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on beckett

alain badiou

editors alberto toscano & nina power

Copyright © Clinamen Press 2003

Translation, introduction

Postface © Andrew

published by Clinamen PTP rl:iT Unit B

Aldow Enterprise Park

Blackett Street

Manchester

M12 6AE

www.clinamen.co.uk

'The Writing of the Genenc' publIshed in French

in the work Conditions by Editions du Seuil as

'L' ecriture du generique: Samuel Beckett'

© Editions du Seuil, 1992

Editions du Seuil, 27 rue Jacob, Paris

Tireless Desire published in French by Hachette

as Beckett: L 'increvable desir

© Hachette, 1995

Hachette Livre, 43 quai de Grenelle, Paris

'Being, Existence, Thought: Prose and Concept'

published in French in the work Petit manuel d'inesthetique

by Editions du Seuil as ,

'Etre, existence, pensee: prose et concept'

First English translation © Stanford University Press

Stanford University Press, 1450 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, California

This book is supported by the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs

as part of the Burgess Programme headed for the French Embassy

in London by the Institnt Franyais du Royaurne-Uni

All rights reserved. No part of this edition may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written pennission of the publishers.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

hardback

paperback

ISBN 1903083 26 5

ISBN 1903083 30 3

Designed and typeset in Times New Roman with Verdana display by Ben Stebbing, Manchester

Printed and bound in the UK by Biddies Ltd

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This book is dedicated to the memory of our friend Sam Gillespie

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Contents

Notes on References Note on the Contributors Acknowledgements Editors' Introduction - 'Think, pig!' Author's Preface

I The Writing of the Generic 2 Tireless Desire 3 Being, Existence, Thought: Prose and Concept 4 What Happens 5 Postface - Badiou, Beckett and Contemporary Criticism

Andrew Gibson

Notes Index

• • • Vlll •

IX X •

Xl xxxv

I 37

79

113

1 19

1 37

161

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Note on the References

The situation regarding Beckett translations is without doubt a complicated one, for a variety of

oft-discussed authorial and editorial reasons. In order to allow the reader to navigate Badiou's

essays and refer to the Beckett texts when necessary, we have endeavoured to render the references

in On Beckett as practicable as possible, opting for the insertion in brackets of the British (Calder

Publishers and Faber and Faber) and American (Grove Press) page references in the main body

of the text. Because of important terminological differences and due to the interest of Beckett's , own 'self-translations' we have placed the original French (Les Editions de Minuit) quotes in

the endnotes. Any other comments made by the editors will appear in brackets. Page references

are to the editions currently in print by each publisher. The abbreviations used throughout the

texts for the British and American editions are as follows:

C - Company (Calder Publishers, 1996) CDW - The Complete Dramatic Works (Faber and Faber, 1 990) CSP - Collected Shorter Prose 1945-1980 (Calder Publishers, 1 986) E - Endgame (Grove Press, 1 958) GSP - The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989 (Grove Press, 1995) HD - Happy Days (Grove Press, 1 983) HII- How It Is (Calder Publishers, 1 996) HII US - How It Is (Grove Press, 1988) ISIS - III Seen III Said (Calder Publishers, 1997) M - Murphy (Calder Publishers, 1 997) MUS - Murphy (Grove Press, 1 970) NO - Nohow On (Company, III Seen III Said, Worstward Ho) (Grove Press, 1 996) SP - Collected Shorter Plays (Grove Press, 1 984) T - Trilogy (Calder Publishers, 1 994) TN - Three Novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) (Grove Press, 1991) W - Watt (Calder Publishers, 1 970) W US - Watt (Grove Press, 1 970) WG - Waiting/or Godot (Grove Press, 1954) WH - Worstward Ho (Calder Publishers, 1 983)

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Note on the Contributors

Andrew Gibson is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at

Royal Holloway and is the author of Postmodernity, Ethics and the

Novel: From Leavis to Levinas. He is currently preparing a book on

Badiou's reading of Beckett.

Nina Power is currently studying for a PhD in philosophy at

Middlesex University, London.

Alberto Toscano teaches at Goldsmiths College and is the author of

several articles on Badiou, De1euze, Nietzsche and Schelling. He is

the translator of Badiou's forthcoming Handbook of Inaesthetics

and The Century.

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Acknowledgements

The editors wish to thank Leslie Hill for his insightful comments and advice on the original manuscript, Bill Ross at Clinamen for his patience, amiability and useful interventions, Peter Hallward and Ray Brassier for their vital insights into Badiou's thought, Dr Julian Garforth at the Beckett archive ,

University of Reading, for his assistance and generosity and Bruno Bosteels for kindly providing us with his original translation of 'The Writing of the Generic' . Above all, our thanks go to Alain Badiou for his unflagging support of this project.

l Ala i n B a d i ou On Beckett

'Think, pig!' An Introduction to Badiou's Beckett

•

These writings on Samuel Beckett by Alain Badiou, assembled here for the

first time, comprise ten years of work by one of France's leading thinkers on

one of the 20th century's most innovative and vital writers. This volume brings

together translations of 'Samuel Beckett: L'ecriture du generique' (the

concluding chapter of the collection Conditions ( 1 992)); a short monograph

entitled Beckett. L 'increvable desir ( 1995); a long chapter on Worstward Ho

from the more recent Petit manuel d 'inesthetique ( 1998); and finally 'Ce qui

arrive' , a brief conference intervention, also from 1 998.1 Viewed as distinct

moments in a prolonged intellectual encounter, these texts reveal a complex

and rigorous reading of Beckett, but a Beckett quite distinct from those of

other French thinkers such as Deleuze, Bataille, Blanchot or Derrida (to note

some of the most obvious of Bad iou's 'rivals' in this enterprise), as well as

from the majority of Anglo-American Beckett scholarship.2 This introduction

will seek to develop two basic theses: Firstly, that Badiou's reading of Beckett,

whilst in part a response to other currently more celebrated French

interpretations, and, indeed, indebted to some of their key insights (such as,

for example, Blanchot's insistence on the relationship between writing and

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silence, or Bataille's account of Beckett's impersonal ontology) is ultimately different in kind to them, in its general aims as well as in the detail of its arguments. Secondly, that, whilst Badiou's writings on Beckett function to some extent as occasions for the rehearsal or mise-en-scene of the principal components of his philosophy - event, subject, truth, being, appearance, the generic - they are by no means a mere 'application' of Bad iou's doctrine to a figure writing (ostensibly) in another discipline. Rather, we shall argue that the encounter with Beckett forces Badiou to introduce concepts and operations which, if not entirely new to his thinking, nevertheless constitute considerable, and possibly problematic, additions to, or variations upon, the fundamental tenets of his enterprise. Taken together, these two lines of inquiry will also give us the opportunity to consider the vexed question of the relationship between philosophy and literature, as it comes to be defined by Badiou's recent doctrine of 'inaesthetics' .

1. In order to indicate in what sense these texts present a unique exposition

of Beckett's thinking, it is worth beginning with one of Badiou's decisive formulas: 'the lesson of Beckett is a lesson in measure, exactitude and courage' . From the outset, we can of course note the polemical nature of such an affirmation, designed as it is to elicit the surprise and consternation of a certain sensus communis pervading both Beckett criticism proper and the reception of his work beyond the narrow confines of the academy. In his exploration of Beckett's writings, Badiou outlines a vision ofa pared-down, philosophically amenable, and ultimately (and, prima facie, surprisingly) resourceful literary and intellectual project. In stark contrast to prevalent readings of Beckett's work by either Anglo-American or (the majority of) other European commentators, Badiou conceives of Beckett's oeuvre as in , toto, more hopeful than hopeless, more optimistic than nihilistic.

How, in the first place, is this affirmative, courageous - though atheological and non-redemptive - Beckett possible? The Beckett we know from Blanchot, from Bataille, from Ricks on the British side, and from numerous others, necessarily and constitutively cannot be this strong ' ethical' writer; Badiou's reading must therefore surely betray what Derrida, above all, points to as the 'impossibility' of writing defmitively about Beckett. Indeed,

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�,\ I l'\ IlllpiclcJy has this edict of 'timidity' subtended the 'post-humanist' rules

III (:oll1mentary about Beckett, that it is seemingly impossible to assert

:lllything at all about Beckett; all one can do is acknowledge that every possible

assertion already becomes its negative within Beckett's work itself, so that

allY criticism begins already from a position of inherent weakness, prefigured

hy thc wry 'admission' that Beckett has stranded his critics in the position of

having nothing left to do. From the outset Badiou's unusually strong reading

thus upsets the (admittedly understandable) trepidation that has always

accompanied the more careful readings of Beckett undertaken during the

laller half of the 20th century.

Badiou will thus engage in none ofthe rhetoric, so often manifested in

thc scholarship, that finds in Beckett so many hypostases ofthe 'paralysing'

imperative of language and silence, the opacity of the signifier, the end of

1l10dernity, etc. In fact, Badiou fails to even discuss the vast bulk of

contemporary Anglo-American Beckett scholarship, as well as refusing any

protracted engagement with any of his French predecessors. Indeed, he has

been explicitly criticised for failing to engage with either of these two strands

of Beckett study.3 Certainly this lack of dialogue is revealing, but arguably

indicates more about the nature of our expectations when it comes to a critical

reading of Beckett rather than demonstrating any outright omission or

shortcoming on Badiou's part. It is, above all, Badiou's desire to read Beckett

'at his word' or 'to the letter' that indicates that what we are dealing with,

quite simply, is Beckett's texts themselves, and not their critical reception.

We are also a long way here from Derrida's half-humble, half-arrogant

declaration: 'Beckett, whom I have always "avoided" as though I had always

already read him and understood him too well. '4 In the first place, Badiou

seems to say, we cannot 'avoid' Beckett, however much he seems to pre­

empt us - the singularity and intellectual weight of his work is such as to

demand an explicitly philosophical response and articulation (without, of

course, over-determining its 'literary' qualities; as we shall see below, this

distinction is precisely at stake in Badiou's notion of 'inaesthetics'). Moreover,

the complexity ofthe categories and operations deployed in Beckett's work,

as well as their transformations, is such that, without a stringent and systematic

investigation, it is entirely fatuous to think that we have (always) already

understood Beckett. Indeed, as with all thinking worthy of the name, Beckett's

writing draws its force and urgency precisely from the way that it subtracts

itself from our impressions and intuitions; in other words, from the manner

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in which it excavates our muddled and spontaneous phenomenologies to reveal

a sparse but essential set of invariant functions that determine our 'generic

humanity'.

Where then, does Badiou find the critical resources to present us with

a Beckett so vigorously opposed to many of the shared presumptions of

contemporary scholarship and philosophical reception? Simply in order to

orient the reader, we would like to point to one of the crucial instances in

which these resources are to be found: The importance of the much-overlooked

and, as Badiou puts it, 'worst understood' 1960s prose text How It Is, and the

identification of a chronological break (corresponding to a real crisis in

Beckett's thought) before and after this text. This will help us the better to

discern the stakes of his approach and the challenge it poses to rival

interpretations. We will then move on, in section two, to assess the

consequences - both for his reading of Beckett and for his thinking as a

whole - of Badiou's concern with Beckett' s method and with the

'philosophical anthropology' that the latter implies.

While the so-called 'Trilogy' (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable)

has received copious and exacting attention for its exploration of the

vicissitudes of language, SUbjectivity and 'aporetics' , and Watt and Murphy

are seized upon as anticipation oflater problematics and for their characteristic

humour, How It Is (published as Comment c 'est by Minuit in 1961 , with

Beckett's English version published by Calder in 1964) seems most often to

be filed under the category of ' anomaly' for many Beckett scholars (although

there are indications that this is increasingly no longer the case). For Badiou,

however, the text occupies an absolutely crucial role in Beckett's oeuvre,

indicating a decisive shift in both the themes and the style of his prose. Badiou

nevertheless professes to agree with all those who see impasse and the torture

of language in the prose works up to and including the Trilogy and Texts for

Nothing. But this is not the end of the matter, and Badiou chastises himself

for having originally accepted this vision of Beckett as manifesting ' the

(ultimately inconsistent) alliance between nihilism and the imperative of

language, between vital existentialism and the metaphysics of the word,

between Sartre and Blanchot.' In this respect, we should note that Badiou

wishes to evacuate the defeatist pathos accorded to the impasse, together

with any intimation that we are here faced with the linguistic 'truth' of human

finitude or with an episode in the genealogy of nihilism; rather, he intends to

approach it as a problem that demands resolution from Beckett at the level of

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the writing itself.

In the kind of ad hominem argument that would scandalise any good

Derridean, Badiou argues that the incessant repetitions in Beckett's early

works, what he refers to as an oscillation between the cogito and the 'grey

black', led to a crisis for Beckett - both personally and as a writer.s That by

the early 1960s he had, in some sense, reached a ' last' state; all that remained

to be said is that there was nothing more to be said. 'Saying' had, for Beckett,

reached its absolutely maximal degree of purification. As Badiou puts it:

It was necessary to have done with the alternation of neutral being and

vain reflection so that Beckett could escape the crisis, so that he could

break with Cartesian terrorism. To do this, it was necessary to find some

third terms, neither reducible to the place of being nor identical to the

repetitions of the voice. It was important that the subject be opened up to

an alterity and cease being folded upon itself in an interminable and

torturous speech. Whence, beginning with How It Is (composed between

1959 and 1 960), the growing importance ofthe event (which adds itself to

the grey black of being) and of the voice of the other (which interrupts

solipsism).

Badiou thus argues that there is a break with two key early positions:

the schemata of predestination that emerge in Watt and Murphy and the

oscillation between the solipsist cogito and the 'grey black' of the 'Trilogy' .

In order, therefore, to understand Badiou's seemingly indefensible claim

regarding the affirmation and hope present in Beckett's work, we must now

refer to the key concept that sustains this view ofthe later Beckett: the event

or encounter. What exactly happens with How It Is for Badiou to find these

'third terms' so crucial? In How It Is the prose is grounded in different

categories: the category of 'what-comes-to-pass' [ce-qui-se-passe] and, above

all, the category of alterity - of the encounter and the figure of the Other,

fissuring and displacing the solipsistic internment of the cogito. In order to

shed some light on this transformation we will need to shift our focus onto

the philosophical armature that subtends Badiou's various readings. As we

shall argue, the constellation of concepts employed in these texts is neither

(explicitly) Beckett's nor (entirely) Badiou's, but is rather the product of a

philosophical or ' inaesthetic' capture of a literary work which does not leave

philosophical doctrine untouched. The aforementioned division of Beckett's

oeuvre into two distinct periods, before and after How It Is is crucial to

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understanding the role of the 'event', both for Badiou's reading of Beckett,

and indeed, for Badiou's own work as a whole. Bearing in mind this 'shift',

the notion of an unforeseen event or encounter that constitutes subjectivity in

the meeting of an other, radically separates Badiou's 'affirmative' reading

from any interpretations centred on the notion of a human condition, as in

Martin Esslin's work on the absurd, for example. This is partly because there

is nothing inevitable about the event, only that ' something happens to us' ,

and partly because what follows from the event is absolutely singular, though

( crucially) universalisable.

The encounter, if it happens at all, is absolutely not pre-determined.

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Encounters in Beckett always arise by chance: Prior to a meeting there is

only solitude. One consequence of this state of solitude is the lack of any

essential or substantial sexual difference. It is true that Beckett's characters

often seem without sex or androgynous. It is only as a consequence, therefore,

as an effect of the encounter, that sexuation becomes possible. As Badiou

writes: 'In the figure oflove . . . the Two occurs, together with the Two of the

sexes or sexualised figures. ' The numericality of this newly arisen pair is

crucial. Prior to the encounter, the solipsistic One has no resources to escape

its One-ness. The encounter, the absolute novelty of the event of love, from

whence arises the Two, does not lead back to a new One, the love which

would be denigrated as 'fusion' in the Freudian sense, or even in a banal,

romantic, popular-cultural sense, but to infinity. One, Two, infinity: For the

voice of How ItIs, there is: 'before Pim with Pim after Pim' . This 'exponential

curve' to infinity derives from the fact that the Two of love, of the pure

encounter is a passage. But to what? Badiou replies: to 'the infinity of beings,

and experience' . The Two oflove introduces a new opening onto the sensible

world, away from the endless circuits of language. Love permits 'beauty,

nuance, colour' . It also permits - in fact, it is the only event to do so -

happiness. Perhaps we are now in a better position to see where the 'hope'

and potential in Beckett's work ultimately lies for Badiou - not, as a reading

that would wish to re-inscribe him into the long wave of humanism, in the

commonality of human properties, but, on the contrary, in the absolute'

singularity of an unforeseen encounter.

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What How It Is indicates, then, is a movement beyond the impasse in

the prose itself, and the revelation that, indeed, 'the narrative model is not

enough', that something else can happen, within the prose, that is not itself

limited to it (here we are obliged to bracket the - always ironic - question:

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what else is there 'besides' the prose?). What does this ' lack of limitation'

mean? Simply that, amidst the Dante-esque crawling and drowning in the

mud of How It Is, the violent tussles involving can-openers and bashed skulls,

the darkness and silence, there is possibility of an existence that is wholly

other, wholly new, not only in the life of memory and images, but in the

present, with and through another: 'two strangers uniting in the interests of

torment' . The encounter, however temporary, however sadistic, smashes apart

the solipsistic linguistic oscillation, such that the speaker of How It Is can

recognise that 'with someone to keep me company I would have been a

different man more universal' . What the temporary, non-fusional, conjunction

of the Two allows is an opening onto infinity, onto universality; 'that for the

likes of us and no matter how we are recounted there is more nourishment in

a cry nay a sigh tom from one whose only good is silence or in speech extorted

from one at last delivered from its use than sardines can ever offer. '

II.

If anything marks out Badiou's approach to the literary and stage works

of Samuel Beckett, it is the steadfast conviction that in order to really think

through their uniqueness, a thorough and unapologetic operation of

formalisation is in order, one demonstrating the ultimately unequivocal

character of Beckett's thought, even (or especially) in what concerns its

oscillations and aporias. This position, which can be expediently summarised

as a concern with method- and which does not exclude careful considerations

of both the methods of failure and the failures of method - is undoubtedly

what makes these commentaries so alien to the more or less pervasive vision

of Beckett as a relentlessly elusive and anti-systematic writer. Whether the

reader of these pages will recoil in horror at such an unwavering Beckett or

assent with enthusiasm to their formal systematicity will depend to a

considerable degree on the manner in which he or she responds to the claims

made herein about the existence and nature of a rationally re-constructible

and rigorously actualised method. Indeed, it is only by confronting this

question that we can come to terms with what constitutes, for better or worse,

the uniqueness of Badiou's reading, and what sets it apart drastically from

the interpretations of most, if not all, his contemporaries when it comes to

the writings of Beckett.6

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In this respect, to focus on analogous identifications of recurrent

Beckettian 'themes' that Badiou may share with other writers, or upon

apparently convergent assessments of certain characters or texts would in the

end divert us from a lucid appraisal of Badiou's challenge. For Badiou, it is

only by confronting the characteristic operations or procedures defining

Beckett's work that we can really come to terms with the singularity and

force of Beckett's contribution to thought. In 'Tireless Desire' these are

enumerated as follows:

Rectification, or the work on the isolation of tenns. Expansion, or the

poetic incision of memory. Declaration, or the function of emergence of

prose. Declension, or the tender cadence of disaster. Interruption, or the

maxims of comedy. Elongation, or the phrased embodiment of variants.

It could not be any clearer that what captivates Badiou is not the

equivocity or impotence claimed for Beckett's writing, but rather the

relentlessness and precision that mark its fundamental moves, those formal

aesthetic inventions which are both technical discoveries and new postures

for thinking.7 This is, after all, the crux of the problem: What is thought in

Beckett's work? This question needs to be understood in both senses. Firstly,

what do Beckett's many texts allow us to think which was previously

unthought, whether in literature or philosophy? Secondly, what place does

thought (la pensee, an insistent presence in these pages) have in Beckett's

work? Rather than, more or less explicitly, according to writing the dubious

privileges of expressive imprecision and fleeting affect, Badiou's

uncompromising penchant for formalisation is designed to affirm the rigour

of writing as a discipline of thought, a rigour that the seriousness of Beckett's

impasses (especially the one sealed by Texts for Nothing) bears witness to.

The comparisons with Kant and Husserl, as well as the more sustained

consideration of Beckett's Cartesianism, should therefore be taken at their

word. Leaving aside for the moment the vexed question of the demarcation of the literary (or aesthetic) from the philosophical, it is worth spending a

brief moment to elucidate this method of Beckett's, and to do so through the

problematic, absolutely central to Badiou's approach, of 'thinking humanity' .

The first approach to the question of method is couched in explicitly

philosophical parameters. Tracing a lineage from Descartes to Husserl in

terms of a postulate of suspension, Badiou argues that Beckett's method of

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suhtractive paring-down- or 'leastening' in the vocabulary of WorstwardHo

is akin to Husserl's epoch?! 'turned upside down'. By this Badiou means

t ha t rather than 'bracketing' or suspending the world in order to examine the

purciy formal conditions of that world in and for consciousness, Beckett

slIsfiends the subject in order to see what then happens to being per se. This

is an intriguing reversal, and links back to Badiou's initial formulation for

t he condition of possibility for the encounter, for the Two. Before this event,

there is only the solipsistic 'torture' of the cogito. In other words, we have a

tormented subject oflanguage, on the one hand, and a non-intentional analysis

of the ' landscape' of being, on the other. Badiou, via Beckett, links the

circularity of the cogito to the 'nothing' beyond it - this is the noir gris, the

'grey black' of being. It is in this space that the language ofthecogito attempts

to approach its Qwn origin, but necessarily always falls short of its object.

The grey black of being is precisely 'nothing', but as Molloy points out,

following the Atomists: 'Nothing is more real than nothing'.

The 'torture' of the cogito is precisely the imperative or 'pensum', as

Hugh Kenner would argue, to commence again, to say again. Because ofthe

necessary interiority of the cogito, its self-supporting persistence, ' It is

necessary that the subject literally twist itself towards its own enunciation' .

We are thus left only with a voice that oscillates, struggling relentlessly

between temporary self-affirmation and the 'beyond' of being, which is

precisely void. For the cogito, all saying is precisely 'ill saying' because it

can never come close to touching the void from out of which language speaks.

The desire for silence cannot, therefore, succeed, for the imperative to repeat,

to begin again, cannot be matched by the desire for cessation. In this reading

ofthe 'void' and the impossibility of silence, we can see an implicit criticism

of those commentators who stay with the aporia, who see in Beckett only the

problem of language and its impossible constraint. Beckett himself, as if

realising the temptation of following the 'pathless path', begins The

Unnamable with an aporetic joke: 'I should mention before going any further,

that I say aporia without knowing what it means. '

As a second approximation to this delicate question of method, let us

contrast it with the explicit discussion of method through which Badiou

elsewhere approaches the works of Rimbaud and Mallarme.8 For Badiou,

Rimbaud's work, despite its formidable inventive capacity and unmatched

vigour, is ultimately incapable of accepting the conditions imposed by the

undecidable character of the event, the fact that the latter can never be transitive

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to, or coincide with, the situation that it affects. In brief, that being and the

event can never enter into any sort of communion. Hence the tendency of

Rimbaud's poetry, when faced with the non- or extra-ontological demand of

the event's emergence, to resort to the operation of interruption, which in the

end denies the 'now' of an event that can itself never be identified with the

situation - thereby signalling both the denial of novelty and the defeat of

language. Given over as it is to what Badiou regards as the 'mirage' of a

complete possession of truth, Rimbaud's poetry manifests the incapacity of

assuming the hardships of subjectivation, the painstaking work of a truth that

can never be immediately present as the truth of things, or as the linguistic

celebration of the appearance of the world.

With Mallarme's method, we move instead to a writing that is entirely

positioned 'after ' the event , or rather, a writing that wholly affirms the

undecidability proper to an event that can never be attested in or by the situation

without a long labour of detection and reconfiguration. This is why Mallarme's

method is concerned with the isolation of an event that is constitutively

evanescent, that must be wagered upon in order then to register its traces and

effects upon a situation. These traces and effects are to be considered in terms

of how the event both inscribes and subtracts itselffrom an ontological state

of affairs, being as such neither present nor non-problematically individuated

in the realm of appearances. Mallarme's method thus establishes something

like an intrigue of the event 's disappearance, a syntactically driven

investigation into the potentially determinate but inapparent effects of

something that can never exactly be said to be. How, in the absence of any

normal 'evidence', can we affirm in a given situation that something has

happened, and, on the basis of this wager (this dice-throw) deduce its

consequences for the situation? Such is the axis of Mallarme's method,

conferring upon it its singular place as a reference for Badiou's work, as 'the

thought of the pure event on the basis of its decided trace. '

Forcing our schematisation somewhat, we could say that if Rimbaud

shows us the abdication oflanguage in the face ofthe present demands of the

undecidable, and Mallarme the retrospective detection of the traces of a

vanished novelty, Badiou's Beckett is almost (and this 'almost' marks the

very place of the event in Beckett's work) wholly devoted to delineating the

conditions demanded for the emergence of truth and novelty - including those

conditions of a cognitive or linguistic order that threaten to forestall any such

emergence, consigning the subject to the infinite ordeal of solipsism, to that

xx

l Alain Bad i o u On Beckett

( 'artesian torture which so preoccupies Badiou in these pages. The

identification of the functions of the human on the basis of the torsion of the

cogito onto the imperative of language, together with the cartography of the

places and inscriptions of being, all seem to indicate, in Badiou's reading, an at tempt to 'prepare' for an event that is only liminally introduced through the

ligures of the Two and the Other.

It could therefore be said that Beckett's method partly inverts the

methods of the two other writers considered by Badiou. In it, the event

functions as an interruption of torture (rather than an interruption of joy in

defeat, as in Rimbaud) and prose lays out the ontological groundwork prior

to an event (rather than thinking it in its disappearance, as in Mallarme). In

sum, we have Beckett as the courageous preparation for the event (,before'),

Rimbaud as the defeatist decision against the undecidable of the event

('during'), and Mallarme as the protocol of fidelity in its subtractive

'relationship' to a disappearance and to the isolation of a pure multiple (' after ').

Lest this partition appear all too tidy, it is worth turning now to the peculiar

and problematic effects that this preparatory or anticipatory character of

Beckett's method has with regard. to the elaborate doctrinal apparatus,

principally set out in L 'etre et I ' evenement, that allows Badiou to isolate this

method in the first place. To emphasize this more conflictive dimension of

Badiou's encounter with Beckett, we will now look at the role of appearance,

subjectivity and language in these essays on Beckett, focussing throughout

on how these notions determine a certain perspective on thinking humanity,

that is, on humanity as a pure capacity to be affected by the irruption of

novelty and to decide upon the event.

We have grown accustomed to (and accustomed to criticising) claims

that Beckett's work offers us a disquisition on the 'human condition', that it

is the bearer of universal formulations regarding 'human nature' . Exemplary

of this position is Esslin who, writing in the late fifties and early sixties,

sought to extract from the dramatic works a Beckett absolutely existentialist

in his proclamations and scope. As he put it: '[Beckett's] creative intuition

explores the elements of experience and shows to what extent all human

beings carry the seeds of such depression and disintegration within the deeper

layers of their personality. '9 Badiou's take, whilst seemingly sharing the

universalising impetus of Esslin's reading, sees in Beckett not so much a

delving into deeper and deeper layers of humanity (and the subsequent

'redemptive' conclusion that always follows these humanist attempts via the

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isolation of some unalienable qualities or properties that sum up what it is to

be 'human'), but rather proposes that in Beckett's work we encounter an

absolutely formal reduction of 'thinking humanity' to its indestructible

functions, to its atemporal determinants.

It is in this respect that Beckett is compared to Descartes - suspending

all that is inessential and doubtful before beginning his ' serious enquiry' into

humanity. Certain of Beckett's prose works (Texts for Nothing among them)

can therefore be read as asking the following question: What is the composition

of thought, if it is reduced to its absolutely primordial constituents? With

explicit reference to Plato's Sophist, Badiou isolates certain generic functions ,

of Beckett's characters in the early texts: movement and rest, being and

language.1o Just as Kant and Husserl vehemently refused any form of

'psychologism' in their work, so Beckett can be read, in a similar way, as

proposing, within a literary set-up, the same move away from personal

descriptions of ' states of mind'. Rather than witnessing in Beckett the essential

'miseries' , the inevitable and ultimately 'absurd' 'predicament' that Esslin,

for one, argues universally underlies 'personality' and 'culture' , Badiou views

this suspension of cultural and individuating traits in Beckett as anabsolutely

positive procedure, because it allows one, he argues, to go ' straight to the

only questions that matter' . What's more: 'Thus reduced to a few functions,

humanity is only more admirable, more energetic, more immortal' .

I ' I , I ' " "

However, aside from texts that lie somewhat outside the speculative

core of Badiou's philosophy (namely the Ethics and its discussion of the

immortal, and the defence of universalism in the Saint Paul), it is hard to say

that the notion of humanity receives any sustained formal treatment in Badiou

- something that should not elicit surprise, given both Badiou's fidelity to

the tradition of philosophical anti-humanism and his 'post-Marxist' decision

for a theory of the subject that regards it as predicated upon the irruption of

an event. But as it arises in his readings of Beckett, this attempt to determine

an 'atemporal' humanity in its basic functions arguably involves certain

deviations from the mainstays of Badiou's philosophy. For instance, it

demands an interrogation of subjects that come 'before' the event (something

seemingly written out of his major works). It also requires a consideration of

the relationship between the human as capacity and the imperative oflanguage.

Lastly, it demands the introduction of the crucial concept of Bad iou's recent

work, appearance. Something in the critical and ascetic approach of Beckett

can thus be said to lead Badiou to an interrogation, otherwise absent or latent

XXII

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l Ala in Bad i ou On Beckett

in his philosophy, of philosophical anthropology. What weight are we to give

to this attempt to delineate the pre-evental 'ethical substance' of fidelity and

subjectivation, and what importance must be ascribed to the fact that this is

done in language?

The hypotheses on humanity that Beckett sets out through his derelict

figures and desolate landscapes are initially staged by Badiou, as we have

already noted, in the confrontation between the tortured cogito and the

indifferent cartography of the places of being. The first thing to note, if we

wish to measure the distance between Badiou's own doctrine and how it

responds to Beckett's art, is that the 'Cartesian' concerns in the latter's work

introduce the problem - which is otherwise alien, if not contrary, to Badiou's

stance - of a subject before or without the event. Though Beckett's epoche

subtracts the subject in order to lay out the place of being (or rather, of its

appearance), it turns out that the resolute annihilation of all subjectivity is

simply impossible - language and its subject abide even (or especially) in the

most extreme moment of their destitution. As Badiou states: 'all fiction, as

devoted as it may beto establishing the place of being - in closure, openness

or the grey black - presupposes or connects to a subject. This subject in turn

excludes itself from the place simply by the act of naming it, whilst at the

same time holding itself at a distance from this name:l l In other words, the

very attempt to establish a literary or fictional ontology (as opposed to a

neutral mathematical ontology) cannot do without the supplementation

provided by a subject; to borrow from Badiou's friend Natacha Michel, it

can never evade the problem of enunciation: 'Who speaks?,12

This subject of fiction or subject oflanguage, as acogito constitutively

determined by the imperative to speak and name being, is itself not a simple

or point-like instance, but rather a tom figure, thrice divided into a subject of

enunciation, a passive body of subjectivation and a subject of the question.

On this 'third' subject, it is worth quoting Badiou at length.

'Question' can be taken here in its judicial sense, as when we speak of a

subject being questioned. For what is in fact this torture of thought? As

we've already said, the dim - the grey-black that localises being - is

ultimately nothing but an empty scene. To fill it, it is necessary to tum towards this irreducible region of existence constituted by speech - the

third universal function of humanity, along with movement and immobility.

But what is the being of speech, if it is not the speaking subject? It is

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therefore necessary that the subject literally twist itself towards its own

utterance. This time, it is the expression 'writhing in pain' that must be

interpreted literally. Once one perceives that the identity of the subject is

triple, and not just double, the subject appears as tom.

It is the tension within this subject of language, and its incapacity to

twist free ofthe equivocity that defines its triplicate composition, which will

lead Beckett into the notorious impasses, and chiefly to the crisis which we've

already seen is punctuated by and surpassed in How ItIs. What is of interest

for our purposes is the realisation that this subject of language is in no way

that subject ofthe event whose theorisation has abidingly occupied Badiou's

speculative energies at least from the Peut-on penser fa politique? ( 1 985)

onwards. Unlike the subject of the event, the torsion of this triple subject of

language is transitive to the situation, to the place of being, that it names and

configures in fiction. In this sense, it is not rare and dependent on chance,

decision and fidelity; rather, it is an inescapable and constitutive feature of

the fictional set-up, or, if one will allow the expression, it functions as its

intrinsic supplement.

Beckett's 'misuse' oflanguage is in this respect initially aimed, via the

aforementioned operations, at the stepwise elimination of this subjective

excess; its anti-humanist drive amounting to an attempt to efface the torture

of speech into the grey black of being. Badiou's reconstruction of the impasse

thereby amounts to the thesis that it is only in the introduction of another

supplement (as testified by the figures of the Other, the Two, the Event), a

supplement which is entirely incalculable and which is only glimpsed at the

far edge of Beckett's work (namely in the conclusion ofWorstward Ho), that

the linguistic and ontological ordeal ofthe subject oflanguage can be alleviated

or interrupted. The mutation signalled by the works after Texts for Nothing

can thus be conceived as the passage from a nihilist solution to the problem

of a subject oflanguage (the attempt to perpetrate its demise, to destroy even

the voice) to a hazardous but ultimately productive one (the conversion of

the subject by the event of alterity). In this sense the subject of Beckett's art - which according to Badiou s ina esthetics is not the author but the work- is

defined by the movement beyond the tormenting excess of a subject of

language towards the futural fidelity of a subject of the event.

Where does this leave the problem of language, which had initially attracted our young Sartrean cretin (as Badiou portrays his former self) to the

X X I V

l Al a i n Bad i o u On Beckett

works of Beckett? Surely, Beckett's Cartesian scenarios preclude any crypto­

I{omantic dissolution of human subjectivity into the One of language. But

l�qually, they forestall any thanatological abdications of the obstinate courage

that so insistently marks his figures and voices, even and especially at their

most ragged and risible. In this respect, and to the very extent that most of his

work is driven by the wish to 'ill say', to puncture speech and corrode its

authority, Beckett does demand from Badiou the recognition, otherwise

I(u'cign to his doctrine, of an irreducibility proper to language or speech as a

'rcgion of existence' . Moreover, though language is not itself an object of

spcculation (whether structural or hermeneutic) or adulation (it is the very

stuff of our earthly ordeals), it is nevertheless identified as an ineluctable and

incliminable 'function' of the human, an essential component of that capacity

/()r thought that determines the existence of humanity. It is this role oflanguage

that Badiou is obliged to assume and, in a qualified manner, affirm. What his

rcconstruction of Beckett does not involve however, is any specific attention

to the 'texture' oflanguage itself- to the operations undergone in Beckett by

grammar, to the usage of certain tropes, etc. Whilst the linguistic dimension

is indeed ineliminable, what captivates Badiou when it comes to Beckett as a

thinker is precisely what emerges from a subtraction of and, of course, through

language (though this does not stop Badiou, himself a novelist and playwrigh.w from indicating, on a number of occasions, fertile grounds for discussions of

style and technique).

The same impossibility of outright destruction, coupled with the

requirement to subtract and supplement, marks that category which is not

simply a 'dimension' but the defining name for existence (as opposed to

being) in Badiou: appearance. The doctrine of appearance, which has been a

chief preoccupation ofBadiou in recent years, finds one of its most elaborate

accounts to date in the painstaking theoretical reconstruction of Worstward

Ho. Whereas the first two of our essays find the counterpart of the cogito in

an ontology oflocalisation (the theme ofthe 'place of being' , or 'grey black'),

in 'Being, Existence, Thought: Prose and Concept' we are presented with a

far more systematic distinction between being ('the void') and appearance

('the dim'). What is at stake is once again the notion that what 'lies behind'

can only 'seep through' (to use Beckett's expressions from his letter to Axel

Kaun) if we begin from the inscription of being in language and things, in

other words, if we begin from existence. The purity of the void can only be

attained in the intervals of appearance, through those operations that 'worsen'

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existence, divesting it of (almost) all order and ornament. Ultimately, however,

the simplification that defines Beckett's confrontation with appearances -

with the ' shades', with 'visible humanity', with all that Badiou classes under

the rubric of 'phenomenology' - needs to be supplemented by the only thing

which, in Badiou's eyes, can truly announce an upsurge of the void that would

not be founded on the pure and simple annihilation oflanguage and existence:

the event. It is with the event that for Badiou we attain the maximal purification

(but not destruction) of language, the ' last state' of saying, when we can

rejoice at the poverty of words. It is also with the event - with beauty, love

and the Other - that a novelty beyond the ordeal of speech can make itself

known.

III.

The fact that Badiou's reading of Beckett does not result in any

straightforward illustration or ventriloquist application of the former's

philosophical doctrines, but on the contrary introduces themes otherwise not

prominent in Badiou's work (from the positive characterisation of the Other

to the idea ofthe atemporal determinants of humanity), opens the question of

how such an encounter may reconfigure the relationship between philosophy

and literature as separate, if interacting, disciplines of thought. Badiou's

'official' position, whilst not the object of a thoroughgoing deduction, is clear

enough. Against any deconstructionist or postmodernist penchant for

disciplinary hybridisation, or worse, for the abdication of speculative

rationalism at the altar of some supposed literary intuition, Badiou has been

proposing for some time a steadfast distinction between the thinking of

philosophy and the thinking of art. This proposal is driven by his identification

of the four intellectual disciplines (or generic procedures, in the technical

vocabulary) that serve as the 'conditions' of philosophy: art, science, politics

and love. It is these conditions, and not philosophy, that are responsible for

the subjectivating capture of events and the production of multiple truths

(though questions about the number and nature of the 'conditions' remain

open). This is why Badiou provocatively describes philosophy as the 'go­

between' or 'procuress' in our encounters with truth.

Philosophy itself therefore has no ' truths' of its own, and art, for one,

remains ent i rely irreducible to philosophy. Under what Badiou calls the

X X VI

L A lain Bad i ou On Beckett

J'()l11antic schema (the key figure here is Heidegger, though neither Nietzsche

hefore him, nor Nancy after, for example, are exempt from the appellation)

art alone is capable of truth, and particularly in the form of the poem. In this

schema, philosophy has been ' sutured' to one of its conditions, and no longer

possesses the ability to operate as the formal (and empty) mediator between

one specific condition and the others, as well as between each condition and

the abstract indifferent discourse which is set-theoretical ontology. Conversely,

Hadiou's schematic presentation ofthe so-called classical view of art indicates

that, for classical thought, art is ' innocent' of all truth. For such a classical

stance, whose primary impetus is didactic, art cannot do the work that

philosophy does, and there are thus no meaningful parallels to be drawn

between what philosophy says about 'being', for example, and what art says

about 'being'. Badiou takes a somewhat different tack. For him, art is not

' innocent' of truth; there are truths specific to art, and they are always

immanent and singular. Art is not blind to its own truth-content, rather, it is

'the thinking of the thought that it is', though this thought of thought is

predicated upon the production of works (otherwise, art w'J:ld be

surreptitiously sutured to philosophy as an ultimately speculative or reflexive

pursuit). Philosophy as the 'go-between' is thus duty-bound to make the truths

of art apparent and consistent with the abstract discourse of ontology, but not

to assimilate them to itself and claim them as its own 'property' (after all,

philosophy itself strictly speaking possesses no truths of its own). It is this

'relation' between philosophy and art that Badiou has baptised as

' inaesthetics' , defining it as 'a relation of philosophy to art which, maintaining

that art is itself a producer of truths, makes no claim to tum it into an object

for philosophy. Against aesthetic speculation, inaesthetics describes the strictly

intra-philosophical effects produced by the independent existence of some

works of art. ' 13

How then are we to square this inaesthetic protocol of demarcation and

vigilant commerce between philosophy and art (literature) with what appear

as the invasively philosophical claims made for Beckett's thought, not to

mention the concepts that his writing seems to suggest or add to Badiou's

own approach? After all, there is nothing in the least ironic about the

methodological parallels drawn with Plato, Descartes and Husserl - if nothing

else, these essays wish to convince us that there is as much rigour and as

much thought in How It Is as in the Meditations, in The Un namable as in the

Parmenides. The formalising tour de force which generates the systematic

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reading of Worstward Ho as a distilled ontology, whilst obviously indebted

to much of the work undertaken by Badiou in L 'etre et l 'evenement and the

forthcoming Logiques des mondes, is also an attempt to show, in considerable

detail, how literature has nothing to envy philosophy in matters of complex

thought. Indeed, Badiou, as he does elsewhere with regard to that great French

dialectician, Mallarme, avows that in the case of Beckett the practice of

inaesthetic demarcation might find itself stretched, that we might be in the

presence of a thinking transversal to those disciplinary borders that Badiou

himself sets up to avert the disaster of suture - that reciprocal parasitism of

philosophy and its conditions which periodically announces the weakening

or abdication of thinking. This is what Badiou writes in the Petit manuel by

way of introduction to his formally exacting reconstruction of Worstward

Ho:

Samuel Beckett [ . . . ] loved to gnaw at the edges ofthat peril which all high

literature exposes itself to: No longer to produce unheard-of impurities,

but to wallow in the apparent purity of the concept. To philosophise, in

short. And therefore: To register truths, rather than producing them. Of

this wandering at the edges, Worstward Ho remains the most accomplished

witness. 14

This effort toward purification, Beckett's characteristic ascesis, is

therefore revealed both as the singular resource of his writing (its capacity to

vie with the great philosophers in a delineation of both the parameters of

appearance and the determinants of humanity) and as the specific threat it

incurs (that it might tum into an amphibious entity of suture: neither art nor

philosophy; neither the empty capture of evental truths nor their production

in a generic procedure). So that Beckett's work is indeed a specifically artistic

or literary confrontation with the resources of language and the power of

fiction, but it is also an attempt to think through and beyond the limitations

imposed by the linguistic set-up and - in operations ofleastening, worsening,

subtraction - to attain something other than language, something other than

fiction. This at least seems to be the 'programme' laid out in the famous letter

to Axel Kaun of 1937, the very same that Beckett later dismissed as ' German

bilge' :

[ . . . ] more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must

XXVIII

• l Alai n Bad iou:On Beckett

be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the No."ngness) behind it.

I . . . ] Let us hope that time will come, thank God that m �ain circles it

has already come, when language is most efficiently used when it is most

efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should

at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into

disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks, behind it ­

be it something or nothing - begins to seep through, I cannot imagine a

higher goal for a writer todayY

If only that, as Badiou is adamant to point out, since the dim can never

go - since appearance or inscription is ineluctable - it is not in the destruction

o r language (which would amount to the annihilation of humanity and the

imperative to speak that defines it) but in its subtraction and supplementation

t hat 'the things (or the Nothingness) behind it' can see the light.

It is thus in its very drive to purity - in its wish to purge language of

i tsclf- that Beckett's thought remains impure - never able or willing to fully

abandon the injunction and the constraints of utterance, nor to do without its

speculative, universalising desideratum, however corroded by comedy it may

be. Following Jacques Ranciere, we could appropriate the case of Beckett

I(lr a critique of the demarcationist purism and philosophical sovereignty

potentially evinced by Badiou's 'conditional' schema. Or we could enlist it

in an appraisal of Beckett as a thinker for whom the category of 'art' or

' literature' is far too narrow. Whilst these are both valid pursuits, and the

questions raised by Badiou's Beckett are perhaps not ultimately capable of

doctrinal resolution, in light of the very themes raised in these essays there is

perhaps another avenue worth considering. This consists in seeing Beckett's

writing as centred around the notion of a capacity for thought, and specifically

around the capacity for thinking through the radical consequences of

cncounters and events that defines the very being of thinking humanity.

Whilst Badiou is explicit in his affirmation of the multiplicity of

cognitive disciplines and generic procedures,16 and wary of any over­

determination ofthought either by philosophy or by any one of its conditions,

his own encounter with Beckett seems to push us towards the recognition

that there is a place for thinking thought itself, or the capacity thereof, in a

manner both transversal to the multiplicity of disciplines and anterior to the

irruption of any event. In brief, that even a doctrine for which every subject

hinges on the incalculable upsurge of a novelty and the systematic deduction

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of its consequences has a place for something like a philosophical anthropology, a thinking of generic humanity that pivots around the capacity for thinking and which, whilst never reducible to its linguistic inscription, moves through a resolute confrontation between subj ects and their enunciations. Whether such a capacity is itself open to a formalisation equivalent to that provided for the event is of course a matter that can only be addressed elsewhere in a critical engagement with the resources of Bad iou's own thought.

IV.

We have seen, briefly, how Badiou can argue that Beckett is a writer of hope, but a hope based on nothing. 'Nothing', because the event or encounter • with the other does not operate as a principle or foundation that could serve to plot the outline of a ' hope-giving' series of texts. 'Nothing', because the ultimate resource from which generic humanity draws its cognitive and practical capacity for novelty, as well as its courage to confront the torture of the cogito and the indifference of the dim, is the void, and the way its pure inconsistency can burst through the partitions of apparent order, to reveal the most radical, and most generic, equality. In this regard, it is indicative that the encounter with the other only appears as a question for Beckett following the impasse of the investigations of the operations of language in the ' Trilogy' . Badiou is clear: We cannot simply rest content with an exploration of Beckett's work that colludes with the sophistical obsession with language. The major shift in potential that Badiou sees with the encounter fromHow it Is onwards, provides Beckett's characters with the only 'way out' of the perpetual linguistic oscillation between the solitary cogito and the grey-black of being . Ultimately, it is this incalculable encounter that frees generic humanity from the relentless and aporetic contortions of language and subjectivity. Though Beckett allows Badiou to consider the ' figural preparation' of this event, or even the quasi­anthropological invariants required for its irruption, it is the event which in the last instance permits us to think the figure of ' thinking humanity'.

Perhaps this is the real challenge posed by the conceptual configuration that has arisen between Badiou and Beckett: To think the entanglement and reciprocal determination of a thinking of the human as pure capacity, on the one hand, and a thinking of the incalculable novelty of the event, on the

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• • l l llT. 1 / Or: To produce a radically egalitarian notion of the human that would ' : l I l l 1l�how remain entirely faithful to the anti-humanist legacy of Althusser i 1 l 1d hllicault, among others � this is what Beckett allows us, or rather forces I I �; , t o do. 18 Whilst Beckett shows us that an inquiry into the atemporal I I l Iguistic and cognitive determinants of humanity on its own cannot but lead 1 1 .', into the ordeal of the subject and the impasse of fiction, into the wretched \ I i I t i I ism of annihilation or (worse) the pieties of humanism, he also manifests t h e i nescapable demand that ' thinking humanity' find its fictional and I I I I i losophical determination, even if this means moving beyond the boundaries or language into the realm of the incalculable, moving beyond the 'on' of spL'cL'h to the invention of operations capable of affirming new beginnings. I I I th is light, if we must 'shelter and retain' the truth that arises from an event, i I ' wc must remain ' tirelessly' faithful to the event, it is because of its potcntiality for thought, and not only for thought, but for action .

