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Abstract Machines Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari

FAUX TITRE 295 Etudes de langue et littérature françaises publiées sous la direction de Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman, Sjef Houppermans et Paul Pelckmans

Abstract Machines Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari

Garin Dowd

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2007

Illustration cover: Leibniz’s calculating machine (detail). © Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library. Cover design: Pier Post. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence’. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2206-5 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2007 Printed in The Netherlands

Contents

Note on references

7

Acknowledgements

9

Introduction

13

1. Shadow Hospitality: Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze & Guattari

25

2. Beckett’s Abstract Machines: from Murphy to The Lost Ones

77

3. From Monadology to Nomadology: Leibniz, Deleuze, Beckett

129

4. Matter, Judgement and Immanence in How It Is

163

5. “Vasts apart”: Deleuze, Phenomenology and Worstward Ho

201

6. Beckett’s ‘Dislocations’

225

Conclusion: “l’insurrection des molécules”

263

Works Cited

273

Index

309

Note on references

In the case of references to works jointly authored by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, quotations (unless otherwise indicated) will be taken from the English translations. In parenthetical page references the French precedes the English translation. Major works by Deleuze alone which are referred to throughout the book such as Proust et les signes, Logique du sens, Différence et répétition, Le Pli, and Critique et clinique will also be treated in this way. In the case of works more tangential to the concerns of the book, or which are referred to in a more localised manner, such as Dialogues and the book of interviews translated as Desert Islands, reference is made to the English translation alone. Works of philosophy, criticism and literature in French are quoted in the original language where there is no readily available English translation; in these instances the accompanying translations (unless otherwise indicated) are my own and appear parenthetically in the body of the text (and occasionally in footnotes where this is more conducive to clarity). In the case of the studies of Beckett by Alain Badiou, in many instances page references to the original versions are also provided, since their original publication contexts provide some of the impetus for my analysis.

Acknowledgements

Numerous individuals have assisted me in a variety of ways in completing this book, not least the organisers of conferences at which draft versions of several parts were presented, and the editors of journals and edited collections in which sections of some chapters appeared in an earlier version. Chapter 1 benefited from an opportunity in 2005 to share my ideas on Beckett’s ‘abstractions’ with the Goldsmiths Beckett Research Group convened by Derval Tubridy; a small part of the discussion of Alain Badiou which appears throughout the book was first published in The Beckett Circle in 2005 (thanks to Derval Tubridy and Thomas Cousineau). In what is, at the time of writing, the centenary year of the birth of Samuel Beckett, I must thank Stan Gontarski and Alec B. Hargreaves, the organisers of the 2006 conference Beckett at 100 at Florida State University, where a section of Chapter 2 had its first airing, and Mary Bryden and Margaret Topping who organised Beckett’s Proust/Deleuze’s Proust, also in early 2006 at Cardiff University, where I outlined some of the other ideas developed in Chapter 2. The chapter also partly reproduces and revises articles published previously in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and The Forum for Modern Language Studies. I am grateful to the editors of the journals, and in particular to Mary Bryden and Tim Armstrong respectively for their critical commentaries. I must thank Mary Bryden again, Lance St John Butler and the University of Stirling which hosted the conference on Beckett and Religion in 1999 at which some of the ideas regarding The Lost Ones were first tried out. In Chapters 3 and 4 I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Patricia Coughlan with whom I discussed an earlier

10

Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze & Guattari

version of the material here reworked and updated. The ideas benefited from being refined in the form in which they were subsequently published by The Journal of Beckett Studies. I am grateful to the editorial team and to those who provided critical commentary, and in particular to Stan Gontarski, Graley Herren, and Paul Shields. Chapter 5 is an expanded version of an essay published in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui which was first presented in rudimentary form at the Sydney conference After Beckett organised by Anthony Uhlmann in 2003. I am grateful to all three editors (Sjef Houppermans, Bruno Clément and Anthony Uhlmann) of the volume which resulted from this memorable conference. A section of Chapter 6 was occasioned by the hospitality of the Beckett International Foundation annual seminars then under the stewardship of Mary Bryden at the University of Reading. The Birkbeck/London Beckett Seminar conference Other Becketts organised by Daniela Caselli, Steven Connor and Laura Salisbury in 2000 was the occasion for which I first developed my approach to Beckett and Kant. A section of the chapter appeared in The Journal of Beckett Studies under the editorship of the conference organisers as well as in the book format of the same collection. Many others have contributed either unwittingly or knowingly to the project. Those who do not recognize themselves in my account of the many personal debts accumulated may protest, but is in the paradoxical nature of the acknowledgement sometimes to skew the resemblance on which it putatively depends. The London Beckett Seminar participants, and in particular Steven Connor, between 1999 and 2001, provided me with an invaluable forum for conjecture and reverie. Josh Cohen has been an inspiring interlocutor on literature and philosophy. Chris Ackerley, Tim Armstrong, Enoch Brater, Marius Buning, Mary Bryden, Steven Connor, Thomas Cousineau, Paul Davies, Andrew Gibson, Stan Gontarski, Sjef Houppermans, Balázs Kicsiny, Ulrika Maude, Philippe Mengue, Naoya Mori, Laura Salisbury, Gabriele Schwab, Christa Stevens, Yoshiki Tajiri, Derval Tubridy and Shane Weller all made helpful and incisive comments in a variety of contexts linked directly or indirectly to separate sections of the project. Neither they, nor any of the other individuals to have had editorial dealings with sections of the contents in their prior forms, share the blame for any unity or disunity of tone in the resulting artefact. I would like to acknowledge the generous financial support of the Faculty Research

Acknowledgements

11

Committee of the Faculty of the Arts (formerly the London College of Music & Media) at Thames Valley University without which I could not have participated in so many stimulating conferences. The Library of Trinity College Dublin kindly granted me permission to consult Beckett’s correspondence with Thomas MacGreevy and his notebooks on philosophy. Family, friends, and colleagues have helped and supported me in a variety of ways; my thanks go to my parents Una and Kieran, TVU colleagues past and present Rachel Carr, (the other) Leslie Hill, Lesley Stevenson, and Jeremy Strong (not forgetting my accomplice in the halcyon dislocation of the Rue de la Commanderie, Hilary S.). The bulk of my personal gratitude, however, goes to Anne Scallan for all the “longs seuils mouvants”, and for her encouragement and insights throughout this latest escapade. For U. and ‘D.D.’, and for A.

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint in a revised form material originally published under the following titles in the journals here listed: ‘Nomadology: Reading the Beckettian Baroque’, Journal of Beckett Studies 8.1 (1999): 15-49, © Journal of Beckett Studies; ‘Mud as Plane of Immanence in Beckett’s How It Is’, The Journal of Beckett Studies 8.2 (1999): 1-28, © Journal of Beckett Studies; ‘Figuring Zero in The Lost Ones’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 9 (2000), Beckett and Religion, Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics, Beckett et la religion, Beckett/L’Esthétique/La politique, Marius Buning, Matthijs Engelberts & Onno Kosters (eds.) (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi): 67-80, © Editions Rodopi; ‘On Four Kantian Formulas that Might Summarise the Beckettian Poetic’, Journal of Beckett Studies 10.1 & 2 (2001): 53-68, © Journal of Beckett Studies; ‘The Abstract Literary Machine: Guattari, Deleuze and Beckett’s The Lost Ones’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Special number on Literature and Technology, Tim Armstrong (ed.), 37.2 (2001): 204-17, © Oxford University Press; ‘“Vasts apart”: Phenomenology and Worstward Ho’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 14, After Beckett/D’après Beckett, Anthony Uhlmann, Sjef Houppermans and Bruno Clément (eds.) (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004): 323-339, © Editions Rodopi.

Introduction

The concept of the Abstract Machine, which receives its most comprehensive development in the jointly authored work by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux (1980), has been central to several attempts to formulate an account of their approach to art forms. According to Stephen Zepke, in the course of what is, at the time of writing, the most recent of these attempts, it is an imperative deriving from the demand, central to their thought, namely to make new connections, to experiment with new assemblages, to pursue what they call “lines of flight”. Such creative engagement has political ramifications, given that the procedures of art put it in a privileged position to resist what Guattari, in his final book Chaosmose (1992), referred to as the “steamroller of capitalist subjectivity” (Guattari 1995, 91).1 Zepke describes the exigency thus: To believe in the break, to affirm a disjunction in which product and production are in absolute immanence, to affirm, finally, a plane of abstract machines, is the very condition of art’s possibility, the very condition of its actuality. (Zepke 2005, 227)

Actuality, here, is a term with a particular resonance in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. It refers to a specific ontology, one based on becoming as opposed to being. Not for Deleuze and Guattari, then, “the continuum of representation and of being, an ontology defined 1

From Dialogues: “There are only different politics of assemblages [...] in this sense everything is political” (Deleuze 1987, 97).

14


negatively as the absence of nothing, a general representability of being, and where being was manifest by the presence of representation” (Foucault 1966, 219). Rather, an ontology of becoming is complemented in Deleuze’s philosophical system, following Nietzsche, by its invocation of the “powers of the false” made possible by art rather than truth—the pursuit of which latter philosophy has traditionally had as its precondition.2 The abstract machine, which does not exist but only becomes, which is never fully emerged, but only ever in emergence, is always subject to what the (‘pre-Guattari’) Deleuze of Logique du sens (1969) calls “contre-effectuation” (counteractualisation). If a work of art is also an abstract machine it is because of its abeyance from form, because of its being located in a materialforce rather than in a matter-form conjunction (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 422/342), and as such belongs to what Deleuze and Guattari call the plane of immanence-composition rather than to a plane subjected to the workings of a transcendent Form. The Abstract Machine as employed by Deleuze and Guattari in a variety of contexts throughout Mille Plateaux does not amount to a unified theory, especially not of literature, yet the notion of an artist as engendering her/his Abstract Machine is stated categorically by them: Abstract, singular, and creative, here and now, real yet nonconcrete, actual yet noneffectuated—that is why abstract machines are dated and named (the Einstein abstract machine, the Webern abstract machine, but also the Galileo, the Bach, or the Beethoven, etc.). Not that they refer to people or to effectuating moments; on the contrary, it is the names and dates that refer to the singularities of the machines, and to what they effectuate. (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 637/511)

The machines are abstract because the universes to which they give rise, and the novelty of thinking anew which they demand, cannot be represented as such. The exigency which they occasion results in an exceeding which thwarts any recuperation in or as mimesis. The 2

One should cite here Philippe Mengue’s incisive formulation whereby “le savoir n’épuise pas la vérité, mais d’une certaine façon sert aussi à la cacher, du moins cette vérité qui est celle du réel, comme limite du pensable et du dicible, et qu’on peut appeler ‘dehors’” [knowledge does not exhaust truth, but in a certain sense also serves to hide it, at least this truth which pertains to the real, as the limit of the thinkable and sayable and which may be called “outside”] (Mengue 2002, 90). That Mengue proceeds on this basis to offer a critique of Deleuze with distinct echoes of Badiou (albeit via a shared predisposition towards certain concepts of Lacan [Mengue 2002, 92]) is a matter for separate consideration and beyond the scope of this study.

Introduction

15

names and dates which are appended to these ‘machines’ identify and position the singularity of the irrecuperable. This is a formulation closely allied to Deleuze and Guattari’s own idiosyncratic critique of what Michel Foucault called the author function, and which had already been suggested in L’Anti-Œdipe (1972). The machine predates the name. Or, the machine breathes, as Éric Alliez puts it in his important reassessment of the schizoanalytic corpus (Alliez 2004, 101). The works for which Samuel Beckett was responsible are the singularities—the becoming—of the machine that has come to be named after him. The Samuel Beckett ‘abstract machine’, then, is, from an ontological point of view, like any other in this respect. There have been responses prior to that of Zepke which in part help establish something of the context for the specific manner in which the present study will employ the term ‘abstract machine’. For John Mullarkey, writing in a review of a 1994 collection of essays on Deleuze, “The best way to understand Deleuze…is in terms of his own concept of the abstract machine: ‘Deleuzian philosophy’ is the name of an abstract machine creating systems of thought” (Mullarkey 1996, 168). Deleuzian or Deleuzoguattarian philosophy would indeed, then, be equivalent to the specific ontology as identified by Zepke, wherein, as Alliez puts it in his 1993 study, La Signature du monde, ou qu’est-ce que la philosophie de Deleuze et Guattari: La philosophie devient l’affaire d’un devenir philosophie qui investit le plan d’immanence comme un champ d’expérience radical. Faire du devenir le concept même, le concept que nous n’avons pas, le concept que nous devons forger en nomadisant, en devenant philosophe et non-philosophe, et autre chose encore. (Alliez 1993, 41-2)3 [Philosophy becomes the concern of becoming-philosophy which treats the plane of immanence as a field of radical experience/experimentation. To make becoming the concept itself, the concept which we do not have, the concept that we must forge while nomadising, in becoming philosophers and non-philosophers, and something else besides]

Elsewhere, in an enduringly authoritative study of Deleuze’s aesthetics, in explaining Deleuze’s recurrent attachment to the vocabulary of 3

More recently, but along the same lines, Alliez has developed this correlation to assert that the Body without Organs is the name of the becoming of philosophy itself (Alliez 2004, 105).

16


the machinic, Mireille Buydens suggests a simple reason: the machinic is produced and not presupposed as a given; it is ontologically contingent rather than ontologically necessary (Buydens 1990, 67). The machinic is the anti-organic as this is understood by Deleuze and Guattari in their reprise of the Artaudian project of the corps sans organes [body without organs]. Philippe Mengue in his book Gilles Deleuze ou le système du multiple (1994) offers a useful summary of the salient characteristics of the Abstract Machine as it functions in their thought: C’est la mobilité de la création, en tant que cette mobilité est conçue comme mise en conjugaison d’éléments intensifs, qui définit la vie, avant même la plasticité, la mise en forme et la production de substance. Si bien qu’elle est, pour son compte, une puissance informelle, une puissance pure de combinaison ou conjugaison des intensités qui est la plus “proche” possible du hasard, qui représente le minimum d’ordre ou d’unité possible capable de se séparer du chaos ultime. (Mengue 1994, 82-3) [It is the mobility of creation, in so far as this mobility is conceived of as the placement in conjugation of intensive elements which define life, even before plasticity, formation and the production of substance. So much that it is, for its part, an aformal power, a pure power of combination or conjugation of intensities which is the ‘closest’ possible to chance, which represents the minimum of order or of unity possible capable of separating itself from total chaos.]

The Abstract Machine, on this model, is a phylum comprising ‘particles’ of ‘matter’ which cannot without remainder be converted into form; it is said to possess an ‘anorganic vitality’ which by definition is opposed, and resistant, to an organic composite formation. In this sense it is virtual rather than actual, real rather than realised.4 The Abstract Machine is not static like the ‘deep structure’, regarded as a given, on which structuralism is predicated, but is, rather, involved in constant variation, in perpetuum mobile.5 Its propulsive force, however, it is not susceptible to being gridded by reference to an 4

This aspect is perhaps not fully developed in L’Anti-Œdipe where the concept of the virtual is not yet in place. John Rajchman’s succinct summary of the difference between Leibniz’s possible and Deleuze’s virtual will serve my purposes here: “‘Virtuality’ is not the ‘possibility’ of something that might be ‘realized’; it is already real, and it does not stand in a representational or mimetic relation to what ‘actualizes’ it” (Rajchman 1998, 125, n. 8). 5 Cf. L’Anti-Œdipe (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983, 19-20/12-13), Massumi (2002) and Bogue (2003, 201 n. 27).

Introduction

17

evolutionary or teleological template. This is the specificity of the machinic mutation which effectuates the break with the structuralist aporia in which, according to Alliez, Deleuze’s Logique du sens ended (Alliez 2004, 90). Beckett and philosophy Setting aside Deleuze and Guattari for the moment, and turning to the question of philosophy more generally, the writing of Beckett can be said to be unique in the extent of the hold it has exerted on many of the key figures belonging to what Alberto Toscano (in his preface to the English translation of Alliez’s book on Deleuze and Guattari) calls the “exquisitely equivocal” category of ‘continental philosophy’ (Toscano 2004, viv), many of them precisely attempting that against which Shira Wolosky wisely cautions when she urges Beckett commentators to hesitate before converting Beckett’s philosophemes into fully articulated structures (Wolosky 1996, 175).6 Adorno, Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze and Badiou have all devoted essay- or book-length interventions to his work. The task of elaborating upon this heritage in its many varieties has already been undertaken by others. Key studies or sections thereof by Connor (1988), Trezise (1990), Locatelli (1990), Hill (1990), Bryden (1993), Clément (1994), Begam (1996), Uhlmann (1999), Katz (1999), and Gibson (2002, 2003) all position Beckett’s writing in proximity to continental philosophy, several of them specifically addressing the work of Deleuze and/or Deleuze and Guattari. Although some of the most directly relevant (to the concerns of my own study) of these contributions are addressed in Chapter 1 below, several other of these important statements—to mention only the best known—will, rather, be referred to in specific and localised discussions throughout the book.7 That it is Alain Badiou more than any of the others—Deleuze and Guattari excepted—who is given most attention in the book is in part explained by the fact that he intervenes in the “reception” of both of the œuvres which the present study juxtaposes, and does so in a manner which betrays, quite revealingly as far as the purposes of this book are 6

For Bruno Clément Beckett’s work is unique in the extent to which it has “seduced” philosophers (Clément 2004, 222). 7 See Gibson (2003) for an overview of certain trends in recent Beckett scholarship in what can be described as the continental tradition.

18


concerned, a common set of predispositions.8 Badiou will be returned to in Chapter 1 and in shorter interventions in Chapters 4 and 5 below. In addition there have been other key statements by Beckett critics on the specific question of Beckett and philosophy which it is necessary to consider, as Chapter 1 will show. This book sets out on one level to provide a kind of inventory of philosophy in the writings of Samuel Beckett. Just as Malone must specify on what basis he identifies his belongings, however, the term “philosophy” will be employed “according to my definition” (Beckett 1979, 215); in addition the inventory will be conducted in a ledger which gives its account a particular slant deriving from two distinct but intimately related bodies of philosophical thought, those of Gilles Deleuze considered separately on the one hand and of Deleuze and Félix Guattari combined on the other. Because Deleuze devoted several volumes to interventions in the history of philosophy, the discipline in conjunction with which it is possible to read the work of Beckett after Deleuze and Guattari is then at once ‘the tradition’, Deleuze’s philosophical system, and Deleuze and Guattari’s own (non-) philosophy. Bracketing the theme of philosophy in general for the moment, the manner of relating Samuel Beckett to the thought of Deleuze and of Deleuze-Guattari9 specifically suggested in the preposition after could comprise a range of conjunctions, among them: § § § § §

8

Samuel Beckett in the wake of Deleuze and Guattari Samuel Beckett in the style of Deleuze and Guattari Samuel Beckett following Deleuze and Guattari Samuel Beckett displacing Deleuze and Guattari Samuel Beckett as belatedly encountered through Deleuze and Guattari10

See Badiou (1992, 1995 and 1997). As several critics have been argued, Badiou’s barely concealed disdain for the contribution of Guattari to Deleuze’s thought and writing—a response he has in common with Žižek (2004)—is open to challenge. 9 In the interests of clarity this formulation has been adopted to enable the unambiguous mention in the same sentence of Deleuze as an author in his own right and of the collaborative body of work written with Guattari. 10 Cf. Nicholas Royle’s book After Derrida which positions itself as “later in time than”, “in the manner of” and “going in search of” its subject (Royle 1995, 3-5).

Introduction

19

Of course philosophy is itself already subjected to a particular encounter in the thinking of Beckett.11 The traces of the liaison are to be found in his many notebooks held by the various institutions to which they were donated, along with his chestnuts.12 Among the most detailed and extensive of these notes are those made on Kant (now held by the library of Trinity College Dublin), Beckett’s own copy of whose collected works was passed on to the painter Avighdor Arika (Knowlson 1996, n. 161 and n. 162). Other significant sections of the philosophy notebooks held at his alma mater Trinity College find him making detailed entries on Geulincx in particular—a link profitably explored recently by Uhlmann (2004). There are brief entries on Leibniz and meticulous diagrams representing the Enneads of Plotinus—whose ideas, from the evidence of the notebooks, Beckett would appear to have gleaned from Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus rather than from the Enneads itself. The notebooks, along with the ‘Whoroscope Notebook’, the ‘German Notebooks’, and various bequeathed and/or donated annotations, such as those in the margins of Beckett’s own copy of Kant, comprise a dispersed corpus of fragments which it is (hypothetically) possible to reassemble with a view to elucidating the directly contributing intertexts, philosophical and otherwise, of a given work by Beckett. Such a task—whether wholly or in part—is not attempted here. Furthermore, if this book is a survey it does not aim to be exhaustive. On occasion, like Malone, it is impatient to get on to the next story. Moreover, in its privileging of certain texts, there emerges the possibility that some works more than others by Beckett inscribe and prescribe a heavier dose of philosophy, or endorse or critique a particular type of philosophy or ontology. For, in the discussions which follow, it is implied that certain works by Beckett more than others gravitate comprehensively towards specific philosophical problems as configured by particular philosophers (and most often by Deleuze and/or Deleuze-Guattari). 11

See Bernold (1992, 82-3). At the Beckett in Berlin conference in 2000, Mary Bryden recounted the story of the loss of a few of Beckett’s many conkers (or at least fruits of the tree of the genus Aesculus gathered by James Knowlson from the garden of Beckett’s house at Ussy) which at one point fell out the window from their perilous perch on the window-sill of the offices of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading. See Bryden (2001). 12

20


In order to proceed, then, in the “non-philosophy” of Deleuze and Guattari which the specific exigency of the work of Beckett inaugurates in its encounter with theirs (an encounter registered in a dispersed manner throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s writings but prolonged through the agency of this book), it is necessary to let the philosophical in to Beckett’s writing (to attend to it), or to let it circulate in it, an entrance permitted and demanded by the allusion, reference, parallelism, and reverberation to and with philosophy to which his work is prone. Many of these philosopher-phantoms are recognizable then—their eliciting is not incompatible with the operation of what Deleuze calls the “structure-other”: Descartes, Spinoza, Kant all already occupying the space of the meeting of the literary and the philosophical as viewed through the optic of existing Beckett criticism. Some, however, are not as ‘familiar’ such as Plotinus and Leibniz.13 Others still—these same others viewed in a different light—are recognizable here as ‘companions’ of Beckett’s writing only because of their intertextual kinship with the thought of Deleuze and Deleuze-Guattari (and only ‘afterwards’ with that of Beckett). It might be objected that the encounters outlined in the following pages are arrived at by means of largely arbitrary juxtapositions. That I conjoin, say, the Kant whom Beckett read and on whom Deleuze wrote is at one level ‘validated’ by a mere coincidence. Each chapter, to a greater or lesser extent, bears the imprint of a coincidence of this sort. It is not my purpose, in any such chapter, to argue that there has been any direct influence by a philosopher on Beckett’s writing or thought. I would not deny that the writings and, in some cases, the summarised thought of Plotinus, Kant, Leibniz, Geulincx, Spinoza, or Berkeley influenced Beckett, but the proof of influence is not my concern. The main concern is: the conjoining of a discussion of Beckett’s writing and a range of philosophical concepts and systems in an assemblage made possible by the particular mode of concrete philosophising practised by Deleuze and Guattari (Martin 1997, 627), 13

Which is not to say that Beckett criticism has not summoned these ghosts either. See Mori (1996, 2004) on Leibniz and Amiran (1993) on Plotinus. The “structureother” as analysed by Deleuze in his study of Michel Tournier’s novel Vendredi ou les limbes du pacifique serves to coordinate, chart, and uphold the subject-object relation. It “assures the margins and transitions in the world […] It is always Others who relate my desire to an object” (Deleuze 1969/1990, 355/306).

Introduction

21

or only possible to pursue in this configuration after them, partly in their wake, with their mode reverberating in what follows, with their style contaminating the newly-configured. To follow them of course—and especially after Deleuze and Guattari—should mean not to mimic them in an unproblematic act of duplication or repetition, but rather to make their concepts work again in a form of what I call shadow hospitality. Chapter 1, Shadow Hospitality, or Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari, is inspired by the formulations of Deleuze in his writings on art and literature, and by passages co-authored by Deleuze and Guattari which describe the interrelationship of philosophy and literature. The chapter introduces its own coinage—“shadow hospitality”—to account for the specific interrelationship of philosophy and literature in the case of the work of Beckett. The specificity of Beckett in this regard is threefold, the chapter suggests. First, his work gravitates towards philosophy, if not to an unprecedented degree among literary authors, then at the very least to an extent which merits more than comment, but a degree of systematic theorisation or inventory. Second, the philosophers with whom Beckett’s work directly and indirectly engages are in many cases linked intimately to the thought of Deleuze and/or of Deleuze-Guattari. Finally, on each side of the “atopian threshold”—another coinage—which characterises what I call shadow hospitality, Beckett and Deleuze (and Guattari) can be said to be caught up in a form of a-parallel evolution. If both DeleuzeGuattari and Beckett are responsible for abstract machines on either side of the atopian threshold, it is also the case that they display a contiguous commitment to one way of formulating the concept of the Abstract Machine, namely as a principle of a ‘becoming” transversal to that threshold. Chapter 2 proceeds on the basis of this correlation to examine Beckett’s 1938 novel Murphy in the context of Spinoza, or of a Spinozism made possible after Deleuze and Guattari. It suggests that the novel is an example of literary ‘ethology’ and, to the end of advancing this argument, turns to the concept of visagéité as initially developed by Guattari and then by both he and Deleuze in plateau 7 of their book Mille Plateaux. This prepares the way for the analysis of the interplay of chaos and form in Murphy. The novel’s protagonist can be read as

22


describing the trajectory of an early version of a “lost one”. He can be said to seek his “dépeupleur” in a manner to be later rendered more abstract in Beckett’s “cylinder” piece of 1972, The Lost Ones. The second part of the chapter focuses on the problematics of ordinality and cardinality thrown up by the play of zeros and ones in Beckett’s ‘digital’ evocation of the activities of the cylinder’s population (or “little people”). The third section develops the analysis of The Lost Ones further by emphasising the extent to which it presents nature as thoroughly “machinic”. Chapter 3 turns to the thinker for whom nature was nothing other than a machinic infinity—Leibniz. It suggests that if Deleuze is a champion of a “perverted” Leibniz in his rigorous and energetic illustration (notably in his book of 1988, Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque) of how to give a philosopher monstrous concepts which remain virtual within a philosophical œuvre, then Beckett, on the other side(s) of the atopian threshold, and in particular in Malone Dies and The Unnamable, is unstinting in his provision of the “sensations of concepts” to complement these.14 Chapter 4 conjures a different modality of Beckett as Deleuzoguattarian ‘athlete’ straddling philosophy and literature, this time by invoking a correlation between the plane of immanence (philosophy) and the plane of composition (literature).15 The crucial links lie in the commitment to immanence (Deleuze) on the one hand and in the evocation and problematisation of the “court that sits in the head” (Beckett) on the other. Beckett and Deleuze-Guattari, it is suggested, both explore the operation characterised in Deleuze’s idiom as “the judgement of God”. If How It Is invokes in its title—as it undeniably does—a philosophical question, then in its unfailingly abeyant answer (given in the French title) it can be said to suspend judgement. Indeed, moreover, it can be said to suspend the edifice of judgement, in a manner which illuminates its own ‘ontology’, Deleuze’s critique of 14

The Deleuzoguattarian notion that literature can furnish “sensations of concepts”, while philosophy delivers concepts proper has been developed by Colombat (1997) and Uhlmann (1999). 15 An allusion to the idea of a hybrid half-philosopher as described in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Deleuze & Guattari 1991/1994, 65/66-7) .

Introduction

23

philosophy’s dominant “image of thought” generally, and the Leibnizo-Kantian “tribunal” of reason specifically. Chapter 5 turns to another philosophical tradition with which the thought of Deleuze has a complex relationship: phenomenology. Beckett’s Worstward Ho affords a fruitful context in which to explore the subterranean “construction-souffle” (Martin, 1998, 98) of philosophemes in a text which for many philosophically-inclined commentators—among them Alain Badiou and Pascale Casanova—is Beckett’s supreme achievement as “philosopher”. My approach is to show to what extent the text displays the abeyance, or preemptory collapsing, of phenomenological intentionality. This is revealed in a particularly emphatic manner in what I call its “appearance anxiety” (with reference to Heidegger) and to its performance of (in Deleuze’s idiom apropos of Foucault) “mute word, blind vision” and (in Beckett’s) “blind voice” and “blank words” (Beckett 1979, 342; 375). Chapter 6 takes its main impetus from the essay in Deleuze’s œuvre which sees him most interpellated by what he calls the ‘formula’, the essay entitled ‘On four poetic formulas that might summarise the Kantian philosophy’ (1984) first published as the Introduction to the English translation of his 1963 book on Kant. In some ways the formulas are those of Deleuze’s own philosophy. There is, I try to show, a reverse fecundation at work here, however, with Deleuze given back his own ‘monstrous’ concepts. This is a consequence of the breakdown of the structure-other as Deleuze described it in his essay on Tournier (1969). It is appropriate, then, to look at matters from across the atopian threshold. Doing so gives us ‘Kantian formulas’ to explore Beckett’s literature. Nowhere does such a reverse application become more useful than in the case of his 1948 poem ‘je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse’. Beckett’s poem is itself on the threshold of philosophy, and specifically of Kantian philosophy. The four formulas assist in showing to what extents both Beckett and Deleuze-Guattari have created a metamorphosis in our thinking both of literary and philosophical “images [and edifices] of thought”.

