The Aesthetics of Failure

The Aesthetics of Failure
The Aesthetics of Failure:

Inexpressibility in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction
By
Marcin Tereszewski
The Aesthetics of Failure:
Inexpressibility in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction,
by Marcin Tereszewski
This book first published 2013
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2013 by Marcin Tereszewski
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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ISBN (10): 1-4438-5043-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5043-8

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Beckett and Theory
Chapter One ............................................................................................... 11

Towards Negativity
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 41

The Inexpressible as the Invisible
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 65

Ethics of Negativity
Conclusion ................................................................................................. 89
Bibliography .............................................................................................. 93
Index ....................................................................................................... 101

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the assistance and
patience of Ewa KĊbáowska-àawniczak, who read and reread these
chapters more times than she would like to remember. I’m also grateful to
the Institute of English Philology at the University of Wrocáaw for
granting me the possibility to carry out this research.
Special thanks go to my parents and Paulina for their infinite support
and encouragement.
INTRODUCTION
BECKETT AND THEORY
What is different about Beckett is not that he provokes a critical response...

but the protean, open-ended, ‘undecidable quality of the challenge he
offers. In this, it seems to us, he is the poet of the post-structuralist age.
Not that he was not the poet of other ages too for he was – Beckett as the
quintessential nouveau romancier, Beckett the Cartesian, Beckett the
Existentialist, these have rubbed shoulders with Beckett the nihilist,
Beckett the mystic and Beckett the explorer of the limitations of language.
(Butler and Davis 1988: ix)
The futility of classifying Beckett into any philosophical or literary

category is now a commonplace sentiment shared by many Beckett
scholars and is one which explains the multiplicity and variety of critical
approaches undertaken throughout the years. Notwithstanding the variety
of philosophical contexts in which Beckett has been read, the question
which has most visibly stood out is whether Beckett is to be classified as a
modernist or as a postmodernist writer. Beckett criticism indeed stands at a
theoretical crossroads, as it seems that Beckett has served critics as both a
paradigmatic modernist and a paradigmatic postmodernist, the poet of
existential humanism and also the deconstructionist par excellence. The
question of where to locate Beckett within these paradigms has been one
of the most enduring fixtures in Beckett scholarship with no valid
consensus being even possible due to the divergent understanding of the
terms in question. This debate between a modernist Beckett and a
postmodernist Beckett, according to David Pattie, “should be thought of as
a divide between those who used literary texts to uncover the essential
truth of human experience, and those who used texts to uncover the
contingent nature of reality” (227) and he concludes that “there is ample
evidence in Beckett’s work to support both cases” (227). The former
approach would adhere to the essentialist bias of existentialist humanism,
whereas the latter would be more in line with the linguistic focus of
poststructuralist theories.
This first approach is connected to the first period of Beckett criticism
inaugurated in the 1960s with the publication of Martin Esslin’s Theatre of
2 Introduction
the Absurd (1961) and Hugh Kenner’s Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study
(1961). Both of these books established Beckett studies within the
paradigm of existentialist humanism, wherein Beckett’s work was read
primarily in terms of a search for a foundation of human experience
confronted in its naked authenticity. For these critics, Beckett is a
modernist not only because of the themes they locate in his work but also
because of the experimental nature of his work, especially in regards to
language and style. This experimentalism breaks with the conventions of
the traditional novel and proceeds to question the ‘essential’ subjectivity
underlying language and the narrative. The idea of a reliable narrator or I
speaker is thus thrown into question, thereby breaking with the convention
of a stable voice constituting the center of a narrative. Along with the
destabilization of authorial voice, language becomes the subject of inquiry.
This break in both narrative and theatrical conventions places language
and style at the forefront of the debate.
The dissolution into incomprehensibility and paratactic language
seems to have been one of the salient features which defined Beckett as
modernist writer, first associated with the French nouveua roman. As
Alain Robbe-Grillet explains:
Things must take place within the text itself. It is impossible to write a text
which, as a narration, is based on the old established order when its
purpose is to show that this order is wavering. On the contrary. Everything
must happen within the text so that severances, faults, ambiguities,
mobilities, fragmentation, contractions, holes must be enacted. It is the text
which must display them. (24)
The text then becomes not a vehicle for any coherent meaning or story as
such, but the object of interrogation. The emphasis on style, itself a
defining feature of a modernist writer, relegates the “story” to a secondary
position of importance, as style is no longer seen as an innocent medium
of the story, but is itself implicated in its construction.
The second period of Beckett criticism, beginning in the 1970 until
today, developed as a result of literary studies becoming more theoretical,
interdisciplinary, extending their scope to philosophy, psychoanalysis,
postcolonialism and feminism, 1 to name just a few of the disciplines
1
All these various theoretical approaches are outlined and examined in Palgrave
Advances in Samuel Beckett’s Studies and Samuel Beckett in Longman Critical
Readers. Philosophy deserves special attention, because it seems to be the most
developed theoretical context in Beckett studies, evidenced by such publications as
Beckett and Theory 3
employed for the purposes of studying literature. With the development of

poststructuralism in literary studies and postmodernism as a general
cultural and literary paradigm shift, critics began to extrapolate postmodern
tendencies in the themes and theoretical tenets underlying Beckett’s work,
especially his prose. They employed theories and terminology connected
with poststructuralism, thus setting themselves apart from Esslin’s humanist
existentialism by pursuing an interest in linguistic indeterminacy,
destabilization of subjectivity and meaning.2 Some of the major deconstructive
readings of Beckett – Connor (1988), Hill (1990), Tresize (1990) – do not
attempt to deconstruct Beckett, but rather read him as a self-deconstructive
author, demonstrating that his own poetics is already parasitically working
on/against itself. This closeness between deconstruction and Beckett’s
own language is the affirmed reason why Derrida himself had never
attempted an analysis of Beckett’s work.
Whereas the humanist existentialist reads Beckett’s work in terms of a
search for the authentic subject and a confrontation with existence, the
poststructuralist would undermine the very conditions in which a subject
and reality could be represented in the first place. Despite the vast
differences between these two approaches, it would seem that both critical
theories express a skeptical attitude towards language: the former seeing it
as an artificial impediment cloaking the essential and ultimately inexpressible
truth of the human condition, the latter seeing language more in terms of
its inherent presuppositions and narratological determinations which
coincide with a logocentric bias always already at work in writing. The
proponents of both approaches to Beckett would therefore agree that he
was writing against language, aware of all the contingencies and pitfalls
traditional narratives hold for a writer. Beckett’s writing thus exposes to
full view the mechanisms and presuppositions defining literature.
Another important focal point identified by critics of the poststructuralist
persuasion addresses the question of foundationalism. Whereas modernists
and humanist existentialists would rather see the breakdown of language
and narrative as serving the overall pursuit of an essential foundation of
truth and the human condition, the poststructuralist sees it more as a
destabilization of the possibilities of representation, a complete break with
the idea of a transcendental signified which would exist outside the
Beckett and Philosophy, which outlines the various philosophical influences on

Beckett.
2
This poststructuralist tendency in Beckett criticism is further exemplified by
publications devoted primarily to this topic. Eric Migernier’s Beckett and French
Theory: The Narration of Transgression and Anthony Uhlmann’s Beckett and
Poststructuralism.
4 Introduction
materiality of an endlessly deferring language. It would seem that

Beckett’s work offers ample evidence in support of both readings;
however, the poststructuralist interpretation would read Beckett as putting
into question the whole concept of the essential truth, self and reality,
seeing them as linguistic constructs adhering to a logocentric constitution.
Beckett’s work can thus be read as an evolution from modernist
intimations of ‘depth’ existing beneath the materiality of language.
Consequently, Samuel Beckett occupies an ambiguous place in the
history of literature. To label Beckett a modernist, postmodernist, avant-
gardist, or any other “–ist” would be a gross simplification of the
philosophically ambivalent nature of his work. Whether or not Beckett can
be considered a modernist or a postmodernist is therefore beside the point,
as his work extends to a remarkably wide field of philosophical thought.
Neither modernist, nor postmodernist, Beckett’s work is an example of the
kind of writing that resists a totalizing interpretation. Accordingly, the
main difficulty faced by anyone attempting a critical account of Beckett’s
work is the inadequacy of any theoretical boundaries within which an
interpretation could be proposed. Because Beckett’s texts do not yield
themselves readily to interpretations, all interpretations ventured on behalf
of any philosophical methodology seem in the end to be impositions on his
work. In this sense, Beckett’s texts resemble what Barthes calls “writerly”
texts, texts which draw attention to themselves as textual constructs and
require the active participation of the reader. For decades now Beckett’s
work has afforded inspiration to adherents of various philosophical trends.
Indeed, it would seem as though the whole history of philosophy can be
read (or rather written) into Beckett’s texts.
One important critic who establishes a theoretical link between the
modernist and postmodernist model of Beckett criticism is Ihab Hassan.
Not only is he one of the first critics of postmodernism, Hassan also
contributed to Beckett criticism with his book, The Literature of Silence:
Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (1967). What separates this study from
the prevailing existentialist interpretations is the shift Hassan makes from
describing a meaningless and absurd world towards establishing language
itself as being meaningless and silence thus being the only possible
outcome and goal of a writer like Beckett who “may be considered the
author who wants to seal the lips of the muse” (31). In his focus on
silence, Hassan introduces one of the defining themes of postmodernism: a
distrust of language as a means of conveying meaning. Of the eleven
“defiens” of postmodernity that Hassan famously lists in “Pluralism in
Postmodern Perspective”, one – The Unrepresentable – stands out as
crucial for this study. He develops this term, stating that “Postmodern
literature, particularly, often seeks its limits, entertains its ‘exhaustion’,

subverts itself in forms of articulate ‘silence’. It becomes liminary,
contesting the modes of its own representation” (197) and later goes on to
quote J-F Lyotard: “the postmodern would be that which, in the modern,
puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself” (197).
The aesthetic dimension of inexpressibility and its ethical consequences
will be the primary focus of this study. Inexpressibility, as evidenced in
the essays collected in Ineffability, is not merely a modernist or a
postmodernist concern, but is a topic that has spanned literature from
religious discourse to Beckett. The Judeo-Christian interdiction against
naming/representing God becomes the basis for the poststructuralist
impossibility of representing the center of any given structure, be it
religious, political, ideological or philosophical. And thus God is
impossible to represent within the confines of the system of which he is
the center as much as the subject who replaced God as the center of what
had become the center of a humanist (instead of theological) model of
reality. As Derrida points out in his famous “Structure, Sign and Play in
the Discourse of Human Sciences” the center is what is at once in and
outside the structure it defines.
The failure to express and represent in Beckett’s work is the guiding
theme of this book. The trope of ineffability, inexpressibility,
unrepresentability is not new to literature, and is certainly not the creation
of the postmodern, as Hassan’s criterion might have suggested;
inexpressibility, as a trope and topic, has been present in Western
literature, philosophy and religion since ancient times. Inexpressibility
spans the modernism/postmodernism debate and it could be argued that it
is one of the central questions of both approaches, which is why it also
holds a central place in this dissertation.
Philosophy has always been a veritable force in Beckett criticism. As
Simon Critchley notes, “Beckett’s work seems to offer itself generously to
philosophical interpretation only to withdraw this offer by periodically
reducing such interpretation to ridicule” (143). Indeed, Beckett’s work is a
reservoir of philosophical allusions and traditions which have given birth
to a staggering array of comparative studies. Starting with a broad
existentialist framework, Beckett criticism later moved to identifying
concrete philosophical influences on Beckett in the works of René
Descartes, Arthur Schopenhauer, Arnold Geulincx, Fritz Mauthner,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to name but a few. This study is no different in
this respect, as it also takes philosophy as its context for reading Beckett
and to this end brings Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas as a
context. The notion of ethics developed by Levinas has been a major
6 Introduction
philosophical influence in the approach represented in this dissertation,

especially in the third chapter, which deals almost exclusively with the
notion of alterity. Blanchot’s philosophy of literature, seeing writing as
negation, the writer as the neutral voice of exteriority, has provided this
dissertation with an illuminating, though by no means exhaustive,
framework. Though critics have commented on the affinity between
Beckett and Blanchot (most notably Simon Critchley and Leslie Hill),
there is, however, no one critical body of work which would develop the
philosophical themes permeating the work of these two writers.
Not much is known about Blanchot’s life. Before the outbreak of
World War II, Blanchot was a Parisian journalist who contributed essays
on literary and political matters to various journals. Blanchot’s writing can
be divided into four types: political journalism, literary reviews, novels
and a hybrid style of writing which escapes classification, often referred to
as recits written in an enigmatic and aphoristic style. It is quite difficult to
reconstruct the philosophical context of Blanchot’s literary theories, as
they were developed mostly through his many reviews commissioned by
French journals such as the Journal des Debats, Critique and La Vouvelle
Revue Francaise. These reviews did not adhere to rigid academic
standards in the sense that neither footnotes nor a works cited page was
employed. Furthermore, Blanchot rarely makes any references to his
contemporaries, even when he is directly commenting on their theories.
Nevertheless, it is possible to establish key ideas and philosophical
tenets which guide the reading of Blanchot’s work. What is at the heart of
Blanchot theory “is the link between language and negativity, where
negativity describes the power of language to negate the reality of things
through the insubstantiality of the word” (Hasse and Large 25). It can be
seen that Blanchot’s work often questions the possibilities of literature
itself. This study will attempt to contextualize Beckett’s work within
Blanchot’s theories of literature, emphasizing the way in which Beckett’s
texts are in many ways a demonstration of Blanchot’s tenets. Though there
was no personal relationship between Beckett and Blanchot, there
certainly was an artistic kinship. By the time Beckett was working on his
trilogy, Blanchot was already established in the literary community as an
influential critic. His favourable review of The Unnamable was, in the
words of Beckett’s biographer Anthony Cronin, “a milestone in the
progress of Beckett’s reputation” (436).
The first chapter explores the place negativity holds in Beckett’s prose,
especially The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing, in terms of its linguistic
(aesthetic) expression and philosophical backdrop. Beckett’s own texts
dealing with literary theory, serve as a starting point for the discussion of
the place language has in his own work. Such pieces as “The German
Letter of 1937” and his essay, “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce”, though
never directly about his own work, nonetheless provide insight into his
poetics, which will be presented as a poetics of negativity and failure. It
must be made clear that this negativity is far removed from the nihilism so
often ascribed to Beckett’s work. This negativity will be read more as a
denial of the constraining force of language and is in line with the
dominant modernist paradigm of negativity being an escape from the
materiality of language towards a metaphysical essence found beyond
representation. Beckett’s trilogy provides a remarkable example of a work,
in which both subjectivity and language become the subjects of negative
subtraction. The final volume of the trilogy, The Unnamable, presents the
self as language with only a voice questioning its own existence. The
means of representing the self are put in question with the only outcome
being an infinite regress of paradoxical language and aporetic self-
contradiction. Beckett’s subsequent prose work, Texts for Nothing, further
develops this experiment in linguistic implosion and draws even more
attention to the negative capacity of literature.
Blanchot’s theory of literature will offer a framework in which to read
Beckett’s fiction, as an affinity can be discerned between the negative
direction Blanchot was to take with the proposal of neutral speech as the
anonymous and disembodied voice of literature and Beckett’s negative
poetics. Language will be the main focus of this chapter which will trace
the philosophical impetus generated by Stéphane Mallarmé and Blanchot
regarding the place of negation in relation to literature.
The second chapter focuses on the visual aspects of Beckett’s work,
seeing in them a reworking of the inexpressibility topos. It can be
observed that Beckett at a certain point in his career moved from writing
prose towards a more visual medium; first, there was the theatre, then
there was work indented for television (Film). Furthermore, even in his
earlier narrative work, Beckett was extremely meticulous about visual
details to the extent that certain fragments can be read as linguistic
snapshots of events, so visually stimulating are the details. For example,
certain scenes in Ill Seen Ill Said, Company, and Imagination Dead
Imagine are comprised of descriptions of an image.
Beckett’s biographers (James Knowlson and Anthony Cronin) have
also portrayed Beckett as a lover and a patron of the arts, frequently
visiting art galleries, befriending and supporting local artists, both famous
and amateur. There is a vivid connection to be discerned between the arts
and Beckett’s work, an influence that has not gone unnoticed by Beckett
critics, especially Lois Oppenheim whose book-length study, The Painted
8 Introduction
Veil, is devoted to the subject. In this book, Oppenheim sought not only to
extrapolate the influence the visual arts had exerted on Beckett’s creativity
but also to offer a theoretical link between the visual arts and Beckett’s
particular sensitivity to the visual medium. Notwithstanding the various
connections particular works of art have to particular scenes in Beckett’s
work or to the theatrical imagery employed on stage, there is also a
philosophical affinity linking Beckett’s conception of art with that of
surrealism and expressionism, as evidenced in his own comments on
famous painters and the arts found in Disjecta.
What this chapter seeks to portray is not so much the relationship
between the arts and Beckett’s writing, but how inexpressibility remains
one of the most dominant themes in the visual dimension of such pieces as
Ill Seen Ill Said and Imagination Dead Imagine. The way absence and
invisibility, ill-seeing, is employed coincides with the general discussion
of inexpressibility in the previous chapter in that both have at their source
a concern for the preservation of alterity; both approaches, the linguistic
and the visual, are predicated on the presupposition that the failure to
represent is a necessary failure, one which is responsible for the ethical
relation with the inexpressible Other.
The third chapter serves as a synthesis of the two previous chapters in
the sense that it binds the notions of inexpressibility and negativity in both
the linguistic and visual medium with the notion of ethics as it is
understood by both Blanchot and, especially, Emmanuel Levinas. The
questions raised in this chapter will concern the relation inexpressibility
and language has to alterity and what figures as the Other in literature.
This question of remaining silent in relation to alterity has already been
approached within the context of negative theology whose links with
Derrida’s deconstruction will be briefly explored for the purpose of
fleshing out the affinity between deconstruction and Beckett’s art.
This chapter will take Beckett’s How It Is as its focal point and will
explore it in terms of ethics, especially in respect to how the notion of the
witness is utilized in relation to alterity. It will be necessary to draw on
Levinas’s philosophy, as the relation a subject has towards this unnamable
Other is for Levinas the basis of ethics. It has been noticed by such critics
as Ewa Plonowska-Ziarek and Alain Badiou that Beckett’s work, starting
with How It Is, shifts its attention from the solipsistic questioning of itself
as a narrative towards a confrontation with alterity. This chapter goes
some way in locating Beckett within the postmodern paradigm in so far as
the postmodern is understood as a current of thought that maintains an
irreducible distance to alterity.
The choice of these particular novels and recits by Beckett was

dictated primarily by the salience of the themes under discussion. Though
theatrical and television works are referred to on occasion, the intention of
this study was to focus on Beckett’s prose works, as they have received
relatively little attention from critics. Compared to the critical attention
Waiting for Godot and Endgame have received, works such as Texts for
Nothing, Ill Seen Ill Said and Imagination Dead Imagine have been mostly
ignored. Two works in particular – The Unnamable and How It Is – stand
out as they represent a culmination, or turning point, in Beckett’s poetics
and thus merit particular attention. The topic discussed in this dissertation
is deeply entrenched in the philosophy of Levinas and Blanchot and thus
much of the content is devoted to an extrapolation of the philosophical
context within which Beckett’s work can be discussed.
My readings of the selected texts by Beckett locate inexpressibility in
the junction between the ethical and the aesthetic significance of a relation
to alterity. This study will attempt to show that inexpressibility in
Beckett’s texts is not only a modernist aesthetic criterion, whereby
language is put to the limit, but also an ethical necessity imposed by the
relation maintained with alterity. The aesthetics of failure is bound with an
ethical obligation imposed by the impossible demand to write the
inexpressible.
CHAPTER ONE
TOWARDS NEGATIVITY
The theme of nothingness in Beckett’s work has gained critical

currency mostly as an example of the moribund nihilism pervasive in
existentialist readings, though the scope of this theme extends further
beyond existentialism to include both ancient as well as modern
philosophy.1 The two primary questions I will attempt to answer in this
chapter are: how does Beckett attempt to present nothingness and what is
the philosophical context of this endeavor? To answer the first question, I
will present the negative imperative as it exists in Beckett’s critical
writing, the importance of which has become increasingly visible in
Beckett criticism due to the publication of Disjecta, a collection of
miscellaneous writings, letters and essays, which give much insight into
the theoretical background of Beckett’s work. Furthermore, I will present
the various textual strategies employed by Beckett as a way of
destabilizing, or perhaps “detextualizing” the work. This will lead us to the
second question of the philosophical conditions of such writing, as well as
to the significant place of nothingness in Texts for Nothing, which will be
approached within the context of Beckett’s contemporary and critic,
Maurice Blanchot. Both these questions will be discussed within the
framework of the inexpressibility topos binding Beckett’s work.
In “The German Letter of 1937”,2 Samuel Beckett states that language
is “like a veil that must be torn in order to get at the things (or the
Nothingness) behind it” (Beckett 1984: 171). This statement seems to
reveal a pivotal declaration; namely, that the direction of Beckett’s artistic
program is informed by an essentialist bias which locates authentic reality
as existing behind the obfuscating appearances of language. Moreover,
this authentic reality, as this statement declares, might also be construed as
1
Ackerley traces this theme of Nothingness, stressing the references Beckett has
made to Democritus, Geulincx and Schopenhauer (409-410).
2
This letter, written in German (translated by Martin Esslin) on July 9, 1937 to
Axel Kaun who he had met in Germany three months prior to writing the letter.
This letter in German and its translation (51-54; 170-73) was included in Disjecta.
12 Chapter One
Nothingness. Therefore, in order to reveal this “Nothingness” behind the

words, Beckett had to first compose the necessary textual fabric which
would then be meticulously dismantled, thereby exposing the
metaphysical presuppositions and grammatical entanglements which
rendered the project an impossibility ab initio. Indeed, much of Beckett’s
work, from The Unnamable onwards, resembles a textual structure
encasing nothingness, mathematically engineered patterns leading to an
exhaustion of the very figures and signs constructing the structure.3 This is
evinced in Beckett’s predilection for the use of exhaustive permutations
and aporetic logic. It has now become commonplace to view language in
Beckett’s fiction as an obstacle on the path to silence and ideal
apperception. 4 This approach owes much to the intentional fallacy of
accommodating Beckett’s own comments on language and his artistic
obligation “to bore one hole after another in it [language], until what lurks
behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot
imagine a higher goal for a writer today” (Beckett 1984: 172). The
metaphysical notion of exposing the something or nothing behind the
artificial nature of language is what strongly links Beckett to the modernist
notion of inexpressibility. Language, or rather the distance that Beckett
hoped to achieve from language, guides the aesthetics of his work, which
is an aesthetics of inexpressibility.
The Philosophical Origins of Nothingness in Beckett

Beckett’s imperative to express the nothingness preempting the
materiality of words is (despite the professed impossibility of fruition) the
driving force behind much of his work. Yet, little consideration has been
given to the tradition from which the concept of nothingness in Beckett’s
work originates. It would be impossible within the limits of this study to
provide a survey of the vast philosophical tradition permeating Beckett’s
work, for one would have to start with pre-Socratic philosophy and work
one’s way up to Derrida; however, the theme of nothingness – already
present, as we have seen, in Beckett’s critical work – can be distilled to a
3
A mathematical awareness informs Beckett’s writings. Permutations, serial
themes and logical exhaustion can be found in Watt. Geometry and accurate spatial
coordinates construct the images in Imagination Dead Imagine. Logic and
mathematics are frequently utilized for either comic purposes or to prove their
ineffectiveness as epistemological tools. Paradox and exhaustion are the results of
logic and mathematics, not conclusions.
4
This approach is visible in critical studies which are based on existentialism (cf.
Esslin 46) and on negative theology (Wolosky 90-92).
Towards Negativity 13
distinct philosophical pedigree alluded already to in a letter to Sighne