Nina Power and Alberto Toscano

1 An English translation of the entirety of the Petit manuel d 'inesthetique (Paris:

SL'uil, 1998) is forthcoming. See Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, translated

hy Alberto Toscano (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

2 See Andrew Gibson's postface for a critical comparison of Bad iou's work on Beckett

I ( ) that of recent Anglo-American commentators.

:l Again, see Gibson's essay for an analysis of Bad iou's implicit decision not to engage

with other critics and commentators. See also Dominique Rabate's stimulating essay

. Continuer- Beckett' in a recent collection of essays on Badiou entitledAlain Badiou:

J>enser Ie multiple, ed. by Charles Ramond (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002), pp. 407-420.

4 Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge (London: Routledge,

1 991), p. 60.

S Regarding this question of the 'grey black' lying beyond the solitary subject, it is

interesting to note that Beckett has so many words in English for this 'nothing' -

among them 'half-light', 'dim' (Worstward Ho) and ' gloom' (The Lost Ones) - whereas

in French, he tends to use penombre across the texts. The French term perhaps better

encapsulates the exact sense of the empty, colourless, topography that Beckett seems

to wish to convey - it is neither light nor dark, neither one colour nor another. It is, in

effect, a term to designate being ' in its localisation, empty of any event'.

6 Beckett shares his identification of a method of subtraction or reduction (Beckett's

'leastening') with two of the 20th century's great philosophical readers of Beckett:

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Ala in Bad iou On Beckett,---------------

Theodor W. Adorno and Giles Deleuze. In 'Trying to Understand Endgame' (1958),

in Notes to Literature, vol. 1 (New York: Colombia, 1 991 ), Adorno explicitly argues

for Beckett's opposition to the 'abstraction' of existentialist ontology in favour of 'an

avowed process of subtraction' (p. 246) that reduces it to a single category: 'bare

existence' (p. 243). However, steeped as it is in the condemnation of 'the irrationality

of bourgeois in its late phase' (p. 244) and the 'pathogenesis ofthe false life' (p. 247),

Adoorno's reading of Beckett is, to use Badiou's terminology, strictly 'anti­

philosophical' ; Adorno refuses to see in Beckett any concession to the speculative

drive and also discounts a priori any reading of him as an affirmative or hopeful

thinker (Adorno concludes that in Endgame ' [h]ope skulks out ofthe world' [po 275]

back to death and indifference). In Adorno's estimation, Beckett's 'metaphysical

negation no longer permits an aesthetic form that would itself produce metaphysical

affirmation' , his 'anti-art' culls 'aesthetic meaning from the radical negation of

metaphysical meaning' (Aesthetic Theory [Minnesota: University of Minnesota, 1997],

pp. 348, 271) . In this light, Adorno reads Beckett's method of subtraction against

'modem ontology' and the 'poverty of philosophy' , as revealing 'an existence that is

shut up in itself like a mollusk, no longer capable of universality'; despite his somber

acumen and eloquence, Adorno ultimately retains the category of the absurd as the

key to Beckett's worrk, and is impervious, in Badiou's terms, to the aesthetic relevance

of concepts of eternal novelty or generic humanity (see 'Trying to Understand

Endgame' , p. 246). In this respect, Deleuze's study of the stepwise, combinatory

'reduction' of language in Beckett's television plays (,The Exhausted', in Essays

Critical and Clinical [London: Verso, 1997], pp. 1 52- 174) bears far greater affinity

with Badiou's depiction of Beckett as a rigorous thinker of formalising procedures.

Nevertheless, Badiou's preoccupation with the place of 'thinking humanity' in

Beckett's work - together with its Cartesian and Husserlian echoes - has no counterpart

in Deleuze's reading, for whom Beckett's reductions lead to a becoming-imperceptible,

to a spiritual and cosmic experience of Life (as he concludes in 'The Greatest Irish

Fihn Ever Made', also in Essays Critical and Clinical). Needless to say, these diffferent

appreciations of reduction and formalisation find their deeper reasons in Badiou's

polemical engagement with Deleuze's philosophy in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being

(Minnesota: University of Minnesota, 2000).

7 Badiou's own philosophy is itself articulated in terms of such' operations, many of

which are drawn from the domain of mathematical thought, operations such asforcing,

intervention, avoidance, subtraction, connection . The very process of evental

subjectivation is eminently operational in character, a trait clearly attested to by

Badiou's recurrent references to the production (rather than intuition) of truths.

8 See Conditions (Paris: Seuil, 1 992).

X X X I I

•

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l Ala in Bad iou On Beckett

l ) Marl in Esslin (ed.), The Theatre of the Absurd (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,

I %X), p. 66.

I I ) l Iadiou will write of the manner in which Beckett's 'anti-phenomenological' or

1 1 < I I l i l l lentional reduction allows us to grasp the moment when 'movement becomes

" \ lcrnal ly indiscernible from immobility' , that is, when movement becomes nothing

I I I"'� than a differential of rest, expressing a sort of minimal and ideal mobility. It is

IV' II lh noting that Beckett himself draws on this theme from the calculus in his ' Joycean'

d l Sl'ussion of the thought of Giordano Bruno and its influence on Vico. ' [N]ot only do

l i lt ' I l l inima coincide with the minima, the maxima with the maxima, but the minima

IV i I h the maxima in the succession of transformations. Maximal speed is a state of

I ('sl . ' See 'Dante . . . Vico. Bruno . . . Joyce' , inDisjecta (London: John Calder, 1983),

I ' .' I . Arguably the irreducibility of the 'functions' allows Beckett, in his later work,

I . . l I Iove beyond this identity of contraries.

I I I I i s worth noting that the problem of the name, and specifically of the naming of

Ih" �vent, is far more prominent in the first two essays in this collection than in 'Being,

1 ' \ is lence, Thought: Prose and Concept' . This is explained by the fact that the

1 kpendence of the theory ofthe event on a philosophy ofthe name has been the object

. . ra self-criticism on the part of Badiou - on the basis both of Lyotard's doubts about

Ihe theory ofthe two names of the event inL 'etre et l 'eVl?nement and ofthe immanent

Ik illands of Badiou's own thinking of subjectivity, especially as it has come to

i l lcorporate a thinking of appearance (see the preface to the English edition of the

Fillies, the forthcoming Angelaki interview with Bruno Bosteels and Peter Hallward

' I kyond Formalisation' , and the forthcoming maj or work by Badiou himself,Logiques

. It'S 1110ndes).

I 2 See her fine ' essay on the novel, L ' ecrivain pensif (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1998), pp

-" )-62. 1 3 Petit manuel d 'inesthetique, p. 7.

1 4 Petit manuel d 'inesthetique, p. 146.

1 5 Disjecta, pp. 17 1 - 172.

1 6 See Conditions, p. 141 .

1 7 This link between a capacity for thought and the event (of the Two) is one of the

pr incipal objects of Badiou's essay ' Qu' est-ce que I ' amour?' , from Conditions. It is

a I so a crucial materialist postulate of Bad iou's that we cannot consider thought outside

of its inscription in bodies and places (i.e. in appearance) and that any straightforward

identification of a transcendental subjective capacity (one unhinged from the irruption

of the event and the procedures that can ensue in its wake) would merely occlude the

ordeal of the cogito for the sake of a meta-head, thereby ignoring the seriousness of

Beckett's impasses, as well as their singular resolution.

XXXIII

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Alai n Bad iou On Beckettr-----------------

1 8 In this respect, it would be interesting to measure and interrogate the gap that

separates the dictum from The Unnamable of which Badiou is so fond - 'I alone am

man and all the rest divine' - from the classically humanist pronouncement from

'Dante . . . Vico. Bruno . . . Joyce' : 'Humanity is its work itself. [ . . . ] Humanity is divine

but no man is divine' (Disjecta, p. 22). The humanity recast in the later Beckett under

the (empty) sign of the generic is a humanity stripped of such transcendence, and

'blessed' with immortality only through the arduous fidelity to a vanishing event.

Whence Badiou's Beckettian programme, as formulated in 'What Happens' : 'To

relegate the divine and its curse to the periphery of saying, and to declare man naked,

without either hope or hopelessness, relentless, surviving, and consigned to the

excessive language of his desire.' At the antipodes ofthe divine, it would be of interest

to consider how the capacity for thought which sustains Badiou's Beckettian venture

into philosophical anthropology also signals a caesura within man separating him, as

rare but Immortal subject ofthe event, from a 'nihilistic' substrate of corporeality and

animality - whence the emblematic nature ofPozzo's exhortation: 'Think, pig ! ' .

X X X I V

•

, ,

L Alai n Bad i o u On Beckett

A uthor's Preface

! !ere then is what I have tried to say about Beckett in French brought back

i l l io English, moving contrariwise to my French capture of this immense

writer of the English language.

For we can say that Beckett, from a French perspective, is an entirely

' ! �nglish' writer. He is so even in the translations made on the basis of his

( IWn French, which amount to something quite different than translations.

Who can fail to see that in English any of Beckett's fables simply do not

sound the same? They are more sarcastic, more detached, more mobile. In

short, more empiricist. French served Beckett as an instrument for the creation

( 1 f an often very solemn fonn of distance between the act of saying and what

i s said. The French language changed the paradoxes of the given into

metaphysical problems. It inscribed into verdicts and conclusions what, in

I hc English, led to irony and suspension. French - the language of Descartes,

Beckett's great philosophical referent - changed picaresque characters into

the witnesses of the reflexive Subject, into victims of the cogito. It also

permitted the invention of a colder poetics, of an immobile power that keeps

the excessive precision of the English language at bay. Beckett's French

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substitutes a rigid rhetoric that spontaneously lays itself out between ornament

and abstraction for the descriptive and allusive finesse of English. There is

something of the 'grand style' in Beckett's French. However, radical as his

inventions are - like the asyntactic continuum of How It Is - in Beckett's

prose we glimpse the elevation of Bossuet, the musical grasp of Rousseau,

the finery of Chateaubriand, far more in fact than the taut 'modem style'

which is characteristic of Proust. This is because, like Conrad in English, the

language that serves Beckett as a model is a language learned in its classical

form, a language to which he resorts precisely so as not to let himself be

carried away by familiarity. A language adopted in order to say things in the

least immediate way possible. It is thus that Beckett's French is 'too' French,

just as Conrad's English is a much 'too' mannered sort of English.

So that when Beckett returns to English, he must undo this 'too much',

this excess, and thereby attain a strange 'not enough' - a kind of subtracted

English, an English of pure cadence. He abandons himself to speed and its

variations. His English is a French laid bare.

And what of me, placed in this in-between of languages? This is for

the reader to say. It must be noted, nevertheless, that what I have described is

Beckett in French, even when this language did not exist for him (such is the

case of Worstward Ho, translated into French by Edith Fournier). You will

read a French philosopher speaking of a French writer. Who is 'English' .

And of whom I am here speaking of in English. Speaking of what? Of his

English? Of his French, reconfigured here into English?

It is impossible to find our bearings here. But thought, in the end,

speaks no language. Plato claims that philosophy 'starts from things, not

from words' . But Beckett too starts from things ! So let us simply say that

these essays, between Beckett and me, speak the Anglo-French of things.

XXXVI

l Alai n Bad i ou On Beckett

The Writing of the G eneric1

1 . The Imperati ve a n d its Desti n at ion

Our starting point: some verses of doggerel, a mirlitonnade written by Beckett around 1 976.2 It is quite singular, in that it brings Mirliton together w ith Heraclitus the Obscure:

flux cause flux causes que toute chose that every thing

•

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To speak will always remain an imperative for Beckett, but an imperative

for the sake of the oscillation or the undecidability of every thing. The thing

is not withdrawn, it can be shown, it is this thing, and yet, once determined,

it oscillates according to its flux between being and non-being. We might

then say that writing - the ' speak on' - holds itself at the place of a decision

as to the being of the thing. It is clear, if only because the doggerel form is

suited to it, that this decision will never be sublated by a dialectic. The image

of the flux conveys the fact that the thing can stand simultaneously at the

place where it is and at the place where it is not. But this flux is never the

synthesis of being and non-being, and is not to be confused with Hegelian

Becoming.

Writing installs itself at the point where the thing, on the verge of

disappearing, summoned by the non-being of its flux, is exposed to the

undecidable question of its own stability. This is precisely why writing -

never destined by what is immobilised in its being - presents itself, with

respect to the uncertainty of the thing, in the guise of an imperative.

In quite general terms, what this interminable imperative must contend

with is the curse of the oscillation rfleau d' oscillation] between being and

non-being - of the balancing and weighing of the thing - but this curse is

also transformed into a number of questions.4

Kant's thought organised Critique around three questions: What can I

know? What should I do? What may I hope? There are also three questions in

Beckett, caught up in an ironic analogy that characterises his relationship to

philosophy. These three questions are clearly stated in Texts for Nothing.

Here is one variant:

Where would I go, if! could go, who would I be, if! could be, what would

I say, if ! had a voice [ . . . J? (CSP, p. 82; GSP, p. 1 14)5

The three-fold interrogation bears on going, being, and saying.6 Such

is the triple instance of an 'I' that is transversal to the questions themselves,

of a subject captured in the interval of the going, the being, and the saying.

Until 1960, and perhaps a little after, in what constitutes the best-known part

of Beckett's work, the 'character' will be - always and everywhere � the man

of a trajectory (going), the man of an immobility (being), and the man of a

monologue (saying).

I laving grasped this triplet of elementary situations of the subject, we

2

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l Alai n Bad i o u On Beckett

' : 1 1 1 immcdiately pinpoint what I will call Beckett's fundamental tendency

lowards the generic. By ' generic' desire I understand the reduction of the

" ' l l lplcxity of experience to a few principal functions, the treatment in writing

" I I hat which alone constitutes an essential determination. For Beckett, writing

I : : a l l act governed by a severe principle of economy. It is necessary to subtract

I l lorc and more � everything that figures as circumstantial ornament, all

I 'lTiphcral distraction, in order to exhibit or to detach those rare functions to

which writing can and should restrict itself, if its destiny is to say generic

h I I l 1 lanity. Initially, at the beginning ofthis prodigious enquiry into humanity

I ha I Bcckett' s art constitutes, these functions are three in number: going, being,

a l id saying.

In Beckett's 'novels' , this subtraction of ornaments has an inner

I l ldaphor: the characters, who realise the fiction of generic writing, lose their

i lll;sscntial attributes in the course of the text: clothing, objects, possessions,

hody parts and fragments of language. Beckett often lists what must be lost

so that the generic functions may emerge. He does not miss an opportunity to

(';Ist unpleasant epithets upon these pointless ornaments and possessions; in

I his way he points out that it is only by losing and dissipating these peripheral

calamities that the essence of generic humanity may be grasped. Consider,

lill' i nstance, one of these lists in Rough for Theatre II:

Work, family, third fatherland, cunt, finances, art and nature, heart and

conscience, health, housing conditions, God and man, so many disasters

(CDW, p. 238; SP, p. 78).1

The subtraction of 'disasters' gives rise within Beckett's prose to a fictional set-up of destitution [dispositij de denuement] . I think it is very i mportant to relate this set-up to the function that it has for thought, because i 1 has far too often been interpreted - taking what is simply a figuration too Ii Icrally - as a sign that for Beckett humanity is a tragic devastation, an absurd a bandonment. Allow me to say that this is the point of view of an owner, for whom possessions are the only proof of being and sense! In fact, when Beckett presents us with a subject who is at the extreme point of destitution, we are dealing precisely with one who has succeeded - volens nolens - in losing, amidst the vicissitudes of experience, all the disastrous ornamentations of circumstance.

We must repudiate those interpretations of Beckett that are filtered

3

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through the 'nihilistic' worldliness ofthe metaphysical tramp. Beckett speaks

to us of something far more thought out than this two-bit, dinner-party vision

of despair. Beckett - who is very close to Pascal in this respect - aims at

subtracting the figure of humanity from everything that distracts it, so as to

examine the intimate articulation of its functions.

The fictional device of destitution is, first of all, a progressively purified

operator for the presentation of 'characters' . It is also, in the flesh of the

prose, an altogether flagrant process that moves, from Beckett's first to his

last writings, towards a kind of rupture that submits the prose to a hidden

poem. Finally, it is a restricting of the metaphorical aspect of the prose to a

finite stock of terms, whose combination and recurrence in the end organise

the entirety of thought.

Little by little, Beckett's text is oriented towards an economy that I

would readily call ancient, or categorial. We have already seen that the

primitive functions are movement, rest, and logos. Ifwe note (and how can

we not?) that, from 1960 onwards, the centre of gravity shifts to the question

ofthe Same and the Other, and, in particular, to that of the existence - whether

real or potential - of the Other, we will argue that behind the trajectory of this

body of work are the five supreme genera (or kinds) of Plato 'sSophist. These

genera are the latent concepts that capture the generic existence of humanity,

and they underlie the prosodic destitution, understood as what makes it

possible to think our destiny. We will say that these supreme genera

(Movement, Rest, the Same, the Other, Logos) as displaced variants of the

Platonic proposal, constitute the points of reference, or primitive terms, for

an axiomatic of humanity as such.

On the basis of these axiomatic terms we can grasp the questions proper

to Beckett's work, those that organise the fiction of a humanity treated and

exhibited by a functional reduction oriented towards the essence or the Idea.

I will limit myselfto treating only four of these questions. The work of

Beckett is a summa, simultaneously theological and a-theological, and it is

not possible here to exhaust its set-up [disposition] . The four questions are

the following:

1 ) That of the place of being, or, to be more precise, that of the fiction

of its truth. How does a truth of being enter the fiction of its place?

2) That of the subject, which for Beckett is essentially a question of

identity. By means of which processes can a subject hope to identify itself?

3) That of 'what happens' [ce qui se passe] and of 'what takes place'

4

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l Ala in Bad i ou On Beckett

I , , ' IllIi advient] . How is the event as a supplement to immobile being to be I hol lght? For Beckett, this problem is closely related to that of the capacities , " lallguage. Is it possible to name what happens or what takes place, inasmuch , IS i I lakes place?

4) That of the existence of the Two, or of the virtuality of the Other.

This is the question that ultimately ties together all of Beckett's work. Is an

, . l'ii:etive Two possible, a Two that would be in excess of solipsism? We might

: i l so say that this is the question of love.

2 . The G rey B lack a s the P lace of Be i n g

Since the originary axiomatic is that of wandering, immobility and the

vo ice, can we, on the basis of this triplet, grasp any truth whatsoever [une

I ','Tite quelconque] regarding what is, inasmuch as it is? The operator of truth,

however, is never indifferent [quelconque] . For Beckett, who is an artist, this

(lpcrator is a set-up of fictions [un dispositij de fictions] , so that the question

hl�comes one of place. Is there a place of being, that can be presented in the

i'ietionalising set-up [le dispositij fictionnant] in such a way that the very

he i ng of this place of being becomes transmissible?

Ifwe consider the entirety of Beckett's work, we find that there exists

ill fact a kind of interweaving of two ontological localisations, which indeed

seem to be opposed to one another.

The first localisation is a closure: arranging a closed space, so that the

set of features of the place of being may be enumerated and named with

precision. The aim is that 'what is seen' be coextensive with 'what is said' ,

I Inder the sign of the closed. This is obviously the case for the room in which

t he characters of Endgame are confined; it also holds for the bedroom where

Malone dies (or does not die), or for Mr. Knott's house in Watt. It is also true

of the cylindrical arena of The Lost Ones. These are some instances of closure,

of which many other examples could be given. In the text entitled Fizzle 5 /Closed place}, Beckett writes the following:8

Closed place. All needed to be known for say is known

(CSP, p. 1 99; GSP, p. 236).9

This is exactly the set-up of fiction with regard to the question of the

5

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place of being, when this set-up is that of closure: a strict reversibility of

vision and diction in the register of knowledge. This requires an especially

ascetic type of localisation.

But there is also a completely different set-up: an open, geographical

space, a space of transit which includes a variety of trajectories. We encounter

it, for example, in the countryside - planes, hills and forests - where Molloy

undertakes the search for his mother, and Moran his search for Molloy. Or in

the city and the streets of The Expelled, and, even, though it tends towards a

uniform abstraction, in the expanse of black mud on which the larvae of

essential humanity crawl in How It Is. Or in the beautiful Scottish or Irish

mounds, covered with flowers, where the old couple of Enough wander around

in happiness.

Both in the spaces of wandering and in the closed places, Beckett tends

to suppress all descriptive ornamentation. This results in a filtered image of

the earth and sky: a place of wandering, for sure, but a place that is itself akin

to a motionless simplicity. In the text called Lessness, we find the ultimate

purification of the place of crossing, or ofthe possible space of all movement:

Grey sky no cloud no sound no stir earth ash grey sand. Little body same

grey as the earth sky ruins only upright. Ash grey all sides earth sky as one

all sides endlessness (eSp, p. 1 53 ; GSP, pp. 197-198).10

At the end of its fictive purification, we could call the place of being

(or the set-up that bears witness to the question of being in the form of the

place) a 'grey black' [noir gris] . This might suffice.

What is the grey black? It is a black such that no light can be inferred to

contrast with it, an 'uncontrasted' black. This black is sufficiently grey for no

light to be opposed to it as its Other. In an abstract sense, the place of being is

fictionalised as a black that is grey enough to be anti-dialectical, separated

from all contradiction with light. The grey black is a black that must be grasped

in its own arrangement arid which does not form a pair with anything else.

In this grey black that localises the thought of being, there operates a

progressive fusion of closure and of open (or errant) space. Little by little,

Beckett's poetics will fuse the closed and the open into the grey black, making

it impossible to know whether this grey black is destined for movement or

immobility. This is one of the conquests of his prose. The figure that goes

and the one remaining at rest will become superimposed at the place of being.

6

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l Alai n Bad iou On Beckett

1 1 1 1 : ; s l Ipl:rimposition is achieved in How It Is, where the journey and fixity

; 1 1 \ ' I wo major figures of generip humanity. However, these two figures are in

II, , · "'"11/(' place, whereas earlier, wandering and closure remained disjoined

I I Il ' iaphors oflocalisation, split between Molloy, the novel ofthe journey, and

A '"/0111' Dies, which is the place of saying fixed at its point of death.

This final and unique place, the anti-dialectical grey black, cannot fall

I I l 1dn thc regime of clear and distinct ideas. The question of being, grasped

I I I l i s IOl:alisation, does not allow itselfto be distinguished or separated by an

I tka l articulation. In Molloy, we find this peremptory anti-Cartesian utterance:

I I h ink so, yes, I think that all that is false may more readily be reduced, to

Ilotions clear and distinct, distinct from all other notions

( ' I ', p. 82; TN, p. 82),u

I [ere the Cartesian criterion of evidence is reversed, and we can see

why: if the grey black localises being, reaching the truth of being requires I hat onc think the in-separate, the in-distinct. By contrast, what separates and

d l st inguishes - what separates dark from light, for example - constitutes the

p lacc nf non-being and of falsehood.

The localisation by the grey black ultimately entails that the being of

i w i ng cannot be said as an isolatable singularity, but only as void. When the

I l l' I ion that fuses the darkness of wandering and the darkness of immobility

( Iperatcs, we notice that what this place presents as the form of being can

oi l ly be named ' the nothing', or 'the void', and has no other name.

This maxim, which from the localisation of being in the grey black

' I ITivl:s at the void as the name of what is located, is basically established as

('art y as Malone Dies. Malone's voice begins by warning us that we are dealing

w i t h a terrible phrase, one of those little phrases that 'pollute the whole of

:;pcl:ch' . This phrase is: 'Nothing is more real than nothing' (T, p. 1 93 ; TN, p.

I ()2) , ' 1 This cardinal statement about being pollutes the entirety of language

w i t h its inconceivable truth. Many variants will follow, but the most

accomplished is to be found in Worstward Ho. In this text, we find the

li ) I I ()wing:

All save void. No. Void too. Unworsenable void. Never less. Never more.

Never since first said never unsaid never worse said never not gnawing to

7

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be gone (WH, p. 42; NO, p. 1 13)Y

This is the ultimate point that the fictionalisation of the place of being

allows us to attest: being as void 'inexists' for language, subtracted as it is

from every degree. But it is precisely being's subtraction from language that

arranges it between its first two categories, movement and rest, and the third

one, speech [la parole] or logos.

That being qua being is subtracted from language is something that

Beckett says in a great many ways, but perhaps, above all, by means of the

always possible equivalence between dit and mal dit, said and missaid. This

equivalence does not amount to an opposition between well saying and ill

saying. Rather, it presents the missaid as the essence of language; it states

that being inexists in language and that consequently, as Molloy says: ' all

language was an excess of language' (T, p. 1 1 6; TN, p. 1 1 6).14

The main effect of this conviction is to split being and existence asunder.

Existence is that of which it is possible to speak, whereas the being of existence

remains subtracted from the network of meanings, and ' inexists' for language.

Even though it is only in the later works that this split between being

and existence with respect to language unfolds according to its true fictional

operator (the grey black), it dates far back in Beckett's work. In First Love,

from 1 945, we already find the following:

But I have always spoken, no doubt always shall, of things that never

existed, or that existed if you insist, no doubt always will, but not with the

existence I ascribe to them (eSp, p. 10; GSP, p. 35).15

This delicate separation between the thing that does not exist and the

same thing which - inasmuch as it is seized by speech - always exists with

an other kind of existence brings us back to the oscillation of the Heraclitean

doggerel: the ' speak on' must operate at the place of being, the place of the

grey black, which maintains an undecidable distinction between existence

and the being of existence.

The clearest statement about this question is perhaps to be found in

Watt. Following an ontological tradition that Beckett takes up in his own

way, we can call being 'Presence' inasmuch as it 'inexists' for language.

More generally, we can call 'Presence' that aspect of being which remains

unpresented in the existent. If being presents itself at the grey black place

8

l Alai n Bad iou On Beckett

\\' Iwle existence 'indistinguishes' itself, we can stipulate that this Presence is

I i t ' i l h er an illusion (the sceptical thesis) nor a truthful and sayable

t t ' 1 1 Iprehension (the�dogmatic thesis), but rather a certainty without concept.

l i ne is what Beckett has to say in this regard:

So I shall merely state, without enquiring how it came, or how it went, that

i ll my opinion it was not an illusion, as long as it lasted, that presence of

what did not exist, that presence without, that presence within, that presence

between, though I'll be buggered if I can understand how it could have

been anything else (W, p. 43;W US, p. 45).16

This text tells us three things. Firstly, that presence, which is a gift of

I w i l lg [donation d 'etre] from what is not in a position to exist, is itself not an

I 1 I I Is ion. Secondly, that it is distributed both within and without, but that its

prl' i l:rred place is no doubt rather the 'between', the interval. And, thirdly,

t ha i i t is impossible to say more about it than that it is a subtraction from

l '\ is lence, and, consequently, that presence entails no meaning whatsoever.

I ks ides, this impossibility is also a prohibition, as the vocabulary of castration

I I I Beckett's original French crudely suggestsP

It is thus obvious why there cannot be any clear and distinct idea of

presence. Such an idea could not exist because what remains of it for us is

pl lrcly a proper name: 'void' or 'nothing' . This name is the beam lfleau] in

I l Ie I I eraclitean balance. Beneath its absence of sense, it effectively proposes

; 1 veritable being which is not an illusion, but it also proposes a non-being,

s i l lee it refers to the inexistence of being, which is precisely its unsayable

" ,i ll. •

If there were only the fictional set-up of the grey black, whose virtues

we have exhausted, we would be forced to agree that we are very close to the • vmious negative theologies, a point that is often made about Beckett. But

I I l erc is something that comes before this localisation of being, something

I hat cannot be reduced to the being of the inexistent, and which is reflection

as slIch, the cogito. Because the one for whom there is the grey black and the

I I l 1sayable presence does not stop reflecting and articulating both the

local isation and its impasse.

In a certain sense, the movement that goes from the void to the cogito,

despite the anti-Cartesian statements that I quoted above (concerning the

cri tcrion of evidence), is itself very Cartesian. Indeed, we know that Beckett

was raised on Descartes. The reference to the cogito is explicit in many texts,

9

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and it is set out in an entirely rational manner - albeit with an ironic grasp of this rationality - in the outline of Film.

Film is indeed a film, a film whose only character is played by Buster Keaton. It concerns a man - an object 0, says Beckett - who flees because he is pursued by an eye, named E. The film is the story of the pursuit of 0 by E,

and it is not until the end that one is meant to grasp the identity of the pursuer and the pursued, of the eye and the man. When Beckett published the script, he introduced it with a text called Esse est percipi, where we can read the following:

All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, self­

perception maintains in being.

Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down

in inescapability of self-perception

(CDW, p. 323; SP, p. 1 63).18

This is the argument of the cogito, save for the ironic nuance which derives from the fact that the search for truth is replaced by the search for non-being, and, moreover, that by an inversion of values, 'the inescapability of self-perception' - which for Descartes is one of the first victories of certainty - appears here as a failure. The failure of what, exactly? Of the extension to the All [Ie Tout] - subject included - of the general form of being, which is the void. The cogito undermines this extension. There is an existent whose being cannot inexist: the subject of the cogito.

We are now appproaching our second question, after the one concerning the place of being: namely, the question of the subject as it is caught up in the closure of the cogito, which is also the question of enunciation [I 'enonciation],

tortured by the imperative of the enouncement [I 'enonce]. 19

3 . O n t h e S o l i p s i st ic S u bject as To rtu re

The fictional set-up that deals with the closure of the cogito is the one that structures the best-known part of Beckett's work. This is the set-up of the motionless voice - a voice put under house arrest by a body [qu 'un corps

assigne a residence] . This body is mutilated and held captive, reduced to being no more than the fixed localisation of the voice. It is in chains, tied to a hospital bed, or stuck in a jar that advertises a restaurant opposite the

1 0

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l A la i n Bad i ou On Beckett

, d ' I I I I ',hkrhouse. This 'I ' is doubly closed: in the fixity of the body and in the 1 ,, ' I : ; l s l l'llee of a voice with neither answer nor echo, it endlessly persists in I I V i l l I ', 10 find the path of its own identification.

What does it mean for this repetitious voice of the cogito to identify •

1 1 .';el l? It means - with the help of a vast array of enouncements, fables, fictional 1 I I I I Ia i i ves and concepts - producing the pure and silent point of enunciation ,I : ; :;l Ich. Of course, this pure point of enunciation, this 'I' , is always antecedent I I I pres upposed since it is that which makes both the voice and the " l I l l l l l leements possible. It is the voice's place of being and as such is itself : l l Ih l ractcd from all naming. The relentless aim of the solipsistic voice - or I he voice of the cogito - is to attain this originary silence, whose being is (l ) l Is l i tuted by its enunciation, and which is the SUbjective condition of all 1 · 1 l0UIlCements. In order to identify oneself, it is necessary to enter this silence I ha l supports each and every word. This will be the hope of the 'hero' of The l il/I/amable:

[ . . . J there were moments I thought that would be my reward for having

spoken so long and so valiantly, to enter living into silence [ . . . J (T, p. 400; TN, p. 396).20

This entry into silence, holding death at a distance ('living'), has been described perfectly by Maurice Blanchot as an 'endless recapitulation' I n ·s.I'assement] of writing which simultaneously effectuates its point of l'llunciation and wants to capture or signify it.

Beckett soon finds out, of course, that this point of identification - the s i lent being of all speech - is inaccessible to any enouncement whatsoever. It would be too simple to believe that this inaccessibility is the result of a formal paradox: the necessity that the ontological condition of all naming be itself I I llnameable. The figure of the impossible, or the unnameable, is trickier than I hat, it fuses together two determinations that Beckett's prose consigns to an i l lsistence without hope.

The first determination is that the conditions of this operation - the conditions of the cogito considered through the sole resort of its capture by a lixed voice - are, in a very precise sense, unbearable, charged as they are with anxiety and mortal exhaustion.

Under the second determination it becomes evident, upon closer inspection, that the cogito is a situation far more complex than simple self-

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reflection. Indeed, the cogito involves not two but three tel1lls. The schema of Film - the eye and the object - is insufficient.

As for the conditions of the cogito, or of a thinking of thinking [une pensee de la pensee], they are terribly restrictive. This is because speech is never relentlessly repetitive or mobile enough and, at the same time, it is never insistent or immobile enough. It would be necessary to find a vocal regime that could simultaneously reach the apex of vehemence and of the vociferating multiple and, in its restraint, be the almost-nothing, on the edge of breathing. The voice cannot maintain this tenuous equilibrium, and what escapes it is the unnameable, which could be said to be located exactly at the point of caesura between the two opposing regimes.

This is because in order to reach this point an inner violence is necessary, a superegoic perseverence capable of literally submitting the subject of the cogito to the question, to torture. The cogito's confession of silence would need to be extorted from it. Beckett underscores the fact that if the '1 think' wishes to mark its own thinking-being - if thought wishes to grasp itself as the thinking of thinking - the reign of terror will commence. This resonates with the famous letter in which Mallal1lle, in a paroxysm of anxiety and crisis, declares: 'My thought has thought itself, and I am perfectly dead' .21 Beckett, on his part, points to the suffering rather than to death itself. In the words of the hero of The Unnamable:

I only think, if that is the name for this vertiginous panic as of hornets smoked out of their nest, once a certain degree of terror has been exceeded (T, p. 353 ; TN, p. 350).22

The 'I think' presupposes terror, which alone compels the voice to over­extend itself towards itself, in order to fold back, as much as it is able to, towards its own point of enunciation. Like all terror, this one is also given as an imperative without concept, and it imposes an obstinacy that gives no quarter and allows no escape. This imperative, indifferent to all possibility _

this terroristic commandment to sustain the unsustainable - concludes The Unnamable:

[ . . . ] you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on (T, p. 4 18 ; TN, p. 4 14).23

Since what is needed is precisely that which is impossible, the

1 2

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l Alai n Bad iou On Beckett

I I I l l I l l l l I a t ioll of the voice's obstinacy is also that of an unbearable torture.

1 1 1 I 1 I 1 1 I , hol i l the Unnamable, tears stream down the face of the speaker.

� ; l Ich heroism on the part of the cogito designates an impasse. Following

1 I 1 1 I 1 1 I · . ! I : l t Icy upon The Unnamable we have Texts for Nothing, which occupy

1 1 1 1 1 t : ; . - iy I he place of dying, where the temptation to abandon the imperative I I I IV t l l l l l g . . to rest from the torture of the cogito - imposes itself. This is the

I I I I I I I I ! ' I I I when the relation between the 'you must go on' and the '1 can't go

"I I ' \ " : :>0 tense that the writer is no longer sure he can sustain it.

' I 'he Texts for Nothing proceed in a more theoretical way, since they are

j. . . . . " l I gaged in the terrifying fictional set-ups of the solipsistic subject. The

I l I i l l l l d iscovery that these texts bear witness to is that the cogito, besides its

1 1 I 1 1 I H' l I t ing and unbearable conditions, is ultimately without finality, because

I t k i l l I l ieation is impossible. The injunction that the 'I' addresses to itself

, "lu'l"\'I I ing the naming of its own founding silence is object-less: in effect,

I I I l ' ( 'ogito is not a reflection, a Two (the couple of enouncement and

" l l l I l Ic iation), rather, it sketches out a three-fold configuration. There are three

1 1 I : : I : l l lces ofthe 'I' that cannot be reduced to the One except under conditions I I I lo la l exhaustion, of the dissipation of all subjectivity.

The crucial text in this regard is the twelfth 'text for nothing' , one of

I I I\' densest and most purely theoretical texts written by Beckett. Here is a

p: l:,sagc that undertakes the analytical decomposition of the cogito:

I . . . ] one who speaks saying, without ceasing to speak, Who's speaking?,

and one who hears, mute, uncomprehending, far from all [ . . . ] . And this

other now [ . . . ] with his babble of homeless mes and untenanted hims [ . . . ] .

There's a pretty three in one, and what a one, what a no one

(eSp, p. 1 12 ; GSP, p. 1 50).24

How is this infernal trio distributed?

1) First, there is the 'one who speaks ' [Qui parle], the supposedly

1l" llexive subject of enunciation, or the one capable of also asking 'Who's

. speaking?' [Qui parle], of enouncing the question concerning itself. It is this

sl Ibject whom the hero of The Unnamable seeks to identify beneath the terror.

2) Then there is the subj ect of passivity, who hears without

understanding, who is 'far away' in the sense of being the underside, the

obscure matter of the one who is speaking. This is the passive being of the

subject of enunciation.

3) Finally, there is the subject who functions as the support of the

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question of identification, the one who, through enunciation and passivity,

makes the question of what he is insist, and who, in order to do so, submits

himself to torture.

The subject is thus tom between the subject of enunciation, the subject

of passivity, and the questioning subject. The third of these subjects is

ultimately the one for whom the relation between the other two is at issue ,

the relation, that is, between enunciation and passivity.

Enunciation, passive reception, question: this is the 'pretty three' of

Beckett's subject. And, if we wish to join them together, to count all three of

them as One, we find only the void of being, a nothing that is worth nothing.

Why is it worth nothing? Because the void of being does not itself claim to

be the question of its own being. In the case of the subject, instead, we have

this terrifying rambling of the question which, were it to issue into the void

pure and simple, would turn the torture of identification into bitter buffoonery.

Every question implies a scale of values (what is the answer worth?), and if,

in the end, we find only what was there before every question - that is, being

as the grey black - then the value of the answer is zero.

Of course, one might think that the only solution is to abandon all

questions. Would rest, serenity and the end of the tormenting question of

identity not reside in a pure and simple coincidence with the place of being,

with the unquestionable grey black? Why wish for the silence of the point of

enunciation rather than for the silence as it is, as it has always been, in the

anti-dialectical identity of being? Can the subject not rejoin the place from

which all questions are absent, can it not desert and deconsecrate the dead

end of its own identity?

Well, the answer is no, it cannot do this. The question, because it is one

of the instances ofthe subjective triplet, insists without appeal. Beckett, inIll

Seen III Said, expressly says that it is impossible to reach a place, or a time,

where the question has been abolished:

Was it ever over and done with questions? Dead the whole brood no sooner

hatched. Long before. In the egg. Long before. Over and done with

answering. With not being able. With not being able not to want to know.

With not being able. No. Never. A dream. Question answered

(ISIS, p. 37; NO, p. 70).25

The idea of disarticulating the subjective trio by suppressing the

questioning instance cannot be put into practice. One cannot rejoin the

1 4

. . - - - -- - -- - - -- . - - ---

l....:.A..:..:I-=a..:..:i n...:.......::B:...::a::...:d.:....:,i ::-o..::..u_O_n_B_e_c_k_e_t_t ___ , i l I I I 1 1 I ' 1 I 101'iai peace of the grey black; there never was a time or a place when

1 1 1 1 ' J l ll's l ions were 'dead the whole brood no sooner hatched'.

We are completely trapped in the impasse. The cogito is literally

I I I I I w ; l I ah le , but it is also inevitable. The solipsism that is given over to the

1 1 1 1 1 l 1'�;S of identification is interminable and pointless, it can no longer sustain

II 1 1 1 1 l 1 g, but neither can the place of being welcome us. This is why Beckett's

I . . . � I :, i'rom this period are textsfor nothing. With extraordinary lucidity, they

I l ' i l l i S of the nothingness of the attempt in progress. They come to the

l I ' n l isal ion, not that there is nothing (Beckett will never be a nihilist), but that

\\' 1 I I i I Ig has nothing more to show for itself. These texts tell us the truth of a

i i l i l ia l ion, that of Beckett at the end of the fifties: what he has written up to

l l i a l point can 't go on. It is impossible to go on alternating, without any

I I ll'd iation whatsoever, between the neutrality of the grey black of being and

I I I l ' endless torture of the solipsistic cogito. Writing can no longer sustain

I I :w l r by means of this alternation.

And yet, Beckett did go on. Unless we imagine that it was a matter of

I I s i mple obsession, or of a slavish obedience to an imperative whose vacuity

I ll' I acitly acknowledged, we must ask ourselves through what this continuation

r a l l l e to pass. I am convinced that it happened through a real artistic and

I I l te l lectual transformation, and more precisely through a change in the

, ,";entation of thought. 26

4 . The Tra nsfo rm at i on i n Beckett 's w o rk a fter 1 9 6 0

It is not true that Beckett's enterprise develops in a linear fashion on

Ihe basis of its initial parameters. It is also utterly wrong to maintain, as

much critical opinion would have it, that his work drove itself ever deeper

into 'despair', 'nihilism' , or the defeat of meaning.

Beckett treats a set of problems in the medium of prose; his work is in

no way the expression of a spontaneous metaphysics. When these problems

tum out to be caught in a prosodic set-up that either does not or no longer

allows them to be solved, Beckett displaces, transforms and even destroys

, this set-up and its corresponding fictions.

This is, without a doubt, what happens at the end of the fifties, after the

Texts for Nothing. We can take How It Is - ultimately a little known book - as

the mark of a major transformation in the way that Beckett fictionalises his

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thinking. This text breaks with the confrontation that opposed the suffering

cogito to the grey black of being. It attempts to ground itself in completely

different categories: the category of 'what-comes-to-pass ' [ce-qui-se-passe]

-present from the start but now recast - and, above all, the category of alterity,

of the encounter and the figure ofthe Other, which fissures and displaces the

solipsistic internment of the cogito.

In order to remain adequate to the categories of thought, the construction

of the texts also undergoes profound changes. The canonical form taken by

the fictions of the 'early' Beckett alternates - as we have seen - between

trajectories (or wanderings) and fixities (or constrained monologues). This

form is progressively replaced by what I would like to call the figural poem

o/the subject 's postures. Beckett's prose is no longer able to retain its usual

'novelistic' functions (description and narration) - not even when these are

reduced to their bare bones (the grey black that describes only being, the

pure wandering that narrates only itself). It is this abdication of the fictive

functions of prose that leads me to speak of the poem. With regard to the

subject, what is at stake in this poetics is no longer the question of its identity,

an effort which the monologue of The Unnamable had subjected to its own

brand of torture. Rather, Beckett's concern will tum to the occurrences of the

subject, to its possible positions, or to the enumeration of its figures. Instead

of the useless and unending fictive reflection of the self, the subject will be

pinpointed according to the variety of its dispositions vis-a-vis its encounters

- in the face of 'what-comes-to-pass ' , in the face of everything that

supplements being with the instantaneous surprise of an Other.

In order to track the discontinuity ofthe subject's figures - as opposed

to the obstinate repetition of the Same as it falls prey to its own speech -

Beckett's prose becomes segmented, adopting the paragraph as its musical

unit. The subject's capture within thought will take place in a thematic network:

repetitions ofthe same statements in slowly shifting contexts, reprises, circles,

recurrences, etc.

This evolution is typical, I think, of what I am trying to present here

under the name of 'the writing of the generic' . Since what is at stake is a

generic truth of Humanity, the narrative model - even when reduced to the

pure feature of its trajectory - is not enough, and neither is the solipsistic

'internal' monologue, not even when it produces fictions and fables. Neither

the technique of Molloy nor that of Malone Dies - both of which remain very

close to Kafka's textual procedures - suffice to submit the prose to what is

indiscernible in a generic truth??

1 6

l Al a i n Ba d i ou On Beckett

In order to grasp the discontinuous interweavings [intrications

1. /. 'III/aires ] of the subject (or of what is dispersed within the subject) the

I I lollologue/dialogue/story triad must be deposed. At the same time, we cannot

: q wak of a poem in the strict sense, since the operations of a poem, which are

a lways affirmative, do not involve fictionalisation. Instead, I would say that

I he prose - segmented into paragraphs - will come to be governed by a latent

II(ll'fI1. This poem holds together what is given in the texts, but it is not itself

I ', ivcn. The thematic recurrences appear on the surface of the text, characterised by their slow motion. Beneath the surface, however, this movement is

Iq�lIlated or unified by an inapparent poetic matrix.

The distance between the latent poem and the surface ofthe text varies.

" or example, the poem is almost entirely exposed inLessness, whereas it is

(kcply buried in Imagination Dead Imagine. Yet in all these texts there is a

k i !ld of subversion of prose and of its fictional destiny by the poem, without

I I IC text itself actually entering the realm of poetry. It is this subversion without

lransgression that Beckett was to refine after 1 960 - with a great many

hcsitations, of course - as the only regime of prose adequate to the generic

intention.

From a more abstract point of view, Beckett's evolution goes from a

progrannne of the One - obstinate trajectory or interminable soliloquy - to I he pregnant theme of the Two, which opens out onto infinity. This opening

orthe multiple will give rise to combinations and hypotheses reminiscent of

cosmology. These combinations and hypotheses are captured in their literal

objectivity; they are given, not as suppositions, but as situations. Finally, we

have the passage from a set-up of fictions, whose stories are perhaps intended

10 be allegorical, to a semi-poetic set-up that puts situations into place. These

situations will allow us to enumerate the possible fortunes or misfortunes of Ihe subject.

As far as the question of the Other is concerned, this new project

oscillates between realisations of failure and flashes of victory. We could say

I hat in Happy Days, Enough or III Seen III Said, it is the positive inflection

Ihat predominates, under the signifier of a 'happiness' that cannot be abolished

by the writing's ironic tone. In Company, by contrast, which ends with the

word 'alone', there is a final deconstruction of that which - in the sublimity

ofthe night - will have been but the fiction of a Two. However, this oscillation

itself constitutes a principle of openness. The second half of Beckett's work

in effect marks an opening onto chance, indifferently sustaining both success

and failure, the encounter and the non-encounter, alterity and solitude. Chance

1 7

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Ala i n Ba d iou On Beckettr---------------

contributes in part to curing Beckett of the secret schema of predestination,

evident in the work between Watt and How It Is. Of course, in the earliest of Beckett's works we can already find traces

of this break with the schema of predestination, of this opening up to the

chance possibility that what exists is not all there is [qu 'il n y ait pas seulement ce qu 'il y a]. These traces are linked to the muffled exposition of the schema

itself. I am thinking, for instance, of the moment when Molloy declares: 'one

is what one is, partly at least' (T, p. 54; TN, p. 54).18 This 'partly' concedes a

point to the non-identity of the self, which is where the risk of a possible

freedom lies. This concession prepares the judgment of Enough: 'Stony ground

but not entirely' (CSP, p. 140; GSP, p. 1 87).29 There is here a breach of being,

a subtraction from the indifferent ingratitude of the grey black. Or, to borrow

a concept from Lacan, there is the not-all, both in that coincidence of self

with self that speech exhausts itself in situating, and in the earth's stony

ingratitude.29

What is this breach in the totality of being and self? What is to be

found in this breach that is simultaneously the not-all of the subject and the

grace of a supplement to the monotony of being? This is the question of the

event, of 'what-comes-to-pass ' . It is no longer a matter of asking the question

'What of being such as it is? ', or 'Can a subject who is prey to language

rejoin its silent identity?' Instead, one asks: 'Does something happen?' And,

more precisely: 'Is there a name for the surging up, for an incalculable advent

that de-totalises being and tears the subject away from the predestination of

its own identity?'