1. Shadow Hospitality: Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze & Guattari

La littérature, elle, a son lieu ailleurs: dans cet espace de la parole décevante qui unit et sépare le roman et le discours sur le roman. (Jacques Rancière, La Parole muette) Il faudrait trouver une ombre vocale, une voix qui soit une ombre. Une voix blanche. (Samuel Beckett, letter to André Bernold) Quel enthousiasme d’une ombre pour un fantôme. (Paul Valéry, Eupalinos ou l’architecte)

Philosophy’s shadow hospitality In an interview the text of which originally appeared in the journal Les Lettres françaises in 1968, Gilles Deleuze is asked: “How should we interpret the clear interest you have in literature?” (Deleuze 2004, 140). His response may serve to introduce the personae, thematic concerns and a specific mode of what Deleuze himself calls ‘dramatisation’ which together orientate the present study: As you are no doubt aware, the problem of formal renewal can be posed only when the content is new. Sometimes, even, the formal renewal comes after. It is what one has to say, what one thinks one has to say, that imposes new forms. Now philosophy, it’s true, is nothing spectacular. Philosophy has not undergone similar revolutions or experiments as those produced in science, painting, sculpture, music, or literature. Plato, Kant, and the rest—they remain fundamental, and that’s fine…the search for new modes of expression (both a new image of thought and techniques) must be essential for philosophy. Beckett’s complaint: “Ah, the old

26

Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze & Guattari style!” takes on its full significance here. (Deleuze 2004, 140-1)1

Samuel Beckett, for his part, had in a very early work already foreshadowed what would become his decision to begin writing in French after 1945 in related terms. According to Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Racine and Malherbe offer a template for a formal renewal in writing through what is conceptualised in terms of a withdrawal from style (Beckett 1993, 48).2 In this respect, Beckett and Deleuze participate in what Jean-Jacques Lecercle has described as “le même combat”. Style becomes the locus of a deliberate and subversive praxis of writing. As Lecercle comments apropos of Beckett’s subversive anti-style as already exemplified in Murphy: This ponderous metaphysical game is played through stuttering. Stuttering language is the name of the work or play of negation at the linguistic level, which entails consequences, in the shape of variation and the blurring or subversion of constraints at the rhetorical or stylistic level, and eventually points towards the utterly Other which human, which human language, at its limit, enables us to glimpse. (Lecercle 2002, 230)

In conjoining the literary writing of Samuel Beckett with philosophy the present volume in some ways works backwards from Deleuze’s invocation of Beckett’s words, from literature to philosophy. The conjunction as it can be explored after Deleuze and Guattari, however, is the specific concern here. In this context the formulation of the common possibilities of literature and philosophy, as opposed to the distinction marked by Deleuze above, which they articulate in their final jointly authored book Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (1991), is instructive: We lack resistance to the present. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people who do not yet exist...Art and philosophy converge at this point: the constitution of an earth and a people that are lacking as the correlate of creation. (Deleuze & Guattari 1991/1994, 104/108)

Despite this convergence literature is in a privileged position with 1

Cf. Pierre Macherey who characterises literature as enunciating the “philosophique de la philosophie” by exposing or staging its problems “comme on organise la représentation d’une pièce de théâtre” [as one organises the staging of a play] (Macherey 1990, 199). 2 Cf. Knowlson (1996, 357). The phrase is from Happy Days.

Shadow Hospitality: Beckett and Philosophy

27

regard to philosophy, in that the problem of formal renewal is more urgently and frequently addressed by literary authors. Literature and philosophy, then, participate in formal renewal at different speeds. Deleuze and Guattari’s concern in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? being the question of creation—specifically philosophy’s creation of concepts—their focus is necessarily the ‘slow’ process of formal renewal in their ‘own’ discipline.3 But, with one eye trained on the quite distinct velocities at work in literature, it is attention which is prone to succumbing to distraction. Literature, with its different speeds, its distinct ‘conducts of time’ (Alliez 1996a), offers philosophy an untimely pedagogy. Although philosophy’s terrain is what Deleuze and Guattari term, inspired by Spinoza, the “plane of immanence”, and is therefore distinct from the province of literature, which has as its equivalent the “plane of composition”, the two planes can be, and frequently are, put into contact in the work of certain philosophers and literary authors. The often marginal and marginalised line of philosophers with which Deleuze identifies himself in his early career is important in this regard. Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson in particular produce their own ‘revolutions’ comparable to the innovations of, say, Francis Bacon in painting (to whom Deleuze devoted a book-length study), or James Joyce in the novel (whose Finnegans Wake is for Deleuze a chaos become cosmos). These philosophers, in their own ways, indeed subject philosophy to a stylistic revolution: Spinoza’s Ethics, for example, is a polyphonic experiment which delivers three interanimating ethics in discordant or ‘stammering’ relation (Deleuze 1993/1998, 187/151), while Nietzsche is a philosopher in whose work it is exceedingly difficult to locate a boundary between the literary and philosophical.4 An important passage in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, which is quoted here at length, elaborates on the interanimation of philosophy and literature: The concept as such can be the concept of the affect, just as the affect can be the concept of the concept. The plane of composition of art and the plane of immanence of philosophy can slip into each other to the degree that parts of one may be 3

Cf. Guattari (1995, 111). Deleuze also directly addresses the question of style in philosophy in his 1988 interview with Raymond Bellour and François Ewald (Deleuze 1995, 140-1). Tom Conley has written a fine study of Deleuze’s own pliant style as evidenced in his Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Conley 1997). 4

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Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze & Guattari occupied by entities of the other. In fact, in each case, the plane and that which occupies it are like two relatively distinct but heterogeneous parts. A thinker may therefore decisively modify what thinking means, draw up a new image of thought, and institute a new plane of immanence. But, instead of creating new concepts that occupy it, they populate it with other instances, with other poetic, novelistic, or even pictorial or musical entities. The opposite is also true. Igitur is just such a case of a conceptual persona transported onto a plane of composition, an aesthetic figure carried onto a plane of immanence: his proper name is a conjunction. These thinkers are “half” philosophers but also much more than philosophers. But they are not sages. There is much force in these unhinged works of Hölderlin, Kleist, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Kafka, Michaux, Pessoa, Artaud and many English and American novelists, from Melville to Lawrence to Miller, in which the reader discovers that they have written the novel of Spinozism. To be sure they do not produce a synthesis of art and philosophy. They branch out and do not stop branching out. They are hybrid geniuses who neither erase nor cover over differences in kind, but, on the contrary, use all the resources of their ‘athleticism’ to install themselves within this very difference, like acrobats torn apart in a perpetual show of strength. (Deleuze & Guattari 1991/1994, 65/66-7) 5

While the authors do not refer directly to Beckett in this passage, it is nonetheless clear from statements made elsewhere, not least the claim that he is the agent of a “Spinozism acharné” (Deleuze 1993/1998, 57/152), that he is, for them, a key figure among these “athletic” thinkers. The convergence proposed by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “athletic” thinker is in some ways an inversion of Plato’s exclusion of literature (or its purveyor, the poet) from the assembly as promulgated in The Republic: 5

Despite this appeal to the arts as a corrective to the dominant image of thought of philosophy, Deleuze would frequently insist—as he did in a text published the year before the interview in question—on the specificity of the philosophical (Deleuze 2004, 106). The final collaboration between Deleuze and Guattari—which repeats the claim regarding specificity—has divided commentators; for some it completes the “sell-out” already underway in Mille Plateaux, offering an allegedly hugely conservative portrait of philosophy. Stengers is among those to have defended the book from this latter charge. In her essay ‘Deleuze and Guattari’s Last Enigmatic Message’ she addresses the controversy caused by the book in seeming to produce a “classical picture”, with a mature science tracing a mature philosophy, as illustrated by “great philosophers” (Stengers 2005, 151). Alliez (1993, 1996) also defends Deleuze and Guattari against accusations of conservativism. See also Stivale’s diverting account of the fortunes of Deleuze and Guattari as their work has been received in certain (often selectively) approving circuits of the academy and as these spilled with corrosive effect into cyberspace in his The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari (Stivale 1998, 71-99).


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his works have a low degree of truth and also … he deals with a low element in the mind. We are therefore quite right to refuse to admit him to a properly run state, because he awakens and encourages and strengthens the lower elements in the mind to the detriment of reason, which is like giving power and control to the worst elements in a state and ruining the better elements. (Plato 1974, 435)

Deleuze’s approach to literature and to the arts in general6 is linked to the rest of his philosophy in the concerted challenge to an “image of thought” which has representation at its basis which they (his aesthetics and ontology combined) effectuate. Paradoxically, the challenge to mimesis as image of thought comes from mimesis—from the structure of mimesis itself. The emblematic challenge within a specifically philosophical context is Deleuze’s celebrated essay ‘inverting’ Platonism in Logique du sens (1969), where Plato’s philosophy finds itself under pressure from an unexpected source, namely from that which had been purportedly excluded in the course of the inauguration of its very own image of thought (Deleuze 1969/1990, 292-307/253266). In Dialogues (1977) Deleuze succinctly describes the interaction of image of thought and the idea of the State: It invents a properly spiritual State, as an absolute state, which is by no means a dream, since it operates effectively in the mind. Hence the importance of notions such as…always having correct ideas…of themes like those of a republic of spirits, an enquiry of the understanding, a court of reason, a pure ‘right’ of thought, with Ministers of the Interior and bureaucrats of pure thought. (Deleuze 1987, 13)

The challenge to right reason for Plato comes from the depths, the lower reaches, the uncultivated terrain which is also the betrayed ground of truth and of a republic of spirits devoted to truth. Deleuze’s conception of how literature relates to philosophy is linked to the challenge to philosophy’s image of thought which it represents. Within this context, the purveyor of works of art is like a ‘false 6

Aesthetics, Rancière has pointed out, specifically apropos of Deleuze, is less a division of philosophy than an idea of thought: “L’esthétique n’est pas un savoir des œuvres mais un mode de pensée qui se déploie à leur propos et les prend à témoins d’une question: une question qui porte sur le sensible et sur la puissance de pensée qui l’habite avant la pensée, à l’insu de la pensée” [Aesthetics is not a knowledge of works but a mode of thought which is deployed on their behalf and takes them as witnesses to a question: a question which relates to the sensible and to the power of thought which inhabits it before thought, without the knowledge of thought] (Rancière 1998, 525).

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claimant’, to employ a phrase from Différence et répétition (1968). As Deleuze would put it in his study of Proust, the “secret pressures of the work of art” (Deleuze 1986a/2002, 119/98) upon the philosophical are felt. The reversal of Platonism means that The non-hierarchised work is a condensation of coexistences and a simultaneity of events. It is the triumph of the false pretender…But the false pretender cannot be called false in relation to a presupposed model of truth, no more than simulation can be called an appearance or an illusion. Simulation is the phantasm itself, that is, the effect of the functioning of the simulacrum as machinery—Dionysian machine. It involves the false as power, Pseudos, in the sense in which Nietzsche speaks of the highest power of the false. By rising to the surface, the simulacrum makes the Same and the Similar, the model and the copy, fall under the power of the false (phantasm). (Deleuze 1969/1990, 303/262-3)

The reverberations in the Republic created by the defiant operation of the Dionysian machine would be like the dissonance created by the pagus as defined by Jean-François Lyotard: those expelled, living on the boundaries reverberate towards (and berate) those remaining in the newly established (and established by virtue of the initial exclusion) domus (Lyotard 1985, 38, 42).7 It is in this context that Deleuze develops the notion of the ‘formula’, as an index of the intermezzine forces operative in the difference between the philosophical and the literary. Jean-Clet Martin has made one of the most incisive statements regarding the status of the ‘formula’ with respect to its operation within and on the philosophical in Deleuze’s work: it is not a metaphor, he argues, but a subterranean link to other texts, a “construction-souffle” which goes towards the limit of a series of conceptual variations and which causes to stammer into articulation all manner of virtualities (Martin 1993, 98).8 Among the formulas, apart from Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” (Melville 1967), notable examples include Mallarmé’s “Toute Pensée émet un 7

The link is made explicit in Lyotard’s Just Gaming (Lyotard 1985). The concept of the domus is explored in a later essay in The Inhuman, ‘Domus and Megalopolis’ (Lyotard 1991). 8 Cf. Baugh (2000) and Colombat (2000). Rancière (2004) is highly critical of the formula in its application, generally but specifically in the analysis of Melville. Deleuze in Rancière’s view, bars the way to politics, because, he argues, the way to shared fabulation is ultimately blocked (Rancière 2004, 164). This position ultimately subscribes to the very un-Deleuzian notion of a separate sphere for politics, even if politics emerges out of the “partage du sensible”.


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Coup de Dés” (Mallarmé 1976, 429). The ‘percepts’ and ‘affects’— which in ontological terms inhabit the equivalent place in literature to that occupied by concepts in philosophy—as these are understood by Deleuze and Guattari, are to be differentiated from perceptions and affections as such; by contrast to the latter, which belong to formed subjects, the former pertain to the pre-subjective or larval subject (cf. Deleuze 2004, 197). André Pierre Colombat has provided a useful précis of what such an emergence might entail: What interests him [Deleuze] in a text are the processes, the resisting strategies writers invent in order to demystify language itself, to experiment with it, to ‘complicate’ signs, to confront the Outside or Life itself, to survive this confrontation and to create their own work, their own events, milestones or shelters for a new ‘life in the folds’. (Colombat 2000, 29)

This is another way of coming to the question of style. For Lecercle, Deleuze and Beckett are engaged in the “même combat” because each, in his way, is concerned to purge the ‘canvas’ or page of cliché, and in the process to abandon “le vieux style”, [in order to] accommodate vision and music [visions and auditions]. There is, however, a condition to be fulfilled: such language must be as a foreign tongue within the material idiom—language, but strange and out of kilter. Deleuze has a phrase to describe this, which is also Beckett’s “non-style”, his rejection of any attempt at writing: such language is “mal vu mal dit”. (Lecercle 2002, 7)

For Deleuze, “A style [which would in fact be equivalent to Beckett’s ‘non-style’] is managing to stammer in one’s own language” (Deleuze 1987, 4).9 In Lecercle’s view, however, the persistence in Deleuze’s thought of the question of style “is only the symptom of a philosophical problem, of the problem of language, in its two, paradoxical aspects of the philosopher’s necessary resistance and hostility to, but also obsession with, language” (Lecercle 2002, 7). Moreover, he has 9

Indeed in Deleuze’s essay ‘Bégaya-t-il’ style is explicitly said to be “non-style” in this sense (Deleuze 1993/1998, 142/113). Deleuze and Guattari had already written in 1972: “That is what style is, or rather the absence of style—asyntactic, agrammatical: the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but by what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode— desire. For literature is like schizophrenia: a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression” (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983, 158-9/133).

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shown, in an earlier study from 1990, The Violence of Language, that language understood as abstract machine (a formulation developed in Mille Plateaux) supports the idea of non-autonomy of language, in that, far from being a domain cut off from praxis, “language is caught both in the bodies of its utterers and in the society they form” (Lecercle 1990, 47). Lecercle goes on to stress the consequences for the political and ethical spheres of this non-autonomy: Words not only do things, they are things. Language...is an intervention within it [the world], to be analysed in terms of positions, advance and retreat, territorial markings, and deterritorializations. We are moving here from the body of the individual to the body politic. (Lecercle 1990, 47)

Thus Deleuze moves from the problematics of style to the question of ethics. In Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the political, by marked contrast to the conceptions of Slavoj Žižek and of Badiou respectively, in the collective enunciation in which individual utterance is abyssally inscribed (and, in a sense, lost), there is an assertion of the role of forces and pre-individual haecceities and instensities. The work of art, within this domain of forces, becomes, in a formulation they were to develop in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, a complex which holds forces in a ‘bloc’ of becoming which they call the monumental (Deleuze & Guattari 1991/1994, 158-160/176-7). It is in for reasons allied to this that Deleuze’s conception of literature is not formalism under another guise. In the concluding paragraph of their book on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari state that it may only be through attaining the inflection of ‘minority’ that literature (or the literature machine) can move toward a specific mode of deterritorialization. It is in the same book that the authors describe the writing of Beckett as belonging to a lineage of literature as the “people’s concern” (Deleuze & Guattari 1975/1986, 32/18). Minor literature is defined according to three characteristics: the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation (33/18). Beckett participates in all three by virtue of what the authors describe as his tendency to “[o]ppose a purely intensive use of language to all symbolic or even significant or simply signifying uses of it. Arrive at a perfect and unformed expression, a materially intense expression” (Deleuze & Guattari 1975/1986, 35/19). He does so, specifically, in proceeding


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“by dryness and sobriety, a willed poverty, pushing deterritorialization to such an extreme that nothing remains but intensities” (35/19). To continue for the moment to explore the genealogy of the formulation “the people to come”, Deleuze’s manner of approaching literature can be likened to the radical passivity of the sort described by Maurice Blanchot in his L’Entretien infini (1969): The encounter: what comes without advent, what approaches face-on, and nonetheless always by surprise […] designates a new relation. At the point of juncture—a unique point—what comes into relation remains without relation […] at the point of coincidence—which is not a point but a divergence—it is noncoincidence that intervenes (that affirms itself in the intervening [l’inter-venue]). (Blanchot 1993, 414-15)

The context in which Blanchot makes these remarks is in part determined by the theorisation of modes of engagement with literature by the profession of literary criticism (as exemplified by his piece in L’Entretien infini on Gaston Bachelard)—as such a type of praxis from which the present study might learn. In this context, moreover, he—specifically—cites the example of Beckett’s novel Comment c’est which, in disarming the critic, “discredits all praise”. The category of work to which Beckett’s novel is said to belong—“closer than is customary to the movement of writing and to the movement of reading, seeking to combine them in an experience that, if not common to both, is at least scarcely differentiated [= neutral]”—puts into question the “honest act of reading” (Blanchot 1993, 329). Such a focus on the intermezzine space of problematised critical intervention finds distinct echoes in the thought of Deleuze (who frequently directly cites Blanchot). Indeed his Dialogues directly addresses the question of the “entretien” (as in Blanchot’s title L’Entretien infini), and does so in terms which recall Blanchot. Departing from the example of what it is to write—that intransitive verb to which so many poststructuralist philosophers would devote time and space—Deleuze summons the figure of solitude, albeit a paradoxically populous mode of that state of existence.10 That which 10

In L’Écriture du désastre (1980), Blanchot defines solitude in the following terms: “solitude or non-interiority, exposure to the outside, boundless dispersion, the impossibility of holding firm, within bounds, enclosed—such is the human deprived of humanity, the supplement that supplies nothing” (Blanchot 1986, 30). The key texts on the concept of solitude appear in L'Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955); see ‘La

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populates solitude, he continues, is not the phantasm or the dream, but the encounter by means of which “a bloc of becoming, an a-parallel evolution” is set in motion (Deleuze 1987, 7). The encounter, then, accounts for an “intimacy of the Outside” in the work, for which it creates what can be described as ‘atopian’ (atopos=without place) or ‘fractal’ thresholds. Correlatively, in an interview published in Cahiers du cinéma to mark the publication of the second instalment of his two-volume work on the image regimes of cinema, Deleuze develops this idea of a-parallel evolution in describing the manner in which philosophy and the arts interact in his projects in general. It is not, he points out, a question of one discipline reflecting on the other; rather what is involved is the realization by one discipline that it has to “resolve, for itself and by its own means, a problem similar to one confronted by the other” (Deleuze in Flaxman ed. 2000, 367). The discipline of philosophy in the case of Deleuze recognizes, as in a mirror image, the operation whereby across the divide (the relation of non-relation as he calls it elsewhere), another discipline poses itself a problem (which could even be to do with recognition or relation itself). The fact is, however, that this recognition is simultaneously, and paradoxically, an encounter with alterity: it amounts to an alter-ation.11 In the present case, approached from a methodological point of view, the encounter (albeit of a specific— mutually parasitical—sort) is between literature and the ‘impostor’ literary critic/practitioner of, faute de mieux, literary criticism. What Blanchot says, however, of the literary critic remains true of Deleuze as the figure standing on the threshold of the other discipline—the discipline subject to separation at or through this bordering-on. Words must travel far: “Encountering the critic, the poet encounters his shadow, the image slightly dark, a bit empty, and vaguely counterfeit

solitude essentielle’ (Blanchot 1955, 11-32) and ‘La solitude essentielle et la solitude dans le monde’ (337-40). For a definition of the concept of solitude in Blanchot, particularly as this is explored in the latter’s Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas (1953), see Bellour (1991). 11 If we recognize the Other we participate in what Deleuze identifies as the structureother of which, for him, Michel Tournier’s novel Vendredi is a critique and anatomy, we are still under the yoke of the One and the Same. As Moira Gatens glosses Deleuze writing on Tournier’s reworking of Defoe, “The absence of an appropriately socialised ‘other’ opens Robinson’s habituated human world—his molar identity—to other possible worlds” (Gatens 1996, 175).


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of himself—moreover a faithful companion” (Blanchot 1993, 327)].12 The enthusiasm of a shadow for a phantom, to translate the words of Paul Valéry in his Eupalinos, ou l’architecte (1932). The challenge to the finished discourse of philosophy which comes from “the secret pressures of the work of art” enables the dismantling—in a Nietzschean conception—of the completion and teleology symptomatic of the philosophical.13 The untimely pedagogy causes philosophy to unlearn its own image of thought: it looks into the mirror and, through the insistence of non-philosophy no longer recognizes itself. Philosophy becomes, like Beckett’s Murphy gazing into the eyes of Mr. Endon over the chessboard, “lost in the speck of … unseen” (Beckett 1973, 140); the structure of recognition, or the “structure-other”, breaks down: relation of non-relation. Philosophy and Literature, or perhaps, as Andrew Benjamin has expressed the relation, “philosophy’s literature” (Benjamin 2001). Appurtenance in this case of shadow hospitality goes both ways. Literature’s philosophy? Commenting on the lack of a ‘role’ per se for literature in the thought of Deleuze (it is not there to exemplify, amplify or in any other way ‘represent’ him, his thought or his discipline), Mary Bryden suggests that literature is an ally insofar as it “is favourable to the exposure of the illusion of transcendence” (Bryden 2003, 105).14 This is literature conceived of as philosophy’s pressurising outside: a domain of creative encounter that exposes the conspiring with transcendence that is never completely out of the frame when philosophical transactions are underway. As Deleuze comments in his book on Proust, “This is because philosophy, like friendship. Is ignorant of the dark regions in which are elaborated the effective forces that act on thought, the determinations that force us to think” (Deleuze 1986a/2002, 116/95) It is the privilege accorded to 12

In certain ways this ‘primal scene’ is evoked by Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu (see Dowd 2003). 13 For Lecercle, Badiou ends up imposing such a teleology in his use of literature. Of the event which in Badiou’s philosophy interrupts the ‘situation’ Lecercle writes: “the event still comes from outside, or above, the world it shatters, and it creates a retrospective teleology—the teleology implicit in truth and faithfulness” (Lecercle 2002, 112). 14 There are many other comparable statements in the corpus of work on Deleuze and literature, such as John Marks’ comment that “Some works of fiction demonstrate a particular capacity to explore the in-between spaces, and in this way to release philosophical forces” (Marks 2000, 81).

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them that means for him that the signs of art can ‘force’ thought. In this respect philosophy is the worse off, for “Philosophy, with all its method and its goodwill, is nothing compared to the secret pressures of the work of art” (1986a/2002, 119/98). What, then, of the question of literature providing philosophy with an attenuating force on the pressure of the transcendent? One may wish to speak of a zone which belongs to no-one, of a Watt-like couloir, but the problem of literature and philosophy resolving problems on their own terms needs to be borne in mind.15 Deleuze’s statement regarding the encounter between the disciplines insists on a level of specificity and irreducibility for each. Some account must therefore be given of the work of fiction/literature as approached not only in an immanent manner (that is, considered as immanent to Deleuze’s work, as part of the unfolding of Deleuze’s thought as a philosopher), but when it is considered on quite another terrain: that of literature ‘itself’. The place of literature in the thought of Deleuze and Guattari For Deleuze and Guattari literature is a rich resource enabling the renewal of philosophical thought by means of ‘non-philosophy’. The critique of interpretation which they together launch in L’Anti-Œdipe (1972) is coextensive with the exposure of their philosophical (a nomination of course already complicated by Guattari’s profession16) thought to all manner of (often disjunctive) relations with disciplines, literature included, beyond the sphere of the professional expertise of the two authors. One of the lessons which philosophy can learn from literature will assist it in unlearning the image of thought which has dominated the discipline, according to Chapter 4 of Deleuze’s Différence et répétition (published some three years prior to his first collaboration with Guattari). Of the many literary authors to have participated in this untimely pedagogy Samuel Beckett is a particular 15

Geoffrey Bennington has also employed the notion of the garden boundary to state his opposition to the idea of interdisciplinarity as “a situation where established disciplines, firm within their frontiers, are invited to have dialogues or debates, those more or less polite academic conversations over their garden fences” (Bennington 2000, 14). 16 Guattari was not himself a (professional) philosopher. See Deleuze’s own comments on Guattari’s “philosopher-becoming” (1987, 16). In Žižek’s deliberately provocative caricature, the worst Deleuze is the “guattarized” version who falls under the “bad influence” of his co-author because he “presented [to Deleuze]…an alibi, an easy escape from the deadlock of his previous position” (Žižek 2004, 20-21).


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case. He is so for reasons only in part explained by the frequent recourse which the authors made to his work by way of illustration or celebration. The uniqueness of the pertinence of the work of Beckett to the question of the relationship between philosophy and literature lies in the extent to which philosophy, philosophical thought and philosophical systems pervade the corpus of his writing in the areas of fiction, prose, criticism, poetry and drama. In short, Beckett’s “athleticism” is, arguably, unique. Before turning to the ‘formulas’ with which Beckett’s writing can be said to furnish Deleuze and Guattari, notably in the opening pages of L’Anti-Œdipe (where the authors assume familiarity with Beckett, naming his works and characters but not always their creator—a phenomenon which the English translations have tended to obscure), a beginning must be made in delineating how literature operates more generally in their thinking, and in particular in that of Deleuze, since of the two it is he who has written more on literature and art. In the filmed interviews which Deleuze gave to Claire Parnet—broadcast (in accordance with Deleuze’s instructions) posthumously in 1996 on the Franco-German television channel Arte as L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze—reference is made to a book on literature the ambition of which, arguably, Critique et clinique did not quite fulfill.17 Several of the pieces collected there are reprinted—from prefaces and academic journals published over a period of 30 years—and do not cohere in a way which the phrase ‘a book on literature’, or expectations deriving from Deleuze’s previously published work, would seem to suggest. The question of the status of Critique et clinique measured against the hypothetical nature of a book that Deleuze might have written had things transpired differently being set aside, the essays which he did compile for publication do not amount to a systematic account of what literature is for Deleuze (there is no “What is Literature?” statement along the lines of the Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? collaboration with 17 Cf. Deleuze (2004, 133). In L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, Claire Parnet asks Deleuze whether he intends to write a major book—a ‘reflective book’—on literature. Deleuze answers that he hopes to if there is time. It is possible to argue, then, that the new essays in Critique et clinique are but a partial or temporary replacement for that project. In another interview, with Bellour and Ewald for Magazine littéraire in 1988 (Deleuze 1990/1995, 196/142), Deleuze explicitly announces a ‘critique et clinique’ project but adds (implicitly) that, even should the latter come to pass, it may still not amount to the book he would have liked to have written about literature (196/143).