Kennedy in which Beckett stated that “if I were in the unenviable position
of having to study my work my points of departure would be the ‘Naught
is more real . . .’ and the ‘Ubi nihil vales . . .’” (Disjecta 113). Both these
quotes refer to the works of two philosophers, Democritus and Arnold
Guelincx respectively. 5 Though Beckett was responding here to a letter
concerning Murphy, I believe that these points of departure are also
relevant for a study of Beckett’s later work.
Beckett directly draws from Democritus when he has Malone say,
“nothing is more real than nothingness” (1973: 193). Nothingness in
Democritus’ atomism bears a relevant relation to Beckett’s conception of
the void. Democritus was the first to argue for the constitutive force the
void has over atoms, which, in other words, translates to the constitutive
role of non-being in relation to being. Empty space became a necessary
element in the constitution of atoms and “was postulated as required for
motion, but was characterized as ‘what is not’, thus violating the Eleatic
principle that what is not cannot be” (Taylor 204). For Democritus the
void was understood as a necessary place for atoms to exist and be in
motion, and thus the void, no longer conceptualized as nothingness, began
to function as space; that is, as a constitutive condition for being to exist.
“Naught is more real than nothing”, because without the void as space
there would be no atoms, no tangible being. As will be seen later, the void
as a positive constitutive force is also present in the literary theories of
Beckett and Blanchot.
The second quoted dictum: Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis (“Where you
are worth nothing, there you should want nothing”) is ascribed to the
Flemish Cartesian Occasionalist, Arnould Geulincx, whose works Beckett
read in their original Latin. The influence of Geulincx’s philosophy is both
covertly (Murphy, The Unnamable) and overtly present (Molloy) in
Beckett’s novels leading up to Texts for Nothing. For Geulincx, the mind,
unlike the body, was outside God’s sphere of influence. Much of the
mind/body dualism present in Beckett’s work owes to Geulincx’s
philosophy. Occasionalists, notably Melanbranche, developed their theory
of divine causation on the basis of the Cartesian mind/body dualism. The
physical world and the mental world are thus completely separated in
terms of mutual influence and God is seen as the supreme intervening
force of events. In his Ethics (1675), Geulincx praises the meditative
efforts exerted within the microcosm of the mind, as only within the
5
Arnold Geulincx’s Ethics has only recently been translated into English from its
original Latin read by Beckett.
14 Chapter One
confines of the mind does the human will enjoy unbridled freedom. The
Beckettian obligation to express can be traced to Geulincx’s ethical
imperative of renouncing materialism in favor of introspection. Along with
materialism language too had to be overcome, and it is at this point that
Beckett’s work comes closest to the practices of negative theology.
Though Beckett never refers directly to any other philosophers as he
had done to Democritus and Geulincx, the problem of nothingness in
modern philosophy and in Beckett has been addressed through the
philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul
Sartre. As Lance St. John Butler’s arduously researched book, Samuel
Beckett and the Meaning of Being: A Study in Ontological Parable,
demonstrates, the philosophical tenets of the three aforementioned
philosophers can be successfully extrapolated from Beckett’s work.
However, the most important aspect of Beckett’s invocation to
nothingness is the degree to which it differs from nihilism understood as a
voiding of meaning and value. It is precisely this hypostatic nothingness in
Beckett’s work that makes meaning possible and constitutes the primary
imperative underlying his fiction.
The negative imperative in Beckett’s critical writing

Beckett’s critical writing emerges from the initial phase of his career
and, though never explicitly about his own literary work, it nonetheless
offers insight into his artistic endeavors, providing as it does a gloss and
framework of the themes found in his subsequent work. I am not
suggesting here that his rather scant critical output should be treated as a
key to a systematic philosophy or aesthetic theory which could be directly
applied to Beckett’s drama and fiction, yet it is impossible to ignore the
multiple clues in the form of philosophical allusions, aesthetic concerns,
and artistic assumptions found in the essays, letters and dialogues
accumulated in Disjecta. Considering Beckett’s reticence about his work,
the publication of such critical texts offers the reader what must be treated
as a tentative, though helpful, intellectual backdrop to his work. The two
seminal critical texts to be considered here – “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . .
Joyce” (1929) and “Three Dialogues with George Duthuit” (1949) – have
been chosen on account of their preoccupation with the themes in
question: negativity and inexpressibility. Before continuing to those
essays, it would be beneficial to outline the literary origins of this
preoccupation.
A brief comparison of Beckett’s work with that of Joyce’s will suffice
to shed some light on the formation of Beckett’s poetics, particularly his
preoccupation with negation. Indeed, the influence that Joyce had on his
protégée has already been the subject of numerous studies,6 which is why
only one aspect of the Joyce/Beckett relationship will be of interest here;
namely, the understanding that each of the writers had of language.
Though Beckett’s poetics was greatly indebted to and influenced by the
few years in the late 20s he spent helping Joyce7 write Finnegan’s Wake, it
becomes clear that a radical separation did occur. This struggle with the
Joycean legacy is evidenced in an interview assembled by Israel Shenker
and quoted by Gontarski:
. . . the difference is that Joyce was a superb manipulator of material,

perhaps the greatest. He was making words do the absolute maximum of
work. There isn’t a syllable that’s superfluous. The kind of work I do is
one in which I am not the master of my material. The more Joyce knew the
more he could. His tendency is toward omniscience and omnipotence as an
artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance. I don’t think that impotence
has been exploited in the past. (1985: 232)
The rejection of knowledge and power for the sake of impotence opens for
Beckett a type of writing that depends on negativity for its ‘structure.’ I
use the term structure loosely, as Beckett’s disintegrating texts and
grammar offer testimony to his anti-systematic and anti-structural
conception of writing, yet within this disintegration, the negative
imperative does offer a principle on which composition is based.
“Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce”, a tribute and interpretation of
Joyce’s “Work in Progress” (Finnegan’s Wake), is a crucial starting point
to a reading of Beckett’s work. Here, Beckett addresses the melding of
form and content in the Work in Progress, an aim that is arguably fulfilled
in Finnegan’s Wake and one that finds its continuation in Beckett’s work.
About Work in Progress, Beckett writes: “Here form is content, content is
form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not to be
read – or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened
to. His [Joyce’s] writing is not about something; it is that something itself”
(Beckett 1984: 27). Indeed, musicality and an onomatopoeic rendering of
content were to remain a constant element in Beckett’s work; however, in
6
The 16th edition of European Joyce Studies, Beckett, Joyce and the Art of the
Negative is a collection of essays exploring the issue of the Beckett/Joyce relation.
Dirk van Hulle’s essay entitled “‘Nichtsnichtsundnichts’: Beckett’s and Joyce’s
Transtextual Undoings” deserves special attention due to its emphasis on this
relation.
7
Knowlson remarks that Joyce’s influence on Beckett was primarily a moral one,
making Beckett realize that indeed writing, not teaching, was his calling (111).
16 Chapter One
other aspects, such as the aesthetic deployment of negativity, Beckett

distanced himself from his mentor’s poetics.
Linda Ben-Zvi draws attention to the influence of Fritz Mauthner’s
linguistic skepticism and nominalism exerted on Beckett’s poetics,
identifying him alongside Descartes and Schopenhauer as key figures in
Beckett’s thinking (1985: 194). Mauthner’s emphasis on the metaphorical
nature of language and its inability to represent anything beyond itself may
have led Beckett to refute Joyce’s “apotheosis of the word” (Beckett 1984:
172). For Joyce language was capable of encapsulating history and could
be utilized to compile an encyclopedic repertoire of phenomenal
experience. Joyce strove for a realistic and teleological depiction of
consciousness afforded by the “immediacy” of the stream of consciousness
technique, a technique already laden with the lyricism and verboseness
Beckett sought to avoid. Instead, Beckett opted for an ascetic approach –
not a mastery of language, but its rejection and reduction. Commenting on
the aesthetic ambivalence present in the Joyce/Beckett relationship,
Gontarski writes: “Although Beckett spent considerable energy imitating
and defending Joyce, his own aesthetics was shaped mostly in recoil”
(1985: 232). Yet this recoil into negativity is nonetheless a form of
potency, as the progression towards inexpressibility and nothingness
propels the text, if not forward, then simply “on”.
“The Three Dialogues with George Duthuit,” most likely fashioned
upon Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, are
famous for containing one of the most famous of Beckett’s dicta regarding
the primary aesthetic dilemma of art which, “weary of its puny exploits,
weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the
same old thing, of going a little bit further along a dreary road” (1984:
139) should instead opt for “the expression that there is nothing to express,
nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power
to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express”
(1984: 139). This oft-quoted passage, made in reference to Bram van
Velde’s paintings, has gained critical notoriety, not only because it rather
exhaustively expounds Beckett’s “aesthetic of nothingness” (Murphy
1991: 49), but also because it combines both ethical concerns connected
with the obligation to express and with the purely aesthetic notion of
inexpressibility. Both the ethical and the aesthetic dimensions of art meld
here as they do in his later work. This passage is, therefore, evocative of
the impotence that a writer deals with when expressing what is not merely
a product of language. Though negativity seems to be the axiomatic
trajectory of Beckett’s work, Gontarski reads the “nothing to express” as
an active phrase: “what remains to be expressed is nothingness, even
though that needs to be done with the faulty system of language” (1985:
236).
Furthermore, this “sweeping distinction” is reiterated during the
conversation on Bram van Velde, where the topic falls on the condition of
the artist: “the situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the
event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him, who,
helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to
paint” (142). Beckett’s work is replete with protagonists who are thrust
into an involuntary relation with alterity which demands a response,
whether it be waiting as is required by Godot, writing as is required by the
mysterious Godot-like Youdi in Malone Dies, speaking as is required by
the “they” in The Unnamable, and remembering as is required by Krapp’s
recorded voice from the past in Krapp’s Last Tape, to name just a few
examples. It becomes clear that the actions of the protagonists, however
inconsequential and circular they may be, are precipitated by the demand
set forth by this inexpressible and invisible source. It must be added that
this is a common Modernist “aporia”, referred to also by Blanchot in
“From Dread to Language”: “The writer finds himself in this more and
more comical situation – of having nothing to write, of having no means of
writing it, and of being forced by an extreme necessity to keep writing
it…. Whatever he wants to say, it is nothing ” (345).
Based on a real conversation between Beckett and George Duthuit,
“The Three Dialogues” express what could be read as an artistic
manifesto, with a clear declaration of the negative mode his fiction and
drama were to assume in the future. Furthermore, “The Three Dialogues”
themselves are a dramatic dialogue structured in a way that reflects the
negative imperative it advocates. This rhetoric of self-negation and false
logic will become familiar in the trilogy. David A. Hatch, in his study on
“The Three Dialogues”, develops the assertion that the two speakers, B
and D, construct an argument with undefined assertions, (such as void),
instead of demolishing a proposed argument in the Platonic fashion by
questioning the assertions (454). The feebleness of this construction is
exposed by B with his last lines, “Yes, yes I am mistaken, I am mistaken”
(Beckett 1984: 45). The character B often contradicts his assertions,
occupying the role of the fool, consigning B to failure.
Beckett’s critical essays can be used to make the case that his
preoccupation with inexpressibility of nothingness evolved in opposition
to Joyce’s poetics and in response to Fritz Mauthner’s skeptical view of
language that draws attention to its own paucity as a means of expression.
Beckett noted that some form of Nominalist irony is necessary to his
project of the “unword” (Beckett 1984: 173). The sense of having to
18 Chapter One
continue writing, despite the impossibility of doing so, is a theme that

permeates much of his later work, starting with the trilogy and onwards.
Moreover, the methods for how this “going on” would be carried out is
prefigured in these critical statements which give a clear indication of the
negative direction his work was to take.
Negativity in The Unnamable

The trilogy as a whole could be seen as representing a culmination in
Beckett’s fiction, where many of the themes of his earlier work are
brought to fruition and where most of what was to follow draws much on
the themes found therein. In one of the few recorded interviews (with
Isreal Shenker) Beckett said “in my last book – The Unnamable – there’s
complete disintegration. No ‘I’, no ‘have’, no being’. No nominative, no
accusative, no verb. There’s no way to go on.”8 In essence, The Unnamable
is a language experiment based on pure reason, wherein self-referential
language is employed for the purpose of a subject establishing himself. In
the course of this experience, the basic oppositions of subject/object,
origin and representation, and same and other, are disintegrated, leading
towards, though never reaching, the inexpressible source of literature.
Every name is later negated and any stable linguistic referent is discarded,
thereby creating a subjectless subject as the first-person narrative. The
themes can be further distilled, as Beckett’s narrator tells us that “in my
life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak,
the inability to be silent, and solitude, that what I’ve had to make the best
of” (400).
Much of what could be seen as the premise of The Unnamable can be
construed as an amalgamation of various philosophical notions pertaining
to subjectivity. The reference to Descartes’ method of self-apperception is
unmistakable, as is the reference to Locke’s tabula rasa. If subjectivity is
conceived as a result of the ability to think self-reflexively, thus
recognizing oneself as a sentient being by means of sensory experience
and language, then The Unnamable is the proper thought experiment in
attempting to conceive of such a consciousness. Severed from an outside
phenomenal existence, the unnamable speaking “I” can refer only to itself
for validity. This self-reflexive reference to “oneself” becomes one of the
most engaging problems in the novel, as it tests the philosophical theories
8
William Hutchings, “The Unintelligible Terms of an Incomprehensible
Damnation”: Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, Sheol, and St. Erkenwald,”
Twentieth Century Literature 27, no.2 (1981): 111.
of Descartes. The starting point for The Unnamable’s self-constitution is

the premise that the cogito, the thinking self, is an antonymous, stable, and
self-sustaining entity. Without a body, without the certainty of seeing
anything outside the self, the unnamable first-person speaker is in the
position of interpreting itself without the aid of external sensory
impressions necessary for the constitution of self-consciousness. The
speaking “I” of The Unnamable attempts to deploy Cartesian logic in
order to constitute a stable ego cogito, the result being a circular and
prototypical mise en abyme structure.
The Unnamable begins with three questions: “Where now? Who now?
When now?” Answers to these three key narratological questions would
enable the I speaker to define himself within the space of his narrative.
These questions are, of course, left unanswered and the I speaker has to
find his bearings with only what is at hand, which in this case seem to be
figments of either memories or imagination (mostly characters interwoven
from Beckett’s previous texts). The process of coming to terms with this
situation of an-archic subjectivity and (re)constructing a stable subject
takes the form of exhaustive deduction, through which the speaking I
succeeds in establishing but the barest facts of his existence: that he is
sitting in the middle of a circle with characters (taken from previous
works) orbiting him as planets would a star or electrons a nucleus.
Sometimes these particles collide, but the speaker for the most part is left
untouched and unnoticed by the passers-by. The association with clocks,
time passing in space, movements at regular intervals allows the
unnamable to measure time. There is at all times a sense of rhythmic and
systematic progression that binds this fictional space. In keeping with
Beckett’s other works (e.g. Endgame, Imagination Dead Imagine), the
association with being inside a skull is well founded. The texts give us no
indication as to how long he has been there or for how long he will have to
be there, though there are indications of gradual degeneration or entropy
associated with the time spent in this state of waiting.
Attempts to constitute a stable ego cogito amount to little more than a
parody of the Cartesian method, as logical deduction and induction reveal
their circular logic. More specifically, the attempt to constitute subjectivity
within a strictly textual context presupposes for its stability a final referent.
Descartes’ methodology is important, not only because of Beckett’s
academic interest in the philosopher, but because of the establishment of
the modern subject which is attributed to Descartes, as the primary
question leading, or, in fact, engendering, The Unnamable as a novel does
not concern solely where and when, but who the I speaker is and how this
consciousness comes to be. It is this question, pursued relentlessly by the I
20 Chapter One
speaker, that unravels the certainty traditionally accorded to the Cartesian

subject, who is brought to existence by his ability to appropriate himself in
and through not so much thought as language. It is also the answer to this
question that remains inexpressible and beyond the scope of the textual
constitution of the I speaker.
In The Unnamable and, to an ever greater extent, in Beckett’s
subsequent work, Texts for Nothing, the status of language as an Orphic
mode of expression is radically brought into question and with it is
suspended the idea of an extralinguistic or preontological source in which
meaning is anchored. This is most clearly present in The Unnamable,
where the protagonist in an attempt to isolate himself textually produces
an endless array of names and “delegates” which speak on his behalf. The
characters of Molloy, Malone, Mahood, Worm, Murphy are avatars of
himself, created in spite of himself. “All these Murphys, Molloys and
Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for
nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speaking, I should have
spoken of me and of me alone” (1973: 305). This “me” would have to be
the essential self, free from any fictionalized characterization; however, as
it becomes clear, this essential self is itself a fiction, the unrepresentability
of which perpetuates the novel. Whatever their names may be, these
characters are referred to by Beckett as “caricatures, latest surrogates,
moribunds, manikins, next vice-existers, miscreated puppets” and are seen
as standing in place of something else, the speaking I, the self, the
transcendent signified, the source of the narrative, which remains
unnamable or ineffable.
The attempt at reduction to the pure “I” proves to be both self-

contradictory and self-defeating in the most literal sense. Having divested
the self of everything, every figment, every figure and voice, one finds no
center, no unity; instead, one is left with nothing at all, no self at all. For
beyond these pronouns, characters, names, there is no self. If the I resists
this multiplicity, the I itself disappears. One is left then not with nothing as
truth, but with truly nothing. (Davies 128)
I have chosen this quote because it seems to articulate a common

understanding of Beckett’s negativity. The self is reduced to nothingness
through the rejection of the “delegates” and names that the I speaker takes
on and later discards. Indeed, the notion of language and names being
artificial constructs deferring the “true” logocentric self can be fleshed out
by the essentialist bias at work in the novel and would be in line with the
negative theological approach to Beckett. The narrator of Company
conveys this idea laconically and succinctly: “The unthinkable last of all.
Unnamable. Last person. I” (17).
With the aim of assembling or reassembling consciousness with
questions and contradictions the narrative unfolds, or rather implodes onto
itself. The unnamable, unable to utter anything that would sustain its
validity, as everything is invalidated as soon as it is uttered; the unnamable
voice can only speak for the sake of speaking. The absent source of
subjectivity, manifested through the disembodied and misappropriated
voice, assumes the central focus of the novel. “But it’s entirely a matter of
voices, no other metaphor is appropriate, they’ve blown me up with their
voices, like a balloon, and even as I collapse it’s them I hear. Who, them?”
(327). The concept of voice has a long philosophical history and is one of
the most prevalent themes in Beckett’s fiction. 9 This is a concept that
Ackerley calls Beckett’s “most profound literary creation” (607).
Because it is impossible to determine whether this voice comes from
inside or outside the subject, the relation between what is heard and the
hearer, a common theme in Beckett criticism, remains irresolvable. By the
end of the novel, the speaking voice is disembodied, belonging to no-one,
neither to the subject (if the term is still applicable to the unnamable) nor
to any character catalogued during the course of the novel:
It is not mine, I have none, I have no voice and must speak, that is all I
know, it’s round that I must revolve, of that I must speak, with this voice
that is not mine, but can only be mine, since there is no one but me, or if
there are others, to whom it might belong, they have never come near me.
(1973: 309)
Despite being dispossessed, this non-diegetic voice does assume a

function. Not only does it impose itself upon the consciousness of the
unnamable, but it also imputes an obligation to speak of oneself. The
narrator, “possessed of nothing but my voice, the voice, it may seem
natural, once the obligation has been swallowed, that I should interpret it
as an obligation to say something. But is it possible?” (1973: 313). This
desire to go on, to speak despite there being nothing to speak about,
despite there being nothing to speak with, seems to be the only condition
9
A detailed entry on the topic of the voice in Beckett’s work can be found in The
Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 607-19. In this well-researched entry, which
can also be found in the form of an article, “The Uncertainty of Self: Samuel
Beckett and the Location of Voice”, Ackerley describes the presence of this theme
through Beckett’s work, citing that “the search for the voice is the great theme of
The Unnamable” (611).
22 Chapter One
for the existence of the story and the “character” as textualized

consciousness. The same situation of negativity generating desire is
represented in Molloy as the search for the titular character’s mother,
which, analogically, seems to constitute the determining force of Molloy’s
existence. Once at his mother’s empty home Molloy recoils into a fetal
position and the story ends. The same pattern of returning to the empty
origin takes place in The Unnamable, where the search for the source of
the voice does not reach its fruition, the story simply lingers on.
The search for the origin of the voice is itself a logocentric construct
and thus initiates the mise en abyme that constitutes the core of Beckett’s
inexpressibility. This endless regress can best be illustrated with reference
to the myth of Echo and Narcissus. What links Narcissus to Echo is
reflection, in its visual and acoustic dimensions, as a constitutive force in
the formation of the subject. The figure of Echo, on the other hand, is an
example of a subjectivity with no origin, as her voice, at the same time,
belongs and does not belong to her. Much like Beckett’s characters in The
Unnamable and How It Is, she can only repeat the words of others, which
disassociates her words from her subjectivity. This uncertainty in effect
precludes her presence as a speaking subject, as she is nothing more than a
sounding board for other people’s words. It is only by means of
appropriating the other’s voice that she can become present; only by
speaking with the words of the other can her presence reveal itself. In
other words, her presence in the world takes on a metaphorical form of a
reflection, a mirror reflection of Narcissus’ words.
The origin of the voice is thus deferred onto another subject, whose
voice is, in turn, deferred further back. The myth of Echo is thus an
expression of one of the most prevalent aporias encountered in Beckett’s
fiction: the origin as repetition. Being able to repeat only what has already
been said, Echo and the Beckettian subject defer the moment of original
evocation. Echo’s death, described as an eternity of repeating the voices of
others, with neither body nor voice of her own, is analogous to the
protagonist of The Unnamable. Both are deprived of a material body and
are consigned to exist solely as dispossessed voices. Like Echo, Beckett’s
characters claim to be only repeating or citing what has already been said,
unable to say anything new, anything that would ultimately belong to
them. Their existence precludes the possibility of distinguishing between
reflections and the thing reflected.
The Echo-like subjectivity without origin is interestingly represented in
Krapp’s Last Tape. In this one-man play we see what seem to be the last
days of Krapp on his 69th birthday performing his annual ritual of
reminiscing with the aid of a taped recording of himself from his 39th
birthday. The tape recording serves a mediating purpose between the

different selves from various times. The sourcelessness of the subject is
represented by Krapp listening to himself who earlier listened to yet an
earlier version of himself. The discontinuity of these selves is emphasized
further by lapses of memory, as when Krapp of sixty-nine has trouble
recalling the definition of a word he used at thirty-nine. Much like in The
Unnamable, the voice from the tape recorder as the phonocentric source of
subjectivity is problematized here by repetition and the condition of
iterability, a concept Derrida argues is the condition of all language,
written as well as spoken. It is “the possibility of extraction and of
citational grafting”, he writes, “which belongs to the structure of every
mark, spoken or written, and which constitutes every mark as writing even
before and outside every horizon of semiolinguistic communication”
(1982: 320). This idea of repeatability as a source is the subject of
Connor’s analysis of this play in the sixth chapter of his Samuel Beckett:
Repetition, Theory and Text. The introduction of the tape recorder
provides Beckett with an opportunity to transfer the iterability of the
written word to spoken language, thus undermining the traditional
privileging of the voice over the written word. In this play, as in The
Unnamable, there is no presence behind the voice, which is a disembodied
echo of a former self or a non-self, a ghostly image of a character on the
stage.
Negation in Texts for Nothing

Few pieces of Beckett’s oeuvre have attracted less critical attention
than Texts for Nothing, written in French mostly in 1951 (the English
translation by the author was published in 1967) after the famous impasse
Beckett encountered upon completing the trilogy. H. Porter Abbott calls
them “a succession of misfires” or “last sputterings from the trilogy”, an
irregularly assembled “aftertext” (1994: 107). James Knowlson in his
monumental biography of Beckett, Damned to Fame, mentions them only
in passing. Exceptions to this critical silence have surfaced relatively
recently and include the considerations by such Beckettian scholars as H.
Porter Abbott, Shira Wolosky, and Susan Brienza. On the whole, however,
critics and biographers have given Texts for Nothing only a cursory glance,
relegating the work to Beckett’s “post-trilogy vacuum” and seeing it as
largely derivative of the themes occupying the trilogy. This attitude is
understandable considering Beckett’s own comments about this work
found in Israel Shenker’s interview from 1956, in which he goes on to
state that Texts for Nothing were meant “to get out of the attitude of
24 Chapter One
disintegration” but ultimately failed in this endeavor (qtd. in Murphy

1991: 34).
The meaning of failure becomes a critical point of departure for
Beckett’s trilogy and Texts for Nothing, in particular. Far from being a
failure in the traditional, negative sense of the word, Texts for Nothing
affirm the necessity for such a failure; that is, the ways in which the Texts
for Nothing fail to expose the underlying paradox of language grappling
with its metaphysical origin and, in so doing, refuse to accommodate the
traditional requirements of fiction, such as character, plot and linear
narrative. This is just one way of reading the title, which would suggest
the futility and purposelessness of the texts; however, as will become
clearer further on in this chapter, this futility is written into the text as a
necessary condition of its being. To “fail better” is the aim of each
subsequent work, to fail in such a way as to render saying/writing no
longer necessary.
Since well saying is impossible, the only hope lies in betrayal: to attain a
failure so complete it would elicit a total abandonment of the prescription
itself, a relinquishment of saying and of language. This would mean a
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. (Badiou 2003: 91)
This imperative to fail not only runs counter to the already expressed
“obligation to express”, but, more specifically – as analyzed by Alain
Badiou in his highly original book, On Beckett – it aims at “subtracting
oneself from the imperative of saying” (91).
Despite the thematic and strategic overlapping between Texts for
Nothing and the trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, Unnamable), I would not
consider them merely reiterative of The Unnamable’s aporetic
disintegration towards the “unword”, but rather its radicalization and
refinement. This sentiment is shared by Knowlson, who sees Texts for
Nothing as a more pared down version of The Unnamable:
For the primary difference between the Texts and The Unnamable, which
helps to account for almost all the other disparities between them, is
obviously the reduction of format that enables Beckett to delimit the area
of his investigations, and to concentrate on specific problems that got
shelved, or simply lost, in the turbid prose of The Unnamable. (Knowlson
and Pilling 1980: 42-43)
Shifting the focus away from the dispossession of the subject and
placing it on a hypostatic void, Beckett once again engages the “unwording”
of the work, but in a more focused and unrelenting manner. As H. Porter

