Samuel Beckett

The age of an absurdist disillusionment is correlated to the 50's and 60's that witnessed a collapse of all previously held firm beliefs. The spiritual and social factors that triggered such a loss of meaning for life are several; starting with the waning of religious faith that emerged with Nietzsche's conceptualization of the 'death of god' and the collapse of the liberal faith at the start of World War I. Not to forget to mention, the social revolutions preached by Marx, the radically political aspects that saw the Soviet Union metamorphosing into a totalitarian tyranny, and the barbaric killings and genocides that were practiced by Hitler. Lastly and most importantly, the aftermath of World War II that left a huge impact on everyone. All of those factors lead to the extrapolation of spiritual emptiness in the outwardly prosperous and affluent societies of Western Europe and the United States. The theatre was not absent from all of these aspects, it was a tool to depict and capture this essence of spiritual loss of the era. The spiritual and social factors of the era lead the theatre to be incarnated with an existentialist spirit. In my paper, I will be elaborating on two plays that are contributively seen to establish a depiction of this existentialist spirit. The two plays that I will be focusing on is Waiting for Godot that belongs to the Theatre of the Absurd and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a play that belongs to the Metatheater. Existentialism is a philosophical term that emerged in the late 19th century, its phenomenal doctrines convey a philosophical thinking that starts with the living, feeling human Amireh 1

This essay examines the human-nonhuman proximity emerging from Beckett’s representation of a deconstructed human being and his encounters with nonhuman animals in the “The Expelled”, “The Calmative”, “The End” and “First Love”. With reference to Simone Weil’s categories from The Need for Roots, I show how Beckett’s narrator is lacking physical, psychological, socio-political and philosophical aspects associated with normative human being, which result in a precarious, imprecise identity. In light of this dehumanisation, I close read passages featuring nonhuman animals to argue that while they emphasise the narrator’s marginalisation from human community, they also reveal profound alienation from other animals too. The destabilisation of specific identity, I argue, initiates a reevaluation of the narrator’s place among living beings in general and prefigures the multispecies connectedness advocated in twenty-first century ecocritical reviews of the human-nonhuman divide, such as Donna Haraway’s ‘chthulucene’.

As an artistic sensibility dedicated to the ephemeral and elusive flux of modernity, modernism can be conceived as a contradictory spirit that enacts an auto-defeating and therefore auto-sustaining rapid cycle of attempt and failure, purpose and obsolescence. In this essay I argue that the unachievable, self-perpetuating aspiration that modernism contains is refigured as despondent, late modern ‘vegetating life’ in the works of two limit-modernists, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. Both writers repeatedly offer comparable expressions of endlessness – through purgatorial narrative conditions encapsulated by the continuous recontextualization of deictic language – that resonate with the belatedness and recommencement of modernism. Although deictic language is not especially frequent in Kafka or Beckett, it acquires great significance in their evocations of ‘vegetation’, an underexplored state identified by critics such as Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno that encompasses a series of related binaries: activity and stasis, desire and passivity, life and death. Through portrayals of interminable vegetative states, Kafka anticipates and Beckett epitomises a virtually exhausted late modernist life, undergoing the throes of modernism’s drive for novelty and immediacy while subject to the pervasive negativity and failure that replaces the possibility of achievement. If modernism’s intrinsic tardiness fuels its invention of ever-new forms, the lateness in late modernism manifests as futility, burden and nostalgia. The vegetating life evident narratively and linguistically in Kafka’s ‘The Hunter Gracchus’ (1931) and Beckett’s Texts for Nothing (1950-51), for example, demonstrates the purgatorial condition of modernism habitually starting anew and converts it into late modernism’s protracted ending.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/becketts-breath-9781474421645?cc=us&lang=en&

Beckett's Breath

Anti-Theatricality and the Visual Arts

Sozita Goudouna

Published by Edinburgh University Press

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism Drama and Performance

Examines Beckett's ultimate venture to define the borders between a theatrical performance and purely visual representation
Juxtaposes Beckett's Breath with breath-related artworks by prominent visual artists who investigate the far-reaching potential of the representation of respiration by challenging modernist essentialism
The focus on this primary human physiological function and its relation to arts and culture is highly pertinent to studies of human performance, the nature of embodiment and its relation to cultural expression
Facilitates new intermedial discourses around the nature and aesthetic possibilities of breath, the minimum condition of existence, at the interface between the visual arts and performance practices and their relation to questions of spectacle, objecthood and materiality

Table of Contents

Preface, David Cunningham;
Introduction: In The Same Breath: From the Black Box to the White Cube and Beyond;
Part I: Respiration, Presence, Modernist Discourse and the Question of Medium Specificity;
1. Deeptime: Breath and the Look of Non Art;
2. The Durational Turn: Absorption and The Specificity of Temporality;
Part II: (Re)Presenting Breath;
3. Shortness of Breath: Beckett's Breath in Context;
4. Emptied of Theatre: Breath and the Phenomenology of Disembodiment; PART III: The Exhaled Field;
5. Waste of Breath: The Readymade as a Stage Set;
6. Intermedial Breath: Defying the Boundaries between Displaying and Staging;
7. The Aesthetics of Respiration: Breathing in Different Media;
Endnotes: The Afterlives of Breath: Breathe, Breathe AgainELBreathe Better;
Bibliography.