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Guattari); neither do they produce collectively a programmatic statement which might be applied by anyone attempting to write about literature and philosophy in the manner of, or after Deleuze. There is, perhaps, an anomalous quality in these interventions which, paradoxically, renders any attempt to resurrect from them (not to mention the rest of the work) a general theory of literature an enterprise doomed in advance (a fact recognized by the most recent survey of Deleuze on literature at the time of writing by Ronald Bogue [Bogue 2003, 3]).18 Certainly the volume has a limited engagement with the work of Beckett (the—welcome—inclusion of Deleuze’s 1992 essay on Beckett, ‘L’Épuisé’, to supplement the short essay on Film, in the English translation perhaps gives the misleading impression that he is more central to the preoccupations of the book).19 The entries in the eclectic list of literary authors to which the volume turns its attention do not belong to an identifiable tradition; they are not linked by means of period, genre, nationality, style, theme or political ideology. The list includes proto-Modernist avant-garde iconoclasts such as Alfred Jarry and nineteenth-century innovators such as Herman Melville, as well as authors less associated with radical innovation in literary form such as D.H. Lawrence and T.E. Lawrence. Indeed in the midst of the list of literary authors to whom Deleuze turned his attention over the 18

Philippe Mengue has also made an important critical statement on Deleuze and literature, in the course of which he nonetheless poses the provocative question: “Pourquoi cette présence obsédante, au point que toute sa philosophie ne serait peutêtre en somme qu’une géniale théorie de la littérature?” [Why this obsessing presence, to the extent that his entire philosophy could perhaps be summed up as nothing other than a brilliant theory of literature?] (Mengue 2002, 32). 19 The fact that without explicitly mentioning that it is an editorial addition (though an endnote does mention it), the English translation of Critique et clinique includes a translation of Deleuze’s essay on Beckett which did not appear in the French version, is a strange oversight indeed. See Smith in Deleuze (1998). Despite the undoubted importance of Critique et clinique (considered in conjunction with the critical and clinical essays of the 1960s) when it comes to an understanding of the importance of literature to the thinking of Deleuze, and of the specificity of his approach to it considered apart from his jointly authored œuvre, it is not from this collection that the present study takes its principal impetus and orientation, but from a broad range of Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s writings. In his Translator’s Introduction to the English edition of Critique et clinique, Daniel Smith makes a strong case for Deleuze’s systematic pursuit of a ‘Critical and Clinical’ project beginning with Proust et les signes and culminating in his collection of essays bearing that title. See Smith (1998).


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span of his career, the only hierarchy he endorsed was a curious one regarding the alleged superiority of Anglo-American literature over its French and European counterparts.20 The case of Beckett is peculiar, since aside from the a number of passages in L’Anti-Œdipe, one arguably inconsequential essay on Beckett’s Film (dating from 1986) which was later reprinted in Critique et clinique, and the passage to which it is quite close in Cinéma I (Deleuze 1985, 66-8), it was not until 1992 that a substantial intervention fully underlined the importance of Beckett to Deleuze’s thought.21 Critique et clinique Beckett, Deleuze: same combat; an interanimation or exchange in the very space of their difference, or as Deleuze puts it in Dialogues, a “‘between-two’ of two solitudes” (Deleuze 1987, 9). The difficulty of negotiating the question of the relation of the work of Deleuze on a given art form to the tradition to which on one level it demands to be 20

This claim—which is set out in Dialogues in a section entitled ‘On the superiority of Anglo-American literature’ (and briefly stated in L’Anti-Œedipe [1972/1983, 158/132-3]) —is curious in the extreme, and perhaps especially so to the anglophone reader, as Tom Conley agrees (Conley 1997, 644, n. 5). When Deleuze speaks of the greatness of the achievement of a given author, he is often referring to their capacity for producing “affects”, for being (and acting as) Spinozists. Deleuzian criteria pertaining to literature—with the notable exception of his book on Proust—would not acknowledge the (neo-Platonic) New Critical principle of the “well wrought urn” with its presupposition of a unifying form; nor does his approach sit comfortably with deconstructive pedagogy. In his view, North American literature is founded on the operational principle of the trajet, the transversal movement which takes the subject elsewhere (as suggested in the title of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road), and which makes it impossible to say “I” (Melville, and Moby-Dick in particular, is his primary example). His attachment to what he calls Anglo-American literature is to a literature which he regards as effectuating dispersal and fragmentation rather than totalization. As Deleuze and Guattari proclaim, in L’Anti-Œdipe, writers such as Kerouac “scramble the codes…cause flows to circulate, traverse the desert of the BwO. They overcome a limit…” (1972/1983, 152/132-33). Cf. Bryden (2003). The exception (to a disavowal of formalism) is his study of Proust where there seem to exist in tension two critical impulses, one toward formalism of the totalizing sort, the other towards an emergent machinic conception which would work against the first (though Mengue [2006] has offered an opposing reading). Jean-Claude Dumoncel makes an interesting point regarding the importance to Deleuze of Tournier’s Vendredi in this context. By reworking Defoe, Tournier transplants the “prototype du roman anglo-américain dans les Lettres Françaises” (Dumoncel 1999, 87 n. 325). 21 The importance of Beckett to Deleuze is frequently mentioned by him in L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze.

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regarded as a contribution, but which on another towards which it is resistant (I have never written anything but philosophy Deleuze says), is a refrain in Deleuzian criticism. Alain Ménil puts it well when he states: “the very idea of assigning an art to some philosophical directive sits ill with the Deleuzian conception of art, science and philosophy” (Ménil 2003, 93). It is interesting, therefore, that many of the essays in Critique et clinique are concerned with philosophy; despite the literary emphasis in appearance these are in many ways just as much essays in philosophy as his book on Hume (Deleuze 1953) was a book on philosophy. They continue the parallel project of another decade—the 1960s—when essays on Zola, Klossowski and Tournier find themselves glued together in the binding of Logique du sens. Not that Deleuze would be unduly concerned about the distinction, these essays are nonetheless thereby implicitly defined as works of philosophy.22 Not unrelated to the classificatory dilemma outlined above, or what Gregg Lambert calls Deleuze’s bordering on the very threshold of the genre of the philosophical (Lambert 2003), more generally the singular body of work co-authored by Deleuze and Guattari has proved an awkward corpus for literary criticism to absorb, reinvent in its own image, or deploy (unproblematically) to its own ends. For one thing, the work to which they signed their names as joint authors enters the bloodstream of the literary critic at a rate quite distinct from the pace at which Deleuze’s solo writings could be said to have effectuated their own distinct transfusion. The four main collaborative works, after all, include a short book on Kafka. This fact on one level precipitates the ‘reception’ of that book (and the other co-authored books) in literary studies; on another level however, in its strident disavowal of the edifice of the signifier, Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure (1975) sits decidedly oddly with books on literature by French philosophers and philosophically-inclined critics writing in the 1970s.23 Deleuze’s 22

It is perhaps for this very reason—one can only speculate, for Bogue does not address the matter himself—that Bogue’s recent book (2003) devotes ample space to the place of Lewis Carroll in Logique du sens, but almost none to either Klossowski or Tournier and none at all to Zola. 23 As Réda Bensmaïa writes in his Foreword to Kafka: “Without seeming to deal with the question at all, Deleuze and Guattari begin by detaching Kafka from what the academic institution calls ‘Literature’. It quickly becomes obvious that Kafka has been misinterpreted …been judged to be the embodiment of a concept of literature


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Proust et les signes, however, is, in some ways a less anomalous work in the context in which it intervenes.24 Proust is affirmed for the manner in which his work can generate what Deleuze describes as a ‘world’, which term he understands in the Leibnizian sense of a world drawn from a set of “possible worlds”.25 Insofar as his work is concerned with a quasi-Leibnizian possiblevirtual, Proust is indispensable to Deleuze. By contrast to philosophy, which is content to render the possible explicit, art—or at least this is the lesson which Proust teaches Deleuze—envelops possible worlds. The activity of Proust’s narrator involves “explicating, that is unfolding, developing a content that is incommensurable with the container” (Deleuze 1986a/2000, 141/117). The beloved, in this context (Albertine, Gilberte for example), appears as a sign or a ‘soul’; “the beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us, implying, enveloping, imprisoning a world that must be deciphered, that is, interpreted” (Deleuze 1986a/2000, 14/7). To love, in this context, is to try to “explicate, to develop these unknown worlds that remain enveloped within the beloved” (14/7). In addition, in the Recherche, asymmetrical and non-communicating parts are arranged either into (and of the Law—of Genre, of Desire) that is totally inapplicable to his work” (Bensmaïa 1986, xiv). Dana Polan notes in his Translator’s Introduction the dismissive review written by Guy Scarpetta in Tel Quel (a journal, he argues, “always already tied to an ideology of the the Author and His Word” [xxiii]). 24 While this is true it also needs to be said (following Lecercle on this point) that in many ways the book on Proust reveals itself to be still in the world of representation (Lecercle 2002, 246). Philippe Mengue has provided an exacting analysis of the geology of Proust et les signes in the broader context of the development of Deleuze’s approach to literature (Mengue 2006). 25 The type of clinic to which the work of Kafka is subjected in Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure is explicitly differentiated from those approaches to his work that persist in revealing the “dirty little secret” (D.H. Lawrence is frequently cited in this context, but see, for instance, Deleuze 1995, 143). Interestingly, as far as the work of Beckett is concerned in this regard, Michel Bousseyroux, writing from a psychoanalytic perspective, argues that Beckett’s theatre has the same structure as psychoanalysis precisely because of its impedance of interpretation: “Parce que l’Autre en est désespérément absent, le théâtre de Beckett, en particulier Fin de partie, a la même structure que, dans une psychanalyse, le dire de l’interprétation, à savoir que, tout en faisant signe, elle ne dit rien, au sens de signifier quelque chose” [Because the Other is despairingly absent from it, Beckett’s theatre, Endgame in particular, has the same structure as in a session of psychoanalysis, the speech of interpretation, to the effect that in signalling it, it says nothing, in the sense of signifying something] (Bousseyroux 2000, 177).

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separate halves or ways (côtés) or such that they create a turbulent interaction throwing up outcomes according to chance or necessity (141/117). It is for these reasons (in the 1970 edition of the book) that Proust is said to be the constructor of a literary machine rather than of a work of art. As Deleuze explains in Proust et les signes, To claim that Proust had the notion—even vague or confused—of the antecedent unity of the Search or that he found it subsequently, but as animating the whole from the start, is to read him badly, applying the ready-made criteria of organic totality that are precisely the ones he rejects and missing the new conception of unity he was in the process of creating …the disparity, the incommensurability, the disintegration of the parts of the Search. (Deleuze 1986a/2000, 140/116)

A machinic (and in some senses Leibnizian) Proust is proposed by Deleuze in opposition to the ‘organic’ Proust so favoured in some approaches (including, as Mengue [2006] has pointed out, Deleuze’s own in 1964) to the monumental achievement of the Recherche. The non-totalizable parts of the Recherche are yoked into disjunctive relation by a narrator whom Deleuze (in the additional chapter included in the 1976 edition of the book) describes as a spider, presiding over captures (captures rather than closures or enclosures). The narrator then is, in terms which derive from L’Anti-Œdipe, an organless body or body without organs (218/181), the strange “plasticity” (218/182) of which enables it to send out “sticky threads” (218/182) to open vessels, in order, Deleuze writes, “to make the characters so many marionettes of his delirium, so many intensive powers of his organless body, so many profiles of his own madness” (219/182). In addition to being the architect of this incomplete ‘cathedral’/architectonic presided over (from within) by a spider “deprived of any voluntary and organised use of…faculties” (218/182), Deleuze’s Proust is a ‘symptomatologist’. In a formulation which retrospectively links the literary machine for which he (Proust) is responsible to the schizoanalytic project of Deleuze and Guattari combined (in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia), Proustism is described as “a semiology of regimes of signs which is anti-psychiatric, anti-psychoanalysis, anti-philosophical” (Deleuze 1993/1998, 145/119-20).26 26

For Serge Doubrovsky—whose book on Proust can be read as a rewriting and reversal of Deleuze’s study (Bové 1986, 151-3)—a symptomatic reading of the Re-


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A final word regarding Proust et les signes is necessary. The status of Proustian completion is complex for Deleuze: it is effectively (as previously stated) a Leibnizian “capture” rather than a totalizing encompassment. Despite the tension in Proust et les signes deriving from the apparently contending halves of the book, the figure of the spider introduced in the final chapter (a text dating from 1973 added to the 1976 edition) must be read in the context of the description of the machine and the body without organs in L’Anti-Œdipe, and of which the authors declare Beckett’s L’Innommable to be exemplary: the subject—produced as a residuum alongside the machine, or as an appendix, or as a spare part adjacent to the machine…The subject itself is not at the centre, which is occupied by the machine, but on the periphery, with no fixed identity, forever decentred, defined by the states through which it passes. (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983, 27/20)

This suggests one way of responding to Philippe Mengue’s undeniably persuasive argument regarding the “dilemma” of Proust et les signes (Mengue 2006). Deleuze, Mengue speculates, would perhaps choose to defend the contradictions between the strata of this book as being themselves indexical of his commitment to experimentation or formal renewal not just as a value in literature but equally, if less compellingly (in his own view), in philosophy. However, it is possible that Deleuze might construct his defence on quite distinct grounds. The spider chapter could be said, in terms borrowed from the passage just quoted, to be a peripheral entity hovering outside the literary machine that is the second half, while the latter in turn might be thought of as the ‘perversion’ of the first. In keeping with Deleuze’s commitment to affirmation, he does not renounce or repudiate (in the manner of his repudiation of all of his published work prior to 1953) his 1964 essay but gives it, in its successive editions, a monstrous offspring. In Critique et clinique Proust returns in the form of an epigraph that can be said to resonate throughout the collection: “les beaux livres cherche is to be located, precisely on the contrary, in the domain of psychoanalysis, specifically according to the Lacanian model (Doubrovsky 1986). In an interview with Madeleine Chapsal for La Quinzaine littéraire in 1967, on the occasion of the publication of Présentation de Sacher Masoch, Deleuze describes symptomology as “located almost outside medicine, at a neutral point, a zero point, where artists and philosophers and doctors and patients can come together” (Deleuze 2004, 134).

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sont écrits dans une sorte de langue étrangère”. “A great novelist is above all an artist who invents unknown or unrecognized affects and brings them to light as the becoming of his characters”, Deleuze and Guattari would reiterate, under a somewhat distinct emphasis, in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Deleuze & Guattari 1991/1994, 165/174). Criticism, in Deleuze’s specialised vocabulary in Critique et clinique, and in keeping with his advocacy of a critical intervention of co-creation and affirmation, should seek to elaborate a plane of consistency, a ‘sieve’ or sorting machine which enables, activates or prolongs fluxes and becomings (driven by the percept and affect) in the writing. The Clinic, on the other hand, names the range of procedures serving to trace lines on this plane, which lead, in effect, to dead-ends. However dead ends do not, necessarily, result in blockage. Deleuze’s clinic is one which will play host to neither psychoanalysis nor interpretation, while criticism does not acknowledge the hegemony of structural linguistics or signification (Deleuze 1993/1998, 9/lv). Elsewhere Deleuze and Guattari speak of “unfortunate psychoanalytic interpretations” (Deleuze & Guattari 1975/1986, 17/9) which track literary authors (such as Kafka in particular) and explain that “(t)he mistake of psychoanalysis was to trap itself and us, since it lives off the market value of neurosis from which it gains all its surplus value” (20/10). Psychoanalysis, in Deleuze and Guattari’s view, is entirely inadequate when it comes to understanding affective states. It is content to “give forbidden objects to itemised affections or substitute simple ambivalences for zones of indetermination” (Deleuze & Guattari 1991/1994, 165/174). By contrast, and against the grain of such hermeneutic neutralisations (or effectuations/actualisations), the great writers (and certainly those admired by Deleuze and Guattari) work at a molecular level against the molar (and stratifying) grain of what they call the ‘major’ language, actively producing such zones of indetermination.27 Minor language makes language itself “stammer”— as the work of Beckett among others attests (Deleuze 1993/1998, 13740/109-111). But the great authors are also expert “symptomatologists” who can, to paraphrase Foucault, diagnose our current becomings.28 Diagnosis need not, however, lead through the teleology of the 27

See Deleuze and Guattari (1986). See also Lecercle’s convincing argument that what is at stake in the concept of minor literature is entirely compatible with Deleuze’s theory of sens as developed in Logique du sens, in Lecercle (1995). 28 See also Birman (1998). Cf. Jacques Rancière: “L’écrivain est prestidgiteur et il est


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‘pharmacy’ to a cure for a given malady, but it can produce, in Deleuze’s terms, “little healths”. Great authors unfold a possible world which secretes and promotes incompossibility, incommensurability, heterogeneity and multiplicity. An encounter with such a world entails the crossing of a threshold of becoming, a ‘vectorial’ displacement which scrambles spatio-temporal positioning.29 In the words of Guattari such ‘machinic’ movements can be translated in terms of a transversal encounter which challenges the psychoanalytic category of the transference: I have crossed a threshold of consistency. Before the hold of this block [bloc] of sensation, this nucleus of partial subjectivation, everything was dull, beyond it, I am no longer as I was before, I am swept away by a becoming other, carried beyond my familiar existential Territories. (Guattari 1995, 93)30

For Deleuze writing is precisely an affair of becoming, as he states in the ‘manifesto’ essay from Critique et clinique, ‘La Littérature et la vie’: It is a process, that is, a passage of Life which traverses the livable and the lived. Literature is inseparable from becoming: in writing one becomes-woman, one becomes-animal or vegetable, one becomes molecule to the extent of becomingimperceptible. (Deleuze 1993/1998, 11/1) 31

médecin, il est le médicin de sa propre maladie” [The writer is conjuror and doctor, he cares for himself in his own illness] (Rancière 1998, 153). 29 The definition of vector given in Deleuze’s Cinéma I is as follows: “Vector (or line of the universe): broken line which brings together singular points or remarkable moments at the peak of their intensity. Vectorial space is distinguished from encompassing space” (Deleuze 1985, 218). 30 In Raoul Ruiz’s 1999 film rendering (in Le temps retrouvé) of the pavé moment of Proust’s Recherche, the editing and camera movement serve to multiply the perspectives on the pose adopted by Marcel, inundating it with vectors and virtualities, making it shimmer and leap in its place. The notion of a vectorial crossing of thresholds of consistency contributed to Guattari’s own practice in the institutional context of psychiatry. See his comments on ‘machinic’ relations at the La Borde clinic in an essay translated as ‘On Machines’ (Guattari in Benjamin ed., 1995) and more generally the paradigm set out in Chaosmosis (Guattari 1995). Nicolas Philibert’s film La moindre des choses (1996), which was made after Guattari’s death, is an indispensable record of certain therapeutic experiments at the clinic, not least the performance by the residents of Gombrowicz’s Opérette. 31 Deleuze himself, no doubt under Guattari’s influence, already develops the idea of transversals in Proust et les signes. With reference to the comments above, the essay

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To be carried far from coordinates is to be unblocked and de-stratified. Within the institutional context of psychiatry (Guattari’s professional domain) this is a particular form of cheminement. Writing, then, for Deleuze conforms to the therapeutic model of unblocking, or opening corporeal universes of virtuality advocated by Guattari within the institutional context of La Borde. ‘Becoming’, in Deleuzoguattarian terms, does not entail the attainment of form, by means of identification, imitation, or mimesis but finding, rather, “the zone of voisinage, of indiscernibility or indifférentiation” such that it is not possible to identify or distinguish this or that animal, woman or molecule.32 It is not a question of imprecision or generality; rather it is one of the unforeseen, the unscripted, the “non-pre-existant” which is less determined in a form than by the manner in which it produces a singularity in “a population” (Deleuze 1993/1998/, 11/1).33 In this respect, the situation is structurally analogous to the encounter with the work of art. One of the most resonant examples of such becoming-other in Deleuze’s view is the novel by his former classmate Michel Tournier whose Vendredi ou les limbes du pacifique (1967) explores the liminal and contagious workings of molecularity in a recombinant Robinson.34 In this context, then, it is far from irrelevant that, in his 1967 interview to coincide with the publication of his book on Masoch, Deleuze leaves us in no doubt about Beckett’s belonging to the lineage of symptomatologists: “Samuel Beckett’s work [he states] is an extraordinary portrait of symptoms: it’s not just about identifying an illness, but about the world as symptom, and the artist as symptomatologist” (Deleuze 2004, 132). quoted would be the closest Critique et clinique comes to a statement along the lines of ‘what is literature?’. 32 On literature and collective enunciation they write: “There isn’t a subject who emits the statement or a subject about which the statement could be emitted...minor literature...is an exemplary situation for the production of new statements” (Deleuze & Guattari 1975/1986, 149/83). 33 Mireille Buydens chooses the term aformel to designate what is at play in Baroque aesthetics (Buydens 1990). 34 Deleuze argues that the fusion with elemental forces which is Defoe’s means is in fact Tournier’s end: “Tournier’s Robinson is opposed to Defoe’s in virtue of three strictly related characteristics: he is related to ends and goals rather than origins; he is sexual; and these ends represent a fantastic deviation from our world, under the influence of a transformed sexuality, rather than an economic reproduction of our world, under the impact of a continuous effort” (Deleuze 1969/1990, 352-3/303).


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Beckett and his ‘crritics’ Where Deleuze finds commentators on Proust to be in error if they find a unity in intention, Beckett exactly three decades prior announces in advance his belonging to such a group when he castigates Proust for an attempt precisely to impose such a unity. Where the young critics, in their respective responses to Proust’s work, concur across the divide of 30 years is that the unity is not in fact attained. That which Deleuze identifies as an instance of “disjunctive synthesis”—which is in fact in his view the modus operandi of the author of the Recherche—is only an accident in the opinion of Beckett. Beckett’s judgement on Proustian synthesis in his 1934 book review for the Spectator is: “If Proust had lived, he would have so altered the original writing as to remove all discord and dissension, a beautiful unity of tone and treatment would have, as it were, embalmed the whole” (1984, 64). Beckett’s playful, erudite and irreverent inhabiting of the space of criticism cleared for him to occupy by the Proust commission creates stylistic, linguistic and conceptual areas of contiguity with his literary writing.35 As much is true of his essay on Joyce, published in 1929. His manner of playing the role of critic, through irony, parody and baroque erudition, is suggestive when it comes to thinking about how he himself viewed the industry of secondary criticism convened upon his own name (an industry the output of which has proliferated at an extraordinary rate since his death in 1989). It is in the context of the more general problematic of which this specific instance is exemplary, that the work of Rancière—to which this chapter has already referred—has been so compelling in recent years. In his book La Parole muette, Rancière exposes that which is inherently problematic in literary criticism’s presumption of a hermeneutic right, of which the ventriloquy of philosophy through the medium of literature is but one (specialised) example (but see earlier comments).36 Literature, in Rancière’s formulation, may be the name of what lies between the novel and the discourse performed upon that novel, but it is also literature 35

Beckett nonetheless confided to MacGreevy that he felt “dissociated from my Proust—as though it did not belong to me” (February 2nd 1931, TCD MS 10402). 36 In this context it is interesting that Beckett is reported to have been far from convinced by the lecture given in 1960 by Adorno on Endgame at an evening in celebration of Beckett organised by the Suhrkamp publishing house (German publishers of Adorno’s work). See Bernold (1992, 55).

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which, in a paradoxical fashion, at once attracts and repels such discursive operations. Hence, to some degree, every book about a literary author—in its partial or virtual participation in the literary—is, in Rancière’s assessment, necessarily an intervention at once located in, and productive of, an intermezzine space of deceiving ‘speech’ (Rancière 1998, 166).37 Literature is a mute utterance and yet speaking is done in its name. Every work of criticism is guilty of the fraudulent assumption of the right to perform this ventriloquy. While the writings of Beckett are no exception to this general rule, what distinguishes the work as a body of work is the extent to which the aporia of literary hermeneutics is embedded in advance, both in his own literary criticism and in the works of literature themselves. Few are the manoeuvres of the exegete that are not foreseen or impeded by the author. Not the least caustic and neutralising epithet bequeathed by Beckett to his interpreters (members of the species identified in Waiting for Godot as “crritic”) famously concerned that “loutishness of learning” with which—once he was at a safe distance from its threatening (albeit briefly nurturing) hold—he had the lack of charity to equate the practices of academic scholarship. Beckett is (arguably) unique in the extent to which he has elicited from his interpreters such labyrinthine preambles and such vertigo-inducing reliance on qualifying footnotes to extricate them in advance or subsequently from the knotty situation which this pre-emptive lure betokens. It may even be the case that, as Bruno Clément has expressed it, the work of Beckett “amène à poser de façon inédite le problème de la subjectivité critique” (Clément 2004, 220).38 For Steven Connor the problem is that while criticism mimics the gesture of Beckett’s “shrug,” in order “to assert humbly its own limits,” in the very act of making this gesture it (criticism) “defies those limits, affirming the possibility of speech and commentary even when these are denied” (Connor 1988, 190). The temporality of criticism will attempt to resist the force of the aporia: if first comes the nothing to express, then, in its wake, 37

That Rancière criticises Deleuze’s use of the formula in his symptomatology in the same chapter as the passage to which I here refer does not, in my view, render the point any less apposite to the present context. 38 Tr.: “leads in an unprecedented manner to the posing of the problem of critical subjectivity”. In a similar vein Drew Milne comments, “The Unnamable’s ability to undermine critical exposition of its parts, generates an anxiety of beginning for any critical account” (Milne 2002, 78).


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there will assuredly follow a discourse upon that nothing. As the industry of Beckett commentary attests, there is much mileage to be got out of this apparently already-running-on-empty vehicle. This is a phenomenon remarked upon by Connor, who shows how, even if destined for somewhere known as Worstward, a text by Beckett can, at the hands of a critic, nonetheless still find itself driven onward to general positivity (Connor 1992, 82).39 In the case of the work of Beckett and the critical responses devoted to this corpus, such solace is often inadvertently a matter of secondary consolation: the form demanded by criticism itself and undertaken in the name of criticism rather than of Beckett’s work. Correlatively, a shadowy absence—the author, Barthes’ “theological” éminence grise (Barthes 1977 [1968], 146)—can find itself remapped on to a terrain one might have thought had been long since vacated, even if only revived as an avatar in a displaced and condensed hybrid author function coterminous with the parade of the critic’s subjectivity: Criticism has the curious task of representing for its publics Beckett’s disclaimers of the public aura and prestige of the writer, while at the same time ceaselessly reconstituting this willed-away mystique in its own operations. (Connor 1988, 191)

Do philosopher-critics fare any better in this game of cache-cache? Beckett’s philosopher readers (and their intermediaries) The peculiarity of the place of Beckett within the elaboration of a philosophical system for that work, then, would lie in its very defiance generally in the face of recuperative critical endeavours, and specifically in the face of the abstractions served up by philosophers and their intermediaries (see Critchley 1997, 142).40 For this reason 39

Chapter 5 gives further consideration to the ways in which Worstward Ho has been interpreted, and especially to the limit case it has become in the eyes of many, even to the extent that it operates, for one such critic (Alain Badiou), as a “philosophical treatise”. Russell Smith characterises the “discrepancy” which Beckett scholars feel between a ‘Beckett’ they uncover in their critical readings and one given them by their epoch as testament to nothing less than failure of “our imaginations” (Smith 2002). 40 The claim that in his own essay Critchley is guilty of “bad faith” in deriding “philosophical interpretations” has been made by Lance St John Butler in his review of Very Little…Almost Nothing (Butler 1999).

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Shira Wolosky, elsewhere, while alert to the presence of references and allusions to philosophy in the work of Beckett, cautions against citing these “toward full articulated structures” (Wolosky 1996, 175).41 Anthony Uhlmann makes several important statements regarding the question of the hermeneutic gesture in the context of poststructuralist philosophy in the introduction to his Beckett and Poststructuralism (1999). He begins by arguing that, for Deleuze, all valid criticism is by definition comparative “because any work in a field is itself imbricated within other fields”. To this extent, then, according to Uhlmann, paving the way for his own deployment of “poststructuralist” thought in his discussion of Beckett’s writing, “the new situations confronted by Beckett on an aesthetic plane constituted urgent questions which confronted a whole generation of thinkers across different disciplines” (Uhlmann 1999, 4-5). A coincidence of history and shared intellectual context, however, does not override the necessary and constitutive distance between the two disciplines in question, nor the allied requirement that whatever resolution of problems internal to them may be attempted, the singular status of each not be neutralised. The encounter between literature and philosophy, in this sense takes place, to adopt an analogy, like the meeting of the narrator and Watt his alter ego, between the fences which are part of (a boundary) and apart from each other (in dividing that very boundary): as Uhlmann avers, “Both the philosopher and the writer…oscillate between the boundaries set up between literature and philosophy, and, further, they encounter one another in this no-man’s land” (28).42 Indeed the notion of the encounter, so central to Deleuze’s thinking of the relationship between philosophy and literature, where the latter forces the former to think what would otherwise not be possible for it to conceive (emblematised most succinctly in the idea of the formula to which 41

Cf. Leslie Hill’s assertion that there are no philosophical positions in Beckett’s work (Hill 1990, 162). 42 In the space between the two fences which mark the mutual (the fences do not mark the boundary but the space does) boundary between two properties in Watt: “No fence was party, nor any fence part of” (1976, 154). This void, or couloir, becomes the site (the non-site) of the encounter between the narrator and Watt. It would have been more comfortable for either to have met the other in one or other of their respective gardens, we learn. But it was better, the narrator reasons, for them to meet in a space which belonged to no-one and which falls under the jurisdiction of neither Watt’s nor Sam’s “pavilion”.