5 . Event, M ea n i n g , N a m i n g

The interrogation concerning both what comes to pass and the possibility

of a thinking of the event as it arises motivates some of Beckett's earliest

texts. It is central to Watt, which dates from the forties. But, to a considerable

extent, it was obliterated by the works that brought Beckett fame. In addition

to Waiting for Godot, this means essentially the trilogy of Molloy, Malone

Dies, and The Unnamable. What common opinion retained from these works

was precisely that in the end nothing happened, nothing but the wait for an

event. Godot will not come; Godot is nothing but the promise of his coming.

In this sense, the role of the event is akin to that of woman in Claudel: a

promise that cannot be kept.

1 8

l Ala i n Ba d i ou On Beckett

I I I Watt, on the other hand, we encounter the crucial problem of what 1 1 11 l ino calls 'incidents', which are themselves quite real.

/Vlltt provides the allegorical arrangement of a structural place: the

h"I I : ; I ' of Mr. Knott.31 This place is both immemorial and invariable, it is

\ "' 1 1 1 , ), a s All and as Law:

I . . . J nothing could be added to Mr. Knott's establishment, and from it

1I( llhing taken away, but that as it was now, so it had been in the beginning,

alld so it would remain to the end, in all essential respects, any significant

presence, at any time, and here all presence was significant, even though

it was impossible to say of what, proving that presence at all times [ . . . ]

( W, p. 1 29; W US, p. 1 3 1).32

Mr. Knott's house binds presence and meaning so closely that no breach

I I I i t s being is thinkable, whether by supplement or by subtraction. All that

( Il le can do is to reflect the Law of invariance that governs the place of being.

I low does the house function over time? Where is Mr. Knott, at any given

I I IOlllent? In the garden, or on the first floor? These are questions that relate

to pure knowledge, to the science of place; they are the rationalisations of

:;( l i llcthing like a 'waiting for Mr. Knott' .

But besides the law of place and its uncertain science there is the problem of incidents. This is what will arouse Watt's passion as a thinker.

Speaking of these incidents, Beckett will say - in a formula of major

l i llportance - that they are 'of great formal brilliance and indeterminable

purport' (W, p. 7 1 ; W US, p. 74).33 What are these incidents? Among the

1 I 10st remarkable ones, let us cite the visit of a piano tuner and his son, or the

pulting out of Mr. Knott's dish for the dog in front of the door, a dog whose

origin is itself an 'impenetrable' question.

What provokes thought is the contradiction between, on the one hand,

I he formal brilliance of the incident (its isolation, its status as exception),

and, on the other, the opaqueness of its content. Watt takes great pains in

'formulating hypotheses about this content. It is here that his thought is really

awakened. What is at issue is not a cogito under the torturing compulsion of I he voice, but rather calculations and suppositions designed to raise the content

ofthe incidents up to the level of their formal brilliance.

In Watt, however, there is a limit to this investigation, a limit that Beckett will not cross until much later: the hypotheses about the incidents remain

1 9

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A l a i n Bad i o u On Beckettr----------------:..

captive to a problematic of meaning. We are still within the confines of an

attempt of the hermeneutic type, in which one is supposed to bring the incident,

by means of a well-conducted interpretation, into agreement with the

established universe of meanings. Here is the passage that lays out the

hierarchy of possibilities that are open to Watt as the interpreter, or hermeneut,

of the incidents:

[ . . . ] the meaning attributed to this particular type of incident, by Watt, in

his relations, was now the initial meaning that had been lost and then

recovered, and now a meaning quite distinct from the initial meaning, and

now a meaning evolved, after a delay of varying length, and with greater

or less pains, from the initial absence of meaning

(W p. 76; W US, p. 79).34

The hermeneut has three possibilities: if he supposes that there is a

meaning to the incident he can retrieve it, or else propose an entirely different

one. If instead he supposes that there is no meaning, he can generate one. Of

course, only this third hypothesis, which posits that the incident is entirely

devoid of meaning and that it is therefore really separate from the closed

universe of sense (Mr. Knott's house), awakens thought in a lasting manner

( ,after a delay of varying length'), and demands its labour ('with greater or

less pains ') . However, if this is all there is, if the interpreter is the giver of

sense, then we remain prisoners of meaning as law and imperative. The

interpreter creates nothing but an agreement between the incident and that

from which he separated himself at the beginning - the established universe

of meanings, Mr. Knott's house. In Watt there certainly is a chance that

something may happen, but what-comes-to-pass - once it is captured and

reduced by the hermeneut - does not preserve its character as a supplement

or a breach. Beginning with the play Endgame, Beckett dissociates what-comes­

to-pass from any allegiance - even an invented one - to meanings. He postulates that the existence of an event does not entail that we are subjected to the imperative of discovering its meaning:

HAMM: What's happening?

CLOY: Something is taking its course.

[Pause.]

I IAMM: Clov!

2 0

l�A ___ I--=-a_i n_B_a ___ d_i_o_u_O_n_B�e_ck_e_t_t ___ " ( ' 1 'oV: [Impatiently.] What is it?

I I A M M: We're not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something?

( ' I ,OV: Mean something ! You and I, mean something ! [Brie/laugh.] Ah I l lat's a good one!

( '[)W, pp. 1 07-108; E, pp. 32-33)35

Ultimately, Beckett replaces his initial hermeneutics - which attempts

I t ! p i n the event to the network of meanings - with an entirely different

t ' 1 1\ Tat ion, that of naming. Confronted with a chance supplementation of being,

l Ia l i l i ng does not seek any meaning at all, but instead proposes to draw an

I l i vented name out of the very void of what takes place. Interpretation is

I hncby supplanted by a poetics of naming that has no other purpose than to

/1 \ I hc incident, to preserve within language a trace ofthe incident's separation.

The poetics of naming is central to III Seen III Said, starting with the

\,\,1 y title ofthe text. Indeed, what does 'ill seen' mean? 'Ill seen' means that

what happens is necessarily outside the laws of visibility of the place of being.

W l lat truly happens cannot be properly seen [bien vu] (including in the moral

: :,'nsc of the term), because the well-seen [bien-vu] is always framed by the

" .Icy black of being, and thus cannot possess the capacity for isolation and

::urprise that belongs to the event-incident. And what does 'ill said' mean?

· I I I C well-said is precisely the order of established meanings. But if we do

I l i anage to produce the name of what happens inasmuch as it happens - the

l Iamc ofthe ill seen - then this name cannot remain prisoner of the meanings

that are attached to the monotony of the place. It thus belongs to the register

" I ' the ill said. 'Ill seen ill said' designates the possible agreement between

t hai which is subtracted from the visible (the 'ill seen'), and that which is

';l I hlracted from meaning (the 'ill said'). We are therefore dealing with the

agrcement between an event, on the one hand, and the poetics of its name, on

t hI; other,

Here is a decisive passage concerning this point:

During the inspection a sudden sound. Startling without consequence for

the gaze the mind awake. How explain it? And without going so far how

say it? Far behind the eye the quest begins. What time the event recedes.

When suddenly to the rescue it comes again. Forthwith the uncommon

common noun collapsion. Reinforced a little later if not enfeebled by the

infrequent slumberous. A slumberous collapsion. Two. Then far from the

still agonizing eye a gleam of hope. By the grace of these modest beginnings

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Ala i n Ba d i o u On Beckett ,---------------

(ISIS, p. 55; NO, p. 83).36

The text, in the end, speaks about itself. 'The inspection' accords with

visibility; it is the well-seen, which is moreover presented here as a torture.

During the torment of the submission to the law of place, in the classical

abruptness of the supplementation by an event, there is a noise. This noise is

out-of-place [hors-lieu], isolated in its formal clarity, in-visible, ill seen?7

The entire problem is to invent a name for it. In passing, Beckett rejects the

hypothesis - which might appear as more ambitious but actually exhibits a

lesser freedom - of an explanation that would 'well say' about the ill seen.

The name of the noise-event is a poetic invention. This is what Beckett

signals by the paradoxical alliance of 'collapsion' and 'slumberous' , one

'uncommon' and the other 'infrequent' . This naming emerges from the void

of language, like an ill saying adequate to the ill seen of the noise.

Even more important is the fact that once ' slumberous collapsion' is

uttered - as what names the suddenness of the noise as a poetic wager on the

ill seen - then and only then is there 'a gleam of hope' .

What kind of hope are we dealing with here? The hope of a truth. A

truth that will be interpolated into the grey black, a truth dependent on the

naming of an event which will itself be eclipsed. The moment of grace, the

'grace of these modest beginnings' . There exists no other beginning for a

truth than the one that accords a poetic name - a name without meaning - to

a separable supplement which, however obscure, however ill seen it is said

to be, is nevertheless, once subtracted from the grey black of being, 'of great

formal brilliance'.

What is thus opened up is the domain of truth. In its separable origin,

this is the domain of alterity. The naming guards a trace of an Other-than­

being, which is also an Other-than-self.

This is the source of the subject's dis-closure, whereby it incurs the

risk of the Other, of its figures and occurrences. It does so under the sign of

the hope opened up by ontological alterity - the breach in being which is

crystallised both by the suddenness of the event and by the brilliance of the

ill seen.

6 . F ig u res of the S u bj ect a n d Fo rm u l a s of Sexu a t i on

The fabulation of the figures of the subject will persistently occupy

2 2

l Ala i n Ba d i ou On Beckett

I \ ' , L ( ' I I in his texts after 1 960. The most significant set-ups [montages] in

I I I I ' , Il'Spcct are the very 'structuralist' one of The Lost Ones, published in

I " /0, :llId the one of How It Is.

I II both cases, fiction lays out an abstract place that does not imply any

, : , I ah l ished figure ofthe sensible. The place is no longer that of the forests, or

" I I I Il' Ilowers of wandering, or of the closure of a room in an asylum. The

' ,p: I ( ' l� is homogeneous and regulated, subjected to strict parameters that one

' , ( , I I�;CS could serve as the object of an exact science. Such coded places evoke

, I I II Ickct cosmology, but they also recall Dante 's Inferno. Their bareness allows

, t i l a l lention to focus upon the figural dispositions of the subject.

In The Lost Ones, the place in question is a giant rubber cylinder in

wl l ich the variations oflight, sound, and temperature are regulated by rigorous

l aws . These laws are empirically observable and yet conceptually unknown.

Tli is is a simple cosmos, purified and reduced to a complex of closure and

I " ! ',a l i ty. Within it, a ' little people' busies itself with obeying a single

1 l l lpcrative: to look for their lost ones.38 This obstinate imperative is no longer

1 1 t : 1 1 of identification, as in The Unnamable. It is no longer a question of

::pcaking one's self or of rejoining oneself at the pure point of silence. The

I I I I perative is to look for the other, or, to be more precise, it is up to each one

In look for its other. Here is the very beginning ofthe tale: 'Abode where lost

i >ndics roam each searching for its lost one' (eSp, p. 1 59; GSP, p. 202).39

The lost one is the one who, by being your lost one, singularises you,

kars you away from the anonymous status of those who have being only to

I l ie extent that they are lost among the people of searchers. To find one's lost

nllC [etre 'depeuplt!'] would be to come to oneself [advenir a soil in the

\�Ilcounter with one's other.

The quest for the other is both constant and varied. People run around

l�vcrywhere in the cylinder - for example climbing the ladders to see if the

lost one is in one of the niches installed at various heights. All ofthis amounts

1 0 a very complicated exercise that Beckett describes in all of its painstaking

m inutiae. In the end we can nevertheless distinguish four figures of the quest,

and therefore four figures of the subject, four possible positions for 'each

one' who searches for its lost one.

Roughly speaking, there are two criteria for setting up this typology of

ligures.

The first one contrasts those who search and those who have given up

on the search; those who still live in accordance with the single imperative

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Ala i n Bad iou On Beckett r-------------.....

and those who have given up on this imperative - which is the same as giving

up on one's desire, since there exists no other desire than that of finding one's

lost one. Beckett calls these defeated searchers the vanquished. To be

vanquished, let us note, is never to be vanquished by the other, but rather entails that one has renounced the other.

The second criterion has its origin in the Platonic categories of movement " and rest, whose importance for Beckett's thought I have already indicated. There are searchers who circulate without stopping, there are others who sometimes stop, and then there are those who stop often - and even some who no longer move at all.

We thus end up with four types of subject:

1 ) The searchers who circulate nonstop, whom we might call the

'nomads' , and who are the ' initial' living beings - the infants, for example.

The infants never stop circulating, on their mothers' backs to be sure, but

without ever coming to a halt. The mothers also belong to this category; they cannot be immobile, not even for an instant.

2) The searchers who sometimes stop, who 'rest ' . 3) The searchers who are definitively motionless, or immobile for a

very long time, but who - and this is very important - continue to search with their eyes for their lost one. Nothing in them moves, except the eyes, ceaselessly turning in all directions.

4) The non-searchers, the vanquished. Those who are immobile, either constantly or for a long time, are called

the sedentary. By combining the criteria of the imperative (to search) and of movement, we can fundamentally distinguish two 'extremal' positions: the absolute nomadic living beings, on the one hand, and the vanquished, on the other. Between these two figures lie partial and total sedentarity.

The principle underlying this distribution of figures is the following: since the law of desire is the search for the other, this search can never be interrupted, except in that approximation of death constituted by irreversibility. The moment when one gives up on the imperative is a point of no return. The one who stops circulating becomes sedentary, thereby entering into the figure of the vanquished.

This is if we view things from the side of life, from the side of the imperative ofthe lost one. But, from the other point of view, that of sedentarity, there exist a variety of possibilities - one can circulate between partial and total immobility. There is even the possibility of the following miracle, which

24

l A la i n Bad i ou On Beckett

1 0 . 1 1 hOl l rs all of Beckett's paradoxical optimism: the return (which is rare,

, 1 1 1 1 I t ,sl never takes place, but there are cases . . . ) of a vanquished one to the

, I I " 1 1 : 1 o r the search. Here the set-up involves a certain torsion: giving up on

I i i , ' l i l lperative is irreversible, but the result of (or the punishment for) this

. I , k :l l , which is apathetic immobility, is not irreversible . Or again:

I l l l 'vlTsibility is a law of choice, a law of the moment; it does not govern a

' : I : i I (' of affairs. Grasped in all its consequences and figures, and not in its

I ' l l n' moment, irreversibility is not irreversible.

The subject's maxims are therefore as follows: to give up is irreversible,

1 ," 1 1111 possibilities exist even where nothing attests to them, in the midst of

I I l l ' l igures of sedentarity. Beckett says as much in an extraordinarily succinct

1 ' : lssage, which presents a very abstract and profound insight into the link

I H' lween an imperative and the domain of possibilities in which it is exercised:

[ . . . J in the cylinder what little is possible is not so it is merely no longer so

and in the least less the all of nothing if this notion is maintained

(eSp, p. 167; GSP, pp. 2 1 1 -2 1 2).40

The slightest failure is total (because less = nothing) but no possibility

I �; annihilated (because not-possible = provisionally no longer possible).

The ethics of the cylinder knows no eternal damnation, but neither

docs it know any compromise regarding the imperative of the Other. What

distributes this ethics into its two sides is a figure of the subject.

In How It Is, the description of the subject's figures takes place in another

rictional montage, bringing us closer to the crucial problem of the Two.

Of course, Beckett maintains that there are four main figures. There

arc always four figures, we cannot escape this number, the problem is knowing

which of them are nameable.

A passing remark: you are probably acquainted with Lacan's thesis

about what can be said of truth. For Lacan, a truth can never be entirely said,

i t can only be half-said.40 When it comes to the truth of subjective figures,

I he proportion that Beckett proposes is somewhat different. Of the four figures,

only three can be named, so that in this case speech can reach three quarters

of the truth:

[ . . . J the voice being so ordered I quote that of our total life it states only

three quarters (HI!, p. 142; HI! US, p . 130)42

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Ala i n Bad i o u On Beckettr---------------

These are the four figural postures of the subject in How It Is:

1) To wander in the dark with a sack.

2) To encounter someone in the active position, pouncing on them in

the dark. This is the so-called 'tormentor 's' position. '

3) To be abandoned, immobile in the dark, by the one encountered.

4) To be encountered by someone in a passive position (someone

pounces on you while you are immobile in the dark). This is the position of

the so-called 'victim'. It is this fourth position that the voice is not able to

say, thus leading to the axiom of the three quarters concerning the relationship

between truth and speech.

These are the generic figures which cover everything that can happen

to a member of humanity. It is very important to note that these figures are

egalitarian ones. In this set-up there is no particular hierarchy, nothing to

indicate that this or that one among the four figures is to be desired, preferred,

or distributed differently than the others. The words 'tormentor ' and 'victim'

should not mislead us in this regard. Besides, Beckett is careful to warn us

that there is something exaggerated, something falsely pathetic in these

conventional denominations. Moreover, we will see that the positions of the

victim and the tormentor designate everything that can exist by way of

happiness in life. In sum, these figures are only the generic avatars of existence;

they are equivalent to one another, and this profound equality offate authorises

the following remarkable statement: 'in any case we have our being injustice

I have never heard anything to the contrary' (HII, p. 135; HII US, p. 124).43

Of course, the justice evoked here, as a judgment about collective being,

does not refer to any kind of finality. It concerns only the intrinsic ontological

equality of the figures of the subject.

Within this typology, we can nevertheless group the figures of solitude,

on the one hand, and the figures of the Two, on the other.

The figures of the Two are the tormentor and the victim. These postures

are the consequence of a chance encounter in the dark, and are tied to one

another by the extorsion of speech, by the violent demand of a story. This is

' life in stoic love' (HII, p. 69; HII US, p. 62).45

The two figures of solitude are: to wander in the dark with one's sack

and to be immobile because one has been abandoned.

The sack is very important. Indeed, it provides the best proof that I am

aware of for the existence of God: every traveller finds his or her sack more

or less filled with tins of food, and to explain this fact God is the simplest

hypothesis; all the other hypotheses, which Beckett tries to list, are extremely

� �� .���---------2 6

, "" 'p l icated.

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L A l a i n Bad i o u On Beckett

I ,ct us note that, as figures of solitude, the journey and immobility are

I h , results of a separation. The joumey is that of a victim who abandons her

I" , " Iel ltor, whilst immobility in the dark applies to the abandoned tormentor.

I I I :; dear that these figures are sexuated, but in a latent manner. Beckett does

1 , , , 1 pronounce the words 'man' and 'woman', precisely because they refer

1 1 1 1 1 00 comfortably to a structural and permanent Two. Depending as it does

t i l l I hc chance of the encounter, the Two of victim and tormentor, of their

I ' 1 I I II Ieys and immobilities, is not the realisation of any pre-existing duality.

I n fact, the figures of solitude are sexuated in accordance with two

I " ('al existential theorems, whose evidence is plotted out by How It Is:

- first theorem: only a woman travels;

_ second theorem: whoever is immobile in the dark is a man.

I will let you reflect upon these theorems. What we should note

I I l 1 l l 1ediately is that this doctrine of the sexes, which states that wandering

'{" /i lies a woman and that ifthere is a mortal immobile in the dark he must be

l i l l ian - this schema of sexuation, in brief- is in no sense either empirical or

h io logical. The sexes are distributed as a result, on the basis of an encounter

I I I which the active position - called 'the tormentor's' - and the passive one

called 'the victim's' - are bound together through 'stoic love' . The sexes

h, '/ 'pen when a mortal crawling in the dark encounters another mortal crawling

I I I the dark, like everyone else, with his or her sack full of tins of food. Of

('ourse, there are always fewer and fewer tins about, but one day another sack

wi l l be found - as long as we don't stop crawling, God wilIling.

Active and passive positions, however, are not the last word on

scxuation. In order to shed more light upon the matter, we must examine

Beckett's 'terminal' thought on its own terms. This is the thought that

eSlablishes the power of the Two as truth.

7 . Love a n d its N u m e r ica l i ty : O n e , Two, Infi n i ty

Whilst Beckett's fables are subject to a number of variations, one feature

remains unchanged: love begins in a pure encounter, which is neither destined

nor predestined, except by the chance crossing of two trajectories . Prior to

I his meeting, only solitude obtains. No Two, and in particular no sexual duality,

exists before the encounter. Sexual difference is unthinkable except from the

point of view ofthe encounter, as it unfolds within the process oflove. There

2 7

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Ala i n Ba d i o u On Beckettr--------------

is no originary or prior difference that conditions or orientates this encounter. The encounter is the originary power ofthe Two, and therefore oflove itself. This power, which within its own domain is not preceded by anything, is i

practically without measure. In particular, it is incommensurable with the power of feeling and with the sexual and desiring power of the body. It is in '

the thirties, in Murphy, that Beckett asserts this excess without measure of · . ..... .

the encounter:

And to meet [ . . . ] in my sense exceeds the power of feeling, however tender,

and of bodily motions, however expert (M, p. 124; M US, p. 222).44

Beckett never reduces love to the amalgam of sentimentality and sexuality endorsed by common opinion. Love as a matter of truth (and not of , opinion) depends upon a pure event: an encounter whose strength radically exceeds both sentimentality and sexuality.

The encounter is the founding instance ofthe Two as such. In the figure oflove - such as it originates in the encounter - the Two arises. This includes the Two of the sexes or of the sexualized figures. In no way does love tum a pre-existing Two into a One; this is the romantic version oflove that Beckett never ceases to deride. Love is never either fusion or effusion. Rather, it is the often painstaking condition required for the Two to exist as Two. An example is provided in Malone Dies by the fictitious encounter that Malone engineers between Macmann and his guardian, Moll. The love that is admirably recounted here, like the love ofthe aging or the dying, takes on an extraordinary lyrical intensity. Malone comments on the truth-effects ofthis love as follows:

But on the long road to this what flutterings, alarms and bashful fumblings,

of which only this, that they gave Macmann some insight into the meaning

of the expression, Two is company (T, p. 261 ; TN, p. 260).46

The Two, which is inaugurated by the encounter and whose truth results from love, does not remain closed in upon itself. Rather, it is a passage, a pivotal point, the first numericality. This Two constitutes a passage, or authorises the pass, from the One of solipsism (which is the first datum) to the infinity of beings and of experience. The Two of love is a hazardous and chance-laden mediation for alterity in general. It elicits a rupture or a severance of the cogito's One; by virtue of this very fact, however, it can hardly stand on its own, opening instead onto the limitless multiple of Being. We might

2 8

l Al a i n Bad iou On Beckett

. d " .- : ; IY Ihat the Two of love elicits the advent of the sensible. The truth of I I , , · ' I WI ) gives rise to a sensible inflection ofthe world, where before only the , ' I . V hlack of being had taken place. Now, the sensible and the infinite are I I hl l l ica l , because the infinity of the world is, together with the One of the , . , , : II, " I he other coherent thesis. Between these two presentational positions, 1 1 11 Two of love functions both as break and as a constitution.

( )ne of the axioms of How It Is is that the One and the Infinite are the 1 \\ 1 ' coherent ontological theses. The hero, crawling in the dark, asserts the 1 "l l owing:

in other words in simple words I quote on either I am alone and no further

problem or else we are innumerable and no further problem either

( l 1 lI, p. 135 ; HII US, p. 124f7

The Two of love deploys the sensible version of this abstract axiom, which jointly validates the thesis of the One and the thesis of the Infinite. I l Ive offers beauty, nuance, colour. It presents what one might call the other I I I .-;econd nocturne - not the grey black of being, but the rustling night, the 1 1 1 1 ', 1 1 1 ofleaves and plants, of stars and water. Under the very strict conditions I " )�;ed by the encounter and the ensuing toil, the Two of love operates the :.I i ssion of the dark into the grey black of being, on the one hand, and the I I I Ii 1 1 itely varied darkness of the sensible world, on the other.

This explains why in Beckett's prose one often chances upon these : ;wlden poems where, under the sign of the inaugural figure of the Two, ' ; I l i l icthing unfolds within the night of presentation. This something is the I l l I d tiple as such. Love is, above all, an authorisation granted to the multiple, I I lade under the ever-present threat of the grey black in which the original ( ) l Ie undergoes the torture of its own identification.

I would now like to quote three such poems that are latent within the plOse, so that another Beckett may be heard - a Beckett who gives voice to I I Ie gift and the happiness of being.

The first poem is taken from Krapp s Last Tape, at the moment in which I he hero of the play, a man nearing his end and launched into interminable a l l empts at anamnesis (he listens to recordings of his own voice at different .'; ( agcs of his life), retrieves the crucial moment when the Two oflove had re­I )pcned the multiple:

-upper lake, with the punt, bathed off the bank, then pushed out into the

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Ala i n Bad iou On Beckettr---------------

stream and drifted. She lay stretched out on the floorboards with her hands

under her head and her eyes closed. Sun blazing down, bit of a breeze,

water nice and lively. I noticed a scratch on her thigh and asked how she

came by it. Picking gooseberries, she said. I said again I thought it was

hopeless and no good going on and she agreed, without opening her eyes.

[Pause.] I asked her to look at me and after a few moments - [Pause.] -

after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I

bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. [Pause. Low.]

Let me in. [Pause.] We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they

went down, sighing, before the stem! [Pause.] I lay down across her with

my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving.

But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side

to side. [Pause.]

Past midnight. Never knew ­

(CDW, p. 221 ; SP, p. 61 )48

As you can see, this is the poem ofthe opening of the waters, the multiple

of the absolute moment, when love, even if it is in the statement of its own

end, brings forth the infinity of the sensible world.

The second quote comes fromEnough, a short text entirely devoted to

love. This text establishes precise connections between love and infinite

lmowledge. The two walking lovers, broken in two, in a world of hills in

bloom, are never closer to one another than when they discuss mathematics

or astronomy:

His talk was seldom of geodesy. But we must have covered several times

the equivalent of the terrestrial equator. At an average speed of roughly

three miles per day and night. We took flight in arithmetic. What mental

calculations bent double hand in hand! Whole ternary numbers we raised

in this way to the third power sometimes in downpours of rain. Graving

themselves in his memory as best they could the ensuing cubes

accumulated. In view ofthe converse operation at a later stage. When time

would have done its work (CSP, p. 141 ; GSP, p. 1 88).49

Here is another very beautiful passage, once again fromEnough, when

the figure of the beloved man becomes this instance of lmowledge through

which the sky is presented in its proper order:

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l Al a i n Bad iou On Beckett

( )n a gradient Of one in one his head swept the ground. To what this taste

was due I cannot say. To love of the earth and the flowers' thousand scents

: l I1d hues. Or to cruder imperatives of an anatomical order. He never raised

I he question. The crest once reached alas the going down again.

I n order from time to time to enjoy the sky he resorted to a little round

Ill irror. Having misted it with his breath and polished it on his calf he

looked in it for the constellations. I have it! he exclaimed referring to the

Lyre or the Swan. And often he added that the sky seemed much the same

(CSP, p. 142; GSP, p. 190).50

I , IVC is when we can say that we have the sky, and that the sky has nothing.51

I I i s then that the multiple of Constellations is held in the opening of the

Two.52

The last poem is taken from Company, and it is doubtless the one most

" I t IScly bound to the metaphor of a division of the dark and of the advent of

l l il� second nocturne:

You are on your back at the foot of an aspen. In its trembling shade. She at

right angles propped on her elbows head between her hands. Your eyes

opened and closed have looked in hers looking in yours. In your dark you

look in them again. Still. You feel on your face the fringe of her long black

hair stirring in the still air. Within the tent of hair your faces are hidden

from view. She murmurs, Listen to the leaves. Eyes in each other's eyes

you listen to the leaves. In their trembling shade

(C, pp. 66-67; NO, p. 35).53

All of these quotes show the Two of love as the passage lPasse] from

I he One of solipsism to the infinite multiplicity of the world, and as the

nocturnal fissure of the grey black of being.

But there is also a conspiring of the Two - an insistence that takes the

ligure of fidelity. This fidelity organises four functions in Beckett, which are

a lso four figures of the subject within love. It is my conviction (for which I

a m unable here to adduce proof) that these functions have a general value, in

I he sense that they are the organising functions of any generic process. They

relate to the duration of love, of course, but also to scientific accumulation,

artistic innovation, and political tenacity.

The first of these functions is wandering [l 'errance] or the journey,

with or without the benefit of a sack: a journey in the dark, which presents

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the infinite chance of the faithful journey of love; the endless crossing of a world henceforth exposed to the effects of the encounter. This function of wandering, whose abstract variant we encountered in How It Is, is also exhibited in the incessant walking of the lovers of Enough among the hills and flowers. It establishes the duration of the Two and grounds time under the injunction of chance.

The second function is exactly the opposite, that is, immobility, which watches over, guards or maintains the fixed point of the first naming, the naming of the event-encounter. We saw that this naming pins the ' incident' to its lack of meaning, and permanently fixes that which is supernumerary into a name. This is the senseless 'I love you', 'We're in love' , or whatever might come in its stead, and which in each of its occurrences is always pronounced for the first time. This immobility is that ofthe second nocturne, of the small craft caught in the flags, of gazes absorbed by the eyes of the other.

The third function is that of the imperative: always to go on, even in separation; to decree that separation itself is a mode of continuity. The imperative of the Two relays that of the soliloquy (You must go on . . . I 'll go

on), but it subtracts the element of pointless torture from it, thereby imposing the strict law of happiness, whether one is a victim or a tormentor.

The fourth function is that of the story, which, from the standpoint of the Two, offers up the latent infinity of the world and recounts its unlikely unfolding, inscribing, step by step - like an archive that accompanies wandering - everything that one may discover in what Beckett calls 'the blessed days of blue' (eSp, p. 153 ; GSP, p. 197).54

Love (but also any other generic procedure, albeit in the regime that is its own) weaves within its singular duration these four functions: wandering, immobility, the imperative, and the story.

Beckett constructs the Idea of the sexes, of the two sexes, by combining these four functions, under the assumption that the event of love has taken place. He thus establishes the masculine and feminine polarities of the Two independently of any empirical or biological determination of the sexes.

The functions combined within the masculine polarity are those of immobility and the imperative. To be a 'man' is to remain motionless in love by retaining the founding name and by prescribing the law of continuation. Yet, because the narrative function is missing, this prescriptive immobility remains mute. In the case oflove, a 'man' is the name's silent custodian. And because the function of wandering is missing, to be a man within love is also

3 2

l Ala i n Bad iou On Beckett

1 " , I , . I H lthing that bears witness to this love, but only to retain, motionless in I I " d: 1 I1, love's powerful abstract conviction.

Thc feminine polarity combines wandering and narrative. It does not i l l , t . rd with the fixity of the name, but with the infinity of its unfolding in the \\ l I l ld , the narrative of its unending glory. It does not stick to the sole 1 ' 1 t ',<;niption without proof, but organises the constant inquiry, the verification I I I : 1 capacity. To be a 'woman', in the context of love, is to move about in i l l t 'ordance with a custody of meaning, rather than of names. This custody I I l 1pl ies the errant chance of inquiries, as well as the perpetual depositing of 1 1 1 1 ,'; chance into a story.

Love exists as the determination of this polarity, supporting the four I l I l Ict ions and providing them with a singular distribution. This is why love i l lo l le calls for the observation that there is indeed 'man' (immobility of the I I l 1perative, the custody of the name) and 'woman' (wandering of a truth, t ( ) l Isequences of the name within speech). Without love, nothing would bear w i l i less to the Two of the sexes. Instead there would be One, and One again, h i l i not Two. There would not be man and woman.

These reflections open onto an important doctrine that concerns all 1 ',l' l leric procedures, which is that of their numericality.

In love, there is first the One of solipsism, which is the confrontation or duel between the cogito and the grey black of being in the infinite I l'capitulation of speech. Next comes the Two, which arises in the event of an " I ICllUnter and in the incalculable poem of its designation by a name. Lastly, I here is the Infinity of the sensible world that the Two traverses and unfolds, where, little by little, it deciphers a truth about the Two itself. This numericality ( one, two, infinity) is specific to the procedure oflove. We could demonstrate I hat the other truth procedures - science, art, and politics - have different I l limericalities, and that each numericality singularises the type of procedure i I I question, all the while illuminating how truths belong to totally I lderogeneous registers.

The numericality of love - one, two, infinity - is the setting for what I kckett quite rightly calls happiness. Happiness also singularises love as a l ruth procedure, for happiness can only exist in love. Such is the reward proper to this type of truth. In art there is pleasure, in science joy, in politics enthusiasm, but in love there is happiness.

Joy, pleasure, enthusiasm, and happiness all concern the advent, within I he world, of the void of being, as it is gathered within a subject. In the case of happiness this void is an interval; it is captured in the between [l 'entre-

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Deux], in that which constitutes the effective character of the Two. This is its separation, that is, the difference of the sexes as such. Happiness is not in the least associated with the One, with the myth of fusion. Rather, it is the subjective indicator of a truth of difference, of sexual difference, a truth that love alone makes effective.

At this point, at the very heart of happiness, once more we come up against sexuation, which is both the site and the stakes of happiness. In happiness, 'man' is the blind custodian of separation, of the between. The heroine of Enough will say: 'We were severed if that is what he desired' (eSp, p. 14 1 ; GSP, p. 1 88).55 In fact, the masculine polarity supports a desire for scission. This is not at all a longing to return to solipsism, but rather the desire for the manifestation of the Two in the divided between. There is a Two only ifthere is this between where the void is located as the ontological principle [principe d 'etre] of the Two. The desire of 'man' is assigned to or by this void. We might say that man desires the nothing of the Two, whereas the feminine polarity desires nothing but the Two, that is, the infinite tenacity whereby the Two endures as such. This instance of the 'woman' is magnificently proclaimed at the very end of Enough. It is there that a woman argues for persistence, against the nothing of the Two, against the void that affects the Two from within and which is symbolised by the man's leaving in order to die. This woman is the one who insists on the 'nothing but the Two', even if it is only in its simple mnemonic outline, within the constantly reworked narrative of wandering:

This notion of calm comes from him. Without him I would not have had it.

Now I'll wipe out everything but the flowers. No more rain. No more

mounds. Nothing but the two of us dragging through the flowers. Enough

my oid breasts feel his old hand (eSp, p. 144; GSP, p. 192).56

Happiness is indistinguishably 'man' and 'woman'; it is, at one and the same time, a separating void and the conjunction that reveals this void. As happiness, as the outline of happiness, it is the nothing of the Two and the nothing but the Two. Such is its inseparable sexuation: immobility and wandering, imperative and story.

This happiness is basically all that takes place between the beginning and the end of III Seen III Said. The entire beginning revolves around the word 'misfortune', while the end leans towards the word 'happiness' . If at the outset we have the reign of the visible and the rigidity of seeing in the

34

l A la i n Bad i o u On Beckett

, ' l l ' Y nocturne (ci limbo between life and death), at the end there arises a kind " I l ra nsparent void, which is laid out in the second nocturne. What more is I l ine to do than to listen to what is happening?

What follows is the opening passage - in my view one of the most I wa lltiful texts in the French language - which captures the brilliance of I I I is fortune:

From where she lies she sees Venus rise. On. From where she lies when

the skies are clear she sees Venus rise followed by the sun. Then she rails

at the source of all life. On. At evening when the skies are clear she savours

its star's revenge. At the other window. Rigid upright on her old chair she

watches for the radiant one. Her old deal spindlebacked kitchen chair. It

emerges from out the last rays and sinking ever brighter is engulfed in its

turn. On. She sits on erect and rigid in the deepening gloom. Such

helplessness to move she cannot help. Heading on foot for a particular

point often she freezes on the way. Unable till long after to move on not

knowing whither or for what purpose. Down on her knees especially she

finds it hard not to remain so forever. Hand resting on hand on some

convenient support. Such as the foot of her bed. And on them her head.

, There then she sits as though turned to stone face to the night. Save for the

white of her hair and faintly bluish white of face and hands all is black.

For an eye having no need oflight to see. All this in the present as had she

the misfortune to be still of this world (ISIS, pp. 7-8; NO, pp. 49-50).57

And now the end, where the instant of happiness is conquered in the vcry brief and trying duration of a visitation of the void:58

Decision no sooner reached or rather long after than what is the wrong

word? For the last time at last for to end yet again what the wrong word?

Than revoked. No but slowly dispelled a little very little like the wisps of

day when the curtain closes. Of itself by slow millimetres or drawn by a

phantom hand. Farewell to farewell. Then in that perfect dark foreknell

darling sound pip for end begun. First last moment. Grant only enough

remain to devour all. Moment by glutton moment. Sky earth the whole kit

and boodle. Not another crumb of carrion left. Lick chops and basta. No.

One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness

(ISIS, p. 59; NO, p. 86).59

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This is also what I would like to call the writing of the generic: to present in art the passage from the misfortune oflife and of the visible to the happiness of a truthful arousal of the void. This requires the measureless power of the encounter, the wager of a name, as well as the combination of wandering and fixity, of imperative and story. All of this must in turn be traced out within the division of the night - only then, under these rare conditions, will we be able to repeat with Beckett: 'Stony ground but not entirely' [Terre ingrate mais pas totalement] .

Translated by Bruno Bosteels Revised by Nina Power and Alberto Toscano

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1 . A 'Yo u n g Creti n '

I discovered the work of Beckett in the mid-fifties. It was a real encounter, a subjective blow of sorts that left an indelible mark. So that forty years later, I can say, with Rimbaud: ' I'm there, I'm always there' rry suis,

j'y suis to ujours ] . This is the principal task of youth: to encounter the incalculable, and thereby to convince oneself, against the disillusioned, that

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the thesis 'nothing is, nothing is valuable' is both false and oppressive.

But youth is also that fragment of existence when one easily imagines

oneself to be quite singular, when really what one is thinking or doing is

what will later be retained as the typical trait of a generation. Being young is

a source of power, a time of decisive encounters, but these are strained by

their all too easy capture by repetition and imitation. Thought only subtracts

itself from the spirit of the age by means of a constant and delicate labour. It

is easy to want to change the world - in youth this seems the least that one

could do. It is more difficult to notice the fact that this very wish could end

up as the material for the forms of perpetuation of this very world. This is

why all youth, as stirring as its promise may be, is always also the youth of a

'young cretin'. Bearing this in mind, in later years, keeps us from nostalgia.

When I discovered Beckett, some years after the beginning of his French

oeuvre (that is, around 1 956), I was a complete and total Sartrean, though I

was possessed by a question whose importance I thought I had personally

discovered to have been underestimated by Sartre. I had yet to realise that it

was already, and was going to be for a long while, the abiding obsession of

my generation and of the ones to follow: the question of language. From

such a makeshift observatory, I could only see in Beckett what everybody

else did. A writer of the absurd, of despair, of empty skies, of

incommunicability and of eternal solitude - in sum, an existentialist. But

also a 'modem' writer, in that the destiny of writing, the relationship between

the endless recapitulation of speech and the original silence - the

simultaneously sublime and derisory function of words -was entirely captured

by the prose at a distant remove from any realist or representational intention.

In such 'modem' writing, fiction is both the appearance of a story and the

reality of a reflection on the work of the writer, on its misery and its grandeur.

I used to delight myself with the most sinister aphorisms -youth having

a fatal tendency to believe that ' our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest

thought' . Into sundry notebooks I copied things like:

And when it comes to neglecting fundamentals, I think I have nothing to

learn, and indeed I confuse them with accidentals (T, p. 80; TN, p. 80).61

I should have concentrated my attention on the irony that charges this

nihilistic verdict with a bizarre energy. All the same, when I delighted in

reading (from Malone Dies):

3 8

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No matter, any old remains of flesh and spirit do, there is no sense in

stalking people. So long as it is what is called a living being you can't go

wrong, you have the guilty one (T, p. 260; TN, p. 259).62

I didn't pay enough attention to the denial that this affirmative, almost violent,

: ; Iyle brings to the commonplace (and sub-Kafkaesque) thesis of universal

l " I I I pability.

In my eyes all of this remained the literary allegory of a conclusive

:;Iatement pronounced by Sartre, the famous 'man is a useless passion'. It

didn't have the same flavour as the maxims on language, which I used in

( lrder to support my conviction that the decisive philosophical task, which I

considered my own, was to complete the Sartrean theory of freedom by means

( 1 I" a careful investigation into the opacities of the signifier. This is why The

{ fnnamable was my favourite book. For several months (in youth, this is, to

speak like Beckett, a 'vast time'), I lived in the company of the striking mixture

of hatred and saving familiarity that the ' speaker' of this novel lavishes upon

h is linguistic instrument.

It's a poor trick that consists in ramming a set of words down your gullet

on the principle that you can't bring them up without being branded as

belonging to their breed. But I'll fix their gibberish for them. I never

understood a word of it in any case, not a word of the stories it spews, like

gobbets in a vomit (T, p. 327; TN, pp. 324-325).63

I should have liked to go silent first, there were moments I thought that

would be my reward for having spoken so long and so valiantly, to enter

living into silence, so as to be able to enjoy it, no, I don't know why, so as

to feel myself silent [ . . . J (T, p. 400; TN, p. 396).64

Without doubt I should have pondered this 'valiance' inherent to all

speech, as well as what exactly is designated by these ' stories' spewed forth

by the breed. Above all, it would have demonstrated more lucidity on my

part to have understood that for Beckett The Unnamable was really an impasse,

one that would take him ten years to get out of. But the (ultimately inconsistent)

alliance between nihilism and the imperative of language, between vital

existentialism and the metaphysics ofthe word, between Sartre and Blanchot,

rather suited the young cretin that I was at the time.

Basically, my stupidity lay in unquestioningly upholding the caricature

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which was then - and still is - widespread: a pitiless awareness of the nothingness of sense, extended by the resources of art to cover the nothingness of writing, a nothingness that would be materialised, as it were, by means of increasingly tight and increasingly dense prose pieces that abandoned all narrative principle. The caricature of a Beckett meditating upon death and finitude, the dereliction of sick bodies, the waiting in vain for the divine and the derision of any enterprise directed towards others. A Beckett convinced that beyond the obstinacy of words there is nothing but darkness and void.

It took me many years to rid myself of this stereotype and at last to take Beckett at his word. No, what Beckett offers to thought through his art, theatre, prose, poetry, cinema, radio, television, and criticism, is not this gloomy corporeal immersion into an abandoned existence, into hopeless . relinquishment. Neither is it the contrary, as some have tried to argue: farce, derision, a concrete flavour, a ' thin Rabelais' . Neither existentialism nor a modem baroque. The lesson of Beckett is a lesson in measure, exactitude and courage. That is what I would like to establish in these few pages.

And since it was on reading The Unnamable that my forty-year passion for this author was born, rather than in the statements on language that enchanted my youth, I would like to hold onto this aphorism which still astounds me today, when the 'unnameable' speaker, through his tears and in the certainty that he will never give up, declares:

I alone am man and all the rest divine CT, p. 302; TN, p. 300).65

2 . Bea uty

The work of Beckett, which is often presented as a block or as a linear movement - becoming increasingly nihilistic in content and increasingly concise in fOlm - is really a complex trajectory employing a great variety of literary means.

One can certainly discern in Beckett a central oscillation between philosophical abstraction (an abstraction that is entirely purified in Worstward

Ho) and the strophic poem. The latter describes a kind of picture through the incessant repetition of the same groups of words, and through minute variations which, little by little, displace the meaning ofthe text (a technique pushed to its extreme in Lessness).

We can also identify two major periods within Beckett's work. After

4 0

/ , \ /1 Iii/' Nothing ( composed between 1 950 and 1 953), the writer is overcome loy ; I I \'d ing of impasse and impotence. He comes out of this impasse with I !. ' I I ' /1 Is ( 1959-1 960), a text that introduces a clean rupture in the themes as l\t - I I a s in the conduct of the prose.

The effect of this oscillation and this caesura is that no single literary " . 1 1 1(' can command the comprehension of Beckett's enterprise. The novel 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 is still perceptible in Molloy, but in The Unnamable it is exhausted, ' 1 l l I l Igh it is not possible to say that the poem prevails - even if the cadence, l i l t ' disposition of the paragraphs and the intrinsic value of the visions indicate I I l a l t he text is governed by what could be defined as a 'latent poem'.

In truth, the scraps of fiction or spectacle that Beckett employs attempt ' I I ,'x pose some critical questions (in Kant's sense) to the test of beauty. These q l lestions are very few in number. To Kant's famous 'What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? ', comes the threefold response from " " Is /or Nothing: 'Where would I go, if I could go? Who would I be if I t Ol i ld be? What would I say, if! had a voice? ' After 1 960, one can add: 'Who

, / 11/ I. if the other exists?' The work of Beckett is nothing but the treatment of I hesc four questions within the flesh of language. We could say that we are dea l ing with an enterprise of meditative thought - half-conquered by the p()cm - which attempts to seize in beauty the non-prescriptible fragments of t ·x istence.

We should also refrain from the belief that Beckett sinks into an I I l tcrrogation that is sufficient unto itself, solving none of the problems that it has posed. On the contrary, the work of the prose is intended to isolate and a l low to emerge the few points with respect to which thinking can become a nirmative. In a manner that is almost aggressive, all of Beckett's genius I l:nds towards affirmation. He is no stranger to the maxim, which always carries with it a principle of relentlessness and advancement.

Let us take just one maxim amongst many others, a conclusion: 'Stony ground but not entirely. '66 Ah! One really should speak of the stoniness, of t he ingratitude ofthe Earth! But only as a last resort, so that the 'not entirely' may come to shine within the prose, this prose that we know is destined to ' ring clear' and to keep courage alive within us.

Like many other writers since Flaubert, Beckett often remarked that only music mattered to him, that he was an inventor of rhythms and punctuations. When asked - in one of those periodic inquiries about the 'mystery of the author' in which every artist is invited to take up a pose and fced the century an ersatz of spirit - why he wrote, he telegraphed back:

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'That's all I 'm good for ' [Bon qu 'd 9a] . Not completely, Beckett, not completely! That's all, but not completely! There was the complicated relationship with Joyce, who, all things considered, was Beckett's immediate master. Against the Nazis, on French territory, there was the immediate and very dangerous commitment to the resistance. There was the long marriage with Suzanne, which, without engaging in vulgar 'biographism', we can clearly see as a central reference for all the couples who traverse Beckett's work. There was the wish to work in the theatre, not only as an author, but also as a punctilious and demanding director. There was the constant preoccupation with the use of new techniques : radio (Beckett is a master of the radio play), cinema, television. There were the relations with painters, and the activity of literary criticism (on Proust and Joyce). And many other people, many other things.

I have never deemed it necessary to take entirely seriously the declarations of artists regarding their absolute vocation, the imperial ordeal of phrases and the mysticism of the page. All the same, it is true that to find a writer of this calibre so little exposed to the world, so little compromised, one would need to look far and wide. Beckett truly was a constant and attentive servant of beauty, which is why, at a distance from himself (at a distance from nature, from a 'natural' language, and at a distance from the mother, from the mother-tongue), he called upon the services of a secondary and learnt idiom, a 'foreign' language: French. Little by little, this language conferred upon him an unheard of timbre. In particular, this took place by a sort of intimate rupture which isolates words in order to rectify their precision within the phrase, adding epithets or repentances. Thus we read, in III Seen

III Said:

Was it ever over and done with questions? Dead the whole brood no sooner

hatched. Long before. In the egg. Long before. Over and done with

answering. With not being able. With not being able not to want to know.

