This book considers how Samuel Beckett’s critical essays, dialogues and reflections drew together longstanding philosophical discourses about the nature of representation, and fostered crucial, yet overlooked, connections between these discourses and his fiction and poetry. It also pays attention to Beckett’s writing for little-magazines in France from the 1930s to the 1950s, before going on to consider how the style of Beckett’s late prose recalls and develops figures and themes in his critical writing. By providing a long-overdue assessment of Beckett’s work as a critic, this study shows how Beckett developed a new aesthetic in knowing dialogue with ideas including phenomenology, Kandinsky’s theories of abstraction, and avant-garde movements such as Surrealism. This book will be illuminating for students and researchers interested not just in Beckett, but in literary modernism, the avant-garde, European visual culture and philosophy.

The voice traverses Beckett’s work in its entirety, defining its space and its structure. Emanating from an indeterminate source situated outside the narrators and characters, while permeating the very words they utter, it proves to be incessant. It can alternatively be violently intrusive, or embody a calming presence. Literary creation will be charged with transforming the mortification it inflicts into a vivifying relationship to language. In the exploration undertaken here, Lacanian psychoanalysis offers the means to approach the voice’s multiple and fundamentally paradoxical facets with regards to language that founds the subject’s vital relation to existence. Far from seeking to impose a rigid and purely abstract framework, this study aims to highlight the singularity and complexity of Beckett’s work, and to outline a potentially vast field of investigation.

Forming a pair with the voice, the gaze is a central structuring element of Samuel Beckett’s creation. And yet it takes the form of a strangely impersonal visual dimension testifying to the absence of an original exchange of gazes capable of founding personal identity and opening up the world to desire. The collapse of conventional reality and the highlighting of seeing devices—eyes, mirrors, windows—point to the absence of a unified representation. While masks and closed spaces show the visible to be opaque and devoid of any beyond, light and darkness, spectres—manifestations without origin—reveal a realm beyond the confines of identity, where nothing provides a mediation with the seen, or sets it within perspective. Finally, Beckett’s use of the audio-visual media deepens his exploration of the irreducibly real part of existence that escapes seeing. This study systematically examines these essential aspects of the visual in Beckett’s creation. The theoretical elaborations of Jacques Lacan—in relation with corresponding developments in the history and philosophy of the visual arts—offer an indispensible framework to understand the imaginary not as representation, but as rooted in the fundamental opacity of existence.

Discusses the most recent advances in the Beckett field and the new methods used to approach it.

Die technologischen Entwicklungen unserer Zeit erwecken den Eindruck, dass wir unseren Leib verbessern und seine Grenzen mit ihrer Hilfe überwinden können. Das hohe philosophische Interesse an der leiblichen Verfasstheit des Menschen ist möglicherweise eine Gegenreaktion auf diese Entwicklung. Dieser Band bietet theologische Perspektiven zu diesem Thema. Die Beiträge vertreten ein integratives Verständnis vom Menschen, zu dem Leiblichkeit als unabdingbare Charakteristik gehört. Sie zeigen, wie diese Leiblichkeit die Art und Weise bedingt, wie wir uns wahrnehmen und miteinander in Beziehung treten und wie sich diese Grundbedingung auch auf unsere Beziehung zu Gott auswirkt. Gegen eine einseitige Perspektive der Verbesserung des Körpers stellen die Autoren einen differenzierten Umgang mit dessen Verwundbarkeit. Die Beiträger stellen die Bedeutung der Leiblichkeit für den Vollzug der Liturgie und für ein zeitgemäßes Verständnis von christlicher Gemeinde und diakonischer Arbeit heraus.