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philosophy can be made to play host), is picked up by Uhlmann (11), but in a very specific manner connected with his intention to situate both Beckett and French thought in the period following the second world war in a common set of historical, cultural and intellectual contexts. Another insight which is convincingly developed in Uhlmann’s book is expressed in these terms: not only do Beckett and Deleuze share some of the same antecedents, they also share a method (a manner of creation) which for Deleuze involves the borrowing and transformation of concepts taken from his antecedents, and, for Beckett involves a similar ‘perversion’ or transformation of ideas and images taken from his antecedents. (Uhlmann 1999, 11)

Thus, for example, one might mention the Deleuzian formula which hands Heidegger over to pataphysics in Critique et clinique in the case of Deleuze (Deleuze 1993/1998, 115-125/91-98), or the Beckettian ‘perversion’ of Proust’s narrator in Molloy (as mentioned by Rabaté [1991, 148]). For another commentator, Pascale Casanova, Worstward Ho is Beckett’s most fully realised work in the quest for a specific mode of abstraction in literature. The premise of her study, Beckett l’abstracteur: Anatomie d’une révolution littéraire (1997), springs from the conviction that the singularity of what Beckett achieves derives from a specific modality of generation. The generative principle of his work is such that Beckett does not merely bequeath to criticism a body of work which it will remain relatively unproblematic—albeit challenging—for that critic to confront along the axis of a subjectobject relation. Casanova alights on the figure of autogeneration (which has an affinity with the concept, of much interest to Guattari in his late writings, of autopoieisis43) in order to problematise such an axis. In other words she registers an awareness of what was characterised above in terms of Blanchot’s notion of a problematised intervention haunting the act of criticism. Despite the fact that this attitude to Beckett’s work (for example that it is an “Art poétique qui énonce à la fois ce qu’il fait et comment il le fait”) is far from rare in Beckett studies,44 to the extent that at one 43

See Guattari (1995). “Art poétique qui énonce à la fois ce qu’il fait et comment il le fait et qui élabore en pratique la théorie (et la pratique) de l’abstraction littéraire, Cap au pire totalise 44

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level it is banal to give voice to yet another variation on the theme,45 in Casanova’s case the assertion has, arguably, a renewed urgency: C’est au contraire un travail vers la forme autonome, autoengendrée par la matrice mathématique et atteignant à une sorte de pureté abstractive. Beckett invente une forme littéraire toujours inachevée qui n’existe qu’en tant qu’elle est, pour reprendre ses termes, “une forme en mouvement”. (Casanova, 1997, 166, my emphasis)46 [It is on the contrary a labour towards autonomous form, autoengendered by the mathematical matrix and attaining to a sort of abstractive purity. Beckett invents an always unfinished literary form which only exists in as much as it is, to adopt his terms, “a form in movement”.]

Notable is the fact that what is identified here as an abstractive purity is described in terms which foreground a processual quality. Abstractive ‘purity’ is construed as dynamic and ambulant; it enjoys a coming into existence as opposed to a fixed status as the outcome of a process. The abstracted is the process itself; abstraction must be constructed; it is nothing more than the process of (rather than the product of) making or construction. Moreover this paradoxical state is maintained in the shape of a writing forged by Beckett which is to be found always below a threshold of accomplishment or totalization; such form as there is in this configuration is mobile and abeyant, or ‘vectorial’ as opposed to ‘encompassing’; a perpetual work in progress—a l’ensemble des innovations et des découvertes beckettiennes” (166-167) [A poetic art which announces at once that which it does and how it does it, and which elaborates in practice the theory (and the practice) of literary abstraction, Cap au pire totalizes the range of Beckettian innovations and discoveries]. For Locatelli Worstward Ho is also a pinnacle: “the crucial and disquieting epiphany…: the literalisation of figurality in the doubling of fictional discourse, undoing the very distinction between figure and phenomenon. As a matter of fact, this is perhaps the most dramatic and ‘beyondless’ revelation of a radically open ‘self-reflective artifact’” (Locatelli 1990 266). For David Watson, “If I were to choose a text which might stand as a summary of Beckett’s aesthetic philosophy” it would be Worstward Ho (Watson 1991, 162). 45 If banality there is, no claim is here made that the present study enjoys any immunity from that charge. 46 Of course I do a grave injustice to the ceaselessly inventive manners in which critics come at this question; a particulalry rewarding example as far as this study is concerned is Dominique Rabaté’s essay ‘Continuer—Beckett’ which states that “le commentaire se trouvait pris dans la rhétorique même de l’œuvre” [commentary found itself caught up in the very rhetoric of the work] (Rabaté 2002, 409).


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“chantier” (Casanova 1997, 151). Proust in pieces,47 then, or, invoking by way of comparison Deleuze’s words in 1967 prior to the presentation of his Doctorat d’Etat: Dynamisms, and all that exists simultaneously with them, are at work in every form and every qualified extension of representation; they constitute not so much a picture as a group of abstract lines coming from the unextended and formless depth. (Deleuze 2004, 98)

Perhaps the second major insight in Casanova’s book as far as the present study is concerned lies in its astute judgement regarding the role of the philosophical in Beckett’s writing. Like Uhlmann, Bryden and others, Casanova is alert to the idiosyncratic positioning of the philosophical concept (or sensation of concept) in the work of Beckett.48 She underlines the fact that the philosophical does not simply exist in a one-dimensionally appropriated, incorporated and tamed manner in its host body, literature.49 Rather there is a sort of mutual parasitism at work in their interrelation: 47

The title of Beckett’s 1934 Spectator review of a book on Proust by Albert Feuillerat (Beckett 1984). Beckett, against the grain of what is claimed here (but perhaps with more than a hint of irony), reported to Harvey that “There is a form, but it doesn’t move, stand upright, have hands. Yet it must have its form. Being has a form. Someone will find it some day. Perhaps I won’t, but someone will. It is a form that has been abandoned, left behind, a proxy in its place” (Beckett quoted in Harvey 1970, 249). Cf. a marvellous summary in the slim but important study of Deleuze by Antonioli: “l’image classique de la pensée demande en effet une distribution du territoire de la pensée de type ‘sédentaire’: chaque faculté (la sensibilité, l’entendement, l’imagination, la raison) se voit assigner un domaine spécifique, un territoire qu’elle ne doit pas dépasser […] À cette image, Deleuze oppose la dimension ‘démoniaque’ d’une pensée nomade; les démons se distinguent des dieux, parce qu’ils n’ont pas d’attributs, de territories, de codes; ils sautent les intervalles, d’un intervalle à l’autre” [The classic image of thought in effect requires a sedentary distribution of territory: every faculty (sensibility, understanding, imagination, reason) sees itself assigned to a specific domain, a territory which it cannot go beyond…To this image, Deleuze opposes the ‘demoniacal’ dimension of nomad thought; demons are distinguished from gods because they do not have attributes, territories, codes; they leap over intervals, from one interval to another] (Antonioli 1999, 52-3). 48 Both Colombat and Uhlmann employ the idea of sensation of concept in order to describe the quasi-philosophical residue (or pressure) that is the “concept” in literature as opposed to philosophy (the domain of concepts proper). See Colombat (1997, 591) and Uhlmann (1999, 4-28). 49 Cf. Pierre Macherey, coming at the problem from the opposiste direction, for whom the “tentative de récupération ou d’annexion, faisant rentrer la littérature dans le

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Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze & Guattari Les textes philosophiques deviennent ainsi pour Beckett ce que l’on pourrait appeler des “opérateurs” littéraires. Il ne les utilise ni philosophiquement—pour exprimer, sur le mode littéraire, une vision speculative du monde—ni littérairement: il ne faut voir dans ces textes ni métaphore ni allégorie, pas de sens excédant la surface textuelle, pas de message à décrypter sous l’apparence manifeste. (115) [Philosophical texts thus become what can be called literary “operators” for Beckett. He neither uses them philosophically—to express, in a literary mode, a speculative vision of the world—nor literarily: it is necessary not to see in these texts either metaphor or allegory, no meaning exceeding the textual surface, no message to decode beneath the manifest appearance.]

For Casanova it would appear that the philosophical as literary “operator” generates material in an exceptional manner in Beckett. It alone has a purchase in Beckett’s writing which can be said in one sense to be generative of it and in another to be its motor (that is, generative and sustaining) force: ils ne racontent que le processus de leur engendrement, soit l’épuisement des possibles et des conséquences logiques et formels d’une proposition donnée arbitrairement comme moteur et principe d’écriture. (115) [They tell only of the process of their engendering, or the exhaustion of possibles and the logical and formal consequences of a proposition given arbitrarily as the motor and principle of writing]

Though the specific example under scrutiny here is Worstward Ho/Cap au pire, it is as the most comprehensively realised text in this respect that it is singled out. The philosophical, nonetheless, provides, according to Casanova (echoing one of the categories of relation identified by Pierre Macherey), a motor force and a generative principle for the rest of the corpus. Despite these promising formulations—promising as far as our present purposes are concerned—Casanova’s perspective arguably continues to rely upon a conception of the via negativa to which the Deleuzoguattarian concept of abstract machinics would display a champ de la réflexion philosophique pour l’y absorber, et, à la limite de ce processus d’inclusion, faire disparaître le littéraire comme tel” [attempt at recuperation of annexation which brings literature into the field of philosophical reflection in order to absorb it, and, once the process of inclusion is complete, to make literature as such disappear] (Macherey 1990, 195—translation taken from the David Macey version, Macherey 1995).


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peremptory, and preemptory resistance.50 The following passage is indicative of this aspect: Comme un travail vers un trait noir d’où ne pourrait surgir aucune trace de représentation, aucune forme pouvant rappeler, même vaguement, un corps…Sans sujet, sans décor, se détachant sur un fond noir (pénombre) et vide, libérées de tout repère temporel ou spatial, les images de Cap au pire inaugurent la littérature abstraite: elles vont vers l’épure de l’abstraction ou le noir. (Casanova 1997, 32) [Like a labour towards the black trace/track from which no trace of representation can emerge, no form be recalled, even vaguely, no body…Without subject, without décor, detaching itself on to a black background (shadow) and a void, freed from all temporal and spatial reference points whatsoever, the images of Cap au pire inaugurate abstract literature: they go towards the purity of abstraction or blackness.]

The orientation here has a clear affinity with the approach to Beckett, and in particular Worstward Ho, taken by the work of Alain Badiou (see for example the emphasis both place on Cap au pire’s ‘pénombre’ and ‘vide’). The latter perspective, from which the present study takes its distance, will be explained later in this chapter. In some respects Casanova shares much with what remains one of the most innovative readings of the evasion of figuration (or abstraction) in the work of Beckett.51 Wolosky, whose essay has already been quoted, suggests that the “reductions reduced” of his late writings entail “complex strategies of apotropism—the turning away from figures” (Wolosky 1996, 165), strategies which she suggests invoke “a broad context and history of negative mysticisms as a framework” (165).52 50

One of the most rigorous readings of the work of Beckett from the point of view of philosophy remains Lance St John Butler’s painstaking Heideggerian account, the conclusion of which unambiguously locates itself in the context of negative theology: “This mystical intuition is perhaps the final depth in Beckett, the mystery towards which his parables aspire but which they never attain, for the end of all these attempts, if they are unsucccessful, is failure, and, if they are successful, is nothing” (Butler 1984, 204). 51 Badiou is cited by Casanova (109 and 112). 52 In a formulation with links to the argument to be pursued below in the first section of Chapter 2, Evelyne Grossman states of Beckett’s late work that it “ne fait plus ‘visage’”; “il se défigure, devient méconnaissable à mesure même que se déforme la vieille complicité du visible et du lisible, du signe et du sens” [it de-figures, becomes unrecognizable even as it deforms the old complicity of the visible and the articulable, of sign and of meaning] (Grossman 2004, 79).

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Beckett’s abstraction(s) and those of his critics Beckett had deprecatory things to say concerning one of the abstractions with which this study is concerned, namely the draining away of the particular (in Andrew Benjamin’s formulation) which philosophy effectuates. In this context Beckett would have been familiar with Bishop Berkeley’s famous attack, in his introduction to The Principles of Human Knowledge, on the doctrine of “abstract ideas”. There, Berkeley (to whose celebrated esse es percipi Beckett turns his attention in Film) argues that the doctrine of abstraction lends support to the opinion that material things exist unperceived (Berkeley 1971, 3-34). The second and related sense of abstraction under consideration here derives from thinking about the visual and plastic arts, but especially of course painting, about which Beckett himself as a critic also had much to say. From his approval pertaining to an abstraction (in the guise of a purging of anthropomorphism) which he discerns in the painting of Cézanne (expressed in his letters to MacGreevy) and in Jack B. Yeats (in letters and reviews), to his clear preference for the precursors of abstract expressionism (and in particular the work of Bram and Geer van Velde on whom he published essays), to his criticisms of the particular form of abstraction associated with Kandinsky (in a letter), Beckett dips in an out of debates central to the development of thinking about twentieth century art.53 Pure geometric abstraction did not seem to appeal to Beckett the art appreciator. Indeed there is perhaps nothing less Beckettian than Mondrian, despite—or possibly because of—Beckett’s comment in the ‘Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit’ (nothing is more replete, he says, than Mondrian).54 The problematics of abstraction as reformulated by Deleuze and Guattari, or made possible after them, do not offer the familiar story of abstraction in the form of a deletion of all content in order to reach the blank page, or the equivalent of the blank canvas (Rajchman 1998, 53

See Oppenheim (2002) for a comprehensive survey of these issues. One of the most successful attempts to address the question of abstraction in the arts and the writing of Beckett is by David Cunningham. See his ‘Aestheticism Against Colour, or Modernism, Abstraction and the Lateness of Beckett’ (Cunningham 2005). 54 “Perhaps [Beckett commented in an interview], like the composer Schoenberg or the painter Kandinsky, I turned toward an abstract language. Unlike them, however, I have tried not to concretise the abstraction—not to give it another formal context” (Beckett interview with John Gruen, cited in Oppenheim 2000, 126).


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59).55 As John Rajchman comments, the sense in which abstraction in its deterritorializing modality is embraced by Deleuze lies less in the “nots of negative theology” than in the “folds” of neo-Platonic complicatio (59).56 Abstraction is an affirmation of the Outside57—a concept which finds its philosophical development in Deleuze (deriving inspiration from Blanchot) on the one hand and its literary elaboration in Beckett (and in emphatic terms in Worstward Ho) on the other. The three languages Perhaps the first thing to note about Deleuze’s 1992 essay ‘L’Épuisé’ is that if it is a reading of Beckett’s œuvre by means of reference to a wide selection of his writing, it is also a specific and genre-conforming intervention the purpose of which is ultimately indicated by the main focus suggested by the essay’s status as an afterword to the Éditions de Minuit publication of Beckett’s television plays under the title Quad. In short it is necessary to hesitate and to bear this in mind when, in his characteristically emphatic style, Deleuze makes a claim about the entire corpus. In ‘L’Épuisé’ Deleuze divides the œuvre of Beckett into three relatively distinct “languages” which happen to conform, albeit in an idiosyncratic way, to a certain orthodox periodisation prevalent in Beckett studies. The framework for Deleuze’s systematisation derives from an approach summarised in his introduction to Critique et clinique as: (T)he problem of writing is also inseparable from a problem of seeing and hearing: in effect, when another language is created within language, it is language in its entirety that tends toward an “asyntactic”, agrammatical limit, or that communicates with its own outside. The limit is not outside language, it is the outside of language. It is made up of visions and auditions that are not of language, but which language alone makes possible. (Deleuze 1993/1998, 9/lv) 55

It is not my intention to retread ground already covered by those who have sought to explore Beckett’s writing through attention to his interest in visual and plastic arts in particular (insofar as it is in these, and even moreso in the case of painting, that the question of abstraction is most insistent). 56 It is precisely the neo-Platonic complicatio which forms the philosophical ‘setting’ for the reading of Beckett’s The Lost Ones in chapter 2 below. 57 The centrality of the concept of the ‘Outside’ to an understanding of Worstward Ho’s range of ‘philosophemes’ (or proto-philosophical concepts, or sensations of concepts) after Deleuze and Guattari is evident in chapter 5 of the present study.

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Language I is a language of names, and occupies itself with exhausting the possible by means of words: “it is an atomic, disjunctive, cut, minced [hachée] language, where enumeration replaces propositions and combinatory relations syntactical ones” (Deleuze 1992/1998, 66/156). In the first language conjunctions take precedence over syntax as such—a phenomenon characterised by Deleuze in the formulation “and...and...and”. For Deleuze, AND…doesn’t just upset all relations, it upsets being, the verb…and so on. AND, ‘and…and…and…’ is precisely a creative stammering, a foreign use of language, as opposed to a conformist and dominant use based on the verb ‘to be’. (Deleuze 1990/1995, 65/ 44)58

One might say that a Deleuzian “logic of sense” supersedes logic itself in Language I. It is governed by an anamorphic disposition on the one hand and by what Jacques Derrida would describe as a ‘disseminatory’ logic on the other. Among Beckett’s works the one which most comprehensively belongs to the category of Language I is Watt, with its relentless combinatory disposition as evidenced in such celebrated instances as the “multitude of looks” which can be itemised between committee members (1976, 173-9) during Louit’s presentation of his doctoral research, and the twelve possibilities that “occurred to Watt” regarding the arrangements in place for Mr. Knott’s food (1976, 86-7). The tendency remains in evidence, however, in Malone Dies with its great theme of the inventory (as explored in Chapter 3 below).59 At the close of this novel concerning the itemisation of possessions (a novel of stocktaking)—and the pencil, and the hammer, and the story told, and the story told another way, and the story told by another, and to another, and in the place of another, and of no other, and no story— the ands proliferate, but also contract and seize up: in compression

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Cf. Deleuze’s statement in Dialogues: “the conjunction AND is, neither a union, nor a juxtaposition, but the birth of a stammering, the outline of a broken line which always sets off at right angles, a sort of active and creative line of flight” (Deleuze 1987, 9-10). 59 The embryonic form of the ideas presented by Deleuze under the category of Beckettian ‘exhaustion’ is already sketched in Différence et répétition (Deleuze 1968/1994, 107-8/78).


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they liberate spaces and times of encounter (series).60 In such coimplication, in place of the “nots of negative theology” Deleuze finds “folds”: the AND, as Rajchman states, is index of “a strange anorganic vitality able to see in ‘dead’ moments other new ways of proceeding” (61). Language II is concerned with the exhaustion of the voice which pronounces the words associated with Language I. Here it is no longer a question of “combinable atoms” but rather one of “mixable fluxes” (66/156). Here one encounters the Other as the expression of a possible world: “the Others have no reality other than that given them by their voices in their possible worlds” (68/157).61 This is a language which, according to Deleuze, characterises the writing of Proust in particular, though it is marked also as a feature of Michel Tournier’s novel Vendredi. Microperceptions represent the world in a state of flux, of étourdissement (swooning). It is a question of so many “vibrations”, or so many possible worlds, but, by contrast to Leibnizian synthesis, with its manner of reinstating an enunciative centre—even though that centre may be “everywhere”—The Unnamable (as Chapter 3 will show) allows no such synthesis to take place. And it is indeed The Unnamable which Deleuze chooses to exemplify Language II. But Language II seems most explicitly manifest in Krapp’s Last Tape (which, strangely, Deleuze does not mention), since while Language I is said to be “imagination stained with reason,” Language II is “imagination stained with memory”. However, Language III relates neither to enumerable and combinable objects, nor to emitting voices, but to “immanent limits which do not cease to displace themselves” (69/158). It has to do with the “pure image” gestured towards in Beckett’s title Imagination, Dead Imagine. The pure image, in Deleuze’s neo-Bergsonian formulation, is not be confused with the object of an idealism; rather what is being proposed is a materialist conception of the image. Language, under the emphasis which Language III brings to bear on it, proceeds (even if this is too teleological a manner to describe the displacement at work) to immanent limits, or 60

Although the conjunction in the closing lines is ‘or’ the logic at work is the ‘AND’ described by Deleuze. Indeed Beckett’s ‘or’ is of the sort described by Deleuze and Guattari in L’Anti-Œdipe as “…soit…soit…” (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983, 18/12). 61 In a slightly different context this will be shown in my analysis of The Unnamable in chapter 3 below, in which the latter novel is read in terms of Leibniz's distinction between micro- and macroperceptions.

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to what have been described above as atopian thresholds, or the Dehors, such as this non-place can be thought of in spatial terms when co-ordinates have failed (to borrow Bernard Cache’s definition of inflection). Language III, Deleuze argues, makes its first appearance in How It Is, the novel which forms the basis for the discussion in Chapter 4 below. However it becomes dominant only in the late plays for television. In the four works for television, Quad, Nachte und Träume, Ghost Trio and ‘…but the clouds…’ Beckett takes further an exploration of the conditions of screen and scenic ‘presence’ which he had already subjected to a reflexive generic mise-en-abîme in his stage drama. In a play such as Quad there is very little left of what one might want to call the ‘discursive’. What remains, in the words of Steven Connor, is “a pure figure, or ‘figment’, a kind of theorem in which a purely conceptual disposition of forms and movements is charted in a purely hypothetical space” (Connor, in Pilling and Bryden 1992, 86). Presentation, the being made present on stage, is, for Beckett, already a portentous state of affairs, ontologically speaking. But, as Begam comments on theatre specifically, “[t]he theatre poses…a special challenge for a writer who seeks to deconstruct the metaphysics of presence, who seeks to derealise the essential facticity of the stage” (Begam 2000, 26). For Connor, making a case for what many commentators agree upon to be, in Brater’s terms, “genre under stress” (Brater 1987), the link between stage and textual performativity in Beckett’s late corpus is enacted though a chiastic and mirroring abyssal structure of mutual attenuation between stage and page. Thus in the prose: stage directions for imaginary performance moving more and more towards a condition of achieved exteriority. At the same time his stage plays are ghostly experiments in bodying forth absence, or presenting visibly on stage virtual presences who are not quite there. (Connor, in Pilling and Bryden 1992, 87)

That there would appear to be something on stage or “en scène”, even if that something is the fleeting appearance of a gesture towards the nothing, is already quite a lot. The space of the plays for television, writes Bryden following Deleuze, is “pre-hodological”, that is abstract in the sense in which the term has been employed in this study: “It is a space of potentiality, where its conjunction with moving bodies offers new avenues of épuisement” (Bryden 2000, 87). Bryden


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continues: “while not divorced from the linguistic, their energies are exercised and spent in directions which are not solely reliant upon words or voice” (87). Writing on Deleuze’s reading of Beckett rather than on Beckett per se, Rajchman nonetheless makes what seems to be a crucial gesture in allying the concept of épuisement to machinic abstraction. Beckett’s épuisements are, in his view, Beckett’s abstract machine; they are not of the self-purifying or kenotic sort. Beckett, then, does not work towards the situation of form withdrawn from matter; that would be to remain confined within a logic of possibilityrealisation. By contrast, abstract virtualities are real even if they are not actualised. As Rajchman explains, Abstract Machines “have the abstraction of immanent force rather than transcendental form—the abstract virtuality within things of other different things, of other ‘possible worlds’ in our world” (65). Machinic abstraction It would be a mistake, however, to associate the machinic exclusively with a principle of deformation or the aformal with a simple power of deterritorialization or de-rangement. As Mille Plateaux counsels, it will take more than an Abstract Machine to save us. Something of the significance of this latter concept, not to mention its operational complexity, is to be gleaned from the place it occupies in Deleuze and Guattari’s book. In the only ‘fixed’ plateau of the book, ‘Conclusion: Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines’, not only is it given half the chapter title but the section devoted to it is reserved until the end. Mille Plateaux thus begins by describing the book as a “little machine” and ends with a celebration of the Abstract Machine.62 The most concise statement on abstract machines as the concept informs the present study is: Abstract machines know nothing of forms and substances. This is what makes them abstract, and also defines the concept of the machine in the strict sense. They surpass any kind of mechanics. They are opposed to the abstract in the ordinary sense. Abstract machines consist of unformed matters and nonformal functions. Every abstract machine is a consolidated aggregate of matters-functions (phylum 62

Guattari would appear to have first used the term ‘machines abstraites’ in the course of a seminar at Columbia University in 1973. A transcript and translation of this talk is published in the journal Chimères (see Guattari 1994). The concept of becoming-woman, is also first independently outlined by Guattari, as Bryden points out (Bryden 1993).

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Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze & Guattari and diagram). […] diagrammatic functions exhibiting only differential equations or, more generally, “tensors”. (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 637/511)

The term ‘abstract machine’ is derived from the work of Alan Turing who devised a hypothetical machine capable of an infinite number of calculations and mathematical operations. His abstract, that is, imagined machine, served to dispute, in the same way as Gödel’s incompleteness theorem had in 1931, the totality to which mathematics is predisposed. Insofar as it is central to the present argument, it is as the term is developed under the specific emphasis of Mille Plateaux (and in particular plateau 15) that it is invoked. In L’Anti-Œdipe the term does not appear, despite the fact that there the outlines of the conceptual framework of the machinic are articulated. In this first volume of Capitalisme et schizophrénie the world (reality), the book (representation) and the author (subjectivity) as fields are not divided; rather, “an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of the orders”. The concept of the Abstract Machine does appear in the second collaboration on Kafka. In Chapter 9 Deleuze and Guattari revisit the machinic terminology of L’Anti-Œdipe. Under the heading ‘What is an Assemblage?’ they define the machine in terms of “connections”: There is no machinic assemblage that is not a social assemblage of desire, no social assemblage of desire that is not a collective assemblage of enunciation. (Deleuze & Guattari 1975/1986, 147/82)

The assemblage, insofar as it requires a territorializing action, takes the place of what might have been a subject.63 It is within the conceptual framework of these statements that Deleuze and Guattari would later mention the manner in which Beckett’s characters territorialize a given site (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 629/503). However, in order to place this reifying and stratifying force in its broader context, it is necessary to look to the other side of the process of localisation and occupation. While on one side are to be located the assemblages, that is the machinic 63

Clément notes of Beckett that “L’œuvre sans sujet de Flaubert devient chez Samuel Beckett une œuvre sans sujet ni forme” [The subjectless work of Flaubert becomes in the case of Samuel Beckett a work without subject and without form] (Clément 1994, 103).


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assemblages (of for instance the artificed assemblage of enunciation which might—under certain circumstances—be mistaken for the subject), on the other side is the “abstract machine” which serves to open assemblages to molecularity and “becoming” (637/510). From a certain perspective, then, these two sides are opposed. The assemblage is on the side of molarity, coalescence and stratification, while the abstract machine is on the side of the molecular. This does not prevent the abstract machine from serving, under certain conditions, as a transcendent model (639/512).64 Fogs (illusions) of transcendence are after all common on the plane of immanence, as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? argues. A conception of the literary work in machinic terms permits, in revealing these fogs to be illusory, in Kafka’s case, a “continuous œuvre in which intensities are produced and in which are inscribed all sorts of connections and polyvalences” (Deleuze & Guattari 1975/1986, 155/87); assemblages that move towards the abstract machine in a process of continuous variation and oscillation—a process described by Manuel De Landa as “a flow that does not allow the intensive process to become hidden underneath the extensive results” (De Landa 1999, 32). As far as the task of interpretation is concerned, one of the lessons of this way of relating to literature as an abstract machine is that the critic, if acting in fidelity to her/his object of scrutiny, must attempt to avoid simply converting the (intensive) abstract machine into a transcendent model, seizing it up by means of (extensive) “symbolical and allegorical exegeses”. The mode of engagement with the literary text, would aspire, thereby, less to being interpretation per se than to functioning as an example of schizoanalysis brought to bear on a particular regime of signs. Schizoanalysis, in the view of Deleuze and Guattari, does not pertain to elements or aggregates, nor to subjects, relations, or structures. It pertains to lineaments running through groups as well as individuals. Schizoanalysis, as the analysis of desire, is immediately practical and political, whether it is a question of an individual, group, or society (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 249/203). Schizoanalysis can be said to be machinic rather than organic, or mechanistic. It is a constructivism not a structure. For Deleuze and 64

The doctrine of hylomorphism derives from Aristotle, but is also present in Plato’s Timaeus. Matter, according to the hylomorphic view, is an inert receptacle for forms that come from the outside, these taking the form of transcendental essences.

