Samuel Beckett and Philosophy

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.

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.

The article weaves Lacanian psychoanalysis with narratology. It explores the Beckettian logic of narrative detritus in The Trilogy by examining stories, progressively “worsened” with every act of narration. Reading these obsessive-compulsive moments of narrative as failure, it sheds light on the various techniques and implications of this experiment that range from freezing a narrative into stasis to pushing it toward the limits of speculation and from forcing the narrative to revolve around its exterior to underlining its artifice through narratorial intrusions. The article focuses on the vestigial story-function to underscore the paradoxical status of Beckett’s narrative impulse and demonstrates how the drift of these narrations relocates storytelling from the subjective pole of the “I” to the opacity of language as a field of the Other and finally into the originary and the terminal silence that conditions narrative. The article reads Beckett’s assaults on the realistic narrative logic of the novel in tandem with an aporetic narrative logic that emerges from Lacanian psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the Real, as opposed to realism.

The gaze is a central structuring element of Samuel Beckett's creation. And yet it takes the form of a strangely impersonal visual dimension testifying to the absence of an original exchange of gazes capable of founding personal identity and opening up the world to desire. The collapse of conventional reality and the highlighting of seeing devices point to the absence of a unified representation. While masks and closed spaces show the visible to be opaque and devoid of any beyond, light and darkness, spectres reveal a realm beyond the confines of identity, where nothing provides a mediation with the seen, or sets it within perspective. Finally, Beckett's use of the audiovisual media deepens his exploration of the irreducibly real part of existence, that escapes seeing. This study systematically examines these essential aspects of the visual in Beckett's creation. The theoretical elaborations of Jacques Lacan offer an indispensible framework to understand the imaginary not as representation, but as rooted in the fundamental opacity of existence.

This paper reads the political logic of a numerical community in Lacan's figurations on the One and in Beckett's novel How It Is (1961). It offers a reading of the collective subject in Lacan's Borromean logic which allows infinite knotting in the Borromean chain but the Borromean property of the "plus one" maintains a special status of the One. If any one of the rings is cut, the whole chain dissolves. While this focus on the One may appear to be undemocratic for the community, the emancipatory aspect lies in that it could be any one. The Borromean knot figures a coexistence of the One and the not-One and this speaks to Beckett's novel that oscillates between solitude and company. The article finally situates this mathematically ordained community in terms of a split between the One and the All.

This thesis seeks to understand the relationship between the Modernist writer Samuel Beckett and the Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin. More specifically, it asks why Beckett incorporated elements of Hölderlin's work into his novel Watt.

In arguing that Watt can be read as a reception of Hölderlin's writings, this study suggests that a more complicated relationship exists between Beckett and Romanticism than has often been assumed. By examining this relationship, it aims to shed light on a largely ignored aspect of Beckett's output, allowing new ways of reading him to emerge.

In this paper I sketch how the writings of Samuel Beckett, the twentieth-century’s greatest writer of the ungraspable, talk to our current crisis. My focus is death, and specifically a sense of death as a limit to sense, to human sense-making. In light of the current nihilism that permeates our contemporary culture, Beckett’s sense of death can be redeemed by neither an appeal to scientific materialism nor religious belief. Between the view that we are wholly determined by causes beyond our will, and the view that our consciousness transcends mere matter, Beckett figures death and dying as beyond rationalisation yet ineluctably embedded and embodied. Death defines the human being as such, orienting our meaning-making projects, our feeling of life in the world, yet this philosophical as such turns out to denote that what makes us proper is also what makes us improper, not fully human, animal, or inhuman, in Beckett’s terms. Death is a destroyer of worlds and operates by returning us to the earth, where we belong in excess of all belonging, in excess of the cognate notions of propriety and of property. This paper thus suggests, firstly, that we might rethink Beckett’s materialism in terms less related to space and the body and more in terms of time and finitude and, secondly, we might begin to rethink in this way by tracing the liminal status of death in Beckett through a global or planetary framework; a framework I will substantiate by distinguishing between earth and world. If Beckett’s inhuman sense of death helped to grasp the 20th century’s most noxious nightmares, then let us draw upon the resources of Beckett’s writing to grasp the inhuman sense of life that haunts the 21st century.

Consequent questions that arise from this paper are: How might the entropic drive towards nothingness that characterises so many of the writings yield a new nihilistic ethics for the Anthropocene? How might the Beckettian pairing of necessity and impossibility, when it comes to speaking of life and death, be repurposed in an era of ecological catastrophe? In other words, this paper posits Beckett’s ‘inhuman’ aesthetics as key to understanding the link between the all-too-human and the non-human in our contemporary reality.