Visitors to the remarkable collection of Marcel Duchamp's work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art currently pass through an installation by the American artist Joseph Kosuth with the enigmatic title Plays of / for a Respirateur. Occupying an entire room, and juxtaposing facsimiles of various Duchamp works with nine of Kosuth's own pieces, the title is taken from Duchamp's famous reply to the question of how, in the last years of his life, he spent his time: 'I'm not an artist. I'm a breather'. Je suis un réspirateur. Strictly speaking, the claim is a typically Duchampian feint: Duchamp's supposed artistic silence actually hid the fact that he was secretly making his final work Étants Données, which today holds pride of place in the Philadelphia collection. But as an articulation of a blurring of the lines between art and non-art, the poetry of the work and the prose of the world, which Duchamp's career always seemed to emblematise, one can see its obvious appeal to not only Kosuth but to an entire generation of post-war artists and thinkers. The great contemporary German thinker of Pneuma, Peter Sloterdijk, connects, in this vein, the (near) silence of this late Duchamp as réspirateur to the concerns of a much earlier work, also included in the Philadelphia collection.1 A gift to his patrons Walter and Louise Arensberg, 50 cc of Paris Air was 'constructed' in 1919 when, before boarding a ship to New York, Duchamp purchased an 'empty' vial from a pharmacist in Le Havre who he had persuaded to pour out its contents and re-seal. One of Duchamp's first readymades, as well as, characteristically, a joke shared with this patrons - who, he said, already owned everything else he could have bought them - 50 cc of Paris Air also posed a typically Duchampian question concerning what might be the most insubstantial artwork possible, a work that was barely there at all.
Sozita Goudouna's book is perhaps, first and foremost, about this question too, although its nodal point is neither Duchamp not the readymade but Samuel Beckett's 1969 Breath; a literal 'play of / for a Respirateur' that is a work of theatre in much the same sense that 50 cc of Paris Air is a work of visual art. The problem of what to make of such work,

Ce livre participe à la question de l’écriture des mathématiques, de leur hermétisme, de leur inutilité aussi bien, qu’on la prenne au sens métaphysique de Blaise Pascal, ou au sens pragmatique de l’application que nous imposent aujourd’hui certains tenants des algorithmes. Dans ce livre s’impose la référence à Jacques Roubaud — poète et mathé- maticien et historien critique—, l’allusion à Yves Bonnefoy, à Stéphane Mallarmé, à Samuel Beckett, et à Edgar Allen Poe. Il y a le parcours de la galerie de génies tels Galois. Et les réflexions de Leopardi, ou de Malherbe, parmi tant d’autres.

Cet ouvrage se débarrasse du genre de l’anthologie, pour accéder, grâce à trois voix bien différentes mais parallèles, à une réflexion qui n’évite pas la question de l’esthétique et du sublime, et n’en fait pas l’objet d’une dissertation imposée en classe de terminale. Est en jeu l’invention humaine, sa construction ou tout aussi bien sa découverte, mais en plus la façon dont l’inventeur aussi bien que le lecteur se les approprient. Avec le beau dilemme de savoir si doivent se louer le résultat ou la façon de le trouver ou de le retrouver, problème qui touche chacun de nous, mathématicien ou non, poète on non.

Poster presented at the IGEL Biennial Meeting, 6.-9. Juli 2016. Chicago, USA.

Wirag, A. (2016). Waiting for the Script to Break Down – Cognitive Scripts and Absurdity in Waiting for Godot (Poster). IGEL Biennial Meeting, 6.-9. Juli 2016. Chicago, USA.

Si la filmographie de Donigan Cumming est reconnue pour révéler le quotidien des exclus et des miséreux, le film Locke’s Way s’en distingue en se référant à la vie personnelle du vidéaste. Considérant cette œuvre à la fois comme autofiction et comme performance, Cumming y raconte un récit familial à partir de photographies anciennes. Pleinement intégrée à la diégèse de l’histoire, l’image personnelle est alors déployée en tant qu’écriture de l’intime.

