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Think, Pig!: Beckett at the Limit of the Human

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Abstract

This book offers a new interpretation of the links between literature, ethics, and philosophy in Beckett’s works. It surveys the entire corpus with a focus on the post-war period, when Beckett found a wider audience and broke from his mentors Joyce and Proust. Beckett’s decision to write in French, and his subsequent bilingualism, were no accidents but followed a program placing him among post-war writers who rejected Sartre and developed a “writing degree zero” as offering a post-Holocaust literary expression. Two philosophers examined in this historical context are Adorno and Badiou. If they often contradict each other, they converge on many points: Adorno sees that one can be a poet after Auschwitz; Badiou grasps how one can combine beautiful forms and a reduction of life to its generic essentials. For both, Beckett offers a lesson in courage, showing that life is worth living in spite of innumerable reasons to despair. The theme of animals permits a further exploration of life reduced to survival. A red thread comes from Beckett’s friendship with Bataille and their fascination with the Marquis de Sade. Both debunk post-war humanism. Bataille’s philosophy of the Impossible, of excess and transgression, was rephrased in a muted manner by Beckett who preferred Dante, Descartes, Geulincx, Kant and Freud to sketch an ethics of humility. All the while, his works are marked by an inimitable sense of metaphysical comedy that creates an infectious and enduring laughter.
... In so far as Joyce and Beckett sought to overcome enormously influential, deep-seated attitudes to the world prevalent within western modernity, their critiques may be related to the recent use of the term 'posthuman', where that is understood to refer to a critique of the legacy of humanism as fundamentally anthropocentric, as well as Eurocentric, androcentric, and certainly not very eco-friendly. 3 The term 'posthuman' will be relevant in that sense in the following also, as it has been applied in recent discussions of the treatment of the environment in the works of Joyce and Beckett (Borg 2017;Olsson 2022;Rabaté 2016). ...
... 4 While it would not be appropriate to "categorize" Beckett "as a thinker, writer, and practitioner of the posthuman", as Rabaté writes (Rabaté 2016, 41) -and indeed it would be wrong to "categorize" Beckett at all -there is a sense in which Beckett's work offers "inklings" which anticipate some of the concerns of those who use the term 'posthuman' in attempting to think through the implications of the climate crisis for "a time-honoured conception of humanity". In his essay "The Posthuman, or the Humility of the Earth", Rabaté (2016) points out how Beckett's ongoing "critique of anthropomorphism" was reflected in his particular appreciation of Cézanne's paintings of the Mont Sainte Victoire: "Cézanne", Beckett wrote, seems to have been the first to see landscape & state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever. (quoted in Rabaté 2016, 40;cf. ...
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This article suggests that the literary works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett may offer a means of ‘seeing beyond the Anthropocene’. A close look at Joyce’s “The Dead” and the “Proteus” and “Penelope” episodes of Ulysses as well as at Beckett’s play Endgame and other works will show how these writers’ distinct ways of looking at the world, and the life and death of mortal human beings, provide radical critiques of (and perhaps alternatives to) anthropocentric idealism. Their insights are still highly relevant today as the ecological crisis demands a fundamental reorientation of the (post)human relationship with the earth.
Chapter
How are we inclined to read the drive of endless striving and perseverance that marks Samuel Beckett’s postwar shift to an aesthetics of failure? His first-person narrators “go on” to the extent that they keep trying to escape from a world and humanity in ruins; from the sociopolitical structures, institutions, and legal codes that brutalize and confine them; from the systemic mechanisms of control that have reduced their existence to the poverty of managed and appropriated life. In this chapter, I consider the ethical and political implications of those impossible fugitive movements that traverse a sequence of Beckett’s writings, concentrating on “the golden moment” in Molloy (1951), ecstatic release in “The End” (1946), and the verbal overflow of Not I (1972). The bodies, voices, or narrators of those stories aspire to break free, though always in vain, from the material forces that have captured them and continue to subject them to the threat of death. However, in failing to escape, they end up becoming immersed in the common life of things; which is to say they end up evoking an immanence opened to the outside. Drawing on Beckett’s affinities with Georges Bataille, as well as his newly unearthed translations on the Marquis de Sade, I aim to elucidate the lines of flight and elusive departures outward, from within biopolitical conditions of enclosure, of these fugitive life forms. Beckett, I argue, stages or elicits a certain linguistic experience of broken immanence, whose openness to the outside we share in common calls into question sovereign configurations of power and violence constitutive of modernity, all the while affirming other ways of getting free.
Article
This article focuses on Samuel Beckett’s selected short prose works “The Lost Ones” and “Ping,” which both present ruinous landscapes that have witnessed an unspeakable catastrophe. Both texts attempt to reflect such deterioration in the collapse of language. Following environmental criticism and new materialism, this paper analyses Beckett’s texts as potential representatives of a poetics for the Anthropocene. Such a project withdraws from evoking spectacular images of an ecocide witnessed by narrators unaffected by the deteriorating reality; instead, it grasps the necessary crisis of narration as a part of a world that is falling apart.