Waiting, even in the theatre of the absurd, could contain the testimony of an existence. Such testimony is expressed in a Story, therefore waiting and its compensatory stories and myths are intrinsically related. For Samuel Beckett, the end of a story as a story is possible, the end of a story as an ending is impossible. The Calmative could be seen as the story Hamm (Endgame) longs to escape into. Unable to move, Hamm longs to find himself in the forests. Of all the characters in Endgame, Hamm is the most aware of the philosophy of the ending. It is the very presence of a boy and boyhood (not in a descriptive way, but as an essential opposition, as a stage of life or of the soul when things could have developed differently) that can join together the theme of ending with the theme of paternity, on one hand, corroborating them with the presence of a Story (and therefore of the myth, too) and the presence of waiting as a way to end the ending, by making through to it (on the other hand). The little boy in Hamm’s story-within-the-play appears to be motherless, his story happens on Christmas, the little boy will be saved from starvation but will not be saved from the condemnation to life.  More likely than not, the little boy is Clov at the age of innocence, before being deformed within any co-dependent relationship. Not the fact that the old man in the Calmative is dead is ambiguous, but the stage of his journey after death is ambiguous. The ending of The Calmative is one of the best depictions in world literature about the mystery of a post-mortem existence aware of itself.

Samuel Beckett's "Textes pour rien" / "Texts for Nothing" has been relatively neglected by critics, who tend to limit its importance to the expression of a creative impasse. This book – like the studies in the following volume of our series – aims to reveal it as an æsthetic success. These annotations shed light on the structure of the work, the wealth of the intertextual or biographical allusions, and echoes to other works by Beckett. They comment the nuances of tone and stylistic effects. Intended for a bilingual readership, this book emphasises the divergences between the two “versions”, and which reveal some of the writer's æsthetic choices. A bibliography of criticism in French and English follows this study.

Samuel Beckett a pu qualifier "Textes pour rien"  d’« arrière-faix de L’Innommable », et la critique semble s’être alignée sans hésiter sur ce jugement négatif, voyant dans cette œuvre l’expression d’une impasse dans la création beckettienne. Face à ce constat, ce volume – complétant le livre d’annotations qui le précède dans notre Série – vise à affirmer son importance, à en faire entendre la richesse et la beauté, dans l’objectif de susciter un regain d’intérêt pour ce corpus. Celui-ci se distingue par la singularité de son esthétique, représentant aussi un moment d’approfondissement et de renouveau de l’écriture beckettienne. Une lecture du troisième tome des Lettres, et une étude des liens entre Beckett et Lacan complètent ce parcours.

Discussions of Samuel Beckett’s work, and of his middle-period plays in particular, have long focused on the pessimistic complexion of the content that partially constitutes these texts. This perhaps has as much to do with the young Beckett’s confessed admiration for Arthur Schopenhauer as it does with Theodor Adorno’s oft-cited contention that Beckett’s is an oeuvre in which ‘philosophy … proclaims its bankruptcy … and the poetic process shows itself to be worn out’ (Trying to Understand Endgame, 1982, p.121). Although Shane Weller does acknowledge the importance of Adorno’s contribution to late twentieth-century European thought, he also notes that Emmanuel Levinas was ‘arguably the most influential thinker of alterity, and indeed of the relation between literature and Ethics, in post-Holocaust Europe’ (Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity, 2006, p.3). Bearing in mind the scope of Levinas’s influence, this paper will draw a distinction between the pessimistic appearance of the events dramatised in Beckett’s middle-period plays and the precise nature of the formal medium through which these plays are ultimately realised. With specific reference to "Waiting for Godot" and "Endgame," I argue that the immediacy generated by Beckettian drama creates something of an ethical intervention by compelling the audience to experience the dynamic of the Levinasian face-to-face encounter as it mediates the experience of their onstage counterparts. Moving on to "Eh Joe," this paper further demonstrates that Beckett’s cinematography more immediately implicates the viewer in this face-to-face encounter as it almost entirely collapses the distinction between audience and stage while reconstructing the accusatory and non-empirical characteristics of the Levinasian ‘Face’.

“Krapp’s Last Tape” by Samuel Beckett falls into the category of theatre of the absurd.  The category arises after World War II and is a reaction to the absurdity of war and violence and it questions the meaning of life and death itself.  It is a tragicomedy with roots in vanguard movements, such as surrealism and existentialist philosophy.  Beckett’s one act play consists of one actor, Krapp, a light, a table and a tape recorder. It is a minimalist stage which accents the importance of each element, its symbolism and the psychological dialogue that the main character has with himself through his tape recordings.

This article examines the function of the static body, both with and without speech, in the plays of Samuel Beckett. Zooming in on bodily stasis in Beckett allows us to see how he develops a corporeal discourse of inertness that goes beyond words to establish and formalize what words cannot say. The article probes into the complications of defining life in a static silent body. Gaze and affect work in a politically charged network to create resistant traces of life in inert bodies in Catastrophe and Rough for Theatre II while speech in all its kinetic prowess fails to animate them in Happy Days and Play.

Résumé Cet article considère la fonction du corps statique, parlant aussi bien que muet, dans les pièces de théâtre de Samuel Beckett. L'inspection de la stase corporelle dans l' oeuvre beckettienne met en évidence la façon dont il a mis au point un discours corporel de l'immobilité qui va au-delà des mots afin d'établir et de donner forme à ce que les mots ne peuvent pas dire. L'article interroge les complications liées à l' effort de définir la vie dans un corps muet et immobile. Le regard et l'affect opèrent dans un réseau politi-quement chargé pour créer des traces de vie résistantes dans les corps immobiles de Catastrophe et de Rough for Theatre II, tandis que le discours dans toute sa force ciné-tique ne parvient pas à ranimer ceux de O les beaux jours et de Comédie.