Abbott notices, Beckett’s oeuvre up to and including The Unnamable is
still entangled in a teleological and linear form of narrative which has
produced similarly end-oriented interpretations (1994: 106). Even though
the trilogy ends with disembodiment and dispossession, it was led to that
point in a linear manner. Texts for Nothing mark the secession of
teleology, which aside from inscribing the abovementioned theme of
failure, is also a step forward from the trilogy in that the text per se is the
sole object of focus instead of the disintegrating subjectivity of the trilogy.
Similarly to The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing are bereft of a central
character and plot capable of serving as a unifying principle. As Brienza
states the only cohesive element in Texts for Nothing is the production of
character, a character is created so that he can later be destroyed (1987:
21). I would suggest, however, that the idea of character as it appears in
Beckett’s work is first and foremost a manifestation of linguistic
materialism and is dissolved as a matter of course, making it thus no more
a cohesive element than the dissolution of any such manifestation, such as
subjectivity, verisimilitude, temporality, and space. Once again, here as in
The Unnamable, it could be argued that language assumes the central
position in a spectacle of self-erasure and aporetic logic. “With Texts for
Nothing, language itself arises as Beckett’s main subject, as his creatures
weigh each unit of thought, question nouns, and revise phrases, all the
while wandering along strange syntactic paths” (Briezna 19). What is
brought into being is just as easily denied; language vacillating between
affirmation and denials is exposed as immaterial and unreliable. Not only
is Beckett here repeating the notion that language can only recreate false
images and fictions deprived of an extralinguistic and logocentric anchor,
he also attempts to reify the gaps coalescing these fictions. When language
is reduced to such impotence, as it is in Texts for Nothing, absence
protrudes from under the jumble of words and, in turn, becomes the focal
point of the texts.
Indeed, these thirteen texts, devoid of order and interdependence, draw
attention to the breaks between the texts. These empty gaps represent the
nothingness and silence that the texts disturb and defer. In support of this
argument one can use the title itself: “Textes pour rien”, which refers to a
musical concept, measure pour rien - pauses in a piece of music (cf.
Ackerley 2004: 562 and Hill 1990: 125). It is through this concept of a
musical pause, a period of silence that is, nevertheless, part of the music,
that we might search for a similar strategy behind Beckett’s literary
lacunae. In the “German Letter of 1937” previously quoted, Beckett asks:
26 Chapter One
Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should
not be capable of being dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn
by enormous pauses, of Beethoven’s seventh Symphony, so that through
whole pages we can perceive nothing but a path of sounds suspended in
giddy heights, linking unfathomable abysses of silence? (1984: 171)
It is clear from this quote that the writer’s emphasis is on silence and
absence, not on the text whose raison d’etre is to bridge the silent gaps.
This approach is reminiscent of John Cage’s musical experiments of the
1930s, where silence served as elements of his musical pieces. In the
Bridge and the Bachelors, Calvin Tomkins devotes a chapter to Cage’s art,
which at one point focuses its attention on significance of silence.
Speaking of Cage, Calvin writes that “he used it [silence] not simply as a
gap in the continuity or a pause to lend emphasis to sounds, but in much
the same way that contemporary sculptors were using open space, or
‘negative volume’ – as an element of composition in itself (87).
If speech is construed only as the material shell encasing and also
deferring the silence at its source, the familiar Beckett reduction and
paring down of language is justified; however, Beckett’s art is one of
willed failure in which silence and nothingness are intuited by means of
the only resource available to a writer, namely language, even if that
language resembles an asymptotic equation approaching, but never
reaching, zero. As Wolfgang Iser observes, Beckett’s project of the
‘unword” involves “a relentless process of negation, which in the novels
applies even on the level of the individual sentences themselves, which
follow one another as a ceaseless rejection and denial of what has just
been said” (126). This paring down of language and disintegration of even
the grammatical structure of sentences was a manifestation of this attempt
to “bore holes in language” and see if something or nothing seeps out.
Perhaps Beckett’s assertion that words belong to a material structure
which must be disassembled in order to make way for what must logically
precede it makes it possible to consider his artistic project as being
metaphysical. Locatelli, however, raises an important question in regard to
this approach. She claims that by ascribing the notion of authenticity to
metalinguistic silence, such an approach reveals its logocentric bias.
“However, this way of posing the issue of authenticity here remains within
a logocentered and metaphysical thought, one that predictably conceives
silence as the opposite of language” (2001: 27). Perhaps, instead of
treating Beckett’s silence as the opposite of language, a teleological
progression towards authenticity silence would embody, silence should be
treated as its condition of possibility in line with Democritus’s atomism.
But how is this sense of absence achieved? In terms of rhetoric,

Beckett utilizes three techniques in order to draw attention to this absence:
rhetorical questions, self-canceling logic and repetition. Rhetorical
questions set up the possibility of an answer only to leave it unfulfilled.
No question is ever answered in Texts for Nothing; instead, these questions
serve as a means of suspending the text from any final affirmation of
anything beyond the fact of its existence. Affirmations and negations (self-
canceling logic) is only the first step, for negation alone would relate the
experience of a singular loss. For there to be infinite regress and the sense
of absence overwhelming the moment, repetition must also be utilized.
Repetition and negation, which take the form of reflections and echoes,
serve as a technique that rids language of substance and consciousness of
subjectivity.
Only when all three techniques are in concert do the texts come close
to purging themselves of content, as is the case in the following passage
from Texts for Nothing: “How many hours to go, before the next silence,
they are not hours, it will not be silence, how many hours still, before the
next silence?” (104). On a purely textual level, this short fragment reflects
the characteristic thematic perseverance in the midst of disintegration.
Despite the introduction and immediate cancellation of “hours” and
“silence”, the speaking voice inaugurates words which are deleted, thereby
leaving behind traces of what could have been concrete and real. Like
most Beckett’s characters, so the speaking voices in Texts for Nothing
oscillate between silence and speech; they wait for nothingness, be it in the
form of silence, emptiness, or death, to engulf them once again. What can
be regarded as Beckett’s brand of negative eschatology, a continuing
theme from the trilogy, achieves in Texts for Nothing a new level of
urgency, as each text seems to be on the verge of collapsing onto itself.
These rhetorical “voiding” or “unwording” techniques can be extended
to include the treatment of the I speaker, or, more precisely, the voice of
the I speaker. Throughout the thirteen texts one of the main foci is the
issue of the speaking voice’s place and ontological integrity. “Where
would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say,
if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s me?” (1967: 91). This confusion
as to who is speaking creates a situation where the “I” does not speak but
is spoken by the voice, a voice whose being is predicated on the incessant
questioning of its own presence. The voice multiplies itself, assuming a
pronominal linguistic form, which leads us to an interesting problem.
Deprived of referents, however, these pronouns play off each other and
are, in turn, reduced to vestiges of meaning. Pronouns thus become empty
capsules recruited to the service of sustaining the texts without imbuing it
28 Chapter One
with any semantic content. In this process, the speaking subject is fused
with the spoken subject, with multiple shifts occurring from “I” to “you”
to “he”. This constant pronominal shifting succeeds in dislocating the
speaking subject from the narrative, thereby opening a space of absence as
the source of the voice.
Negation in Texts for Nothing only seemingly brings the voice closer
to its professed goal of silence and finality. A quote from Text 11 gives
brief hope that there is yet a way out from this impasse:
No, something better must be found, a better reason, for this to stop,
another word, a better idea, to put in the negative, a new no, to cancel all
the others, all the old noes that buried me down here, deep in this place
which is not one, which is merely a moment for the time being eternal,
which is called here, and in this being which is called me and is not one,
and in this impossible voice . . . (1967: 130-131)
As we see here, the project of negation and self-erasure, predicated as it is

on the hope of finding the right word that would put an end to the
“incessant and interminable” voice, is frustrated by the very logic of its
enterprise. To find a word, an idea, and a reason that would silence the
voice via negativa implicitly affirms what is negated, and so the voice
must continue despite itself. The voice’s continuing despite there being
nothing left to say, that is continuing as a condition of its own survival,
moves to the forefront of the narrative, where it is not a story of any kind
that is being told. The progression of words lays bare the space in which
stories can potentially take place. As Knowlson and Pilling have noticed,
“there is little attempt made here to tell a narrative in the manner which the
speaker of The Unnamable finds himself unable to resist, and hence much
less temptation to invent ‘vice existers’ and subsume the self under the
rudimentary biography of someone else” (Knowlson 1980: 44). The
movement away from constitutive language is not only a step towards the
linguistic transcendence Beckett sought (cf. “The German Letter of 1937”)
but is also indicative of the negative movement as an originary movement
of language. This step back from narrative, characters, and plot brings the
text to the originary space of literature, exposing the props and strings
which are employed for the purpose of not only constructing a fictional
world but constituting our experience of reality.
Negativity in Blanchot
Having discussed Beckett’s The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing, I
will call upon Blanchot’s thoughts on the implicit negativity of literature
in an attempt to rearticulate the role language occupies in Beckett’s

aforementioned works. In his considerations of the inherent negativity in
language, Blanchot refers to Marquis de Sade (whom he considers the
quintessential writer), Stéphane Mallarmé, Gustaw Flaubert and the
surrealists. Blanchot only briefly refers to Beckett in The Infinite
Conversation, but devotes a more developed analysis, entitled “Where
Now?, Who Now?”, found in a collection of critical essays entitled The
Book to Come. Reading Blanchot’s work makes it clear that he does not
present a coherent philosophical system which could be applied to
Beckett’s writing; in fact, much of what Blanchot had written, from
political commentaries, literary and philosophical exegeses, and works of
fiction, indeed blurs the distinction between literature and philosophy, and
moves towards fragmentary and multivocal writing, a practice which was
to become commonplace with Blanchot’s commentator, Jacques Derrida.
Before revisiting Beckett’s The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing, I would
like to outline, first the general concerns present in Blanchot’s writing,
such as the ontological status of literature, and then the more specific
philosophical elaborations pertinent to our discussion on Beckett. Many of
the main philosophical elements discussed in relation to The Unnamable
and Texts for Nothing, especially the voice and subject, find their
correlative formulation in Blanchot’s work. However, the overarching
focus of this chapter will be Beckett’s writing as a manifestation of the
Blanchotian notion of literature.
“Literature and the Right to Death”, an essay which provides an
introduction to Blanchot’s critical vocabulary and philosophy, starts with
the question of the possibility of literature. “Let us suppose that literature
begins at the moment when literature becomes a question” (1995: 300).
Though Blanchot admits that it is not by any regard a new question, he is,
nonetheless, not satisfied with any of the answers provided hitherto. And
thus this essay becomes, on one level, a polemic with Sartre’s concept of
literature being engaged in the socio-political circumstances in which it is
born, and on the other hand, it is an elaboration of Hegelian negativity (cf.
chapter one, p. 42) at work as the source of literature. Blanchot elaborates
on the idea that the reason why the question of literature’s meaning has
received only “meaningless” answers stems from the form of the question.
Not only does the ‘what is’ question take away all the seriousness from
literature, as Blanchot writes, but also, as Rodolphe Gasché notices, it
presupposes “an essence or substratum for its object” (34) as though the
answer would provide an archeological foundation for literature itself. The
self-reflective approach implied by this question is not applicable to
literature which disintegrates in response to such a question in a futile
30 Chapter One
attempt to prop itself upon baseless assumptions. Thus, instead of asking

the question “what is literature?”, Blanchot asks “how is literature
possible?”. When not imposed upon by reflective and cognitive inquiries,
literature thrives precisely as a question of its own possibility. This
becomes essential in Blanchot’s concept of literature, as only when
literature becomes a question does it truly aspire to the status of literature.
Thus, in its essence, literature exists as its own negation, perpetual self-
questioning that renders impossible a revelation of any kind, as the answer
to how is literature possible is that it is not and yet “literature continues to
be, despite the internal absurdity that haunts it, divides it, and renders it
properly speaking inconceivable” (Blanchot 1995: 304).
The second point of our analysis of negativity involves the Hegelianism
permeating Blanchot’s “Literature and the Right to Death”. It has been
widely acknowledged that Hegel was the primary influence on this text,
though it is important to emphasize that this text does not present a reading
or an interpretation of Hegel. Instead, Blanchot performs a deconstructive
reading, one which Leslie Hill on the topic of Blanchot’s reading of Hegel
describes as “accompany[ing] the text along a certain trajectory in order to
propel it into an aporia of its own making” (1997: 109). Following the
Hegelian negative dialectics that organizes everything into a totality,
negativity for Blanchot is by definition tied to the act of writing, a writing
that is understood as radically exterior to the world, to culture, and to
possibility as a logical category. In other words, writing for Blanchot is
alterior to all forms of totality and is, thereby, anarchic, in the sense of
being outside all forms of principle and integral rationality (1993: 347).
It is possible to discern that the anarchic quality of literature, embodied
in Beckett’s The Unnamable, is based on the radical movement of
negation, which overturns and questions the grounds of knowledge to the
point of exhaustion. These moments of absolute negation and questioning
Blanchot, following Hegel, calls Revolution, an event linked to absolute
moments of freedom and terror (1995: 318). In this way, Blanchot,
speaking of Sade, sees sovereignty as based upon a transcendent power of
negation, where what is negated is not only the recognizable mindscape of
subjectivity, but the totalizing imposition of knowledge itself. The power
to say everything and to exhaust the possibilities of language manifest this
transcendent power of negation. And so, perhaps, Beckett should not be
approached as a writer who attempted to say nothing, but as one who
attempted to say everything.
The point at which Beckett and Blanchot seem to be at their closest is
in their language, or in the role and limit language plays in their work. For
both writers, the subject of writing is oftentimes language at its limit, the
extent to which language can be pushed. Language here becomes its own
limit, dividing the expressible from the inexpressible. At this point it is
necessary to keep in mind that there is a distinction to be made between
the Blanchotian concept of language and literature. This distinction takes
shape in Blanchot’s appropriation of Heidegger and Mallarmé, as both
these thinkers, in their respective attempts to revolutionize our approach to
the relation between being and language, exerted an indelible mark on
Blanchot theory.
As Gerald Bruns observes, the first section of Heidegger’s “The Origin
of the Work of Art” called “Thing and Work” provides valuable insight
into Blanchot’s assessment of the role of negation (46). In this work,
Heidegger attempts to place the role of the indefinable and unnamable Das
Ding in the context of language whose attempts to name the thing are seen
as “assaults upon the thing” (Heidegger 32), which must always remain
outside of language. Heidegger’s 1936 lecture, “Hölderlin and the Essence
of Poetry” inaugurates the distinction between ordinary language and
poetic language (Dichtung), where the latter is understood as preceding all
language. For Heidegger and for Blanchot poetry belongs to the realm of
the unnamability of the thing, where to refuse light and clarity corresponds
to Blanchot’s ideal of literature which is “to say nothing, to speak in order
to say nothing” (Blanchot 1995: 324). For Blanchot, therefore, language
belongs to the day, where logic is clear and the project is one of
enlightenment. Literature, on the other hand, belongs to the night “the
intimacy of the unrevealed” (1995: 326).
Mallarmé’s influence on Blanchot during the 1940s is comparable to
that of Heidegger’s, as evidenced by the number of references and articles
devoted to the poet. Blanchot’s choice to contribute to the Journal des
debats articles on Mallarmé were in most part due to his general project of
implicitly introducing his own literary theory. Language for Mallarmé was
the basis and substance for poetry, not an instrument or conveyor of
meaning. Because nothing precedes language to undermine its primacy,
poetry exists as itself and is its own foundation. Thus, Mallarmé’s poetry,
as analyzed by Kathleen Staudt, denies language the capacity to “express
any ineffable or transcendental truth. Far from developing a poetic
technique that could mediate an ineffable ideal, Mallarmé’s poetics seeks a
new language that would free itself altogether from mediation and become
an end in itself” (147). Mallarmé thus draws attention to the notion of
language as opaque, self-reflexive rather than referential. Gerald Bruns in
his commentary on Mallarmé identifies his poetry with the Hermetic mode
(as opposed to the Orphic mode of poetry which sees language as a
medium of expression). Seeing the role Mallarmé assigns to language, one
32 Chapter One
could see him as the “spiritual ancestor of a group of modern poets and
critics who have sought a radically self-referential, autonomous language,
transcendent in itself” (Staudt 147). Paul Valery, Ferdinand de Saussure
and Derrida with their radical questioning of the transcendental signified
are seen as descendants of this “spiritual ancestry”. To this list of kin, I
would also add Beckett and Blanchot.
What particularly interested Blanchot in Mallarmé was his placement
of absence as the source of the demand of writing. Mallarmé’s “Igitur” is
an attempt to make the work possible by grasping it at the point where
what is present is the absence of all power, impotence” (1982: 108). This
fundamental lack, thematized often by Blanchot as death and the time of
dying, is seen in Mallarmé as inextricably bound to literature, an
association emphasized also in Beckett’s treatment of language and
negativity. This concept of language is also close to Hegel whose
influence on Blanchot can be evidenced in The Infinite Conversation:
Language is of a divine nature, not because it renders eternal by naming,

but because, says Hegel, ‘it immediately overturns what it names in order
to transform it into something else,’ saying of course only what is not, but
speaking precisely in the name of this nothingness that dissolves all things,
it being the becoming speech of death itself and yet interiorizing this death,
purifying it, perhaps, in order to reduce it to the unyielding work of the
negative through which, in an unceasing combat, meaning comes toward
us, and we toward it. (1993: 35)
Language is thus of a divine nature, not only because it brings something

into existence by the act of naming but because naming annihilates the
being of the named thing. This idea is not Blanchot’s, as it can be found in
Mallarmé’s famous excerpt from “The Crisis in Poetry”, where in a similar
vain he expounds on the annihilating capacity of naming: “I say: a flower!
and outside the oblivion to which my voice relegates any shape, insofar as
it is something other than the calyx, there arises musically, as the very idea
and delicate, the one absent from every bouquet” (76). This thought is
almost paraphrased by Blanchot:
For me ably to say, ‘This woman,’ I must somehow take her flesh-and-
blood reality away from her to be absent, annihilate her. The work gives
me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the
absence of that being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost
being – the very fact that it does not exist. (1995: 332)
In the same way that Blanchot owes a debt to Mallarmé, Mallarmé draws
his inspiration from Hegel’s comment in The Phenomenology on Adam’s
first act of naming animals by means of which the animals ceased to exist
as real creatures and came into existence as ideas. And thus meaning and
language for Blanchot are always borne out of death; they are a “deferred
assassination” that plunges the subject “into a nothingness in which there
is no existence or presence” (1995: 323). As Hill states in his work on
Blanchot, “To supply any name is always tantamount to erasing a name;
and any name, it would seem, can only ever exist in response to a prior
absence of name, which is also a demand for a name” (130). It is,
therefore, this condition of namelessness and semantic void that elicits the
demand to name, though the paradoxical logic subtending this condition is
that any name is a replacement, or a provisional name, of this original state
of namelessness.
The state of namelessness as an absent center of the subject plays an
integral part in Beckett’s The Unnamable. As mentioned earlier, much of
The Unnamable is organized on the basis of a failed attempt at constituting
self-consciousness. This self-constitution would necessarily have to
involve the process of conferring a name onto the source of the speaking
voice, an action that entails the imposition of language onto a pre-
linguistic, and therefore semantically empty, self. This originary non-
identity plays in The Unnamable the role of the infinite reflection, the mise
en abyme, of subjectivity. It is this idea of the deferred apperception of
self-consciousness that constitutes the narrative as well as what is often
paradoxically interpreted as being the manifestation of self-consciousness.
The title itself – The Unnamable – is precisely this designation of an
empty space, where the possibility of signifying mainly asserts itself but
without meaning and content to follow suit. Blanchot summarizes this
point in “Literature and the Right to Death”:
When literature refuses to name anything, when it turns a name into

something obscure and meaningless, witness to the primordial obscurity,
what has disappeared in this case – the meaning of the name – is really
destroyed, but signification in general has appeared in its place, the
meaning of the meaninglessness embedded in the word as expression of
the obscurity of existence, so that although the precise meaning of the term
has faded, what asserts itself now is the very possibility of signifying, the
empty power of bestowing meaning – a strange impersonal light. (1995:
329)
This ‘strange impersonal light’ can be construed as the voice of the “they”
that imposes itself on the unnamable I speaker. And, again as in the case of
the possibility of literature, the important question here is not what or who
the “I speaker” is, but how it is possible that it is. The possibility of
34 Chapter One
literature merges with the possibility of subjectivity being borne in

language and should be thought of simultaneously.
The answer to this question is once again double, as the “I speaker” is
and is not at the same time, much like the ghostly figures dominating
Beckett’s later plays. Some light on this point is shed by Blanchot who in
the first chapter of The Space of Literature, called “The Essential
Solitude”, deals with the solitude encountered by the writer upon entering
the literary work. For Blanchot, one of the essential conditions of the work
is that it must be separated not only from the world but also from the self:
“to write is to break the bond that unites the word with myself” (1982: 26).
This notion, again, can be traced back to Mallarmé’s “Crisis in Poetry”:
“The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, yielding
his initiative to words, which are mobilized by the shock of their
difference” (Mallarmé 75). In addressing the role of solitude of the writer
who loses authoritative control over his work, Blanchot conceptualizes
literature as containing statements which
state nothing, that is not the repose, the dignity of silence, because it is
what is still speaking when everything has been said, what does not
precede speech because it instead prevents it from being a beginning of
speech, just as it withdraws from speech the right and the power to
interrupt itself. (1982: 26)
It is language that is supposed to speak in literature, not the author whose

link with the reader must be severed if such an unveiling of language is to
take place. Moreover, it should be remembered that, according to
Blanchot, the writer does not put language to use for the purpose of
expressing “the exactitude and certainty of things and values according to
the sense of their limits” (1982: 26) but instead must “surrender to the
interminable” (27). Therefore, the disappearing I speaker, the authorial
voice, must recede into the background if language is to speak in a voice
disposed of its owner.
The question of the speaking voice and its relation to subjectivity in
Beckett’s trilogy is elaborated in Blanchot’s essay the title of which comes
from the first sentence of The Unnamable, “Where Now? Who Now?”.
This is the only text devoted to Beckett’s work, as other works are
mentioned only in passing.10 As is the case with other articles by Blanchot,
the purpose of this one is not solely to offer an interpretation or
commentary on the work of another writer, but to showcase the application
of his own theories on literature. One of the predominant considerations in
10
A short analysis of How It Is can be found in Infinite Conversation.
Blanchot’s theory – one that bears relevance to Beckett’s writing - is the

question of the neutral voice speaking from behind the text. Blanchot starts
his article with a question, already considered earlier in this chapter: “Who
is speaking in the books of Samuel Beckett? What is this tireless ‘I’ that
seemingly always says the same thing? Where does it hope to come?”
(2003: 210). Blanchot is using this question to make a case for his concept
of the neutre. This question of the absolute loss of subjectivity in the
process of writing recalls the fascination that Blanchot sees in literature.
With the loss of the I, the narrative voice slips into a neutral space, which
is neither the voice of the author (who for all extensive purposes is dead)
nor the voice of the narrator, who has dissipated. This is precisely the
situation one finds in The Unnamable, where the “speaking I” recedes and
merges into the neutral background from which it emerges. Blanchot
quotes Mallarmé who “having reached the horrible vision of a pure work”
is now perfectly dead, meaning that “I am now impersonal and no longer
the Stéphane whom you know” (1982: 108). Writing of this kind not only
“yields him up to the impersonality of death” (109), but also to the
experience of irreducible exteriority, an effect of negativity that in
Blanchot’s works is called neutrality.
I have already mentioned that the speaking voice in Beckett’s The
Unnamable is analogous to an echo without a source. Blanchot’s analogy
would be that of a circle without a center – “a speech, one that is not
deprived of meaning, but deprived of center, that does not begin, does not
end, yet is greedy, demanding, will never stop, . . .” (210). This incessant
speech of The Unnamable is not concealing anything more essential and
primal than itself, as “when it does not speak, it is still speaking, when it
ceases, it perseveres, not silently, for in it silence speaks eternally” (210).
The fundamental question is, however, “[w]hat is the void that becomes
speech in the open intimacy of the one who disappears into it?” (210).
Taking a phenomenological approach to the art of writing, Blanchot
saw the void as the source and essence of literature, an inexpressible
beginning and end of writing. Though the negative implication is there, the
concept of the void in regard to literature should not be understood as the
emptying out of being but as a pre-ontological space of possibility, space
beyond the dialectics of negation and affirmation, space which leads to
one of the most significant concepts to have come out of Blanchot’s
critical output: the neutre. However, similarly to the question of literature,
asking ‘what is the neutre?’ will only yield insignificant answers, as part
of the answer to this question resides in the very form of the question or,
more precisely, in the copula “is”, whose inapplicability to the neuter
36 Chapter One
reminds us that it is precisely the unsettled ontological status of the neuter

that is at stake.
Similarly to Derridean differance, the neutre is not a concept in the
strictest sense of the term, as it stands beyond conceptualization and is,
therefore, neither definable nor stable. In other words, the neuter is what
must lie outside the narrative and ultimately outside signification; it is
what precedes language and what makes language possible. Blanchot in
The Infinite Conversation states explicitly that:
The neuter is that which cannot be assigned to any genre whatsoever: the
non-general, the non-generic, as well as the non-particular. It refuses to
belong to the category of subject as much as it does to that of object. And
this does not simply mean that it is still undetermined and as though
hesitating between the two, but rather that the neuter supposes another
relation depending neither on objective conditions nor on subjective
dispositions. (299)
The neuter, therefore, occupies a pre-ontological place in which the very

