-Hegelian or, more accurately, post-Kojèvian French philosophical concept of the 'reason in history’ as rare, sporadic and irregular. Gibson’s case is that the philosophers in question produce a counter-phenomenology of spirit and a 'melancholic-ecstatic' conception of historical time. As such, however, they call to their necessary complement which, Gibson argues, is, above all, literature. The book includes chapters on Badiou, Rancière, Proust, Jambet and Lardreau, though it also abundantly contextualizes them both with reference to a specific conception of modernity beginning with the French Revolution, Kant’s late writings and Wordsworth’s Prelude, and a range of significant modern thinkers, from Hume to Benjamin, Lacan and Sartre. It also includes extended discussions of major literary figures, notably Wordsworth, Kleist, Flaubert, Rimbaud, Orwell, Carlo Levi and Sebald (and a film-maker, Rossellini).
Intermittency is available to order online and can be found here:
Intermittency
SAMUEL BECKETT: A CRITICAL LIFE
(Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press, 2010)
The life of Samuel Beckett has been the subject of exhaustive scholarship, yet Beckett himself was a spare, minimalist writer who deeply distrusted biography as a form of knowledge. In this new, concise, critical account of Beckett’s life and work, Andrew Gibson seeks to remain faithful to the writer’s aims, staying close to Beckett’s style of thought and work in his analysis of this supremely modern figure. Beckett’s Rockabye ends with a resounding `fuck life`. Andrew takes as his key concept the formidable Beckettian drive to say exactly that, to give up on the world. He locates the logic of this drive in Beckett’s responses to contemporary events, showing how he came to have an unusually profound feeling for the spirit of the times, and a power of conveying it unrivalled in any artist. The book tracks Beckett’s painful progress through the historical situations that defined his experience: Ireland after independence, Paris and the École Normale Supérieure in the late twenties, London in the thirties, Nazi Germany, Vichy France, the early years of the Fourth Republic, the Cold War and the eventual triumph of Capital in the late 1980s. The book analyses the often muted and oblique traces of and responses to these situations in a range of Beckett’s works. Andrew Gibson argues that Beckett was devastated by modern history without being completely overpowered by it. He espoused an extreme version of the Romantic doctrine that art is a criticism of historical forms of life, but his version of it is wryly ironical and perverse, for it stubbornly refuses to assume that life can ever say its final word.
BECKETT & BADIOU: THE PATHOS OF INTERMITTENCY
(Oxford University Press, 2006)
Alain Badiou has been an admirer of Beckett's work for more than forty years, and has written about him at some length. His thought about Beckett is precisely constructed in opposition to the traditions (of nihilist absurdism and existential humanism) that dominated Beckett criticism until the late 80s. Yet, at the same time, whilst having a fair amount in common with them, Badiou moves in a strikingly and significantly different direction to the post-theoretical and postmodern accounts that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s. Gibson's book argues that Badiou's reading does indeed make possible an important new departure in Beckett studies, but only if it is itself modified and to some extent transformed in the light of Beckett's work. For in certain respects, Beckett continues to raise certain questions, not only for Badiou's aesthetics, but for his philosophy as a whole. Gibson's book is an innovative comparative study that not only provides a fresh interpretation of Beckett but is also concerned with a specific set of problems within contemporary philosophy and aesthetics.
JAMES JOYCE: A CRITICAL LIFE
(Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press, 2006)
James Joyce has traditionally been viewed as the paradigm of international modernism in literature. In this radical reappraisal of his life and writings, Andrew Gibson firmly resituates both in an Irish context, showing them to be intricately bound up in Irish history, politics and culture. In doing so, he argues that, whilst Joyce cannot be understood as engaged in an exclusively Irish-centred endeavour, it is just such an endeavour that powers his work. Andrew highlights the historical and political traditions within Joyce’s family and upbringing and the importance to his literary evolution of specific events in Irish history: the emancipation of Irish Catholics, the Famine, the rise of Charles Stuart Parnell, the collapse of political hope after his fall and the transfer of political energies to cultural activity. Even the author’s move to mainland Europe emerges as a continuation of a centuries-old tradition of exile. Joyce remained closely in touch with developments in Ireland after leaving it, and Andrew Gibson demonstrates the importance for his work of the Easter Rising, the Anglo-Irish war, the Irish civil war, the progress of the Irish Free State and de Valera’s new constitution for Ireland. Andrew everywhere relates his arguments to close readings of Joyce’s works, and shows how far Joyce’s work as a whole represents a sustained and coherent project.
jOYCE’S REVENGE: HISTORY, POLITICS AND AESTHETICS IN ULYSSES
(Oxford University Press, 2002)
Andrew Gibson`s Joyce's Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in 'Ulysses' was published by Oxford University Press on 16 June, 2002. This major, book-length account of Joyce's Ulysses took fifteen years to write. It is a complex and evolving treatment of what were — for Joyce — the most crucial issues in Irish history and contemporary Irish politics. The study is original in arguing that, in many of their most important aspects, the aesthetic practices that make up Ulysses are responses to the colonial history and condition of Ireland, the colonial politics of Irish culture and British-Irish cultural politics, particularly in the years 1880-1920, approximately the years of Joyce’s early life. The book pays particular attention to Joyce's treatment of a wide variety of historically specific English and Anglo-Irish discourses in his greatest novel, arguing that Ulysses is fuelled by a Parnellite hostility to the colonizer's culture yet, at the same time, both transforms and transcends the available range of nationalist responses to that culture.