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Guattari all systems are machinic, and this includes social, political and economic systems. Machinic levels can be identified and enumerated in terms of material, cognitive, affective and social loci or points of reference. By contrast to these points of concretion, abstract machines—as opposed to technology per se, which is concrete—install themselves “transversally to the machinic levels” in question. Such a conception radically challenges the resources of anthropocentric thinking, and of notions of the machine and the human respectively as grounded entities (and unities) with identifiable boundaries.65 Looking back at the context in which L’Anti-Œdipe intervened, Guattari in a 1985 interview with Jacques Pain provides a succinct explanation of the book’s emphasis on the machinic: Our conception of desire was completely contrary to some ode to spontaneity or a eulogy to some unruly liberation. It was precisely in order to underline the artificial, “constructivist” nature of desire that we defined it as a “machine”, which is to say, articulated with the most actual, the most “urgent” machinic types. (Guattari 1996, 128)66

From both the hydraulic model of the unconscious promulgated by Freud, and the anthropomorphic residues of Barthesian jouissance, the Deleuzoguattarian concept of desire is a radical departure. It flows, connects and cuts. “Desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented” (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983, 11/5). Desire is at once cause, substance and term. As configured in L’Anti-Œdipe, desire is not what resides in the subject; rather it is the machine in desire. Desiring-machines—the earlier version of assemblages—are formative, but not in the hylomorphic sense, not in the sense of an Aristotelian primemover or its surrogate. As Ansell Pearson notes: formativity is possible only through functional misfirings; that is, formation requires deformation, and what makes [...] a machinic process is the fact that it takes

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“An affect is a rise or fall of power within a machinic assemblage. As such, the affect is the becoming-other of the assemblage, a corporeal (re)composition expressing the cosmic plane of Nature in a Spinozian sense” (Zepke 2005, 178). 66 Cf. in Dialogues: “Desire [...] is itself a revolutionary process. It is constructivist, not at all spontaneist. Since every assemblage is collective, is itself a collective, it is indeed true that every desire is the affair of the people, or an affair of the masses, a molecular affair” (Deleuze 1987, 96).


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place through cuttings, breakages, slippages, breakdowns. (Ansell Pearson 1997, 143)

The continuous flows and partial objects of the body without organs— an earlier variant of the abstract machine—are subject to couplings which are the operation of desire and the function of the desiring-machines. The formative nature of the desiring-machines/assemblages can yield coalescences, atrophying the body without organs/abstract machine. Binary and dialectical thought, however, it is important to note, find little to adhere to in this configuration. It is not simply a question, for example, for Deleuze and Guattari, of the body without organs as something to be celebrated while the desiring-machine is negated. Indeed, desiring machines break down: “the automata stop dead and set free the unorganised mass they once served to articulate” (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983, 14/8). This is why the full Body without Organs belongs to what they describe as “anti-production” (14/8). The body without organs is a surface of resistance but also a threshold—a space-time of undifferentiated flows and inarticulate murmur as opposed to one of connection and communication; an open-ended process rather than a closed product (the abstract machine entails an opening to molecularity).67 “Bégaya-t’il”, as Deleuze would later write: “it stammers”. Both organism and technical machine are cut across by what Mille Plateaux calls the phylum. The phylum, or “unformed matter”, as Deleuze and Guattari understand it, is a larval, fluid and machinic matter. In Mille Plateaux they explicitly illustrate their thinking of the phylum by way of reference to literature. The titular waves in Virginia Woolf’s novel constitute a kind of phylum. “Waves are vibrations, shifting borderlines inscribed on the plane of consistency as so many abstractions. The abstract machine of the waves” (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 252/308). Within this context, individual characters in a work of fiction or drama are multiplicities. Character, on this model, is “a functioning of a polyvalent assemblage of which the solitary individual is only a part” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1975/1986, 152/85). Lear’s desire, writes Bruce Baugh glossing this quotation, is not a 67

“In order to resist linked, connected, and interrupted flows it [the body without organs] sets up a counterflow of amorphous, undifferentiated fluid. In order to resist using words composed of articulated phonetic units, it utters only gasps and cries that are sheer unarticulated blocks of sound” (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983, 15/9).

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property of Lear the solitary individual, since it is nothing outside of his relations with others, and involves these others as much as him, even though it doesn’t belong to the others either; it is a force connecting the characters without being confined to any of them, a ‘between’ rather than a point. (Baugh 2000, 43)

This amounts to a ‘machinic’ conception of character. Characters are at once, Deleuze and Guattari explain, the multiplicity and its edge, that is the edge which marks the tipping over of one into the other, the point of crossing or of passage into other multiplicities. One can therefore see why the permutations, superimpositions and fluid boundaries of many of Beckett’s characters would hold such an appeal for Deleuze and Guattari. Their conception of the phylum as a complex of perdurant amorphic forces is deliberately opposed to a hylomorphic conception of raw material formed by human hands, or of a natural flux subject to human perception: there will be no Miltonian God or its human stand-in to set a boundary on “matter unformd and void” (Milton 1980, 283, l. 233).68 In L’Anti-Œdipe, in assessing the section of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) entitled ‘The Book of the Machine’, Deleuze and Guattari first argue that its achievement is twofold, disavowing on the one hand the vitalist argument by challenging the alleged “specific or personal unity of the organism,” and on the other shattering the mechanist argument by challenging the alleged “structural unity of the machine” (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983, 338/284). Both unities are challenged, then, by the phylum; the transversal constituent force and material of dispersal (matter existing only in its unformed state will fuse supposed distinct bodies, organisms and utensils in a generalised “ooze”, to use a term central to Beckett’s Worstward Ho) undermine the possibility of hylomorphism. They challenge, moreover, the substantialist position which would account for individuation on the basis of self-identical atoms united in a composite unity. The human-machine interface (via the phylum) leads to the following equation: “The two definitions are exact equivalents: man as a “vertebro-machinate mammal”, or as an “aphidian parasite of machines” (339/285, referring to Butler 1969, 230). 68

For a reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s opposition to hylomorphism and an informative digression on Milton see Welchman (1992).


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In summary, then, the conceptual framework provided by the Abstract Machine serves to support the allied critical premises which orientate the remaining chapters, viz.: 1. The work of Beckett is in abeyance, via its immanent procedures, from totality; 2. The work of Beckett is in abeyance from extensional hermeneutical gridding or striation; 3. Beckett’s writing as machine as opposed to organism. Badiou and Beckett (and Deleuze) Alain Badiou approaches the question of the relationship between literature and philosophy from a perspective at variance with that of Deleuze and Deleuze-Guattari. The essays which he devoted to the work of Beckett over a period of 10 years (and recently collected together in one English translation) are in the course of giving rise to what will no doubt be a prolonged engagement on the part of Beckett scholars. He, then, will be the latest in a list of French philosophers to be coupled as an exegetical tool to the work of Beckett. The appearance of his brief 1998 study had the effect of rendering more visible his longstanding interest in the author—a fact already in evidence to his readers since 1989 at least. As when Deleuze’s postface to the volume published by Éditions de Minuit as Quad appeared in 1992, such events inevitably lead to an increase in metacritical productivity in Beckett scholarship, but it is for reasons quite at a remove from this inevitable incursion on the sphere of interests of the present study that it needs to confront his work. Badiou’s approach must be considered, however, as that of Deleuze has been above, within the overall context provided by the rest of his work. This is attempted here only to a limited extent, by considering his position in the light of his related conceptions of “desuturation” and the “inaesthetic”.69 Philosophy, he has written, 69

Nonetheless Andrew Gibson, author of the first major study of Badiou and Beckett (forthcoming as the present book went to press), provides indirect support for my own partial engagement with the rest of Badiou’s work, when he argues, in an essay which is deliberately restricted in its own scope, that such restriction is warranted and even necessary because “Badiou manages to make Beckett both vital and central and yet, at the same time, incidental to the mainstream of his own thought” (Gibson in Lane 2002, 101).

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“cannot begin, and cannot seize the real of politics, unless it substitutes the authority of the matheme for that of the poem” (Badiou [1998] 2005, 18). This re-statement (but radical reframing, it should be added) of the Platonic mistrust of poetry enables Badiou to castigate the new sophists who corrupt philosophy’s act of thought (18).70 Deleuze belongs to this category, if only to a certain extent (less so than Derrida or Heidegger). In Badiou’s appraisal, sketched in the introduction to Handbook of Inaesthetics, Deleuze is to be found in the unlikely company of the Hegelian tradition which conceives of art as the sensible form of the idea. In disjoining art from philosophy, Badiou argues that Deleuze “leaves the destination of art as a form of thought entirely inapparent” (Badiou 2005, 10). Not alone does Deleuze foreclose art as a form of thought with its own specificity, in Badiou’s estimation he also bars the opening to the infinite which by rights, in his view, is the province of art (Deleuze has a poor conception of the multiple would be another way of putting this). The thinking of Deleuze (yoked to Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés) about the work of art as “chaoide”, the outcome of a chance which cannot be abolished by the throw of dice, does not dupe Badiou into thinking that here we have a proper conception of multiplicity and singularity. Instead, he asserts that for Deleuze “art entertains with the chaotic infinite the most faithful of relationships precisely because it configures the chaotic within the infinite” (11). While Beckett veers towards philosophy, and even, in the eyes of Badiou, succeeds in writing a “philosophical treatise” in the shape of Worstward Ho, Deleuze and Deleuze-Guattari themselves are ‘sutured’ to ‘the poem’; in Badiou’s idiom they are sophists who cathect philosophy to art, literature and music. For Badiou this is an unsustainable and debilitating compromise, while for Deleuze and Guattari it is prerequisite for “thinking otherwise”, facilitating as it does the encounter worthy, in their view, of the name of thinking. As Éric Alliez (1998) in particular has sought to point out, however, Badiou seriously misrepresents Deleuze’s conception of multiplicity.71 For, if philosophy is, as Badiou asserts, the theory of 70

It is important to note, Alberto Toscano reminds us in a review of the English translation, that the virulence which characterises Badiou’s attack in 1989 is, to a degree, of its time (Toscano 2000). 71 See also important essays by Simont (2002) and Bergen (1998) which make similar arguments.


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multiplicities, this is a formula, Alliez points out, which is “systematically ignored by Badiou in his Deleuze”.72 Moreover, insofar as his approach to Beckett and his ‘virtual’ dispute with Deleuze’s Beckett is concerned, one of the key considerations is the practice of writing on which suggests manners of engaging with the literary text quite at odds with one another. While each intervention is in its own way a philosophical reading which would also be a practice of philosophy, not a literary critical reading of the work in question, the origins of Deleuze’s essay on Beckett are specifically literary—the essay is tightly bound, one might say, to the space of literature. The original context for the appearance of Badiou’s text is, by contrast, somewhat more marked by the philosophical—the book is a contribution to a series of studies of thinkers, much like the series to which Deleuze himself had earlier contributed a short study of Spinoza.73 Dominique Rabaté has come to the issue at stake here in his succinct postulation of the specific manner in which Badiou “substantialises” Beckett’s writing. The latter is in part explained, he argues, by the fact that Badiou’s answer to the following question is in the affirmative: “Y at-il une lecture philosophique des textes littéraires et diffère-t-elle de celle que pratiquent les théoriciens de la littérature ou les critiques?” (Rabaté [Dominique] 2002, 407).74 The indifference to literary intertextuality which might be so shocking to a literary critic upon reading Badiou on Beckett—a shock which is ably anticipated by the editorial additions (Power and Toscano, 2003) and postface (Gibson 2003) to the English translations of Badiou’s Beckett essays—is explained by the fact that Badiou is prosecuting a reading intended to be philosophical and therefore indifferent to these echoes (411). The suture to the matheme (positivism) and revolutionary politics (in the shape of dogmatic Marxism) are merely institutional or academic instances long since ossified (one assumes the Levinas-sponsored 72

Deleuze’s philosophy, for Alliez, developed within “an ontology of the virtual. This is sufficient to state what Deleuzian thought is not: a metaphysics of the One doomed to affirm the ‘fictive character of the multiple’. Which is precisely what Badiou practices, despite, or rather because of, his claim to a ‘Platonism of the multiple’, at least in his exercises in textual commentary” (Alliez 2004, 10). 73 Both Deleuze: ‘La clameur de l’Être’ and Beckett: L’increvable désir are published by Hachette in the Coup double series which, while including entries on Hergé and Buster Keaton in addition to literary authors, positions these as thinkers. 74 Tr.: “Is there a philosophic reading of literary texts and does this differ from that which is practised by literary theorists or critics?”

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suture is of a similar status in Badiou’s view, despite its temporal proximity to Badiou and the roughly contemporary suturists Blanchot, Derrida and Deleuze). The current most pressing task of philosophy, L’Être et l’événénement had already stated, is to undo these sutures (Badiou 1988, 66-7). Indeed there is a necessity, Badiou confidently asserts, to take up once more the “thread of human reason,” even of one version of this enterprise traceable back to Cartesian meditation. This thread has been rendered discontinuous due to the imposition of positivism, Marxisms and a Nietzschean poetics (presumably continued in the work of, say, Lacoue-Labarthe, but clearly, given the battle lines drawn throughout the book, truly inaugurated by Heidegger). The focus which can be brought to bear on the writings on Beckett by virtue of an approach centred on the question of the relation of philosophy to its conditions is not without its contentious aspects. Peter Hallward, in his important study of Badiou (2003), does not devote a separate discussion to the de-suture of philosophy from its conditions (while he does dwell on other concepts such as ‘the generic’). Hence, from the point of view of locating the work on Beckett in the framework of Badiou’s systematic philosophy, the angle proposed here in the present study may be over emphatic and, to some eyes, distorting. For the present purposes, however, coming as the author does from Beckett studies indirectly to the philosophical system in which his writings on Beckett occur, a negotiation of the issue seems unavoidable, since ‘we’ (if an imagined community of Beckett readers for this book may be temporarily summoned), as Beckett critics reading a philosopher writing on Beckett, find ‘ourselves’ of necessity in a tangle of suture and de-suture.75 Badiou, then, sews Beckett back together again (or ‘runs up’ a new Beckett) and in the process permits, again in microcosm, philosophy to fuse only with itself, the act of reading Beckett as a “project of thought” being, presumably, a performative de-suturing on the one hand and a partial ceding of some of the fabric of philosophy to Beckett on the other, as when it somehow makes the leap perfected (in Badiou’s opinion) in the specific mode of abstraction of Cap au pire. This tension is familiar to those who have found that suturing acts of 75

Rancière by contrast does give the matter some attention in his contribution to the collection of essays Alain Badiou: Penser le multiple. This essay is reprinted in his Malaise dans l’esthétique (Rancière 2004).


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desuturation are often at play when Badiou writes on literature and art (for Badiou, it should be noted, the poem stands for art in general). Lecercle comments on his use of Mallarmé that one must evince some hesitation in accepting Badiou’s confident prose précis of the work of the poet whose work is pre-eminently resistant to the operation of such transposition (Lecercle 1999, 11).76 In his essay on Mallarmé, ‘Language, Thought, Poetry’, Badiou, in order to illustrate his claim that the poem melts (fondre) subjectivity, quotes from a poem’s description of melting (Badiou 2004, 237). Something of the same problem emerges in Badiou’s avowedly teleological reading of Cap au pire (Andrew Gibson, in his postface to Badiou on Beckett, for his part, is quick to point to this possible area of weakness, one of the consequences of the ‘strong reading’ undertaken by Badiou), a text which is singularly defiant towards the hermeneut, and which, one might argue, demands, of any critic hoping to present an argument deploying paraphrase or quotation, recourse to elaborate qualifiers and abyssal burrowings (not to mention borrowings from locations in the text both posterior and anterior to the quoted or paraphrased passage, phrase or word). It would take an omnipresent reader to harmonise these disjunctive and discordant manifestations into a “philosophical treatise”. Badiou is an advocate of what he describes as a “Platonism of the multiple,” (Badiou 1999, 104, see also for an expanded discussion of the multiple Badiou 1988, 31-37) and this overarching project is inseparable from the individual statements made on Beckett collected in On Beckett. It is indeed the concept of the inesthétique and the place 76

Lecercle comments: “when he does give a close commentary of a Mallarmé poem (as I said, a model reading), he begins, horrible dictu for the average literary critic, by giving a prose paraphrase of the text” (Lecercle 1999, 11: the reference is to what Badiou himself descibes as the “retrieval” of the “latent prose” of Mallarmé’s poem [1992, 110]). But, as Lecercle points out, to make this criticism would already, in Badiou’s view, be to display one’s sophist credentials (11). In Discours figure Lyotard, undeniably a suturist in Badiou’s terms, would not subscribe to the précis mode of rendering Un coup de dés. He comments with approval on the manner in which Mallarmé renders the “thinginess” of the poem: “When the word is made thing, it is not to copy a visible thing, but to render visible an invisible, lost thing: it gives form to the imaginary of which it speaks” (Lyotard 1971, 69). Martin Jay’s gloss on this is also worth quoting: “if the materiality of the word on the page can be said to mirror the meaning of the text, it does so through an anamorphic glass, which reflects only chiasmically. The result is a hybrid ‘discourse/figure’ that ‘expresses through its blanks, its body, the folds of its pages’” (Jay 1994, 179 citing Lyotard 68).

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occupied by Beckett in its elaboration that sheds perhaps the single most pertinent light retrospectively upon the other interventions on the work of Beckett. Re-read in the light of this essay—and its framing volume—it becomes clear just to what extent Badiou’s Beckett is, as the editors of On Beckett point out, the product of a ‘systematic’ reading.77 Rancière, in his book Malaise dans l’esthétique, has positioned Badiou’s book on the side of the ‘anti-aesthetic’ discourse associated with Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Pierre Bourdieu, Hal Foster and JeanFrançois Lyotard which in his view has come to dominate recent debate and to form a “configuration très consensuelle” (Rancière 2004a, 88)—incidentally, a rare accusation to level at Badiou. The context is crucial to an understanding of Badiou’s approach not only to Cap au pire (to which he devotes an essay in Handbook of Inaesthetics) specifically but also to his approach to literature and to works of art in general. By “inaesthetics” [Badiou writes in an epigraph] I understand a relation of philosophy to art that, maintaining that art is itself a producer of truths, makes no claim to turn art into an object for philosophy. Against aesthetic speculation, inaesthetics describes the strictly intraphilosophical effects produced by the independent existence of some works of art. (Badiou 2005)

Arguably the Platonism which Rancière has done so much to contextualise in Malaise dans l’esthétique finds other avenues by means of which to underwrite and in some cases overdetermine the thinking of Badiou on Beckett. For, as the principle of the inaesthetic manifests itself in Badiou’s thinking of the poem (in particular, in his thinking regarding Beckett, with its latent poem—that which is shorn off in Cap au pire), “le poème dit seulement ce que la philosophie a besoin qu’il dise et qu’il feint de découvrir la surprise du poème” (Rancière 2004a, 109).78 The poem requires philosophy to dictate to it, or to ventriloquise its orientations (sens) on its behalf. This would be, to para-

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Systematicity is defined by Badiou as “the prerequisite of a complete configuration of the four generic conditions of philosophy….by means of an exposition that also exposes its expository rule, then it is of the essence of philosophy to be systematic” (Badiou 1999, 65). 78 Tr.: “the poem only says that which philosophy needs it to say and to feign the discovery of the poem’s surprise.”


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phrase Rancière, effectively to tether the poem to the Platonic order of the logos. Beckett and literary form If writing cannot itself be an event in Badiou’s idiom, in the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, in Mille Plateaux, writing is described as possessing or entailing a privileged link to the informe (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 639/512).79 One writes, Deleuze and Guattari state, at the same level as that of an unformed matter or: a plane of proliferation, peopling, contagion; but this proliferation has nothing to do with an evolution, the development of a form or the filiation of forms....it is...an involution, in which form is constantly being dissolved, freeing times and speeds. (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 327/267)

Involution is a modality of folding, but is not confined to a formative function. A sense of the specific ways in which literature participates in the production of the abstract machine is given in an essential section of Mille Plateaux. There the authors consider the arts in terms of the distinct planes which can be thought of as characterising them. In music there is a sound plane (Deleuze and Guattari’s example is from John Cage), in cinema a visual plane (Jean-Luc Godard provides their example) and in literature a “writing plane”. The example from the domain of literature is the nouveau roman author Nathalie Sarraute. In her ‘Conversation et sous-conversation’ (1956) she had written: ce qui dissimule derrière le monologue intérieur: un foissonnement innombrable de sensations, d’images, de sentiments, de souvenirs, d’impulsions, de petits actes larvés qu’aucun langage intérieur n’exprime, qui se bousculent aux portes de la conscience, s’assemblent en groupes compacts et surgissent tout à coup, se défont aussitôt, se combinent autrement et réapparaissent sous une nouvelle forme, tandis que continue à se dérouler en nous, pareil au ruban qui s’échappe en crépitant de la fente d’un téléscripteur, le flot ininterrompu des mots. (Sarraute 1987, 96-7) [that which hides behind the interior monologue: a swarming of innumerable sensations, images, feelings, memories, impulses, little larval acts which no interior language expresses, which jostle one another at the gates of consciousness, assemble themselves into compact groups and suddenly surge forth, unmake themselves, combine in other ways and reappear in a new form, while, like the 79

For more on this see René Schérer’s essay on Deleuze’s “four formulas” (Schérer 1997).

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Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze & Guattari ribbon unfurling inside us that escapes crackling from the slot of a teleprinter, is an uninterrupted flow of words]

Sarraute establishes, Deleuze and Guattari argue, a clear distinction between two planes of writing: a transcendent plan(e) which organises and develops forms (genres, themes, motifs) and assigns and develops subjects (personae, characters, feelings); and an altogether distinct plane which liberates the particles of an “anonymous matter”. In the second mode these latter are able to communicate through the ‘envelope’ of forms and subjects, retaining between them only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness, floating affects. In this way the plane itself is perceived at the same time as it facilitates the perception of what is—at the level of molarity—the imperceptible, or what the authors call the “micro-plane” or the “molecular” plane (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 327/267).80 From the evidence of their three examples (Cage, Godard and Sarraute), Deleuze and Guattari conclude that form and subject are only inferred—they are not given on the plane—whereas what is given are unformed elements ‘between’ which (or pertaining to which) can be identified speeds and slownesses, and nonsubjectified powers between which pass affects. By contrast to a conception of the plane as giving rise to forms and subjects as an after-effect of the processes occurring upon that plane, if form and subject are only ever inferred, then the plane is coextensive and coterminous with that to which it gives rise. In short this is an immanentist (and Spinozist) as opposed to a transcendent conception of the writing plane: 80

The fundamental accord between Deleuze’s concept of sense (as developed in Logique du sens) and the later collaborative concept of the plane of immanence is indisputable. For Emer O’Beirne, Sarraute’s “focus on the border between articulate language and preverbal sensation accounts for the frequency of free indirect discourse in her early novels”, such as Martereau (see O’Beirne 1999, 29), whereas for Benjamin Cope this dual emphasis on the semiotic/symbolic divide and on monologue elides the necessarily and constitutively ‘social’ and multiple nature of Sarrautean ‘sous-conversation’ (see Cope 2002). Blanchot, in L’Entretien infini links Sarraute to Beckett on the basis of their works’ shared residence in the “enigmatic space of repetition” (Blanchot 1993, 343). His description of the interplay of formal and structural constraint and fluid diagrammatic (in Deleuzian terms) transports is close in many respects to Deleuze and Guattari. On an essential difference between the work of Beckett and Blanchot and the nouveaux romanie(è)r(e)s with regard to their respective “puissances d’abstraction” see Bident (2003, 130-1).


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between substantial forms and determined subjects, between the two, there is not only a whole operation of demonic local transports but a natural play of haecceities, degrees, intensities, events, and accidents that compose individuations totally different from those of the well-formed subjects that receive them. (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 310/253)

So rigorous is the anti-hylomorphic disposition of Beckett’s writing, so diligent is his affirmation of the writing plane, so salutary his subversion of philosophy’s traditional image of thought, that the Beckett Abstract Machine assumes an extraordinary position within the thought of Deleuze and Guattari and within the variation on their thinking here produced as the constructed afterlife of their piecemeal formulations regarding Beckett’s work. The immanence of the critical and hermeneutic operations within his literary endeavours may be regarded as the collapsing of two abstractions (kenotic and rarefying respectively) into one, as well as being, simultaneously, their subversion. If the imperative is to construct the abstract machine and to maintain it under construction, then Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari would be: a study of two abstract machines producing assemblages of philosophy and literature as an experiment in literary analysis.

2. Beckett’s Abstract Machines: from Murphy to The Lost Ones

By virtue of the title Murphy, and its echo of the Greek word morphē, Beckett’s first published novel at once yields and withdraws the concept of form. In this sense it offers the first encounter to be developed here between his writing and a philosophical concept. The question of form, and specifically, of literary form as this latter can be approached after Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is, as has already been stated, a central one for the present study. Faciality (Visagéité), the first section of the present chapter, on Murphy, will show, is one of the concepts created by Deleuze and Guattari in response to the question of form and representation in a broad sense. It is the link between faciality as a philosophical concept and the thought of Spinoza which facilitates a reading of Murphy after Deleuze and Guattari here, through an attention divided between the velocities which Beckett’s characters ‘experience’ on the one hand and the faces, facets, façades and other dermic and epidermic surfaces which form out of the novel’s “superfine chaos” (Beckett 1973, 142) on the other. In Spinoza Deleuze (separately from Guattari) finds his way towards the words with which Différence et répétition (1968) ends: “A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple…a single clamour of Being for all beings” (Deleuze 1968/1994, 388-9/304). Equally, however, as the same quotation serves to illustrate, it is from Spinoza that Deleuze takes one of his most divisive methodological orientations as far as his

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critics and interpreters are concerned. The criticism mounted by Alain Badiou, for example, against Deleuze in his book Gilles Deleuze: “La clameur de l’être” (1995) attributes to Deleuze a conception of multiplicity which ends up being nothing less than a Platonic unity of parts. The second section of this chapter, therefore, in an oblique contribution to this debate, turns to the question of the one and the many in the context of theological controversies formative of what would become Beckett’s own embedded reflection on the one and the many in The Lost Ones. The third section takes up the Deleuzoguattarian problem of the abstract machine and reads The Lost Ones as an example of the machinic phylum operating as a force of deformation against the solace of good form, while also turning to the specifically technological framework within, and against, which a sizeable portion of Deleuze and Guattari’s account of machinics is critically positioned. Beckett’s ethology, or, “faciality” and the abstract machine in Murphy Beckett’s career is frequently described as one wherein, through an ongoing process of depletion (kenosis), his writing eventually yields what Shira Wolosky calls the “reductions reduced” of the late prose works (Wolosky 1996). From the heavily populated (but curiously empty—see Pilling 1976) Murphy to the densely packed (and also curiously empty, albeit in a different way) The Lost Ones, one witnesses also the distinct use to which philosophical allusion is put. Moreover, an insight is gained into the prospects for, as Wolosky puts it, citing these allusions into systematic shape. Indeed the bridge between these radically differentiated works is the question of form, both on the level of the literary work’s manifestation of form and of the philosophical heritage of reflection on form which each text in its distinct way negotiates. Might there be a case to be made for Murphy’s (Spinozan) modes? Scholars have often discussed the influence of Spinoza on Beckett, and especially as this can be traced in Murphy. John Pilling, for example, describes Beckett as an amateur or dilettante where philosophy is concerned, and in the case of Beckett’s interest in Spinoza, while impressed by the dispassionate and clinical manner of Spinoza’s Ethics and immensely attracted to the ideas of order that Spinoza’s mathematical form conjures up, [Beckett was]…at no time so committed to the premises that he could mean-

Beckett’s Abstract Machines: from Murphy to The Lost Ones

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ingfully be called a Spinozist. (Pilling 1976, 112)

By contrast, P.J. Murphy argues for a localised Spinozist presence, allied to a comprehensive Spinozist texture, in Beckett when he says, of the ‘fireworks’ which enable Beckett to blow up his character, that “they are primarily indebted to Beckett’s very close reading of Spinoza, which underlies all the other more superficial philosophical references in the novel (Geulincx, Descartes and Democritus included)” (Murphy 1994, 229).1 To a certain extent what follows is more in agreement with Murphy than it is with Pilling on this issue. Let us begin, then, with a life form. It is given the name Murphy. It sits in the shade. It has spatio-temporal co-ordinates to begin with but ends up dispersed amid the detritus of a pub floor in London.2 So, what of the body burdened with the name for form which dissolves into formlessness; which begins coordinated, tethered, and cruciform, and ends up dispersed, loosened and cremated? “Comment Spinoza définit-il un corps?” [How did Spinoza define a body?], Deleuze asks (Deleuze 1981/1988, 165/123) in his study of one of the line of maverick philosophers to whom he devoted studies in his early career.3 The answer which he draws from the Ethics is: by means of a distinction between a kinetic and a dynamic axis. On the 1

Jean-Michel Rabaté has also done much to tease out the Spinozist aspects of Murphy in the context of his analysis of ‘The “Moderns” and Their Ghosts’ (Rabaté 1996, 216-222). Spinoza clearly figured in Beckett’s reading—at about the same time as he was compiling data such as the height from floor to buttocks of the statue of Cuchulainn in Dublin’s General Post Office (referred to in a letter of August 27th 1936). In a letter to MacGreevy (August 19th 1936) Beckett refers to an atempt to read Spinoza’s Ethics, while another letter a month later refers to Brunschvicg’s Spinoza et ses contemporains. It is known that Beckett did read Spinoza properly after he had finished Murphy in 1938 (for which last piece of information I am indebted to Mark Nixon). 2 As Ackerley neatly observes, “a Gestalt configuration: in Neary’s conceit, the body, mind and soul of Murphy are now literally at one with the ground against which he had previously figured so prettily” (Ackerley 1998, 211). Cf. Knowlson (1995, 737 n. 109). 3 While Spinoza: Philosophie pratique is from 1981, Deleuze had already devoted a book to Spinoza in 1969. This followed his earlier books on Hume (1953), Nietzsche (1962) and Bergson (1966). In a letter to Michel Cressole (1973) Deleuze comments that these studies, focusing as they did on authors challenging the rationalist tradition, served to prevent him being entirely “bludgeoned to death” by a certain orthodox history of philosophy purveyed by the French educational system (Deleuze 1995, 5). Of the early studies, that on Kant—the “enemy” (Deleuze 1995, 6)—,as Deleuze notes, is an exceptional case.