distinction between presence and absence or between subject and object is
irrelevant. What is absolutely unknown, impossible to be known is the
neutre and so it is not a site of possibility but of radical and infinite
impossibility through which literature and writing can exist. In the same
way that Heidegger posits the Das Nichts beyond negation, so the neutre is
outside all consideration of the there/not there, I-Thou relation of
intersubjectivity but is instead a relation to alterity. (Bruns 162). In that
regard neither the Das Nichts nor the neutre can be treated as purely
nothing.11
The paradox of speaking when there is nothing to say, discussed earlier
in reference to The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing, constitutes the
neutral silence that for Maurice Blanchot is the source of literature. It is
this frantic search for the last word that allows silence to speak. In
“Literature and the Right to Death” Blanchot writes:
One can, then, accuse language of having become an interminable resifting

of words instead of the silence it wanted to achieve. . . . But this endless
resifting of words without content, this continuousness of speech through
an immense pillage of words, is precisely the profound nature of a silence
11
Blanchot’s thoughts on the neutre and nothingness would have been impossible
without Heidegger’s “Nothing” (Nichts). Blanchot was familiar with both Being
and Time and What is Metaphysics. Heidegger’s understanding that a Nothing
prior to negation (Verneinung) coexists in moments of dread is intrinsic to the
development of Blanchot’s thoughts on negativity.
that talks even in its dumbness, a silence that is speech empty of words, an
echo speaking on and on in the midst of silence. (1995: 332)
The echoing effect of empty pronouns, the endless repetitions and “pillage
of words” spurring the text on is precisely what Blanchot considers
constitutive of silence in literature, the “speech empty of words”.
Moreover, Blanchot’s project of dissolving the materiality of words is
realized in this conception of silence, which underscores nothingness as
the hypostatic and neutral space of literature. The greatest creative
ambition for Blanchot is “to make literature become the exposure of this
emptiness inside, to make it open up completely to its nothingness, realize
its own unreality” (1995: 301). And thus transcending the materiality of
language through literature entails putting literature into question, making
it “null”. This is done through a language which submits itself to a double
relation towards the inexpressibility of the unknown based on the necessity
and impossibility to express, a theme already discussed in relation to
Beckett and one that finds a direct correlation in Blanchot’s work.
What also makes the Blanchotian neuter such a relevant force in
Beckett’s writing is its relation to the question of the subject in the
narrative and to the discussion of the voice. Blanchot in “The Narrative
Voice” meditates on the origin of “the impression that someone is
speaking in the background and prompting the characters or even the
events with what they have to say” (460). One possible explanation which
comes to mind is parabasis – or the intrusive voice of the author. This
possibility, suggested and rejected by Blanchot, leads him to another
possible explanation concerning the impersonal and dispossessed voice
carrying the narrative, as though “the center of the circle lay outside the
circle, in back and infinitely far back, as though the outside were precisely
this center, which could only be the absence of all center” (460). This
position of alterity of the source of the narrative voice is for Blanchot
constitutive of language. Therefore, as the source of language must lie
outside its jurisdiction, so the source of the subject, which is a textual
subject, must remain ineffable.
the voice set free from speech; it announces a possibility prior to all saying,
and even to any possibility of saying. The voice frees not only from
representation, but also, in advance, from meaning, without, however,
succeeding in doing more than committing itself to the ideal madness of
delirium. The voice that speaks without a word, silently – in the silence of
a cry – tends to be, no matter how interior, the voice of no one. (1993: 258)
38 Chapter One
It is the experience of the voice of the outside that constitutes the space of
literature, a dispossessed voice, which prefigures speech and remains
immune to negation or appropriation – it is “beyond mastery” (259).
As was mentioned before, the arbitrariness of naming is a central
problem in The Unnamable and perpetuates a self-effacing withdrawal
from all names and deictic markers. It seems that Blanchot could have
been writing about The Unnamable when he said that “[t]he novelist is a
person who refuses to say ‘I’ but delegates that power to other people; the
novel is filled with little ‘egos’” (1999: 461). For Blanchot, the defining
property of literature is the departure from the first person “I” towards the
impersonal “he” (it should be pointed out here that in French “he” and “it”
share the same pronoun “il”). In the trilogy, there is a similar withdrawal
from the first person pronoun, as the characters of Molloy, Moran or other
names these “delegates” adopted, no longer have corporeal presence, and
are conceptualized only in the form of voices. These voices refuse even
the pronoun “I”, opting instead for the impersonality of the third person: “I
shall not say I again, ever again, it’s too farcical. I shall put in its place,
whenever I hear it, the third person, if I think of it” (358). The neutral “he”
should not be seen as representing yet another site from which the narrator
can speak, it is not yet another mouthpiece for the writer; instead the
neutral “he” is the alterior voice, speaking from beyond the limits of the
narrative; its source is outside the narrative and outside language.
The consequence of such an approach of conferring names renders all
names arbitrary and subject to constant revision and displacement, thereby
– as Leslie Hill points out in his study on Blanchot, “the neutre is perhaps
best understood as a movement of perpetual effacement and re-inscription
that is logically prior to all conceptual distinctions” (132). Again, it is
important to emphasize that the neuter as well as namelessness necessarily
precede language and thus cannot be applied and subordinated to the logic
of dialectics. Nevertheless, despite this conceptual marginality, namelessness
and the neuter refer to the impossible limit of thought that is always
already the “alterity that is at the origin of all thought as such” (133). For
Blanchot this originary state of namelessness is precisely the domain of
the neuter.
Beckett’s critical texts provide evidence of his negative direction in art,
a direction taken by his later fiction; however, they fail to elaborate in
greater detail on the extent and form this negativity was to take. The
philosophy that Beckett draws upon in his formulation of the subject is too
diverse to record concisely, leaving his own philosophical underpinnings
in the realm of speculation. Blanchot’s innovative, albeit derivative,
approach to literature and negativity does provide the conceptual
framework that is missing in Beckett’s critical writing, though it is a

framework that resists framing of any kind. Much of Blanchot’s theory
draws heavily on Mallarmé and Heidegger and in many ways is a
reformulation of their approaches to language. In particular, the relation of
language to the subject, the origin of speech, and the source of literature,
are all questions which Blanchot developed to a large extent on the basis
of Heideggerian phenomenology. Nevertheless, Blanchot’s commitment to
developing a philosophically informed theory of literature yields numerous
innovative and original thoughts on the negative aspect of literature, which
is a context in which Beckett’s work can be elaborated with some insight
into the structure and purpose of what has come to be regarded as his
exhaustive minimalism and philosophical nihilism.
The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing have been singled out in this
chapter, as they both exemplify the negative project Beckett hinted at in
his critical work, especially in the “Three Dialogues with George Duthuit”.
What becomes the salient point of analysis is the dispossessed subject in
language, a subject that is assailed by an exterior voice whose presence is
a reflection of his consciousness. The ensuing project of negation and self-
erasure, predicated as it is on the hope of finding that right word that
would put an end to the voice, can only be frustrated by the very logic of
its enterprise. To find a word, an idea, a reason that would silence the
voice via negativa implicitly affirms what is negated, and so the voice
must continue despite itself. This paradox, which for Blanchot constitutes
the demand of literature, takes the form of speaking when there is nothing
to say. In this light, Blanchot asks us to consider that The Unnamable is
not merely a book, but rather “the pure approach of the impulse from
which all books come…” (213).
What becomes a major point of interest in the Blanchot/Beckett
relation is the neutral space encountered as a result of the aporias,
rhetorical questions, repetition, pronominal shifts permeating The
Unnamable and the Texts for Nothing. Though these two texts present
language and subjectivity disintegrated to the bare minimum, they do this
in different ways. The thirteen texts constituting the Texts for Nothing,
instead of showcasing semantic and syntactic disintegration in the manner
of the trilogy, tend to focus more succinctly on neutrality and vacancy.
Therefore, it is not so much a question of difference of style, but a
difference of intensity and consistency that separates these two otherwise
similar works. Negativity still remains the primary underlying force of
these texts, though it would be an overstatement and an oversimplification
to claim that Beckett’s work endeavors towards a state of silence and
nothingness, as such a teleological implication would be a distorting
40 Chapter One
imposition on the texts. As was mentioned before, failure of expression is

written into the text and, what is more, it is a necessary failure, because
this aesthetics of failure requires that language finally betrays its
materiality (this is in concord with Beckett’s project of “unwording” the
text as stated in “The German Letter of 1937”); moreover, inexpressibility
spurs the voice on in spite of the negativity and subtraction working
against it. Negation in Beckett’s work is, therefore, constitutive of the
ethical obligation to “go on”, to continue despite there being no reason to
continue, nothingness being not the telos of the incessant writing but both
the cause and effect of the repetitions and “syntax of weakness”
precipitating the Texts for Nothing.
This paradoxical language of the neutre, which “discloses the unknown,
but by an uncovering that leaves it under cover” (Blanchot 1993: 300), a
language that neither discloses nor conceals but leaves the unknown in its
otherness intact can be found in The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing, as
we see the I speaker gradually receding into the background of language
substituted by deictic markers. In the myriad of voices, the materiality of a
single and definite referent is dissolved, which exposes the neutral space
on which literature is founded. This neutrality serves the purpose of
allowing the hypostatic nothingness to speak. However, in a Heideggerian
turn, what is ultimately elevated by means of negation of being is being
itself. Being is resuscitated by its negation.
CHAPTER TWO
THE INEXPRESSIBLE AS THE INVISIBLE
In this chapter inexpressibility will be analyzed in terms of its visual

dimension as it is constructed in both the novels (Ill Seen Ill Said,
Imagination Dead Imagine) and dramatic pieces (Krapp’s Last Tape).
Taking into account Beckett’s turn towards a predominantly visual
medium of television and film, I will analyze these works within the
context afforded by critical studies in the field of visuality. Some of the
issues I would like to discuss in this chapter regard Beckett’s concern with
the visual aspect of his drama as well as the images found in his prose.
Even before his turn to television and film, Beckett laid great emphasis on
the visual details of the stage design, movement of actors, and the
placement of props. The attention paid to the external visual integrity of
his plays evinces a general concern regarding the extent to which the
visual medium, much like language, should be treated as an instrument of
knowledge. The details and themes to be examined here regard the image
of the eye, the play of light and darkness and the ubiquitous emptiness
found in both fiction and drama. Blanchot’s considerations on the gaze
will also be utilized in this chapter, especially in relation to Beckett’s Ill
Seen Ill Said. The primary theme to be analyzed here concerns the
correlation to the strictly linguistic configuration of unnamability based on
the necessity of retaining the invisible as a narrative site.
As Martin Jay argues, the primacy accorded to vision was challenged
after the First World War and its hegemony, the “scopic regime” of
Cartesian perspectivism, was at an end in the works of Surrealists.
Especially in postwar France, where Beckett took up residence, “many
intellectuals from a wide variety of different camps experienced a palpable
loss of confidence in the eye, or at a very minimum, in many of its time-
honoured functions” (Jay 212). One of the main points I will attempt to
prove in this chapter is that Beckett’s work inscribes itself into the
antiocularcentric thrust in literature and philosophy, where vision was
undermined as a privileged mode of apprehension. Beckett concerned
himself with the ways in which vision, operating as a metaphor for
understanding and knowledge, conceals within itself an impetus to
42 Chapter Two
violently apprehend the perceived object, thus destroying it in its

singularity. This ethical dimension of vision will be the subject of the
analysis of Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said.
As discussed in chapter one, Beckett’s preoccupation with the
insubstantial void beneath the materiality of language could be interpreted
as a phenomenological sketching of the fundamental emptiness pervading
language, which has by now become viewed as an inherent modernist
stance and is the basis for a postmodern questioning of subjectivity as a
textual construct. This preoccupation with emptiness later manifested itself
in scenic displays, as Beckett’s craft shifted from predominantly narrative
to dramatic and theatrical scenes of particular visual intensity. Beckett’s
concern with the voice is paralleled by his concern with the visual
correlatives of many of the same themes discussed earlier. The void
discussed in chapter one is substituted by empty space, an abyss (abyme).
Symbolist poets often referred to the concept of the abyss which was
understood as an expression of essential nothingness, while Surrealists
extended the concept to include the personal psyche, and thus the mise en
abyme has served “as a spatially oriented rendering of what the Anglo-
Saxon critical tradition has referred to as aesthetic self-consciousness”
(Essif 43). Beckett utilizes the aesthetic spatial abyss in order to
metaphorically represent the imaginary space of the thinking subject
whose presence is preconditioned by the empty space which, in turn,
becomes the object of its thought, thus instantiating the mise en abyme
which is to characterize the struggle of the Beckettian protagonist.
As Martha Fehsenfeld notices, since 1977 Beckett’s work shifted from
a predominantly literary and dramatic form to explore “the possibilities of
the visual image – both fixed and moving – within the framework of
television, film and videotape” (222). This shift coincides with a more
general repositioning of focus from language to the visual medium, where
much of the same concerns and themes occupying the earlier prose are
transposed and revisited. It is already a well-documented fact that
Beckett’s work, especially his drama and television plays, were heavily
influenced by the visual arts. 1 Numerous critics have attested to the
analogy between paintings and Beckett’s later work. Knowlson writes: “If
we could take X-rays of some of Beckett’s later plays, we would surely be
1
Oppenheim composes a list of the most influential: “Rembrandt, Caravaggio,
Adam Elsheimer, and Gerrit van Honthorst among the Old Masters; Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner, Emil Nolde, and others associated with the Die Brücke group; Paul Klee,
Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, and other German Expressionists; along
with [Jack B.] Yeats, George Braque, Karl Ballmer, the van Veldes and other
twentieth-century favourites” (73-74).
The Inexpressible as the Invisible 43
able to detect some of the ghostly images of the Old Masters lurking
beneath the surface” (187). Moreover, Ruby Cohn notes that “in his
television plays, Beckett comes close to painting still lives in movement,
so visually are the works conceived” (31). As a director Beckett took pains
to “paint” images on the stage. Billie Whitelaw relates that when
performing in Footfalls, she sometimes felt “as if he were a sculptor and I
a piece of clay. At other times I might be a piece of marble that he needed
to chap away at. He would endlessly move my arms and my head in a
certain way, to get closer to the precise image in his mind.” And later she
notes that “I felt I was being painted with light” (Whitelaw 144-145, qtd in
Oppenheim 125).
Interestingly, the gradual movement to a more visual display of
Beckett’s themes coincides in part with the amount of illustrations
becoming a part of publications. Beckett never solicited artists for their
work, but was often approached by various painters who asked Beckett for
opinions and artistic feedback. Many artists, ranging from objective to
nonobjective painters, found inspiration in the images Beckett conjured in
his texts, especially in those that came after the trilogy, where more
distilled and vivid imagery is to be found. These close collaborations are
further evidence of the conceptual integration existing between visual and
literary art. The result of these collaborations are the limited and illustrated
editions, called livres d’artiste, 2 where the texts are fitted with various
illustrations.
Beckett’s fascination with the visual arts can be witnessed in the
variety of references found in the scenic composition of the stage design
and the images found in his early and late fiction. However, it is not only
in the visual references to paintings that Beckett’s interest in the visual arts
can be seen as influencing his work, but also in the philosophical themes
buttressing the Surrealist movement in art. This is evidenced in the
numerous essays and letters Beckett wrote on the topic of art and his
befriended artists.3 From these essays it becomes apparent that what is of
prime importance for Beckett is the ontology of art and the relation to the
2
Of the many artists to have contributed their illustration to Beckett’s books,
Avigdor Arikha must be accorded a special place, as no other artist was as close to
Beckett during his lifetime. However, Robert Ryman’s minimalist etchings (found
in Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho) come extremely close to
Beckett’s own aesthetics in terms of their self-reflexive questioning of the limits of
art itself. Other notable contributing painters include the German artist, H.M.
Erhardt, and Stanley William Hayter.
3
Disjecta contains Beckett’s earlier essays on painters, including Geer van Velde,
Henri Hayden, Jack B. Yeats, Avignor Arikha.
44 Chapter Two
dialectic of visible and invisible that is the common tension between

Beckett’s work and the work of the artists he admired.
To further study the proposition that Beckett’s art is a hybrid of
literature and the visual arts, I would like to focus on two intrinsically
related aspects of Beckett’s so-called paintings that merit discussion, if
only for their ubiquity in his work: light (darkness) and space (emptiness).
Darkness surrounding the central area of the play is one of the
characteristic visual effects of Beckett’s plays and is reminiscent of
Caravaggio and Rembrandt; for example, Rembrandt’s Parable of the Rich
Man depicting an old man behind a cluttered desk, surrounded by darkness
was a source of influence for the stage design of Krapp’s Last Tape, where
we find in the stage directions a “table and immediately adjacent area in
strong white light. Rest of stage in darkness” (481). Darkness in both the
painting and the play constitutes more than mere background, but “the
vessel for the lighted condition, the inner stated, depicted stories”
(Oppenheim 1999: 167). In both the painting and the set design, the
engulfing darkness both consumes and substantiates the small area of light
at the center. It is precisely the indefiniteness of darkness and emptiness
that becomes the central focus. Not only does darkness frame the scenes,
but it can be seen as being an active element in the narration. Moreover,
what also merits attention in The Parable of the Rich Man is that the center
is illuminated by a concealed source of light, an effect that is reproduced
almost identically in Krapp’s Last Tape. Beckett took pains to make sure
that the source of light remained out of view, which is in keeping with the
source of the voice (subjectivity) remaining beyond the structure it
supports. Krapp spends most of the time in the illuminated space, moving
away from the light toward darkness, which can be understood to
symbolize the movement from reason to emotion (Brienza 128). Light,
with its ancient associations with knowledge, is a metaphor that is put to
use by Beckett for the same purpose as discussed earlier. If knowledge is
illumination, language is construed as a concealing.
The last element connected with the use of light concerns the sharp
contrast between the lighted stage and the surrounding emptiness. The
chiaroscuro effect achieved by directing intense light at the main character
to the effect of differentiating him or her from the surrounding void can
also be noticed in Beckett’s narratives, such as Ill Seen Ill Said and Ohio
Impromptu. The same type of effect was noticed by Jessica Prinz in Emile
Nolde’s monochromatic painting Prophet, which relates not only to
Beckett’s use of light, but also to the gaunt and skeletal figures so often
portrayed in his work. It is this play of light and darkness that “allows the
invisible to enter the perceptual field” (Oppenheim 2000: 42). Oppenheim
further notes that “[l]ight and darkness, color and the lack of it, in sum, are
construct of the visual paradigm to the extent that they concretize the play
of the visible and the invisible, more precisely, the rendering of the
invisible visible” (2000: 43). The visual field became for Beckett a stage
where the linguistic problematic of reconciling opposites is reappropriated
into an ocular metaphor.
The second critical element in the visual portrayal concerns the use of
space, specifically emptiness. In Beckett’s drama and fiction, emptiness,
formlessness is placed alongside geometrical precision of objects moving
in predictable, oftentimes repetitive, movements. Emptiness on the stage,
much like darkness, acquires an intense presence and is itself part of a
semantic code that draws on inexpressibility as the source of its
expression. As Essif states, “perhaps the greatest contribution of twentieth-
century dramatists to the historical evolution of theatre art has been the
development of a new poetics of space for the text, one based on
emptiness” (19). Emptiness is the destructured extension of silence, as it
constitutes and foregrounds an operative, yet ultimately inexpressible,
space. Beckett’s ultimate goal was not to eliminate either visual image or
language, but to discover images as well as utterances, which, instead of
telling a story, would “convey to the spectator a profound and complex
sense of emptiness and silence” (Essif 61). The task was, therefore, to
allow silence and emptiness to speak through words and images.
Beckett’s interest in minimalist stage design as a means of conveying
emptiness was not an isolated case. As realism and naturalism gave way to
the avant-guard and absurdist tradition, so detailed stage sets and
psychologically viable characterization gave way to a more austere set
design and a general emptiness of theatrical space. This shift was to lead to
a realization of theatre as a manifestation of its own potential as a “more
pristine signifier rather than a dictatorial signified” (Essif 20). One of the
effects of anti-representational symbolism in drama and fiction was a shift
to an emphasis from realism to the illusion of realism, to the evocative
potency of the theatre, and its iconic presence. The Symbolist legacy
extends to Beckett in its preoccupation with representing the non-mimetic
‘unrepresentability’ of emptiness, and thus theatre for Beckett became a
metatheatre, where theatricality is staged and exploited as an object in
itself. This awareness applies also to Beckett’s fiction, especially his later
novellas, where the process of creating an image becomes the focus of
writing (Imagination Dead Imagine) or where the process of writing is
conveyed through a visual metaphor (Ill Seen Ill Said).
What this entails, in terms of how Beckett’s work can be interpreted, is
a presentation of the inner life rather than a materialistic representation of
46 Chapter Two
the conditions encasing this inner space; and, indeed, the inner space
becomes exteriorized on the stage within the context of emptiness. This
inside/outside dichotomy was a crucial element in the theoretical backdrop
to this development and was one that has become a constant point of
contention in Beckett’s art. The way space is utilized to eliminate this
inside/outside dichotomy in Beckett’s later fictions is bound with the
mobility of the character presented. Whereas in Murphy and Molloy we are
dealing with characters who inhabit a world which for the most part
conforms to the expectations of realism and are able to maneuver in this
world with little or no impediment, Beckett’s later fiction presents a
gradual decomposition of both bodily mobility and space, which
ultimately leads to the characters being enclosed and paralyzed. Molloy
slowly loses his command of his body, finally being consigned to crutches,
Malone is bed-ridden and Mahood in The Unnamable is kept in a jar; in
Rockaby the woman is confined to a chair, in Happy Days the characters
are buried neck-deep in sand, Krapp is confined to his den, rarely able to
leave the vicinity of the lighted area. The realism of these enclosed
dwellings varies significantly, but it can be said that with no exceptions,
all Beckettian characters’ movements are either impeded or imposed.
The significance of the characters’ immobility is that it allows their
corporeal presence to blend into the surrounding environment, becoming,
as a result, its integral part. The body merges with its surroundings,
physically uniting with its environment, becoming, in effect, a living prop.
By being tied down to their surroundings (sometimes literally), the
Beckettian subject becomes the place of struggle between materiality
pulling the subject down in the mire and mud away from any form of
idealism. This blurring of borders between the body and its surrounding
can be noticed in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, a painting that shares
many characteristics of Beckett’s later plays. The silent scream rippling
centrifugally is the subject of the painting as it merges the background
with the writhing figure, as what is being represented visually is an
invisible scream. As Peter Selz writes, “Munch has painted what might be
called sound waves, and these lines make the human figure merge with the
landscape to express a total anxiety that evokes an immediate response
from the observer” (52). This same anxiety can be found in Beckett’s
plays, where the emptiness of the background merges with the immobile
and finally silent figures, expressing the complete disintegration of the
demarcation between inside/outside that is the defining feature of
subjectivity.
Imagination Dead Imagine

Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Beckett’s language in “The
Exhausted” is useful as a beginning of the present analysis of visuality,
especially since language for Deleuze does not only refer to linguistic
signification but to images as well. The notion of exhaustion is at the
center of Deleuze’s analysis and should be understood not as fatigue but as
an emptying of all possibilities. Deleuze explains this difference, claiming
that “the tired person has merely exhausted the realization, whereas the
exhausted person exhausts the whole of the possible” (152). The state of
exhaustion is thus one where there are no possibilities left. Within this
concept of exhaustion, Deleuze distinguishes three forms of language at
work in Beckett’s art, all conforming to three different types of
exhaustion.
Langue I refers to the language of Beckett’s novels where “enumeration
replaces propositions and combinatorial relations replace syntactic relations:
a language of names” (156). Words and grammar are manipulated in such
a way as to “exhaust the possible through the elaborate extension of
rationality into meaningless absurdity” (Critchley 152). The defining
characteristic of this language is that exhaustion is carried out within the
confines of rational thought; it is logical thinking (by means of
permutations, as is the case with the famous sucking stones scene in
Molloy) taken to its absurd extremes. Language here works within the
boundaries of standard syntax in a manner that exhausts its own semantic
possibilities.
Langue II refers to what has been discussed in Chapter One; namely
the nameless voices that speak in order to stop speaking, voices which
speak despite the impossibility to say what needs to be said in order for
speech to cease. Langue II “is no longer of names, but that of voices, a
language that no longer operates with combinable atoms, but with
bendable flows. Voices are waves or flows that direct and distribute the
linguistic corpuscles” (156). Exhausting the voices would entail
exhausting the possibilities of discourse, something that can be found in
The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing, and How It Is, where we have the
voice of the Other creating an “inexhaustible series of all these exhausted
beings” (157). These beings refer to the series of names the voices take on,
Molloy, Malone, Mahood, Worm, an endless array of beings this voice
inhabits.
The third category of language is of primary interest for this chapter,
because it is Langue III “which is no longer a language of names or voices
but a language of images, resounding and colouring images” (158). As
48 Chapter Two
Simon Critchley argues, this language attempts to exceed all categories of

language by “aspiring to a pure image, an image that is no longer part of
the imagination of names and voices, of reason and memory, as in Langue
I and Langue II but is image without imagination” (153). This, of course,
is a reference to Beckett’s Imagination Dead Imagine, a text which for
Deleuze is exemplary of Langue III, though he does admit that “[i]t is
extremely difficult to make a pure and unsullied image, one that is nothing
but an image, by reaching a point where it emerges in all its singularity,
retaining nothing of the personal or the rational, and by ascending to the
indefinite as if into a celestial state” (158). Furthermore, as Deleuze notes,
it is not only in images that Langue III operates but also in the
representation of space. Quad, along with Nacht und Traume, marks
Beckett’s complete break with language, presenting space with silence.
Both plays present something of a moving picture, where the exhaustive
movements take place on a filmed stage. As Critchley argues it is only in
Beckett’s televisual works that the true expression of Langue III can be
found, as it is a medium that allows the artist to overcome the limitations
of words.
Imagination Dead Imagine (1966) reworks and refines the basic
themes found in All Strange Away whose last image of the rotunda
becomes the focus of this recit. As Knowlson and Pillig observe in
Frescoes of the Scull, Imagination Dead Imagine is an improvement of All
Strange Away, which he considers “shapeless and prolix”, as opposed to
“the more coherent, more accessible and more moving”(145) piece of
work we find in Imagination Dead Imagine. This assessment is one that
Beckett might have shared, considering his reluctance to have All Strange
Away published.
Unlike in All Strange Away, Beckett focuses here on only one image
which he develops with both mathematical and poetic detail, the effect of
which is a meditation on the process of imagination itself. The text can be
roughly divided into two parts describing an image of a white rotunda
containing two silent and motionless bodies facing each other. The first
part concentrates on establishing the conditions in the rotunda, especially
the temperature and space. The second part shifts to a description of the
two bodies inhabiting the rotunda. In both descriptions, Beckett takes
pains to offer precise measurements and geometrical parameters, giving us
what seem to be instructions to reassemble the image in our imaginations.
Time is measured only in the intervals between darkness and light. The
reader/narrator takes the role of a camera zooming inside the rotunda,
panning the interior with its inhabitants and then zooming out to inspect
the rotunda from the outside. The eye carefully inspects the faces of the
two bodies and walls from all sides and angles; there is nothing that
escapes the gaze of the narrator, even the regular intervals in which the
two pairs of eyes open and shut. With our perception the image is created,
guided by the narrator’s voice.
This is not the first piece of work in which Beckett undertakes a self-
conscious narrative of perception and imagination; however, as Brienza
notices, what differentiates the treatment of these themes in Imagination
Dead Imagine from that of his earlier work is narratological distance. In
other words, Imagination Dead Imagine does not present these themes, but
instead it “stylistically enacts the cognitive processes” (Brienza 120)
associated with imagination and perception. Authorial distance is thus
eradicated for the sake of a vicarious experience of imagining in which
we, the readers, are instructed through the construction of the image. This
is done mainly by means of shifts to the imperative voice. Beckett
commands the reader to imagine a blank world where even imagination is
dead.
The narrative starts with the refusal to accept the death of imagination:
“No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination
not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine. Islands, waters,
azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit. Till all white in
the whiteness the rotunda” (551). This is the imagination’s attempt to
escape its own creation, to omit and eliminate the fantasies. An obverse
situation can be found in Mallarmé’s “Les Fenetres” in which we have a
bed-ridden, dying man dragging his decrepit old body from the banal
whiteness of his room to the window to press
His white hair and the bones of his gaunt face

On the windows that a fine clear sunbeam burns;
And fevered, greedy for deep azure, the mouth,
As, youthful, it would breathe its wealth away,
A virgin skin of a long ago! befouls
With a long, golden kiss the warm golden panes.
(Mallarmé 9)
In Imagination Dead Imagine, however, the eye looking through the

window of the imagination is instructed to omit the warm familiarity of
exteriority and focus its attention on the rotunda. “No way in, go in,
measure. . . Two diameters at right angles AB CD divide the ground into
two semicircles ACD BDA. Lying on the ground two white bodies, each
in its semicircle. White too the vault and the round wall eighteen inches
high from which it springs” (551). As Oppenheim notices, Beckett’s
tendency toward minimalism utilizes a geometrization, which was the
50 Chapter Two
defining element of Cubism (127). With all the precise measurements and
parameters of the rotunda, the rotunda is a fabrication and nothing more.
What is strikingly familiar in this image is that the source that
illuminates and heats the rotunda is absent, “[t]he light that makes all so
white no visible source, all shines with the same white shine, ground, wall
vault, bodies, no shadow” (151). This raises once again the question of
origin. As Rabinowitz notices, “In a number of works the narrator
observes that there is no visible source of light, and the objects depicted
are usually self-illuminated; this, of course, is a good description of the
appearance of imagined entities (166-67). Self-illumination would mean
that these “imagined entities” exist of their own accord, which puts in
question the conjoined role of the observer/creator. With no source of
illumination things exist independently of the author/reader. This would go
against P.J. Murphy’s explanation suggesting that the author himself is the
source: “He is the source that links heat and light, just as he is the source
that links the authorial voice and the ‘voice’ of the occupants” (95). Such
an explanation not only undermines Beckett’s insistence on authorial
neutrality but imposes structural integrity in the form of an origin to a
carefully crafted structure whose existence is meant to question the
concept of origin and source. This would be more in line with Iser’s view
of negativity being a predetermining force in Beckett’s work, where
“imagination is to be negated as the source of such images” (126).
The two bodies which are to be imagined are in an embryonic state (a
position taken by both fetuses and corpses, which reiterates Beckett’s
conflation of death and birth); these bodies are motionless except for their
eyes which open and shut at regular intervals, creating in effect an image
which is both human and strictly mechanical. The narrator describes the
two bodies in the negative as being “neither fat nor thin, big nor small”
and that they “seem to want nothing essential” (1976: 554). It seems that
the two bodies are alive, but just barely; however, in accord with the
womb/tomb imagery, it remains uncertain whether they are barely alive or
almost dead. Being that they are the only organic entities in an otherwise
sterile and lifeless environment, it is justified to construe them as
manifestations of a dying/nascent imagination at work in an inhospitable
mindscape. The repetitious and cyclic movement of light and dark, hot and
freezing inaugurates birth and death respectively. Within this dichotomy,
the focus should be placed on the brief interval between light and dark, as
this is where life takes place. “Then all vibrates, ground, wall, vault,
bodies, ashen or leaden or between the two, as may be” (552). To clarify
this point, in “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce”, Beckett explores Vico’s
development of his cyclic theory of history from Bruno’s ideas on
opposites. This theory suggests an approach to Beckett’s own constitution

and resolution of opposites.
The maxima and minima of particular contraries are one and indifferent.
Minimal heat equals minimal cold. Consequently transmutations are
circular. The principle (minimum) of one contrary takes its movement
from the principle (maximum) of another. Therefore not only do the
minima coincide with the minima, the maxima with the maxima, but the
minima with the maxima in the succession of transmutations. Maximal
speed is a state of rest. (1984: 21)
The two states of hot and cold, dark and light described in Imagination
Dead Imagine coalesce in one moment when they become one and the
same. The vibrating fluctuation between these two states constitutes the
tympanum, or limit, at which opposites merge.
The two bodies lying symmetrically next to each other in Imagination
Dead Image are mirror reflections. This situation can also be found in a
more developed fashion in Ohio Impromptu, which is why I would like to
briefly outline this short play, as it more clearly extrapolates the self-
reflective gaze that I believe is also present in Imagination Dead Image.
The two identical characters “as alike in appearance as possible”, a Reader
and a Listener sitting at a table are shown in black and white, with the
contrast accented. Just like Imagination Dead Imagine, Ohio Impromptu is
starkly black and white. The play portrays a man who has lost a
companion and to whom comes a man, the Reader, who reads him a story
about a man who has lost a companion. The act of reading and hearing,
like speaking and hearing oneself speak, is presented here not as ideal self-
presence but rather as division and doubling, the two characters being two
sides of the same ontological coin. This story of infinite regress and mirror
doubling yields a rather surprising ending. When the Reader finishes
reading the book, they both look at each other for five seconds in silence.
This Narcissistic recognition of the self as the other ushers in the end of
the play, the death of the physical character. However, the “Nothing left to
tell” is both an end as well as a beginning, as Nothingness is, as it has
always been, the primary theme of Beckett’s work, to which the play was
but a prelude.
In Imagination Dead Imagine, the male and female are also two
aspects of the human, the generic and sexless character of Mahood from
The Unnamable. However, it is the gaze that deserves closer attention.
Firstly, the narrator remarks that seeing is not always an easy task in the
depicted conditions. The narrator comments that “in this agitated light, this
great white calm now so rare and brief, inspection is not always easy”
52 Chapter Two
(553). The characters as well as the reader have difficulties with vision
and, as a result, the imagination is frustrated in its attempt at constituting
itself. Secondly, the gazes do meet at one point of the cycle: “Piercing pale
blue the effect is striking, in the beginning. Never the two gazes together
except once, when the beginning of one overlapped the end of the other,
for about ten seconds” (553-554). I would like to emphasize the omission
of the word “eyes” from this sentence, indicating perhaps the
disembodiment of vision which characterizes the recit as a whole. A
similar image can be found in The Unnamable: “I sometimes wonder if the
two retinae are not facing each other” (301). This image of the
reciprocated gaze, found in Ohio Impromptu, The Unnamable and in
Imagination Dead Imagine, prompts a self-reflection that inaugurates a
long-awaited respite, as it negates the difference that is the source of
representation which, as Derrida writes, “mingles with what it represents...
There is no longer a single origin. . . The reflection, the image, the double
splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference”
(1976: 36). The reciprocity of the gaze shifts the origin of representation
away from the two pairs of eyes, away from the two subjects, towards
itself as the differentiating origin of the image.
In Imagination Dead Imagine one can find two distinct styles. The
mathematical accuracy with which Beckett constructs, and, in turn, asks
the reader to visually construct the two bodies facing each other inside the
white rotunda, is juxtaposed with the stylized poetic language constructing
the scene. These two styles both oppose and complement each other in
much the same way that the materiality of bodies (words) would
complement the ephemeral substance of consciousness and thought, a
dualism which is present in most of Beckett’s work and is brought to the
fore in the “Letter of 1936”. Imagination Dead Imagine, however, not only
coalesces the poetic and mathematical, but also the visual and linguistic
spheres. It seems that Rabinowitz would view the use of poetic and
mathematical language as fruitless, claiming that “by attributing stability
to images of the inner world we deny their intrinsic impermanence” (165).
Indeed, as the narrative progresses, the scientific accuracy with which
descriptions were rendered gives way to indeterminacy. “Wait more or
less long. . . . More or less long, for there may intervene . . . pauses of
varying length. . . .”(551). The rational mind uses geometry and quantifiers
as a means of vying for dominance with indefiniteness and disintegration,
whilst in effect achieving a balance akin to the cyclic exchange of light for
darkness.
Language is here brought to the aid of visualization and in a similar
way as in The Unnamable we bear witness to (or vicariously participate in)
what Rubin Rabinowitz observes is a Cartesian mind exercise where the

ontological certainty of existence is put into question, and thus the world,
bodies, heaven, earth and minds are relegated to the status of illusion. The
one aspect of existence impervious to this negation is the thinking entity,
the cogito itself. In Imagination Dead Imagine the same process can be
observed, where we see the speaking voice attempting to imagine
everything away, but unable to fully extinguish the imagination itself. In
this context, imagination takes the place of the interminable voice of The
Unnamable, bearing testament to Beckett’s shift from the ontology of
linguistic self-determination to visual self-objectification. The relentless
voice is substituted by the relentless disembodied eyes found in Ill Seen Ill
Said, in Film and in Imagination Dead Imagine.
The central paradox, however, remains the same as in The Unnamable
and Texts for Nothing: the impossibility of negating that is needed for
negation to be at all possible. Whereas in The Unnamable negation was
conducted by means of paradox and exhaustion of logic and argumentation
in an effort to achieve pure silence, Imagination Dead Imagine employs a
visual metaphor for the same end, in which invisibility and pure
“imagelessness” would be the product. In order to undermine the workings
of the imagination, to effectively kill it, the narrator has to utilize
imagination itself, and thereby instance an infinite regression, a mise en
abyme, of images undermining themselves.
The Eye of the Other in Ill Seen Ill Said

Ill Seen Ill Said (1981), often classified, albeit against the intentions of
the author, as belonging to Beckett’s second trilogy (Company, Ill Seen Ill
Said, Worstward Ho),4 is a text that, according to James Knowlson, “is
best read as an exquisite prose poem” (1996: 558). Though the story is still
written with an impersonal voice, a trademark of Beckettian style, it
distinctly departs from the “midget grammar” and “camera images” of his
earlier work, e.g. Lessness and Fizzles. Instead of embarking on what
would ultimately amount to a futile interpretation of the text, I will instead
focus on certain themes that I consider not only prevalent in Beckett’s
texts but also indicative of a wider philosophical relation that exists
between his works and the works of Maurice Blanchot whose philosophy
4
In the 1996 introduction to the Three Novels (the accepted title by the American
and British editions of Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho), Stanley E.
Gontrarski recounts that despite Beckett’s vocal apprehensions towards grouping
the three novels under the title “Trilogy”, critics persistently refer to the three
novels as a trilogy.
54 Chapter Two
will provide a conceptual framework for this analysis. 5 The title of

Beckett’s text will serve as a starting point for an elaboration on the link
between sight and speech and, by extension, between vision and writing.
This will lead to a consideration of the Blanchotian concept of writing and
its applicability to Ill Seen Ill Said. There is evidence supporting the claim
that Ill Seen Ill Said is a self-referential account of the writing process and,
when approached within the question of visuality, will yield a reading
which is attuned both to Blanchot’s thoughts on the process of writing and
to the antiocularcentric investment underpinning those thoughts.
Though the interrelations between visuality and understanding have
occupied philosophers since antiquity, I will restrict my consideration to
the 20th century and approach this vast question through the work of
Maurice Blanchot, whose reflections on the matter are in line with
Nietzsche’s anti-ocularcentrism. Blanchot asks: “Why, among all possible
metaphors, does the optical metaphor predominate? Why this imperialism
of light?” (1993: 162). Nietzsche recognized that the ubiquity of visual
metaphors in our language testifies to the degree to which seeing has
become the ultimate metaphor for understanding. Just as sight is capable
of instantly embracing its field of vision, thus making the outside world
“legible” for the perceiving subject, so linguistic understanding, in its aim
to totalize the unknown, is also based on the mind’s capacity to create a
comprehensible – and therefore closed – system within which the subject
is posited as the Cartesian cogito. The stability of the seen world thus
depends on the stability of the cogito, i.e. on the stability of the perceiving
I/eye. In this respect the subject is defined not only in terms of its
linguistic configurations, but also in terms of the visual metaphor which
substantiates the presence of the self. The questions of epistemology and
ontology pervading the linguistic turn of philosophy can be formulated
within the visual idiom.
The title of Beckett’s work deserves a gloss, as its compressed
structure, when developed, yields possible interpretive directions. Firstly,
Ill Seen Ill Said not only indicates the existence of a relation between
seeing and saying, but also the impossibility of either of them being fully
achieved. Moreover, the order in which the two actions are placed in the
title itself implies the primacy of seeing: there is sight before there is
speech, and the relation is not one of equilibrium, but of speech being
5
Blanchot did write a short article on Beckett’s trilogy, particularly The
Unnamable, entitled “Where now? Who now?” which can be found in a collection
of essays, The Book to Come. In this article, Blanchot focuses mainly on the
question of the source of the speaking I, yet offers no developed articulation of
Beckett’s work in more philosophical terms.
dependent on sight. We are familiar with Beckett’s distrust of language as

a medium of expression; hence, the paring down of language, the gradual
linguistic disintegration characteristic of Beckett’s post-trilogy texts.
Though language and its limits occupy an essential place in Beckett’s
texts, the ontologically constitutive role of visuality has always accompanied
this linguistic investment, testifying to the influence Descartes and
Berkeley had on his work.6 If language and visuality are linked in terms of
their function as mediums for understanding, then both are shown to be
ultimately flawed and riddled with aporias. Consequently, any kind of
saying will necessarily and always be an “ill saying” and, conversely, any
kind of seeing will be an “ill seeing”. As the narrator of Ill Seen Ill Said at
one point sates: “The mind betrays the treacherous eyes and the
treacherous word their treacheries” (78). Thus, against the grain of the
Western ocularcentric tradition, established predominantly with the
Cartesian cogito, “seeing” in this text is not commensurate with
understanding. Light brings no clarity, only treacheries. The ambiguities
and paradoxes of speech which figured in Beckett’s preceding novels are
thus now presented as visual aporias.
In Ill Seen Ill Said, the contrast or clash between blackness and
whiteness, between visibility and invisibility, as well as the role of light
are emphasized throughout the text, where we are presented with a
woman, simply referred to as “she”, who is clad in black (perhaps
mourning), in a room where “she sits on erect and rigid in the deepening
gloom (49). The only white is found on her face and hands, and later, as
the narrative unfolds with her back and forth journey from her cabin
located “at the inexistent centre of a formless place” (50) to a graveyard,
where she kneels in front of a tombstone. Along the way, amid the “zone
of stones” she is constantly followed by a hovering, disembodied eye,
which, having “no need of light to see”, (50) relentlessly pursues her every
step. Upon reaching the graveyard, this mysterious figure finds herself
surrounded by twelve “figments” who silently stand afar “invisible were
she to raise her eyes” (68).
What this journey to the tombstones constitutes is a repetitive
movement of the narrative, a pendulum movement whose rhythm reflects
the binary black and white construction of the narrated world. This rhythm
suggests an interstitial zone situated between the two opposing states
(light, dark; presence, absence); it is a place of indeterminacy, evidenced
6
Beckett’s fascination with Descartes dates to his early years as a writer with such
works as “Whoroscope”. The influence Descartes’ philosophy had on Beckett’s
work cannot be overestimated, even in the later prose works, such as in the trilogy,
where Cartesian logic and the mind as camera obscura are brought into question.
56 Chapter Two
in the title itself Ill Seen Ill Said: what is seen by the woman or by the
hovering eye is neither fully seen nor completely invisible, what is said is
neither fully said nor silent. Indeterminacy, liminality and limbo are
features of many Beckettian texts, where words never seem to attain
finality, either in absolute absence or presence. This is also the situation of
The Unnamable, where we have the subjective voice of the speaking “I”
speaking from a place between life and death with nothing but the words
of its consciousness keeping it company. Similarly, the narrative of Ill
Seen Ill Said, shrouded in haze and fog, is indicative of the visual
indeterminacy pervading the text as a whole. Vision is often impeded by
impenetrable darkness or fog to the point that there is nothing left to see
but the darkness and fog themselves. “The eye will close in vain. To see
but haze. Not even. Be itself but haze” (78). Never is the reader certain of
the presence of anything, least of all the protagonist, whose ontological
status is always in question, as she is repeatedly and mysteriously
vanishing and reappearing: “But she can be gone at any time. From one
moment of the year to the next suddenly no longer there. No longer
anywhere to be seen. Nor by the eye of flesh nor by the other” (56). I
would like to focus on this quote, as it brings together a few important
elements: (1) the ontological significance of seeing and (2) the position of
the eye. Firstly, what is significant about the woman’s presence is that it is
completely separated from the gaze of the eye; neither is she constituted or
“divined” by the eye nor does she seem to be under its power. The eye in
vain pursues her, tries to capture her, but remains always impotently
passive and independent of her. She is “no longer anywhere to be seen.
Nor by the eye of the flesh nor by the other” (64). This raises questions
concerning the position and relevance of the eye in regard to the woman.
Are we to understand that there is another eye apart from the physical one
used for vision, an eye of the poetic imagination perhaps? Or are we to
understand that there is a physical eye belonging to one person and another
eye belonging to another, the Other. This ambiguity is exacerbated if we
take this to be another example of Beckett’s puns on the “I” as the subject
and the “eye” of perception. Who is perceiving and who is perceived? This
is a question (now posed within the visual paradigm) which harks back to
the central dilemma haunting the trilogy: “Who speaks the “I” of the text?”
A similar relation to the one found between the writer (perceiver) and
the woman (the perceived) can also be discerned in Beckett’s Film, where
we see (or rather we are) a camera pursuing Buster Keaton’s character in
an attempt to finally capture or seize him. A strikingly similar drama
unfolds in Ill Seen Ill Said with the woman being pursued by the hovering
eye (the narrator). And again, the eye of the narrator cannot seize the
object of its gaze, “but quick seize her where she is best to be seized. In
the pastures far from shelter” (55), as the woman is always half-present,
liable to disappear at any moment. A brief look at Film will yield more
insight into answering the question of what the relevance and significance
the eye has for Beckett.
Beckett wrote a screenplay for Film at the behest of his American
publisher, Barney Rosset, who invited him, along with Pinter and Ionesco,
to write a film script, though this does not mark the beginning of Beckett’s
fascination with film as a possible artistic medium.7 According to Enoch
Brater, “Beckett’s attraction to film, therefore, lies in the medium’s ability
to evoke the ‘said’ by the ‘unsaid,’ quite the opposite of the ‘extraordinary
evocation of the unsaid by the said’ he admired so much in Denis Devlin’s
poetry of the thirties” (Brater 84). It was Beckett’s choice for this to be a
silent film, evocative in its expressive potential to intimate the unsaid
through the visual imagery afforded to him by the new medium.
The short story set in 1929 is quite simple in its narrative. Buster
Keaton’s character, the object (O), is relentlessly pursued by the eye (E).
The pursuit begins on the street and gradually progresses from an exterior
environment to an interior one, the last scenes taking place inside a small
room. The final frames of the film make it clear that the two perspectives
involved have an identical source. O’s attempt to remove all forms of
perception ultimately fails as one cannot escape self-perception and the
last scene is that of the camera eye (E) finally catching sight of O. This
catching sight is now a familiar image (see Imagination Dead Imagine, Ill
Seen Ill Said).
The title brings self-reflexive focus to the medium itself. Film is, as
Linda Ben-Zvi writes, “a film about a film” (31). This work has been most
commonly interpreted with the aid the Latin epigraph – esse est percipi (to
be is to be perceived) – attributed to George Berkeley, whose maxim
places ontology in the subordination to perception and thus the protagonist
is dependent on the ocular for proof of his existence. The eye is, therefore,
of utmost importance in Film, appearing in the first and last scene. The
reference antiocularcentric thrust of the slit eyeball at the beginning of Un
chien andalou by Dali and Buñuel is unmistakable. Further evidence of the
7
Beckett revealed an interest in the medium much earlier, when, in 1935, he wrote
to Sergei Eisenstein in hopes of securing an apprenticeship for himself (Knowlson
1996: 212-213). It is ironic that Beckett’s aim at that time was to move out of
silent black and white film and take advantage of the possibilities of colour film,
when the only film he realized was black and white, and silent.
58 Chapter Two
importance of the eye as the central metaphor of the film is in the fact that
the working title of Film was “The Eye”.8
Since the enucleated eye is given such a salient position in both Film
and Ill Seen Ill Said, its significance must be given further attention. The
eye can be construed as the eye of the omnivoyant Other, whose pursuit to
visually capture its object (whether it be the woman in Ill Seen Ill Said or
(O) in Film) in its full presence is frustrated by the object taking flight or,
as in the case of the woman in Ill Seen Ill Said, by fog, haze and her
tentative corporeal presence. However, let us consider the alternative. It is
equally possible to construe the woman as the other. Seeing her would
entail defining her within the space of the eye’s visual field. Defining her,
however, would in effect deprive her of her alterity. The eye’s gaze is
directed at the woman, who is not aware of the eye’s presence. Despite
this violent gaze, the woman’s alterity is ensured by our not discerning her
and is further reinforced by our absolute ignorance of her thoughts and
motives which lie outside the narrative and, therefore, outside our
knowledge. Furthermore, the impenetrable haze and confusion surrounding
her bar access to this knowledge, thereby securing her from the
“objectifying gaze”. This distance – both visual and epistemological – is
maintained between her and the eye, a distance which is the constitutive
difference between writing and sight.
As stated earlier, Ill Seen Ill Said, seen as an extension of the semi-
autobiographical Company, focuses on the artistic process of writing rather
than on biographical fragments of the artist’s life. “Already all confusion.
Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing.
Despite precautions. If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This
old so dying woman. So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere
else” (1996: 58). The meaning and effects of writing will thus be
recognized as occupying the salient theme of the text. If Ill Seen Ill Said is
read in such a way, then the “poetics of naming” indeed becomes central
to our analysis.
In the chapter entitled “Speaking is not Seeing” of his monumental
book, The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot poses a challenge to the
ocularcentric bias of Western philosophy by exposing the underlying
reasons for such a privileging. The same reason why sight was elevated to
the metaphor for understanding and thus given primacy over language is
for Blanchot the reason for its incompatibility to neutrality. As mentioned
8
In his essay “On Directing Film”, Schneider mentions that the earlier draft of
Film was titled “The Eye”, changed upon completion when it became clear that the
appearance of the eye at the beginning and ending of the film suffices as a clear
philosophical indication of the ocular emphasis.
earlier, seeing as understanding involves the violent act of grasping the

object and assimilating it into the idiom of the subject and thereby
destroying the alterity of the perceived object. Sight, due to the immediacy
of the relation between the object and the subject, instantly reveals and
exposes whatever precedes it. The same rule is applicable to writing, since
it is also in danger of destroying the alterity of what approaches, if the
purpose of writing is to “delimit” and “define”. For Blanchot – and I
believe also for Beckett – writing is thus trapped in a double-bind, wherein
the necessity of writing is linked with the impossibility of writing in such a
way that would preserve the alterity of the object. In other words, seeing
and writing, in their different yet ultimately violent ways, efface the
perceived object as an Other. And thus Blanchot states that
. . . we find justified in Beckett’s case the disappearance of every sign that