With not being able. No. Never. A dream. Question answered

(ISIS, p. 37; NO, p. 70).67

But it also occurred by means of sudden lyrical expansions, in which the calculus of sound appeases the tension of the spirit, filling the air with the nocturne of reminiscence. From Company:

You are on your back at the foot of an aspen. In its trembling shade. She at

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l Al a i n Bad i o u On Beckett

right angles propped on her elbows head between her hands. Your eyes

opened and closed have looked in hers looking in yours. In your dark you

look in them again. Still. You feel on your face the fringe of her long

black hair stirring in the still air. Within the tent of hair your faces are

hidden from view. She murmurs, Listen to the leaves. Eyes in each other's

eyes you listen to the leaves. In their trembling shade

(e, pp. 66-67; NO, p. 35).68

And also by means of a declarative tone that establishes the splendour ( ) f the universe and the apparent misery of its immobile witness as a spectacle Ihat is unveiled through prose, as in III Seen III Said:

From where she lies she sees Venus rise. On. From where she lies when

the skies are clear she sees Venus rise followed by the sun. Then she rails

at the source of all life. On. At evening when the skies are clear she savours

its star's revenge. At the other window. Rigid upright on her old chair she

watches for the radiant one (ISIS, p. 7; NO, p. 49).69

And also by way of falls and halts in the action that indicate, in the prose of Enough, a tenderness which until that point had been restrained, whilst showing in the rhythm that the business of life will not have the last word:

Now I'll wipe out everything but the flowers. No more rain. No more

mounds. Nothing but the two of us dragging through the flowers. Enough

my oid breasts feel his old hand (eSp, p. 144; GSP, p. 1 92).10

And also by the jokes (here from Rough for Theatre II), which annul any loftiness in the tone of the prose:

Work, family, third fatherland, cunt, finances, art and nature, heart and

conscience, health, housing conditions, God and man, so many disasters

(eDW, p. 238; SP, p. 78).71

And finally - against the grain of the brevities and caesurae that elsewhere dominate - by means of length, that extreme flexibility which permits the withdrawal of punctuations, when Beckett wants all the data of a

43

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situation or of a problem to be enveloped in a unified prosodic movement -

something that he attempts in How It Is:

in other words in simple words I quote on either I am alone and no further

problem or else we are innumerable and no further problem either (HIl, p. 1 35 ; HII US, p. 1 24).72

Rectification, or the work on the isolation of terms. Expansion, or the

poetic incision of memory. Declaration, or the function of emergence of prose.

Declension, or the tender cadence of disaster. Interruption, or the maxims of

comedy. Elongation, or the phrased embodiment of variants. These are, in

my opinion, the principal operations through which Beckett's writing attempts,

at one and the same time, to speak unrepentantly of the stony ingratitude of

the Earth, and to isolate, according to its proper density, that which exceeds

it.

This is why we must begin with the beauty in the prose. It is this beauty

that tells us what it is that Beckett wishes to save. This is because the destiny

of beauty, and in particular of the beauty that Beckett aims at, is to separate.

To separate appearance, which it both restores and obliterates, from the

universal core of experience. It is indispensable to take Beckett at his word:

the word of beauty. In this separating function, the word declares what we

must disregard in order to face up to what may be of worth.

3 . Asces is a s Method

In his own way, Beckett rediscovers an inspiration belonging to

Descartes and Husserl: if you wish to conduct a serious enquiry into 'thinking

humanity' [l 'humanite pensante] , it is first of all necessary to suspend

everything that is either inessential or doubtful; it is necessary to reduce

humanity to its indestructible functions. The destitution of Beckett's characters

- their poverty, their illnesses, their strange fixity, or indeed their wandering

without any perceptible finality, in other words, everything that has so often

been taken as an allegory of the infinite miseries of the human condition - is

nothing other than the protocol of an experience which deserves comparison

with the doubt by means of which Descartes reduced the subject to the vacuity

of its pure enunciation, or Husserl's epoch!!, which reduces the evidence of

the world to that of the intentional fluxes of consciousness.

44

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l,--A_I_a_i n __ B_a_d_i o_u __ O_n_B_e_c_k_e_tt ______ 'il I n the first part of his French oeuvre, Beckett's methodical ascesis

1 ' . I . l a les three functions: movement and rest (to go and to stall, or to collapse,

1 . 1 1 1 , l i e down); being (what there is, the places, the appearances, as well as

1 1 1[ ' vacillation of any identity whatsoever); language (the imperative of saying,

1 1 1[ ' impossibility of silence). A ' character' is never anything but the assemblage

I I I a journey, an identity, and a cruel chatter. Fiction, which is always presented

l I : : mbitrary, as an aleatory montage, tends to set out the loss of everything

wh ich is not reducible to these three functions and to demonstrate that these

I I l l 1ctions are what cannot be abolished.

I, , ,

Such is the case with movement: not only must wandering be detached,

! t l i l e by little, from all apparent sense, but since it is a matter of presenting

I he essence of movement - the movement in movement - Beckett's advance

w i l l bring with it the destruction of all the means, outside supports, and

perceptible surfaces of mobility. The 'character' (Molloy, or Moran) will

I l l isiay his bicycle, injure himself, no longer know where he is, and even lose

a good part of his body. Innumerable in Beckett's prose are the blind, the

lame, the paralytic, the old who have lost their walking sticks, the helpless

and the impotent, and, in the end, those bodies that are reduced, little by

I i I tie, to a head, a mouth, a skull with two holes to ill see and an oozing of

words for ill saying. In this dispossession, the 'character' reaches a pure

moment in which movement becomes externally indiscernible from

immobility. This is because movement is no longer anything but its own

ideal mobility, testified only by a minute tension, a sort of differential of

which we could say - so exhausted is the prose - that it is brought back to a

point of movement.

, Immobility would thereby find its complete metaphor in the corpse:

'dying' is the conversion of all possible movement into permanent rest. But

here again, the irreducibility of the functions means that 'dying' is never

death. In Malone Dies, one sees how movement and language ultimately

infect both being and immobility, so that the point of immobility is constantly

deferred; it does not allow itself to be constructed otherwise than as the

unattainable limit of an increasingly diminishing network of movements,

memories and words. Beckett's poetics is thus constituted by a progressive

alleviation of constraints, a demolition of that which delays the moment of

immobility. If movement is undone, so as to be no more than a difference of

rest, rest itself is presented as the integral of movement and language, as a

strange mix of the deceleration of prose and the acceleration of its dispersal .

When Beckett wishes to concentrate his attention on one of thc

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functions, he makes sure that the others are blocked. It thus that the 'speaker'

of The Unnamable, trapped in a jar at the entrance to a restaurant, is rendered

immobile, and the subject matter of his gigantic monologue is nothing more

than the imperative to speak. This is not a tragic image. In fact, if we consider

what requires thinking in the beauty of prose, we will say that this ' character' ,

whose proper name is effaced or undecided and who is utterly destitute, has

actually succeeded in losing all the secondary ornaments, all the dubious

possessions that would have diverted him from what it is his destiny to

experiment, and which concerns generic humanity, whose essential functions

are: going, being and saying.

One can never emphasise enough the degree to which the confusion

between this methodical ascesis - staged with a tender and voluble humour ­

and some sort of tragic pathos of the destitution and the misery of man has

distracted our contemporaries from any deep understanding of the writings

of Beckett.

Beckett says, in How It Is:

the dejections no they are me but I love them the old half-emptied tins let

limply fall no something else the mud engulfs all me alone it carries my

four stone five stone it yields a little under that then no more I don't flee I

am banished (HII, p. 43; HII US, p. 39)13

We cannot understand the text if we immediately see it as a concentration

camp [concentrationnaire] allegory of the dirty and diseased human animal.

On the contrary - admitting that we are indeed animals lodged upon an earth

which is insignificant and brimming over with excrement - it is a matter of

establishing that which subsists in the register of the question, of thought, of

the creative capacity (in this case, the will to movement, as opposed to flight).

Thus reduced to a few functions, humanity is only more admirable, more

energetic, more immortal.

From the sixties onwards, a fourth function takes on a more and more

determining role: that of the Other, of the companion, of the external voice. It

is not by chance that the three parts of How It Is relate to the three moments

that are named by the following syntagms: 'before Pim', 'with Pim' and 'after

Pim'; or that a later text is called Company. The 'with the other' is decisive.

But here too, it is necessary to isolate the essential nature of this 'with the

other' by means of a montage that eradicates all psychology, all evidence,

and all empirical exteriority. The Other is itself a knot tying together the

4 6

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L-....:.A....:..I....:::a..:..:i n�B---.:.a---.:.d_i o_u_O_n_B_e_c_k_e_tt ___ ., .. I I I I L�e primitive functions.

In How It Is, the Other is assigned to movement and to rest: sometimes,

I I I Ihe black night - where, like everyone else, it crawls with its sack - the

( ) I her encounters an immobile entity; sometimes it is encountered in tum, in

l i s immobility, by the reptations of a subject. This accounts for the derived

fU llctions of activity (the one who falls on the other: the tOlmentor) and of

passivity (the one on whom the other falls: the victim). The existence of the

( ) 1 her is not in doubt, but its construction and identity refer back to an evasive

c ircularity; it is possible to occupy successively the position of the tormentor,

1 I H.;n that of the victim, and nothing besides these positions can serve to specity

a i tcrity.

In Company, the problem is inverted, since this time the Other is

assigned to the third function, language. It presents itself as a voice reaching

()ut to someone in the dark. The singularity of this voice is not in doubt; it

relates childhood stories of a rare poetic intensity. But since no real movement

()r corporeal encounter bears witness to it, its existence remains suspended: it

could be the case that there is nothing but ' [t]he fable of one fabling of one

with you in the dark' (C, 89; NO, 46). Just as movement, purified by a methodical literary ascesis, is a

difference of the immobile, and the immobility of being, or death, is never

anything but the inaccessible limit of movement and of language, so the

other, reduced to its primitive functions, is caught in the following tourniquet:

i f he exists, he is like me, he is indiscernible from me. And if he is clearly

identifiable, his existence is uncertain.

In all these cases we can see that the ascesis - metaphorically enacted

as loss, destitution, poverty, a relentlessness based on almost nothing - leads

to a conceptual economy of an ancient or Platonic type. If we disregard (and

Beckett's prose is the movement of this disregard, of this abandon) what is

inessential, what distracts us (in Pascal's sense), we see that generic humanity

can be reduced to the complex of movement, of rest (of dying), of language

(as imperative without respite) and of the paradoxes of the Same and the

Other. We are very close to what Plato, in The Sophist, names as the five

supreme genera: Being, Sameness, Movement, Rest, and Other. If Plato the

philosopher uses these to determine the general conditions for all thinking,

then Beckett the writer intends, through the ascetic movement of prose, to

present in fiction the atemporal determinants of humanity.

This humanity, which has been called 'larval' or 'clownish', and which

in Worstward Ho in fact comprises nothing but skulls oozing words, must be

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thought of as constituting a sort of purified axiomatic, allowing us to go straight to the only questions that matter. And, first of all, to the question that makes writing itself possible, the one that is able to ground the fact that there is a reason to write [qu 'il y ait lieu d' ecrire] : what is the link between language and being? Of course, it is a fact that we are constrained to speak, but of what does speech speak? Of what can it speak?

4 . Be i n g a n d La n g u a g e

If it is indeed necessary to speak, this is not simply because we are prey to language. It is also, and above all because as soon as it is named that which is and of which we are obliged to speak escapes towards its own non­being. This means that the work of naming must always be taken up again. On this point, Beckett is a disciple of Heraclitus: being is nothing other than its own becoming-nothingness. This is what is summed up in one of the mirlitonnades from Poemes:

flux cause flux causes

que toute chose that every thing , tout en etant while being

toute chose every thing

done celle-ld hence that one

meme celle-ld even that one

tout en etant while being

n 'est pas is not

parlons-en speak on74

On this basis, how can the imperative to speak, which governs in particular the imperative of the writer - and above all of the one who is 'good for' nothing else - attune itself with being? Have we some hope that language could stop the flux and confer upon a thing (that one / even that one) at least a relative stability? And if not, what good is the imperative that we should speak on?

For the artist - who differs from the philosopher in this regard - the operator of thought is the fiction within prose. That being ceases to flee in order to convert itself into nothingness entails that language must determine the place of being within a fiction, that it must assign being to its place.

4 8

I I ---------------11

Ala in Bad i o u On Beckett I : "-------------------j<I I ' i tl 'l 'kett devotes many of his inventions to the following task: to name the I h i ional place of being.

There are two places of being in Beckett's first fictions, according to . 1 1 1 opposition that we could refer to as Bergsonian, to the extent that it d lsl i nguishes the closed and the open.

The closed place forbids flight - it blocks the always menacing identity I I I heing and nothingness - because the set of its components is denumerable ; 1 1 11 1 the components themselves can be named exactly. The aim of the fictions I I I closure is that the seen be coextensive with the said. Beckett fixes this I Ihjective in a short text, Fizzle 5: Closed Space:

Closed place. All needed to be known for say is known

(CSP, p. 199; GSP, p. 236).75

This same tendency is exemplified by the room where the two protagonists of Endgame are enclosed, by the room where Malone dies (or rat her moves indefinitely towards his death), and by the house of Mr. Knott I I I Watt, as well as by the cylinder where the entities of The Lost Ones bustle ahout. In all these cases, the set-up of the fiction [Ie dispositij de fiction]

('stablishes a strict control upon place, constructing a universe sufficiently ti ll ite so that when the prose wishes to seize being its escape can be temporarily hlocked.

The open place instead exposes the aleatory character of paths; it extends I he dissipation and tries to maintain itself as close as possible to the flight of appearances. What is in question is a wholly other equality between language and being: the flexibility of the first matches the versatility of the second. This equality tries to anticipate the metamorphoses. This is the case with the I rish countryside - plane, hills, gloomy forests - where Molloy looks for his mother, and where Moran looks for Molloy. We also find it in the town and t he labyrinth of streets of The Expelled, and it is even present in the corridor of black mud where the torturers and the victims of How It Is crawl, since, as we will later learn, this corridor is infinite. In these open places the arrangement of the fiction seeks to capture in language the 'conversion times' of being into nothingness. Therefore, it is not by controlling its elements that prose adheres to being, but rather because it flees as fast - or even faster - than being.

Little by little, nevertheless, Beckett will fuse together these two prosodic figures of the place of being. Whether it is a question of the closed

49

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space or of wandering, the suppression of any descriptive particularity ends up with a uniform image of the earth and the sky, in which any movement is equivalent to a transparent immobility. The text Sans (for which Beckett created the word ' lessness' in English) - a pure description that slowly repeats or modifies its components - represents in my view the successful realisation of Beckett's poetic effort to assign being a place:

Grey sky no cloud no sound no stir earth ash grey sand. Little body same

grey as the earth sky ruins only upright. Ash grey all sides earth sky as one

all sides endlessness (CSP, p. 1 53 ; GSP, pp. 1 97-1 98).76

In this kind of passage, it is a question for Beckett of fixing the scene of being, of determining its lighting, which -precisely because we are 'before' the taking place of something - must be grasped in the neutrality of that which is neither the night nor the light. Which is the most appropriate colour for the empty place that constitutes the ground [fond] of all existence? Beckett replies: dark grey, or light black, or black marked by an uncertain colour. This metaphor designates being in its localisation, which is empty of any event. Often Beckett typifies this with the names gloom, half-light, or dim.77

Thus in The Lost Ones:

What first impresses in this gloom is the sensation of yellow it imparts not

to say of sulphur in view of the associations (CSP, p. 1 69; GSP, p. 2 13) .78

In Worstward Ho, the question ofthe prosodic construction of the place of being, of what there is prior to all knowledge, or rather of the minimum of knowledge to which language can cling, is explicit, and it takes the name of 'dim' :

Dim light source unknown. Know minimum. Know nothing no. Too much

to hope. At most mere minimum (WH, p. 9; NO, p. 91 ) .79

Beckett notes with great precision that this 'mere minimum' is the being of an empty place awaiting bodies, language, and events:

Void cannot go. Save dim go. Then all go (WH, p. 1 8 ; NO, p. 97).80

At the end of this fictive simplification, one could call the place of

5 0

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Alai n Bad i o u On Beckett

1 1 1 1 1 11 '" or dim, a 'grey-black' . A black grey enough so that it will not enter

1 1 1 1 " ( ,( lI1tradiction with the light; a black which is not the opposite of anything,

fi l l i l n l i-dialectical black. It is here that the closed and the open become

I I I ,hs l i nguishable, and that voyage and fixity become the reversible metaphors

" I I l la l aspect of being which is exposed to language. Of course, the grey-black itself does not let itself be spoken of in a

.I . . ar and distinct manner. This is why literary writing is required here. It is 1 1 " , ' , �ssary to reverse the Cartesian equivalence between the true and the clear­i l l id d istinct. Thus in Molloy:

[ think so, yes, I think that all that is false may more readily be reduced, to

notions clear and distinct, distinct from all other notions

(T, p. 82; TN, p. 82).8 1

I l lhe grey-black, which does not separate the dark and the light, is the place "Iheing, then artistic prose is required, since it alone carries a possible thought " I I he in-separable, of the indistinct. Prose alone can reach the exact point where being, far from letting itself be thought in a dialectical opposition to l Ioll-being, stands towards it in a relation of unclear equivalence. This is the point where, as Malone says (not without warning us that one could thus ' pollute the whole of speech'): 'Nothing is more real than nothing (T, p. I In; TN, p. 1 92).

It is far from being the case that employing the resources of the latent pocm allows Beckett to surmount all the obstacles before him. This is because I IlCre is not just the place; or, as Mallarme said, it is not true that 'nothing will lake place but the place' [rien n 'aura lieu que Ie lieu]. In effect, all fiction, as I levoted as it may be to establishing the place of being - in closure, openness or the grey-black - presupposes or connects to a subject. This subject in tum excludes itself from the place simply by the act of naming it, whilst at the same time holding itself at a distance from this name. The one for whom Ihere is the grey-black does not cease to reflect and recommence the poetic work oflocalisation. In so doing, the subject advenes as an incomprehensible supplement of being; it is borne by a prose whose entire energy, inasmuch as i t seeks to make the real and the nothing equivalent, is expended in trying to Icave no room for any supplement whatsoever.

Whence the torture of the cogito.

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5 . The S o l ita ry S u bject

Let us then suppose that the subj ect, in its link to language, is the thought of thought, or the thought of that which thinks itself in speech. In what then consists the effort of fiction to seize, to reduce, to stop this haunting exception to the pure grey-black of being? Writing, this place of experimentation, will " ,

annul the other primitive functions of humanity: movement and the relation to an other. Everything will be reduced to the voice. Stuck in a jar, or pinned to a hospital bed, the body - captive, mutilated, dying - is nothing more than the vanishing support of a word. How can such a repetitious and interminable speech identify or reflect itself? As Blanchot, analysing Beckett, has rightly said, it can only do so by returning to the silence that can be supposed at the origin of all speech. The role of the voice is to track down - by way of a great deal offables, narrative fictions, and concepts - the pure point of enunciation, the fact that what is said belongs to a singular faculty of saying. This faculty is not itself said; it exhausts itself in what is said but nevertheless always remains on this side of things, as a silence which is indefinitely productive of

'

the din of words. To seize and annul itself the voice must enter into its own silence, it

must produce its own silence. This is the fundamental hope of the 'hero' of The Unnamable:

[ . . . ] perhaps it's a dream, all a dream, that would surprise me, I'll wake, in

the silence, and never sleep again, it will be I , or dream, dream again,

dream of a silence, a dream silence [ . . . ] (T, p. 418 ; TN, p. 414).82

But the desired self-annulment reveals itself to be inaccessible. First of all, because the necessary conditions for obtaining this

awakening of language to its first silence submit the subject of the voice to an intolerable torture.

Sometimes this voice is exacerbated: it proliferates, invents a thousand fables, whimpers and takes flight. But this mobility is insufficient for the intended aim: to destroy language by excess and saturation, to obtain silence through the violence inflicted on words.

Sometimes, on the contrary, the voice exhausts itself: it stammers, repeats itself, inventing nothing. But this sterility is still not enough if, from a tired and worn out language, an original silence is to suddenly emerge.

This oscillation between, on the one hand, an excess so violent that it

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, k: : l roys not language but the subject and, on the other, a lack which in vain " p( )ses the subject to the throes of 'dying' , places the subject ofthe Beckettian , / , , :i/() in a state of genuine terror. In the words of the hero of The Unnamable:

I only think, if that is the name for this vertiginous panic as of hornets

smoked out oftheir nest, once a certain degree ofterror has been exceeded

(T, p. 353; TN, p. 350).83

But the objective is also inaccessible, since reflection, such as it is t it -posited in the voice, does not possess the simple structure that one may at I l lsl imagine (one who speaks and - the same - one who thinks speech so 1 1 1 : 1 1 it may tum into silence).

In the Texts for Nothing, which coincided with a serious crisis in I kckett's work - so that the title must be taken, as always, to the letter (these i t " ,� I s are written for nothing, nothing results from the artist's thought) - Beckett : : l iows that the subject is not double (the thought and the thought ofthought), I l i i t t riple, and that it is is absolutely impossible to try and reduce this triplicity I t l t he unicity of silence is impossible. In Texts for Nothing, we find the I " I lowing decomposition of the cogito into three:

[ . . . ] one who speaks saying, without ceasing to speak, Who's speaking?,

and one who hears, mute, uncomprehending, far from all [ . . . J . And this

other now [ . . . ] with his babble of homeless mes and untenanted hims [ . . . ]

There's a pretty three in one, and what a one, what a no one

(eSp, p. 1 12; GSP, p. 150).84

Let us note carefully the components of this 'pretty three in one'. First of all, there is the subject who speaks, the subject of saying, who

I S equally supposed to be capable of asking 'who speaks?' at the same time : IS he speaks. Let us call this the subject of enunciation.

Then there is the passive subject, who hears without understanding, who is 'distant' because he constitutes the obscure matter of the one who ,�peaks, the support or the idiot body of all thinking subjectivity. Let us call I h is the subject of passivity.

Finally, there is the subject who asks himself what the other two are, I he subject who wants to identify the 'ego' of speech, the subject who wants 10 know what is at stake in the being of the subject, and who, in order to : l t tain this knowledge, subjects himself to torture. Let us call this the subject

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of the question.

'Question' can be taken here in its judicial sense, as when we speak of

a suspect being questioned. For what is in fact this torture of thought? As

we've already said, the dim - the grey-black that localises being - is ultimately

nothing but an empty scene. To fill it, it is necessary to turn towards this

irreducible region of existence constituted by speech - the third universal

function of humanity, along with movement and immobility. But what is the

being of speech, if it is not the speaking subject? It is therefore necessary that

the subject literally twist itself towards its own enunciation. This time, it is

the expression 'writhing in pain' that must be interpreted literally. Once one

perceives that the identity of the subject is triple, and not just double, the

subject appears as tom.

The 'true' subject, the one who should be led back to silence, and who

would reveal for us what there is in the grey-black of being, is the unity of

the three. But Beckett tells us that this unity is worth nothing. Why then?

After all, the fact that it is 'nothing' does not constitute a failing, because, as

we have seen with regard to the grey-black of being, 'nothing is more real

than nothing. ' True, but the whole problem is that unlike the dim, which is in

fact indiscernible from nothing (because being and nothingness are one and

the same thing), the subject results from a question. Now, every question

imposes values, and demands that one is able to ask oneself: what is an answer

worth? If, in the end, after an exhausting labour of speech, the only answer

one finds is the one that precedes every question (the nothing, the grey-black),

the torture of the subject's identification will have amounted to nothing but a

bitter charade. If, when you count as one the subject of enunciation, the subject

of passivity and the subject of a question, the question itself is dissolved in

the return to the indifference of being, then you have counted badly.85

That means you must begin again. You must recommence even though

you have just realised that all this work is impossible. The only result of the

torture is the desolate and desert-like injunction that one must subject oneself

to torture again. Such is, after all, the conclusion of The Unnamable:

[ . . . J you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on (T, p. 418; TN, p. 414).86

The cogito of the pure voice is unbearable (stricto sensu: in writing, it

can be borne by no one), but it is also inevitable. Having come to this point,

it looks like we have reached an impasse. At the time of the Texts for Nothing,

this was indeed Beckett's own feeling. It was a question of knowing if one

5 4

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----------, Alain Bad iou On Beckett

1 1 1 1 1 1 < 1 go on, and the response was negative. How could one continue to 1 1.':( , 1 1 late - helplessly and without result - between the grey-black of being

I l l Id t he infinite torture ofthe solipsistic cogito? Which new fictions could be

1 ' 1 1 1 I,cndered within such an oscillation? Once being was named and experience

was had ofthe impasse of that subject which constitutes an exception within

Iw ing, where - if not in the pure impossibility of rejoining its constitutive

' : i lcilce - does the writer's word find its nourishment?

It was necessary to have done with the alternation of neutral being and

vain reflection so that Beckett could escape the crisis, so that he could break

wi th Cartesian terrorism. To do this, it was necessary to find some third terms,

I wither reducible to the place of being nor identical to the repetitions of the

voice. It was important that the subject open itself up to an alterity and cease

I teingfolded upon itself in an interminable and torturous speech. Whence,

heginning with How It Is (composed between 1959 and 1 960), the growing

I mportance of the event (which adds itself to the grey black of being) and of

t hc voice of the other (which interrupts solipsism).

6 . The Event a n d its N a m e

Little by little - and not without hesitations and regrets - the work of

Beckett will open itself up to chance, to accidents, to sudden modifications

of the given, and thereby to the idea of happiness. The last words ofIll Seen

III Said are indeed: 'Know happiness '.

This is why I am entirely opposed to the widely held view according to

which Beckett moved towards a nihilistic destitution, towards a radical opacity

of significations. We have already remarked above how the destitution of the

scenes and the voices, as well as of the prose, is a method directed against

mere distraction [divertissement], and whose ever more prevalent support is

the poeticisation of language. The opacity results from the fact that Beckett

substitutes the question 'how are we to name what happens?' for the question

'what is the meaning of what is?' But the resources of happiness are

considerably greater when we tum towards the event than when we search in

vain for the sense of being.

Contrary to the popular opinion, I think that Beckett's trajectory is one

that begins with a blind belief in predestination and is then directed towards

the examination of the possible conditions, be they aleatory or minimal, of a

kind of freedom.

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to Watt, the writing of which dates from 1942- 1943. But the immense success of Waitingfor Godot, after the impasse to which the trilogy (Molloy, Malone

Dies and The Unnamable) had led, has served to hide this initial impetus. Of all these works, all that people retain is the idea that in them nothing ever happens. Molloy will not find his mother. Moran will not find Molloy. Malone

stretches ad irifinitum the fables that populate his agony, but death never comes. The Unnamable has no other maxim than to go on forever. And Godot, of course, can only be awaited, being nothing but the constantly reiterated promise of his coming. It is in this element devoid of emergence and novelty that prose oscillates between grasping indifferent being and the torture of a reflection without effect.

In Watt, the place of being is absolutely closed; it validates a strict principle of identity. This place is complete, self-sufficient, and eternal:

[ . . . J nothing could be added to Mr. Knott's establishment, and from it

nothing taken away, but that as it was now, so it had been in the beginning,

and so it would remain to the end, in all essential respects [ . . . J (W, p. 1 29; W US, p. 1 3 1 ).87

It could therefore be believed that we are here in the midst of a typically predestined universe. Knowledge lacks any kind of freedom; it consists of questions relative to the laws of the place. It is a question of attempting, forever in vain, to understand the impenetrable designs of Mr. Knott. Where is he right now? In the garden? On the first floor? What is he preparing? Who does he love? Struggling with obscure laws - here lies the Kafkian dimension of this book - thought is irritated and fatigued.

What saves thought is that which functions 'outside the law', what adds itself to the situation - which is nevertheless declared closed and incapable of addition - as symbolised by Mr. Knott's house. Watt calls these paradoxical supplements ' incidents' . For example, the fact that, according to the perceptible laws of the House, the origin of the dog for which Mr. Knott leaves out his dish is entirely incomprehensible. As Watt declares, with regard to these incidents, they are 'of great formal brilliance and indeterminable purport' (W, p. 7 1 ; W US, p. 74).88

At this juncture, thought awakens to something completely different than the vain grasp of its own predestination - not to mention the torture elicited by the imperative of the word. By means of hypotheses and variations,

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I I I I I I I ) , I J I will therefore seek to bring its knowledge of the 'indeterminable I 1 ' 1 1 ' 1 " I I I ' of incidents to the height of their 'formal brilliance' . This formal ': I I I o I l i d l lcc designates the unique and circumscribed character, the evental

I I d i l l y, lhe pure and delectable 'emergence' , of the incidents in question.

S ince it is a question of the event, Beckett must take a further step.

1 1 1 1 : ; i s the step that takes us from a will to find a meaning for the event (a

d l ' ; ,o tJ ruging path, precisely because the event is what is subtracted from any

I I I '. I I I IC of meaning), to the entirely different desire of giving the event a

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In Watt, we still possess only the first figure of the event, so that the I l l lvl'I is not entirely detached from a religious symbolism (I call 'religion' l i l l ' dcsire to give meaning to everything that happens). Watt is an interpreter, , I I ll 'rmeneut. Even the hypothesis of meaninglessness is the prisoner of a ' , l l I i lhorn will to give meaning, and even more of a will to link this meaning I I I : 1 1 1 original meaning, a meaning lost and then found again (this is the 1 I I l ' Iuctable tendency of what I call 'religion' : meaning is always already there, 1 1 1 1 1 man has lost it):

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[ . . . J the meaning attributed to this particular type of incident, by Watt, in

his relations, was now the initial meaning that had been lost and then

recovered, and now a meaning quite distinct from the initial meaning, and

now a meaning evolved, after a delay of varying length, and with greater

or less pains, from the initial absence of meaning.

(W p. 76; W US, p. 79).89

I I I Watt, thought is therefore granted the following opportunity: that the event ex ists. But, once awoken by incidents, the movement of thought turns back 1 0 the origin and the repetition of meaning. The predestining pull of Mr. Knott's house is the strongest element of them all. The question remains that of linking incidents back to the supposed core of all signification.

Almost at the other extreme of Beckett's trajectory - inIll Seen III Said

or in Worstward Ho - we encounter once again the central function of the cvent, but here thought's awakening operates in a thoroughly different manner. I t is no longer a question of the play of sense and nonsense, of meaning and meaninglessness.

Already in Endgame ( 1952), Cloy mocks Hamm's idea, according to which if 'Something is taking its course' (CDW, p. 1 07; E, p. 32)90 one must conclude that there is meaning:

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Mean something! You and I, mean something! [Brie/laugh.] Ah that's a

good one! (CDW, p. 108; E, p. 33)91

What does 'ill seen ill said' mean? The event cannot but be 'ill seen' , since it precisely constitutes an

exception to the ordinary laws of visibility. The 'well seen' takes us back to the indifference of the place, to the grey-black of being. The formal brilliance of the incident, of 'what happens' , thwarts both seeing and 'well seeing' by way of the surprise that it imposes.

But the event is also 'ill said', since well saying is nothing other than the reiteration of established significations. Even under the pretext of meaning, it is not a question of reducing the formal novelty of the event to the significations carried by ordinary language. To the 'ill seen' of the event there must correspond a verbal invention, an unknown act of naming. In terms of the usual laws oflanguage, this will necessarily manifest itself as an ' ill said' .

'Ill seen ill said' designates the possible agreement between that which, as pure emergence [surgissement], is in exception of the laws of the visible (or of presentation) and that which, by poetically inventing a new name for this emergence, is in exception of the laws of saying (or of representation).92

Everything depends on the harmony between an event and the poetic emergence of its name.

Let us read the following passage from III Seen III Said:

During the inspection a sudden sound. Startling without consequence for

the gaze the mind awake. How explain it? And without going so far how

say it? Far behind the eye the quest begins. What time the event recedes.

When suddenly to the rescue it comes again. Forthwith the uncommon

common noun collapsion. Reinforced a little later if not enfeebled by the

infrequent slumberous. A slumberous collapsion. Two. Then far from the

still agonizing eye a gleam of hope. By the grace of these modest beginnings

(ISIS, p. 55; NO, p. 83).93

We must carefully note the stages whereby Beckett fixes within prose the movement of the 'ill seen ill said'.

1 ) The situation that serves as the starting point is the ' inspection' , understood as the normal role of seeing, and of well seeing; the ' inspection'

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IX hausts itself(as Beckett says, the eye is ' still agonizing') in the consideration " I what there is, of the neutral abode of being.

2) Reduced to a simple trait by the method of ascesis, the event is a I i ( l i se, constituting an exception ('sudden') to the monotonous and repetitious 1 I 1 spection.

3) 'The mind awakens' . This confirms that thought is only diurnal and v l j ', i lant under the effect of an event.

4) At first, the question that constitutes the awakening of thought is PIl:occupied with explaining ('How explain itT). This is the dominant figure I I I Watt. But the subject renounces explanation at once, in favour of a ('( llllpletely different question, the question of the name: 'How say itT

5) This name is doubly invented, doubly subtracted from the ordinary laws oflanguage. It is constructed from the noun 'collapsion' � of which it is l Ioled that it is 'uncommon' � and of the adjective ' slumberous' � which is , i I I frequent' and moreover does not agree with the noun. In sum, this name is a poetic composition (an ill said), a surprise within language attuned to the :al l'prise - to the ' sudden' � of the event (an ill seen).

6) This attunement produces a 'gleam of hope' . It is opposed to the lorture of inspection. And though it is certainly nothing more than a rommencement, a modest beginning, it is a commencement that comes to I he thought that it awakens like an act of grace.

What is this beginning? What is this hope? What power is harboured hy the precarious agreement between the emergence ofthe new and the poetic i l lvention of a name? Let us not hesitate to say that we are dealing with the hope of a truth.

Meaning, the torture of meaning, is the vain and interminable agreement hdween what there is, on the one hand, and ordinary language, on the other

between 'well seeing' and 'well saying' . The agreement is such that it is 1 I0t even possible to decide if it is commanded by language or prescribed by heing. Frankly, this is the tiresome torture of all empiricist philosophies.

A truth begins with the organisation of an agreement between, on the one hand, a separable event 'shining with formal clarity' and, on the other, I he invention in language of a name that from now on retains this event, even i f - inevitably � the event 'recedes' and finally disappears. The name will guarantee within language that the event is sheltered.

But if some truths exist, then happiness is not out of the question. It is s imply necessary to expose these truths to the test of the Other. One must experiment if at least one truth can be shared. Like in Enough, when the two

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other:

We took flight in arithmetic. What mental calculations bent double hand

in hand! (eSp, p. 14 1 ; GSP, p. 1 88)94

The poem of improbable names makes it possible to imagine an amorOUH .

mathematics.

7 . Oth e rs

Even though Molloy, Malone and the Unnamable seek out and encounter other supposed subjects, they move towards their own solitude. The tone of The Unnamable could even be described as starkly solipsistic. Without doubt it is in Beckett's theatre, with the couples of Vladimir and Estragon (Waiting for Godot) or Hamm and Clov (Endgame), that something which will not cease to be at the heart of Beckett's fictions comes to the fore: the couple, the Two, the voice of the other, and lastly, love. Both to defer and to beckon death through distance, Malone recounts all the elements that this love contains:

[ . . . J what flutterings, alarms and bashful fumblings, of which only this,

that they gave Macmann some insight into the meaning of the expression,

Two is company (T, p. 261 ; TN, p. 260).95

Nevertheless, being-two is inscribed into the many, into the bizarre mUltiplicity of human animals. Always careful to bring the proliferation of details back to a few crucial traits, Beckett devotes some of his texts to arranging, on a background [fond] of anonymous being, the bustle of plural humanity, so as to classify its postures and inventory its functions. These texts are human comedies in which the diversity of social and SUbjective figures is replaced by an enumeration of all the essential possibilities that existence could ever contain, an enumeration which is declared to be exhaustive. But they are also divine comedies, because the will to produce the complete inventory of actions and situations (always, of course, under the rule of the methodical ascesis) presupposes the existence of a fixed place far from any empirical reality, a sort of 'no-man's land' between life and

6 0

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l�A_I_a_i n_B_a_d_i_o_u_O_n_B_e_ck_e_t_t ___ ,! Ihi l i l l /\ s though it were necessary, in order to guarantee prose's definitive i" 1 1 1 1 " 0 I' p i ural humanity, that prose establish an eternity of sorts, a separate 1 11 1 " ' 1 . I I my where the animals in question are atemporally observed. It is 1 1 1 1 1 It i l lable that these laboratories clearly resemble Dante's settings. As we

k , I I '1\ . I kckett undertook painstaking studies of The Inferno, and of the fifth , , 1 1 1 1 " I I I particular.

I I I The Lost Ones ( 1 967-70) the place is a huge rubber cylinder whose

I ' l l \ : ; I l ' a I parameters are subj ect to laws (light, temperature, sound, etc.) which Ill ' , I : ; strict and contingent as the laws of physical science.96 The ' little people' l i l i l l I l i habit the place have no other aim than to look for their lost one. This is I h, ' vny start of the fable:

i\bode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.

( 'SP, p. 1 59; GSP, p. 202).97

What is the ' lost one'? It is each one's own other, the one who " I I I I ',u larises a given inhabitant, who wrenches the inhabitant away from i l l I l ' I lymity. To find one's lost one is to come to oneself; to no longer be a r, l l l Ip lc element of the small group of searchers. It is thus that Beckett ' ; l l l l I Iounts the painful antinomies of the cogito: one's identity does not depend I IpOIl the verbal confrontation with oneself, but upon the discovery of one's , 0 0 1 ICr.

On this simple basis, and through the meticulous description of the \ I l ' issitudes ofthe search (one must run around in the cylinder, climb ladders, " ,plore the niches situated at different heights, etc.), Beckett succeeds in " , I racting a few criteria for the classification of plural humanity.

The most important among these criteria distinguishes searching humans 110m those who have renounced the search. The latter have given up on their dcsire, since in the cylinder no other desire exists than that of finding one's lost one (i.e. no desire other than - in the words of Nietzsche, whom the VI )Lmg Beckett knew well - 'to become what one is ') . These broken searchers ; 1 rc called the vanquished. Note that to be vanquished is never to be vanquished by the other. On the contrary, here to be vanquished is to renounce the other.

The second criterion brings us back to the primitive categories of l I Iovement and rest. Some of the searchers ambulate ceaselessly, some stop and others no longer move.

Beckett recapitulates as follows the human groups that can be described

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and enumerated with the help of these two criteria:

Seen from a certain angle these bodies are of four kinds. Firstly those

perpetually in motion. Secondly those who sometimes pause. Thirdly those

who short of being driven off never stir from the coign they have won and

when driven off pounce on the first free one that offers and freeze again.

[ . . . J Fourthly those who do not search or non-searchers sitting for the

most part against the wall [ . . . J (CSP, p. 1 6 1 ; GSP, pp. 204-205).98

The absolute nomadic living beings (first category) and the vanquished (fourth category) are extreme figures of human desire. Between the two we find those that Beckett names the ' sedentary' (the second and third figures).

Notwithstanding these distinctions, all of Beckett' s paradoxical optimism is concentrated in one point: it can happen - very rarely, almost never, but not quite never - that a vanquished searcher returns to the arena of the search. This is what we could call the Beckettian conception of freedom. Of course we can be vanquished, that is, defeated in the desire that constitutes us. But even then, all possibilities still exist, including the possibility that this defeat, irreversible in its essence (for how could the one whose desire is dead even desire for his desire to return?), may become miraculously reversible.

Every sedentary figure is a possible nomad. Even the one who gives up on his desire can suddenly desire to desire (we are then dealing, in a strong sense, with an event) . There is no eternal damnation, and hell - for one who dwells within it - can be revealed as nothing but a purgatory.

This indestructibility of possibles, which takes place precisely at the point at which one has renounced them, is affirmed by Beckett in an extraordinarily dense passage. This passage is a perfect example of what above I called the 'elongation' of the phrase, the non-punctuated style that unifies all the ramifications of the idea:

[ . . . J in the cylinder what little is possible is not so it is merely no longer so

and in the least less the all of nothing if this notion is maintained

(CSP, p. 1 67; GSP, pp. 2 1 1 -2 1 2).99

This statement is elucidated as follows. On the one hand, every lapse in the desire to search for one's other is absolute. For though this desire diminishes ('the least less '), it is also as if it had annulled itself (in the least

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1 " , ; , t here is 'the all of nothing'). On the other hand, however, what is not

I " , , ' ah le (such as recommencing one's search if one has renounced it) is not "" 1 1 1 1 1 ively and properly speaking impossible, but only temporarily 'no longer'

l ' t I ' , : : ih le . That means that the choice of renunciation destroys everything, I I l I t t l I e possibility that inheres in choice remains mysteriously indestructible,

;\ figure of plural humanity is always suspended between the i l l t'versibility of choice and the maintenance - which is to say the reversibility

t I i possibles,

In How It Is - without doubt the greatest of Beckett's prose works, n i t I l ig with Enough and III Seen III Said- the distribution ofthe figures obeys 1\ t I i f'icrent principle.

The human animals crawl along through a sort of black mud, each one t i l : Igging a sack of food. This imperative to travel harbours four possiqilities:

1) To continue crawling alone in the dark. 2) To encounter someone in an active position, pouncing upon them in

I I Il' dark. This is the figure that Beckett calls the 'tormentor ' , Note that the pri l lcipal activity ofthe tormentor is to extort from his victim - if needs be by plal lting in his arse the sharpened top of a tin can - stories, fables from another 1 1 1l:, memories. This proves that the tormentor also wants to find his lost one, I t I hc wrested away from solitude and subtracted from the darkness of infinite nawling by the one he encounters.

3) To be abandoned by the one encountered. At this point, all that 1 l' l l Iains is to make oneself immobile in the dark.

4) Being encountered by someone, this time in a passive position: he pounces on you while you are immobile in the dark, and it is you who will I lave to give him his due of fables. This is the position that Beckett calls the ' victim' .

The enumeration of the generic figures of humanity operates once again hy combining the movement/rest couple and the self/other couple. One can I ravel alone and one can be immobile alone; one can be either a tormentor or a victim.

These figures are sustained by a rigorous principle of equality: none is sliperior to the others. The use of the words 'tormentor' and 'victim' must not Icad us astray. It does not imply any sort of pathos or ethics - besides the ethics of prose, that is. And even the latter, as Beckett warns, could easily be exaggerated, since words always 'ring' too much for them to maintain the :l l1onymity and the equality of the figures that the human animal can take. I t

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is this equality of the figures that justifies this very profound statement:

[ . . . ] in any case we have our being injustice I have never heard anything to

the contrary (RII, p. 1 35 ; RII US, p. 1 24)100

The justice mentioned here is entirely unrelated to any kind of norm or finality. It concerns the ontological equality of the figures taken by the generic human subject.

Speaking of the moments in which one is either tormentor or victim -and thereby concerned with the extortion of a word or a story - Beckett declares that they relate to ' life in stoic love' . This establishes a double link that makes ' love' into the true name of a subject's encounter of its other or lost one and connects this encounter to the tender fables of the past.

Having traversed - thanks to the fictional set-up of the encounter with an other - the terrorising limits ofthe solipsistic cogito, we discover both the potentiality of love and the resources of nostalgia.

8 . Love

The event in which love originates is the encounter. From the thirties onwards - in Murphy - Beckett emphasises that the power of the encounter is such that nothing, either in feeling or in the desiring body, can measure up to it:

And to meet [ . . . ] in my sense exceeds the power of feeling, however tender,

and of bodily motions, however expert (M, p. 1 24; M US, p. 222).101

If the question ofthe existence and difference ofthe other is so charged, it is because the very possibility of the encounter is played out within it. It is with regard to this point that Beckett constructs set-ups of literary experience in order to evaluate the negative hypothesis (as in Company, whose last word is 'alone') or to hold the positive hypothesis (as inEnough and Happy Days, in which the figure of the couple is indisputable and gives rise to a strange and powerful form of happiness).

The encounter brings forth the Two; it fractures solipsistic seclusion. Is this primordial Two sexuated? We are not speaking here of the numerous and mostly carnivalesque sexual scenes that can be found in Beckett's stories,

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I I I which the dilapidation of the elderly is regarded with tenderness and l i pn�scnted with joy. Rather, we are trying to see if love and the encounter I " I I V idc us with sexuated figures.

It has often been claimed that Beckett's 'couples' are in fact asexual or I I I 1 L�cllline and that there is something interchangeable - or homo-sexual - in 1 I 1 l ' positions of the partners. I think this is entirely mistaken. Of course, I kckctt generally does not start out from the empirical evidence that divides 1 I I I I I1an animals into men and women. The methodical ascesis forbids him 1 1 1 1 111 doing so; often, he makes careful use ofthe pronouns and articles so as 1 1 1 .1 10 permit a decision regarding the sex of the speaker or 'character ' . But f l lC effect of the encounter truly does fix two absolutely dissimilar positions. ( I I IC can therefore say that for Beckett the sexes do not pre-exist the amorous " I I counter, being instead its result,

What does this dissimilarity consist in? We have seen that in How It Is,

; I l icr a human animal has pounced upon another, there is the figure of the I , 'Imentor and that ofthe victim. Let us agree to call the first 'masculine' and I I IL� second 'feminine' (though it is true that Beckett refrains from uttering I hcse words). We must insist that this distinction is entirely unrelated to any ,'; l Ipposed 'identity' of the subjects. For all that, under the condition of an el lcounter in which ' she ' would pounce on an other, a victim could become a lurmentor. But from within a given amorous situation (let us call ' love' what proceeds from an encounter) there necessarily are these two figures.

However, these figures are far from being reducible to the opposition hetween the active and the passive. Here we must keep the complexity of l lcckett's construction firmly in mind.

For example, after an indeterminate time, it is the victim who goes away, leaving the tormentor ' immobile in the dark' . Therefore, we must I I llderstand that whoever is travelling with his or her sack is on the side ofthe ' Ieminine' , or at least coming from the feminine. Conversely, someone who i s abandoned immobile in the dark is on the side of the 'masculine' , or at least can be said to stagnate in this position. We can therefore oppose the l I10bility that defines the feminine to a tendency within the male to morose i mmobility.

Likewise, it is certain that the figure of the tormentor is that of the commandment, of the imperative. But what is the content of this figure? It is 1 0 be found in the extraction from the victim of stories and reminiscences, scraps of everything that may touch on what Beckett magnificently names 'the blessed days of blue ' (CSP, p. 1 53 ; GSP, p. 1 97).102 We are therefore

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justified in saying that if on the masculine side we rediscover the (half-joyous and half-torturous) imperative to ' go on', it is on the female side that the power of the story, the archives of wandering, and the memory of beauty are set out.

Ultimately, every encounter prescribes four main functions: the force of wandering, the pain of immobility, the enjoyment [jouissance] of the imperative, and the invention of the story.

It is on the basis of these four functions that the encounter determines the emergence of sexuated positions. The combination of the imperative and immobility will be called 'masculine' ; the combination of wandering and the story will be called ' feminine' .

In Enough, we find an even deeper determination of the duality of the sexes, as elicited by love. Here, the masculine position is specified by a constant desire for separation. The heroine (I don't exactly call the one who holds the inseparable position a 'woman') says:

We were severed if that is what he desired (CSP, p. 14 1 ; GSP, p. 1 88).103

In Happy Days, it is evidently Willie who keeps himself aloof, invisible and absent, whilst it is Winnie who proclaims the eternity - day after day - of the couple, and declares its legitimacy.