This study argues that the most consistent concern in Coetzee’s oeuvre is the question of what makes us human. Ideas of the human that stress language-use, reason, self-consciousness, autonomy and God-likeness are revised in his novels via a ‘poetic of testing’ which pits intertextually-referenced ideas against each other in polyphonic narratives. The study goes on to purport that without acknowledging Coetzee’s revisions of the human, other concerns in his novels such as ethics, the status of the animal, or racial politics cannot be fully understood. In addition to examining the philosophical provenance of questions of the human in the work of such thinkers as Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Barthes and Foucault, the study charts Coetzee’s reconfiguration of elements drawn from major literary precursors like Cervantes, Heinrich von Kleist, Kafka and Beckett. Its leading argument is that Coetzee revises the Enlightenment idea of the human as a disengaged, autonomous thinker by demonstrating the limitations of reason; that he instead offers a view of humanity as engaged agency, a view most compatible with ideas developed in the discourse of posthumanism, theories of materiality and social practice theory; and that his revisions depend on narrative form as much as they recommend a narrative approach to ideas in general.

Quello che è strano, via

Complesso testo di Beckett. Un uomo rinchiuso in un cubo cerca la posizione più confortevole. E senza mai trovarla prova e riprova diverse posizioni e solo nella variazione continua che alterna e muove la sofferenza da un punto all'altro del corpo trova un certo sollievo. I motivi del testo sono innumerevoli. Ne individueremo discrezionalmente tre. La luce, lo spazio, l'immaginazione.
La luce è sollievo e dannazione. si cerca la luce come si cerca l'acqua poi si cerca il buio come si cerca il riposo. La luce è vita, la luce è Dio, la luce in genere si associa al positivo. Ma qui è positivo e negativo assieme, o meglio alternativamente. Dunque anche la luce non è risolutiva. Lo spazio è il problema immediato principale, costringe ad acrobazie assurde che non lasciano riposo. Anche qui il bene è alternanza. Una posizione è bene poi diventa male e via un altra che è bene e poi diventa male a sua volta e via così. Non c'è riposo nello spazio, non c'è soluzione. Movimento sofferenza e barlumi di pace. L'immaginazione è quello che resta in assenza di realtà. E allora pensieri di pensieri di filosofi e donne forse esistite forse immaginate e sempre si torna sui pensieri pensati sulle immagini immaginate e sempre lo stesso e sempre variando e anche qui non c'è pace se non nell'alternanza dei pensieri di pensieri e di immagini uguali e diversi. Non c'è soluzione alcuna. Frammenti di pace nella sofferenza. Solo questo. Il testo termina quando termina l'immaginazione. E questa è la fine.
Interpretare questo testo non è semplice, ma ci proveremo. La chiusa contiene la chiave. L'immaginazione è morta, sembra dire Beckett. E segue il nulla. La fine. Ma si può leggere in positivo, e io tendo a farlo. L'immaginazione finisce e dopo c'è il nulla. Ma il nulla è di nuovo il cubo e la luce e lo spazio e l'immaginazione. Dunque dopo il nulla c'è di nuovo l'immagnazione e via all'infinito. E allora sopravvive la speranza di uno scarto. Una minima quantistica variazione. Il batitto d'ali e il tornado. E l'immaginazione potente vince. Il cubo va in pezzi e l'uomo esce. Libero.
Ecco, io custodirei la speranza nella vittoria di un'immaginazione senza potere.

Bedeuten bis zum Ende-Beckett übersetzt Beckett: It's human, a lobster couldn't do it. Abstract Indem Samuel Becketts bidirektionaler Textkorpus, die ständig neue Überschreibung der eigenen Texte, die Kategorie des Originals unterläuft, hebelt sie die Bedeutung, scheinbar, mit aus, welche dem Text über Becketts Autorität verliehen werden soll. Seine Selbst-Übersetzung ist ein Endspiel, d.h. ohne Ende, eine unmögliche "Aufgabe", um den Text all seiner Bedeutung zu entleeren. In diesem Anspruch ist sich Beckett mit dem Positivismus der ideal language philosophy einig, in der Anerkennung der Grenzen der Sprache ist er ihm voraus. So verbindet sich Becketts Schreiben mit seinem Geschriebenen, seinem Fin de Partie. Beckett, so die These, zeigt nicht die totale Bedeutungslosigkeit, sondern die Unmöglichkeit nichts zu bedeuten. Die Figuren offenbaren im Stück ihr Verstrickt-Sein in Worten und Geschichten, vor allem in die Geschichte von Noah, Gott und der Arche, in die große Geschichte der Eschatologie, von denen sie sich nicht befreien können: "Ah, les vieilles questions, les vielles réponses, il n'y a que ça!" Becketts Selbst-Übersetzungspraxis erweist sich vor dem Hintergrund des Fin de partie als eine Strategie, die Bedeutungslosigkeit zu erreichen, als Versuch, die Kontrolle über die Sprache zurück zu erlangen, indem sie bis zum Null-Punkt geführt wird, nur um ihre, und das heißt unsere eigenen, Grenzen anzuerkennen.