would merely be a sign for the eye. Here the force of seeing is no longer
what is required; one must renounce the domain of the visible and of the
invisible, renounce what is represented, albeit in negative fashion. Hear,
simply hear. (1993: 329)
For Blanchot writing does not necessarily have to fall into the same
imperialistic category as sight. He attempts to address the possibility of a
language which would be separated from the ocularcentric metaphor,
based on the unveiling of the thing said, “a speech such that to speak
would no longer be to unveil with light. . . . Here what reveals itself does
not give itself up to sight, just as it does not take refuge in simple
invisibility” (1993: 29). By combining the sight metaphor with speech,
Blanchot’s notion of light is anything but an agent of epistemological
revelation. Here, the theme of indeterminacy, where something is neither
visible nor invisible, defers from the encapsulating law of light.
One of the constitutive differences between vision and language is the
extent of the limits the respective mediums possess. Whereas vision,
grounded as it is in one perspective, is always bound by the limitations of
a horizon which encircles the subject, language, on the other hand, has no
such limitations and is capable of limitless perspectives. Blanchot writes:
“The terrifying word passes over every limit and even the limitlessness of
the whole” (1993: 28). The terror he writes of can be found in the absolute
transgression of language, which “no longer presents itself as speech, but
as sight freed from the limitations of sight” (1993: 29). What is more,
visibility annuls the distance between the object and spectator, but in
speech there is always a difference, a distance in the form of language.
Keeping this in mind, I would like to introduce Blanchot’s distinction
between two types of writing; the writing of the day and the writing of the
60 Chapter Two
night. Writing of the day, also referred to as the first slope, refers to
traditional prose, wherein language serves the writer in order to represent
ideas clearly and realistically. This is the language of enlightenment, of
comprehension and clarity; in short, it is a language dependent not only on
mimesis but also on the metaphor of light; hence, what is named is known.
The other form of writing is nocturnal; the writing of the night does not
aim at a mastery of language but, instead, opens the writer and language to
the impersonal voice that is at the source of writing. It is because of this
irreducible distance between the writer and the writer’s work that
Blanchot’s concept of nocturnal writing becomes the only “responsible”
mode of writing, as only it is through it that a response to the other is
possible. In the absence of the law of the light, the uncertain and ineffable
can be approached.
This distinction is important, not only because Beckett also uses the
night/day opposition to foreground the narrative in Ill Seen Ill Said. The
protagonist moves between these two states, but only leaves the safety of
her cabin when night descends. Encountering the others at the graveyard,
the place of death, during the night would be evocative of Blanchot’s
description of the nocturnal writer for whom ambiguity and silence, the
two themes which invoke the infinity of a relation that can never be
achieved, take precedence over the “enlightened” and ocularcentric model
of language which totalizes, grasps, and comprehends. The ever-present
darkness in Ill Seen Ill Said – for it is never day, just evening and night –
reveals the difference and separation that would otherwise be eliminated
by the clarity of light. Visibility is rejected in Ill Seen Ill Said for the sake
of difference by which a relation with the unseen and ineffable is
preserved.
For Blanchot writing does not seek to encapsulate the subject and,
therefore, it breaks with all “empirical experience of the world” as well as
“. . . with thought when thought gives itself as an immediate proximity”
(1993: 261). And thus, writing, always engaged with the “non-manifest”
and the unknown (understood by Blanchot as the neutral), will, as a result,
always border on the incomprehensible and the ambiguous, and its
determinations will strive not for full presence but, instead, will exist
interstitially between the realms of speaking and seeing, between black
and white. The woman of Ill Seen Ill Said exemplifies the subject of
writing in her “vacillations” between the safety of the shelter (the writing
of the day) and her nocturnal journey to the graveyard (the writing of the
night); she is neither fully present nor fully absent and, therefore, occupies
the position of the limit. Furthermore, the eye’s inability to assimilate her
provides further indication of the unsurpassable distance Beckett establishes
between the subject and the object. The woman does not “give herself as
immediate proximity” (62) and so will always remain beyond the
totalizing grasp of language as well as vision.
Visuality and writing – as well as another familiar Beckettian and
Blanchotian theme, namely, death – come together in Blanchot’s analysis
of the myth of Orpheus entitled “Gaze of Orpheus”. As Martin Jay claims
in his account of Blanchot’s analysis, “Orpheus’s gaze is the founding act
of writing because it crosses the threshold of death and seeks in vain to
return to an immediate of visual presence that cannot be restored” (Jay
553). A comprehensive examination of all the concepts involved in the
“Gaze of Orpheus” would prove impractical within the scope of this
chapter; therefore, I will limit my concluding consideration to a reading of
this myth in the context of the possibilities and impossibilities of writing
in Ill Seen Ill Said. My hypothesis will be that Orpheus’s descent to the
underworld to retrieve Eurydice is a confrontation with the Blanchotian
other night and parallels the dramatization of nocturnal writing found in Ill
Seen Ill Said.
Orpheus is granted permission by Pluto and Persephone to bring
Eurydice back under the one condition that he may not turn around and
look at her until they have both returned to the light of day. Of course, the
pivotal moment of the myth is when Orpheus breaks this agreement and
does glimpse at Eurydice at which point she disappears. If we consider
Orpheus’s project to be, as Blanchot defines it, “to bring back [the work]
into daylight and in the daylight give it form, figure and reality” (1993:
437) then this confrontation with Eurydice reveals an impasse which is at
the heart of writing. In order to complete his Work, which is the retrieval
of Eurydice, he must obey the law imposed on him, a law that forbids
sight. The law of concealment thus constitutes the necessary limit in
Orpheus’s work, but it is a limit that must be transgressed in order for
Orpheus, or metaphorically the writer, to complete his work, that is, in
order to fail. As Simon Critchley writes, Orpheus’s aim and the aim of
nocturnal writing is not to make the “invisible visible, but to see the
invisible as invisible” (43). This impasse defines the work for both
Beckett, Blanchot and Orpheus and reveals the inevitable failure of the
work. Sight, here being a metaphor for writing, is shown not only in its
futility but also in its destructive capacity. Orpheus’s gaze is considered to
be a movement of desire and inspiration and is thus inextricably linked to
writing, which, in turn, “is related to the absence of the work...” (Blanchot
1993: 424).
In Ill Seen Ill Said, the act of looking directly and seizing the object,
that is the woman, is also frustrated. The impossibility to see well in Ill
62 Chapter Two
Seen Ill Said corresponds to the impossibility of Orpheus’s gaze capturing

Eurydice. The act of writing for Blanchot, and perhaps also for Beckett, is
predicated on this impossibility of naming or seeing in a way that would
once and for all master the object. For Blanchot, Eurydice is “the limit of
what art can attain; concealed behind a name and covered by a veil, she is
the profoundly dark point towards which art, desire, death, and the night
all seem to lead” (1993: 437). The woman, who is also covered by a veil,
profoundly dark, is for the writer’s eye the impossible end towards which
seeing and writing leads.
Taking into account all that has been said thus far, it may be assumed
that the violent power of language to subdue and destroy, a theme
consistently revisited by Blanchot and Beckett, can be understood also to
hold true for vision. To say or see something completely, not ill, but fully,
would be to place it in a totalizing structure, thereby eradicating its
otherness and reducing it to the context from which we see or name it.
This imperialism of light, therefore, refers also to the word, which is used
to comprehend and impose order. Beckett’s earlier distress regarding
saying too much and yet not saying enough, can also be seen as bearing a
relation to seeing. The power to see clearly in Ill Seen Ill Said is just as
diminished as the power to speak comprehensibly, that is, in a way that
would permanently fix and entrap meaning. “Seeing well” and “saying
well” would thus only expose the imperialistic attitude towards the
unknown that should always be present as an absence and spoken of in
silence.
In conclusion, it is important to reiterate a few major points. Beckett’s
interest in the visual arts extended not only to his occasional
corroborations with painters, but an aesthetic kinship he discerned between
his minimalism and the art of German Expressionism and Surrealism. His
interest surpassed dilettantish fascinations with trends and fashions in
contemporary art and was more concerned with the means by which art
questions its own possibilities of expression, a theme that is one of the
most conspicuous in his own art. These possibilities focused on the
oscillating limits of visibility and invisibility, and it is this limit that
becomes for Beckett the site of his art. This shift of focus from the purely
literal to the visual coincides with the antiocularcentric inclinations
discernable in the works of postwar French writers and philosophers,
notably Bataille and Merleau-Ponty respectively. Nowhere in Beckett’s
prose do we see a privileging of sight over any other mode of
apprehension or apperception; quite to the contrary, both sight and
language are seen as denigrated modes of understanding that only frustrate
and bar the preontological silence and nothingness.
Though most of Beckett’s prose contains a strong visual element, it is

in his post-trilogy work where visuality and the image act as a proxy for
the linguistic entanglements found in the trilogy and Texts for Nothing.
Indeed, Deleuzes’s classification of three languages is applicable to the
difference of focus. Whereas the trilogy dealt with the exhaustion of
logical means of expression, the later works, such as Imagination Dead
Imagine and Ill Seen Ill Said, take on a more visual aspect of exhaustion.
The former expresses the process of imagination at work within the
impossibility of adhering to the call of self-annihilation. The latter work
presents the impossibility of vision taking hold of the object in a way that
would retain its otherness. Analogous to this theme is Blanchot’s
description of Orpheus’s gaze which kills what it apprehends. This
metaphor can be traced in Beckett’s presentation of the enucleated eye of
Ill Seen Ill Said, Film, and Imagination Dead Imagine. This all-seeing eye,
reminiscent of the Benthamite panopticon, figures as a camera lens or the
imagination itself, and is depicted in its impossible pursuit of the object of
perception. What must remain outside of view is the inexpressible
otherness that engenders writing and sight.
The notion of inexpressibility is a bi-product of the subject/object
dichotomy, and of the presupposition that Beckett is writing to say some
“thing”. According to Alain Badiou, Beckett’s work is self-sufficient, self-
constituent as it establishes its own internal interrelations. A similar claim
could be made of abstract expressionism, as both forms of art do not
appeal to anything outside their borders for either validity or meaning. In
the same way that abstract expressionist painting is not a painting of
something particular, so Beckett’s narratives are not about something, they
are that something – to echo Beckett’s praiseful essay on Joyce’s
Finnegan’s Wake: “Here form is content, content is form” (1984: 27).
What is, therefore, so often termed as inexpressibility in Beckett’s
work does not necessarily have to connote an unattainable source of
enunciation, a totality and plentitude achieved in a teleological, and even
theological, manner. Nor does it have to exclusively connote an aesthetics
of failure which curtails the limits of language, though both interpretations
are well-established and justifiable. As was already elaborated on in
Chapter One, Beckett’s incessant impossibility to say the final “I” and
achieve the long-desired silence in The Unnamable results from the self-
reflexive movement lying at the origin of the Cartesian self-constitution. It
is also from that impossibility to express that the obligation to express is
borne. Inexpressibility is thus not the failed outcome of expression, but its
origin. Likewise, the visual metaphor works in much the same way and
perhaps goes some way in elucidating the logic of inexpressibility. With
64 Chapter Two
the emphasis on emptiness and darkness, it becomes clear that whatever is

the object of perception exists precisely as a delimited abstraction of its
background; in the same way words cut through silence, so a painter’s
brush separates and divides space. Beckett’s art is one that is trapped
between two extremes and these dichotomies operate against each other as
a generating force of imagination and life. This event of birth/death takes
place in the reciprocated gaze which, like Orpheus, kills, while, at the
same time, constituting the possibility of art.
CHAPTER THREE
ETHICS OF NEGATIVITY
The first chapter proposed a reading of inexpressibility in terms of its

linguistic manifestation, the second chapter approached absence and
invisibility in its visual manifestation; both these visual and textual aspects
of Beckett’s treatment of inexpressibility will in this chapter converge into
an ethical reading, as what is sustained in Beckett’s texts, construed as
either linguistic exhaustion or visual emptying, can be read as an
encounter and tentative relation with alterity. This chapter, therefore, shall
focus on the ethical reverberations of inexpressibility and will be in many
ways an extension of what I have already outlined in the previous
chapters; namely, the relation between Beckett and Blanchot approached
through a common set of terms, such as neutrality, obligation and silence.
To flesh out this relation further, it will be necessary in this chapter to
refer to Emmanuel Levinas’s redefinition of ethics as the first philosophy,
as it constitutes the basis of Blanchot’s philosophy and further develops
the theoretical backdrop against which I will read Beckett’s How It Is.
Although an ethical role of inexpressibility can be traced in apophatic
discourse of negative theology and Derridian deconstruction, it was
Levinas who developed and problematized the relation with alterity, which
is the basis of ethics. Accordingly, I will show how these aforementioned
apophatic traditions leading up to Levinas and Blanchot bear upon Beckett
studies.
Though the place and significance of alterity have already been
discussed in relation to negative theology and deconstruction, the usefulness
of reading Beckett through Levinas and Blanchot has rarely been the
subject of critical analysis. 1 With Levinas’s work being so intimately
connected with the philosophical framework developed by Derrida and
Blanchot, both of whom viewed Beckett’s work as expressing their
1
Connor’s “Beckett in the Face of Levinas” (Connor 1992) is devoted to the
subject. Trezise and Locatelli (1990) briefly address this issue. There is also a
chapter in Anthony Uhlmann’s Beckett and Postructuralism devoted to the
relationship between Derrida, Levinas and Beckett in terms of ethics and language.
66 Chapter Three
respective philosophical tenets, it is surprising that more attention has not

been paid to the ethical aspect of Beckett’s work. This chapter will attempt
to address this question with respect to Beckett’s How It Is, which has
been regarded as a turning point in Beckett’s prose writing after the ten
year period following the publication of Texts for Nothing, during which
Beckett concentrated on theatre work. How It Is marks a return to prose
work and for the first time establishes a relation to alterity as its primary
theme. The argument developed in this chapter is that the ubiquity of
absence and silence pervading Beckett’s How It Is is tied to the ethical
demand as posited in Levinas’s philosophy. The notions of il y a in a
similar way as the Blanchotian neutre serve to establish the place, or rather
non-place, in which How It Is is set.
How It Is is an attempt to address alterity without incorporating it into
its own idiom, i.e. preserving its otherness by means of not only paratactic
syntax, which frustrates cohesion and comprehension, but also through the
theme of witness and testimony which I draw from Giorgio Agamben’s
Remnants of Auschwitz. The role of the witness and testimony will be
selected as a focal point of the analysis because of its relation to the
Holocaust experience referred to by Theodore Adorno, Agamben and
Levinas. Speaking of the Holocaust has become a modern resuscitation of
the apophatic tradition which confers upon the witness silence in much the
same way in which the true protagonist of How It Is is a silent witness, on
behalf of whom the narrator conveys the story.
In order to develop this argument, I will place it in relation to the
apophatic tradition as it develops with Derrida and Levinas. Instead of
arguing that Beckett’s work is yet another manifestation of this tradition, I
do propose the thesis that ontology in How It Is is rather a manifestation of
the obligation to respond to alterity, exteriority and the Levinasian il y a.
Inexpressibility in Negative Theology and Derrida

The trope of inexpressibility has long history, as it has for centuries
been utilized in religious discourse as a means of positing the infinite
divine and sacred beyond the finite materialism of language. The Cloud of
Unknowing, the Hebrew prohibition to name God, Plato’s Timaeus,
Eckhart’s sermons, to Dionysius’ hierarchies to Heidegger’s late unpublished
lectures – what all these disparate works have in common is the attention
they accord to the inexpressible source of their discourse proper to
apophatic discourse. Apophatic discourse, or negative theology, is not a
particular religion containing a set of tenets and prescriptions, but is a way
of approaching God through via negativa. Instead of a revelation being the
Ethics of Negativity 67
basis of religion, apophatic discourse, through subtraction and negation,

intimates the metaphysical essence that is God. This approach is based not
only on the tenet that language is a human construct, therefore a useless
means of apprehending God, but also on the interdiction against graven
images of God found in the Old Testament, an interdiction which,
according to Jean-François Lyotard, Kant viewed as the most sublime
fragment of the Bible (146).
This unmistakable strand of apophatic discourse in Western philosophy
can certainly be detected in Beckett’s prose, especially in the dramatized
tension of language at its limits. These affinities between negative
theology and modernist literature have not gone unnoticed by Beckett
scholars. Shira Wolosky goes as far as to claim that Beckett’s work in
general “invokes a broad context and history of negative mysticisms as a
framework” (165). Within the tradition of negative theology, apophatic
discourse approaches that which, by definition, must remain outside
language. If religious discourse approaches God through negation, so
Beckett, through much the same techniques of negation and paradox,
approaches self-consciousness, self-present subjectivity, and the foundation
afforded to thought by the Cartesian tradition.
Although the aforementioned critics present an interpretation that
justifies the deployment of negative theology as a lens though which to
analyze Beckett’s work, it must be remembered that this can only be done
to a certain degree; otherwise the interpretation becomes an imposition on
Beckett’s texts. Indeed, inscribing theological discourse onto Beckett’s
texts can provide a context wherein a meaningful pattern is revealed, yet
this context nonetheless contaminates the text with surplus meaning,
which is why the focus of this comparison should be directed solely on the
rhetoric and techniques common for both negative theology and Beckett.
Reading Beckett alongside negative theology is an exercise which yields
results in the form of a topographical analysis of language patterns
centered around paradox and negation; however, it would be unfounded to
claim that references to negative theology are in any way privileged or
more pronounced than other discourses applicable to Beckett’s texts, or
that negative theology offers a more comprehensive context to analyze this
work. How negative theology is important and relevant for this study can
be summarized by focusing on one essential factor without which neither
negative theology nor Beckett’s paratactic prose would be able to sustain
themselves; namely, the tentative relation maintained with the
inexpressible exteriority of the text.
The themes of impossibility of expression, failure of expression, and
instability of the speaking subject have all given deconstruction grounds to
68 Chapter Three
become a productive theoretical tool in approaching Beckett’s writing.

What is more surprising, however, is that for the same thematic reasons,
critics turned to negative theology as a means of approaching Beckett’s
use of paradox and insistence on the impossibility of giving expression to
the inexpressible. It would, however, be an overstatement to suggest that it
is some kind of divinity or godhead that is invoked, when Beckett’s
characters are struggling with speech or when language itself is brought to
exhaustion and absurdity. Negative theology is applicable in terms of
methods but becomes counterproductive if the whole theological and
ideological context upon which apophatic discourse is predicated is
brought into play as a means of conferring meaning where there is none.
It should be mentioned that negative theology reemerged in
philosophical discussion only after deconstruction had established itself in
contemporary literary theory. Not only has Derrida’s deconstruction been
linked to negative theology, but poststructuralist critics, such as Jean Luc
Marion intentionally took up negative theology as their philosophical
domain. Indeed, Derrida’s critique of the metaphysical bias within
Western philosophy could be viewed alongside negative theology’s
negation of language, especially in terms of the differential and deferring
movement of the sign, which renders impossible the self-presence of the
signifier. Because each signifier has to refer to another signifier for
meaning, the final signified is kept at bay; the transcendental signified
figures as the promise which can never be fulfilled in language. Similarly,
the metaphysical kernel of theological systems is also kept beyond the
system it purportedly supports.
Derrida made a point early on in his career to distance himself from the
implicit relation deconstruction has with negative theology, but it was not
until the publication of “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials” that he
addressed the topic directly. In this essay, Derrida recognizes the “more or
less tenable analogy” and “family resemblance” between negative
theology and “every discourse that seems to return in a regular and
insistent manner to this rhetoric of negative determination” (74) but
refuses to equate deconstruction with negative theology. Whereas negative
theology proposes identifying God with a hyperessential presence beyond
any affirmative and propositional statements, deconstruction proposes
disturbing the very ontological presuppositions which allow such
statements to function in the first place. Derrida works on the margins of
the ontological tradition, seeking pre-ontological infrastructures, instead of
simply repeating metaphysics. This seems to be the reason why Derrida
refuses to place deconstruction under the banner of negative theology:
“No, I would hesitate to describe what I put forward under the familiar
heading of negative theology, precisely because of that ontological wager

of hyperessentiality that one finds at work both in Dionysius and in
Meister Eckhart” (1992: 78). In its negation, the hyperessential being that
is God still figures as a presence, a being beyond being (epekeina tes
ousias). This form of inexpressibility does not do justice to the ethical
demand posed by a radically Other.
Now, since I have already discussed the link negative theology shares
with Beckett and Derrida respectively, I will proceed to the third relation –
Derrida and Beckett. Though Derrida’s writing has on occasion wandered
towards literature, incorporating such writers as Joyce, Mallarmé, and
Kafka, he has always refrained from writing about Beckett. The reasons
for Derrida’s refusal to approach Beckett are discussed in an interview
with Derek Attridge, where he admits that, apart from devoting some of
his seminars with students to Beckett, he has never written anything about
him, despite or indeed because of a deep affiliation with Beckett’s writing.
Thus, it can be seen that Derrida has consciously distanced himself from
both negative theology and Beckett’s work, albeit in different ways and for
different reasons. Speaking about Beckett in the interview with Attridge,
Derrida says:
This is an author to whom I feel very close, or to whom I would like to feel
myself very close; but also too close. Precisely because of this proximity, it
is too hard for me, too easy and too hard. I have perhaps avoided him a bit
because of this identification. Too hard also because he writes – in my
language, in a language which is his up to a point, mine up to a point –
texts which are both too close to me and too distant for me even to be able
to ‘respond’ to them. (1992: 60)
This closeness Derrida notices between his own work and Beckett’s has
given a cue to many critics to pursue a deconstructive approach to
Beckett’s work, viewing it as essentially self-deconstructive, thereby
rendering impossible any deconstructive reading, as that would merely
repeat the inherently deconstructive gestures found in Beckett’s texts.
Such interpretations have very often relied heavily on the application of
Derridean terminology to Beckett’s fiction with an emphasis on the now
common themes of the subject’s absence from the text, the disappearance
of authorial presence, and a denial of logocentricity.2 Though Derrida is
reticent about this topic, he betrays one important thought:
2
Trezise’s book Into the Breach stands out as the seminal deconstructive
interpretation of Beckett’s fiction.
70 Chapter Three
The composition, the rhetoric, the construction and the rhythm of his
[Beckett’s] works, even the ones that seem the most ‘decomposed,’ that’s
what ‘remains’ finally the most ‘interesting,’ that’s the work, that’s the
signature, this remainder which remains when the thematics is exhausted
(and also exhausted, by others, for a long time now, in other modes).
(1992: 61)
Beckett’s work, so often viewed as a systematic exhaustion, has rarely

been seen outside its technical and linguistic layer. It is here in the
“remains” of what is left that the ethics of Beckett’s work can be
extrapolated.3 As decomposition and fragmentation break down any means
of meaningful discourse, the remains become of vital importance.
According to Critchley, “such remains (reste) would be the irreducible
idiom of Beckett’s work, its ineffaceable signature. It is this remainder that
is both revealed through reading and resists reading” (145). Gary Banham
takes up this line of though in “Cinders: Derrida and Beckett”, where the
‘cinders’ or remains link Derrida’s deconstruction with Beckett’s
apophatic discourse. The cinder in question refers to the “nothing that can
be in the world, nothing that remains as an entity. It is the being that [...]
remains beyond everything that is, remains unpronounceable in order to
make saying possible although it is nothing” (Derrida 1991: 73 qtd. in
Banham 57). This cinder is a nothingness that cannot be expressed, it is,
according to Banham, the place from which issues the voice of the
unnamable, a limit between exteriority and the subject. Banham writes
that, “when we reach the ‘edge of language’ through the encounter with
that which defies naming we find that language itself is an edge which cuts
between the world and the one who speaks” (58). To write of this place or
for this place is to write at the edge of language, an edge separating the
writing/speaking subject with alterity.
Exteriority, Alterity and Obligation