In effect, the masculine position fosters the desire for a break. It is not a question of returning to solipsism, but rather of the Two being experienced and re-experienced [eprouve re-prouve] in the between [entre-Deux] , in what distinguishes the two terms of the couple. Masculine desire is affected here -infected by the void that separates the sexuated positions in the very unity of the amorous process. The 'man' desires the nothing of the Two, whilst the 'woman' - the wandering guardian and narrator of original unity, of the pure point of the encounter - desires nothing but the Two, that is, the infinite tenacity of a lasting Two.

She is 'the lasting desire to last' ,104 whilst the masculine is the perpetual temptation to inquire about the exact location of the void that passes between One and One.

But the most admirable part of the text is the examination of the relation between love and knowledge [connaissance], between the happiness oflove and the joy of knowledge. We have already cited the passage where the couple sustain each other in their walk by means of vast arithmetical reflections.

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l�A_I_a_i n_B_a_d_i_o_u_O_n_B_e_c_k_e_t_t ___ :,,,,, l l i l s ligure of free knowledge [savoir], of the encyclopaedia - in which the

, I.. V emerges upon the mirror of thought - is 'masculine', and as such it is I l l ved by the woman. Thus we read in Enough:

In order from time to time to enjoy the sky he resorted to a little round

mirror. Having misted it with his breath and polished it on his calf he

looked in it for the constellations. I have it! he exclaimed referring to the

Lyre or the Swan. And often he added that the sky seemed much the same

(CSP, p. 1 42; GSP, p. 1 90).105

Love is this interval in which a sort of inquiry about the world is pursued I ' l i nfinity. Because in love knowledge [savoir] is experienced and transmitted

I let ween two irreducible poles of experience, it is subtracted from the tedium or objectivity and charged with desire. Knowledge is the most intimate and 1 1 1()st vital thing that we possess. In love, we are not seized by what the world I�; . it is not the world that holds us captive. On the contrary, love is the paradoxical circulation - between 'man' and 'woman' - of a wondrous knowledge that makes the universe ours.

Love then is when we can say that we have the sky, and that the sky has lIothing. 106

9 . N osta l g i a

Because Beckett wrote a brilliant essay on Proust in 1 93 1 , it has often heen deemed possible to conclude that there is some analogy between the two writers in what concerns the treatment of memory. This conviction is reinforced when one notes that in Beckett the emergence ofthe past presents itself in blocks, episodes of prosodic isolation, and that childhood is privileged with regard both to places (Ireland) and to characters (Mother and Father).

I believe that this analogy is misleading. This is because the function of involuntary memory, which in Proust is bound up with a metaphysics of time, in Beckett - besides the fact that one should instead speak of a 'voluntarism of remembrance' - constitutes an experimentation of alterity.

It follows that the fragments of childhood - or the amorous memories , are always signalled by an abrupt change in the tone of the prose (a calm

beauty made up of rhythmic fluidity, assonance, and an elemental certainty: the night, the stars, the water, the meadows . . . ), and never reflect what the

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presented situation (the place of being) could harbour in terms of truth 01' eternity. We are dealing with another world, with the hypothesis whereby the

grey-black of being is juxtaposed, in an improbable and distance place, to a colourful and sentimental universe. The narration of this universe puts solipsism to the test and forces literature to refect upon the theme of pure

difference (or of the 'other life'). It is essential to note that we are dealing here not with an experience of

consciousness but with a story that is materially distributed at a distance from the subject. What this story proposes can touch upon three distinct dimensions of the universe of nostalgia: the existence of a 'voice' that would come to the subject from outside; what a real encounter allows one to hear, by way of fables and tender beauties, from the mouth of an other; a stratification ofthe subject itself, whose origin is by no means to be found in childhood or youth, which instead constitutes the subject's interior aIterity. This interior aIterity refers to fact that an existence has no unity, that it is composed of heterogeneous sediments; it thus lends greater consistency to the thesis concerning the impossibility of a cogito that would be capable of counting the subject as One.

These three uses of nostalgia are systematically set out, one at a time,

in three of Beckett's works.

Krapp s Last Tape ( 1 959) presents a ' character' - Krapp - who listens

to various stories and reflections recorded onto magnetic tapes. The voice that reaches us is thus in general a 'Strong voice, rather pompous, clearly

Krapp s at a much earlier time' (CDW, p. 2 1 7; SP, p. 57).107 Krapp listens to fragments from these old tapes, comments upon them and records these commentaries. Thus the distance between these fictionalised fragments of the past and his real situation is staged: Krapp is an old man who eats nothing but bananas and - in line with the favourite occupation of the inhabitants of the grey-black of being - it is beyond doubt that he must die interminably.

Whether they are gestural or practical, Krapp's commentaries are for the most part not very affable. This is especially the case when the tape's

prose appears to rise to the level of philosophical formulation, like in the following:

- unshatterable association until my dissolution of storm and night with

the light ofthe understanding and the fire - (CDW, p. 220; SP, p. 60).108

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' I 'hen 'Krapp curses louder, switches off' (CDW, p. 220; SP, p. 60) .109

I I 1 1 I we quickly realise that he is looking for a fragment of what this voice is

I tl l i l lg him. This is a voice that only appears to be his, being that of this

, , " I I I T ' that he was, and thereby proving to him the irreducible multiplicity of

I I II ' q"o [Ie Moil This is a sublime fragment, composed of both perceptible

1 1 1 1 1 1 verbal elements that are completely foreign to Krapp's real situation.

l ' I ( ' l l lents such that no passage can be conceived between them and Krapp. I i Several pieces of this fragment, indeed several variations, will be

pl l.:;ented in the play, but throughout the fragment remains intact, saved by

I I Il' tape (i.e. by the prose, functioning here like a kind of billiard cushio�,

I I I ( )v iding an indirect or diagonal safety); it authorises Krapp to evaluate - III i I " ,ap that is attributed to a scission in being rather than to temporality - what

I : : t h i s 'other life' borne by each and every one. Krapp will end up letting

1 I I 1 I lseif go, listening to the fragment in complete absorption and nostalgia:

-upper lake, with the punt, bathed off the bank, then pushed out into the

stream and drifted. She lay stretched out on the floorboards with her hands

under her head and her eyes closed. Sun blazing down, bit of a breeze,

water nice and lively. I noticed a scratch on her thigh and asked her how

she came by it. Picking gooseberries, she said. I said again how I thought

it was hopeless and no good going on and she agreed, without opening her

eyes. [Pause.] I asked her to look at me and after a few moments - [Pause.]

_ after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare.

I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. [Pause. Low.]

Let me in. [Pause.] We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they

went down, sighing, before the stem! [Pause.] I lay down across her with

my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving.

But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side

to side (CDW, p. 221 ; SP, p. 61),uo

At first, Krapp struggles to annul nostalgia by recourse to pure distance:

Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago,

hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that's all done with

anyway (CDW, p. 222; SP, p. 62).1 1 1

But the remainder of the play shows that the insistence of the fragment is not damaged by this abstract protest. The other life radiates beneath thc

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insult. Certainly, Krapp is brought back to the classical couple of silence and the void (this is the end of the play: 'Krapp motionless staring before him.

The tape runs on in silence', CDW, p. 223; SP, p. 63).1 12 No true link is established between nostalgia and the course of things. Memory is not a saving function. But, once it is captured in a story, memory is simply what attests to the immanent power of the Other.

In How It Is, this power of the story derives from a real Other - Pim, the 'victim' - who gives the 'hero' his own life, whether real or invented it does not matter:

that life then said to have been his invented remembered a little of each no

knowing that thing above he gave it to me I made it mine what I fancied

skies especially and the paths he crept along how they changed with the

sky and where you were going on the Atlantic in the evening on the ocean

going to the isles or coming back the mood of the moment less important

the creatures encountered hardly any always the same I picked my fancy

good moments nothing left (HII, p. 80; HII US, p. 72)1 13

This time the story is a transmission of existence, the possibility of fabulating one's own life using the most intense fragments of the other's life as material. Nostalgia abides, because for those who crawl in the dark these fragments remain inaccessible, they are ' above' , like stigmata of light. But the possibility of demanding the story, of extorting it from the one with whom 'it was good moments good for me we're talking of me for him too we're talking of him too happy too' (RII, p. 57; RII US p. 5 1 )1 I4 guarantees for prose its function as a measure. This measure concerns the gap between the other life and the real, between the dark and the light, and thus inscribes within being itself the possibility of difference:

I nothing only say this say that your life above YOUR LIFE pause my life

ABOVE long pause above IN THE in the LIGHT pause light his life above

in the light almost an octosyllable come to think of it a coincidence

(HU, p. 79; HU US p. 72)1 l4

In Company, the construction of the text is carried out on the basis of seventeen 'memorial' sequences, all of which are connected to the initial supposition, which is that 'A voice comes to one in the dark' (C, p. 7; NO, p.

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\ ) I I " These are limpid stories, whose biographical dimension is underlined

i l l l i rst in a parodic way, as in the paragraph that starts: 'You first saw the

I I I , h t in the room you most likely were conceived in' (C, p. 1 5 ; NO, p. 7).1 17

l i l l ie by little, however, the nostalgic tonality takes hold of the prose.

I ', TSliaded by the latent poem, this tonality will attempt to overcome the danger

I ha t fabulation may tum out to be nothing but a fictional rearrangement of

,;( ) I i tude. And it is still this tonality that here demands we imagine an eternal

1 1 1�ht:

A strand. Evening. Light dying. Soon none left to die. No. No such thing

then as no light. Died on to dawn and never died. You stand with your

back to the wash. No sound but its. Ever fainter as it slowly ebbs. Till it

slowly flows again. You lean on a long staff. Your hands rest on the knob

and on them your head. Were your eyes to open they would first see far

below in the last rays the skirt of your greatcoat and the uppers of your

boots emerging from the sand. Then and it alone till it vanishes the shadow

ofthe staff on the sand. Vanishes from your sight. Moonless starless night.

Were your eyes to open dark would lighten (C, pp. 75-76; NO, pp. 39-40).1 1 8

Nostalgia gives rise in the prose to fragments of beauty, and, even if I he certainty always returns that the other life is separated, lost, a light from e lsewhere, the force of nostalgia lies in giving us the power to suppose that one day (before, afterward, time is of no importance here) the eye will open and, under its astonished gaze, in the nuances of the grey-black of being, something will lighten.

1 0 . Theatre

Theatre, and especially Waiting for Godot, is the source of Beckett's fame. Today Godot is a classic, along with Endgame and Happy Days.

Nevertheless, we cannot say that the exact nature of Beckett's theatre has been rendered entirely clear. Nor can this be said of the relation (or non­relation) between the theatre and the movement of that prose which it constantly accompanied - given that a play like Catastrophe, for examplc, can be considered a late work ( 1982).

Of course, the major themes of Beckett's work can, without exception, be found in the theatre.

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The assignation of the place of being, as in this characteristic passage from Footfalls:

Faint, though by no means invisible, in a certain light. [Pause.] Given the right light. [Pause.] Grey rather than white, a pale shade of grey (CDW, p. 402; SP, p. 242)y9

The estimations of the importance of language, as in Happy Days:

Words fail, there are times when even they fail. [Turning a little towards

WILLIE.] Is that not so, Willie? [Pause. Turning a little further.] Is not

that so, Willie, that even words fail, at times? [Pause. Back front,] What is

one to do then, until they come again? (CDW, p. 147; HD, p. 24)120

The torture of the cogito, prey to the uncontrolled imperative of saying, a perfect example of which is Lucky's long monologue in Waitingfor Godot

(this is especially the case if we recall that Lucky only begins to speak when Pozzo, pulling him by his leash, commands him: 'Think, pig! ' ,12 1 CDW, p. 4 1 ; WG, p. 28):

[ O o .] the beard the flames the tears the stones so blue so calm alas alas on

on the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara in spite ofthe tennis

the labours abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a

word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in

Connemara in spite of the tennis the skull alas the stones Cunard [Melee,

final vociferations] tennis . . . the stones . . . so calm . . . Cunard . . . unfinished . . .

(CDW, p. 43; WG, p. 47)122

. .The event is also central. It sets the framework for Waitingfor Godot, ill which two distinct visions are opposed to one another.

. On the one hand, that ofPozzo, for whom time does not exist, meaning �hat �ife can be dissolved in an incessantly repeated and incessantly self­identical pure point:

Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable!

When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day like any other

day, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf,

one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second,

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l Alai n Bad iou On Beckett '-:....:.:..=:..:.��::...:.:�-=--=----=---------" is that not enough for you? [Calmer.] They give birth astride of a grave,

the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more

(CDW, p. 83; WG, p. 1 03).123

( ) 1 1 the other, that of Vladimir, who will never give up on the hypothesis of ( ,odot's arrival (the caesura of time and the constitution of a meaning), so t ha l the duty of humanity is to hold onto an uncertain, but imperative, I l ljunction:

What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this,

that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one

thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come [ . . . ] Or for night to

fall. [Pause.] We have kept our appointment, and that's an end to that. We

are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can

boast as much? (CDW, p. 74; WG, p. 9 1 )124

Obviously, the question of others is incessantly brandished on stage, whether under the effect of an encounter (meeting Pozzo and Lucky, Vladimir and Estragon speak to them in order to evade being 'alone once more, in the midst of nothingness,' 12s CDW, p. 75; WG, p. 52); or because the apparent ligure of the monologue, like in Happy Days, presupposes an interlocutor, someone whom the voice reaches and who might respond ( ,Oh he's coming to speak to me today, oh this is going to be another happy day! ') ; or because, as in Play - in which the characters (two women and a man) are stuck up to their necks in urns - it is only a question of their links, which become the eternal material of these stereotypical stories that they ceaselessly lavish upon us; stories that are borrowed, even in their style, from the repertoire of gutter talk:

M: She was not convinced. I might have known. I smell her off you, she

kept saying. There was no answer to this. So I took her in my arms and

swore I could not live without her. I meant it, what is more. Yes, I am sure

I did. She did not repulse me.

W I : Judge then of my astonishment when one fine morning, as I was

sitting stricken in the morning room, he slunk in, fell on his knees before

me, buried his face in my lap and . . . confessed

(CDW, p. 309; SP, p. 149).126

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We have shown how nostalgia, which gives rise to calm blocks of beauty within the prose, haunts Krapp s Last Tape. But even a text as harsh and impenetrable as Endgame can sometimes open up to the metaphor of the inventions of childhood:

Then babble, babble, words, like the solitary child who turns himself into

children, two, three, so as to be together, and whisper together, in the dark

(CDW, p. 126; E, p. 70).127

As for love, conceived as what a 'tormentor' and a 'victim' are capable of, it is the subject of most ofthe plays, and it must be noted that the couple, or the pair, forms its basic unit. Willie and Winnie in Happy Days, Hamm and Clov (flanked by Nagg and Nell) in Endgame, Vladimir and Estragon (flanked by Pozzo and Lucky) in Waitingfor Godot. . . Even Krapp forms a duo with his magnetic tape, pairing up with his own past.

What's more, this is where the singularity of Beckett's theatre can perhaps be seen to reside. There is theatre only so long as there is dialogue, discord and discussion between two characters, and Beckett's ascetic method restricts theatre to the possible effects of the Two. The display of the unlimited resources of the couple - even when it is aged, monotonous and almost despicable - and the verbal capture of all the consequences of duality are Beckett's fundamental theatrical operations. If these duettists have often been compared to clowns, it is precisely because in the circus one already ignores situations or intrigues, exposition or denouement; what matters is the production of a powerfully physical inventory ofthe extreme figures of duality (symbolised by the juxtaposition of Auguste and the white clown). This physical immediacy is very evident in Beckett's theatre, in which the stage directions that describe the postures and gestures of the characters occupy as much, if not more, space than the text itself. Besides, let us not forget that Beckett was always tempted by mime, as testified by Acts Without Words

( 1 957). From this point of view, Beckett is indisputably the only serious writer

of the last century to belong to a major tradition within comic theatre: contrasted duos, anachronistic costumes (falsely 'posh' outfits, bowler hats, etc.), sequences of skits rather than the development of an intrigue, trivialities, insults and scatology, parodies oflofty language (in particular philosophical language) indifferent to any verisimilitude, and above all the relentlessness

-" "----"'''--'''-

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1 1 I : l l l i tested by the characters in persevering in their being, in maintaining -1 1 1 I 1 1t: hell or high water - a principle of desire, a vital power that circumstances . ITI I l to render illegitimate or impossible at each and every instant.

The handicap is not a pathetic metaphor for the human condition. Comic I I l l'alre swarms with libidinous blind figures, with impotent old men I l · t t:ntlessly following their passions, with battered but triumphant maid-slaves, IV i I h imbecilic youths, with crippled megalomaniacs . . . It is in this ' - ; l I"Ilivalesque heritage that we must situate Winnie, buried up to her neck al ld singing the praises ofthe happy day; Hamm - blind, paralytic and mean

hi tterly playing out his uncertain part to the very end without faltering; or I l it: duo of Vladimir and Estragon, amused and revived by a mere nothing, l"!nnally capable as they are of keeping the 'appointment' .

Beckett must be played with the most intense humour, taking advantage ( ) f " the enduring variety of inherited theatrical types. It is only then that the I rl lc destination of the comical emerges: neither a symbol nor a metaphysics

,

I I I disguise, and even less a derision, but rather a powerful love for human ( )bstinacy, for tireless desire, for humanity reduced to its stubbornness and malice. Beckett's characters are these anonymous figures of human toil which I hc comedy renders at once interchangeable and irreplaceable. This is indeed I hc meaning of Vladimir's exalted tirade:

It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are

needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all

mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears!

But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we

like it or not (CDW, p. 74; WG, p. 90).128

On the stage, embodied by couples acting out all the postures of visible humanity, two by two, for the laughter of all, we have this 'here and now' which gathers us together and authorises thought to grasp that anyone is the cqual of anyone else [n 'importe qui est / 'egal de n 'importe qUI] .

Doubtless, we will never know 'who' Godot is, but it is enough that he is the emblem of everyone's obstinate desire for something to happen. However, when Pozzo asks: 'Who are you?' , one easily understands - in the lineage of Aristophanes and Plautus, of Moliere and Goldoni, but also of Chaplin - why Vladimir will respond in the following way (which, as Beckctt notes in the directions, provokes a silence):

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We are men (CDW, p. 76 ; WG, p . 54) .129

1 1 . B e a u ty, A g a i n

Despair, you say? I am reminded of this Illagnific C:;<:::::::�-::llt pass age from Malone Dies, in which prose attains cadences that recal I the writings of Bossuet:

The horror-worn eyes linger abject on all they have beseech. :od so long, in a last prayer, the true prayer at last, the one that asks for noth ing . And it is then a little breath of fulfillment revives the dead longings a=-:3d a munnur is born in the silent world, reproaching you affectionately

despaired too late (T, p. 278; TN, p. 277). 130 vvith having

But if it is best to despair at the right moment, is it n �t because what grants our wishes relieves us for an instant from the tiring co �c em of prayer? Never to ask for anything, this is B eckett's foremost demarr.. ] _ The beauty of his prose comes from this motivation, that we not ask an /thing frOID the prose itself other than to remain as close as possible to that v Thich, in the last analysis, makes up each and every existence: on the one � and, the elllpty stage of being, the half-light where everything is played out" but which itself does not play a role; and, on the other, the events that sudde1: e ly p opulate the stage ofbeing, like stars in anonymous places, hol e s in the d __ stant canvas o f the theatre of the world.

r the inunortal <1, both a s the

�C existence and

The enduring patience of life and prose only exists Ie== arousal of what fixes in beauty the possibility of an en interruption of the half-light and as the conjoined finalitie s <> • saymg.

These patiences are not in themselves deserving of our .. ;;;;:::=:;�ontempt. Like in How It Is, there is always 'the blue there was then the whit: · � dust' (HII, p. 78; HII US, p. 70),13 1 but there is also:

[ . . . ] the j ourney the couple the abandon when the whole tale

tonnentor you are said to have had then lost the journey you :is told the

said to have made the victim you are said to have had then lost the 1 =--nages the

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, :ack the little fables of above littIe scenes a little blue infernal homes. ( 1 1 1 1 , p. 140; HII US, p. 128)132

. . I [ I'D without I �ut when it is seized by beauty thiS acceptable matena 0 a I e . . . ? h d d meanIng?) 1 1 1 , - ; l I l ing (and why would hfehave ameamng . ls lt suc a go sen ,

h t f I . . h' h the weakness, " I I . I i l lS a super-existence comparable to t a 0 ga aXles, 1ll w IC . . ' b

. thO more man a l I ' pt'l i tion and obstmacy of hfe, disappears, ecommg no mg . the I II I I l i t of light in the dim of being. At the end of the methodical ascesls,

I , . 1 1 ( )wing happens, which is entirely comparable to the emergence of the

( ; It 'at Bear at the end of Mallanne's Coup de des:

Enough. Sudden enough. Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. All least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bouuos of boundless void (WH, pp. 46-47; NO, p. 1 16).133

For Beckett, like for Mallarme, it is false that 'nothing wlll take place

. I d ' h ' [ the dlnI. No h i l i the place' . Existence is not dlsso ve III t e anonymlty o . ' A d ' h " t I ved to the

I l lore does it coincide with sohpslsm. n nelt er IS I ens a d

rclationship with others and to imprescriptible laws - be they the suppose

I ; I ws of desire or of love. Love, which as Malone says, is to be 'regarded as a

k i nd of lethal glue' (T, p. 264; TN, p. 262).134 . Art's It happens that something happens. That somethmg happenstous. . . fi h' h truth proceeds, to

1 1 1 ission is to shelter these pomts of exceptIOn rom w IC . make them shine and retain them - stellar - in the reconstitutedfabnc ofour patience.

sort This is a painstaking task. The element of beauty is necessary, as a

of diffuse light within words, a subterranean lighting that I have named t�e C I tr lied necesSIty m

latent poem of prose. A rhythm, a lew rare co ours, a con 0

the images the slow construction of a world fashioned so as to allow one to ,

. I h . h h tfis hole trUth see - in a far-away point - the pmho e t at saves us. t roug and courage come to us.

. e to Beckett fulfilled his task. He set out the poem of the tireless deslr

think. . ' . , bo also Without doubt this is because he was lIke Moran mMo/lo), w .

needed the element of beauty. Beauty, whose Kantian definition Moran IS

we ll aware of, as the following remark amusingly testifies:

F or it was only by transferring it to this atmosphere, how shall I say, of

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We are men (CDW, p. 76; WG, p. 54).129

1 1 . Beauty, Aga i n

Despair, you say? I am reminded of this magnificent passage from Malone Dies, in which prose attains cadences that recall the writings of Bossuet:

The horror-worn eyes linger abject on all they have beseeched so long, in

a last prayer, the true prayer at last, the one that asks for nothing. And it is

then a little breath of fulfillment revives the dead longings and a murmur

is born in the silent world, reproaching you affectionately with having

despaired too late (T, p. 278; TN, p. 277).130

But if it is best to despair at the right moment, is it not because what grants our wishes relieves us for an instant from the tiring concern of prayer? Never to ask for anything, this is Beckett's foremost demand. The beauty of his prose comes from this motivation, that we not ask anything from the prose itself other than to remain as close as possible to that which, in the last analysis, makes up each and every existence: on the one hand, the empty stage of being, the half-light where everything is played out, but which itself does not play a role; and, on the other, the events that suddenly populate the stage of being, like stars in anonymous places, holes in the distant canvas of the theatre of the world.

The enduring patience of life and prose only exists for the immortal arousal of what fixes in beauty the possibility of an end, both as the interruption of the half-light and as the conjoined finalities of existence and • sayIng.

These patiences are not in themselves deserving of our contempt. Like in How It Is, there is always 'the blue there was then the white dust' (HII, p. 78; HII US, p. 70),13 1 but there is also:

[ . . . ] the journey the couple the abandon when the whole tale is told the

tormentor you are said to have had then lost the journey you are said to

have made the victim you are said to have had then lost the images the

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�,ack the little fables of above little scenes a little blue infernal homes.

( l l ll, p. 140; HII US, p. 128Y32

But when it is seized by beauty this acceptable material of a life without I I wal l ing (and why would life have a meaning? Is it such a godsend, meaning?) 1 1 1 1 : 1 i liS a super-existence comparable to that of galaxies, in which the weakness, H 'pdition and obstinacy of life, disappears, becoming nothing more than a pi l i I I ! of light in the dim of being. At the end of the methodical ascesis, the I l l i l owing happens, which is entirely comparable to the emergence of the

( I reat Bear at the end of Mallarrn6's Coup de des:

Enough. Sudden enough. Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. All

least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of

boundless void (WH, pp. 46-47; NO, p. 1 1 6) .133

For Beckett, like for Mallarrne, it is false that 'nothing will take place hut the place' . Existence is not dissolved in the anonymity of the dim. No I IlOre does it coincide with solipsism. And neither is it enslaved to the rciationship with others and to imprescriptible laws - be they the supposed laws of desire or oflove. Love, which as Malone says, is to be 'regarded as a k ind oflethal glue' (T, p. 264; TN, p. 262).134

It happens that something happens. That something happens to us. Art's

I l l ission is to shelter these points of exception from which truth proceeds, to I llake them shine and retain them - stellar - in the reconstituted fabric of our patience.

This is a painstaking task. The element of beauty is necessary, as a sort o f diffuse light within words, a subterranean lighting that I have named the latent poem of prose. A rhythm, a few rare colours, a controlled necessity in the images, the slow construction of a world fashioned so as to allow one to see - in a far-away point - the pinhole that saves us: through this hole truth and courage come to us.

Beckett fulfilled his task. He set out the poem of the tireless desire to think. .

Without doubt this is because he was like Moran inMolloy, who also needed the element of beauty. Beauty, whose Kantian definition Moran is well aware of, as the following remark amusingly testifies:

For it was only by transferring it to this atmosphere, how shall I say, of

7 7

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finality without end, why not, that I could venture to consider the work I

had on hand [Ie travail a executer] (T, p. 1 12; TN, p. 1 1 1 ).135

Beckett, for us who hardly dare to, took this work into consideration. The slow and sudden execution of the Beautiful.

Translated by Nina Power Revised by Alberto Toscano

C rit i ca l B i b l i o g ra p hy to 'Ti re less Des i re'

BATAILLE, Georges, 'Le silence de Molloy', Critique 58 ( 195 1 ) ['Molloy's Silence', in Samuel Beckett 's Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable,

ed. by Harold Bloom (London: Chelsea House Publishers, 1 988), pp. 1 3-2 1 ] .

BECKETT, Samuel Cahiers de I 'Herne (Paris: Livre de poche, 1976).

BLANCHOT, Maurice, 'OU maintenant? Qui maintenantT ,NR.F. 1 0 ( 1953),

reprinted in Le Livre a venir (Gallimard) [The Book to Come, trans. by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002)].

,

DELEUZE, Gilles, 'L'Epuise', introduction to Quad (Paris: Minuit, 1 992)

[ 'The Exhausted', inEssays Critical and Clinical, trans. by Daniel Smith (London: Verso, 1 997), pp. 1 52-1 74].

MAURIAC, Claude, L 'Alitterature Contemporaine (Paris: Albin Michel, 1 969) [The New Literature, trans. by Samuel I. Stone (New York: George Braziller, 1 959), pp. 75-90] .

MAYOUX, Jean-Jacques, 'Samuel Beckett et l'univers parodique' ,Les Lettres

nouvelles 6 ( 1960), reprinted in Vivants piliers (Julliard, 1 960) [ ' Samuel Beckett and Universal Parody' , in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of

Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1 965), pp. 77-

9 1 ] . SIMON, Alfred, Samuel Beckett (Paris: Belfond, 1 983).

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Being, Existence, Thought: Prose a n d Concept136

a ) The Betwee n - La n g u a g es a n d the S h o rth a n d of

Bei n g ,

Samuel Beckett wrote Worstward Ho in 1 982 and published it in 1 983.

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I t is together with Stirrings Still, a testamental text. Beckett did not translate it in�o French so that Worstward Ho expresses the real ofthe English language as Samuel B:ckett's mother-tongue. To my knowledge, all of his texts �tten in French were translated by Beckett himself into English.137 There are mst�ad some texts written in English that he did not translate into French, and WhICh, for this exceptional artist of the French language, are aki

.n �o t�e remnants of

something more originary within English. Nevertheless, It IS Said that Samuel Beckett considered this text 'untranslatable ' . We can therefore say that I I

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Worstward Ho is tied to the English language in such a singular manner that its linguistic migration proves particularly arduous.

Since in this essay we will study the French version of the text, WI.) cannot consider it in terms of its literal poetics. The French text we are dealing with, which is altogether remarkable, is not exactly by Samuel Beckett. II belongs in part to Edith Fournier, the translator. We cannot immediately approach the signification of this text by way of its letter, for it really is a translation. 1 3 8

In Beckett's case, the problem of translation is complex, since he himself was situated at the interval of two languages. The question of knowing which text translates which is an almost undecidable one. Nevertheless, Beckett always called the passage from one language to another a 'translation', even if, upon closer inspection, there are significant differences between the French and English 'variants' , differences bearing not only on the poetics oflanguage, but on its philosophical tone. There is a kind of humorous pragmatism in the English text that is not exactly present in the French, and there is a conceptual sincerity to the French text which is softened and sometimes, in my view, just a bit watered down in the English. In Worstward Ho, we have an absolutely English text, with no French variant, on the one hand, and a translation in the usual sense, on the other. Hence the obligation of finding support for our argument in the meaning rather than the letter.

A second difficulty derives from the fact that this text is - in an absolutely conscious fashion - a recapitulatory text, that is, one takes stock of the whole of Samuel Beckett's intellectual enterprise. To study it thoroughly it would be necessary to show how it is woven out of a dense network of allusions to prior texts, as well as of returns to their theoretical hypotheses _ to be re­examined, possibly contradicted or modified, and refined - and, moreover, that it functions as a sort of filter through which the multiplicity of Beckett's writings is made to pass, thereby reducing Beckett's work to its fundamental hypothetical system .

. Having said this, if we compound these two difficulties, it is entirely

pOSSIble to take Worstward Ho as a short philosophical treatise, as a treatment in shorthand of the question of being. Unlike the earlier texts, it is not governed by a sort oflatent poem. It is not a text that penetrates into the singularity and power of comparison that belong to language - like III Seen III Said, for example. It maintains a very deliberate and abstract dryness, which is offset, especially in the English original, by an extreme attention to rhythm. We could thus say that as a text it tends to offer up the rhythm of thought rather

8 0

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1 1 1 1 1 1 1 l i s configuration, whilst, for III Seen III Said, the opposite is true. This is

\\ i i I wc can approach Worstward Ho conceptually without thereby betraying

i I : ; l l Ioe it allows us to put together a table of contents for the entirety of

I I " let L's work, it is entirely apposite to treat this text as if it were, above all,

rI Iw lwork of thought or a shorthand of the question of being. What we will

I"", ' i ll this operation - what 1 called the 'rhythm' - is the figure of scansion

( I I , ,' l i nguistic segments are generally extremely brief: just a few words), that

1 ' 0 . I he stenographic figure belonging to the text and which, in English, is

1 1 1 ; l lc hed by a kind of pulsation within the language which is altogether unique.

b ) Say i n g , Be i n g , Tho u g ht

Cap au pire (an admirable French translation for the title ofWorstward

" , , ) presents us with an extremely dense plot, organised - like in all the later I lL:ckett - into paragraphs. A first reading shows us that this plot develops l our central conceptual themes into their respective questions (I will explain I I I a moment what must be understood by 'question').

The first theme is the imperative of saying. This is a very old Beckettian Ihcme, the most recognisable but in certain regards also the most unrecognised or his themes. The imperative of saying is the prescription of the 'again', I I nderstood as the incipit of the written text, and determining it as a continuation. In Beckett, to commence is always to 'continue ' . Nothing commences which is not already under the prescription of the again or of re­

commencing, under the supposition of a commencement that itself never commenced. We can thus say that the text is circumscribed by the imperative o f saying. It begins by:

On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on (p. 7; p. 89).139

And ends by:

Said nohow on (p. 47; p. 1 1 6).140

Therefore, we can also sunnnarise Worstward Ho by the passage from 'Be said on' to 'Said nohow on'. The text presents the possibility ofthe 'nohow on' as a fundamental alteration ofthe 'on' . The negation ( 'nohow') attests to the fact that there is no more 'on'. But in truth, given the 'be said', the

8 1

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of saying. The second theme - the immediate and mandatory correlate of the firsl

throughout Beckett's work - is that of pure being, of the 'there is' as such. The imperative of saying is immediately correlated to that about which there is something to say, in other words, the 'there is' itself. Besides the fact that there is the imperative of saying, there is the ' there is' .

The 'there is' , or pure being, has two names and not just one: the void and the dim. This is a problem of considerable importance. Let us note at once that with respect to these two names - void and dim - we discern, or at least appear to discern, a subordination: the void is subordinated to the dimin the exercise of disappearance, which constitutes the essential testing ground [plan d 'epreuve] of Worstward Ho. The maxim is the following:

Void cannot go [Disparition du vide ne se peut] . Save dim go. Then all go

(p. 18 ; p. 97). 141

Once it is obliged to prove itself through the crucial ordeal of disappearance, the void has no autonomy. It is dependent on the disappearance of the all, which is, as such, the disappearance ofthe dim. If the 'all go' - i.e the ' there is' thought as nothingness - is named by the dim, the void is necessarily a subordinate nomination. Ifwe accept that the 'there is' is what is there in the ordeal of its own nothingness, the fact that disappearance is subordinated to the disappearance of the dim makes 'dim' into the eminent name of being.

The third theme is what could be referred to as ' the inscribed in being' . This is a question of what is proposed from the standpoint of being [du point

de l 'etre], or again, a question about what appears in the dim. The inscribed is what the dim as dim arranges within the order of appearance.

Insofar as 'dim' is the eminent name of being, the inscribed is what appears in the dim. But one can also say that it is what is given in an interval of the void. This is because things will be pronounced upon according to the two possible names of the 'there is' . On the one hand, there is what appears in the dim, what the dim allows to appear as a shade - as a shade in the dim [I 'ombre dans la penombre] . On the other, there is what makes the void appear as an interval, in the gap of what appears, and consequently as a corruption of the void - if the void is determined as being nothing but difference or separation. This explains how Beckett could name the universe, that is, the

8 2

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We can also say that the inscribed in being - the shades - is what allows 1 1 , ;,. 1 1 " to be counted. The science of number - of the number of shades - is a 1 I I I H Iamental theme in Beckett. What is not being as such, but is instead I I I ' Iposed or inscribed in being, is what lets itself be counted, what pertai�s to p imality, what is ofthe order of number. Number is obviously not an attnbute , 1 1 · 1 he void or the dim: void and dim do not let themselves be counted. Instead, I I is the inscribed in being that lets itself be counted. It lets itself be counted

pri Illordially: 1 , 2, 3 . A last variant: the inscribed in being is what can worsen. 'Worsening' -

; 1 1 1 essential theme in Worstward Ho, where worsening is one of the text's I adieal operations - means, amongst other things, but above all, to be iller : : : I id than said before [etre plus mal dit que deja ditl

Under this multiplicity of attributes - what is apparent in the dim, what n Hlstitutes an interval with respect to the void, what lets itself be counted, wllat is susceptible to worsening or to being iller said than said - there is the l ',cneric name: 'the shades ' . We can say that the shades are what is exposed in I I tc dim. The shades are the exposed plural of the 'there is' , which manifests

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In Worstward Ho, the presentation of shades will be minimal: the count will go up to three. We shall see why it can go no lower. Categorially, once you count what lets itself be counted, you must at least count to three. .

The first shade is the standing shade, which counts as one. In truth, it is the one . The standing shade will also be found 'kneeling' - these metamorphoses should elicit no surprise - or 'bowed' . These are different Ilames. They are not so much states as names. Of this shade that counts as one, it is said - from page 34 ( 108) on - that it is an old woman:

. h ' d t o 'S 142 Nothmg to s ow a woman s an ye a w man .

And Beckett immediately adds (this will be clarified later):

. ft h d ' 143 Oozed from softenmg so t e wor woman s.

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These are the fundamental attributes of the one: the one is the kneeling

shade and it is a woman.

Then there is the pair, which counts as two. The pair is the sole shade

that counts as two. Beckett will say: 'Two free and two as one' - one shade. �nd once the pair is named, it is established that the shades which constitute

It are an old man and a child.

Let us remark that the one is not called woman until much later whilst

the two is named 'old man and child' right away. What will be said later

instead, is tha� nothing has proven that we were indeed dealing with an old man a�d a

.chlld. In all these instances - with regard to the question of the �etermmatlO�s 'man', 'woman', 'child' - nothing provides proof, and yet it

IS the case. SImply put, the modality of saying is not the same for the one­

wo�a� and for the two-man-child. Of the one it is not said until much later

that It IS an old wom�n, whilst the composition of the pair is immediately

declared (ol.d �a�-chtld); the crucial statement returns: nothing proves that,

and yet. ThIS mdlcates that the masculine sexuated position is evident and

t�at the impo.ss

.ibility of proving it is difficult to understand. On the con�rary,

�1�ce the femmme sexuated position is not evident, the impossibility of proving

It IS.

In the pair it is obviously a question of the other, of 'the-one-and-the-

other' . '

. Th� other is here designated by its internal duplicity, by the fact that it

IS two. It IS a two that is the same. It is, let us say it again: 'Two free [shades]

and two as one. ' But, a contrario, it is the one that turns into two: the old man

and the chil� . We must suppose that old man and child are the same man qua

shade, that IS to say, human life qua shade in its extreme of infancy and its

extr��e of old age; a life given in what splits it in two, in the unity of the pair

that It IS qua alterity to itself.

In the end, we can say that the inscribed in being is visible humanity:

wo�an as one and as inclination, man as double in the unity of number. The

pertment ages are the extreme ones, as is always the case in Beckett: infant

and old �an. The adult is almost an ignored category, an insignificant category.

Fmally, the fou�h theme. i� thought - as is to be expected. In and by

th�ug�t the configuratlOns of vIsIble humanity and the imperative of saying

eXIst sImultaneously.

. T�ought is the recollection of the first and third themes: there is the

Imperative of saying, there is the inscribed in being, and this is 'for' and ' in'

thought. Let us note right away that Beckett's question is the following one:

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" I I I I\\! i ng that thought (the fourth theme) is the focal point or the recollection

I I I I I IC imperative of saying (the first theme) and of the arrangement of visible

h l l l l l : l I1ity - that is, of the shades (third theme) - what can thought say about

1 1 1 1 ' second theme, that is, about the question of being? This provides the

I I I < ladest possible organisation for the text as a whole. The philosophical

I I I I 1st ruction of the question will go like this: what can be pronounced about

t i ll' ' there is ' qua 'there is' from the vantage point of thought, in which the

I I l 1 perative of saying and the modification of the shades (i.e. the circulation

"I visible humanity) are given simultaneously?

In the figural register of Worstward Ho, thought is represented by a

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1 1('ad. One will speak of 'the head' or of 'the skull' . The head is repeatedly

( a i led the ' seat and germ of all . ' If it is referred to in this way, it is because

I H I t h the imperative of saying and the shades exist for the head, and it is in the

lil�ad that the question of being takes place. , I

What is the composition of thought? If reduced to its absolutely

primordial constituents - according to the procedure of simplification which

('onstitutes Beckett' s organic method - there is the visible and there is the

i I Ilperative of saying. There is ' ill seen ill said' . This is thought: 'ill seen ill

said' . It follows from this that the presentation of the head will be essentially

reduced to its eyes, on the one hand, and to its brain, oozing words, on the

other: two holes on a brain, this is thought.

Hence two recurrent themes: that of the eyes and that of the oozing of

words, whose source is the soft matter of the brain. This is the material figure

of spirit.

Let us be more precise.

It will be said that the eyes are 'clenched staring' . The 'movement' of

staring is essential to Worstward Ho. It designates seeing as such. This

'clenched staring' - obviously an abrupt juxtaposition - designates precisely

the emblem of the ill seen. Seeing is always an ill seeing, and consequently

the eye of seeing is 'clenched staring' .

As for words - the second attribute of thought after seeing - one will

say ' somehow from some soft mind they ooze ' . These two maxims, the

existence of 'clenched staring eyes' and the fact that words ' somehow from

some soft mind [ . . . ] ooze' , determine the fourth theme, that is, thought in the

modality of existence represented by the skull.

It is of capital importance to note that the skull is a supplementary

shade. The skull makes three, besides the one offeminine inclination and the

other - in the guise of the pair - of the old man and the child. Thought always

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required is the possibility that something appear in its being. This possibility is not constituted by the void, which is instead the name of being qua being. The name of being qua possibility of appearance is 'dim' .146

The dim is being to the extent that a question can be formulated as to the being of being, that is, to the extent that being is exposed to the question qua reserve of being for appearance [ressource d'etre de l 'apparaftre] .

This is why there must be two names (void and dim) and not just one. For a question to be, being must have two names. Heidegger saw this too, in his concepts of Sein and Seiende.

The second condition for a question is that there be thought. A skull­thought, let us call it. Skull-thought is an ill seeing and an ill saying or a clenched staring eye and an oozing of names. But, and this point is essential, the skull-thought is itself exposed. It is not subtracted from the exposition of being. It is not simply definable as that for which there is being - it participates in being as such, it is caught in its exposition. In Beckett's vocabulary one will say that the head (seat and terminus of all) or the skull are in the dim. Or that skull-thought is the third shade. Or, again, that the skull-thought lets

'

itself be counted in the uncountable dim. Does this not leave us exposed to an infinite regress? If thought as such

co-belongs with being, where is the thought of this co-belonging? From where is it said that the head is in the dim? It seems that we are on the edge of the necessity - if one can hazard this expression - of a meta-head. One must count four, and then five, and so on to infinity.

The protocol of closure is given by the cogito; it is necessary to admit that the head is counted by the head, or that the head sees itself as head. Or again, that it is for the clenched staring eye that there is a clenched staring eye. Here lies the Cartesian thread running through Beckett's thought. Beckett never denied this thread, which is present from the beginning of his work, but in Worstward Ho it is identified as a kind of halting rule which alone allows thatjor which there is the dim to also be in the dim.

Finally, and still remaining within the register of the minimal conditions for a question, there must be - besides the 'there is' and the skull-thought ­inscriptions of shade within the dim.

Shades are ruled by three relations. First, that ofthe one or the two, or ofthe same and the other. In other terms, the relation of the kneeling one and the walking pair, taken, like Platonic categories, as figures of the same and the other. Second, that of the extremes of age, infancy and senescence, extremes which also make it so that the pair is one. Third, the relation of the

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' ,ncs, woman and man. These are the constitutive relations of the shades that populate the dim

, 1 1 11 1 infest the void. A parenthesis: there is a point, only alluded to in Worstward Ho, which

I : ; I levertheless crucial; it is that, as we have seen, the sexes are without proof. Morc specifically, they are the only thing to be without proof. The fact that I h is shade turns out to be old woman or old man, this is always without I 'roof, whilst nevertheless being certain. This means that, for Beckett, the d i I Terentiation of the sexes is, at one and the same time, absolutely certain ; I l lli absolutely beyond proof. This is why I can call it a pure disjunction.

Why a pure disjunction? It is certain that there is 'woman' and there is , ! l lan' - in this case the old woman and the old man - but this certainty does l Iot let itselfbe deduced or inferred on the basis of any particular predicative I ra it. It is therefore a pre-linguistic certainty, in the sense that it can be said, hilt that this saying does not in turn have any other saying as its source. It is a lirst saying. One can say that there are woman and man, but at no time can (mc infer this from another saying, and in particular not from a descriptive, ( l r empirical, saying.

e) Be i n g a n d Exi ste n ce

Under these relations - of the one and the two, of the extremes of age, and of the sexes - the shades attest not to being but to existence. What is cxistence, and what distinguishes it from being?

Existence is the generic attribute of what is capable of worsening. What can worsen exists. 'Worsening' is the active modality of any exposition to the seeing of the clenched staring eye and to the oozing of words. This exposition is existence. Or, perhaps at a more fundamental level, what exists is what lets itself be encountered. Being exists when it is in the guise of the encounter.

Neither void nor dim designate something that can be encountered, because every encounter is under two conditions: on the one hand, that there be a possible interval of the void to section off what is encountered; on the other, that there be the dim, the exposition of everything that exposes itself. The shades are what lets itselfbe encountered. To let oneself be encountered and to worsen are one and the same thing, and it is this that designates the existence of shades. Void and dim - the names of being - do not exist.

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Therefore, the minimal set-up will also be referred to as follows: being, thought, existence. When one possesses the figures of being, thought and existence, or the words for this set-up, or, as Beckett would say, the words to ill say it - that is, when one possesses the minimal and experimental set-up of saying - one can construct questions, one can set the -ward.

f) The Ax i o m of Say i n g

The text will therefore organise itselfby way of hypotheses concerning the -ward, that is, the direction of thought. These hypotheses will concern what binds, unbinds, or affects the triad of dim-being, shade-existence, and skull-thought. Worstward H ° will treat the triad being/existence/thought under the categories of the void, of the same and the other, of the three, and of the seeing/saying complex.

Before formulating any hypotheses, one must seek support in a certain number of axioms that establish the primary bindings or unbindings. Almost the only axiom of Worstward Ho, which moreover generates its title, is an old axiom of Beckett's. It is by no means invented here and perhaps even constitutes one of his oldest axioms. This axiom goes: to say is to ill say.

It is necessary to fully understand that 'to say is to ill say' establishes an essential identity. The essence of saying is ill saying. III saying is not a failure of saying, but precisely the contrary: all saying is, in its very existence as saying, an ill saying.

The ' ill saying' is implicitly opposed to the 'well saying' . What is the :well saying'? 'Well saying' constitutes a hypothesis of adequation: the saying IS adequate to the said. But Beckett's fundamental thesis is that the saying that is adequate to the said suppresses saying. Saying is only a free saying, and in particular an artistic saying, to the extent that it does not coalesce with the said, to the extent that it is not subject to the authority of the said. Saying is under the imperative of saying, it is under the imperative of the ' on', and is not constrained by the said.

If there is no adequation, if the saying is not prescribed by 'what is said' but only governed by saying, then ill saying is the free essence of saying, or the affirmation of the prescriptive autonomy of saying. One says in order to ill say. The apex of saying - which is poetic or artistic saying - is then precisely the controlled regulation of ill saying, what brings the prescriptive autonomy of saying to its culmination.

