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Language, Multiplicity, Void: The Radical Politics of the Beckettian Subject

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2012

NICHOLAS E. JOHNSON
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Abstract

This article re-examines the legacy of modernist aesthetics, with special focus on Samuel Beckett and his radical critique of subjectivity, language and ontology. The problem of language as a fundamental agent of difference pervades both the content and form of literary modernism. Beyond conventional semantic and aesthetic function, language acts in Beckett's works to construct a subject that is at once multiple in expression and voided at its core. Drawing on performance and philosophy to explore an ethical dimension of Beckett's praxis already sensed by Theodor Adorno and Alain Badiou, this study recalls the political implications of what are sometimes dismissed as ‘mere’ aesthetic questions, by looking deeper into the modernist attitude toward language, subjectivity, and void. This research suggests that the full radicality of the Beckettian subject has yet to be fully absorbed in philosophy and culture, devastating as it is to the postmodern focus on identity and difference.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 38 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2012

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References

NOTES

1 This appears in MS 2259/1 (holograph on verso of leaf 1), at the University of Reading Beckett Archive. The fragment has also been published previously; see Seelig, Adam, ‘Beckett's Dying Remains: The Process of Playwriting in the Ohio Impromptu Manuscripts’, Modern Drama, 43, 3 (Fall 2000), pp. 376–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 This number represents the tally given by an online resource that compiles Beckett criticism citations, but it should be treated as a minimum for the period, and it excludes critical collections, companions and articles. See Ricorso, ‘Samuel Beckett: Criticism (1), Annual Listing – Monographs’, at www.ricorso.net/rx/az-data/authors/b/Beckett_S/crits/crit1.htm, accessed 7 August 2011.

3 Beckett, Samuel, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Cohn, Ruby, trans. Esslin, Martin (New York: Grove, 1984), p. 19Google Scholar.

4 It is important to note that the twentieth-century fragmentation of identity from its Enlightenment model focuses solely on a Western tradition of philosophy; if Eastern thinking (particularly Taoism) is taken into account, the ‘modernist’ critique of language and identity actually exists much earlier.

5 Müller, Heiner, Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, ed. and trans. Weber, Carl (New York: PAJ Publications, 1984), p. 137Google Scholar.

6 While full analysis of the American debate over identity politics will not be undertaken here, it is nonetheless a useful debate to observe, since it shows by its existence the political potential inherent in any description of the subject.

7 Bell, Kevin, Ashes Taken for Fire: Aesthetic Modernism and the Critique of Identity (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007), p. 4Google Scholar.

8 Žižek, Slavoj, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2008), p. 55Google Scholar.

9 Ibid.

10 I follow Žižek's distinction here between the three types of violence, made at the beginning of his book Violence, at pp. 1–2. He notes the tendency of news stories to focus on ‘subjective’ manifestations of violence over the systems and symbols that underlie them.

11 Ibid., p. 57.

12 Toscano, Alberto, ‘Introduction’, in Alain Badiou, The Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2007; first published 2005), p. viiiGoogle Scholar.

13 I refer here to this shift into drama as ‘late’ because Beckett was forty-one by the time he was writing his first play (Eleutheria); he had been working as a writer of prose, poetry and criticism for the previous twenty years.

14 Beckett, Samuel, Endgame, ed. McDonald, Rónán (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), p. 22Google Scholar.

15 Beckett's entire oeuvre indexes this impulse, but especially notable examples of vivisected or multiplied subjects are Play (1963), Not I (1972), That Time (1975) and Ohio Impromptu (1982).

16 I refer here to Abstract Machines: Staging the Televisual Beckett, the 2010 practice-based research project that I undertook with Matthew Causey at the Arts Technology Research Laboratory at Trinity College Dublin, as well as to Disjecta: A Samuel Beckett Laboratory at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Dublin in 2007.

17 Samuel Beckett, Disjecta, p. 19.

18 Ibid., p. 172.

19 Ibid., p. 142.

20 Adorno, Theodor, Negative Dialectics, trans. Ashton, A. B. (London: Continuum, 1983; first published 1966), p. 380Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., p. 381.

22 Ibid.

23 Badiou, Alain, Being and Event, trans. Feltham, Oliver (London: Continuum, 2005; first published 1989), p. 391Google Scholar. Further specific discussion of this operation in Beckett's prose can be found in both Badiou's On Beckett, ed. and trans. Nina Power and Alberto Toscano (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003) and the Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

24 See Badiou, The Century, pp. 48–57.

25 Bell, Ashes Taken for Fire, n.p.

26 Beckett, Samuel, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove, 1958), p. 414Google Scholar.