In “Tympanum”, an essay found in Margins of Philosophy, Derrida
discusses how exteriority forces upon philosophy a reexamination of
textuality. Derrida criticizes philosophy not for ignoring alterity, as
“exteriority and alterity are concepts which by themselves have never
surprised philosophical discourse. Philosophy by itself has always been
concerned with them” (1982: viii), but for having done something far more
3
A hypothesis could be ventured here that when Derrida speaks of Beckett poetics
in terms of a ‘remainder’ he is also referring to deconstruction, seeing in it an
ethics in terms of what is left after the process has been carried out to the end.
violent; it “has appropriated the concept (of the other) for itself; it has
believed that it controls the margin of its volume and that it thinks its
other” (1982: x). Derrida argues that the coherence of scientific and
philosophical discourse is maintained at the expense of alterity, its margins
defined in such a way that alterity is kept at bay, unable to disturb the
structurality it helps to create. It is this relation, a recognition without
appropriation, that becomes the crux of the ethical demand. The notion of
signifying alterity without determining it philosophically is what
constitutes the question Derrida poses to Emmanuel Levinas. If one is to
speak of alterity, one has to do the impossible task of shedding the
ontological language used in philosophical discourse in favour of ethical
interminability, silence and the inexpressible. Thus, the ethical dimension
of inexpressibility has as its base the thought of the Other, or rather as a
saving of the Other from expression which would entail its destruction, as
through expression it would no longer be other than me. In other words, if
the Other is to be viewed as the absolute Other, it must be infinitely
separated from a language which seeks to identify it always in relation to
itself by conferring an identity to it (naming) or by defining it and thus
drawing a limit, thereby excising it from the unknown. To include the
Other into the discourse of the subject while at the same time preserving or
saving its otherness has been, as Theodor Adorno notices, the theme of
post-Holocaust thought, a theme Adorno thought was best exemplified by
Beckett’s negative poetics.4
Indeed, what binds the disparate postmodern theories is a concern for
difference and a resistance to mastery and thematization of alterity and
Adorno sees Auschwitz as the confirmation and horrific effect of identity-
thinking which incorporates and thereby destroys alterity. For Adorno,
“Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death” (1973:
362), as identity is formed only by eliminating what is Other. It is
important to mention here that Auschwitz plays a significant role in the
reformulation of the inexpressibility topos, having become a synecdoche
of the inexpressible horrors of the Holocaust, where silence is the only
possible means of conveying the enormity of destruction. To make the
Holocaust intelligible by means of a narrative is to commit violence on an
event which has become unspeakable. Therefore, this silence speaks not
only of the limits of language in the face of inexpressible horror, but also
of the distance that must be maintained.
It is not surprising then that ever since the nihilistic tendencies of
metaphysics have been linked to the historical tragedy of the Holocaust,
4
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory was to be dedicated to Samuel Beckett.
72 Chapter Three
critics have attempted to think of postmodern ethics in terms of the

preservation of alterity in relation to our discourse. And thus literature, art
and philosophy have oriented themselves around the notion of maintaining
a distance to what has become the metaphysical Other, a distance that
would save alterity from the integrative economy of enlightened and
identity-oriented discourse.
This ethical distance takes certain artistic forms, silence being only one
poetic manifestation of the abovementioned interdiction, yet, as Beckett’s
work displays, there are other tools at hand which serve to manifest this
distance. Fragmented, incoherent writing which rejects any form of
totalizing rational comprehension is a technique readily utilized by Beckett
in his post-trilogy years. Meaninglessness, not as an effect of linguistic
inaccuracy, but as an expression of the futility and failure of language in
the face of existence, becomes meaningful in itself. Indeed, only a
literature which breaches the limits of meaning and meaningless is possible
after the Holocaust; it is a literature of both necessity and impossibility.
Though Adorno leads the way to a reorientation in the way the Other is
approached in post-Holocaust modernity, it is Emmanuel Levinas who is
most credited for bringing the notion of alterity and ethics to bear on
contemporary philosophy. Levinas goes against the tradition which has
always reduced alterity into the order of what he, following Plato, calls the
Same (le même; te auton) by approaching it in a dialectic manner, thus
always treating the Other as the Other of the Same instead of the
absolutely Other. This infinite distance between the Same and the Other is
the foundation of his ethics. In his 1961 Totality and Infinity, ethics is
described as “the putting into question of my spontaneity by the presence
of the Other” (1987: 43). This exteriority that puts the subject into
question bears the name of “face” in Levinas’s philosophy. Because the
subject has a habitual tendency to ‘devour’ all that is other, totalizing it
and stripping it of its alterity, it only achieves a violent manifestation of
power over the Other. The violent notion of grasping (comprehending) is
thus regarded in term of an imperialistic power relation towards alterity,
because “if you could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be
the other. Possessing, knowing, and grasping are synonyms of power”
(Levinas 1987: 90). Ontology and epistemology have assimilated alterity
through this comprehension and understanding. Being forced to respond to
the face of the absolutely other interrupts this tendency and is the basis of
ethics. Language and generosity are seen as instruments of this response
(responsibility appears in his later works).
Levinas also warns us not to confuse this notion of alterity with
mystical ecstasy, where “the subject is absorbed in the object and recovers
itself in its unity” (Levinas 1987, 41). There can be no unity, oneness with
the other without destroying the distance which must be preserved if
alterity is to be preserved. Without this distance and without the preservation
of other in its otherness, the possibilities of an ethical relation are
destroyed. Similarly, although tendencies of apophatic discourse associated
with mysticism can be discerned in Beckett’s work, there is no final unity
and coalescence of the divine and worldly found in Beckett’s writing,
where final meaning is always deferred.
To further understand Levinas’s notion of ethics, certain key concepts
have to be first defined. The enigmatic notion of il y a, similarly to
Derrida’s differenace and trace, and Blanchot’s neutre, resists definition,
as it refers to a preontological state which must necessarily remain beyond
the grasp of language. Il y a is a notion which is very close to Heidegger’s
es gibt as Being. To imagine the il y a Levinas asks us to conduct a
thought experiment:
Let us imagine all things, beings and persons, returning to nothingness.

What remains after this imaginary destruction of everything is not
something, but the fact that ‘there is’. The absence of everything returns as
a presence, as the place where the bottom has dropped out of everything,
an atmospheric density, a plentitude of the void or the murmur of silence.
There is, after this destruction of things and being, the impersonal “field of
forces” of existing. There is something that is neither subject nor
substantive. The fact of existing imposes itself where there is no longer
anything. And it is anonymous: there is neither anyone nor anything that
takes this existence upon itself. It is impersonal like “it is raining” or “it is
hot.” Existing returns no matter with what negation one dismisses it. There
is, as the irremissibility of pure existing. (1987: 46-47)
This exhausted and anonymous residue of what remains after negation has
run its course is the il y a, which cannot be approached in any way but in a
language of paradox in keeping with its “fundamental absurdity” (Levinas
1987: 51). Here we can find the connection between Banham’s analysis of
Derrida’s deconstruction and the search of the remaining cinders. These
non-concepts cannot appear in language of mastery and ‘light’, but can be
discerned in the blanks between the words in the lacunae created by
fragmented speech. It would seem, therefore, then that the Other and the il
y a are one and the same thing, as both notions exist outside the bounds of
rational discourse and resist incorporation into an identity-based idiom.
There is, however, a vital distinction that has to be made between the
Other and il y a. This distinction is based on the irremissibility of the il y
a, its irrevocability, and irreducibility, as it is always possible to kill the
Other by way of appropriation, while the il y a will always remain outside
74 Chapter Three
the reach of language. The il y a is what remains beyond the dialectic of

being and nothingness, it is “the absence of everything returns as a
presence, as the place where the bottom has dropped out of everything, an
atmospheric density, a plenitude of the voice, or the murmur of silence”
(Levinas 1987: 46). The Other, on the other hand, can and has been
violently incorporated into the order of the Same, and it is thus in relation
to the Other that one can speak of a proper ethics. There can be no relation
with the il y a; it is, indeed, the urgent necessity to escape the vacuous
horror of the il y a that brings one into an ethical relation with the Other,
which ultimately takes the form of responsibility for the Other, for the
death of the Other. Therefore, we see that the escape from the il y a, which
is neither being nor nothingness, demands a questioning, not of the
ontological status of Being as was the case with Heidegger, but of the
ethical relation between one and the absolute other. If alterity is reducible
to anything, it is nothing more than this relation, which for Levinas can be
mediated only through language and, more specifically, conversation. “We
shall try to show that the relation between the same and the other – upon
which we seem to impose such extraordinary conditions – is language. . .
The relation between the same and the other, metaphysics, is primordially
enacted as conversation. . .” (Levinas 39). It is this “infinite conversation”
which Blanchot sees as the encounter with alterity and the source of
literature.
What Levinas and Blanchot share is a focus on literature’s relation
with alterity and a conception of ethical writing that challenges totalization.
The Infinite Conversation takes up Levinas’s emphasis on language as a
non-totalizing relation to the Other. The Blanchotian parole “is beyond the
reach of the one who says it as much as of the one who hears it. It is
between us, it holds itself between and the conversation is the approach on
the basis of this between” (1993: 212). Blanchot’s earlier writings from the
early 1950s, collected in The Space of Literature (1955), are an attempt to
outline the claim that writing is always a response to radical exteriority.
There Blanchot locates the il y a in the other night, the paradoxical site of
the presence of absence. This is a being without light and without the
possibility of passing into day. Blanchot compares this to the incessant
night of the insomniac who in his restlessness must wait without
expectation. However, the il y a should not be understood as a kind of
condition or event which can be lived through. It is a space in which there
is no coherent and tangible dimension to experience.
The difference between Blanchot’s and Levinas’s approach to the il y a
is that where Levinas sees the subject attempting to escape the horror of
the il y a through the ethical relation with the Other, Blanchot sees the il y
a in terms of the voice of alterity, the condition of literature. This voice is

to be disclosed and pursued, as it is in Beckett’s Trilogy, Texts for Nothing
and How It Is. As was already mentioned in the first chapter, this voice of
alterity binds literature with an impossible obligation towards it.
Beckett’s famous dictum, discussed in the first chapter, concerning the
impossibility of expression arrested by the obligation to express, has, as I
have shown earlier, its correlative in Blanchot’s theory of literature.
Whereas the first part of this dictum concerns the place of language within
the trope of inexpressibility, that is, within this irrevocable impossibility to
express, the second part concentrates on the pressing obligation to
undertake this impossible task. To write in spite of the avowed impossibility
of expressing requires more than a concession to the inexpressible as has
been done, in varying degree, from romanticism to modernism, by way of
evoking the inexpressible in the form of negation and silence
Inexpressibility as it appears in Beckett’s and Blanchot’s writing
constitutes not an illusory end in itself but a determining force calling one
to write and thus invoking literature. What is more, one of the striking
characteristics of this obligation is that it does not issue forth from anyone
within the narrative, but is an obligation whose source lies outside the text
itself, outside literature. When writing on Kafka, Blanchot construes
writing as exigency and locates the demand of writing outside the writer.
A writer like Kafka is under an obligation to write by an outside force. It is
purely a voice from an unknown outside, which never directly manifests
itself, but by way of proxy. The second characteristic of this obligation is
that it can never be fulfilled, as the obligation is only an obligation to act,
to talk, the recourses that the characters have at their disposal impede the
fulfillment of this obligation. Because language is seen as an alien
imposition on the subjectivity of the I speaker, it can never serve the
purpose of expressing anything related to apperception or pure expression
in the Mallarmean sense.
It is through a development of these characteristics as they appear in
Beckett’s The Unnamable that a ‘meaning’ of obligation might be called
to the surface. The first characteristic to be discussed is the radical alterity
of the source of obligation, a source which remains unknown in its
absence while exerting a perpetuating force on the narrative. Beckettian
characters usually receive orders and assignments from an undisclosed
source, usually by proxy. Waiting for Godot stands as a prime example of
this structure, though in Molloy we find the character of Youdi who sends
Malone on his journey to find Molloy. The Unnamable and Texts for
Nothing present the most pared down version of this structure with the
voice being called to account for itself by the other voices. Indeed, the
76 Chapter Three
common duality characterizing Beckett’s work is lost in The Unnamable

where there is no certainty of what the other voices are in relation to the
speaking voice. Though the pronouns I and ‘them’ are used, they fail to
offer any determining location of the characters. In the fist two volumes of
the trilogy, the source of the obligation is thus known only by name
(Godot, Youdi), present only in name and as a name, whereas be the end
of The Unnamable not even the name survives the exhaustive implosion of
language.
The ethics of alterity in How It Is

During the period following the publication of the trilogy and Texts for
Nothing, Beckett’s focus shifted away from prose work towards theatre,
Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape being the most
famous pieces of this period. Upon his return to Ussy-sur-Marne in 1959,
Beckett returned to prose composition and embarked upon a tediously
laborious project that was to become How It Is. It could be stated that How
It Is, published in French as Comment c’est in 1961 and translated by the
author in 1964, is partly a continuation of the familiar disintegrated prose,
decomposed and fragmented further to rid itself of a speaking subject. Not
as well known as the trilogy or his earlier work (Murphy, for instance),
How It Is is nonetheless regarded by some critics as “the greatest of
Beckett’s prose works” (Badiou 63) and a “turning point in Beckett’s art
(Abbott 111) and yet many critics have either given it a cursory glance or
have completely ignored it. Those, however, who did attempt an analysis
of How It Is have almost exclusively limited themselves to the familiar
interpretations involving the themes of self-expression and the search for
identity, existentialist meanderings in search of an authentic self, and the
impasse of language expressing the subject (cf. Abbott). Seeing language
as the most unusual and innovative aspects of Beckett’s prose, certain
critics, notably Brienza, have tended to base their interpretation primarily
on the linguistic aspect of the prose. Those who chose a more
philosophical approach did so primarily within the familiar context
mentioned earlier. A good example of an analysis which takes, what will
become clear later, an unethical approach can be found in Murphy’s
Reconstructing Beckett. Murphy claims that “the essential drama of How It
Is involves a struggle for being which turns decisively upon the issue of
the ontological status of fiction, that is, what being can a character actually
be said to possess?” (62). According to this reading “only when the
character as ‘narrator/narrated takes possession of the ‘voice’ and proceeds
as if it were his own do his words take on a meaning beyond the purely
formal contrivances necessary for the fabrication of a text” (62). This is an

ideal example of a totalizing and ontological reading of a text that is seen
as assimilating alterity in order to constitute the self as a character. What is
significant about the voice, not only in How It Is, but in The Unnamable,
Texts for Nothing, is precisely that it cannot be appropriated; it always
exists outside of the knowing subject. And thus the interpretation which
sees the struggle in How It Is in terms of the narrator’s struggle to
“authenticate” his existence by “breaking away from the formal structures
imposed by the authorial voice” (62) must in effect fall short.
What all the aforementioned interpretations fail to address or recognize
is the role of alterity in How It Is and how the confrontation with an
alterior exteriority not only structures the text on a linguistic level, but also
supports it thematically. This ethical dimension in How It Is becomes the
backdrop for critics such as Alain Badiou, Ewa Plonowska-Ziarek, and
Russell Smith, who see the relation with alterity along with its
appropriation by the narrative voice, as the basis for How It Is. As
Plonowska-Ziarek comments, How It Is
stages almost obsessively a violent clash between the signification of

alterity and the rationality inherent in communication, between the shock
of otherness and absorption of this shock within a discursive community,
has been read almost exclusively within the paradigms of self-expression
or self-referential language. (171)
Alain Badiou considers How It Is “as the mark of a major transformation

in the way that Beckett fictionalizes his thinking” (Badiou 15-16). Badiou
notes that How It Is is grounded in the category of alterity, “of the
encounter and the figure of the Other, which fissures and displaces the
solipsistic internment of the cogito” (16). Therefore, it is the constant
negotiation with the external otherness that becomes the guiding thread in
How It Is, which is a clear break from the aporetic dissolution and
obsessive questioning of the solipsistic subjective “I” one finds in the
trilogy and Texts for Nothing. What How It Is seems to address for the first
time is the confrontation with an alterity a self contained cogito excludes
in the process of self-formation.
The problems of analyzing How It Is become obvious from the first
pages. Even more so than Texts for Nothing, How It Is is devoid of any
stylistic and grammatical syntax, there is no punctuation, verbs are
sometimes omitted, pronouns are left suspended without referents: the
whole work is consequently replete with seemingly incoherent and
illogical statements, most of which reappear recontextualized throughout
the text. To categorize How It Is into any literary genre becomes a
78 Chapter Three
daunting task, as it completely distances itself from fictive narrative,

moving further towards poetry while preserving a semblance of prose.
There is, as Badiou asserts, “a latent poetic matrix as work behind the
prose, ensuring thematic unification and coherence” (17). A combination
of both poetry and prose, How It Is negotiates the relation with the alterity
it cannot directly address.
The text is quite neatly divided into three parts: “before Pim, with Pim,
and after Pim”. These three parts present the journey of an anonymous
being as he crawls through a mud-laden environment with only a sack with
food tied around his neck. Only his words constitute the story. His
progression towards Pim is depicted in part I. Part II depicts the relation
between the anonymous character and Pim in what Ziarek calls “a
gruesome master/slave dialectic” (172). The subject in this encounter is
represented in the “tormentor’s position. Part III depicts the subject being
abandoned by Pim and left immobile in the dark. As Brienza notes,
symmetry demands that there be a fourth part in which the protagonist
becomes the victim. “It is this fourth position”, claims Badiou, “that the
voice is not able to say, thus leading to the axiom of the three quarters
concerning the relationship between truth and speech” (26). It should also
be remembered, as Badiou later points out, that despite the designations of
“victim” and “tormentor” these relations between the characters are
egalitarian, representing no hierarchy, as the positions and figures are only
“generic avatars of existence; they are equivalent to one another, . . .” (26).
Structurally, the three parts are composed of versets or strophes, each
constituting a beginning and an end in itself as well as contributing to the
whole of the text. This structure is a departure from the long meandering
sentences found in the trilogy and Texts for Nothing. These fragments
create the impression that the text is constantly starting anew, trying again
with each new verset. This impression would be in line with the French
title, which exploits the homonym “comment c’est” (how it is) and
“commencer” (to begin). Much like the protagonist himself, the language
of How It Is cannot seem to get itself off the ground and its staccato tempo
imitates the drudgery and sheer exhaustion of crawling in the mud with a
heavy sack tied to one’s neck. Similarly to Beckett’s other prose work,
notably Imagination Dead Imagine, How It Is is comprised mainly of
images rendered in “midget grammar”, flashes of consciousness depicting
the life “under the light” and it is in these images that Beckett’s language
takes flight.
Mostly, however, the language is ascetic and undeveloped in terms of
vocabulary and syntax, yet despite this and its seemingly hermetic distance
from intertextual influence, the text is riddled with references and
allusions to literature and religion. Sometimes these allusions take the

form of general aspects of the text, such as the setting which is taken from
canto 7 of Dante’s Inferno:
The kindly master told me: Son, now see the souls of those whom anger
has defeated; and I should also have you know for certain that underneath
the water there are souls who sigh and make this plain of water bubble, as
your eye, looking anywhere, can tell. Wedged in the slime, they say: 'We
had been sullen in the sweet air that's gladdened by the sun; we bore the
mist of sluggishness in us: now we are bitter in the blackened mud.' This
hymn they have to gurgle in their gullets, because they cannot speak it in
full words. (Inferno 7 115-126)
Similar conditions of slime and mud pervade How It Is with the main
protagonist crawling, unable to speak in full words. In other instances,
these allusions take the form of minute details, phrases and words which
would not be relevant if not for their repetitive nature. Such is the case
with the various references to the Bible which are readily visible, scattered
as they are throughout the text, offering what might be construed as a
framework in which to contain the protean semantics of the prose. For
example, the narrator is often presented as a God figure who breathes life
into his creations, “Pim never be but for me anything but a dumb limp
lump flat for ever in the mud but I’ll quicken him you wait and see how I
can efface myself behind my creature” (84). There are also instances
where the image of Christ is raised with the repeated allusions to nails,
crosses and the lamb with the narrator describing himself as “dead as
mutton”, as well as a brief summary of Jesus “others knowing nothing of
my beginnings save what they could lean by hearsay or in public records
nothing of my beginnings in life” (50) and the end of the text reveals the
narrator with his “arms spread yes like a cross” (146). Though these
references never amount to anything substantiating a basis for predominantly
theological (Judeo-Christian) interpretation, their presence does suggest
that Beckett is working through a tradition of metaphysical inquiry, related
to the notions of sacrifice, witnessing, and creation in general, all of which
bear a relation to the notion of alterity; it is this notion that will constitute
the focus of the following analysis. To this effect, two related questions
will be presented in relation to How It Is. One overarching question
concerns the ethical relation of the other taking place in language. The
second question, which hinges on this ethical relation, deals with the role
of the silent witness.
Ewa Plonowska-Ziarek construes Badiou’s “latent poetic matrix” as
the relation between the I and the Other, which, according to her,
80 Chapter Three
“provides the narrative with the minimum of content and structure while at
the same time undercutting all remnants of structural stability” (172). She
proceeds to attribute the paratactic style of How It Is to the attempt to
include what representation excludes; namely, the enigmatic and always
anonymous Other. Much of her analysis depends on the assertion that the
fragmentary nature of How It Is appeals to the alterity which cannot be
admitted within the structural coherence of discourse. Concentrating
mainly on the structural and linguistic aspect of the text, she asserts that
“the rhetorical effects of parataxis expose a signification of alterity
incommensurate with the coherence of discourse” [emphasis mine] (173).
Parataxis, as a trope of disconnection and disruption, by undermining the
aesthetic unity of the text, opens itself up toward the Other. Plonowska-
Ziarek locates this relation with the Other not only in the dissolution of the
syntax comprising the text, but also in the persistent destabilization of any
possible synthesis. The main claim in her argumentation is that “the
rhetorical effects of parataxis allow for the inscription of alterity in
language and simultaneously prevent its assimilation into the present
possibilities of signification” (174). This conclusion would be a very neat
solution to the tension between expressibility and inexpressibility, between
saying and not being able to speak which has been the foundational
tension in Beckett’s poetics of failure, if not for the fact that a solution,
any solution, would be detrimental to the poetics itself. More specifically,
however, the trouble with this aspect of her interpretation can perhaps be
found in the self-defeating language Plonowska-Ziarek employs. For
example, the phrase “signification of alterity” (173) seems to be a glaring
contradiction in terms. Furthermore, the analysis in an implicit and covert
way reverts to negative theology and presents apophatic discourse this
time in the guise of Levinasian ethics. It is, however, possible to take this
analysis further and discern in How It Is not only a linguistic and structural
indication of this relation to alterity but a thematic one as well.
As was mentioned earlier, Levinas conceived the authentic relationship
with the Other in terms of a discursive relationship that takes the form of
speech. In a conversation with Philip Nemo in 1981, Levinas says, “I have
just refused the notion of vision to describe the authentic relationship with
the Other; it is discourse and, more exactly, response or responsibility
which is this authentic relationship” (Levinas 1985: 87-8). It is no longer
vision that serves as the metaphor for the relation with the other, as vision
is complicit in the act of incorporating the Other. Instead, conversation
becomes a metaphor for this relation. What is important to bear in mind is
Levinas’s distinction between the Said (the content of discourse) and the
Saying, which is a response, a greeting to the Other. As Critchley states
(admittedly crudely) in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to