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When reading in Beckett terms such as ' ill saying' , 'failure' , etc., it is

I I " , Tssary to keep all of this well in mind. Were we dealing with an empiricist

di ll'! ri ne oflanguage according to which language sticks to things with various

I h" ',rees of adherence, this would arouse no interest. Moreover, the text itself

wOllld tum out to be impossible. The text only functions from the moment

l l ia l one hears in the expressions 'fail' or ' ill say' the self-affirmation of the

I llt:seription of saying as governed by its own rule. Beckett clearly indicates

l l i i s from the start:

Say for be said.' Missaid. From now say for be missaid (p. 7; p. 89).147

g ) The Te m ptati o n

The strict consequence of all this is that the norm of saying is called

, failure' . Of course, the fact that failure provides the norm of saying arouses

; 1 fallacious hope within the subject, a hope that Beckett identifies perfectly:

I hc hope of a maximal failure, of an absolute failure that would have the

mcrit of turning you off both language and saying, once and for all. This is

I he shameful temptation, the temptation of subtracting oneself from the

imperative of saying. The temptation to have done with the 'on' ; no longer to

suffer the intolerable prescription of ill saying. Since well saying is impossible, the only hope lies in betrayal: to attain

it failure so complete it would elicit a total abandonment of the prescription

itself, a relinquishment of saying and oflanguage. This would mean the return

to the void - to be void or emptied, emptied of all prescription. In the end, the

temptation is to cease to exist in order to be. In this form of failure one returns

to the void, to pure being. This is what we could call the mystical temptation,

in the sense in which it appears in Wittgenstein, in the last proposition of the

Tractatus. To reach the point at which, since it is impossible to speak, one

can only remain silent. To reach the point at which the awareness that it is

impossible to say ' it' , that is, the awareness that ' it' has failed absolutely,

firmly places you under the sway of an imperative that is no longer the

imperative of saying but the imperative of silence. In Beckett's vocabulary this is called ' going'. Going where? Well, going

away from humanity. In truth, like Rimbaud Beckett thinks that one nevcr

leaves. He recognises absolutely the temptation of leaving humanity, the

temptation of failing both language and saying to the point of disgust. To

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leave existence once and for all, to return to being. But Beckett corrects and ultimately rejects this possibility.

Here is a text in which he evokes the hypothesis of an access to going and to the void by means of an excess of failure, an excess of failure that would be indistinguishable from the absolute success of saying:

Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still

worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where

neither for good. Good and all (p. 8 ; p. 90).148

This is the temptation: to go where all shade is gone, where nothing is exposed to the imperative of saying any longer.

But in numerous passages, further on in the text, this temptation will be challenged, revoked, prohibited. For example on page 37 ( 1 1 0), where the idea of the 'but worse more . . . ' is declared to be inconceivable:

Back unsay better worse by no stretch more. If more dim less light then

better worse more dim. Unsaid then better worse by no stretch more. Better

worse may no less than less be more. Better worse what? The say? The

said? Same thing. Same nothing. Same all but nothing.149

The fundamental point is that the 'throw up for good, good and all' does not exist, because every ' same nothing' is really a ' same all but nothing' . The hypothesis of a radical departure that would subtract us from the humanity of the imperative � the essential temptation at work in the prescription of silence � cannot succeed for ontological reasons. The ' same nothing' is really always a ' same all but nothing', or a ' same almost nothing' , but never a 'same nothing' as such. Thus, there are never sufficient grounds for subtracting oneself from the imperative of saying, in the name either of the advent of a pure 'nothing' or of absolute failure.

h ) The La ws of Worse n i n g

From this point onwards, the fundamental law that governs the text is that the worst that language is capable of � the worsening � never lets itself be captured by the nothing. One is always in the ' same all but nothing', but never at the point ofthe 'go for good', where a capture by the nothing would

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L l k l' place. This would be a nothing that is neither void nor dim, but the pure

, I l id s imple abolition of the prescription of saying.

We must therefore maintain the following: language partakes exclusively

. . l lhc capacity of the least. It does not partake of the capacity of the nothing.

I I has, as Beckett will say, ' leastening words' [des mots qui reduisent] . One

has words that leasten, and these words that leasten are those thanks to which

, I I l C can hold the worstward ho, that is, the direction of a centring of failure.

Between Mallarme's 'never direct, allusive words' and Beckett's

, kastening words' , the filiation is evident. To approach the thing that is to be

::a id in the awareness that it cannot be said under the guarantee of saying � or

or the thing � leads to a radical autonomisation ofthe prescription of saying.

' I 'h is free saying can never be direct, or, according to Beckett's vocabulary, it

I S a saying that leastens, that worsens. In other words, language can expect the minumum of the best worse,

hilt not its abolition. Here is the essential text, the one in which the expression

' Icastening words' also appears:

Worse less. By no stretch more, Worse for want of better less. Less best.

No. Naught best. Best worse. No. Not best worse. Naught not best worse.

Less best worse. No. Least. Least best worse. Least never to be naught.

Never to naught be brought. Never by naught be nulled. Unnullable least.

Say that best worse. With leastening words say least best worse. For want

ofworser worst. Unlessenable least best worse (pp. 3 1 -32; p. 106).150

'Least never to be naught' is the law of worsening. 'Say that best worse' i s the 'unnullable least' . The 'unlessenable least best worse' can never be confused with abolition pure and simple, or with the nothing. This means that the 'one must remain silent', in Wittgenstein's sense, is impracticable. We must hold the worstward ho. Worstward Ho: the title is an imperative, and not simply a description. . . The imperative of saying thus takes the guise of a constant repnse; It belongs to the regime of the attempt, of effort, of work. The book itself wil l

try to worsen everything that offers itself up to the oozing of wo�ds. A considerable amount of the text is devoted to what could be called expenmcnts in 'worsening' . Worstward Ho is a protocol of worsening, presented as a figurc of the self-affirmation of the prescription of saying. Worsening is a sovereign procedure of naming in the excess offailure; it is the same as arousing thought by 'never direct, allusive words', and carries with it the same impassablc

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proximity to nothingness as Mallanne's poetry. Worsening, which is the exercise of language in its artistic tension,

takes place through two contradictory operations. What in fact is worsening? It is the exercise of the sovereignty of saying with respect to the shades. Therefore, it is both saying more about them and restricting what is said. This is why the operations are contradictory. Worsening is saying more about less. More words to better leasten.

Whence the paradoxical aspect of worsening, which is really the substance of the text. In order to leasten 'what is said' so that - with regard to this purging [epuration] - failure may become more manifest, it will be necessary to introduce new words. These words are not additions - one does not add, one does not make sums - but one must say more in order to leasten, and thus one must say more in order to subtract. Here lies the constitutive operation of language. To worsen is to advance the ' saying more' in order to leasten.

i ) Exerc ises i n Wo rse n i n g

The text lavishly multiplies worsening exercises over the entire phenomenal field of shades, over the configuration of generic humanity. These can be briefly categorised as follows:

- worsening the one, or, worsening the kneeling woman; - worsening the two, or, worsening the pair of the old man and the

child; - worsening the head, or, worsening the eyes, the oozing brain, and the

skull. These are the three shades that constitute the phenomenal detenninations

of shade. Worsening the one: this is the exercise that occupies page 2 1 (99):

First one. First try fail better one. Something there badly not wrong. Not

that as it is it is not bad. The no face bad. The no hands bad. The no-.

Enough. A pox on bad. Mere bad. Way for worse. Pending worse still.

First worse. Mere worse. Pending worse still. Add a-. Add? Never. Bow it

down. Be it bowed down. Deep down. Head in hat gone. More back gone.

Greatcoat cut off higher. Nothing from pelvis down. Nothing but bowed

back. Topless baseless hindtrunk. Dim black. On unseen knees. In the dim

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void. Better worse so. Pending worse stilU51

The deployment of names that marks out this first shade with a great I H I mber of subtractive attributes is, at the same time, its leastening or reduction. l i s reduction to what? Well, to what should be named a mark of the one [un

imit d 'un], a mark that would give the shade with nothing else besides. The words demanded for this mark are 'bowed back' . A simple curve. Nothing I )ut a curve, such would be the ideality of the 'worse still' ; knowing that l Ilore words are needed in order to make such a curve arise, because words alone operate the leastening. We can thus say that an operation of nominal ()ver-abundance - over-abundance always being relative in Beckett - aims hcre at an essential leastening.

This is the law of worsening: one cuts the legs, the head, the coat, one (;uts all that one can, but each cut is in truth centred on the advent - by way of supplementary subtractive details - of a pure mark. One must supplement so as to purge the last mark of failure.

And now the worsening exercise of the two:

Next two. From bad to worsen. Try worsen. From merely bad. Add -.

Add? Never. The boots. Better worse bootless. Bare heels. Now the two

right. Now the two left. Left right left right on. Barefoot unreceding on.

Better worse so. A little better worse than nothing so (p. 23; p. 100).152

The boots - there aren't many names like 'boots' in this piece, whose texture is extremely abstract. When there are such names, it is a sure sign that we are dealing with a risky operation. In a moment we will see this with a (;oncrete and essential word, the irruption of 'graveyard' . Nevertheless, the boot, which appears all of a sudden, is only there in order to be crossed out, crased: 'The boots. Better worse bootless. '

A part of things is only given so as to fail, to be crossed out; it only (;omes to the surface of the text so as to be subtracted; here lies the wntradictory nature of the operation. The logic of worsening, which is the logic of the sovereignty of language, equates addition and subtraction. Mallanne did not proceed otherwise. Mallanne, for whom the very act of the poem consists in bringing about the emergence of an object (swan, star, rose . . . ) whose arrival imposes its own tennination. Beckett's 'boot' is the support­tenn of such an act.

Finally, worsening the head. This passage concerns the eyes (rc(;al l

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that the skull is composed of eyes on a brain):

The eyes. Time to try worsen. Somehow try worsen. Unclench. Say staring

open. All white and pupil. Dim white. White? No. All pupil. Dim black

holes. Unwavering gaping. Be they so said. With worsening words. From

now so. Better than nothing so bettered for the worse (p. 27; p. 1 03).153

The logic of the writing in this passage is altogether typical. On the basis of the syntagm 'clenched staring' - whose meaning I 've already discussed - we have the attempt at an opening. We will pass from 'clenched staring' to ' staring open', which is a semantically homogenous datum. 'Open' will in tum give us white, and white will be terminated, giving us black. This is the immediate chain. We pass from clenched to open, from open to white, and then white is crossed out in favour of black. The outcome of the operation - the operation of worsening - is that in place of 'clenched staring' we will have 'black holes', and that, from now on, when it will be a question of eyes, it will no longer even be in terms of the word ' eyes' - Beckett will simply mention two black holes.

Note that the open and the black only emerge within the sequence of the operation in order to pass from eyes to black holes, and that this operation of worsening aims at ridding us of the word 'eyes' - too descriptive, too empirical, and too singular - so as to lead us, by way of diagonal worsening and deletion, to the simple acceptance of black holes as blind seats of visibility. The eye as such is abolished. From this point onwards, there is only a pure seeing linked to a hole, and this pure seeing linked to a hole is constructed by means of the abolition of the eye with the (supplementary and exemplary) mediation of the open and the white.

j ) H o l d i n g Worstwa rd

Worsening is a labour, an inventive and arduous effectuation of the imperative of saying. Being an effort, holding to the worstward ho demands courage.

Where does the courage of effort come from? I think this is a very important question, because it is in general the question of knowing where the courage of holding to any procedure oftruth comes from. The question is ultimately the following: where does the courage of truth come from?

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For Beckett, the courage oftruth could not come from the idea that we w i l l be repaid by silence or by a successful coincidence with being itself. We have seen this already: there will be no termination of saying, no advent of t he void as such. The on cannot be effaced.

So, where does courage come from? For Beckett, courage comes from t i le fact that words have the tendency to ring true. An extreme tension, which perhaps constitutes Beckett's vocation as a writer, results from the fact that courage pertains to a quality of words that is contrary to their use in worsening. ' I 'here is something like an aura of correspondence in words from which ( paradoxically) we draw the courage to break with correspondence itself, that is, to hold worstward.

The courage of effort is always drawn out against its own destination. I ,et us call this the torsion of saying: the courage of the continuation of effort is drawn from words themselves, but from words taken against their genuine destination, which is to worsen.

Effort - in this case, artistic or poetic effort - is a barren work on language, undertaken in order to submit language to the exercises of worsening. But this barren effort draws its energy from a fortunate disposition of language: a sort of phantasm of correspondence that haunts language and to which one returns as if it were the possible place in which to draw from language itself, but wholly against the grain of its destination, the courage of its treatment. In Worstward Ho this tension gives rise to some very beautiful passages. Here is the first:

The words too whosesoever. What room for worse ! How almost true they

sometimes almost ring! How wanting in inanity! Say the night is young

alas and take heart, Or better worse say still a watch of night alas to come.

A rest of/ast watch to come. And take heart [Et prendre courage] (pp. 20-

2 1 ; p. 99). 154

It is to the extent that one can say something that rings almost true -that one ean say what in the poem is 'like' the true, and take heart - that one holds worstward. ' Say the night is young alas and take heart. ' How magnificent! Here is a variation on the theme:

What words for what then? How almost they still ring. As somehow from

some soft of mind they ooze. From it in it ooze. How all but uninanc. To last unlessenable least how loath to leasten. For then in utmost dim to

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unutter leastmost all (p. 33; p. 1 07).155

Everything here shows to what extent one is 'loath to leasten' , to what extent this effort is barren. One loaths to leasten because words are 'all but uninane', because the word sounds true, because it rings clear and it is from the word that we take heart, that we draw our courage. But taking heart for what? Well, precisely in order to ill say; to challenge the illusion that it rings true, the illusion that summons us to courage. The torsion of saying is thus both what clarifies the barrenness of effort (one must overcome, towards the worst, the clarity of words) and the courage with which we treat this barrenness.

Nevertheless, there is another reason why holding worstward proves difficult: being as such resists, being rebels against the logic of the worst. As worsening comes to be exercised upon the shades, one reaches the edge of the dim, the edge of the void, and there to continue to worsen becomes more and more difficult. As if the experience of being were witness, not to an impasse of worsening, but to a difficulty, to a growing effort - ever more exhausting - in this worsening.

When one is led to the edge of being by a barren and attentive exercise in the worsening of appearances, a sort of invariance comes to confound saying, exposing it to an experience of suffering - as if the imperative of saying encountered here what is furthest away from it, or most indifferent. This will be said in two ways: according to the dim or according to the void. This relation between the dim, the void and the imperative of saying brings us to the core of our ontological questions.

Let us recall that dim is the name of what exposes being. It follows from this that the dim can never be a total darkness, a darkness that the imperative of saying desires as its own impossibility. The imperative of saying, which desires the leastmost, is polarised by the idea that the dim could become the obscure, the absolutely dark. The text makes several hypotheses concerning how this desire can be satisfied. But these hypotheses are ultimately rejected, for there is always a minimal exposition of being. The being of void being is to expose itself as dim; in other words, the being of being is to expose itself, and exposition rules out the absoluteness ofthe dark or obscure. Even if one can lessen the exposition, one can never attain the obscure as such. Of the dim, it will be said that it is an 'unworsenable worse' :

So leastward on. So long as dim still. Dim undimmed. Or dimmed to

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dimmer still [plus obscur encore] . To dimmost dim. Leastmost in dimmost

dim. Utmost dim. Leastmost in utmost dim. Unworsenable worst (p. 33;

p. 1 07).156

Thought can move in the leastmost, in the utmost dim, but it has no access to the obscure as such. There is always a lesser least - so let us state the fundamental axiom once again: 'least never to be naught' . The argument is simple: because the dim, which is the exposition of being, is a condition of the worstward ho - what exposes it to saying - it can never be entirely given over to it. We may go worstward, but we can never go voidward [Nous ne

pouvons mettre cap sur Ie neant, seulement sur Ie pire]. There can be no voidward precisely because the dim is a condition of the -ward. Thus one can argue for the quasi-obscure, the almost obscure, but the dim in its being remains dim. Ultimately, the dim resists worsening.

k) The U n wo rsena b l e Vo i d

The void is given in experience. It is given in the interval of shades within the dim. It is what separates. In fact, the void is the ground [fond] of being, but in its exposition it is a pure gap [ecart]. With respect to the shades or the pair, Beckett will say: 'vast of void atween'. Such is the figure in which the void is given .

The worsening aims to get closer to the void as such, no longer to have the void in its mere dimension of interval, but the void as void - being as retracted from its exposition. But if the void is subtracted from its own exposition it can no longer be the correlate of the process of worsening, because the process of worsening only works on shades and on their void intervals. So that the void 'in itself' cannot be worked upon according to the laws of worsening. You can vary the intervals, but the void as void remains radically unworsenable. Now, if it is radically unworsenable, it means that it cannot even be ill said. This point is a very subtle one. The void 'in itself' i s what cannot be ill said. This is its definition. The void cannot but be said. In it, the saying and the said coincide, which prohibits ill saying. Such a coincidence finds its reason in the fact that the void itself is nothing but i ts own name. Of the void 'in itself' you have nothing but the name. Within Beckett's text this is expressly formulated in the following form:

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The void. How try say? How try fail? No try no fail. Say only- (p. 17; p. 96Y57

That the void is subtracted from ill saying means that there is no art of the void. The void is subtracted from that which suggests an art within language: the logic of worsening. When you say 'the void' you have said all that can be said, and you possess no process that could elicit the metamorphosis of this saying. In other words, there is no metaphor for the void.

In the subjective register, the void, being but a name, only arouses the desire for its disappearance. In the skull the void arouses not the process of worsening - which is impossible in its regard - but the absolute impatience of this pure name, the desire that the void be exposed as such, annihilated, something which is nevertheless impossible.

As soon as one touches upon a void that is not an interval, upon the void 'in itself', one enters what in Beckett constitutes the figure of an ontological desire that is subtracted from the imperative of saying: the fusion in nothingness of the void with the dim. It will also be remarked that, in a manner resembling the functioning of drives, the name of the void sets off a desire for disappearance, but that this desire for disappearance is without object, for there is here nothing but a name. The void will always counter any process of disappearance with the fact that it is effectively subtracted from worsening; this subtraction results from a property of the void, which is that in it the 'maximum' and the 'almost' are the same thing. Let us note that this is not the case with the dim, so that the two names of being do not function in the same way. The dim can be dimmost, leastmost dimmost; the void cannot. The void cannot but be said, seized as pure name and subtracted from every principle of variability, and therefore of metaphor or metamorphosis, because, within it, the 'maximum' and the 'almost' coincide absolutely. Here then is the great passage on the void:

All save void_ No. Void too. Unworsenable void. Never less. Never more.

Never since first said never unsaid never worse said never not gnawing to

be gone.

Say child gone [ . . . ] (p. 42; p. 1 1 3).158

'Say child gone' : Beckett attempts to approach the question at an angle. The unworsenable void cannot disappear, but if, for example, one makes a shade disappear, since one is dealing with a shade-infested void, perhaps a greater void will ensue. This growth would deliver the void over to the process

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o r language. It is this experiment that the continuation of the text describes:

Say child gone. As good as gone. From the void. From the stare. Void then

not that much more? Say old man gone. Old woman gone. As good as gone.

Void then not that much more again? No. Void most when almost. Worst

when almost. Less then? All shades as good as gone. If then not that much

more than that much less then? Less worse then? Enough. A pox on void.

Unmoreable unlessable unworseable evermost almost void (pp. 42-43; p.

113).159

The experiment, as one can see, fails. The void qua pure nomination remains radically unworsenable and thus unsayable.

I ) Appea ri n g a n d D i sa p pea ri n g . M ovem e nt

Together with the supposed movements of appearance and disappearance, the argument tied to the void summons all of the Platonic supreme ideas. We have being, which is the void and the dim; the same, which is the one-woman; the other, which is the old man/child-two. The question is that of knowing what becomes of movement and rest, the last two categories in the five primordial genera of The Sophist.

The question of movement and rest presents itself in the form of two interrogations: What can disappear? And: What can change?

There is an absolutely essential thesis, which says that absolute disappearance is the disappearance of the dim. If one asks: What can disappear absolutely? The response is: The dim. For example:

On back to unsay void can go [disparition du vide]. [As I've already said,

the disappearance of the void is subordinated to the disappearance of the

dim.-AB] Void cannot go. Save dim go. Then all go. All not already gone.

Till dim back. Then all back. All not still gone. The one can go. The twain

can go. Dim can go. Void cannot go. Save dim go. Then all go (p. 1 8; p.

97). 160

There always remains the possible hypothesis of an abso l u te disappearance that would present itself as the disappearance of exposit ion

itself, and therefore as the disappearance of the dim. But one must not forget

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that this hypothesis is beyond saying, that the imperative of saying has nothing to do with the possibility of the disappearance of the dim. Hence the disappearance of the dim, like its reappearance, is an abstract hypothesis that can be fOImulated but which does not give rise to any experience whatsoever. There is a horizon of absolute disappearance, thinkable in the statement ' dim can go'. Nevertheless, this statement remains indifferent to the entire protocol of the text.

The problem will therefore centre upon the appearance and disappearance of shades. This is a problem of an altogether different order which is associated to the question ofthought. On the contrary, the hypothesi� of the disappearance of the dim is beyond saying and beyond thought. More generally, this new problem is to do with the movement of shades.

The investigation ofthis point is very complex, and I will limit myself here to presenting my conclusions alone.

First, the one is not capable of movement. The figure ofthe old woman which is the mark of the One, will certainly be termed 'stooped' and the� 'kneeling', all of which seems to express change. But the crucial proviso is that we are dealing here only with prescriptions of saying, rules of the worst, and never with a movement proper. It is not true that the one stoops or kneels. The text always states that one [on] will say kneeling, sunk, etc. All this is �re�cribed by the logic of lessening within worsening, but does not thereby mdIcate a capacity of the one [I 'un] to any sort of movement.

The first thesis is therefore Parmenidean: what is counted as one insofar . . ' as It IS only counted as one, remains indifferent to movement.

. Sec?nd statement: thought (the head, the skull) is incapable of dISappearIng. There are a number of texts concerning this point. Here is one:

The head. Ask not if it can go. Say no. Unasking no. It cannot go. Save

dim go. Then all go. Oh dim go. Go for good. All for good. Good and all (p. 1 9; p. 98). 161

This 'Oh dim go' remains without effect. As we've seen, you can always say 'Oh dim go' , the dim does not care in the least.

What is important for us then is that the head is incapable of disappearing, save of course the dim go, but then all go.

Consequently, we must note that the head has the same status as the void when it comes to the question of disappearance. This is exactly Parmenides' maxim: ' It is the same to think and to be' . Parmenides designates

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I I Il" essential ontological pairing of thought and being. And concerning the

q l lestion of disappearance - which is the very test or ordeal of being -

I I ', II"stward H 0 declares that the skull and the void are under the same sign.

This means that ultimately only the other, or the two, supports

I l lovement: this is the third thesis. This is a classical thesis, a Greek thesis. There is no movement but of

Ihe pair, i .e. of the old man and the child. It is they who walk, who plod on.

This is the idea that movement qua alteration is consubstantially linked to

I he 'other' . But what is significant here is that this movement is in a certain

,�ense immobile. When speaking of the old man and the child - this is a

veritable leitmotiv - the text will constantly say:

Plod on and never recede (p. 13 ; p. 93).162

There is movement, but there is an internal immobility to this movement.

They plod on and never recede. What does this mean? Of course, this means

that there is movement (they plod on), but that there is only one situation of

heing, that there is only one ontological situation. One will also say: there is

but one place. This is what is declared very early on by the maxim:

No place but the one (p. 1 1 ; p. 92).163

There is but one place, or one universe; there is only one figure of

being, not two. For the pair effectively to recede, for it to recede in going,

there would have to be an other place, the pair would have to be able to pass

into another place. But there is no other place: 'No place but the one' . In

other words, there is no duality in being. Being is One in its localisation. This

is why movement must always be recognised, but, at the same time, must be

grasped as relative because it does not allow us to leave the unity of the

place. This is what is confirmed by the pair.

, m ) Love

This immobile migration, which is that of the two, is deeply markcd hy

Beckett's conception of love. Here, it is the old man and the child, but i t

matters little. For what we have is the maxim of the two, and, in that prodigiolls

text on love that is Enough, Beckett presents us with the two oflove as a sort

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of migration, which is at the same time a migration unto oneself. Such is the essence of love. The migration does not make one pass from one place to another. Instead, it is a delocalisation internal to the place, and this immanent delocalisation finds its paradigm in the two of love. This explains why the passages on the old man and the child are marked by a muted emotion, which is very particular to Worstward Ho: the immobile migration designates what could be called the spatiality of love.

Here is one ofthese texts, in which a powerful and abstract tenderness - echoing Enough - can be heard:

Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free hands -no. Free empty

hands. Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand

raised to reach the holding hand. Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be

held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and

never recede. Backs turned. Both bowed. Joined by held holding hands.

Plod on as one. One shade. Another shade (p. 13 ; p.93).I64

n ) A p pea ri n g a n d D isa p pea r i n g . C h a n g e . The S ku l l

A hypothesis accessible to the skull would be that the shades - between a disappearance and a reappearance - have been modified. This hypothesis is evo

.ked and worked through, but it is expressly presented as a hypothesis of

saymg:

They fade [disparaissent] . Now the one. Now the twain. Now both. Fade

back [reapparaissent] . Now the one. Now the twain. Now both. Fade?

No. Sudden go. Sudden back. Now the one. Now the twain. Now both.

Unchanged? Sudden back unchanged? Yes. Say yes. Each time unchanged.

Somehow unchanged. Till no. Till say no. Sudden back changed. Somehow

changed. Each time somehow changed (p. 14; p. 94).165

That there can be real changes, that is, changes caught between appearance and disappearance, is not a hypothesis liable to affect the being of a shade; rather, it is a hypothesis that the prescription of saying might formulate. It is somewhat like above with ' Oh dim go' , or when one says 'kneeling' , 'stooped', etc. It is necessary to distinguish what is an attribute of the shade

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i !selffrom the hypothetical variation it can be submitted to by the prescription , I

o f saying. In the end, with regard to shades of type one (the woman) and type two

( the old man and the child), only the immobile migration of the pair bears

witness to a movement. Thus we are finally led to the question of the changes ofthe type three

shade, the skull, the skull from which words ooze, the skull from which the

prescription of saying oozes. At this juncture, there clearly intervenes the

halting point of which we spoke above: the structure of the cogito. Every

modification, disappearance, reappearance or alteration of the skull is blocked

by the fact that the skull must be represented as that which seizes itself in the

dim. Therefore we cannot presume that everything has disappeared in the

skull. The hypothesis of radical doubt, which would affect the shades with a total disappearance - subject to the prescription to be made by the skull --cannot be maintained, for the same reasons that force Cartesian radical doubt to impose limits upon itself. Here is the passage in question:

In the skull all gone [disparu]. All? No. All cannot go. Till dim go. Say

then but the two gone. In the skull one and two gone. From the void. From

the stare. In the skull all save the skull gone. The stare. Alone in the dim

void. Alone to be seen. Dimly seen. In the skull the skull alone to be seen.

The staring eyes. Dimly seen. By the staring eyes (pp. 25-26; p. 102).166

The hypothesis of the disappearance of the shades, based on the fact that they would have gone from the skull - and thus that they would no longer be of the order of seeing or of ill seeing - does not entail the disappearance of the all, the 'all go '; in particular, it does not entail the disappearance of all the shades, because the skull, which itself is a shade, cannot itself disappear or 'go' .

The Cartesian matrix is necessarily stated as follows: 'In the skull all save the skull gone'. I think, therefore I am a shade in the dim. The skull is

the shade-subject, and cannot disappear; it cannot 'go ' .

0 ) Of t h e S u bject as S ku l l . W i l l , Pa i n , J oy

The subject as skull is fundamentally reducible to saying and seeing;

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the skull brings together staring eyes and a brain. But there are, as in Descartes, other affections. In particular, there are the will, pain and joy, all of whose places are assigned in the text. Each of these affections will be studied in accordance with the method of worsening, that is, in their essential 'unlessenable least' .

What is the essential unlessenable least of the will? It is the will given in its ultimate form, which is to will the non-will, or to will that there shall be no more willing, that is, to will itself as non-will. In Beckett's own words this is the ' longing that vain longing go' :

Longing the so-said mind long lost to longing. The so-missaid. So far so­

missaid. Dint of long longing lost to longing. Long vain longing. And

longing still. Faintly longing still. Faintly vainly longing still. For fainter

still. For faintest. Faintly vainly longing for the least of longing.

Unlessenable least of longing. Unstillable vain least of longing still.

Longing that all go [que tout disparaisse] . Dim go. Void go. Longing go.

Vain longing that vain longing go (p. 36; p. 1 09).167

Many comments could be made regarding the correlations between this passage and the canonical doctrines of will. We could say that willing is shaped by the imperative of saying and that the 'all go' - the will that the 'vain longing that vain longing go' itself go or disappear - is the irreducible trace of will, or that the will, as the imperative of saying, cannot but go on.

Pain is ofthe body (whilst joy comes from words). In the body, pain is what provokes movement, and this is what makes it the first witness of the remains of mind. Pain is the bodily proof that there are remains of mind, inasmuch as it is what arouses the shades to movement:

It stands. What? Yes. Say it stands. Had to up in the end and stand. Say

bones. No bones but say bones. Say ground. No ground but say ground.

So as to say pain. No mind and pain? Say yes that the bones may pain till

no choice but stand. Somehow up and stand. Or better worse remains. Say

remains of mind where none to permit of pain. Pain of bones till no choice

but up and stand. Somehow up. Somehow stand. Remains of mind where

none for the sake of pain. Here of bones. Other examples if needs must. Of

pain. Relief from. Change of (p. 9; p. 90).168

Joy, in the end, is on the side of words. To rejoice is to rejoice that there

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are so few words to say what there is to say. Joy is always the joy of the poverty of words. The mark of the state of joy or of rejoicing - of what rejoices - is that there are exceedingly few words to say it. Upon reflection, this is entirely true. Extreme joy is precisely what possesses few or no words to speak itself. Whence the fact that in the figure of the declaration of love there is nothing to say but ' I love you' - an extremely meagre statement, because it finds itself in the element of joy.

I am thinking, in Richard Strauss 's Elektra, of the scene of the recognition of Orestes by Elektra, in which Elektra sings a very violent 'Orestes! ' and the music is suddenly paralysed. Here we encounter a musical passage injortissimo, but one that is absolutely formless and rather lengthy. I have always liked that quite a lot. It is as if an unspeakable and extreme joy were musically presented in the self-paralysis of the music, as if its internal melodic configuration (which later on will present itself, over and over again, in saccharine waltzes) were stricken by powerlessness: here is a moment of 'rejoicing', understood as an impoverished disposition of naming.

Beckett says this very clearly. It is evidently linked to the fact that there are poor remains of mind, and poor words for these poor remains:

Remains of mind then still. Enough still. Somewhose somewhere somehow

enough still. No mind and words? Even such words. So enough still. Just

enough still to joy. Joy! Just enough still to joy that only they. Only!

(p. 29; p. 104)169

So much for the subjective faculties other than seeing and saying, and above all the three main ones (will, pain, joy). All things considered, what we have here is a classical doctrine of the passions.

p ) How c a n a Su bj ect be T h o u g h t?

Given what we have just said, if we wish to proceed in the study of the subject, we must do so subtractively. Fundamentally, Beckett's method is like Husserl's epoche turned upside down. Husserl's epoche consists in subtracting the thesis of the world, in subtracting the 'there is' in order to then turn towards the movement or the pure flux of that interiority which i s directed at this 'there is' . Husserl's lineage originates in Cartesian doubt. The thetic character of the universe of the intentional operations o r

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consciousness is retracted in order to try to apprehend the conscious structure that governs these operations, independently of any thesis concerning the world.

Beckett's method is precisely the opposite: it is a question of sUbtracting or suspending the subject so as to see what then happens to being. The hypothesis of a seeing without words will be forwarded. A hypothesis of ,,:ords without seeing will also be made, together with a hypothesis of a dIsappearance of words. And it will be noted that there is then a better seen [du mieux vu] . Here is one of the protocols ofthis experiment:

Blanks for when words gone. When nohow on. Then all seen as only then.

Undimmed. All undimmed that words dim. All so seen unsaid. No ooze

then. No trace on soft when from it ooze again. In it ooze again. Ooze

alone for seen as seen with ooze. Dimmed. No ooze for seen undimmed.

For when nohow on. No ooze for when ooze gone (p. 40; p. 1 12).170

Here it would be necessary to explain the text in greater detail. We are dealin� with a protocol of seeing that remains undimmed when the hypothesis of a dIsappearance of words is made, the hypothesis of the real end of the imperative of saying. Like Husserl 's epoche, this is a pure abstract hypothesis, as well as an untenable hypothesis, one that is actually impracticable. In this hypothesis, some light is shed on being. The inverse experiment can also be ca�ied out: subtracting sight and then asking oneself what is the destiny of an III saying that is disconnected from seeing, from ill seeing.

. 1 shall not develop these experiments any further. Ultimately, if we recapItulate our argument about the question of disappearance we can obtain three propositions.

First of all, the void is unworsenable once it is caught in the exposition of

.the dim. This means that there is no experience of being, only a name of

bem�. A name commands a saying, but an experience is an ill saying and not a saymg proper.

S�con�ly, the skull or subject cannot really be subtracted from seeing and �aymg; It can only be subtracted in formal experiments [experiences], in partIcular because for itself it is always 'not gone' .

Finally, the shades - i.e. the same and the other - are worsenable (from the point of view of the skull) and are therefore objects of experience of . . . '

artIstIc exposItion.

Here is what is exposed, said and outlined in the text, together with a

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host of other things. In Worstward Ho, there is an entire doctrine of time, of

:;pace, of variations . . . we could go on forever.

At least until page 45 ( 1 1 5). Because from this point onwards, something

dse happens, whose complexity is such that long analyses would still be

required in order to get to the bottom of it. Let me simply indicate the essential

points.

q ) The Eve nt

Until page 45, we remain within the parameters of the minimal set-up

that links being, existence and thought. It is at this point that we witness the

production of an event in the strict sense - a discontinuity, an event prepared

by what Beckett calls a last state. The last state is grosso modo what we have

just described: it is the last state as the last state of the state, the last state of

the saying of the state of things. This state is seized by the impossibility of

annihilation - 'save dim go' , which remains a hypothesis beyond saying.17l

The event- of whose trajectory we shall have to say more -will arrange,

or expose, an imperative of saying reduced (,leastened') to the statement of

its own cessation. The conditions will be modified in and by the event in

such a way that the content of the 'on' will be strictly limited to the 'nohow

on' . What will remain to be said will simply be that there is nothing more to

be said. And thus we shall have a saying that has reached an absolutely

maximal degree of purification .

Everything begins with the recapitulation of the last state:

Same stoop for all. Same vasts apart. Such last state. Latest state. Till

somehow less in vain. Worse in vain. All gnawing to be naught. Never to

be naught (p. 46; p. 1 1 5) .172

The last or latest state seals the process of worsening as interminable.

Its maxim is: 'Worse in vain' . But, once the recapitulation is complete thcre

brusquely occurs - in a moment introduced by 'sudden' - a sort of distancing

of this state to a limit position, which is like its absolute retreat into the interior

of language. As if everything that had been said, by being able to be said in

its last state, suddenly found itself at an infinitesimal distance frol11 the

imperative of language.

It must be noted that this movement is absolutely parallel to the irruptioll

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analogy is a conscious one - we shall see why. In this moment when there is

nothing more to say but 'behold the state ofthings, the things of being' (which

Mallarme says in the form: 'Nothing has taken place but the place') - when

one thinks that the text will stop there, that this maxim represents the last

word on what the imperative of saying is capable of- it is as though a kind of

addition took place. This addition is sudden, abrupt, in rupture, and takes

place on a scene situated at a remove from the one at hand, a scene in which

a metamorphosis of exposition is presented - a sidereal metamorphosis, or a

'siderealisation' [sideration]. It is not a question of the disappearance of the

dim, but of a retreat of being to its very limit. Just as in Mallarme the question

of the dice-throw results in the appearance of the Great Bear, likewise what

was counted in the dim will here be fixed in pinholes - a closely related

metaphor. Here is the passage introduced by the clause of rupture, 'Enough' :

Enough. Sudden enough. Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. All

least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of

boundless void. Whence no farther. Best worse no farther. Nohow less.

Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on. Said nohow on (pp. 46-47; p. 1 1 6).173

I would simply like to insist upon a few points.

The intratextual, evental character of this limit-disposition is marked

by the fact that the ' sudden' is devoid of movement: ' Sudden all far. No

move and sudden all far' . Therefore it is not a change, but a separation; it is

another scene, doubling the scene that was primordially established.

Secondly - making me think that the Mallarmean configuration is

conscious - there is the passage: 'Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void' .

This sounds very close to 'on high perhaps, as far as place can fuse with the

beyond . . . a constellation. '174 I am absolutely convinced that Beckett's three

pins and Mallarme's seven stars are the same thing.

For thought, they are in fact the same thing: at the moment in which

there is nothing more to say but the stable figure of being, there emerges, in

a suddenness that amounts to a grace without concept, an overall configuration

in which one will be able to say 'nohow on'. Not an 'on' ordained or prescribed

to the shades, but simply 'nohow on' - the 'on' of saying reduced, or leastened,

to the purity of its possible cessation.

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heing, an exercise in worsening. It is an event, creating an afar. It is an

i ncalculable distancing. From the point of view ofthe poetics ofthe text, we

would need to demonstrate that this evental configuration - this ' sudden' - is

acsthetically or poetically prepared by a specific figure. In Mallarme, the

Constellation is prepared by the figure of the master, drowning himself on

the surface of the sea. In Beckett, this figural preparation, which deserves to

be admired, consists in the altogether unpredictable metamorphosis of the

one-woman into the gravestone, in a passage whose imagery of discontinuity

should alert us. Immediately prior to this passage, a page before the event at

the limits, we find the following:

Nothing and yet a woman. Old and yet old. On unseen knees. Stooped as

loving memory some old gravestones stoop. In that old graveyard. Names

gone and when to when. Stoop mute over the graves of none (p. 45; p. 1 1 5).175

This passage is absolutely singular and paradoxical in relation to what

we have argued hitherto. First of all, because it makes a metaphor emerge

with regard to the shades. The one-woman, the stoop of the one-woman,

literally becomes a gravestone. And on the stoop of this gravestone, the subject

is now given only in the erasure of its name, in the crossing out of its name

and date of existence.

It could be said that it is on the background of these ' graves of none' ,

on this new stoop, that the 'enough' indicates the possibility of the event. The

stoop opens onto the sudden, the anonymous tomb opens onto the astral pin.

In Coup de des, it is because the element of the place has managed to

metamorphose into something other than itselfthat the evental rupture ofthe

constellation is possible.

In Worstward Ho, we have a grave; the old woman herself has become

a grave, a one-grave. Likewise, in Mallarme's poem we have the foam

becoming vessel and, in so doing, call1ing forth the vessel's captain, etc. We

have a transmigration of the identity of the shade into the figure ofthe gravc,

and when you have the grave, you also have the migration of the place: what

was dim, void, or unnameable place, becomes a graveyard. I call this a figural

preparation.

In effect, we can say that every event admits of a figural preparation,

that it always possesses a pre-eventalfigure. In our text, the figure is given

from the moment that the shades become the symbol of being of an ex istel1cc.

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What is the symbol of being of an existence, if not the gravestone, on which we find the name, as well as the dates of birth and death, effaced? This is the moment when existence is ready to present itself as symbol of being and when being receives its third name: neither void nor dim, but graveyard.

The grave presents the moment when, by a mutation internal to saying, existence attains a symbolism of being, such that the nature of what one will be able to pronounce with regard to being changes drastically. An altered ontological scene doubles the last state, which proves to be not the last, but only the latest. There is a state supernumerary to the last state - precisely the one that constitutes itself all of a sudden. Having been figurally prepared, an event is what happens so that the latest state of being will not be the last.

And what will remain in the end? Well, a saying on a background [fond]

of nothing or of night: the saying of the 'on', of the 'nohow on', the imperative of saying as such. Ultimately, this saying is the terminus of a sort of astral language, floating above its own ruin and on the basis of which all can begin again, all can and must recommence. This ineluctable recommencement can be called the unnameable of saying, its ' on' .176 And the good - that is, the proper mode of the good within saying - is to sustain the 'on'. That is all. To sustain it without naming it. To sustain the ' on' and to sustain it at the extreme, incandescent point at which its sole apparent content is: 'nohow on' .

But in order for this to be, an event must go beyond the last state of being. Then and only then can I and must I continue. Unless, in order to recreate the conditions for obeying this imperative, one must fall asleep a little; the time necessary to conjoin, in a simulacrum of the void, the dim half-light of being and the intoxication of the event. Perhaps the entire difference between Beckett and Mallarme lies here. The first forbids sleep, like he forbids death. One must remain awake. For the second, after the work of poetry one can also return to the shade - through the suspension of the question, through the saving interruption. This is because Mallarme, having posited, once and for all, that a Book is possible, can rest content with 'tries in view of better' [d 'essais en vue du mieux], and sleep between attempts. In this regard, I approve of his being a French faun, rather than an Irish insomniac. 177

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W hat Hap p e n s178

Yes, of course, there is in Beckett what does not happen, what insists on not happening - like Godot, like Molloy in search of hi

.s mother. A�d

there is also repetition, like in the discouragement that afflIcts the bodIes busy looking for their lost one in the cylinder of the world. . • .

But why not begin instead with what happens, with thIS fIgure 0 1

suddenness that seizes the prose, disrupting both its rhythm and its image? Why not begin with the link between the impatience of the 'Eno�gh! ' and

, the

caesura of the ' sudden', of which Rimbaud was the foundmg poet ? A

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suddenness that also summons the distant, that constitutes the dis­appropriation of our enslavement to the monotony of the near. Let us listen to the almost stellar ending of Worstward Ho:

Enough. Sudden enough. Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. All

least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of

boundless void (WH, p. 46; NO, p. 1 1 6).1 79

Alternatively, we could begin with the naming of what happens. After all, for Beckett, to find the name of what does not happen is a matter of comedy - like in the amusing facility of the proper name ' Godot', this occasional God of the theatre. On the contrary, to find the name of what happens demands an invention within language, a poetic forcing. Like when - in III Seen III Said- a sound comes to unsettle the inspection of proximity and awaken the mind. Beckett's question is: How can this sound be said? In other words: How can the sound be said as the event is waning? This is his answer:

Forthwith the uncommon common noun collapsion. Reinforced a little

later if not enfeebled by the infrequent slumberers. A slumberous collapsion

(ISIS, p. 55 ; NO, p. 83).1 80

And having matched - in order to name what happens - the uncommon to the infrequent, we are accorded the gift, as the paragraph concludes, of a 'gleam of hope. By the grace of these modest beginnings' (ISIS, p. 55; NO, p. 83).181

Where then are these 'modest beginnings'? In the prose, in the beauty of the prose, through which courage is incessantly renewed. For if the paradoxical exactitude of an ill said in prose comes to correspond to the ill seen of experience, then the awakening of mind under the injunction of 'what happens' gives us, at least, the courage to continue.

Of course, the function of words is that of bringing about the failure of things, because things themselves are failures of being. The ground of everything is but void and dim. The aim of the prose is to hold the worstward ho, to ill say the ill seen, to fail in words the failure of experience. It must:

Say that best worst. With leastening words say least best worse. For want

of worser worst. Unlessenable least best worst (WH, p. 32; NO, p. 1 06).182

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But the whole problem is that this failure of prose is by no means given. I t is an effort and an ascesis, because words themselves ring clear. As Beckett says: 'How almost true they sometimes almost ring! How wanting in inanity! Say the night is young alas and take heart' (WH, pp. 20-21 ; NO, p. 99).183 Artistic or poetic effort is a work upon language whose aim is to bring language under the rule of the worst. But this barren effort draws its energy from a lortunate disposition oflanguage, a sort of aura of correspondence that haunts language, and which is where - in a figure of torsion - the writer looks for the courage to break with correspondence itself. '

This is why we must begin with beauty. What is beauty? It is the trace - within the ascetic effort to submit saying to the 'unlessenable least best worst' - of the paradoxical courage that feeds this effort, and which is nourished by the 'ringing clear' of words, by their lack of ' inanity' , and by their fallacious virtue of correspondence. Beauty surges forth when we understand that the path of words goes counter to the demand of thought. This is because words bear the courage of the mUltiple and the true, whilst thought obstinately seeks to approach the void. Beauty takes place when the poetic naming of events seizes thought at the edge of the void.

By surprise, beauty superimposes the path of words onto the counter­path of thought. In other words, it superimposes the multiple onto the void. This is why in Beckett we find three regimes of prose, three configurations of beauty.

The first comes forth when words settle upon the inertia of being, upon the still surface of what there is, respecting the countours of thought whilst modifying its colour, like a golden dust spread upon the gray rock of the planet. Let us listen to Lessness:

Earth sky as one all sides endlessness little body only upright. One step

more one alone all alone in the sand no hold he will make it. Ash grey little

body only upright heart beating face to endlessness. Light refuge sheer

white blank planes all gone from mind. All sides endlessness earth sky as

one no sound no stir (eSp, p. 1 56; GSP, p. 201).184

But we also find it - this prose brought to it greatest calm - when what. remains of humanity walks the world without pain, benefiting from a grace compatible with the surest of maladies. Such is the case with the two loyers

in Enough, as she who renders their chronicle declares :

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I don't know what the weather is now. But in my life it was eternally mild.

As if the earth had come to rest in spring (CSP, p. 143; GSP, p. 1 9 1).185

Yes, we can certainly call this regime of prose that of mildness [douceur] . Because within it everything happens, for a time, as ifthe path of words doubled, almost silently, the counter-path ofthought - the one matched by the other in a sort of immobile movement.

At the other extreme, we find what I will call Beckett's sarcastic prose. Built almost entirely on rhythm, it gratingly utters - a little as with some of Mahler's allegros, with a touch ofthe lop-sided and incongruous - that words are an inadequate vehicle, that ill saying is always already too much of a well saying, and that the counter-path of thought can only be rediscovered by throttling words, SUbjecting them to a syntactical ordeal that forces them to ill ring. Here is an altogether typical example of this regime (in From an

Abandoned Work):

Ah my father and mother, to think they are probably in paradise, they were

so good. Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there,

and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off

their bliss. Yes, I believe all their blather about the life to come, it cheers

me up, and unhappiness like mine, there's no annihilating that

(CSP, p. 1 33 ; GSP, p. 1 59). 186

We should understand that the prosodic regime of mildness seeks the slowness of a coincidence, whilst the sarcastic regime attempts to establish a perpetual lag [dlxalage] , and is therefore in need of an acceleration of saying, of an energy that must be ceaselessly nourished. Words always bum when they are forced to counter thought. But Beckett, in his own sovereign way, knows that there is the slow combustion that takes place in the mild and nocturnal embers of prose, on the one hand, and there is the dry fire of incinerating sarcasm, on the other.

Finally, where can we find the entanglement of these two regimes; the melding, in the long run, of these contrasting fires? It is in Beckett's most ambitious prose, which holds together the two primordial regimes, oscillating as it does between the emaciated primacy of the void and the proliferation of terms, between mildness (be it the mildness of tears) and violence (be it the violence of laughter). This is a prose thoroughly recast in order to follow a

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I I l 1possibility of silence. This prose unbinds syntax and pun�tuation, not iiil hecause of a preoccupation with formal novelty, but because m the verbal I' l ' arks that are thereby opened one can follow, almost at every instant, both the

:;lIbtractive counter-path of thought - which leads to the imminence of the

I lothing _ and the radiating path of words - which leads to the captu�e. of

what happens, as well as to a singular form of happiness. Such is the am�1t10n

of Beckett's worst understood prose, that of How It Is. Allow me a smgle

quote, where a long affirmative cadence, which recalls Bossuet, culminates • 111 sarcasm:

from the next mortal to the next leading nowhere and saving correction no

other goal than the next mortal cleave to him give him a name train up

blooody him all over with Roman capitals gorge on his fables unite for life

in stoic love to the last shrimp and a little longer (HIl, p. 69; HIl US p.