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one hand bodies, no matter how small, comprise infinite numbers of particles. Among these latter it is on the basis of the register of the “velocities”, or relations of acceleration and deceleration, which traverse and constitute it that the body achieves its individuation. On the other hand a body affects other bodies and is affected by them. It is on this level—that of a capacity to affect and to be affected—that it achieves individuation in another way. The kinetic conception requires an approach to the question of form and composition which will rule out conceiving of the former as static and final, and the latter as unified and whole. Anything passing for static or whole has merely been slowed down sufficiently in order that an apparent state of quiescence or completion is in operation. The result is that “life, each individuality of life” should be thought of as a “complex relation between differential speeds, between the slowing down and acceleration of particles” (Deleuze 1981/1988, 165/123). In terms which will be central to the discussion in Chapter 4 below, each individuation, rather than being a substance with an underlying form, is a composition of forces on a plane of immanence—in Spinoza’s terms, a mode. It is in this context that Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between movement and speed needs to be understood: It is this necessary to make a distinction between speed and movement: a movement may be very fast, but that does not give it speed; a speed may be very slow, or even immobile, yet it is still speed. Movement is extensive, speed is intensive. Movement designates the relative character of a body considered as “one”, and which goes from point to point; speed, on the contrary, constitutes the absolute character of a body whose irreducible parts (atoms) occupy or fill a smooth space in the manner of a vortex, with the possibility of springing up at any time. (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 473/381)4

This is the lesson reiterated in the final essay by Deleuze to be published in his lifetime, ‘L’immanence: une vie’: it is by means of velocity, by means of an alteration in velocity, that one slips between things, that one conjugates in a diabolical pact with another thing 4

Cf. “Vectorisant des matières d’expression plutôt que des contenus (toujours) déjà formés, le principe ou le plan de composition sera perçu en même temps que ce qu’il compose dans l’identité ontologique de la forme d’expression et de la forme de contenu” [Vectorising the materials of expression more than of contents (always) already formed, the principle or the plan of composition will be perceived at the same time as that which it composes in the ontological identity of the form of expression and the form of content] (Alliez 1993, 22).


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(Deleuze 1981/1988, 166/123). One of the consequences of Deleuze’s Spinozist conception is that the body can no longer be thought of under the auspices of a determinant and delimiting form. Also ruled out, by the same logic, are definitions of the body in terms of organ, function, substance or subject. For, bodies and souls in the philosophy of Spinoza are neither subjects nor substances: they are modes. A mode, Deleuze points out, considered in concrete terms, is precisely a relation of speed and slowness (Deleuze 1981/1988, 166/123). The plane known as the theological plane, at least in Spinoza: Philosophie pratique, is the refuge of form, subject, substance and its avatars, whereas the plane of immanence is the domain of “the infinitesimal particles of an unformed material” (Deleuze 1981/1988, 172/129). With such a conception of formation as immanent, a hylomorphic conception of the process is displaced.5 To the list of Spinozist authors (Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche)—identified “because they think in terms of speeds and slownesses, frozen catatonias and accelerated movements, unformed elements, and non-subjectified affects” (Deleuze 1981/1988, 172/129)—the author of course also adds elsewhere the name of Samuel Beckett. If Spinoza is for Deleuze the most philosophical (le plus philosophique) of philosophers (Deleuze 1981/1988, 174/130), then Beckett is the most Spinozist of literary authors.6 He has, indeed, Deleuze claims, written the Spinozist (literary) œuvre. Both Spinoza himself and Beckett as Spinozist direct one along avenues leading towards ‘non-philosophy’, the one by virtue of his status as prince of philosophers, the other as the quintessential half-philosopher. Spinoza in Beckett, or rather the Spinozism of Beckett, then, is an appropriate place to consider what one might call the Beckett Abstract Machine in operation.7 The facts combined then lead inexorably to Beckett’s first published novel Murphy where Spinoza’s thought, sometimes invoked explicitly, more often implicitly felt as a kind of air current (in Deleuze’s sense, 175/131), is registered as “a set of affects, a kinetic 5

Cf. Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1988, 422/342). A fuller discussion of the plane of immanence so closely identified with Spinoza by Deleuze and Guattari is to be found in Chapter 4 below. 7 Cf. Marquet for whom every great author “porte en lui un philosophe (heureusement) avorté” (Marquet 1996, xiv). 6

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determination, an impulse” (Deleuze 1981/1988, 174/130).8 Murphy’s modes From its first stirrings to its Stirrings Still Beckett’s œuvre has as one of its central concerns the exploration of the theme of the body’s capacity for affecting and for being affected. Murphy is especially interesting in this regard, with its pronounced concern with Cartesian dualism, or at least with the particular dualistic impasse to which Descartes leads rationalism in his Meditations, and moreover for its exploration of the various ways in which philosophers and their representatives in the novel articulate the possibility or impossibility of causal and/or other relations between mind and body, a concern memorably encapsulated by Miss Counihan in one of the book’s many metaphors: “‘Everywhere I find defiled,’ continued Miss Counihan, ‘in the crass and unharmonious unison, the mind at the cart-tail of the body, the body at the chariot-wheels of the mind. I name no names’” (122).9 The echoes, both explicit and implicit, of rationalist thought in Murphy have been thoroughly documented elsewhere in many studies of the novel. Ackerley is, however, quite correct to point out the extravagance and impertinence to attempt to define whence Beckett’s ideas derive; the chapter [6], brief as it is, represents a compression and distillation of his years of reading, from the Presocratics through the traditions of Western mysticism and reason to the recent discoveries of psychology and science. (Ackerley 1998, 101)

First, in a kind of prehistory, there are the pre-Socratic associations. Democritus, whose guffaw signals a commitment to the idea that the Void shares as much claim to reality as Being, is associated with a monadological-atomistic conception which Beckett lifts from Burnett’s Greek Philosophy (Ackerley has documented the many instances of such borrowing in his Demented Particulars). Then there are the neo-Platonic elements which find their way into the novel via its meditations on the one and the many—a central concern of 8

Indeed the level of engagement with Spinozism in Murphy is akin to what Deleuze describes and celebrates as the second (non-philosophical) reading of Spinoza (Deleuze 1981/1988, 174/129). 9 It is of course important to stress that this is a novel in which characters need not be loyal to their philosophies, as Ackerley notes of Neary who loses faith in Newtonian certainties.


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philosophy from the Greeks onward and still powerfully felt in the rationalist tradition under various guises. Then there is the occasionalism of Geulincx, the monadology of Leibniz and the shadow— undeniable—of Spinoza all blended together in the philosophical cassoulet of Chapter 6, that image of the imageless in the words of Richard Begam (Begam 1996, 58).10 Ackerley, as many have done before him, locates the crux of Murphy’s rejection of rationalism in the inversion (and subversion) of Spinoza, whose “Deus se ipsum amore intellectuali infinito amat” becomes “amor intellectualis quo Murphy se ipsum amat” (the intellectual love with which Murphy loves himself). But there is another level of Spinozism in Murphy which comes to light after Deleuze (and Guattari). Begam’s distinction between Murphy’s “two novels” is very helpful in its foregrounding of a key characteristic of the text. Velocity is central to its universe, from the rocking-chair of Murphy, to the bradycardia practised by the grand seigneur of Cork’s Grand Parade, to the flights and forays of the peripatetic Cooper, to the demented “non-virginal” circuit of the inmates conducted by Mr. Endon while Murphy wallows in the third zone, not to mention the varied velocities operative within each of the three zones (the aforementioned third of these included). Within this novel of speeds and slownesses, the body and mind are either operative as conduits or as impedance mechanisms—for where there are forces there is always, of necessity, a question of resistance to, or accommodation of, forces. Ronald Bogue, in a commentary, links Deleuze’s aesthetics to its Foucaultian aspect by calling it an “aesthetics of force” (Bogue 1996). If Foucault’s Les mots et les choses demonstrates that knowledge takes shape through relations of forces that render some things visible and sayable, while others remain invisible and unsayable, every historical formation, as Bogue’s gloss points out, has its arrangement of forces which dictate “the conditions of visibility and enunciability of all possible objects of knowledge” (Bogue 1996, 266). Thus the subject is produced by a bending of forces, while “force always engenders resistance, even in 10

For Fletcher (1971) a pot-pourri is called to mind. Rabaté shows how in “Amor intellectualis quo Murphy se ipsum amat” Beckett “fold[s] intellectual love back onto the Leibnizian monad, transfom[s] the definition of divine love into an autonomy of the human intellect free to adore itself, and link[s] this fundamental desire to a psychotic paroxysm of the perception of an irrevocable breach between the body and mind” (Rabaté 1996, 220).

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schemas in which forces can be said to co-operate” (Widder 2000, 126). For Daniel Smith, This is the importance of Deleuze’s notion of intensity: beyond prepared matter lies an energetic materiality in continuous variation, and beyond fixed form lie qualititative processes of deformation and transformation in continuous development. What becomes essential in modern art, in other words, is no longer the matter-form relation, but the material-force relation. (Smith 1996, 43)

In Murphy, under a certain configuration, forces are harnessed in a particular manner; this is emblematised in many diverse ways in the novel, from the stars tethered to the—albeit arbitrary—hermeneutic grid of the horoscope (as rejected by Murphy unless the projection was on his terms: 104), to Celia with her “hips etc.” as if these latter were forces ricocheting in a corporeal monad, to Murphy in his restraints and rocking chair, to the kite which Mr. Kelly lets play in the wind high above Hyde Park, to the heart-stopping practised by Neary, to the suicide by apnoea (105) to which it is feared Mr. Endon will resort.11 Cooper too, in the Big World, is a locus of resistance, or a site of impedance: things come to rest in him, are neutralised in him, or flow and slip through him. The idea of forces under restraint, with the body or bodies (including the celestial bodies, of which Celia, by virtue of her name, is of course one) as resistors, is especially present given the novel’s concern in general for limits and limitation: the star chart is a case in point, becoming as it does a “corpus of deterrents” (24, my emphasis).12 11

Following the text’s listing of Celia’s vital (the “unimportant” details concerning her age and instep size being notable by their—noted—absence) statistics and physical attributes, “She stormed away from the callbox, accompanied delightedly by her hips, etc. The fiery darts encompassing her about of the amorously disposed were quenched as tow” (10-11). 12 Murphy comes to doubt the causal connection posited in the “celestial prescriptions of Professor Suk” (25) as he moves comprehensively into the inner world: “The more his own system closed around him, the less he could tolerate it being subordinated to any other. Between him and his stars there was no doubt correspondence, but not in Suk’s sense. They were his stars, he was the prior system. He had been projected, larval and dark, on the sky of that regrettable hour as on a screen, magnified and clarified into his own meaning. But it was his meaning. The Moon in the Serpent was no more than an image, a fragment of a vitagraph” (104). The movement away from a transcendent corpus of deterrents towards one produced by the one deterred is further evidence of a sustained relation with a philosophy of immanence (for which one can


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However within the inner novel, as Begam has it (Begam 1996, 57), the laws of physics and chronometry cease to hold sway. Here durée characterises time (the cuckoo clock and its machinations are in fact elsewhere, as far as the physically adjacent Murphy is concerned); the laws of the Big world no longer apply, as suggested by the fact that a rocking chair that rocks faster and faster can achieve stillness. In the “inner novel” forces interact with bodies in such a way that these latter remain in a state of pliancy or suppleness; an elastic resistance is operative. By contrast, the outer novel of the Big world would violently bend bodies into configurations and forms: there the characters have co-ordinates and professions; they are under the yoke of the puppeteer (of course Murphy in the end is himself a puppet—that is the irony): “our medians, whatever the hell they are, meet in Murphy” as Wylie reports (120). Postures In this novel which is so concerned with bodies in postures, the original position in Murphy is, arguably, that of Mr. Kelly (24)— ‘pinioned’ like so many Beckett bodies—whose face is very far removed from the normal commerce between subject and object, or between voyeur and voyant, to appropriate the words of Rimbaud, themselves lifted by Beckett.13 Mr. Kelly, with his propensity for sky over land, is removed in other respects from the Big world (Ackerley notes how he can be linked to Murphy, via the kite as emblem of the Cartesian mind adrift in a macroscopic version of Murphy’s little world [Ackerley 1998, 33]). His face is partly withdrawn from presence: “Just as all hope seemed lost it burst into a fine bulb of skull” (11), a withdrawal underlined by the sunken eyes which, although they can open via an act of volition on his part, also require a detour through the rest of the body (a detour the duration of which can read Spinozist thought, albeit in the parodied version whereby Murphy’s intellectual love is directed only toward himself). 13 For Butler Mr Kelly is thereby Heideggerian, inhabiting “the world already discovered” (of Being and Time 89, cited Butler 1984, 18-19). See Mary Bryden’s essay ‘Figures of Golgotha: Beckett’s Pinioned People’ (Bryden 1992) in which there is an analysis of a manuscript fragment dating from 1950 featuring some fascinating doodles by Beckett. One drawing, which is reproduced in her study, features a man immobilised on a cross and a female attendant, while the Watt notebooks feature a dioramic interface wherein Watt’s image fuses irrevocably with that of Christ (Bryden 1992, 53).

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be felt). Mr. Kelly has to move himself upright in order to get them to open, in the manner of a doll. In Beckett’s fiction when a character is confined to bed, there is always an echo of the crucified Christ (20).14 Insofar however as Christianity lays a claim to presiding over the activities of the characters/puppets in a form which religious faith might declare preordained, it is of course important to remember that this is a novel in which in the beginning is the pun, rather than the Word. One of the strings fixing celestial puppet master to terrestrial puppet is returned to sender in the novel’s closing sequence, after the sky-gazing Murphy has melded with the detritus on the floor of a London pub. Site and position, posture and attitude: these form a kind of corporeal syntax in the novel. To “be in the usual at the usual”, Celia instructs Murphy, who fails to turn up at either the spatial or the temporal co-ordinate, while Mr. Kelly, for his part, is also found “in the usual manner” (11). Extraordinary postures (21) and attitudes are, however, frequently assumed once the relevant set of conditions obtains: such as for example the spatial arrangements, including Cuchulainn’s buttocks, which cause Neary to reach the “limit of his Cork endurance”, or when Murphy swoons in Nothing face down on the chessboard, host to the “irrational” accelerations and decelerations of the Murphy heart, the two opposites which Neary could not blend in Murphy (6). These postures assumed signal, in Spinozist terms, affects, rather than affections, percepts rather than perceptions, as this distinction is made by Deleuze and Guattari: Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. They could be said to exist in the absence of man because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. (Deleuze & Guattari 1991/1994, 154-5/164)

What happens to the characters does not belong to them: that which happens and that to which that thing happens are at variance with one another; they constitute two series yoked together in the violence of

14

Rabaté, for example, likens Murphy to Christ (Rabaté 1996, 126).


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encounter and disjunctive synthesis.15 Faciality: Murphy’s year zero “Yes, the face has a great future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled” (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 210/171)

The first exchange of dialogue in the novel establishes the perhaps central antagonism of Murphy, that between the Newtonian-Pythagorean Neary and the non-Newtonian Murphy. Where Neary, via the form of Miss Dwyer, seeks figure and face (these are deemed equivalent), Murphy (whose name of course paradoxically suggests morphē, or Greek “form”) flees form, even though he will think of, and occasionally be detained by, what could be formed or take form on the way. The source for one and the destination for the other is “the big blooming buzzing confusion” (“I think of Miss Dwyer” says Neary, the text following his theorem with “Murphy could have thought of a Miss Counihan” [6-7, emphasis added]). It is the fact that in its first and yet so central and generative exchange that it is the face that Neary chooses to name this essence which is Miss Dwyer, or the index of her emergence as form, into form, that is of specific interest here, insofar as it both inaugurates the antagonism of Neary and Murphy and sparks off the first of many rallies between body and mind (7) that will enliven the proceedings amongst the novel’s moribund marionettes. Indeed it will be argued below that it is possible to read Murphy—or a stratum of the novel— in the context of what is referred to by Neary as “the system of faces”. Faces (often figured in synecdoche as eyes, the agents, metaphorically speaking, of all countenancing) are inclined, to the firmament in both brightness (12, 39, 42) and obscurity (54), to the sky both replete and abandoned (141), to an ‘anoint[ing]’ light (27)16, to solar and lunar (62) orbs themselves described as faces (75-6), to rain, to weather of all sorts (27, 39, 156), to other faces (18, 140), to rear-ends (which in Murphy themselves are often ‘faces’ capable of expression); faces are 15

It has been noted that Beckett had a pronounced interest in cinema and in early film theory, and this interest is exemplified by, but not limited to, the mention of Ticklepenny emerging into view “as though thrown on the silent screen by Griffith in midshot soft-focus sprawling on the bed” (108). 16 Not rendered in the French translation.

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frozen in torpor (36), ravaged and in shadow (67), “narrow and seamed” (11), clamped into various types of millinery (158), set off by skulls and cranial domes of various dimensions, hues and degrees of hirsuteness (11, 62, 67, 105); they can be highly mobile of feature (140) or they can be blank screens; they can have eyes open or closed; closed they are a shuttered façade (as in the “defence of West Brompton, by West Brompton, against West Brompton” [70] with its shutters down), open, open for business. Eyes are either sunken (as is the case with Mr. Kelly, 11) into inhuman inexpressiveness (30) or give off illumination themselves (“blue glitter of the eyes in the depth of their orbit”: 17, 155). The eyes can form a gaze which is “pythonic”, “delphique” (24) or “chessy” (135) and, without necessarily furnishing a gaze, they can also be “like a gull’s” (26). Faces have both colour (notably yellow [21], “blue and olive” [135]) and weight, and occasionally both (“leaden face” [19] or “tête plombée” in the French version of the novel [Beckett 1953, 25]). The faces, along with their features, like other parts of Mr. Kelly’s corporeal expanse, can migrate (67, 139), as in the voltefesses attributed by the novel to Neary locally (112) and to Socrates via intertextual relay (as noted in the novel itself: 112), or be migrated to, as in the suppressed whiskers of Neary which were (before they were “suppressed without pity”) the outcropping of a “virility” lacking other corporeal channels for expression (30-1).17 In the end the star-gazing (a pastime including looking at and for Celia [12, 21, 54, 56]) is a scrutiny of the expanse, into or out of which latter definition may or may not emerge (106). Murphy himself is such a blotch (single compact and organised, to employ Neary’s words to Murphy [7]) under the scrutiny of Mr. Endon (from the Greek for “within” as Ackerley notes); he is merely a speck in Endon’s unseen (140), a speck in a backdrop (or “backwash” as Dream of Fair to Middling Women puts it), even though his sky is merely a void. The cosmos is the screen out of which form can be arrived at; otherwise, “Tous les jours le visage blanc sous les spasmes blanchâtres” (1953, 53, emphasis added) in a formulation added by Beckett to the French translation. Star-gazing, 17

“He thought of his latest voltefesses, at once so pleasant and so painful. Pleasant in that Miss Counihan had been eased; painful, in that Murphy had been made worse; fesses, as being the part best qualified by nature no only to be kicked but also to mock the kicker, a paradox strikingly illustrated by Socrates, when he turned up the tail of his abolla at the trees” (112-113).


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then, as mediated via a “corpus” either of “deterrents” or “incentives”, is facing, looking for ‘face’ or countenance: it is hermeneutics, or form imposed on forces. Posture (which has already been briefly discussed above) of course is another way in which, in a corporeal context, form is imposed on forces. The face-down posture is notable for its frequency in Murphy, giving distended, distorted and hidden faces. This is how Rosie Dew ends up accosting Murphy in the Cockpit in Hyde Park (57). Celia is also found in this way on the bed (62) and will, reciprocally, find Murphy similarly arrayed, albeit in his case on the floor (20), while the “old boy” upstairs from them dies when he “falls on his face with the razor under him, zzzeeeppp” according to Miss Carridge’s “onomatopoei(c)” report (84). These are instances in the novel’s system of faces where the face is ‘counteractualised’, de-faced, or defigured. There is no-one to face, no one to scrutinise, no-one to yield face, or to countenance. The faces face away from the scrutinising subject (“Is it its back that the moon can never turn to the earth, or its face?”, asks the narrator [75-6]). One might say, adopting the French version’s formulation, that it is where “le monde s’effaça” (11, my emphasis). The system of Faces, façades and facing cannot access the concrete multiplicity of faces. The act of facing away from can also be a refusal to face, or to make a face, to conform to the Face and its operations. Of course, in this context, the terror of autoperception is not a fear of perceiving one’s hand, leg or fingers—for all of these are seen by E without causing O any anguish in Beckett’s Film. The terror is reserved for facing (signified by the “angle of immunity” in Film), for perceiving the façade of the self; its home; its partition; its boundary, the wall containing its perceptual and sensory orifices: mouth, nose, eyes.18 For Deleuze and Guattari faciality names a particular modality of organisation, formation, or engendering. It proves instructive, it will now be suggested, about “the face or system of faces” adhered to by Neary and unsuccessfully combated by Murphy in this novel. Each of the ‘plateaus’ which comprise Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux includes in its title a year (for example, plateau 2 is ‘1914: One or 18

Skin too perhaps, since the naked body might be closer to a face than is the clothed version, a blank face (such as is furnished in a voltefesses). Cf. Dream of Fair to Middling Women with its façade penetrated by façade (Beckett 1993, 46).

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several wolves’ in an allusion to Freud).19 Plateau 7 is given “year zero” as its temporal co-ordinate because it marks the beginning of the so-called Christian era. It is a plateau in which the key conceptual persona will be “Jesus Christ Superstar”, while the central concept is faciality. That Christ operates as a conceptual persona is already an indication that the concept of faciality will have something to do with identity (Christ has a lot—a surplus—of it), with form (Christ is the incarnation of God the Father), and with values (Christ is also the name which gave rise to an entire morality). In Guattari’s idiom, “Faciality as a concrete machine demonstrates the impossibility, in the field of representation, or any becoming independent of the formalism of the contents” (156). Concretion is the term given by Guattari to the tendential gravitation which causes the desiring machine to hover over and become attracted to sites and identities. In an essay entitled ‘Concrete Machines’ he begins by asking what it is that is operating “in what one sees as the features of a face, a landscape, a body” (Guattari 1984, 154). The features of faciality, animality and scenery seem, he suggests, to be masks which conceal something else. That to which the features of a face give on are “some other world” which he equates with “the entry of memory into perception”. Important to note here is the immediate inclusion of alterity (and alteration) as indexical of the features of the face. When it is itself it is always something or someone else. Guattari locates that which is specific to the ontological question posed by the face or its features in the context of a dynamism: pivotal is the idea that it inheres in a moment of entry. One is concerned here with a threshold moment, a passage into being. He further emphasises this dynamic conception by stating that the moment of the entry of memory into perception should not be characterised vertically as the tapping into by the present of the past, say in the form of a “childhood memory”, but rather, as the horizontal locking-on to a “childhood bloc” (a concept crucial to the passages on aesthetics in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?). The features of faciality, animality etc. form constellations or masses which are machines of the kind that actualise the intensities. I want to describe all these various kinds of blocks [blocs] generally as concrete machines. (Guattari 1984, 155) 19

The final chapter is not, strictly speaking, a plateau since according to the authors it must be read at the end, and a plateau, in their account, is something that exists in series or a system of variation.


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The remainder of Guattari’s essay sets up a connection between the concrete machine of faciality and power formations. Why the face? Why faciality? Well, Guattari explains, “The features that compose a face present a real micro-authority” (156) which he exemplifies by referring to faces of “authority” by means of which the child’s experience is negotiated (mother…teacher…pop-star…). On this level “the concrete machine develops heavy, figurative territorialities” which reify and fix, whereas on another level there is a deterritorialization. The face is a useful example because on one level it is so indexical and on another so subject to morphological transformation.20 The face that peers through the judas into Mr. Endon’s cell in Murphy is the face of the institution of psychiatry with its taxonomical and often carceral modus operandi. Such a manner of facing should enable the maintenance of subject-object relations, the surveillant and the surveilled frontally arranged. Such of course is not the arrangement sustained in the encounters between Murphy and Mr. Endon. In their face-à-face, facial features are not, despite their concreteness, present fully formed before us, and merely the ‘output’ of genetic codes and biological coalescences; rather the faces we see are engendered by what Deleuze and Guattari call “abstract machines of faciality” (168). The use of the terms “abstract” and “machine”, in conjunction with that part of the body so closely associated with individuality and humanity, to form a phrase naming something masquerading as a philosophical concept is of course a provocative manoeuvre, as the authors are well aware. In thinking about machines one is already apparently very far indeed from humanity and from human subjectivity, which is entirely the point of a project inaugurated in the work of Guattari and carried through into L’AntiŒdipe, where ‘it’ rather than the ‘Id’ is the closest one gets to a vestige of human subjectivity (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983, 7/1). In plateau 7, then, to judge by its terminology, the location is already beyond a certain threshold; this is the space of “protosubjectivity”. Guattari’s essay ‘Subjectless Action’ says of the ‘it’ that

20

In Roland Barthes’ analysis in Mythologies (1957) the face of Greta Garbo is a pure mask which operates as a reifying essence, or Platonic Idea, whereas that of Audrey Hepburn, simultaneously “child” and “kitten”, is the face as “event” (Barthes 1993, 57), “constituted by an infinite complexity of morphological functions” (57).

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Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze & Guattari ‘It’ does not represent a subject; it diagrammatises an agency. It does not over-encode utterances, or transcend them as do the various modalities of the subject of the utterance; it prevents their falling under the tyranny of semiological constellations whose only function is to evoke the presence of a transcendent uttering process; it is the a-signifying semiological matrix of utterances—the subject par excellence of the utterances—in so far as these succeed in freeing themselves from the sway of the dominant personal and sexual significations and entering into conjunction with machinic agencies of utterance. (Guattari 1984, 135)

The reader, then, is asked to abandon on traversing this plateau certain preconceived notions—if s/he subscribes to them—of causality and of representation. Although the abstract machine of faciality engenders concrete faces, the authors also caution: “Do not expect the abstract machine to resemble what it produces, or will produce” (168). What, then, is the abstract machine of faciality? How might it be configured? What, as it were, does it look like? Faciality, as Brian Massumi explains in his informative gloss, pertains less to “a particular body part than the abstract outline of a ... categorical grid applied to bodies” in the service of “patriarchal ends”. As Guattari specifically thinks of it, that of which the heavy territorialities (Massumi’s “grid”) are in service is, more generally (though not exclusively), capitalism (Guattari 1984, 161).21 It “organises systems of binary opposition operating on different levels, and functions as their dynamic point of contact: an abstract plane with which they all intersect” (Massumi 1992, 172-3 n. 54). It has two components: white walls (upon which signifiance inscribes its signs and redundancies) and black holes (in which it lodges its consciousness, passion and redundancies). Their combination yields “[a] broad face with white cheeks, a chalk face with eyes cut in for a black hole. Clown head, white clown, moonwhite mime, angel of death, Holy Shroud” (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 205/167) or...Mr. Willoughby Kelly. That these two components or values (white walls, black holes) could, in another philosophical system, designate on the one hand a ‘positive’ value—with the white wall being regarded as flat, solid and capable of being projected upon—and on the other a ‘negative’ value—with the black hole thought of as, inter alia, a vortex, an absence, or anti-matter, does not 21

Clearly, however, the link between patriarchy and capitalism is stated by Guattari too, as in the sentence “The way it is continually oscillating between the revelation of an invisible binary-phallic power and the wild explosion of desire in all directions that follows the disruption of the old territorialities” (Guattari 1984, 162, my emphasis).