Levinas, this distinction can also be drawn along the lines of the ethical
and the ontological, where the Said would be ontological and the Saying
ethical language (2002: 17). Further Critchley adds that the Saying is “a
non-thematizable ethical residue of language that escapes comprehension,
interrupts ontology and is the very enactment of the movement from the
same to the other (2002: 18). The problem that inevitably arises from this
distinction is one which has appeared numerous times in this dissertation;
namely, the paradox of expressing that which by definition must remain
inexpressible. Since the Saying is a “non-thematizable residue” that must
remain beyond comprehension, how can it survive within the confines of
philosophical exposition (the Said), which deals in ontological categories?
In other words, how is it possible to ‘perform’ the saying without
betraying it? Critchley suggests that one solution to this problem may be
found in the process of reduction, of how ‘the said can be unsaid’ reduced
thereby allowing the saying to circulate in the text. This would be
analogous to what has already been discussed in the first chapter, when
Beckett was quoted saying that his attempt is to reduce and exhaust
language in order for the nothing beneath it to speak.
This saying is a response which, in Otherwise than Being, is construed
as bearing witness to the Other: “No theme, no present, has a capacity for
the Infinite. The subject in which the Other is in the same, inasmuch as the
same is for the other, bears witness to it” (Levinas 1998: 146). Similarly,
the ethicality of Beckett’s work does not lie in its thematizing or
addressing the Other in any way, but in bearing witness to the Other. The
protagonist of How It Is constantly repeats that he is only relaying what he
has already heard. This places him at a distance from the alterior speaking
subject, the one who is ‘really’ telling the story, a story which in the text
effectually becomes a quote and testimony.
To further extrapolate the role of the witness and the significance of
testimony, I would like to return to the Holocaust reference and draw upon
Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, which
focuses on the figure of the witness in the concentration camp. One of the
preliminary claims Agamben makes is that in Auschwitz there were two
types of prisoners: the typical prisoners who every day struggled to
survive and the Muselmann. The first type of prisoner is motivated to
survive in order to later become the witness of the unfolding tragedy. The
prospect of retelling their story gave these people the will to live.
Alongside these people, there are the Muselmann, the walking dead. These
people who due to the trauma of experiencing the horrors of the
concentration camp and the effects of malnutrition and destitution were
82 Chapter Three
bereft of speech and thus could not ever hope to give their testimony. The
suffering they endured has brought them to “the extreme threshold
between life and death” (Agamben 47) and they can no longer speak of
their experiences. There is, however, a lacuna which, Agamben argues,
calls into question the meaning of testimony and consequently the
reliability of the witness, because to be a witness and give testimony
means having survived. Primo Levi, therefore, in The Drowned and the
Saved, advances the claim that indeed it is the Muselmann who is the true
witness of the camp, though he is stripped of the ability to speak, write,
and simply respond. The Muselmann, who experienced dying and death,
“those who saw Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned
mute, but they are the Muslims, the submerged, the complete witnesses,
the ones whose deposition would have a general significance’ (33).
Agamben sees here the central paradox in Levi’s claim and asks: “how can
the true witness be the one who by definition cannot bear witness?”
(Agamben 82). This paradox seems to be the one found in How It Is as
well.
Testimony takes place where the speechless one makes the speaking one
speak and where the one who speaks bears the impossibility of speaking in
his own speech, such that the silent and the speaking [...] enter into a zone
of indistinction in which it is impossible to establish the position of the
subject, to identify the ‘imagined substance’ and the ‘I’ and, along with it,
the true witness. (Agamben 120)
This ‘zone of indistinction’ is precisely what is being created by the

paratactic nature of Beckett’s prose in How It Is. The speechless Muselmann
needs a speaking subject to give testimony in his stead, thereby deferring
the origin of the testimony. The impossibility of positing the origin of
enunciation and of distinguishing what is being quoted from what is being
said confers authority to the testimony. Furthermore, this zone of
indistinction renders possible the opening towards alterity without the
attendant risk of synthesizising and incorporating it.
As the protagonist of How It Is utters, “a witness I’d need a witness”
(23). The whole text is structured as a testimony given in place of an
unknown subject. “I say it as I hear it” is a sentence repeated in all three
chapters and presents the text as a quote of a silent witness. The story
starts with “how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is
three parts I say it as I hear it” (7). What deserves attention here is that this
is a quote of a quote because the phrase “I say it as I hear it” can also be
found in Text 5 of Texts for Nothing, “the things one has to listen to, I say
it as I hear it” (97) or “my life last state last version ill-seen ill heard ill-
recaptured ill-murmured. . .” (7) [emphasis mine]. Thus, as Smith rightly

asserts, the role of the witness is a recurrent almost integral theme in
Beckett’s work and tends to take on two distinct forms: that of the listener
and noter (writer), the writer merely transcribing what he hears. In
previous works, such as the trilogy, characters (Molloy, Moran and
Malone) are often presented as having to fulfill an obligation to write of
their experiences, even the unnamable who at one point asks, “is it I who
write, who cannot raise my hand from my knee” (233), is presented in
terms of his ability to write. Further, Text 5 of Text for Nothing deals
almost exclusively with this listening/noting dichotomy. Writing thus is
inextricably linked in Beckett’s work with being in terms of both
composition and decomposition, creation and doubling.
In How It Is witnesses are evoked only to be replaced by others in
much the same way as the vice-existers in The Unnamable appear only to
later make room for a new name. The narrator invents witnesses, as he is
“all alone and the witness bending over me name Kram bending over us
father to son to grandson yes or no and the scribe name Krim generations
of scribes keeping the record a little aloof sitting standing it’s not said yes
or no samples extracts” (80). Later, Krim and Kram, coalesce into Kram,
“Kram alone is enough Kram alone witness and scribe” (67). The narrator
has to invent these witnesses in order to constitute his own existence in
accordance with Berkeley’s esse est percipi discussed in relation to Film.
In much the same way witnesses were necessary to authenticate the
sacrifice of Christ on the cross – sacrificial torture referenced in How It Is
– so a witness is also necessary for the act of creation, as God ‘saw’ that
what He had created was good. Similarly in How It Is a divine being, who
“listens to himself and who when he lends his ear to our murmur does no
more than lend it to a story of his own devising” (139) presides over the
narrative.
Dante’s Inferno has already been quoted as a possible reference in
regards to the setting of How It Is. The primordial mud through which the
protagonist crawls also takes place in what Levi calls the ‘grey zone’.
It is the zone in which the ‘long chain of conjunction between victim and
executioner’ comes loose, where the oppressed becomes oppressor and the
executioner in turn appears as victim. A grey, incessant alchemy in which
good and evil and, along with them, all the metals of traditional ethics
reach their point of fusion. (Levi 21)
Though it becomes clear that the encounter between the narrator and Pim
is established within the master/slave or God/creation dichotomy, none of
the positions are fixed and stable. Pim is once the tormentor and once the
84 Chapter Three
slave. The tormentor becomes the tormented and the all-powerful God
becomes the sacrificial lamb, which is why the biblical references
juxtapose the creation myth of the Old Testament with the sacrifice of the
New Testament. The all-powerful writer of stories with those who are
incorporated to those stories and are left incapable to bear witness to their
plight.
Further elucidation as to the setting of How It Is can be found in the
tohu-buhu of the Old Testament. In reference to the anguish and shame of
the Auschwitz survivors, Agamben quotes Levi who writes “the anguish
inscribed in everyone of the ‘tohu-buhu,’ of a deserted and empty universe
crushed under the spirit of God but from which the spirit of man is absent;
not yet born or already extinguished” (Levi 85). The tohu-buhu also
appears in How It Is, where the narrator speaks of the “world for me from
the murmurs of my mother shat into the incredible tohu-bohu” (42). This
is the place before God, before light, before creation and it is what links
the speechless Muselman with the ‘real witness’ of How It Is, the one for
whom the speaking subject is relating the story. The tohu-buhu is the non-
place occupied by the Muselman and the Beckettian subjects from The
Unnamable onwards, a non-place where language is a foreign imposition
unable to express the experience of ‘what lies beneath the light’. The tohu-
buhu is the horror of the il y a, from which the consciousness flees and in
which the protagonist finds himself immersed. As was mentioned before,
the il y a is a “space without place”, and thus is a dimension where identity
and language are in constant flux.
By the end of the narrative even these witnesses are disposed of: “all
this business [...] of an ear listening to me yes a care for me yes an ability
to note yes all that all balls yes Krim and Kram yes all balls yes” (145). As
Russell Smith argues, the analysis of How It Is hinges on the validity of
this one single declaration. Smith places particular focus on the final
words of the text, where the narrator claims that everything written thus
far, including the characters of Pim and Bom, Krim and Kram, the
numerous encounters and solitude have been “all balls from the start to
finish” and that there has only been “only one voice here mine yes”, not
the constant quoting and ‘saying it as I hear it”. According to Smith, “this
interpretive decision is ultimately about whether the text portrays a self-
referential invention or a testimony to the presence of alterity” (356). If the
whole text thus far has been predicated upon the insistent claim that the
narrator is merely recounting what he hears, then the idea of authority and
source of origin of the speaking voice are issues which have to remain
suspended. This final negation would, in fact, reinstate a source and
central character who devised the whole story. This is a decision which
remains suspended and no finality is evoked. On the one hand, there is no

reason to privilege the final negation as having more weight than all the
previous negations in the text. There is no evidence that would allow us to
endow this negation with more value. Be that as it may, this final negation
does succeed in suspending the text, for no conclusion can be drawn as to
its validity. It would seem that no other conclusion could be more fitting
for a text which addresses alterity. Any form of certainty granting
signification validity would be incompatible with otherness and, therefore,
the impossible obligation to express the inexpressible is framed here
within the ethical demand towards the Other.
The ambivalence of writing as an instrument of destruction and torture
is depicted in a poignant scene found in Part II, where the protagonist is
torturing Pim by inscribing onto his body the Roman alphabet. “With the
nail then of the right index I carve and when it breaks or falls until it grows
again with another on Pims back intact at the outset from left to right and
top to bottom as in our civilization I carve my Roman capitals” (70). This
very short fragment is a metaphorical rendering of the crucifixion of the
other (the nails being a direct reference to the crucifixion of Jesus) by the
Roman civilization, an imposition of an imperialistic rule in the form of
language. It should be noted that language here is represented in the form
of the alphabet which has a limited set of permutations and serves the
purpose of incorporating alterity into an understandable and comprehensible
entity. In The Infinite Conversation, the ethical relation to the Other is
understood as a relation to language, which can only ethically preserve the
distance between the subject and the Other in the form of speech, not
writing. This confrontation with the Other, as Blanchot writes, “that does
not come about in the lighter space of forms belongs to the domain of
speech” (1993: 55). Only speech in the form of dialogue can preserve this
distance which sustains the conversation infinitely.
Much of postmodern theory deals with the questions of how to
properly respond and take into account alterity in discourse. Weller goes
so far as to argue that “hospitality to an irreducible other is the defining
characteristic of the postmodern” (21). Levinas, Derrida and Blanchot
work in a tradition where the infinite relation with the Other serves as the
basis not only for ethics, but also for literature. The space of literature is
for Blanchot located outside the reach of light, i.e. out of the reach of
rational discourse, identity-thinking, and propositional language. Herein
lies the connection with apophatic discourse that permeates the language
of mystics, Derrida, Blanchot and Beckett. It is a language which draws on
negativity and recoils from the faith invested in language’s ability to
provide comprehensive revelation of the logos. And thus in the same way
86 Chapter Three
that Levinas rejects totality in place of the infinite relation with alterity, so
Beckett’s fiction frustrates attempts at comprehension and instead
instantiates an infinite regress of both subjectivity and meaning in general.
Beckett’s fiction becomes the manifestation of Blanchot’s “space of
literature”, a region which traverses ontology and ethics, as subjectivity is
allowed to exist without the possibility to possess and control its
surroundings and outside of the perspective of totality.
Inexpressibility as a theological construct and unrepresentability as an
ethical one are both based on the question of how alterity should be
approached. In negative theology, in Derridian deconstruction, as in
Beckett’s How It Is, the unrepresentable and the unnamable are categories
of the ethical deference of alterity. As has been discussed in this chapter
the relation of the “I” and the Other is one of the central questions in How
It Is; it is this question that provides the text with an underlying matrix
sustaining its structure. This obligation to respond to the Other issued by
the exteriority of the text puts the subject in an ethical relation not only to
alterity, but what is most important, to itself, as it is through this process,
that the self is brought into question. Indeed, the destabilization of the self
has been one of the main features of Beckett’s fiction, noticeably
pronounced in the trilogy, and can also be observed in How It Is. Because
How It Is is constructed by means of paratactic syntax, proposition
advanced only to be later negated, paradox and inconsistency, then we see
that the idea of authority and source of origin of the speaking voice are
issues which have to remain suspended. On this level, however, How It Is
does not differ greatly from the trilogy and Texts for Nothing. The way in
which How It Is advances this aesthetics of inexpressibility further is by
placing the relation to alterity as the focus of the text, instead of the
solipsistic self-questioning which governed the trilogy and Texts for
Nothing. By bringing the Other to bear upon the self, Beckett instantiates
what Levinas and Blanchot construed as the infinite conversation with
alterity. Instead of reading this disintegration of language as a way to
apophatically approach a presence beyond the propositional materiality of
language, How It Is asks us to reposition a relation to alterity in such a way
that would preserve it from the institutionalising force of linguistic
dominion.
How It Is presents an encounter with alterity in a way that would be
consistent with a Levinasian Saying. The effects of paratactic prose, which
suspends the position of both the narrator and the confrontation with Pim,
render possible an ethical questioning of the subject as the source of the
narrative. In How It Is, Beckett succeeded in eliminating the speaking I, a
project that obsessively haunted The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing.
With the multilayered intertextual quoting and self-referencing, the text

refuses the invocation of presence, but instead invokes the non-
thematizable remainder of the Said. In other words, Beckett is no longer
operating within the ontological domain by attempting to establish a
source of presence through via negativa, but has entered the ethical
domain of the Levinasian Saying which has no end, no beginning and,
most importantly, no content. The Saying circulates in the text as the
indeterminate and silent witness which, much like the Muselmann, makes
its voice manifest by proxy. Placing the subject in a Dantesque purgatory,
or what amounts to an indefinite rendition of the il y a, with the
protagonist merely quoting or speaking on behalf of the real witness,
Beckett engages the liminality of the il y a, which Blanchot sees as the
position of the writer who is brought into question only “when there is not
more world, when there is no world yet” (1982, 33). This nothingness
anterior to language and consciousness, of “my consciousness, without
me” (1981, 47) constitutes the ethical relation insofar as it is divested of
identity-thinking.
CONCLUSION
Beckett’s literary career can be described as one of gradual reduction

of language, a striping away of the tools rendering expression possible for
the sake of approaching the inexpressible. Like many artists of his time,
including John Cage (in music), Bram van Velde and Tal Coat (in
painting), Beckett opted to discard coherence and meaningful exposition in
favor of an ascetic linguistic environment, fragmented, barren and
relentlessly open-ended. By means of paratactic syntax the experience of a
coherent narrativized reality is rendered impossible. Further, the
experience of a coherent and stable I speaker, which would constitute the
origin of the voice of subjectivity, is also frustrated for the purpose of
evoking the mechanisms by which language brings forth the illusion of
stability and coherence. In an attempt to create a self-sustaining linguistic
reality, Beckett relied only on what language provided; namely, a self-
referential network of signs with no recourse to extra-linguistic referents.
Thus, neither a transcendental logos nor an origin, be it in the form of a
controlling and stable Cartesian subject or a mystical and divine anchor,
can be inferred from the narrative. What this absence of source creates in
effect can be interpreted as a postmodern play of signifiers, a narrative
questioning the fundamental assumptions of its existence, and, in so doing,
exposing the conditions of its possibility.
Beckett’s language, in its pursuit of liminality, exposes and lays bare
these mechanisms of generating a center-oriented (in this case
phonocentric) subjectivity, where the voice is a byproduct of an imposed
language, a language the voice strives to purge itself of in an attempt to
achieve silence whilst remaining, by necessity, within the linguistic
structure of which the subject is a construct. The aporetic tension can thus
be defined as an impossible demand to express this inexpressible silence in
language. Language is here treated in the Mallarmean sense, as an object
in itself without the metaphysical and evocative treatment it had received
from the Romantics. Language is something that Beckett’s narrators want
to rid themselves off and they do so by exposing it to aporias, paradoxes
and self-negations, thereby turning language and narrative in on itself.
However, far from being a mere metanarrative which comments on its
own fictional status, Beckett’s fiction also inscribes itself into a
confrontation with the limits of narrative fiction, of the possibilities of
90 Conclusion
language. This limit has been construed in this dissertation as the limit
with alterity, an alterity which cannot for ethical reasons be appropriated
into the cognitive reality of the speaking subject. Visually, it must always
remain outside the grasp of the inquiring gaze, as has been elaborated in
the second chapter. The immediacy of sight serves as a metaphor of
understanding and immediate apperception. Bypassing the rationalizing
nature of linguistic exposition, vision grasps in one instant the totality of
its object thus becoming for Beckett and Blanchot a prime target. This is
staged most clearly in Beckett’s Film where the perceiving eye (“I”)
pursues the object of its gaze, as if attempting to devour it by stripping it
of its otherness. Not seeing well and not speaking well – i.e., ill-seeing and
ill-saying – are activities occupying the grey liminal zone of perception,
neither blind and silent nor all-encompassing and omni-vocal. This is an
in-between zone which likens the conditions in which Beckett’s characters
struggle to Dante’s Purgatory, from which he so readily drew (How It Is).
Similarly, Beckett’s characters are also never fully characters, never
fully alive, yet they are also never fully dead – they are thus in the process
of constantly dying. Again, the metaphorical limit thematizes the
inexpressible not as an impenetrable great beyond but as a force which
never ceases to exert its power on the linguistic and visual structure of
Beckett’s fictional reality. The inexpressible, precisely because of its
simultaneous demand/injunction, calls into question the self in its
projections and the language by which the self is evoked, thus becoming
the Levinasian Other which calls into question the language of the self, or
the self in language.
Language takes the form of an asymptotic curve which can never
completely achieve its desired silence. Negation is never completely
fulfilled and a transcendental signified which would take the form of a
silent Other, which is at the heart of the speaking subject, is always
deferred with each word. Thus, in language there is always an excess and a
lack which can never be resolved. Inexpressibility is a condition which can
never be achieved and at the same time can be seen as the limit barring
this achievement. It is the necessary injunction forbidding expression and
the demand, the insatiable desire, to go on speaking that constitutes the
condition of Beckett’s work. It is precisely from that impossibility to
express that the obligation to express is borne; inexpressibility
paradoxically becomes the origin of expression, not a teleological or
theological ideal of unattainable plentitude, so often attributed to silence
by way of mystical theology.
To ask what inexpressibility is in Beckett’s fiction would be the same
as asking what literature is, a question which Blanchot rejected on the
The Aesthetics of Failure: Inexpressibility in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction 91
grounds that it presupposes a foundation radically antithetical to the object

of the question. The question that should therefore be asked in line with
Blanchot’s direction of thought would be “how is inexpressibility
possible?” Just as literature is borne of its negation, so inexpressibility also
exists as a radical negation of its own possibility. Hence the futility and
failure that is intrinsic of this type of writing. Failure to succeed in the
“unwording” of the text is a necessity if language and literature are to be
possible. Inexpressibility is the Other that brings about the demand for
language to affirm its desire to separate itself from the totalizing
tendencies of language. Blanchot’s notion of neutral speech is especially
evocative of this desire, as it proposes itself as an ethical language which
leaves the otherness of the Other intact. However, it must be emphasized
that an ethical subject and a neutral voice in literature are impossible.
According to Derrida, “there is no “I” that ethically makes room for the
other, but rather an “I” that is structured by the alterity within it, an “I”
that is itself in a state of self-deconstruction, of dislocation” (2001: 84).
The aesthetics of inexpressibility is in this dissertation intrinsically
bound with the ethics of inexpressibility, making inexpressibility as much
an ethical concept as an aesthetic one. Both aspects have been explored to
the conclusion that interminable disappearance of the speaking subject in
language as it is presented in Beckett’s fiction and Blanchot’s writing
portrays an ethical response to alterity which serves as the hypostatic
prerequisite to literature as a self-questioning activity.
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INDEX
Abbott, H. Porter, 23, 25, 76 The Unnamable, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13,

Adorno, Theodore, 66, 71, 72 17, 18-22, 23, 24-25, 28, 29-
Agamben, Giorgio, 66, 81-82 30, 33-36, 38-40, 46, 47, 51,
alterity, 6, 8, 9, 17, 36, 37, 38, 58- 52-53, 54, 56, 63, 75-76, 77,
59, 65-66, 70-80, 82, 84-86, 90, 83, 84, 86
91 Waiting for Godot, 9, 75, 76
Attridge, Derek, 69 Watt, 12
Badiou, Alain, 8, 24, 63, 76, 77, 78, Ben-Zvi, Linda, 16, 57, 93
79 Berkeley, George, 16, 55, 57, 83
Banham, Gary, 70, 73 Blanchot, Maurice
Barthes, Roland, 4 “From Dread to Language”, 17
Beckett, Samuel “Gaze of Orpheus”, 61
“The German Letter of 1937”, 7, “Literature and the Right to
11, 28, 40 Death”, 29, 30, 33, 36
“Three Dialogues with George and Kafka, 75
Duthuit”, 14, 39 The Infinite Conversation, 29,
Company, 7, 20, 43, 53, 58 32, 36, 58, 74, 85
Disjecta, 8, 11, 13, 14, 43 The Space of Literature, 34, 74
Film, 7, 53, 56, 57, 58, 63, 83, Brater, Enoch, 57
90 Brienza, Susan, 23, 25, 44, 49, 76,
Happy Days, 46 78
How It Is, 8, 9, 22, 34, 47, 65, Butler, St. John Lance, 1, 14
66, 75-84, 86, 90 Cage, John, 26, 89
Ill Seen Ill Said, 7, 8, 9, 41-58, Cohn, Ruby, 43
60, 61, 62, 63 Connor, Stephen, 3, 23, 65
Imagination Dead Imagine, 7, 8, Critchley, Simon, 5, 6, 47, 48, 61,
9, 12, 19, 41, 45, 47-53, 57, 70, 80, 81
63, 78 Cronin, Anthony, 6, 7
Krapp’s Last Tape, 17, 22, 41, Dante, 7, 14, 15, 50, 79, 83, 90
44, 76 Deleuze, Gilles, 47, 48
Malone Dies, 17, 24 and exhaustion, 47, 53, 63, 65
Murphy, 13, 46, 50, 76 Democritus, 11, 13, 14, 26
Ohio Impromptu, 44, 51, 52 Derrida, Jacques, 3, 5, 8, 12, 23, 29,
Quad, 48 32, 52, 65, 66, 68-71, 73, 85, 91
Rockaby, 46 Descartes, René (and Cartesian), 1,
Texts for Nothing, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 5, 13, 16, 18-20, 41, 53, 54, 55,
20, 23-25, 27-29, 36, 39, 40, 63, 67, 89
47, 53, 63, 66, 75, 76, 77, 78, Esslin, Martin, 1, 3, 11, 12
82, 86 Gasché, Rodolphe, 29
102 Index
Geulincx, Arnold, 5, 11, 13-14 Munch, Edvard, 46

Hassan, Ihab, 4-5 Murphy, P.J., 16, 24, 50
Hegel, G. W. F., 14, 30, 32 negative theology, 66-69
Heidegger, Martin, 14, 31, 36, 39, neutre, 35-36, 38, 40, 66, 73
66, 73, 74 Oppenheim, Lois, 7, 8, 42, 43, 44,
Hill, Leslie, 3, 6, 25, 30, 33, 38 49
il y a, 66, 73, 74, 84, 87 parabasis, 37
Iser, Wolfgang, 26, 50 Plato, 66, 72
Jay, Martin, 41, 61 Plonowska-Ziarek, Ewa, 8, 77, 78,
Joyce, James, 7, 14-17, 50, 63, 69 79-80
Finnegan’s Wake, 15, 63 Rabinowitz, Rubin, 50, 52, 53
Kaun, Axel, 11 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 2
Kenner, Hugh, 2 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 5, 11, 16
Knowlson, James, 7, 15, 23-24, 28, Shenker, Israel, 15, 18, 23
42, 48, 53, 57 subjectivity, 18-19, 21-23, 25, 27,
Levi, Primo, 82-84 30, 33-35, 39, 42, 44, 46, 67, 75, 86,
Levinas, Emmanuel, 5, 8, 9, 65, 66, 89
71, 72, 73, 74, 80, 81, 85, 86 Trezise, Thomas, 65, 69
Totality and Infinity, 72, 96 Uhlmann, Anthony, 3, 65, 92, 95
Locatelli, Carla, 26, 65 van Velde, Bram, 17, 43, 89
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 7, 29, 31-32, voice, 2, 6, 7, 17, 20, 21-23, 27-28,
34, 35, 39, 49, 69 29, 32-35, 37-40, 42, 44, 47, 49,
Marion, Jean Luc, 68 50, 53, 56, 60, 70, 74, 75-78, 84,
Mauthner, Fritz, 5, 16, 17 86, 87, 89, 91
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 5 Weller, Shane, 85
mise en abyme, 19, 22, 33, 42, 53 Wolosky, Shira, 12, 23, 67

The Aesthetics of Failure

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The Aesthetics of Failure

The Aesthetics of Failure:

This book first published 2013

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright © 2013 by Marcin Tereszewski

ISBN (10): 1-4438-5043-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5043-8

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii

Chapter One ............................................................................................... 11

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 41

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 65

Index ....................................................................................................... 101

BECKETT AND THEORY

What is different about Beckett is not that he provokes a critical response...

The futility of classifying Beckett into any philosophical or literary

employed for the purposes of studying literature. With the development of

Beckett and Philosophy, which outlines the various philosophical influences on

materiality of an endlessly deferring language. It would seem that

literature, particularly, often seeks its limits, entertains its ‘exhaustion’,

philosophical influence in the approach represented in this dissertation,

The choice of these particular novels and recits by Beckett was

The theme of nothingness in Beckett’s work has gained critical

Nothingness. Therefore, in order to reveal this “Nothingness” behind the

The Philosophical Origins of Nothingness in Beckett

distinct philosophical pedigree alluded already to in a letter to Sighne

The negative imperative in Beckett’s critical writing

. . . the difference is that Joyce was a superb manipulator of material,

other aspects, such as the aesthetic deployment of negativity, Beckett

continue writing, despite the impossibility of doing so, is a theme that

Negativity in The Unnamable

of Descartes. The starting point for The Unnamable’s self-constitution is

speaker, that unravels the certainty traditionally accorded to the Cartesian

The attempt at reduction to the pure “I” proves to be both self-

I have chosen this quote because it seems to articulate a common

Despite being dispossessed, this non-diegetic voice does assume a

for the existence of the story and the “character” as textualized

birthday. The tape recording serves a mediating purpose between the

Negation in Texts for Nothing

disintegration” but ultimately failed in this endeavor (qtd. in Murphy

of the work, but in a more focused and unrelenting manner. As H. Porter

But how is this sense of absence achieved? In terms of rhetoric,

As we see here, the project of negation and self-erasure, predicated as it is

in an attempt to rearticulate the role language occupies in Beckett’s

attempt to prop itself upon baseless assumptions. Thus, instead of asking

Language is of a divine nature, not because it renders eternal by naming,

Language is thus of a divine nature, not only because it brings something

When literature refuses to name anything, when it turns a name into

literature merges with the possibility of subjectivity being borne in

It is language that is supposed to speak in literature, not the author whose

Blanchot’s theory – one that bears relevance to Beckett’s writing - is the

reminds us that it is precisely the unsettled ontological status of the neuter

The neuter, therefore, occupies a pre-ontological place in which the very

One can, then, accuse language of having become an interminable resifting

framework that is missing in Beckett’s critical writing, though it is a

imposition on the texts. As was mentioned before, failure of expression is

THE INEXPRESSIBLE AS THE INVISIBLE

In this chapter inexpressibility will be analyzed in terms of its visual

violently apprehend the perceived object, thus destroying it in its

dialectic of visible and invisible that is the common tension between

Imagination Dead Imagine

Simon Critchley argues, this language attempts to exceed all categories of

His white hair and the bones of his gaunt face