62)187

Let us call this third regime of prose and beauty the regime of

metamorphoses. Behold Beckett: the confident poet of mildness, the rhythmic master of

sarcasm the constructor of metamorphoses. , .

It will always be a question of making sense of the magmficent formula

from The Unnamable: ' I alone am man and all the rest divine' (T, p. 302; TN,

p. 300). To relegate the divine and its curse to the periphery of saying, �n� to

declare man naked, without either hope or hopelessness, relentless, survlvmg,

and consigned to the excessive language of his desire. . But also to let each and every one know that it is necessary to be faithful

_ which is not so easy - to Vladimir 's sentence in Waitingfor Godot: 'But at

this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or

not' (CDW, p. 74; WG, p. 5 1).

1 1 7

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Badiou , Bec kett and Conte m porary C ri t i c i s m

And rew G i bson

Alain Badiou's work on Beckett radically takes issue with what he takes to be a distinct and coherent tradition running through Beckett criticism. Badiou argues that the tradition has too often made of Beckett an absurdist or existentialist, a nihilist or tragic pessimist. In doing so, it has effectively always contemplated Beckett as its own opposite, as the negative to the unrelenting positivity of its own discourse. For it has invariably adopted the point o f

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Alai n Bad iou On Beckett r------------_ view of the proprietor, for whom possessions are 'the only proof of being and sense'. In its very admiration of Beckett, the tradition has declared its distance from him. That distance is also the measure of its own worldliness. Badiou is opposed to the view that Beckett moved towards 'a nihilistic destitution , towards a radical opacity of significations ' . The criticism that produces this insistence can understand Beckett only as inverting what it takes to be its own fullness. For Badiou, however, from a philosophical perspective, that fullness - of being and meaning - is no more self-evident than is the supposed 'poverty' of Beckett's art. From the philosopher's point of view, what primarily commands attention, in Beckett's work, is not a condition of existential deprivation. It is the evidence of labour, unremitting effort and, above all, thought: 'Beckett speaks to us', Badiou writes, with existentialist criticism in mind, of something 'far more thought out than this two-bit, dinner-party vision of despair' [ 'beaucoup plus pense que ce desespoir de salon'] .

Strictly speaking, however, from an Anglo-American perspective the critical tradition with which Badiou takes issue is one that now looks r;ther dated. It has been superseded by the theoretical tum in Beckett studies: the various theoretically informed, sophisticated and sometimes brilliant studies of Beckett that have been appearing since the late eighties. Much of that criticism has also taken issue with the tradition described by Badiou. Thomas Trezise, for example, has called what he refers to as 'the pervasive association of.Be

.ckett's work with the ideology of existential humanism' into question,

prIncIpally because it 'derives from a phenomenological understanding of the

.h.um�n subject'� which Trezise is concerned to interrogate (Trezise, p. 5).

WrItmg III 1 996, RIchard Begam suggests that readings of Beckett as either 'a �i��tic nihilist' or an 'existential humanist' are being fast outstripped by a CrItlcIsm that reads Beckett 'through the discourse of poststructuralism' and drastically reconstitutes our understanding of his treatment of ' such fundamental issues as the subject-object dialectic, the metaphysics of presence, and the correspondence theory oftruth' (Begam, p. 8). Badiou's writings on Beckett do not refer to this criticism, and he appears to be unaware of it.

What I want to do here, then, is to position Badiou 's account of Beckett not in relation to those commentaries he in some small measure addresses' but in relation to a critical tradition with which he might appear more strikingl; �o compete

. for a contemporary terrain. This seems all the more appropriate �n t�at BadlOu has taken issue with many of the thinkers who have chiefly

IllspIred the tradition in question (Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard). He has called, for instance, for a reconfiguration of post-

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war French thought which would place him on one side, perhaps surprisingly, i l l the company of Sartre and Lacan (a Sartre and Lacan one must imagine read in Badiou's own distinctive terms), and, on the other side, contemporary I l cideggerians, Bergsonians and those heirs to the linguistic tum that, in his Manifesto for Philosophy, he calls 'the sophists' . I shall proceed by identifying what I take to be five principal concerns in the dominant discourses in Beckett eriticism over the past fifteen years. I call these concerns: the logic of reversal; the general economy; repetition; the instability of the name; the dissolution of the subject. These five themes are by no means clearly and consistently distinct from one another: they play against each other, and sometimes overlap. Nor are they necessarily discoverable in all the positions to which I shall refer: indeed, I will simplify matters by associating each theme with one Beckett critic in particular, scattering references to others here and there. In one form or another, however, the themes recur. I would maintain that, taken together, they represent a kind of disposition within Beckett criticism at the current time, a set of parameters within which it has been operating. By and large - and one would have to except here, for instance, Leslie Hill's emphasis on the ' emotional fervour' and 'intellectual disarray ' to be found in Beckett's work (Hill, p. x) - the tendency of the disposition in question has been to rethink the Beckettian proj ect as determined less by mood (the angst or despair of the existentialist, for example) than by what I would term the diagnostic attitude. I shall counterpose the five themes to five emphases that I take to be central to Badiou's account of Beckett. There can be no question of systematically opposing Badiou's Beckett at every point to what we might call the postmodern or poststructuralist Beckett. There are clearly occasions on which Badiou and at least some of the new Beckett criticism have a certain ground in common. Towards the end, too, I shall argue that, whilst Badiou's own terms of reference constitute a significant contribution to Beckett studies, they are not themselves immune to question and - more importantly - neither is the overall philosophical structure in which he locates them. To some extent, Badiou's terms may seem to ask for a rather different set of applications or distributions to those proposed by Badiou himself. I shall nonetheless claim that Badiou's work has the power to orient Beckett studies in a different direction: towards understanding Beckett's work, neither as determined by mood nor as engaged in a practice of theoretical diagnosis, but rathcr as a project of thought, one whose implications are ultimately ethical.

According to the concept of a logic of reversal, in Beckett's work

opposite terms are exchangeable, implode, cannot be kept apart . The

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architecture that once cemented them in place, baldly confronting one another,

has come asunder. Its joints have sprung loose. From now on, interminably

and indeterminably, there is play within the system. Beckett sees this before

others; alternatively, he sees it - and articulates it - with special penetration.

Leslie Hill in particular has meticulously traced the logic of reversal through

a range of Beckett's works. Indeed, I have borrowed the term from him. Beckett

is committed to defending the autonomy of literary texts, says Hill. His

commitment leads him to define fiction ' as an activity oflanguage in which,

paradoxically, the foundations of meaning are attacked by the uncontrollable,

self-inverting character of meaning itself' (Hill, p. 6). Beckett is concerned

with 'what could be called indifference'. that which is in-between positions

of meaning, neither positive nor negative, constantly shifting and irreducible

to subject or object' . He therefore understands a logic of circularity - the

'purgatorial cycle' (Hill, p. 1 0) - as being what constitutes a modem literary

text. There is no dialectical union of opposites in Beckett's work, but rather a

movement of constant displacement. Thus at the very heart of Murphy, for

example, there lies paradox, oxymoron and chiasmus, contradictory apposition

and rhetorical inversion, an unstoppable play of convergences and divergences.

So, too, in Molloy, binaries become 'both crucial and indeterminate, significant

yet devoid of meaning' (Hill, p. 62). The significance of that great Beckettian

figure, aporia - partiCUlarly in the Trilogy - is that it both describes and

challenges the possibility of a 'moment of passage' (Hill, p. 63), at once

articulating and suspending a structure of opposition. Theatre allows Beckett

to move even further away from dialectics (Hill, p. 1 32). Later prose texts

like The Lost Ones fall prey to 'aporetic contradiction' or 'a powerful

identificatory ambivalence' (Hill, pp. 1 55 , 1 57). Logically enough, the

switchback afflicts the difference-indifference dyad itself. Thus in Watt, Watt's

quest is for 'the impossible difference' (Hill, p. 29) that will serve as anchor,

security, foundation, but instead encounters Knott, a figure of indifference,

' engulfment and indeterminacy, apathy and invisibility' (Hill, p. 27) . At the

same time, however, indifference in Watt becomes an uncontrollable

proliferation of difference: Beckett 'dramatises the threat of engulfment by

indifference by multiplying all manner of differences, contrasts, distinctions

in his own text' (Hill, p. 34). In effect, the logic of reversal instigates a hollowing or emptying out of

value; except that, for Hill, it is not so much value as 'positions of meaning'

that are at issue. This way of putting matters seems to me to be quite

characteristic of recent Beckett criticism. Here the gap between that criticism,

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and the existentialist and humanist criticism that preceded it, looks narrower

than it may initially have appeared to be. Where Beckett's concern was

I()rmerly deemed to be an absence of sense ( 'absurdity'), recent criticism

now takes it to be the activity of sense-making, understood as differentiation.

I n either instance, the question of an already existent meaning is of cardinal

importance. By contrast, Badiou has been much concerned to turn philosophy

dccisively away from hermeneutics and towards an interest in the emergence

of truths in their radical newness. If, as we will shortly see, this interest also

involves a reduction of experience to a finite set of minimal functions, these

are established as beyond interpretation. Not surprisingly, therefore, Badiou

does not read Beckett as engaged in a more or less deconstructive kind of

work. For he experiences the weight of doxa more oppressively than most

current deconstructionists appear to, and understands Beckett as labouring

under the same oppression. In Badiou's terms, Beckett 'makes holes' in

knowledge. In contradistinction to contemporary Beckettians, Badiou stresses

historicity on the one hand and a principle of antagonism on the other. Here

the cardinal sentence appears on the first page of Tireless Desire: 'thought

only subtracts itself from the spirit of its time by means of a constant and

delicate labour' . Badiou's Beckett is not primarily engaged in an activity of

constatation, that is, in the registering and diagnosis of a general structure of

sense. With a force and decisiveness that, after all, might make him finally

seem closer to Sartre than to Derrida, he rather commits his art to opposition,

a scrupulous but fiercely corrosive assault on contemporary orthodoxies,

particularly as they are couched in language. Of course, one can hardly claim

that this assault has gone unnoticed by previous or indeed by contemporary

critics. Hill notes, for example, the 'peremptory and polemical' references to

'received opinion' in Beckett's essay 'Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce' and in

his monograph on Proust (Hill, p. 2). He asserts quite rightly that Beckett's

attitude of 'indifference' is also an 'abdication from the world's commercial

round' (Hill, p. 9). Similarly, recent critics like Richard Begam have reminded

us of and indeed done much to refine our sense ofthe extent to which Beckett's

art works to undermine established codes of representation. None the less,

the deconstructive bent of recent criticism has made it wary of attributing to

Beckett's art a rigorously negative power. Badiou, by contrast, has no such

qualms.

The key term in the sentence from Tireless Desire that I have just quotcd

is subtraction. It is subtraction, in effect, that Badiou counterposes to t l1(;

logic of reversal. Badiou asserts that, ' since Plato, philosophy is a brcak with

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opinion. For the philosopher, everything that is consensual is suspect' . In Badiou's philosophy, what he calls truths are not objects of knowledge but holes made in the orders of knowledge and representation and indiscernible to them. They appear as a subtraction from the particularity of what is currently known. With Lacan in mind, Badiou calls this process a reduction of the density of knowledge. Truths do not destroy a previous knowledge. They rather traverse and fracture it. A truth is always distinct from the realm of what Badiou calls opinion, the realm customarily occupied by the human animal going about its ordinary business and according to which this animal sustains itself in its social existence. Truths appear as subtractions from opinion. Philosophy formalises truths and places them in relation to one another. It understands that they emerge in relation to the void (which is precisely what means that they are always possible) and therefore takes its bearings from a ' subtractive' conception of being. But philosophy itself does not produce truths. By the same token, it does not exactly subtract. Truths appear in four domains; in other words, there are four spheres oflife in which subtraction can take place: the political, the romantic, the scientific and the artistic. It is clear that, for Badiou, Beckett's work constitutes a primary instance of art as an activity of subtraction. Beckett is concerned with subtraction as a patient, disciplined, vigilant elimination of doxa. In a fine phrase, Badiou even suggests that Beckett's prose is itselfthe very movement of 'negligence' ofthe mundane. It is seldom, if ever, writes Badiou, that one finds a writer of Beckett's calibre so little exposed to the world and so little compromised by his relations with it. Badiou partly shares the continuing emphasis in recent criticism on Beckett's quarrel with Descartes. He would also partly assent to Trezise's case for an anti-phenomenological Beckett. He sees Beckett as inverting the Husserlian epoche and breaking with 'Cartesian terrorism' . But the inversion and break are finally less important than a fundamental allegiance, a shared commitment to subtraction. In this respect, for Badiou, it would be crucial to register what Beckett once said about the active force of his own will to self-impoverishment (in speaking of 'my desire to make myself still poorer') . Self-impoverishment would be an austere and necessary clearing of the ground for thought, as distinct from the incorrigible, muddy complicities of daily life (for Badiou insists that we are bound to inhabit the world of opinion, we cannot do otherwise). True, the principle of methodical ascesis to which Badiou is committed has no immediate implication for subjectivity. But the structures that Beckettian self­impoverishment itself is concerned so rigorously to undermine are arguably

1 24

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But if subtraction operates as a kind of clearing of the ground, what is the thought that proceeds from or along with it? Badiou describes it as what, following Mallarme, he calls a mode of 'restricted action' (action restreinte).

This concept may be pointedly contrasted with the shift in recent Beckett criticism away from a Beckett understood in terms of a restricted economy towards a Beckett whose work refers us to the general economy. The shift is evident, above all, in Trezise's book Into the Breach, which is where these terms chiefly figure. For Trezise, the general economy - as opposed in particular to the restricted economy of phenomenology - 'produces the world . . . and exceeds it' as a ' strangeness constitutive of all familiarity' (Trezise, p. 30). Since phenomenology conceives of subjectivity as a 'separation from exteriority ', the general economy is irreducible to its terms (Trezise, pp. 6,

8). For his part, however, Beckett understands that, however originary it presents itself as being, all separation is itself conditioned. This is why he gives up on an art of 'the feasible' : he recognises that literature ' in its very secondarity belies the priority of that world that originates in the dis­appearance ofthe sign' (Trezise, p. 3 1). Beckettian art exposes the ' illusory priority of consciousness' and ' its pre-originary involvement in an economy of signification' that escapes it (Trezise, p. 32). It dramatises the immemorial dispossession of subjectivity as 'an involvement with an outside' that is always 'already within' (Trezise, p. 33). Thus Molloy reverses the reversal by virtue of which closure or separation appears to precede, found and condition ' its own genesis' (Trezise, p . 48); Malone Dies reverses the phenomenological pour-soi into the pour I ' autre of signification; and the 'non-self-coincidental voice' of the Unnamable ' thematizes literature itself as the ex-pression of a SUbjectivity beyond separation' (Trezise, p. 97). The personages in the Trilogy

are powerless because they cannot escape an ironical knowledge that, as speaking subjects, they articulate themselves only on the basis of a more fundamental intersubjectivity that they cannot articulate. In this manner,

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Beckett calls to account 'the era in which the philosophy of separation has striven to totalize the very alterity that conditions and exceeds it' (Trezise, p. 65).

The point is not exactly that Trezise's concept of alterity has no meaning for Badiou, but rather that he sees alterity as banally self-evident, and therefore as without any great importance. ' Infinite alterity,' he writes, in his Ethics,

'is quite simply what there is' . What matters crucially is not alterity or ' the infinite multiplicity of differences' , but sameness, understood as a feature not of what exists already but of what 'comes to be' . 1 87 Badiou would certainly have no interest in mounting a defence specifically of phenomenology or phenomenological readings of Beckett. Yet his own account of Beckett takes a very different direction to Trezise's. For Badiou's Beckett is not concerned with a concept of the general, but rather with the 'restricted action' of what Badiou calls 'writing the generic' . Beckett's work is therefore not read as a diagnosis of its own condition. The Beckettian project is rather a question of determination and therefore also a mode of action. It constitutes itself as a form of thought that is self-grounding or self-constituent, establishing its own internal samenesses or consistencies. (We shall note a little later that this emphasis creates certain problems for Badiou). It is worth reflecting here on what Badiou says about the poem � and, above all, the Mallarmean poem � in 'Que pense Ie poeme?': the poem or work cannot be general or refer to any generality. 1 89 In its singularity, it proffers not knowledge but thought. The work has no object or objectivity. In its self-constitution, as its own universe, it aims rather to deny or depose the object. What emerges in this denial of objectivity is pure thought or the Mallarmean 'pure notion' . Nothing confirms the universe - constituted by and as the work - as having a right to exist. In this respect, the work of art is pure affirmation (which is how Badiou can claim that 'in an almost aggressive way, all of Beckett's genius tends towards affirmation' , and yet, in doing so, mean something quite different by affirmation to what the existential humanists meant). This is generic work, in Badiou's understanding of it: Beckett reduces experience to a set of significant minima, 'to certain major functions or axiomatic terms' (Movement, Rest, the Same and the Other, the Logos); to certain questions about these functions (the place of being, the subject, 'what happens' , the existence of the pair); to certain responses to these questions (the grey-black of Being, the solipsistic torture of the subject, the event and its nomination, love). It is thus that he produces what Badiou calls his axiomatics of humanity. Like Rimbaud and Mallarme, Beckett decides a universe into existence, and

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proceeds to make it consistent on the basis of that decision. Beckett writes, says Badiou, at the very point at which the decision as to the being of the I hing in question is made. He commits himself to a treatment of that which alone constitutes an ' essential determination' (see 'The Writing of the Generic' i n this volume). This 'determination' is neither an objective essence nor established in its right to existence. It proceeds axiomatically, on the basis of a soit, mettons, disons, or supposons que.

If, as Badiou adamantly maintains, his is a philosophy of sameness rather than alterity, this does not mean that it is a philosophy of inexorable recurrence. Something like the reverse is true: Badiou is intent on sustaining a thought of the radical break - if within a set of rigorous conditions - under the rubric of the event. Here again, his thinking takes a different tack to the new Beckett criticism, particularly with regard to what has tended to be its concern with repetition. Richard Begam, for example, reads Beckett in terms of a Derridean scepticism according to which every attempt to move 'beyond' or 'outside' metaphysics, humanism, anthropologism insistently returns to 'a set of ideas . . . which themselves participate in the anthropocentrism they are meant to transcend' . For Begam's Beckett, there is no rupture that is not a repetition. But the most significant and influential study of repetition in Beckett has been Steven Connor's Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and

Text. Connor does not simply assert the power of repetition over that of newness in Beckett's work, but rather suggests that they share a complex and problematic interrelationship. Repetition does not necessarily have a stymying effect on Beckett's world. It is not an index of an essential paralysis. Nor does Connor read it as a centring or unifying force in Beckett's work. Indeed, he suggests that Beckett's practice 'instances the powerful possibilities of reproduction over the sterile compulsions of replication' (Connor, p. 20 1) . He argues that repetition brings with it 'a principle of difference' , in Beckett, that it even activates a 'perverse dynamism of difference' (Connor, p. 1 3).

This is hardly surprising, since, according to Connor, Beckett tends to dissolve the difference between repetition and difference itself. Yet it is none the less the case that Beckett's work 'shows a self-constraining movement in which sameness always inhabits or inhibits what may initially present itself as novelty' (Connor, p. 2). Connor's concept of a Beckettian ' self-constraint' actually bears a certain resemblance to what Badiou means by 'restricted action ' . But Connor's Beckett can imagine nothing beyond the ' self­constraining movement' of his art. This means that that art is everywhere intrinsically ambivalent: in Murphy, for example, 'repetition enacts a

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, . . ' ---:-:-�-=--:-:--------------" Al a i n Ba d i ou On Beckett)r---------__ " '--------------doubleness, asserting both the freedom of the language from referentia l constraints and its internal emptiness and exhaustion' (Connor, p. 23). 1 11 Krapp s Last Tape, as Krapp listens to himself, repetition opens up possibilities, in that he recognises his ' ironic non-coincidence with himself', the truth of self-difference (Connor, p. 128). On the other hand, it closes possibilities down, in that the play also demonstrates the Derridean principle of the graft, according to which 'every utterance can be taken up or enveloped by some other occasion' (Connor, p. 1 30). The effects of repetition thus also tend towards inertia, a reminder of 'the death into writing of every living word' (ibid.). As Connor describes it, the ineluctable ambivalence of repetition in Beckett thus traps him, again, in the endlessness of Hill 's 'purgatorial cycle' . There is no exterior to this purgatory. There cannot be, because the power of the relationships between repetition and difference transcends time and history. For Badiou, however, this is not the case, because there is always the possibility of an event. The event is an 'extra-being' . 'Every singular truth', writes Badiou, 'has its origin in an event. Something must happen, in order for there to be something new. Even in our personal lives, there must be an encounter, there must be something which cannot be calculated, predicted or managed, there must be a break based only on chance'. An event is a substanceless fragment of pure fortuitousness. It is also ephemeral, and therefore precisely historical. It arrives as a supplement to being, in that it both pertains to a given situation and yet is also outside and detached from the latter 's 'rules' , constraining us to decide on a new way of being which conservatism would decree to be impossible. Of course, no newness is absolutely new: the event must compose with elements of the situation as given. In this respect, Badiou does not so much oppose the very terms in which Begam and Connor construct their Becketts as alter the proportions of those terms. Nonetheless, what �ist�nguishes Badiou's account of the 'purgatorial cycle' - which he interprets, III hIS own way, as a seemingly interminable oscillation between the dim or grey-black of being and the solipsistic torture ofthe cogito - is that it ultimately presents Beckett with an impasse from which he gradually recognises that he must work his way free. Thus, from Texts for Nothing onwards, Beckett's work begins to open itself up to the event: to chance, the incident, ' sudden modifications of the given', even to the possibility of happiness and love. Beck�tt effects this, not least, to return to an earlier point, by abandoning the questIon of meaning. This is evident in later work from The Lost Ones to Enough to III Seen III Said. Worstward Ho even presents us with a kind of

1 28

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' ; l I l 1 l 1nary of Beckett's trajectory, in this respect, tracing the course of a long lahour that ends in an impasse. This impasse, however, is decisively broken prccisely by an event.

If the event is not to sink back unnoticed into the grey-black of being, I i( )wever - if it is to inaugurate what Badiou calls a truth procedure - it must hc held, stabilised in a trace. This means that it must be named. For Badiou, i l l Beckett's later work, the activity of naming becomes very important. Here, again, Badiou seems at odds with recent critics, who have repeatedly in�isted on the instability of the name or what Carla Locatelli calls 'the realIty of semantic instability' (Locatelli, p. 229), with Watt's deliberations on the word 'pot' as a kind of locus classicus or textual crux. For Locatelli, ' the rundamental dichotomy between words and things' is what powers the theoretical interrogation sustained by Beckett's art (Locatelli, p. 5 1 ) . She pits Beckett unstintingly against naIve referential fallacies and logocentric closure. In Locatelli's account, Beckett moves steadily towards a ' literature of the unword' by means of a process of 'active and lucid "unwording'" (Locatelli, p. ix). His art does not exactly repudiate the practice of naming, however. Instead, he institutes a ' suspension of designation' (Locatelli, p. 6) which, by means of paradox, contradiction, lacunae, 'pseudo-referents' (Locatelli, p. 58), 'comic slippage' , ' irresolution' (Locatelli, pp. 100-1 ) and other devices produces 'a type of verbal art that faces the problem of the visibility ofreali� by deconstructing the unity of saying' (Locatelli, p. 228). In fact, LocatellI also describes 'designative suspension' as a process of ' subtraction' . But the context for what she means by the term is not what Badiou sees as a given order of knowledge pertaining to a situation but, as in other recent studies of Beckett, the 'logocentric orientation that characterises Western thought' (pp. 225-26).

Badiou puts this familiar emphasis into reverse. For Badiou - and this makes him quite remarkably distinct from many of his philosophical and theoretical contemporaries - there is at least one domain in which language must be deemed to 'come after', to have a secondary or subordinate function. 'There exists a realm of the thinkable', he asserts, 'that is inaccessible to the so-called total jurisdiction oflanguage' . As Badiou affirms the sheer radicality of the event in its rarity, so too he also affirms its radically heterogeneous relation to the orders of language. The event is hors loi (outside the law) and a supplement to the situation at hand. As such, it is irreducible to the terms of that situation, and is thus subtracted from any and every regime of sense. It must therefore be named; in effect, it calls for a name, and this namc serves

1 29

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This way ofthinking Beckett in relation to subjectivity is quite foreign to Badiou. For one thing, it takes Beckett's 'characters' to be representative of the generalised conditions of subjectivity. But, as I observed earlier, for Badiou, like Mallann6's poems, Beckett's art cannot be general or refer to any generality. Beckett decides a world into existence, in all its singularity. The question of subjectivation needs to be approached quite differently, principally in relation to Beckett himself. Badiou's conception of the subject is very different from the one on which Katz depends. There is no universal or general subject whose deconstruction would now be imperative. Subjects are subjects of events, and specific to them. A truth - in what we saw earlier is Badiou's sense of the term - is the consequence of an event. Truths persist because of the allegiance of their subjects, who commit themselves to truths and insist upon them. The subj ect is constructed in a process of supplementation that makes the subject more and other than he or she has hitherto been; or, better still, it even ' induces' a subject. Ordinarily, the human animal comports itself in terms of Spinoza's 'perseverance in being', the pursuit of interests, self-preservation. Individual consciousness is indeed always already 'deconstructed' ; it is an indeterminate and heterogeneous flux. Identity is no more than a given state of this flux, a representation expressing a more or less habitual preference for certain features of the flux at the expense of others. The representation in question is what one customarily takes for the stable structure of a self. But this perseverance is the law of one's being only insofar as one knows oneself. The experience of the event and the 'process' of a truth do not fall under this law. Routine perseverance in being can be broken by an event, an encounter with something that refuses to correspond to what one has taken for the law of one's being and is not representable in its terms. It is thus that subjectivation begins.

A concept of fidelity is therefore crucial to Badiou's thought. The subjects of a truth remain faithful to the event that inaugurated the truth in question. Fidelity is the 'process' of continuing within a situationfrom the

point of view of the event that has come to supplement it. It is the determination to think a world according to the principle of what has come to change it, to make it new. SUbjectivation is fidelity to the interruption constituted by the event and therefore a continuing resistance to the law. Subjectivity is perseverance in what has broken one's perseverance in being. In a phrase of Lacan's that Badiou returns to repeatedly, the imperative undergone in subjectivation is 'ne pas ceder sur son desir' ('not to give up on one's desire'). The question is: how am I to continue to exceed my own being, to remain

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I rue to the shock of an event that came to me from beyond the terms of my knowledge? How am I to remain true to 'son desir', one s desire, my desire as what I do not know about myself? How do I continue to will something that I could not have willed to start with, that could only have come to me through an encounter?

In Badiou's account of him, Beckett possesses two qualities that might seem to indicate fidelity, in Badiou's sense of the term: ascesis and vigilance. The first is intrinsic to Beckett's practices of subtraction and 'restricted action' . Beckett engages in them with what is, for Badiou, a kind of principled intransigence. In other words, he refuses to give up on a desire that has overtaken him. His is a 'constant and delicate labour' undertaken without promises or guarantees, and with no certain knowledge of where it is tending . Indeed, it led Beckett precisely into crisis and impasse. But it is also at the very heart ofthe Beckettian lesson, which is a lesson in measure, exactitude and courage. As regards vigilance: attentiveness - attentiveness, that is, to the possibility of the most radical difference that is the event - is or becomes Beckett's very principle. Badiou finally contrasts a vigilant Beckett with Mallarme the Irish insomniac with the French faun. For Mallarme, says , Badiou, it is always possible to break from the poetic endeavour, to relinquish the effort, to suspend activities, to cease to pose the poet's question. Mallarme can always return to the indeterminacy from which the poetic endeavour springs and will spring again. There is no possibility of any relaxation in Beckett. His work has no place for a suspension of operations. Here, again, he is intransigent, not only in his asceticism, but in his injunction to watchfulness.

But there is an oddity, here. As I suggested earlier, Badiou's account of Beckettian fidelity does not exactly correspond to his larger account of the structure of subjectivation itself. Subjectivation begins with an event, to which the subject then declares his or her fidelity. But Beckett is not the subject of an event, for Badiou; at least, he has given no indication that he sees Beckett in this way. Rather, Beckett is faithful to an exteriority, to what lies outside the particularity of what is currently known. Initially, this commitment appears only in negative form, in the austere operations of subtraction and the singularity of 'restricted action' . After Texts for Nothing, however, it becomes a commitment to the possibility of the event. But neither commitment is precisely an instance of fidelity, since there is a sense in which Beckett has nothing to which to be faithful. Indeed, Badiou has preferred to speak of Beckett's courage, rather than his fidelity. One might propose of course that

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the very extent to which Badiou's version of Beckett departs or differs from

the terms of his own philosophy actually makes him look less open than the

new Beckett criticism to the charge of using Beckett as an exemplification of

a prior set of decisions. The very rift between Badiou's philosophical system

and his version of Beckett's art helps to preserve an aesthetic practice in its

specificity, as a procedure whose truth is sui generis, both immanent and

singular. This would be consistent with Badiou's assertion, notably in 'Art and Philosophy', from the Petit manuel d 'inesthetique, that philosophy does

not produce truths, as art does, but rather grasps, announces and displays

them; that its relation to a n artistic truth will therefore always be in some

sense secondary.190

Such arguments, however, do not wholly dispose of the problem. Badiou

has a quite unBeckettian attachment to the clarity of narrative sequence. His

accounts of the progress of a truth or the process of subjectivation and of

Beckett's career both take the form of orderly, sequential narrative. The trouble

is that the second narrative does not conform to the first. Furthermore, the

narrative of Beckett's career will hold good only if modified to the point

where it hardly looks like a plausible narrative at all. The early Beckett does

not commit himself to subtraction, for instance, without waverings and

demurrals. As I have argued elsewhere, Murphy is an ironic account of the

problematics of subtraction understood, in this instance, as a principle central

to modernism. For all Badiou's claims that, in How It Is and The Lost Ones,

we find a Beckett concerned to tum away from the agonistics of the cogito

and towards the other, both are principally later instances of a practice of

'restricted action' which offer no more obvious hope of liberation than did

the Trilogy. This is indicative: Badiou appears reluctant to countenance the

possibility that there might be a paradoxical or problematic aspect to his twin

insistence on the self-founding character of Beckettian thought on the one

hand and Beckett's desire to open his art up to the event or encounter on the

other. Is the relationship between these two principles not partly contradictory?

Is there not, in Beckett's work as a whole, a kind of sporadic, irregular

oscillation between them that cannot be reduced to logical or chronological

order? So, too, Badiou's account of the place of the event in Beckett seems

unduly confining, both in terms of period (with the exception of Watt, Beckett

after 1 960) and modality (the event happens, and is named). Is there no sense

of events in the Trilogy? If not, is that just the case because Badiou can only

understand the event in one particular, narratable dimension, as founding the

progress ofa truth? Does not Badiou's theory of the event actually also require

1 34

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a theory of a play in being, 'eventfulness' , a version or, better, an equivalent

of Heideggerian Ereignis? Might not Beckett be concerned with this play,

and thus with other kinds of event, as well as the one that interests Badiou?

Might he not be much concerned, in Texts for Nothing, for example, with

what Bennington has called 'writing the event? ' Might Badiou' s understanding

of the Beckettian event need to be supplemented from elsewhere, notably,

perhaps, from Lyotard? Beckett's treatment of the event is arguably

multifarious, heterogeneous and uneven, and cannot be encapsulated in

narrative form.

Leslie Hill has stressed the danger of taking 'a misleading teleological

approach to Beckett's literary project' (Hill, p. 12 1 ). For all his own distrust

of teleological assumptions, it seems to me that Badiou has not been altogether

successful in avoiding this trap. In fact, I would suggest that his narrative of

Beckett needs to be worked over in an awareness of the very principle of

disunity and complicating incoherence in Beckett's work to which the new

Beckett criticism has so effectively successfully alerted us. In this respect, at

least, the two critical dispositions should not be placed in polar opposition.

That said, however reworked and redistributed, Badiou's terms of reference

- subtraction, 'restricted action', the event, naming-as-missaying and fidelity

or courage - seem to me to offer an important new framework for

understanding Beckett. This framework is ethical. Recent Beckett criticism

has found in Beckett a writer concerned to elucidate or to deconstruct - to

diagnose - the generalised conditions within which meaning or truth is

produced. In Badiou's own specific sense, he and Beckett, too, are interested

in sets of conditions for truths. They are partly concerned with the conditions

ruptured by truths, or upon which truths supervene, as in the case of the

Beckettian concern with the reduction of experience to a set of major functions.

They are also much preoccupied with the formal criteria for the appearance

of truths. But the postmodern or post-structuralist Beckettian's attention to

the conditions of truth necessarily problematises truth itself. At the very least,

it shrinks truth's scope. In Badiou, by contrast, truths are added on to their

conditions, to the world. This is the case because truths are singular not general.

They are historically inexistent or 'indiscernible' before their emergence, if

universal in their trajectory in so far as they are available to all. This conviction

categorically determines Badiou's reading of Beckett. Beckett's art is founded

on a fierce resistance to doxa. It opens up a space for a different construction

of the world through an axiomatic procedure whose mode is hypothesis. Whilst

failure never ceases to haunt this project, tentatively, contradictorily, fitfully,

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and by a variety of different means, Beckett edges towards a faith in possibility. This is also a faith in transformation whose token is the transformation of language itself. To return to the Sartre with whose project Badiou partly identifies his own, one might think of Badiou's Beckett as granting at least a kind of minimal credibility to the assertion, in the Critique of Dialectical

Reason, that 'man exists only in flashes' . Such a project - a project whose ultimate bearing is surely on the legacy of a century of disaster, one of what Beckett calls 'the times of the great massacres' - could only be undertaken with the extraordinary and selfless courage that has long been attributed to Beckett. As Badiou's writings help us see, this project is, in the highest degree, an ethical one.

B i b l i o g ra p hy BEGAM, Richard, Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1996) CONNOR, Steven, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1988) HILL, Leslie, Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1990) KATZ, Daniel, Saying 'J' No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the

Prose of Samuel Beckett (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1999)

LOCATELLI, Carla, Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett 's Prose Works

After the Noble Prize (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990)

TREZISE, Thomas, Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990)

1 3 6

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L Alai n Bad i ou On Beckett

1 [ 'L'ecriture du generique: Samuel Beckett', in Conditions (Paris, Editions du Seuil:

1 992), pp. 329-366. This text was read out in 1 989, in the context of the Conferences du Perroquet (a series oflectures set up by I 'Organisation politique in Paris). It was published as a conference pamphlet and has long been out of print. It will be noted that, since this lecture was given, Samuel Beckett has died. And that Worstward Ho

has been admirably translated into French by Edith Fournier, under the title Cap au ,

pire (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991).]

2 [Mirlitonnade is a Beckettian neologism used as the title for a set of poems written for the most part between 1 976 and 1978, which Beckett himself described as 'gloomy French doggerel' (quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life o/Samuel

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1 9 [We are here following Beckett's usage for the translations of (monce and

enoneiation, following a suggestion by Anne Banfield. Badiou's discussion here echoes

Michel Foucault's distinction (itself originating with Benveuiste) between an

'enunciating subject' [sujet del 'enoneiation] and a ' subject of the statement' [sujet de

I 'enonce] . See The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1989) p. l 07.]

20 [ . . . ]je croyais par moments que ce serait la ma recompense d 'avoir si vaillamment

parte, entrer encore vivant dans Ie silence [ . . . ] (p. 1 83).

2 1 Ma pensee s 'est pensee et [ . . . ]je suis parfaitement mort [letter to Cazalis, May 14,

1 867].

22 Moi je ne pense, si c ' est la cet affolement vertigineux comme d 'un guepier qu 'on

enfume, que de passe un certain degre de terreur (p. 1 06).

23 [ . . . ] ilfaut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer (p. 2 1 3).

24 [ . . . ] un qui parle en disant, tout en parlant, Qui parle, et de quoi, et un qui entend,

muet, sans comprendre, loin de tous [ . . . ] . Et cet autre [ . . . ] qui divague ainsi, a coups

de moi a pourvoir et de lui depourvus [ . . . ] . Voila un joU trio, et dire que tout 9a ne fait

qu 'un, et que cet un ne fait que rien, et quel rien, il ne vaut rien (p. 199).

25 Fut-il jamais un temps ou plus question de questions? Mort-nees jusqu 'a la

derniere. Avant. Sitot con9ues. Avant. OU plus question de repondre. De ne Ie pouvoir.

De ne pouvoir ne pas vouloir savoir. De ne Ie pouvoir. Non. Jamais. Un reve. Voila la

reponse (p. 46).

26 [For a meta-ontological presentation of Bad iou's theory of orientations in thought, see Meditation 27 ofL 'etre et l 'evenement (Paris : Seuil, 1 988), pp. 3 1 1-3 1 5.]

27 [On the relationship between the concepts of generic and indiscernible, a crucial

feature of Badiou's philosophy, see Manifesto for Philosophy, ' Conference sur la

soustraction' in Conditions, and L 'etre et l 'evenement, Meditations 33 and 34.]

28 [ . . . ] on est ce qu ' on est, en partie tout au moins (p. 8 1).

29 Terre ingrate mais pas totalement (p. 35). [This can be translated literally as 'Ungrateful earth but not entirely. ' ]

30 [For Lacan's concept of the 'Not-All ' , originating in his mathemes of (feminine)

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Ala in Bad iou On Beckett

scxuation, see Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love

and Knowledge, 1972-1973, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Bruce Fink

( London: w.w. Norton, 1 998).]

3 1 [By adding in the French '(Monsieur Noeud, Monsieur Noue) ' - literally Mister

Knot, Mister Knotted - Badiou is alluding to the link between the concept of structure

and the theory of knots in late Lacan.]

32 [ . . . ] a la maison de Monsieur Knott rien ne pouvait etre ajoute, rien soustrait,

mais que telle elle etait alors, telle elle avait ete au commencement, et telle elle resterait

jusqu 'a la fin, sous tous les rapports essentiels, et cela parce qu 'ici a chaque instant

toute presence significative, et iei tout presence etait significative, meme si l 'on ne

pouvait dire de quoi, impliquait cette meme presence a tout instant [ . . . ] (pp. 135-

136).

33 [ . . . ] brillants de clarte formelle et au contenu impenetrable (p. 75).

34 [ . . . ] la signification attribuee a cet ordre d 'incidents par Watt, dans ses relations,

etait tantot la signification originale perdue et puis recouvree, et tan tot une signification

tout autre que la signification originale, et tantot une signification degagee, dans un

delai plus ou moins long, et avec plus ou moins de mal, de l 'originale absence de

signification (p. 80).

35 Hamm: Qu 'est-ce qui se passe? / Clov: Quelque chose suit son cours. /Un temps.

/ Hamm: Clov! / Clov (agace): Qu 'est-ce que c 'est? / Hamm: On n 'est pas en train de

. . . de . . . signifier quelque chose? / Clov: Signifier? Nous, signifier! (Rire brei) Ah

elle est bonne! (p. 49)

36 Pendant l 'inspection soudain un bruit. Faisant sans que celle-la s 'interrompe

que I 'esprit se reveille. Comme l 'expliquer? Et sans aller jusque-la comment Ie dire?

Loin en arrit'!re de I '(Ril la quete s ' engage. Pendant que I ' evenement palit. Quel qu 'il

fut. Mais voila qu ' a la rescousse soudain il se renouvelle. Du coup Ie nom commun

peu commun de croulement. Renforce peu apres sinon affaibli par I 'inusuel languide.

Un croulement languide. Deux. Loin de l 'oeil tout a sa torture toujours une lueur

d'espoir. Par la grace de ces modestes debuts (p. 70).

37 [The 'out-of-place' [horlieu], together with the 'space of placements' [esplace],

provides the conceptual matrix for Badiou's attempt to re-found dialectics as a theory

of political subjectivation in his Theorie du sujet (Paris: Seuil, 1982).]

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�8 [In the lines that follow, Badiou plays on the French title ofthe text,Le Depeupleur,

lIterally, 'The Depopulator' . ]

39 Sejour ou des corps vont cherchant chacun son depeupleur (p. 7).

40 [ . . . ] dans Ie cylindre Ie peu possible la ou it n 'est pas n 'est seulement plus et dans

Ie moindre moins Ie rien tout en tier si cette notion est maintenue (p. 28).

41 [The notion of a mi-dire is discussed by Lacan in Seminar XXIII.]

42 [ . . . ] la voix etant ainsi faite je cite que de notre vie totale eUe ne dit que les trois

quarts (p. 202)

43 [ . . . ] en tout cas on est dans lajusticeje n 'aijamais entendu dire le contraire (p. 193)

.

44 [ . . . ] la vie dans I 'amour stoique [ . . . ] (p. 97)

45 [ . . . ] se rencontrer comme moi je l 'entends, cela depasse tout ce que peut le sentiment, si puissant soil-it, et tout ce que sait Ie corps, queUe qu 'en soit la science (p. 1 59). .

46 [ . . . ] que de marivaudages, de frayeurs et de farouches attouchements, dont il

importe seulement de retenir ceci, qu 'ils firent entrevoir a Macmann ce que signijiait

l 'expression etre deux (p. 144).

47 soit en clair je cite ou bien je suis seul et plus de probleme ou bien nous sommes

en nombre infini et plus de probleme non plus (p. 1 92)

48 - Ie haut du lac, avec la barque, nage pres de la rive, puis pousse la barque au

large et laisse aller a la derive. Elle etail couchee sur les planches du fond, les mains

sous la tete et les yeux fermes. Soleil flamboyant, au brin de brise, I 'eau un peu

clapoteuse comme je I 'aime. J'ai remarque une egratignure sur sa cuisse et lui ai

de,:ande comment elle se l ' etait faite. En cueuillant des groseilles a maquereau,

m a-:-elle repondu. J'ai dit encore que c,:a me semblait sans espoir et pas la peine de

continuer et elle a fait oui sans ouvrir les yeux. Je lui ai demande de me regarder et

apres quelques instants - apres quelques instants elle I 'a fait, mais les yeux comme

des fentes a cause du solei!. Je me suis penche sur elle pour qu 'i!s soient dans I ' ombre

et i!s se sont ouverts. M'ont laisse entrer. Nous derivions parmi les roseaux et la

142

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Alai n Bad i ou On Beckett

barque s ' est coincee. Comme its se pliaient, avec un soupir, devant la proue! Je me

suis coule sur elle, mon visage dans ses seins et ma main sur elle. Nous restions lii, couches, sans remuer. Mais, sous nous, tout remuait, et nous remuait, doucement, de

haut en bas, et d 'un cote a l 'autre. / Passe minuit. Jamais entendu - (pp. 24-26)

49 II causait rarement geodesie. Mais nous avons du parcourir plusieurs fois

l 'equivalent de l 'equateur terrestre. A raison d 'environ cinq kilometres par jour et

nuit en moyenne. Nous nous refugiions dans I 'arithmetique. Que de calculs mentaux

efJectues de concert plies en deux! Nous elevions ainsi a la troisieme puissance des

nombres ternaires en tiers. Parfois sous une pluie dituvienne. Tant bien que mal se

gravant au fur et a mesure dans sa memoire les cubes s 'accumulaient. En vue de

I ' operation inverse a un stade ulterieur. Quand Ie temps aurait fait son oeuvre (pp. 38-39).

50 Par une rampe de cinquante pour cent sa tete frolait Ie sol. Je ne sais pas a quoi

it devait ce gout. A I 'amour de la terre et des milles parfums et teintes des fleurs. Ou

plus betement a des imperatifs d 'ordre anatomique. Il n 'ajamais souleve la question.

Le sommet atteint helas it fa Ua it redescendre. / Pour pouvoir de temps a autre jouir

du ciel il se servait d 'une petite glace ronde. L ' ayant voitee de son souffle et ensuite

frottee contre son mollet il y cherchait les constellations. Je I 'ail s 'ecriait-i! en parlant

de la Lyre ou du Cygne. Et souvent it ajoutait que Ie ciel n 'avait rien (p. 42).

5 1 [Badiou's statement resonates far more with the last line in the French version (Et

souvent i! ajoutait que le ciel n 'avail rien) than with the far more ambivalent, if not altogether deflationary, tone of 'the sky seemed much the same' in the English. Whilst the English could be said to retain the ultimate indifference of being (the sky) to the

event of love ('the sky has nothing', 'the sky seemed much the same') it seems to offer a less confrontational and heroic figure of the Two. Perhaps this shift in emphasis could be summarised by saying that in the English version the sky is indifferent to the event of love, whilst in the French text love allows us to become indifferent to the indifference of being, by fixing it into a 'constellation' that we can possess.]

52 [The theme of the Constellation is one that Badiou draws from the thinking of Stephane Mallarme. For Badiou's thinking on Mallarme, see 'La methode de Mallarme: soustraction et isolement' , in Conditions, pp. 1 08-129, 'Philosophie du faune', in

Petit Manuel d'Inesthetique (Paris: Seuil, 1998), pp. 1 89-215, as well as the earlier

'Est-il exact que toute pensee emet un coup de des' , Les conferences du perroquet 5

(January 1986), pp. 1 -20.]

53 Tu es sur Ie dos au pied d 'un tremble. Dans son ombre tremblante. EUe couchee a

143

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ecoutez les feuilles. Dans leur ombre tremblante (p. 65-66).

69 De sa couche elle voit se lever Venus. Encore. De sa couche par temps clair elle

voit se lever Venus suivie du solei!. Elle en veut alors au principe de toute vie. Encore.

Le soir par temps clair elle jouit de sa revanche. A Venus. Devant I 'autre fenetre.

Assise raide sur sa vieille chaise elle guette la radieuse (p. 7).

70 Je m 'en vais maintenant tout effacer sauf les fleurs. Plus de pluies. Plus de

mamelons. Rien que nous deux nous trafnant dans les fleurs. Assez mes vieux seins

sentent sa vieille main (p. 47).

7 1 Travail, famille, troisieme patrie, his to ires de fesses, finances, art et nature, for

interieur, sante, logement, Dieu et les hommes, autant de desastres (Fragment de

thM.tre II, in Pas, p. 39).

72 soit en clair je cite ou bien je suis seul et plus de probleme ou bien nous sommes

en nombre infini et plus de probleme non plus (p. 1 92)

73 les dejections non elles sont moi mais je les aime les vieilles boftes mal videes

mollement McMes non plus autre chose la boue engloutit tout moi seul elle me porte

mes vingt kilos trente kilos elle cede un peu sous c;a puis ne cede plus je ne fuis pas je

m 'exile (p. 60)

74 [See notes 2 and 3.]

75 Endroit clos. Tout ce qu 'ilfaut savoir pour dire est su (Pour finir encore et autres '

fOirades, p. 57)[See note 8 on the title of this text].

76 Ciel gris sans nuage pas un bruit rien qui bouge terre sable gris cendre. Petit

corps meme gris que la terre Ie ciel les ruines seul debout. Oris cendre a la ronde

terre ciel confondus lointains sans fin (p. 70).