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The article concentrates on a variety of textual alterations introduced to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot either in the process of translation by the author or by the third parties. In a close reading of these changes the article follows the philosophy of human degradation and connects it both with Beckett’s own ideas on the matter and with a broad cultural context of the epoch. Apart from this philological and cultural analysis, the article advances a thesis that the main theme of Beckett play is not necessarily the absence of Godot/God, or a figure of authority, but the fact of humanity slowly descending into stagnation, depletion of energy and hope as well as physical deprivation. Therefore the article offers an interesting study of Beckett from textual and cultural perspectives, but it also makes a contribution to the genetic criticism of his oeuvre.
Article
This essay argues that the 1957 Black-cast revival of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot stages an Africana absurd sensibility that precedes and supersedes European philosophies of absurdism. While the Continental absurd developed as a repudiation of Western reason and aspired to a universalizing assessment of the human condition, the Africana absurd is situated in the historical formation of racial slavery and colonialism. More specifically, the Africana absurd is a response to the formal meaninglessness and incoherencies of Western racial logic. Locating it within the existential and historical situation of Black theater in the Jim Crow era and attending to theatrical elements such as casting, stage props, and choreography, this essay shows how the production recasts Beckett's absurdism, metatheatricality, and antihumanism to present, rather than represent, the felt absurdity of racial modernity.
Chapter
The question and concept of ‘Life’ in Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre has had a long, complicated and submerged trajectory: from existentialist attributions of radical freedom, to post-structuralist engagements with an ethics of dying and weakness and further to contemporary strands of criticism derived from the neurological and biological sciences that direct our attention towards the material, somatic and posthuman in Beckett’s works. But what does Beckett have to say about Life itself, before the act of critical and conceptual sublation in the work of interpretation? The negative freedom presented by Beckett’s works challenges the hierarchies, exclusions, and binary thinking of biopower, as formulated by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. However, Beckett’s works do not afford a political position through which to directly rival any such discourse. Rather, they undermine the very ground of the oppositions between conceptuality and materiality, the mind and the body, the rational and the irrational, that structure conventional political and ethical modalities of thought, action and responsibility.
Chapter
Asking ‘How Beckett has modified modernism’ presupposes a definition of modernism and agency facing a critical consensus. Unlike the ‘historical’ avant-gardes, modernism as a category was applied retroactively to a preceding corpus. One often hears that modernism culminated in 1922, which situates Beckett as a belated ‘late modernist’. I would suggest a longer periodicity for modernism and see it continue after 1950. It would be represented by writers like Beckett and Coetzee and by theoreticians like Adorno, Greenberg, Bataille, Derrida, or Deleuze. Such a ‘late-late’ modernism will retroactively impact our current definitions of ‘high modernism’. Beckett contributed to this ongoing re-evaluation by transforming a few Proustian and Joycean premises. This essay focuses on Joyce’s later work and analyses how Beckett took over from Joyce a concept of the ‘posthuman’ that he deployed in The Unnamable. It requires to be interpreted with the help of the theories of the philosophers quoted above.
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This article reflects on the relation between Fritz Mauthner and James Joyce, of whom we know that he read Mauthner's Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache and quotes sections of it in his monumental last work, Finnegans Wake. It will focus on the complex multilingual environments in which Joyce and Mauthner grew up and consider the ways in which these shaped how they thought about language.
Article
The many achievements of Beckett scholarship in recent years, exploring drafts and notebooks, tracking sources, investigating the biography and mining the letters, run the risk of losing sight of the reason why he merits this degree of attention: the singularity, inventiveness and power of his work, on the page, stage and screen. Starting from Derrida's brief comments on Beckett, in which the philosopher expresses a fascination for what is left over when we have digested (or failed to digest) the content of the writing, this essay takes The Unnamable as an example of a work whose strangeness has often been reduced by accounts of its thematic substance or its various contexts. Addressing primarily the English text but dipping into the French where appropriate, it focuses on the way the work happens: the sequencing of elements, the build-up and relaxation of tension, the enigmas and their resolutions, the withholding and unfolding of information. What, it asks, does this work offer for our enjoyment? What makes it, sporadically, so funny? A short passage from The Unnamable is discussed, with attention to its rhythms, its deployment of expectations aroused and satisfied, postponed, or disappointed, its sometimes recondite diction, and its modulation of tone and register. To read The Unnamable with full appreciation, it is argued, is to participate in the voice's dilemmas, to follow its tortuous reasonings, to take part in its ironic musings, to share its anger and frustration, to laugh at its absurdities, to savour its sheer energy and persistence. All this arises from the event of reading, the experience of the text as it unfolds its words and sentences. Taking advantage of language's capacity to unmake what it has made, Beckett invites the reader to participate in its paradoxes as oscillations and self-cancellations that occur in the reading experience to produce an engaging and entertaining work of literature rather than the mental exercise or verbal puzzle that it can sometimes seem in the hands of its critics.
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