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mean that a binary function will characterise their ultimate use here. Indeed it comes as no surprise to the reader of Deleuze and Guattari already familiar with their work that these values are established only to be suspended, amounting to a vectorial rather than an encompassing arrangement of terrain. For these two values are not themselves fixed within a hierarchical system; it is the Face which makes them fixed and which makes them signify. The Face, so-named to designate a quasi-Platonic status as a Form, is the set of operations performed on the abstract machine of faciality.22 The colonising, however, of the pure abstract machine in what Deleuze and Guattari call a “twilight [crépusculaire] state” (207/169), by the Face does not end with the face itself. (Recall that we are not to expect the abstract machine to resemble what it produces). It is the Face which forms assemblages on the abstract machines of nature and the body (the latter considered as unformed matter).23 Through its pervasive annexing drive, the Face functions such that it will “landscapise” (in the case of landscape) or “subjectivise” (in the case of the body) any outcropping or emergence of the pure abstract machine. It is important to note that when the phrase pure abstract machine is used what is thereby indicated is the machinic in its “diagrammatic” function, wherein it operates a deterritorialization with a resultant capacity for the formation of new abstract machines, new connections and links; in this manifestation the abstract machine is equivalent to the machinic phylum. However the narrative which Deleuze and Guattari are proposing in Mille Plateaux is one wherein Oedipus and its avatars construct and programme assemblages at the edges of the abstract machine.24 The abstract machine of faciality further serves in its general function to set up functional correlations between distinctions made on one level and analogous distinctions on another, suggesting a web of standardised symbolic relays between levels. This authorises one to proceed metaphorically from any given distinction to its counterpart on any level. (Massumi 1992, 173 n. 54) 22

“The face is an organised whole” (Beckett 1973, 38). Under the heading ‘Memories of a Spinozist’ Deleuze and Guattari state: “The plane of consistency of nature is like an immense Abstract Machine” (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 311/254). 24 In this connection it is worth noting the extent to which Deleuze and Guattari’s penchant for ethology is indexical of their resistance to the institution of psychoanalysis. 23

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This explains how the landscape is codified as a face, or as if a face. Correlatively this is how body parts can be invested semiotically to the extent that they too become ‘facialised’, as Neary discovers when the process helps to cause his breakdown in the General Post Office and he attacks the buttocks of the Statue of Cuchulainn with his own head: “That deathless rump was trying to stare me down.” “But there is no rump,” said Wylie. “How could there be? What chance would a rump have in the GPO?” “I tell you I saw it,” said Neary, “trying to downface me.” (36)25

The Face touches all levels and imbues them with co-ordinates upon which a recognition function can find omnipresent refuge. A kind of immunity from a-signifying neutrality is granted, while there will always be a satisfying trace of subjectivity, a crumb at least of substance. As characterised by Deleuze and Guattari, such immunity and refuge are facilitated by a particular colonisation or conjugation: “The movement of the black hole across the screen, the trajectory of the third eye over the surface of reference, constitutes so many dichotomies or arborescences” (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 217/177). The vectorised space is colonised and made subject to retrospective formation. The Holy Shroud becomes the presence of Christ.26 25

See also the linked “voltefesses” (40) and “cheek by jowl” joke about relations at the Mercyseat. My reading of the buttocks encounter, while downplaying the historical referents to which Beckett was so deliberately attuned in choosing this statue in this location—scene of the 1916 rebellion (i.e. the Rising)—and necessarily foregrounding certain locutions while ignoring others (not least the Victorian rendering of “Red Branch”—albeit in the formulation “Red Branch bum” [30]—for a member of the Fianna), is not, in my view, necessarily at the expense of those referents. On these latter the reading by William J. McCormack remains indispensable (McCormack 1994). Beckett’s rendering of the key moment in the French translation is “ce cul impérissable qui voulait me faire baisser les yeux”, reiterated in less physiognomical terms as “m’intimider” (Beckett 1953, 46). 26 Leslie Hill and Mary Bryden respectively have gone furthest in analysing the trope of crucifixion in Beckett’s work. For Hill this latter operates as the “sign of an unresolved conundrum, as a paradigm for the strange impossibility of joining word and flesh together in such a way as to give birth to a speaking human subject in whom name and body share a common bond of identity” (Hill 1990, 104). John Banville’s novel Shroud (2002), set in Turin and featuring a much anticipated and eventually abandoned visit to view the shroud, makes for interesting reading in this context. In a related context, the strange news that Pier Paolo Pasolini hears, from, as Michael


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The conversion of this ‘pure’ machine into an abstract machine of faciality indicates the tendency towards Form and conformity (where there is form there is nothing but conformities, as Deleuze reports in Différence et répétition [Deleuze 1968/1994, 176/134]). The abstract machine of faciality as Deleuze and Guattari envision it comprises 1, the white wall/black hole system (with what they describe as its hovering Christ=black hole/central computer) and 2, the machine selecting and rejecting faces that do not conform (despotic machine of faciality). However, the abstract machine (even one of faciality) can ‘return’ in order to “defacialise” (253/190), and a facialised body which has not been subject to defacialisation, its surroundings and objects, coupled with the ‘landscapification’ (paysagéificiation) of all worlds and milieus (222/181) describes what can be summarised in an equation: Christianised = Facialised. One possibility of the year zero of the title of plateau 7 is, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, with a heavy dose of irony, that a new Christ be installed, in the form of Spinoza. Less ironically intended is the argument that, instead of forcing flows into signifiances and subjects, which is what the Face-Christianity does, what is needed is an ethology (derived from Spinoza’s Ethics). Spinoza furnishes a way of theorising what Deleuze and Guattari call at this point in plateau 7 “inhumanities”, these inhumanities which make up humans (exclusively make up humans). Access to these inhumanities is equivalent to finding the ‘probe head’ under the face; it is an essentially ‘demonic’ operation: In short, between substantial forms and determined subjects, between the two, there is not only a whole operation of demonic local transports but a natural play of haecceities, degrees, intensities, events, and accidents that compose individuations totally different from those of the well-formed subjects that receive them. (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 310/253)

Hardt puts it, the “impure angel” of the crucifixion is that through this self-emptying rather than the confirmation, via correspondence and conformity, of the form of God, in reality what one is left with is “merely a hollow husk”. Paradoxically “The selfemptying or kenosis of Christ, the evacuation of the transcendental, is the affirmation of the plenitude of the material, the fullness of the flesh” (Hardt 2002, 78), and an absence of mediation. Instead incarnation is herald of the “intimate complementarity” of transcendence and the immanent (79). In the analysis of Evelyne Grossman “L’homme-Christ Beckettien est recrucifié jusqu’à la fin des temps pour rien” [The Beckettian Christ-man is re-crucified until the end of time for nothing] (Grossman 2004, 61).

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This in-between state of affairs is that of the pure abstract machine, as opposed to the abstract machine already become an abstract machine of faciality. Whereas the latter gives elements that already tend toward form and function, the former are “abstract” even though perfectly real (310/253-4). On this level Deleuze and Guattari address the question of univocity under the inspiration of Spinoza: “A fixed plane of life upon which everything stirs, slows down or accelerates [précipite]” (312/255). It is time to return to Murphy to explore the nature of its participation in this thought of faciality within the context of a more pervasive novelistic ethology within and on a univocal plane (or plane of immanence).27 Murphy and Murphy in anamorphic repose When, out of the big blooming buzzing confusion, the flux of forms (65), or matrix of surds (66), a face emerges what occurs is the genesis of form and line, but also of social organisation, conjugality and coupling (the “music” which Murphy attempts to get out of his head). When Murphy acquires an address he also acquires a marital status (or at least becomes engaged to marry): “so all things limp together for the only possible” (131), declares the novel in a pared down palimpsest of Leibniz. Cooper’s agile features constitute a high-speed economical index of the face which, despite the phenomenal speed of its alterations, remains under the determining form of the Face: Now Cooper’s face, though it did not seem to move a muscle, brought together and threw off in a single grimace the finest shades of irresolution, revulsion, doglike devotion, catlike discretion, fatigue, hunger, thirst and reserves of strength, in a very small fraction of the time that the finest oratory would require for a greatly inferior evasion, and without exposing its proprietor to misquotation. (115)

Cooper, the agent of retrieval, is an example of multiplicity delivered over a threshold of unity. The novel however has other thresholds which permit no such deliverance, as when the ‘abstract faciality machine’ is switched on, exemplified by Murphy when he manages to speed his rock up to the velocity required for him to come out in his 27

For Foucault in ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’ “[univocity] is paradoxically the principal condition which permits difference to escape the domination of identity” (Foucault 1977, 192).


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mind or to enter his zone. Deleuze and Guattari would perhaps see in this moment the “probe head” beginning to “de-facialise” the face, creating the conditions for the proliferation of other abstract machines (in Deleuze’s analysis of the paintings of Bacon the “meat” overwhelms the Face and figurality).28 Murphy also manages to get close to such a state in playing chess: “Mr Murphy is a speck in Mr Endon’s unseen” (140); here subjectivisation has broken down. The carefully named object—Murphy—dwindles to the status of an undifferentiated “blotch”, but within Mr. Endon’s (as subject) out of field vision. In their extreme intimacy, however, anamorphosis contaminates distance by introducing a distorted spacing and distribution of perceiver and perceived. The facing players plunge back into a state of abyssal and recursive façade. The face is defaced at the interface. “There is nothing [in the words of Deleuze and Guattari] to explain, nothing to interpret”; this is the consequence of “the pure abstract machine of a twilight state” (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 207/169). An interesting intertextual relay requires comment here. In the years leading up to the publication of Murphy Beckett was reading Proust. In the chapter on faciality in Mille Plateaux it is to Proust that Deleuze and Guattari turn in order to illustrate their claim that the French novel remains confined within the white wall/black hole system. Given this, it is worth recalling one of the points raised by Beckett in his study of Proust, as well as looking to Deleuze’s own study of Proust the better to illuminate the Beckett of Murphy, which, as we have seen, has its own version of the white wall/black hole system. Beckett is alert to an aspect of Proust which Deleuze will also discern some thirty years later: the idealist side (which for Deleuze is also Proust’s ‘Catholic’ side). Beckett opposes this aspect of Proust to 28

Manola Antonioli’s gloss on the notion of the pre-face is worth quoting: “L’homme n’est fait que d’inhumanités, mais elles suivent des natures et des vitesses très différentes: dans l’inhumanitié du pré-visage la tête reste une appartenance d’un corps qui ne cesse de se déterritorialiser sur des devenirs spirituels et animaux, dans l’inhumanité à venir au-delà du visage de nouvelles lignes de déterritorialisation forment d’étranges devenirs nouveaux, de nouvelles polyvocités clandestines” [man is made up of nothing but inhumanities, but these adopt very different natures and speeds: in the inhumanity of the pre-face the head remains a belonging of the body which ceaselessly deterritorializes itself on spiritual and animal becomings; in the inhumanity to come beyond the face new lines of deterritorialization form strange new becomings, new clandestine polyvalences] (Antonioli 2003, 206).

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Baudelairean abstraction: Proust is too much of an affectivist to be satisfied by the intellectual symbolism of a Baudelaire, abstract and discursive. The Baudelairean unity is a unity ‘post rem,’ a unity abstracted from plurality...Proust does not deal in concepts, he pursues the Idea, the concrete. (1987, 79)

The final volume of the Recherche convenes upon the appearance, shocking to the narrator, of old friends at the hôtel de Guermantes. The ‘Bal de têtes’ section, if one follows the terminology proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, is still organised according to an economy of white wall/black hole. By contrast, for an instant at the end of Beckett’s novel—the dialogue of which springs into action with talk of the face—there is a dismantling of this economy in line with the operation of what Deleuze and Guattari would call the ‘probe-head’ (“tête chercheuse”: 1980/1988, 232/190). Mr. Kelly is, at this juncture, in his only other position (the first is cruciform or ‘pinioned’). He is found in Hyde Park in an attitude which retains some of its affinity with the posture of the crucified Christ, albeit with kite rather than cross in hands: “he lay sideways in the chair, his cheek on his shoulder, a fold of the slicker lifting his lip in a mild snarl” (158). The composite picture, with its stricken land-bound body and its airborne, and ultimately fugitive, representative creates an oblique association with another component of Christian belief, the Ascension of Christ. However, while through a process of deformation Mr. Kelly’s face becomes a cramp of bones and accedes to the forces playing within, Celia’s face is, concomitantly, obscured: what is thereby occluded is the white wall. Meanwhile the heart—that very important organ in this novel—is fatigued and appears to be diminishing in tempo. The organ, at any rate, is cut out of the novel at this almost last moment. In the absence of the white screen, with a Christ who has neither died nor risen (replaced in an inverted form— in the anamorphic and atomised form of a outspread/widespread Murphy on the bar-room floor), there is no white wall for recognition to be played out. In such a world it is no longer possible for the levers to be like the tired heart; society’s “is like” becomes a painfully personalised “is” (Massumi 1992, 173). The strictly limited social ‘foyer’ of Murphy, where Proustian mondanité has been replaced by more marginal or impoverished modalities of social intercourse


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(Balbec plage, courtyard, salon, and the piazza San Marco give way to Cork County, asylum and digs, public house and Brewery Road), then, yields a vortex of subject-object relations with no possibility of conferring coordinates, perspective and distance in order for a subject or its avatar to thrive. No simile plays about the slowed down bodies of this finale without finality. Not even the solace of metaphor offers the vestige of resolution. The levels have collapsed on to one another; the hierarchy with a vertical relay system organising and policing analogical gymnastics is no more. Moreover, Celia (ciel là: simply there; and tellingly it is Kelly who puns on her name [68]—is it Mr. Kelly who gives names, a demiurge? a prime mover? a programmer?) also closes her eyes: the black hole disappears, refuge of subjectivation. Kelly—the face now that Dwyer has receded from the novel—is a cramp of bones, where once it was a featured haven of “craters between nose and cheekbones” (69).29 Over the course of its thirteen chapters, with Chapter 6 in the middle delineating the complexities of Murphy’s mind, the novel’s hermeneutic grids of astrology, psychiatry and detection all slide over one another in the world of the characters. Morphē or Murphy: the shape, we often read, of chaos.30 This is a novel which takes its name from form and which is reducible to an erudite disquisition through the medium of the novel upon the form of the novel. Various critics, notably Hill and Katz, have formulated compelling accounts of the nature of Murphy’s experiment with novelistic form in so far as this latter endeavour is bound up with a more pervasive interest in the (philosophical and aesthetic) question of form as such.31 In Jacques Lacan’s reading of Holbein’s Ambassadors—during the course of which his indebtedness to Jurgis Baltrusaïtis is acknowledged—through recourse to anamorphosis (specifically the distorted skull) the artist “makes visible for us here something that is simply the

29

The pun is “s’il y a”. As Rabaté remarks, “The submerged Morphē enables Beckett to connect the god of sleep, trance, and half-death with the philosophically loaded interrogation of form” (Rabaté 1996, 151). See Ackerley for a series of original additions to the morphē/morpheme debate (Ackerley 1998, 1). 31 Hill’s account also draws out an important link between the essay on Joyce and the experiment of Murphy, making particular reference to the ‘purgatorial’ mode which Beckett favours. 30

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subject as annihilated” (Lacan, 1994, 88). 32 While in Lacan’s elaboration—and this is before we get to castration—this would perhaps fall under the category of “superficial” resemblance to anamorphosis,33 there is a predilection for the concept in several readings of Murphy to have emerged in post-1990 studies. Indeed Hill’s attempt to suggest the author’s cryptic signature may be found spread across Murphy as well as throughout the work or indeed across the corpus is in its way an argument for an anamorphic conception of the signature which has a precedent in anamorphic art itself.34 What, therefore, are the anamorphic elements of Murphy and how do these aid in the task of articulating another way in which the novel is Spinozist, an instance of “spinozism acharné”? Murphy is given to us whole at the start and spread out at the end.35 His subjectivity is perhaps, in Lacanian terms echoed above, annihilated. In Mr. Endon’s cornea can be discerned “Murphy’s own image but horribly reduced, obscured and distorted”. Mr. Kelly is said to be “spread over a vast area” (73). The novel begins with the tethered Murphy and ends with the broken string of the kite. It begins with Murphy out of it (the sun) and ends with the “All out” of dusk. It begins with Murphy in his chair and ends with Mr. Kelly out of his. So, to what extent is Murphy’s “wandering to find home” (6) an anamorphic journey, as described by Baltrusaïtis: “instead of reducing forms to their visible limits, it projects them outside themselves and distorts them so that when viewed from a certain point they return to normal” (Baltrusaïtis 1977, 1)? For Hill, such a return is not the trajectory of the novel since it remains firmly committed to the “purgatorial” line identified in the 32

Guattari is unequivocal about the halt on processuality which this figure endorses: “Lacan’s phallic function, in so far as it over-codes each partial object, does not give them back a particular identity…[and thereby] distributing a lack to each, [it calls] … on another form of totalization, this time in the symbolic order” (Guattari in Deleuze 2004, 222). 33 “There is no doubt that anamorphosis contributes to the overturning of forms [he wrote] which opened up the way to every sort of deviation; but the resemblance [he is writing specifically about surrealism] is only superficial” (Lacan 1994, 130). 34 As noted indeed by Hill himself (Hill 1990, 113). Cf. Manuel Asensi who in referring to J. Hillis Miller’s reading of Wallace Stevens’ ‘The Rock’ writes of how “The opposition between the literal and the figurative remains (they exchange their places, but never fuse); the frictions among the irreducible meanings are kept; the anamorphosis of the pictogram of the ‘i’ looks at us from the text” (Asensi 1999, 264). 35 For Jean-Jacques Lecercle the novel possesses “a self-destroying incipit that immediately ruins the expectations it evokes” (Lecercle 2002, 227).


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essay ‘Dante…Bruno. Vico..Joyce’ (1929). Specifically, Hill argues that one consequence of the chiastic patterning of the novel is the maintenance of the abeyance from form which Beckett identifies with the Joyce’s purgatorial mode. As far as the present taxonomy of faces, facing and perspectival approaches to surfaces is concerned, while Cooper could be said to conform to the anamorphic correction, in returning to normal spatial, vectorial and velocity arrangements, Murphy remains caught in the ‘purgatorial distension’ of the anamorphotic: in him the logic of redemption and return (to form) is refused. In the section of his Ethics entitled ‘Of Human Bondage’ Spinoza describes the necessity of proportion to the interaction of rest and motion if the human form is to be maintained: “What constitutes the form of the human body is this, that its parts communicate their motions to one another in a certain fixed proportion” (Spinoza 2001, 192). Whatever maintains this proportion, Spinoza continues, is good because it facilitates the human body in affecting other bodies. Conversely, anything which upsets this proportion causes a metamorphosis in the human body. In changing form the human body dies. Death is understood here as the absence of the ability to be affected. If not entirely susceptible to being coaxed into systematic shape (to paraphrase Wolosky once more), Murphy undeniably plays host to shadows of Spinozist philosophical concepts. Figuring zero Murphy’s pursuit of annihilation, or the suspension which he achieves via the ‘transports’ of his rocking chair is but one of the echoes which his first and most populous (from a certain perspective) novel forms with the late prose work The Lost Ones. In Murphy the padded cells— “bowers of bliss”—are, like the cylinder of the later prose work, sealed; they are “windowless, like a monad”. Both edifice and cell feature a respirable vacuum and a temperature “such that only total nudity could do it justice” (1973, 103). One is designed for single occupancy, the other for creatures who, as will be suggested below, have lost their oneness. Murphy, then, is already a contribution to an exploration of the relation of the one to the many, just as much as it is a playful negotiation and mockery of the heritage of rationalist thought. The evasion of figuration specifically, however, which Murphy announces in its opening sentence and then puts into practice finds its most explicit and systematic shape in The Lost Ones. Finally,

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stargazing or the putative practice thereof, forms a thematic bridge between the early and late works under consideration in this chapter. The question of the one and the multiple is posed in a theological context by Pierre Klossowski (who was, incidentally, of great importance to Deleuze) thus: “Quand un dieu voulut être le seul Dieu, tous les autres dieux furent pris de fou rire jusqu’à mourir de rire” (Klossowski 1963, 226). Klossowski’s pretender to the divine throne elicits a laughter from its peers which in one and the same act deposes them and installs itself. In The Unnamable, however—the direction of the comedy being reversed—amusement is delivered to the one who pretends or simulates: “But it’s probably the same foul brute all the time, amusing himself pretending to be a many” (Beckett 1979, 323). Between the French and the English editions of a work whose thematic concerns include “depopulation” and aspects of theology, each of these two diametrically opposed divinely comedic moments is played out. For, as far as the respective titles are concerned, whereas in The Lost Ones we observe the undoing of many, in Le Dépeupleur there is but a single undoer. The Demonic At a particular juncture in the course of The Lost Ones it is reported that if a certain infraction of the laws governing behaviour in the cylinder were to take place, the abode would swiftly descend to the status of what it calls a “pandemonium,” or many-demoned space.36 It is the fact that there are many demons compromising the unity of the One which makes such a situation best avoided, both as far as the Divine being, and—if the etymological echo is not coincidental—as far as existence in the cylinder are concerned. Coincidental echo or not, however, in its general concern with number, Beckett’s text demands to be linked to one of the age-old questions of philosophy: the contested nature of the relation which obtains between the One and the Many. The philosopher François Laruelle describes the stakes in the following terms: by choosing between either “remarking or subtraction,” and between either “accentuation or cutting,” the end-product will amount either to the “valorizing or [the] suspending [of] the One or the Multiple” (Laruelle 1999, 3 my emphasis). 36

I am indebted to Steven Connor and the London Beckett Seminar for this etymological reminder.


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It has always been, since the ancient Greeks, a question of, and a question of choosing between, as Beckett’s puts it in The Unnamable, “the old void or the plenum”.37 The choice can also be described as between the One of unity, identity and the Good, and the Zero of multiplicity, the irrational and that which deviates from the demands of the Good. This choice, along with the dilemma for philosophy which it sets up, was resolved by Parmenides, for his part, by having the path of Being always superimposed on the path of non-Being. In short, to quote Jean-Pierre Vernant, for the ancient Greeks “perfection, plenitude and eternity are the exclusive attributes of totally unified Being. Every fragmentation of the One ... signifies death’s entrance ... multiplicity and finitude” (Vernant 1989, 41). In his analysis of the interplay of Dionysian and Apollonian forces, Vernant explains how while the former guarantee a lapse into primordial indistinctness, this detour will ultimately take place under the sign of Apollo. While Dionysus divides, Apollo always reunites and thus ensures the restoration of the One which has been temporarily deposed by way of what Vernant calls “the fragmentary images through which he is refracted” (41). The One, monotheism, “monotonotheism” For the present purposes the assertion of the primordiality of the One made by Plotinus in his Enneads can stand as exemplary of the entire neo-Platonic tradition on this issue: In the same way, the soul must be both one and many, the single soul being the source of a multitude of souls differing just as from one genus there rise various species ... For over there, there is an Intelligence, which like some huge living being contains potentially all the other beings; and there are other intelligences of which each contains in actuality what another contains potentially. It is as if a city had one soul even though it contained a multitude; the soul of the city would be more perfect and more potent than the souls of individuals; that does not prevent them from being all of the same nature. (Plotinus 1991, 337-338)

Emphasising the historical complicity between religion and philosophy, Deleuze asserts that whether it is a question of one or of multiple deities, just as Gods are the myth of religion, so the One, Being and the Whole are “the myths of a false philosophy totally impregnated by 37

As Richard Coe points out, the dilemma is resolved for Taoist thought by means of a “plenum Void” (Coe 1964, 25).

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theology” (Deleuze 1969/1990, 323/278-9).38 Indeed such entrenchments of the One and the Whole—emblematically represented by Plotinus—would be a mainstay of much subsequent philosophy. To choose but one example, Pascal takes momentary refuge from the tumult of his Pensées to write: “We love ourselves because we are members of Christ ... because he is the body of which we are members. All are One. One is in the other” (Pascal 1966, 483). Prior to such declarations, however, various religious and mystical traditions had also struggled with the question of the One and the Many. The following paragraphs constitute a brief and by no means comprehensive survey of moments in this struggle, a struggle in which the shadow of Zero (in one or other of its forms) is always discernible. In traditional Christian monotheism the human is regarded as being made in the image of God, while a consecrated seed passes on to further engenderment down the line of descent. According to this account, since his mother is not his father’s spouse, Christ ruptures the chain of descent. Thus “the body of engenderment” is fragmented (Mopsik 1989, 55). Just as for the Greeks, when for Christianity the One of perfection, unity and eternity is compromised, the resultant breach must be repaired. Whereas for the Greeks Apollo aids and abets the necessary restitution, for Christian thought as manifest in Saint Paul, the overcoming of rupture and finitude (death) is achieved via ascension (or, as Alfred Jarry once put it, by having Christ continue the race airborne). Whereas heretofore the dilemma had been resolved horizontally, now it is overcome vertically. In kabbalistic thought, however, the One has significantly more richness and dynamism than in more traditional conceptions of monotheism (Mopsik 1989, 61). In rejecting incarnation it retains the Unity of the divine in quite a distinct manner. Procreation remains an essential causal factor in this retention. However, through it the divine “passes into time’s texture woven by the thread of engenderments” (61). The body of engenderment becomes, on this account, a body of passage, of tradition, transmission and reception. Such a conception of Oneness and Being—one wherein there is a space and a scope for becoming—would find no favour, however, in 38

Ansell Pearson has indicated the extent to which—via Bergson—Deleuze’s concepts of univocity and the virtual derive from his position on Plotinus. See Ansell Pearson (2002); on Deleuze and Plotinus see Davies (2001); on univocality see Smith (2001).


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Gnosticism. For Gnostic thought, becoming is synonymous with physical corruption and with death. Engenderment here becomes the signifier of the manner in which—in a formulation not with out its echoes in the work of Beckett—the body is a tomb, while the soul is chained to its mass of obscure matter (Mopsik 1989, 64). The Gnostic conception of the body as tomb is but one manner of addressing the age-old relation of soma and sema—either the body is the prison-house of the soul, or the soul’s exile takes place in the body. In the light of this, one of the chief concerns for Gnosticism became the provision of a coherent rationale for the way in which the soul might come to triumph over its loathsome and troublesome baggage. Plotinus affords an intriguing reading of this relation. In the light of his centrality to the tradition of Christian (to speak only of Christian) negative theology, his work provides an instructive backdrop against which to consider the engagement with the tenets of monotheism by The Lost Ones, and to assess the extent to which it can be claimed that the work is recuperable at the end of a via negativa. Lost: One First some preliminary thoughts on the two titles of this work which either lose or gain much in being translated, or converted, to use a verb more in tune with the idiom of the text, from French to English and vice-versa.39 The English title, for instance, may be regarded as implying a post-lapserian landscape which has been abandoned, perhaps by a God, or by multiple gods. If so, then the question of the location of the carcass(es) of the abandoned (or absconded) deity arises. It is not intended here to rehearse the arguments already amply elaborated in other studies concerning the origins of the French title (Le Dépeupleur) in a poem by Lamartine. Suffice it to say, the word dépeupleur is not French, while “depopulator”—one of its potential translations—is an archaic word in English. In a characteristically ludic move Beckett chose not to restore this obsolete word to circulation, opting instead to duplicate the obscurity afforded by dépeupleur 39

Brater’s list of the overtones which the English title carries can be consulted. It gives both an echo of Dante’s “la perduta gente” in Canto 3 of The Inferno and what the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation renders as “the unpeopled vacancy” of Proust’s Swann’s Way. See Brater (1994, 193, n. 32).