77 [It is far easier to identify this 'conceptual ' consistency in Beckett's French work,

where the name of the place of being is quite consistentlypenombre. As many of the

quotations presented here demonstrate, in the English works there is some variation

in Beckett's designation of this 'place' . See the translators' introduction for further discussion of the concept of place in light of Badiou's recent theory of appearance.]

78 Ce qui frappe d 'abord dans cette penombre est la sensation de jaune qu 'elle

donne pour ne pas dire de soufre a cause des associations (p. 32).

1 46

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79 Penombre obscure source pas suo Savoir Ie minimum. Ne rien savoir non. Sera it

trop beau. Tout au plus Ie minime minimum (p. 1 0).

80 Disparition du vide ne se peut. Sauf disparition de la penombre. Alors disparition

de tout (p. 22).

8 1 Je Ie crois, oui, je crois que tout ce qui est faux se laisse davantage reduire, en

notions claires et distinctes, distinctes de toutes les autres notions (p. 1 10).

82 [ . . . ] c ' est un reve, c ' est peut-etre un reve, c;a m ' etonnerait, je vais me reveiller,

dans Ie silence, ne plus m 'endormir, ce sera moi, ou rever encore, rever un silence, un

silence de reve [ . . . ] (p. 2 12).

83 Moi je ne pense, si c ' est la cet affolement vertigineux comme d 'un guepier qu ' on

enfume, que depasse un certain degre de terreur (p. 1 06).

84 [ . . . ] un qui parle en dis ant, tout en parlant, Qui parle, et de quoi, et un qui entend,

muet, sans comprendre, loin de tous [ . . . ]. Et cet autre [ . . . ] qui divague ainsi, a coups

de moi a pourvoir et de lui depourvus [ . . . ]. Voila un joti trio, et dire que tout c;a ne fait

qu 'un, et que cet un nefait que rien, et quel rien, il ne vaut rien (p. 1 99).

85 [Badiou's theory of the count-as-one [compte-pour-un] constitutes one of the foundational moments in his ontology, as can be seen in Meditation 1 of L 'etre et

I 'evenement.]

86 [ . . . ] il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer (p. 2 13).

87 [ . . . ] a la maison de Monsieur Knott rien ne pouvait etre ajoute, rien soustrait,

mais que telle elle etait alors, telle elle avait ete au commencement, et telle elle resterait

jusqu 'a lafin, sous tous les rapports essentiels [ . . . ] (pp. 135- 136).

88 [ . . . ] brillants de clarteformelle et au contenu impenetrable (p. 75).

89 [ . . . ] la signification attribuee a cet ordre d 'incidents par Watt, dans ses relations,

etait tant6t la signification originale perdue et puis recouvree, et tant6t une signification

tout autre que la signification originale, et tant6t une signification degagee, dans un

delai plus ou moins long, et avec plus ou moins de mal, de l 'originale absence de

signification (p. 80).

147

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90 Quelque chose suit son cours (p. 49).

91 Signifier? Nous, signifier? Ah elle est bonne! (p. 49).

92 [Badiou fonnulates the distinction between presentation and representation in L' etre et [ ' evenement, see especially Meditations 1 , 8 and 9.]

93 Pendant [ 'inspection soudain un bruit. Faisant sans que celle-fa s 'interrompe

que I 'esprit se reveille. Comment l 'expliquer? Et sans aUer jusque-Ia comment Ie

dire? Loin en arriere de I 'adl la quete s 'engage. Pendant que I 'evenement palit. Quel

qu 'ilfot. Mais voila qu 'a la rescousse soudain il se renouvelle. Du coup Ie nom commun

peu commun de croulement. Renforce peu apres sinon affaibli par I 'inusuel languide.

Un croulement languide. Deux. Loin de I 'ceil tout a sa torture toujours une lueur

d 'espoir. Par la grace de ces modestes debuts (p. 70).

94 Nous nous refugiions dans l 'arithmetique. Que de calculs mentaux effectues de

concert plies en deux! (p. 38)

95 [ . . . ] de marivaudages, de frayeurs et de farouches attouchements, dont if importe

seulement de retenir ceci, qu 'ils firent entrevoir a Macmann ce que signifiait

l 'expression etre deux (p. 144).

96 [In this respect, it is interesting to note the 'philological' debate over the exact dimensions of the cylinder, discussed in the 'Notes on the Texts' ofthe Grove Press

edition of the Complete Short Prose, edited by S.E. Gontarski (p. 282). The original French text mistakenly gives the dimensions as 80,000 square centimeters, whilst the

correct figure (given a height of 16 meters and a circumference of 50) should be of

approximately 12,000,000 square centimeters. As Beckett wryly noted upon being presented with the error (which had emerged on the occasion of a stage adaptation of

The Lost Ones): 'After all, you can't play fast and loose withpi. ' ]

97 Sejour ou des corps vont cherchant chacun son depeupleur (p. 7).

98 Vus sous un certain angle ces corps sont de quatre sortes. Premierement ceux qui

circulent sans arret. Deuxiemement ceux qui s 'arretent quelquefois, Troisiemement

ceux qui a moins d 'en etre chasses ne quittent jamais la place qu 'its ont conquise et

chasses se jettent sur la premiere de fibre pour s y immobiliser de nouveau. [ . . . ]

Quatriemement ceux qui ne cherchent pas ou non-chercheurs assis pour la plupart

contre Ie mur [ . . . ] (pp. 12-13) .

148

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99 [ . . . ] dans Ie cyfindre Ie peu possible la ou it n 'est pas n 'est seulement plus et dans

Ie moindre moins Ie rien tout entier si cette notion est maintenue (p. 28).

1 00 [ . . . ] en tout cas on est dans lajusticeje n 'aijamais entendu dire Ie contraire (p.

193)

10 1 [ . . . ] se rencontrer comme moi je I ' entends, ' cela de passe tout ce que peut Ie

sentiment, si puissant soit-il, et tout ce que sait Ie corps, queUe qu 'en soit la science

(p. 159).

1 02 [ . . . ] Ie temps beni du bleu [ . . . ] (Sans, p. 70).

1 03 Nous nous etions scindes si c ' est cela qu 'it desirait (p. 38).

104 [Le dur desir de durer is the title of a collection of poetry by Paul Eluard, published

in 1 946.]

1 05 Pour pouvoir de temps a autre jouir du ciel if se servait d 'une petite glace ronde.

L 'ayant voilee de son soujJle et ensuite frottee contre son mollet iI y cherchait les

constellations. Je I ' ail s ' ecriait-il en parlant de la Lyre ou du Cygne. Et souvent if

ajoutait que Ie ciel n 'avait rien (p. 42).

1 06 [See note 50]

1 07 voix forte, un peu solennelle, manifestement celle de Krapp a une epoque tres

anterieure (p. l3).

108 _ indestructible association jusqu 'au dernier soupir de la tempete et de la nuit

avec la lumiere de l 'entendement et lefeu - (p. 23).

1 09 Krapp debranche impatiemment I 'appareil [ . . . ] (p. 23).

1 1 0 - Ie haut du lac, avec la barque, nage pres de la rive, puis pousse la barque au

large et laisse aller a la derive. Elle etait couchee sur les planches du fond, les mains

sous la tete et les yeux fermes. Solei! flamboyant, un brin de brise, I 'eau un peu

clapoteuse comme je l 'aime. J'ai remarque une egratignure sur sa cuisse et lui ai

demande comment elle se I ' etail faite, En cueillant des groseilles a maquereau, m 'a t­

elle repondu. J' ai dit encore que 9a me semblait sans espoir et pas la peine de continuer

et elle a fait oui sans ouvrir les yeux. Je lui ai demande de me regarder et apres

quelques instants . . . apres quelques instants elle l 'a fail, mais les yeux comme des

149

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fentes a cause du solei!. Je me suis penche sur elle pour qu 'ils soient dans I 'ombre et

ils se sont ouverts. M'ont laisse entrer. Nous derivions parmi les roseaux et la barque

s 'est coincee. Comme ils se pliaient, avec un soupir, devant la proue! Je me suis coule

sur elle, mon visage dans ses seins et ma main sur elle. Nous restons la, couches, sans

remuer. Mais, sous nous, tout remuait, et nous remuait, doucement, de haut en bas, et

d'un cote a I 'autre (pp. 24-26).

1 1 1 Viens d 'ecouter ce pauvre petit cretin pour qui je me prenais il y a trente ans,

dijJicile de croire quej 'aiejamais be con a ce point lao 9a au moins c 'estjini, Dieu

merci (p. 27).

1 12 Krapp demeure immobile, regardant dans Ie vide devant lui. La bande continue

a se derouler en silence (p. 33).

1 1 3 cette vie qu 'il aurait eue inventee rememoree un peu de chaque comment savoir

cette chose la-haut il me la donnait je la faisais mienne ce qui me chantait les ciels

surtout les chemins surtout ou il se glissait comme ils changeaient suivant Ie ciel et

ou on allait dans I 'atlantique Ie soir l ' ocean suivant qu 'on allait aux lies ou en revenait

I 'humeur du moment pas tellement les gens tres peu toujours les memes j ' en prenais

j 'en laissais de bons moments il n ' en reste rien (pp. 1 13-1 14)

1 14 c 'bait de bons moments bons pour moi on parle de moi pour lui aussi on parle

de lui aussi heureux [ . . . J (p. 79)

1 1 5 moi rien seulement dis ceci dis cela ta vie la-haut TA VIE un temps ma vie LA-,

HA UT un temps long la-haut DANS LA dans la LUMIERE un temps lumiere sa vie la-

haut dans la lumiere octosyllabe presque a tout prendre un hasard (p. 1 13)

1 1 6 Une voix parvient a quelqu 'un dans Ie noir (p. 7).

1 1 7 Tu vis Ie jour dans la chambre ou vraisemblablement tu fus conc;u (p. 1 5).

1 18 Une greve. Le soir. La lumiere meurt. Nulle bientot elle ne mourra plus. Non.

Rien de tel alors que nulle lumiere. Elle allait mourant jusqu 'a l ' aube et ne mourait

jamais. Tu es debout Ie dos a la mer. Seul bruit Ie sien. Toujours plus faible a mesure

que tout doucement elle s 'etoigne. Jusqu 'au moment OU tout doucement elle revient.

Tu t 'appuies sur un long baton. Tes mains reposent sur Ie pommeau et sur elles ta

tete. Tes yeux s 'ils venaient a s ' ouvrir verraient d ' abord au loin dans les derniers

rayons les pans de ton manteau et les tiges de tes brodequins enfonces dans la sable.

Ensuite et elle seule Ie temps qu 'elle disparaisse I ' ombre du baton sur la sable. Qu ' elle

1 5 0

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Alai n Bad i ou On Beckett

disparaisse a ta vue. Nuit sans lune ni boiles. Si tes yeux venaient a s 'ouvrir Ie noir

s 'eclaircirait (pp. 74-75).

1 1 9 Bleme, quoique nullement invisible, sous un certain eclairage. Donne Ie bon

eclairage. Gris plutot que blanc, gris blanc (p. 14).

120 Les mots vous ldchent, il est des moments ou meme eux vous ldchent. Pas vrai,

Willie? Pas vrai, Willie, que meme les mots vous ldchent, par moments? Qu 'est-ce

qu 'on peut bienfaire alors, jusqu 'a ce qu 'ils reviennent? (p. 30)

121 Pense, pore! (p. 55)

122 [ . . . J la barbe les flammes les pleurs les pierres si bleues si calmes helas la tete la

tete la tiile la tete en Normandie malgre Ie tennis les labeurs abandonnes ina cheves

plus grave les pierres brefje reprends helas helas abandonnes inacheves la tete la

tete en Normandie malgre Ie tennis la tete helas les pierres Conard Conard . . . (pp. 57-

58)

d ? C ' · ' I 123 Vous n 'avez pasjini de m 'empoissoner avec vos histoires e temps. est msense.

Quand! Quand! Un jour, c;a ne vous suffit pas, un jour pareil aux autres it est devenu

muet, un jour je suis devenu aveugle, un jour nous deviendrons sourds, un jour nous

sommes nes, un jour nous mourrons, Ie meme jour, Ie meme instant, c;a ne vous suffit

pas? Elles accouchent a cheval sur une tombe, Ie jour brille un instant, puis c ' est la

nuit a nouveau (pp. 1 16- 1 1 7).

124 Quefaisons-nous ici, voila ce qu 'ilfaut se demander. Nous avons la chance de Ie

savoir. Oui, dans cette immense confusion, une seule chose est claire: nous attendons

que Godot vienne. [ . . . J Ou que la nuit tombe. Nous sommes au rendez-vous, un point

c 'est tout. Nous ne sommes pas de saints, mais nous sommes au rendez-vous. Combien

de gens peuvent en dire autant? (pp. 1 03-104)

125 [ . . . J a nouveau seuls, au milieu des solitudes (p. 1 05).

1 26 H. Elle nefut pas convaincue. J'aurais pu m 'en douter. Elle t 'a empeste, disait­

elle toujours, tu pues la pute. Pas moyen de repondre a c;a. Je la pris done dans mes

bras et luijurai queje ne pourrais vivre sans elle. Je Ie pensais du reste. Oui,j 'en suis

persuade. Elle ne me repoussa pas. / F 1. Juges done de mon efJarement lorsqu 'un

beau matin, m 'bant enfermee avec mon chagrin dans mes appartements, je Ie vois

arriver, I 'oreille basse, tomber a genoux devant moi, enfouir son visage dans mon

giron et . . . passer aux aveux (pp. 13-14).

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1 27 Puis parler, vite, des mots, comme I 'enfant solitaire qui se met en plusieurs,

deux, trois, pour etre ensemble, et parler ensemble, dans fa nuit (pp. 92-93).

128 Ce n 'est pas tous lesjours qu 'on a besoin de nous. Non pas a vrai dire qu 'on ait

pYlkisement besoin de nous. D 'autres feraient aussi bien I 'affaire, sinon mieux. L 'appef

que nous venons d 'entendre, c 'est plutot a l 'humanite tout entit�re qu 'il s 'adresse.

Mais a cet endroit, en ce moment, I 'humanite c ' est nous, que c;a nous plaise ou non

(p. 1 03).

129 Nous sommes des hommes (p. 1 07).

130 Les yeux uses d 'offenses s 'attardent vils sur tout ce qu 'ils ont si longuement

prie, dans la derniere, la vraie priere enfin, celle qui ne sollicite rien. Et c 'est alors

qu 'un petit air d'exaucement ranime les VIEUX morts et qu 'un murmure nait dans

l 'univers muet, vous reprochant affectueusement de vous etre desespere trop tard(p.

1 72).

1 3 1 Ie bleu qu ' on voyait dans la poussiere blanche [ . . . ] (p. 1 1 0).

132 [ . . . ] Ie voyage Ie couple I 'abandon ou tout se raconte Ie bourreau qu 'on aurait

eu puis perdu Ie voyage qu ' on aurait fait la victime qu 'on aurait eue puis perdue les

images Ie sac les petites his to ires de la-haut petites scenes un peu de bleu infernaux

homes (p. 1 99) [In Badiou's quotation the sentence reads infernaux hommes, 'men infernal' - however, it seems that Beckett has here, rather enigmatically, left the English 'homes' in the French text, which Badiou has in turn read as an erratum.]

1 3 3 Assez. Soudain assez. Soudain tout loin. Nul mouvement et soudain tout loin.

Tout moindre. Trois epingles. Un trou d 'epingle. Dans l 'obscurissime penombre. A

des vastitudes de distance. Aux limites du vide illimite (p. 62).

134 [ . . . ] considere comme une sorte d'agglutinant mortel [ . . . ] (p. 148).

135 C' hait seulement en Ie deplac;ant dans cette atmosphere, comment dire, de finalite

sans fin, pourquoi pas, que j 'osais considerer Ie travail a executer(p. 1 72).

,

136 [Originally published as 'Etre, existence, pensee: prose et concept', in Petit manuel

d 'inesthhique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1 998), pp. 137-187. Unless otherwise noted all references in this essay are to Worstward Ho. In the body ofthe text, the first page number refers to the Calder edition, the second to the Grove edition.]

> - - - ---

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1 37 [Molloy was in part translated in collaboration with Patrick Bowles, 'The Expelled'

and 'The End' were translated in collaboration with Richard Seaver, and the two brief texts 'The Image' and 'The Cliff' were translated by Edith Fournier.]

138 [It ahnost goes without saying that by inverting the direction of Bad iou's operation our own translation has had to confront a number of serious challenges, often forcing us to test the resources of the English language in order to maintain the closeness of Badiou's reading, as well as the way in which Beckett's own terminology is progressively appropriated into Badiou's prose. We shall try to deal with specific

issues as they appear, in the notes. Hopefully, the singular distance provided by passing

through Fournier's translation will prove illuminating even when the discussion of the text is restored to the English language and the principal quotations are from Beckett's original. ]

1 39 Encore. Dire encore. Soit dit encore. Tant mal que pis encore (p. 7).

140 Soit dit plus meche encore (p. 62).

141 Disparition du vide ne se peut. Sauf disparition de la penombre. Alors disparition

de tout (p. 22).

142 Rien qui prouve que celui d 'une femme et pourtant d 'unefemme (p. 45).

143 Ont suinte de la substance molle qui s 'ammolit les mots d'unefemme (p. 45).

144 Desormais un pour I ' agenouille. Comme desormais deux pour la paire. La paire

comme un seul s ' en allant tant mal que mal. Comme desormais trois pour la tete (p.

24).

1 45 Ce que c 'est que les mots qu 'il secrete disent. Quoi l 'ainsi dit vide. L 'ainsi dite

penombre. Les ainsi dites ombres. L 'ainsi dit siege et germe de tout (p. 38).

146 [Badiou is currently developing a systematic approach to the relation between being and appearance, to be presented in his forthcomingLogiques des Mondes (Paris: Seuil, 2004). Many of the themes anticipated in these writings on Beckett find their

logical and mathematical formalisation in this work, sections of which will appear in

English in Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, edited and translated by Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2003).]

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1 47 Dire pour soit dit. Mal dit. Dire desormais pour soit mal dit(p. 7).

148 Essayer encore. Rater encore. Rater mieux encore. Ou mieux plus mal. Rater

plus mal encore. Encore plus mal encore. Jusqu 'a etre degoute pour de bon. Vomir

pour de bon. Partir pour de bon. La au ni I 'un ni I 'autre pour de bon. Une bonne fois

pour toutes pour de bon (p. 8).

149 Retour dedire mieux plus mal plus pas concevable. Si plus obscur mains lumineux

alors mieux plus mal plus obscur. Dedit done mieux plus mal plus pas concevable.

Pas mains que moins mieux plus mal peut etre plus. Mieux plus mal quai? Le dire? Le

dit? Meme chose. Meme rien. Meme peu s 'en faut rien (p. 49).

150 Pire moindre. Plus pas concevable. Pire a defaut d'un meilleur moindre. Le

meilleur moindre. Non. Neant Ie meilleur. Le meilleur pire. Non. Pas Ie meilleur pire.

Neant pas Ie meilleur pire. Mains meilleur pire. Non. Le mains. Le mains meilleur

pire. Le moindre jamais ne peut etre neant. Jamais au neant ne peut etre ramene.

Jamais par Ie neant annule. Inannulable moindre. Dire ce meilleur pire. Avec des

mots qui reduisent dire Ie moindre meilleur pire. A defaut du bien pis que pire.

L 'imminimisable moindre meilleur pire (p. 41).

1 5 1 D 'abord un. D 'abord essayer de mieux rater un. Quelque chose la qui ne cloche

pas assez mal. Non pas que tel quel ce ne so it pas rate. Rate nul visage. Ratees les

nulles mains. Le nul -. Assez. Peste soit du rate. Minimement rate. Place au plus mal.

En attendant pis encore. D 'abord plus mal. Minimement plus mal. En attendant pis

encore. Ajouter un -. Ajouter? Jamais. Le courber plus bas. Qu 'a soit courbe plus

bas. Au plus bas. Tete chapeautee disparue. Long pardessus coupe plus haut. Rien du

bassin jusqu 'en bas. Rien que les dos courbe. Trone vu de dos sans haut sans base.

Nair obscur. Sur genoux invisibles. Dans la penombre vide. Mieux plus mal ainsi. En

attendant pis encore (pp. 26-27).

1 52 Puis deux. De rate a empirer. Essayer d' empirer. A partir du minimement rate.

Ajouter -. Ajouter? Jamais. Les bottines. Mieux plus mal sans bottines. Talons nus.

Tant6t les deux droits. Tant6t les deux gauches. Gauche droite gauche droite encore.

Pieds nus s ' en vont et jamais ne s ' en eloignent. Mieux plus mal ainsi. Un petit peu

mieux plus mal que rien ainsi (pp. 28-29) .

1 53 Les yeux. Temps d'essayer d'empirer. Tant mal que pis essayer d 'empirer. Plus

clos. Dire ecarquilles ouverts. Tout blanc et pupille. Blanc obscur. Blanc? Non. Tout

pupille. Trous nair obscur. Beance qui ne vacille. Soient ainsi dUs. Avec les mots qui

empirent. Desormais ainsi. Mieux que rien a ce point ameliores au pire(pp. 34-35).

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154 Les mots aussi de qui qu 'ils soient. Que de place laissee au plus mal! Comme

parfois as presque sonnent presque vrai! Comme l 'ineptie leur fait defaut! Dire la

nuit est jeune helas et prendre courage. Ou mieux plus mal dire une nuit veille encore

helas a venir. Un reste de derniere veille a venir. Et prendre courage (pp. 25-26).

155 Quels mots pour quai alors? Comme as presque sonnent encore. Tandis que tant

mal que pis hors de quelque substance moUe de I 'esprit as suintent. Hors c;:a en c;:a

suintent. Comme c ' est peu s ' en faut non inepte. Jusqu 'au dernier imminimisable

moindre comme on rechigne a reduire. Car alors dans I 'ultime penombre finir par

de-proferer Ie moindrissime tout (p. 43).

1 56 Ainsi cap au moindre encore. Tant que la penombre perdure encore. Penombre

inobscurcie. Ou obscurcie a plus obscur encore. A I ' obscurcissime penombre. Le

moindrissime dans l 'obscurissime penombre. L 'ultime penombre. Le moindrissime

dans I 'ultime penombre. Pire inempirable (pp. 42-43).

1 57 Le vide. Comment essayer dire? Comment essayer rater? Nul essai rien de rate.

Dire seulement- (p. 20)

158 Tout saufle vide. Non. Le vide aussi. Inempirable vide. Jamais moindre. Jamais

augmente. Jamais depuis que d'abord dit jamais dedit jamais plus mal dit jamais

sans que ne devore I 'envie qu 'a ait disparu. Dire I 'enfant disparu (pp. 55-56).

1 59 Dire I 'enfant disparu. Tout comme. Hors vide. Hors ecarquilles. Le vide alors

n ' en est-il pas d' autant plus grand? Dire Ie vieil homme disparu. La vieille femme

disparue. Tout comme. Le vide n 'en est-if pas d'autant plus grand encore? Non. Vide

au maximum lorsque presque. Au pire lorsque presque. Moindre alors? Toutes ombres

tout comme disparues. Si done pas tellement plus que c;:a tellement mains alors? Mains

pire alors? Assez. Peste soil du vide. Inaugmentable imminimisable inempirable

sempiternel presque vide (p. 56). [The US edition has 'then' instead of 'than' in the

line 'ifthen not that much more than that much less then?']

1 60 Encore retour pour dedire disparition du vide. Disparition du vide ne se peut.

Sauf disparition de la penombre. Alors disparition de tout. Tout pas deja disparu.

Jusqu 'a penombre reapparue. Alors tout reapparu. Tout pas a jamais disparu.

Disparition de I 'une se peut. Disparition des deux se peut. Disparition du vide ne se

peut. Sauf disparition de la penombre. Alors disparition de tout(p. 22).

1 6 1 La tete. Ne pas demander si disparition se peut. Dire non. Sans demander non.

D 'elle disparition ne se peut. Sauf disparition de la penombre. Alors disparition de

1 5 5

I I , I I

Al a i n Ba d i ou On Beckett r--------------tout. Disparais penombre! Disparais pour de bon. Tout pour de bon. Une bonne fois pour toutes pour de bon (p. 26).

1 62 Tant mal que mal s 'en vont etjamais ne s 'eloignent (p. 15) .

163 Nul fieu que I 'unique (p. 13) .

164 Main dans la main its vont tant mal que mal d 'un pas egal. Dans les mains fibres

- non. Vides les mains fibres. Tous deux dos courbe vus de dos ils von! tant mal que

mal d'un pas ega!. Levee la main de I 'enfant pour atteindre la main qui etreint.

Etreindre la vieille main qui etreint. Etreindre et etre etreint. Tant mal que mal s 'en

vont et jamais ne s 'eloign en!. Lentement sans pause tant mal que mal s ' en vont et

jamais ne s 'eloignent. Vus de dos. Tous deux courbees. Unis par les mains etreintes

etreignant. Tant mal que mal s 'en vont comme un seul. Une seule ombre. Une autre

ombre (pp. 14- 1 5).

165 Lentement ils disparaissent. TantOt I 'un. TantOt la paire. TantOt les deux. Lentement

reapparaissent. Tantot l 'un. TantOt la paire. TantOt les deux. Lentement? Non.

Disparition soudaine. Reapparition soudaine. TantOt I ' un. TantOt la paire. TantOt les

deux. / Inchanges? Soudain reapparus inchanges? Oui. Dire oui. Chaque fois

inchanges. Tant mal que pis inchanges. Jusqu 'a non. Jusqu 'a dire non. Soudain

reapparus changes. Tant mal que pis changes. Chaque fois tant mal que pis changes

(p. 16).

166 Dans Ie crane tout disparu. Tout? Disparition de tout ne se peut. Jusqu 'a

disparition de la penombre. Dire alors seuls di�parus les deux. Dans Ie crane un et

deux disparus. Hors du vide. Hors des yeux. Dans Ie crane tout disparu saufle crane.

Les ecarquitles. Seuls dans la penombre vide. Seuls a etre vus. Obscurement vus.

Dans Ie crane Ie crane seul a etre vu. Les yeux ecarquilles. Obscurement vus. Par les

yeux ecarquilles (p. 32).

167 II voudrait I 'ainsi dit esprit qui depuis si longtemps a perdu tout vouloir. L 'ainsi

mal dit. Pour I 'instant ainsi mal dit. A force de long vouloir tout vouloir envole. Long

vouloir en vain. Et voudrait encore. Vaguement voudrait encore. Vaguement vainement

voudrait encore. Que plus vague encore. Que Ie plus vague. Vaguement vainement

voudrait que Ie vouloir soit Ie moindre. Imminimisable minimum de vouloir. Inapaisable

vain minimum de vouloir encore. / Voudrait que tout disparaisse. Disparaisse la

penombre. Disparaisse Ie vide. Disparaisse Ie vouloir. Disparaisse Ie vain vouloir

que Ie vain vouloir disparaisse (pp. 47-48). [The US edition has 'last' not ' least' in

the line 'Unstillable vain, least of longing' . ]

1 5 6

A la i n Bad i ou On Beckett

1 68 Il est debout. Quoi? Oui. Le dire debout. Force d la jin a se mettre et tenir

debout. Dire des os. Nul os mais dire des os. Dire un sol. Nul sol mais dire un sol.

Pour povoir dire douleur. Nul esprit et douleur? Dire oui pour que les os puissent tant

lui douloir que plus qu 'd se mettre debout. Tant mal que pis se mettre et tenir debout.

Ou mieux plus mal des restes. Dire des restes d'esprit OU nul auxjins de la douleur.

Douleur des os telle que plus qu 'a se mettre debout. Tant mal que pis s 'y mettre. Tant

mal que pis y tenir. Restes d 'esprit ou nul aux jins de la douleur. Iei des os. D 'autres

exemples au besoin. De douleur. De comment soulagee. De comment variee (pp. 9-

1 0).

169 Restes d'esprit done encore. Assez encore. Tant mal a qui tant mal ou tant mal

que pis assez encore. Pas d'esprit etdes mots? Meme de tels mots. Done assez encore.

Juste assez pour se rejouir. Rejouir! Juste assez encore pour se rejouir que seulement

eux. Seulement! (pp. 37-38)

1 70 Hiatus pour lorsque les mots disparus. Lorsque plus meche. Alors tout vu comme

alors seulement. Desobscurci. Desobscurci tout ce que les mots obscurcissent. Tout

ainsi vu non dit. Pas de suintement alors. Pas trace sur la substance moUe lorsque

d' eUe suinte encore. En elle suinte encore. Suintement seulement pour vu tel que vu

avec suintement. Obscurci. Pas de suintement pour vu desobscurci. Pour lorsque

plus meche. Pas de suintement pour lorsque suintement disparu (p. 53).

17 1 [Badiou's doctrine ofthe state of a situation as a re-presentation of being is laid

out in Meditations 8 and 9 ofL 'etre et l 'evenement. The crux of this doctrine is that events always take place despite the state and at a distance from it, whilst at the same

time measuring the excess of re-presentation over presentation, of the state over the

situation (or in Beckettian terms, of the dim over the void).]

1 72 Meme inclinaison pour tous. Memes vastitudes de distance. Meme hat dernier.

Dernier en date. Jusqu ' a tant mal que pis moindre en vain. Pire en vain. Devore tout

I 'en vie d'etre neant. Neantjamais ne se peut etre (p. 61) .

173 Assez. Soudain assez. Soudain tout loin. Nul mouvement et soudain tout loin.

Tout moindre. Trois epingles. Un trou d'epingle. Dans l 'obscurissime penombre. A

des vastitudes de distance. Aux limites du vide illimite. D 'ou pas plus loin. Mieux plus

mal pas plus loin. Plus meche moins. Plus meche pire. Plus meche neant. Plus meche

encore. / Soit dit plus meche encore (p. 62).

1 74 [ . . . ] d I 'altitude peut-etre aussi loin qu 'un endroitfusionne avec au-dela [ . . . ]

1 5 7

I

I I

, i i ,

, ,

A l a i n Ba d i o u On Beckettr---------------

une constellation [A Throw of the Dice/Un coup de des, in Stephane Mallarme,

Collected Poems, translated and with a commentary by Henry Weinfield (Berkeley:

University of Cali fomi a Press, 1 994), p. 144].

175 Rien et pourtant une femme. Vieille et pourtant vieille. Sur genoux invisibles.

Inclinee comme de vieilles pierres tombales tendre memoire s 'inclinent. Dans ce vieux

cimetiere. Noms effaces et de quand a quand. Inclinees muettes sur les tombes de nuls

etres (pp. 60-61).

1 76 [On the unnameable as a concept defining the ethic of truths, see 'La verite:

fon,:age et innomable' in Conditions (pp. 1 96-212) and Ethics (pp. 80-87). It is worth noting that lately Badiou has abandoned this doctrine, thinking it too compromised with a diffuse culpabilisation of philosophy, and also much reconfigured his theory of

naming. See his forthcoming interview with Bruno Bosteels and Peter Hallward in

Angelaki, 'Beyond Formalisation' . ]

1 77 [In the collection from which this article is taken it is followed by a piece entitled 'Philosophy of the Faun', a reading of Mallarme's poemL 'Apres-midi d 'unfaune.]

•

178 [Originally published as 'Ce qui arrive', in Regis Salgado and Evelyne Grossman, eds, Samuel Beckett, l 'ecriture et la scene (Paris: SEDES, 1 998), pp. 9-12.]

1 79 Assez. Soudain assez. Soudain tout loin. Nul mouvement et soudain tout loin.

Tout moindre. Trois epingles. Un trau d 'epingle. Dans I 'obscurissime penombre. A

des vastitudes de distance. Aux limites du vide illimite (p. 62).

1 80 Du coup Ie nom commun peu commun de craulement. Renforce peu apres sinon

affaibli par I 'inusuel languide. Un croulement languide (p. 70).

1 8 1 [ . . . ] d 'espoir. Par la grace de ces modestes debuts (p. 70).

1 82 Dire ce meilleur pire. Avec des mots qui rMuisent dire Ie moindre meilleur pire.

A defaut du bien pis que pire. L 'imminimisable moindre meilleur pire (p. 41) .

1 83 Comme paifois ils presque sonnent presque vrai! Comme I 'ineptie leur fait defaut!

Dire la nuit est jeune helas et prendre courage (p. 25).

1 84 Terre del confondus infini sans relief petit corps seul debout. Encore un pas un

seul tout seul dans les sables sans prise il le fera. Gris cendre petit corps seul debout

cceur battant face aux lointains. Lumiere refuge blancheur rase faces sans trace aucun

1 58

, ,

, ,

" I

A l a i n B a d i o u On Beckett

souvenir. Lointains sans fin terre del confondus pas un bruit rien qui bouge (p. 77).

1 85 Je ne sais plus Ie temps qu 'ilfaU. Mais du temps de ma vie il hait d 'une douceur

hernelle. Comme si la terre s ' hait endormie au point vernal (p. 44).

1 86 Ah mon pere et ma mere, dire qu 'ils doivent etre au paradis, bons comme .ils

l 'etaient. Aller en enfer, c 'est la grace queje demande, et la �ont�nuer a I�S m:�dlre:

t 'ils me voient de la-haut et m 'entendent, �a pourrazt lUI couper a c Ique a

e eux qu . I ' fi t e ra me remonte, et

leur felicite. Oui, je crois toutes leurs con�erzes �u� a vie u ur: , y

pour du malheur comme Ie mien pas de neant qUI tlenne (p. 1 9).

1 87 de mortel suivant en mortel suivant ne menant nulle part sans autre b�t jusqu ' � plus ample que Ie mortel suivant me coller contre Ie nommer Ie dress�r e cotvr�r

'usqu ' au sang de majuscules romaines me gaver de ses fables nous unzr pour a vie

Jdans I 'amour stoi"quejusqu 'au dernier hareng gai et un peu plus (p. 97)

1 88 Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. by Peter Hallward (London:

Verso, 2001), pp. 25 and 27.

. . ?

1 89 'Que pense Ie poeme?' , in Roger-Pol Droit (ed.),L 'Art est-II une connazssance.

(Paris: Le Monde, 1993), pp. 2 14-24.

1 90 Petit manuel d'inesthhique, pp. 9-29.

1 5 9

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1--·------------------- ------------ --- - - ----- - --

Al a i n B a d i o u On Beckettr---------------

, " ,. ' , : 'i,'J. •

, ,1, " ' , . "

In d ex

abstraction 6, 40 absurd, the xxii, 3 , 38, 1 19, 1 33 activity 47, 63, 122- 124, 129, 1 30 affirmation xii, xv, xix, xxix, 4 1 , 90,

91 , 93, 126 All, the 7, 1 0, 1 8, 77, 1 00, 10 1 , 102,

1 05, 108-1 1 0, 1 14, En29 ascesis xxviii, 45, 46, 47, 59, 60, 65,

77, 1 1 5, 1 24, 1 33 beauty xvi, xxvi, 29; 4 1 , 42, 44, 46,

66, 67, 7 1 , 73, 75, 76, 77, 1 14,

A l a i n B a d i o u On Beckett

1 1 5, 1 17, En50, En76, En 145 , En 1 70

being passim intro. , passim ch. 1 , passim ch.2, passim ch.3, 1 14, 1 1 5, 120, 124- 130, 1 32, 1 34

Bergson, H. 1 2 1 Blanchot, M. xi, xii, xiv, 1 1 categories xiii, xiv, xv, xxv, 8, 15 , 16,

23, 6 1 , 88, 90, 1 0 1 chance xvi, xxiv, 1 7, 20, 2 1 , 26, 27,

28, 3 1 , 55, 128

,

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I

------------------------------------------------------------------', A l a i n B a d i o u On Beckett) cinema 40, 42 closed, the 5, 6, 10, 20, 28, 49, 5 1 ,

56 cogito xiv-xxxii, 9- 15 , 19, 28, 33, 5 1 ,

53, 54, 55, 6 1 , 64, 68, 72, 88, 1 04, 128, 1 3 1 , 1 34

comedy xviii, xxix, 44, 75, 1 14 count, the 14, 54, 83, 84, 86, 88, 102,

1 10, En84 couple, the 6, 13 , 60, 63, 64, 66, 74,

76 courage xii, xxi, xxiv, xxx, 40, 4 1 ,

77, 96, 97, 98, 1 14, 1 1 5 Dante xiv, 23, 6 1 , 123 dark, the xvi, xxxi, 7, 25-29, 3 1 , 32,

35, 47, 5 1 , 63, 65, 70, 7 1 , 74, 98 death 7, 1 1 , 12, 24, 34, 40, 45, 47,

49, 56, 60, 1 1 1 , 128 Descartes, R. xviii, xxi, xxvii, 9, 1 0,

44, 1 05, 1 24 desire xix, xxxiii, 3 , 23, 24, 33, 34,

52, 6 1 , 62, 66, 67, 74, 75, 77, 98, 1 00, 1 1 7, 124, 132, 133

despair 4, 1 5, 38, 76, 120, 1 2 1 dialectic xxvii, 2, 5 1 , 120, 122,En36 dim xxiii, xxv, xxix-xxxi, 50, 5 1 , 54,

77, passim ch.3, 1 14, 128, 1 30, En 1 70

dying 1 2, 28, 45, 47, 52, 53 encounter passim intro. , 1 5, 1 7, 23,

25-29, 3 1 , 33 , 35, 37, 38, 47, 60, 63-66, 68, 70, 73, 89, 98, 106, 1 22, 128, 132-134

eternity 6 1 , 66, 67, 77 event passim intro, 5, 1 8, 20, 2 1 , 22,

28, 3 1 , 32, 33, 50, 55-59, 62, 64, 72, 76, 108-1 12, 1 14, 1 1 5, 126-1 30, 132- 1 35, En50, En1 70

exhaustion 1 1 , 13 , 128 existence xvi, xvii, xxiii, xxv, 4, 5 , 8,

9, 20, 26, 38, 40, 4 1 , 47, 50, 54, 60, 64, 68, 70, 76, 77, 85, 89-9 1 , 109, 1 1 1 , 1 12, 126, 127, 1 32, 135

existentialism xiv, xxi, 39, 40 failure xvii, 10, 1 7, 25, 62, 90-95,

1 14, 1 1 5 figures xv, xvi, xx, xxii, xxiii, xxiv,

xxx, 49, 60, 62-65, 74, 75, 88, 90 finitude xiv, 40 flux 1 , 2, 45, 48, 107, 1 32 freedom 1 8, 22, 39, 55, 56, 62, 127 functions xiii, xx, xxi, xxii, 3 , 1 9,

3 1 , 32, 44-47, 52, 60, 66, 123, 126, 135

going 2, 3, 29, 30, 46, 49, 1 03 happiness xvi, 6, 1 7, 26, 29, 32, 33,

34, 35, 55, 59, 64, 66, 1 1 7, 128 Heidegger, M. xxvi, 88, 1 20, 1 2 1 ,

135 Heraclitus 1 , 48 hope xii, xv, xvi, xxx, xxxii 2, 1 1 , 2 1 ,

22, 40, 4 1 , 48, 50, 52, 58, 59, 69, 9 1 , 1 14, 1 17, 1 30, 1 34

humanity, generic xiii, xviii, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxvi, xxix, xxx, xxxii, 3, 4, 6, 7, 16, 26, 44, 46, 47, 54, 63, 94, 126

humour xiv, 46, 75 Husserl, E. xviii, xxii, xxvii, 44, 1 07,

1 08, 1 24 immobility xxiii, xxxi, 2, 5 , 6, 7, 24,

26, 3 1 -34, 45, 47, 50, 54, 65, 66, 1 03

impasse, in Beckett's work xiv, xvi, xviii, xxiv, xxx, xxxii, 12, 14, 39, 4 1 , 54, 55, 56, 128, 129, 133

1 6 2

,', 'I' , ,

, " , , , ' , , , , . ,

I I , ' ,

, :

incidents 19, 20, 21 , 3 1 , 56, 57 infinity xvi, xvii, 1 7, 27, 28, 30, 32,

33, 67, 88 jokes xix, 43 journey 6, 7, 26, 3 1 , 40, 45, 76 justice 26, 64 Kafka, F. 16, 39 Kant, I. xviii, xxii, 2, 4 1 , 77 knowledge 6, 1 9, 30, 50, 54, 56, 57,

66, 67, 123-126, 129, 1 3 1 , 133 Lacan, J. 1 8, 25, 121 , 124, 132,En29,

En30, En40 language passim intro., 3, 5, 7, 8, 1 8,

2 1 , 22, 34, passim ch.2, 79-81 , 9 1 - 100, 109, 1 12, 1 14, 1 1 5, 1 1 7, 1 22, 123, 1 27, 129- 1 3 1 , 1 36, En137

localisation xxiii, xxv, xxxi, 5, 6, 7, 9, 50, 5 1 , 103

love xvi, xxvi, 5, 26-33, 46, 56, 60, 64-67, 74, 75, 77, 1 03, 106, 1 17, 126, 128, En50

Mallarme, S. xix, xx, xxi, xxvii, 12, 5 1 , 77, 93, 95, 1 09-1 12, 125, 126, 1 32, 1 33, En5 1 , En 173, En1 76

mathematics xxiii, xxxi, 30, 60 meaning 8, 9, 15 , 19, 20, 21 , 22, 28,

3 1 , 32, 4 1 , 55, 57-60, 72, 76, 120, 1 22, 123, 128, 130, 1 3 1 , 135

memory xvi, xviii, 30, 44, 66, 67, 70 mobility xxxii, 45, 52, 65 movement xxii, xxiii, xxxi, 4, 6, 8,

23, 24, 40, 44-47, 50, 52, 54, 57, 58, 61 , 63, 85, 10 1 - 104, 106, 107, 1 09, 1 10, 1 16, 122, 124, 126, 127, 1 30, 1 3 1

multiple, the xxi, xxvi, 12, 1 7, 28, 29, 30, 3 1 , 1 1 5

L A l a i n Ba d i o u On Beckett music 4 1 , 106, 1 07 naming xxiii, xxxii, 1 1 , 13 , 1 8, 2 1 ,

22, 3 1 , 5 1 , 58, 82, 93, 1 07, 1 12, 1 14, 1 15, 129, 1 30, 1 35, En1 75

nihilism xii, xxx, 15 , 39 non-being 2, 7, 9, 1 0, 48, 5 1 nostalgia 38, 64, 67-71 , 73 open, the xxiii, 6, 1 7, 30, 3 1 , 49, 5 1 ,

96 optimism 24, 62 oscillation xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xxx, 2,

8, 9, 1 7, 40, 4 1 , 53, 55, 1 28, 1 34, En4

other, the, (alterity) xv, xvi, xx, xxiv, xxvi, xxx, passim 4-32, passim

40-77, 84, 86, 88, 90, 10 1 - 1 03, 108, 126, 1 3 1 , 1 32, 134

passivity 13, 14, 47, 53, 54 place xv, xx, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxxii,

4- 1 2, 14, 15 , 1 8, 19, 2 1 , 22, 23, passim 45-77, 86, 97, 103, 109-1 1 1, 1 1 7, 126, 1 34, En36, En76

Plato xxii, xxvii, 4, 23, 47, 88, 10 1 , 123

plays, radio 74 poem xxvi, 4, 16, 1 7, 29, 30, 3 1 , 33,

40, 4 1 , 48, 5 1 , 60, 7 1 , 77, 80, 95, 97, 1 1 1 , 126, 132, En2, En 1 76

politics 33 predestination xv, 1 7, 1 8, 55, 56 procedures xvii, xxvi, xxix, xxxii, 16,

33 Proust, M. 42, 67, 1 23 repetition xiv, xv, 16, 33, 38, 40, 55,

57, 77, 1 13, 12 1 , 127, 128 Rimbaud, A. xix, xx, xxi, 37, 91 , 1 1 3,

126 Sartre, J-P. xiv, xxiv, 38, 39, 121 , 123,

1 6 3

,

i I , I ' , '

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-.,;-­

I

A l a i n Ba d i o u On Beckettr---------------

136

saying xiv, xix, xxv, xxxii, 2, 3 , 7, 8 ,

1 3, 22, 45, 46, 52, 53, 58, 59, 72,

76, passim ch.3, 1 15, 1 1 6, 1 1 7,

129- 1 3 1 , 135 , En6 sense 3, 9, 20, 40, 45, 55, 57, 73, 87,

1 20, 1 23, 129, 1 30

sexuation xvi, 22, 27, 33, 34, 64, 65, 66, 84, En29

signification 55, 57, 58, 80, 1 20, 1 25,

130

silence xi, xiii, xvi, xvii, xix, 1 1 - 14,

23, 38, 39, 45, 52-55, 69, 75, 9 1 ,

92, 96, 1 17, 1 3 1

solipsism xv, xvi, xviii, xx, 5, 14, 28,

3 1 , 33, 55, 66, 68, 77

Sophist, The xxii, 4, 47, 1 0 1 , 1 2 1 subject, the passim intro., 2, 3, 4, 1 0-

1 8, 22-26, 3 1 , 33, 44, 47, 5 1 -55,

59, 60, 64, 65, 68, 91 , 1 00, 1 05,

1 07, 1 08, 1 1 1 , 120- 122, 124-126,

1 3 1 - 1 34, En36

subtraction xxv, xxviii, xxix, xxxi, 3, 8, 9, 18 , 19, 95, 1 00, 123-125, 1 29, 1 30, 133- 135

supplement, of being xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxix, 4, 1 6, 1 8 , 1 9, 20, 2 1 , 22,

5 1 , 56, 86, 96, 1 28-1 30, 1 32, 135

terror xv, 12, 1 3, 53, 55, 64, 1 24

theatre, the 40, 42, 60, 7 1 , 74, 76,

1 14, 1 22 thought xviii, xx, xxii, xxiii, xxv, • • • • • • •

XXVi, XXVll, XXiX, XXXi, XXXll, xxxiii, 3, 4, 6, 1 2, 1 5, 1 6, 1 8,

1 9, 20, 27, 38, 40, 4 1 , 46, 48, 52-57, 59, 66, 75, passim 80-90, 93,

98, 1 0 1 , 1 02, 1 09, 1 10, 1 1 5-

1 17, 1 20-126, 1 29- 1 34, En25

torture xiv, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, xxx, 1 0, 1 2- 1 6, 2 1 , 29, 32, 49, 5 1 , 52, 54-56, 59, 72, 126, 128

trajectory 2, 4, 1 6, 1 7, 55, 57, 1 28,

135

truth xi, xx, xxvi, xxvii, xxviii, xxxi, 4, 5, 7, 1 0, 1 6, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28,

33, 5 1 , 59, 60, 67, 77, 96, 1 20,

123, 1 24, 128, 1 29, 1 32, 1 34, 1 35,

En 1 75

Two, the xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xxiv, xxxii, 5, 13 , 1 7, 2 1 , 25-29, 3 1 -

34, 58, 60, 64, 66, 74, 75, 84, 86, 88, 89, 94, 95, 1 0 1 - 1 03, 1 05, En50

void xix, xxv, xxx, 7- 10, 1 4, 2 1 , 22,

33, 34, 35, 40, 50, 66, 77, passim

ch.3, 1 14- 1 1 6, 1 24, En 1 70

Wittgenstein, L. 91 , 93 youth 37-40, 68

1 64