POSTMODERNITY, ETHICS AND THE NOVEL: FROM LEAVIS TO LEVINAS
(Routledge, 1999)
This book aims to elaborate a postmodern `ethics of reading’, setting out to demonstrate that postmodern literary theory has actually made possible an ethical criticism of fiction. Taking the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas as a starting point, each chapter discusses a particular aspect of Levinas’s thought and its bearing on the novel, and relates it to other forms of contemporary theory before providing detailed analyses of particular texts. Part of the book’s originality lies in its development of an ethical theory of fiction on the sole basis of modern and postmodern novels. It discusses a range of works by a wide variety of such novelists, including Conrad, Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, Beckett, Proust, Jean Rhys and Salman Rushdie.
This is the one book Andrew Gibson has written from which he prefers to distance himself. Firstly, the Levinas-based methodology he adopted was flawed. Levinas’s ethics is impracticable and even negligible without a theology, and Andrew has no theological convictions or interests as such. Thus, whilst, in his view, the readings of the texts in the book may frequently remain interesting and not without value, its theoretical orientation is not defensible. Secondly, Andrew Gibson committed himself to the ancient term `ethics’ at an honourable moment when it seemed to represent a serious and even necessary alternative to a balked politics. This was before the term was usurped by the likes of the CIA, Imperial British Tobacco and African dictators preaching the virtues of free enterprise. Andrew would not wish to be seen as an `ethical’ writer in any sense that could make for confusion. Thirdly: published in 1999, the book appeared at the beginning of what were to prove, intellectually and educationally, the most depressing years of his lifetime, the New Labour years, when Labour turned against intellectuals and education alike in a major and highly successful campaign of dumbing down. This book belongs to a short period when Andrew Gibson was still naïve about what was afoot, and its concept of ethics bears the mark of that naivety.
TOWARDS A POSTMODERN THEORY OF NARRATIVE
(Edinburgh University Press, 1996)
Though it is the book of a young man and certainly not his most serious and substantial one, this has actually turned to be Andrew Gibson’s most widely read academic work. Twenty years after its first publication, it is still taught. From the late 60s to the early eighties, narratology offered itself as a powerful and radical challenge to more classical modes of theorizing narrative. However, from the early 80s onwards it also took an increasingly conservative turn. This book argues that, far from being in the vanguard of literary theory, narratology has always been complicit with the very established methodologies it sought to oppose. This has been particularly clear in its resort to `geometrics,’ the reduction of narrative texts to geometric models. Andrew Gibson sets out to deconstruct the geometrics of the narratological system, and thereby to theorize narrative in new and quite different terms. He draws heavily on postmodern and post-structuralist theory from (in particular) Serres, Derrida and Lyotard to Deleuze, Kristeva and Vattimo to Badiou and Rosset. He addresses issues raised for narrative theory by a range of challenges from feminism to the new technology. He ranges widely in the modes and examples of narrative he considers, from the Bible, Fielding, Austen and Thackeray to Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, Sarraute, Beckett and science fiction to films by Almereyda, Godard, Jarmusch and Tarkovsky to contemporary British video and computer narrative or interactive fiction. The result is a study of scope, adventurousness and originality.
The book had few if any of the effects it hoped it might have. Though less front stage than in the past, narrative theory continued more or less as it always had, becoming if anything more conservative, if not more humanist and even implicitly theological, as for example in `natural’ narratology. New influences on the discipline only confirmed this tendency, notably in the case of cognitive science. However, Andrew Gibson still has a soft spot for the book and happily still identifies with it. Indeed, he still thinks it was basically right, if not always in detail. But of course conservative methods may offer more purchase to a discipline that, for various reasons, must continue to appear to flourish than methods that seem close a cheerful nihilism, and may prevail simply for that reason. Andrew Gibson’s work in this field was nonetheless to orient him in certain directions that were important for his later work and thought, as is evident enough from the book.
READING NARRATIVE DISCOURSE: STUDIES IN THE NOVEL FROM CERVANTES TO BECKETT
This book was in some respects a dry run for and an early version of Postmodern Theory of Narrative. Andrew Gibson set out to take issue with the neo-Aristotelean assumptions then underlying the larger part of work on narrative fiction. Andrew argued for an attention to meanings in fiction that were beyond content or expressions of `attitudes’ to content, and were rather latent in narrative discourse and form. He drew on Nietzsche, Bakhtin, Genette and a range of modern theories of narrative to provide a basis for reading the more distinctive forms of narrative fiction in terms of their own specific logic. The result was some challenging accounts of different narrative texts, notably Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Richardson’s Clarissa, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s The Trial and the Castle, Henry Green’s novels and early Beckett.
Andrew is now inclined to agree with one or two early critics of the book who claimed that in methodological terms, it was insufficiently adventurous for the time. However, he also has a certain affection for it, thinking of it as perhaps a flawed but necessary stage in his development, and one that first broached certain themes and concerns that are still very much his today, notably perhaps in the Kafka chapter.