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Prologue : Nothing ... but words : words and tears -- Part 1. No theodicy : a chance of happiness. Negative dialectics -- In the secret of guilt : punishment as meaning -- Political theology : old dictations, old knots -- Ending the endings : the endgame of theodicy -- Part 2. The Utopian idea : remembering the future in the past. Paradise : nowhere--but here! -- Tales for children : retrieving the enchantment -- Hope and despair in a time of mourning -- Waiting : in the meantime -- In the event of a new word -- Part 3. After Hegel, Beckett's How it is : approaching justice with infinite slowness -- Swamp : justice in the state of nature -- The struggle for acknowledgement and recognition -- Cruelty and kindness : humanity in question -- The human voice : of promises and solaces -- Redeeming words -- Where in the world is justice? At stake in this book is a struggle with language in a time when our old faith in the redeeming of the word-and the word's power to redeem-has almost been destroyed. Drawing on Benjamin's political theology, his interpretation of the German Baroque mourning play, and Adorno's critical aesthetic theory, but also on the thought of poets and many other philosophers, especially Hegel's phenomenology of spirit, Nietzsche's analysis of nihilism, and Derrida's writings on language, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, because of its communicative and revelatory powers, language bears the utopian "promise of happiness," the idea of a secular redemption of humanity, at the very heart of which must be the achievement of universal justice. In an original reading of Beckett's plays, novels and short stories, Kleinberg-Levin shows how, despite inheriting a language damaged, corrupted and commodified, Beckett redeems dead or dying words and wrests from this language new possibilities for the expression of meaning. Without denying Beckett's nihilism, his picture of a radically disenchanted world, Kleinberg-Levin calls attention to moments when his words suddenly ignite and break free of their despair and pain, taking shape in the beauty of an austere yet joyous lyricism, suggesting that, after all, meaning is still possible
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