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by means of the English title The Lost Ones. That having been said, however, Lamartine does establish the trail of one of the central concerns of this chapter. The poem ‘L’isolement’, after all does gesture towards monadic being, deprived and isolated in singularity and/or solitude. Beckett’s text also has its units or monads.40 The question of the One and the Many, or of the lost oneness, can be articulated otherwise: if God has been deposed or has absconded, who, then, is to occupy His vacant residence? And “if a man,” what sort of ‘man’ will it be? Will there remain, after all is said and done, a space for the judgement of God? What of the Body and its Organs, since for Artaud the God, whether he absconds or not, has robbed humans of their Body without Organs? Soma, sema: Plotinus In their articulation of the ‘Reflections of a Soul’ as understood in the thought of Plotinus, the philosopher Éric Alliez (author of several important studies of Deleuze) and his co-author Michel Feher outline two manners of responding to the dilemma of the soma-sema relation. The first of these is what they term a “civic” line of thought, the second a “mystic” line. The civic model serves to establish a hierarchy of rulers and of ruled. If, Alliez and Feher explain, referring to this tradition, the soul which causes one to move is precisely that to which one is “connected,” then one is said to be “free”—a free man. If one, by contrast, is not moved by the soul to which one is connected but is, rather, subject to influence and control, to manipulation by outside forces, namely by other souls, then one is in thrall. That to which one is in servitude, the argument goes, is precisely one’s body’s refusal of, and resistance to, its soul. Such a person will be doomed to be violent and will fail to participate in the Good (Leibniz would later revive certain aspects of this line of thought in his Theodicy). Such an individual will not be active, unlike the ‘free man’, but will be, rather, “agitated,” that is to say, moved by external forces. The individual who is led and moved by the soul to which it is connected will be, in this tradition, an archon. The outward signs of such an individual will be evidenced by the harmony (aesthetic) of their 40

Plotinus points out, however, that the monad is useful only as a symbol to help us think the higher Unity (Plotinus 1991, 541).


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practice and the temperance (moral) of their actions (Alliez and Feher 1989, 51). For the Greeks a model can be derived from the contemplation of the stars and the orbital arrangement of the celestial bodies. To contemplate these is to assist in the pursuit and promotion of aesthetic and ethical equilibrium. Thus it is that although our sublunary domain is subject to decay, the contemplation of aesthetic beauty of the human body could extend into expressions of physical desire without compromise to the values of harmony and temperance (just as Socrates could drink his interlocutors under the table and yet remain the shining example of the excellent and Good life). Just, then, as harmony is a signature of the divine, the eternal and univocal, “agitation” is the signature of corruption, evil, finitude and multiplicity. If the civic way—which has just been outlined—grounds the theory of the Archon as free man and upholder of the law, and indirectly of the Good, then the so-called mystic line establishes a somewhat different vision of the body-soul relation. For the Plato of the Timaeus the contemplation of celestial bodies revives the memory of a time before (a life in the light according to How It Is perhaps) the fall to fleshly corruption and corruptibility (Plato 1971, 119). In other words written in the celestial harmony is an impression or an imprint of the divine. The emergent mystic way, which would be felt in Plato but strengthened in Plotinus in the third century, took some of the aspects intuited by proponents of the civic line, in particular as these concerned contemplation and praxis. For instance, Alliez and Feher point out how athletics and gymnastics were, despite appearances to the contrary, at the service of the soul rather than of the body, the latter being trained by the soul into the accomplishment of feats of symmetry, rhythm and accuracy. It is here that Alliez and Feher wish to complicate the received wisdom on Plotinus, based on his famous dictum about the shame of being in a body.41 Despite this the body can become a site for knowing (which is of course the meaning of the gnosis of Gnosticism), the 41

In the philosophy notebooks held by Trinity College, Dublin, Beckett can be seen to have consulted Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus from which he copies the phrase “shame of being in a body”. See Beckett MS 10968/15. The same notebook includes Beckett’s elaborate visual schema for the Enneads (MS 10968/17), based, to judge from the evidence of the notebooks, on the account in Porphyry rather than the Enneads itself. See Plotinus’ attack on Gnosticism (Plotinus, 1991, 108-132).

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locus for a life of active contemplation. Plotinus, faced with “the agitation of daily life, in which the soul is guided by its passions, the body by its appetites,” took an alternative route in his Care of the Self than that adopted by either the Epicureans or the Stoics. In place of the former’s advocacy of pleasure and the asceticism promoted by the latter, Plotinus offers a mystical third way. In Plotinus contemplation becomes entirely active and productive. The object of this contemplation is, ultimately, the One. In the movement of implicatio-complicatio-explicatio characteristic of neoPlatonic thought in general, the manner in which Plotinus arrives at this is by co-implicating or infolding (one-into-the-other) the contemplator and the contemplated. The light of the One which the contemplator perceives emanates from the One. As Alliez and Feher are quick to point out, for the optical science upon which neoPlatonism draws, rays of light are the same as rays of vision. In this vast optical arena it occasionally falls on the observer to tire of contemplating intelligible realities (that is those illuminated by the One) and to look instead to its own corporeal reflections, that is to the reflections in its body of the light of the One. Plotinian thought has such moments of narcissism in common with Gnosticism, for which the reflection of the soul in the body was a trap luring the body into abjection. In Plotinus, however, the matter is somewhat more complicated. The lapse into narcissistic observation of the reflection of the soul in one’s body can lead, if conditions are favourable, to a desire for union with one’s self.42 Second it can lead to a desire for union with others; a downward spiral is inaugurated into the bodily reflection as opposed to the requisite ascent towards Intellect and the One, the source of these tarnished reflections, or pale imitations. Instead of merely ruling out of order this narcissism tout court, however, Plotinus distinguishes between what Alliez and Feher call a specular and a speculative narcissism. The former takes the form outlined above whereas the latter entails the quest for an internal psychic space wherein to find “radiant intellect” and the One of which intellect is a reflection. The speculative relation pays dividends by means of 42 Rist’s summary of Porphyry’s Vita Plotini reports that Plotinus refused to have his portrait painted on the grounds that it would be contrary to the thinking of Plato on simulacra (Rist 1967).


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certain sumptuary controls. When the soul realises that what it is gazing upon so intently and with such desire is not so much its reflection in the body as itself as soul, darkness becomes light: “we are lightened of the burden and move by virtue towards Intellectual-Principle and through the Wisdom in That to the Supreme” (Plotinus 1991, 548-9). It is at the moment of this ecstatic liaison, alone with the One that Plotinus’ epiphany becomes possible: “each in the solitude of himself shall behold the solitary-dwelling Existence, the Apart, the Unmingled, the Pure—that from which all things depend” (52). Beckett’s reflections of a soul The distinction between mind and body as it informs philosophy whether ancient or modern is of course one of the most enduring, not to say the most hackneyed, of themes for Beckett criticism. The possibility of reading the relation as it is presented in The Lost Ones in terms of an older system of thought than the familiar Cartesian and Postcartesian one (as in the section on Murphy above), however, lends a certain novelty to what follows.43 The soma-sema relation is explicitly pointed up when the text reflects that although the climate has a detrimental effect upon the soul the consequences for the skin are even worse (Beckett 1995, 219). When one reads, for instance, of the various schools of belief within the cylinder, it is more than likely that Beckett has in mind some of the debates as to the status of the spirit among the sects and schisms of the Middle Ages. Those who swear by the tunnel and those who, by 43

In Wandering and Home, in the chapter ‘Beckett’s Cosmology’, Amiran argues that Beckett’s work is a direct engagement with questions deriving from neo-Platonism (and therefore at least in part from Plotinus). Grounding the analyis in the Plotinian notion that the soul is in transit seeking to reascend to the One, Plotinian and neoPlatonic thought are posited as together forming “Beckett’s central metaphysical context” (Amiran 1993, 124). In particular it is argued that Beckett has a particular interest in the “metaphorical journey that distinguishes between figure and ground, between the wandering subject and its home in unity” (ibid.). Central to the thesis is the belief that Beckett’s is an accretive œuvre which dramatises a latter-day inscription of a Plotinian quest by means of a buried transcendence. At this point the present study would depart from the claims made, as it equally would desist from the author’s fanciful reflections on the etymology of Beckett’s first name (125). That having been said, however, Amiran has much to say that is of importance, especially in the claims made about the use made by Beckett of Yeatsian cosmology, even if, ultimately, the conclusion—which posits a metaphysical underpinning for Beckett’s work—is fundamentally at variance with what I claim here.

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contrast, direct their faith towards the trap-door are referred to in the text as “sects” (207). There is little doubt that Beckett intends a parodic relation between the hopes and beliefs of his secular searchers and the heightened spiritual devotions of religious mystics, while the tradition of equating the divine with an illuminating Oneness whose trace may be found even in the abased body is evoked in the text, not least by the omnipresent yellow gleam, but also by the assessment of the “little light [which] will be assuredly the last to leave them always assuming they are darkward bound” (Beckett 1995, 207). In an explicit reference to Genesis (“Let us make man in our image”: Genesis 1.26ff), the aged vanquished is said to have none about him but others in his image (223). However, in the Apocryphon of John, although the archons make a human in the likeness of the perfect human, their creation cannot stand upright until it is unwittingly insufflated (a theme also taken up by Klossowski in his novel Le Baphomet44). In a variation on this theme, the early second century Gnostic Satornil of Antioch has a spark from above lend verticality to a creature which, prior to this intervention, could merely wriggle like a worm (Williams 1989, 139). According to this tradition the created human body—site of imperfection, corruption and corruptibility—is not the handiwork of a transcendent God but the crude creation of “archontic pirates” (Williams 1989, 139). These latter capture the Divine image and contaminate it by introducing the base desires and impulses which animate it. There is little doubt that Beckett’s text gestures towards these controversies, even if often in the forms they were later to take for the rationalist tradition. Returning to the civic and the mystic lines as these negotiate the relation between soma and sema, The Lost Ones provides ample ground for a reading based on the distinction. Where, for the Greeks, to have one’s body moved by the soul attached to it qualified one as a free man or archon, in The Lost Ones it seems to confer on one the status of a climber. In the cylinder, however, there is no reward for aspiring beyond the condition of the vanquished, that is, for being either a searcher or a climber. The cylinder does have both bodies and souls, as the text on more than one occasion makes clear. When it is suggested that the category of the climber corresponds to a soma-sema relation wherein the soul has, so to speak, the upper hand over the 44

See Klossowski (1988).


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body which belongs to it, the formulations of Leibniz (whose hierarchy of monads, from the most debased to the most exalted, forms the focal point of Chapter 3 below) should also be kept in mind. Certainly the distinction marked by Alliez and Feher between active and passive modalities seems to apply to the hierarchy of roles in the cylinder. Active and free humans, or archons, are juridically valid, while by contrast those moved by souls other than their own are “agitated”. Indeed, in the “pullulement centrale” (or the “teeming precinct” of the English text) is found none other than precisely a group referred to in the French text as les agités (1970, 33) [“those who never know a moment’s rest” in the English (Beckett 1995, 213)]?45 There is a strong case to be made for reading the harmony which is said to prevail in the cylinder as a parody of the Platonic method— shared by Plotinus—whereby contemplation of the celestial wonders provided a template for human action. In place of a transcendent model (which can only be posited and projected beyond an imaginary point of egress), however, The Lost Ones proposes an immanent ‘celestial’ harmony, thus effectuating the collapse already at work in Murphy. In one sense “bodies” already gives the signification celestial bodies (Weber-Caflisch 1994, 31). Moreover, when viewed from a height and in a certain light, the movement of the cylinder resembles that of the celestial bodies. Their slow counter-carrier-wise creates a second even narrower belt respected in its turn by the main body of searchers. Which suitably lit from above would give the impression at times of two narrow rings turning in opposite directions about the teeming precinct. (Beckett 1995, 211)

For Plato athletics and gymnastics respectively served to train the body at the behest of the soul, the better to enable it to mimic celestial and divine harmony through the accomplishment of feats of symmetry, rhythm and accuracy.46 Is it perhaps therefore more than merely coincidental that Beckett’s cylinder evokes a Lyceum populated by 45

For Leibniz, in his Theodicy, a distinction is to be made between the Form or the Soul and Matter: the soul acts whereas matter “is simply passive, and has need of being impelled to act, agitur, ut agat” (Leibniz 1952, 323). 46 Vernant points out how “physical qualities—youth, force, swiftness, agility, skill, and beauty—that the victor must display in the course of the agon, and which, in the eyes of the public, his naked body incarnates, are still eminently religious values” (Vernant 1991, 160).

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naked ladder-climbing gymnasts (albeit somewhat less than at the peak of their physical condition). Finally it is compelling to see the activities of this “little people” amounting to an act of contemplation centred on the One, wherein the “omnipresent” light is the emanation of, and is thereby equivalent to, this One. Once the first shocks of surprise are finally past this light is further unusual in that far from evincing one or more visible or hidden sources it appears to emanate from all sides and to permeate the entire space as though this were uniformly luminous down to its least particle of ambient air. To the point that the ladders themselves seem rather to shed than to receive light with the slight reserve that light is not the word. (Beckett 1995, 213-14)

In Beckett’s oblique engagement with the One of monotheism and its avatars, however, what, it has to be asked, is enacted if not the repeated and multiple subtraction of the one(s) from the One, leaving a proliferation of zeros, of wounds and marks of an evanescence or dissipation, perhaps the traces of absconding or deposed Gods? Does the English title not locate the text, after all, in a post-lapserian landscape, one which has been abandoned, perhaps by a God, or by multiple gods? If so the question arises, is it possible to locate the remains of the abandoned (or absconded) deity (or deities) in Beckett’s work? Christianity has, in its time, been implicated in acts of depopulation, extermination and annihilation, but has underwritten such practices in terms of plenitude, One-ness and coincidence with itself. The Christian God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. He is boundless, coterminous with infinity. With this celestial theorem as its demonstration, however, a paraphrase of Beckett suggests itself: what a concession—in this dependency—to geometry! The task of Divine depopulation will be to neutralise the “pandemonium” (the many-demoned space), and shore up the population of the domain circumscribed and designated as within the purview of the Divine, of Being and the One.47 47

It is also possible to read such an operation as genocide, which would lend some credence to the often asserted link between Beckett’s “if a man” and the work of that title by Primo Levi. In a remarkable study to which it is only possible to refer in passing, Giorgio Agamben has argued that “(t)he camp as dislocating localisation is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living” (Agamben 1998, 180). This logic of exclusion results in a class of individuals which is not acknowledged as


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For Georges Bataille monotheistic religion is the systematic accompaniment to, and compensation for, the loss of the One. It centres, then, on one sort of zero, a zero described by Jean-François Lyotard in his Économie libidinale (1974) in the following terms: “the despotic fantasy of the master situated on the alleged site of the central zero and hence identifying himself with the matrix of the Nothing” (Lyotard 1994, 212). There is, however, an alternative zero, this time of a more Nietzschean aspect. In his Genealogy of Morality Nietzsche, having declared the death of God, speculates: “this Antichristian and Antinihilist, this conqueror of God and of nothingness—he must come one day ...” (Nietzsche 1996, 76). Lyotard, in the same spirit, cautions against a metaphysics of negation and argues that “We must model ourselves an affirmative idea of the Zero”—in other words there must be no falling back on the zero of lack or negativity (Lyotard 1994, 5). For the tradition of reflection on the allied problems of the Zero and the One, the lost one, and the lost One retrouvé, has, as one commentator has argued, entailed taking it (One) “as originary” and hence “is to presuppose everything; such as unity, individuation, achieved form, and dogmatic plenitude” (Land 1992, 90). What then, finally, of negative theology and of the possibility of finding it in, or of supporting it by means of, The Lost Ones? There has been no shortage of similar judgements of individual works by Beckett and of his entire œuvre. Such is the attempt made by David McCandless who, reading Beckett via Paul Tillich, succeeds in retrieving “a new spiritual enlightenment from the abyss of existential anguish” (McCandless 1990, 364). Similarly Richard Coe, writing significantly earlier, concludes, specifically of the closing lines of Comment c’est: “All that has gone before is cancelled out, and the novel itself becomes that Void, that silence, that absolute zero to which all of Beckett’s work is tending” (Coe 1964, 87). In what remains an extremely rich reading of Beckett in the context of negative theology, Shira Wolosky asserts that recuperative possibilities, although puny, are nonetheless to be found in what she calls the “continuous imaginative effort” which the paradoxically plethoric nothingness arrived at in Beckett’s work promotes in the juridically valid. The ‘invalid’, the cancelled, neutralised homo sacer, or bare life deprived, in Agamben’s terms, of sovereignty (and who exists only in his capacity to be killed rather than sacrificed), certainly bears comparison—up to a point—with Beckett’s vanquished.

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reader (Wolosky 1996, 184). The redemptive move is completed when the work is reclaimed from the abyss, and figure (the central trope of her essay) is in the end affirmed rather than elided: “What Beckett finally offers then is a potent defense of figures, of language, as the medium in which, against and through all negation, we go on” (184). Despite the merits (and they are many) of Wolosky’s study, it is nonetheless true that this narrative participates in the privileging of the One to which negative theology subscribes, sustaining the tradition whose inaugural moment lies in Aristotle and evidence of whose shining light is to be found in the darkening shadow of the Hegelian dialectic. In Deleuze’s account, negativity is inherently theological, for to admit it is to allow it to prescribe. The Zero to which The Lost Ones attests is not that of logical negativity; it entirely avoids the relaunching of transcendence. Eschatological thought, in which category can be included monotheism and such doctrines as the Day of Judgement, depends on the One as its foundation. For Deleuze however, in his book on Nietzsche (1963), the Lack with two non-superimposable sides, is purely mythical; it is like the One in negative theology, it introduces lack into desire and causes exclusive series to emanate, to which it attributes a goal, an origin, and a path of resignation. (Deleuze 1983, 60)48

It is in this context that his affirmation of Artaud is to be placed. In Artaud’s pronouncements on the subject, the perdurant figure of the Christian God has deprived us of our Body without Organs, or our great withoutness, which is quite distinct from lack.49 The great Zero has been purloined, while in its place the pedagogy of One repeats itself. In order to attain this withoutness (Beckett would call it Sans), and in order to avoid replicating the structure he wishes to challenge, the figure of God must be subject to something more than negation. 48

Luce Irigaray’s indictment of the collusion of thought systems founded on the One and patriarchal and phallocentric oppression cannot be discussed here for reasons of space. However, in her ‘Une Mère de Glace’, it is worth noting that Irigaray, under the guise of a critique of Plato, cuts and pastes (and thereby appropriates) a selection of passages from Plotinus. See Irigaray (1985). 49 “The forces of attraction and repulsion, of soaring ascents and plunging falls, produce a series of intensive states based on the intensity=0 that designates the body without organs” (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983, 28/ 21).


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To negate in Deleuze’s ontology is to subscribe to the same system; negation is still underwritten by the judgement of God: “The judgement of God ... the theological system, is precisely the operation of He who makes an organism, and organisation of organs called the organism,” as Deleuze and Guattari write in Mille Plateaux (1980/1988, 196-7/158). Beckett’s work, then, announces and enacts a resistance to the One, refusing all recuperative gestures made upon it in the name of critical redemption, not least the redemption offered by such projects as negative theology. Rather than a search to restore the lost One to its proper place, The Lost Ones implies the undertaking of a programme that loses one-ness—its manifesto: seek your dépeupleur.50 Nonetheless, the placement en-abîme of a figure of reading may offer some solace. Does the reader not ascend, as Dante did, led by Virgil? “When the soul begins to mount, it comes not to something alien but to its very self” (Plotinus 1991, 548). Dante is in one sense Beckett’s Virgil in one of the most ingeniously comic mise-en-abîmes of all of his work. Despite the apparent choice, however, the fact of being “darkward bound” and tethered to obscurity, does not lead, in the atheistic vision of The Lost Ones, to the type of conversion to which negative theology subscribes, re-installing God in the very depths of nature, as Leibniz once tried to do, divinity still burbling in his mud. While it is true that Vladimir and Estragon are the two thieves on whom God has not yet passed judgement and that as such they are “poised between damnation and redemption” (McCandless 1990, 344), to find, via negation and the deployment of the zero of negative theology, an affirmation of spiritual enlightenment is a far from unproblematic hermeneutic move. Writing of that other key mentor—Joyce—and marking a contrast between their respective approaches to the question of resolution, Beckett writes in ‘Dante…Bruno. Vico..Joyce’ (1929): “A last word about the Purgatories. Dante’s is conical and consequently implies culmination. Mr Joyce’s is spherical and excludes culmination” (1984, 21-22). In Joyce, however, being will still be round, and as Bachelard observed Images of full roundness help us to collect ourselves, permit us to confer an initial constitution as ourselves, and to confirm our being intimately, inside. For when it 50

A procedure of ‘counteractualisation’ (contre-effectuation)—the concept developed by Deleuze in Logique du sens (1969/1990).

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Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze & Guattari is experienced from the inside, devoid of all exterior features, being cannot be otherwise than round. (Bachelard 1969, 234)

As flattened cylinder, however, the space of The Lost Ones will fall significantly short of Bachelard’s requirements. If Dante provides the wan smile, Bruno the climactic conditions, Vico and Joyce combined yield the strange commodicus vicus of The Lost Ones. The result is a space characterised by the circling by ambulant bodies of a central agitated mass of bodies, any attempt at the co-agitating (co-agitare=shepherding) of either of which must fail. The unremitting abeyance of such shepherding prompts the conclusion that Beckett’s is a demonic (and perhaps even pandemonic), rather than a divine comedy. The Lost Ones and the problem of machinic abstraction/the abstract machine If Murphy represents an attempt to unleash the abstract machine of faciality against the Face, The Lost Ones pits pandemonium against One and the logic of the One. The Lost Ones, however, is a particular case in Beckett’s work in so far as it seems to invite allegorical readings which confer on it an emphatically ‘converted’ (or representational) status. Despite its virulent abstraction, it invites a reading in terms of its evocation of material, historical technologies. The problem of the relation between technology and humanity is for Heidegger at the heart of the question of the human’s ‘fallen’ state. In a short story the Polish author Bruno Schulz at once evokes the complexity of the interpenetration of technology and human bodies and serves to pinpoint the deception whereby one might fail to notice that: It was not man who had broken into the laboratory of nature, but nature that had drawn him into its machinations, achieving through his experiments its obscure aim [...]. It was Nature that willed and worked, man was nothing more than an oscillating arrow, the shuttle of a loom, darting here or there according to Nature’s will. He was himself only a component, a part of Neeff’s hammer. (Schulz 1988, 102)

The situation described by Schulz could be said to be similar to that which is evoked in The Lost Ones. Nature in Beckett’s text is ‘machined’. Its bodies move to the rhythm of internal chronometers, their


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movements apparently strictly controlled, their near-mechanical displacements and actions the outcome of no more than a minimal application of will and desire on the part of the inhabitants. Of all of Beckett’s works in prose, then, perhaps this text is the most likely to bear out a Heideggerian reading of the fall into technicity (allied perhaps to a call for the restoration of authenticity). The increase in critical interest in the representation of technology in the work of Beckett in the last decade (see especially Miller [2000] and Schwab [2000]) is in part attributable to the range of responses to the question of technē in recent French philosophy, and the filtering through of these more general developments to the question of literature. Philosophers such as Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, and Lyotard have all in their sundry ways broached the question concerning technology, whether or not they felt the question as articulated by Heidegger in the first place was ill-posed.51 The term “machine” is employed here in a quite specific fashion, after the manner in which it is used in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. The machinic, as has been shown, is for them in no way reducible to the technically machinic. The machinic has two sides: the abstract machine and the machinic assemblage. Rather than amounting to a binary distinction, this duality gives rise to a complex formulation closely allied to several other similarly complex conceptual and nonbinary distinctions, such as that between molar and molecular (throughout their jointly-authored work and in the work of Guattari in particular), fold and unfold (in Deleuze’s Le Pli in particular) and being and becoming.52 The approach to The Lost Ones advanced here, 51

See Heidegger (1993), Derrida and Bernard Stiegler (1996), Derrida (1992), Lyotard (1993), Deleuze and Guattari (1983), and Deleuze and Guattari (1988). Mark Hansen has addressed the tendency towards what he calls “the machine reduction of technology” in these and other philosophers. Technesis is the term employed by Hansen collectively to identify “the master thinkers of technological modernity,” all of whom in distinct ways implement what he claims is the “reductive strategy that allows for a progressive assimilation of technology to thought (Hansen 2000, 4). Of these it is Deleuze and Guattari who according to Hansen are the least reductive. 52 For a critique of reductive readings of the machinic, that is as pertaining to the technological in its broad sense, see Mullarkey (1997). Žižek’s critique of Deleuze’s machinic thinking is reductive in precisely this way (Žižek 2004, 16). Massumi points out that the mechanical and the organic are in fact both ranked on the side of the molar, whereas the machinic (which pertains to bodies as much as to hard technology), being concerned with connection, is on the side of the molecular. “By machinic they mean functioning immanently and pragmatically, by contagion rather than by

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then, is concerned with material technology in a specific way, but will use the concepts of the machinic and of the abstract machine to offer an alternative to an exposition of, or commentary on, the role and significance of ‘hard’ technology as such in the work of Beckett.53 Critical responses to The Lost Ones Of all of Beckett’s spartan late works The Lost Ones has invited perhaps the widest range of critical responses centering on the disputed question of allegorical interpretation. These have ranged from the defiantly allegorical—P.J. Murphy’s demand that the “challenged referent” be restored in the wake of waves of deconstructionist attempts to have it deported from the cylinder best exemplifying this strand—to the compellingly evasive—Shira Wolosky’s convincing (though not entirely unproblematic) argument regarding the abeyant figurality of the text—to, at a location off this scale, the “slow going” advocated by Steven Connor who reads The Lost Ones as “a proleptic summary of the whole of Beckett’s work, considered as a system closed upon itself, and therefore inexorably, but by insensible degrees, proceeding towards exhaustion and saturation” (Connor 1998, 8).54 Just as there are various sects within the cylinder, so The Lost Ones has engendered among critics its partisans of the “way out” (advocates of the referent this way please) and its adherents of the opposing view that what is at stake is an immanent as opposed to a transcendent (i.e. celestial in the terms proposed in the text) harmonics.55 Then there is an equally committed faction which insists on the paradigmatic, but not allegorical, reading of the cylinder in terms of cosmos-level entropy—of whom comparison, unsubordinated either to the laws of resemblance or unity” (Massumi 1992, 192, n. 45). 53 For a convincing re-statement of Deleuze and Guattari’s own insistence that desiring machines are not literary tropes see Welchman (1998, 226). I employ the term “phylum” here in the sense in which it is adopted by Deleuze and Guattari: “It names a single phylogenetic lineage that can be said to be ‘ideally continuous’ since it concerns ‘materiality’, whether natural or artificial, and frequently both” (Ansell Pearson 1999, 141). 54 See, respectively, Murphy (1990), Wolosky (1996), Connor (1998) and Schwab (2000). 55 The “way out” dreamed of by certain “amateurs of myth” (Beckett 1995, 205-6) occupying the cylinder has in the eyes of some critics been regarded as the trace which might permit the retrieval either of the referent on the one hand (say, a referent attainable via allegorical interpretation) or the author/narrating consciousness (the “devising deviser” as Company puts it) on the other. Both presuppose transcendence.


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Schwab is the most representative (Schwab 2000). Here, after all, is a text where 200 bodies abide in a rubber-lined (or “suchlike”) cylinder, modulated by their “inner timepiece(s)” (Beckett 1995, 209), prompted by sundry agitations into action, or frustrations into quiescence, according to the rigours imposed by various sumptuary circuits. If there is one thing the various critical ‘sects’—with the exception of Connor—have in common it is that The Lost Ones causes them to deploy language which must take note in some fashion of the “human”, or of some variant of that term (posthuman in Schwab’s case). The apparent susceptibility to an allegorical reading which might somehow render the text a testament to the human condition in the face of technological developments seems especially pronounced in the case of this late text. The type of existence with which The Lost Ones is concerned is, however, far from a human existence; far that is from the anthropocentric or anthropomorphic conception of existence. Rather the concern is with the machinic.56 Here is Guattari putting both terms, existence and machinic, together: Existence, as a process of deterritorialization, is a specific intermachinic operation which superimposes itself on the promotion of singularized existential intensities...there is no generalized syntax for these deterritorializations. Existence is not dialectical, not representable. It is barely livable! (Guattari 1995, 52)

If Beckett’s work is in any sense concerned with ‘the unbearable nature of human existence’ (or an equivalent formulation) it is within the context of a thought such as this. Moreover, prompted by Guattari’s thought—and an uncanny a-parallel evolution in the work of Beckett—it may be possible to make the move which he advocates, beyond the immediately technical machine to a notion of machinic assemblages, to a conception of the machinic in terms of interfaces.57 56

Mengue (1994) writes of (Deleuzian) machinic abstraction that although it necessarily entails nothing of the human, it is not the draining away of life and vitality. On the contrary it is emblematic of Deleuze’s new vitalism. Mengue explains that “life” is a fluidity without form culminating in a line of flight towards “the a-cosmic, the an-organic, the a-signifying” (Mengue 1994, 82, my translation). For an exploration of the trans- as opposed to the post-human condition see Ansell Pearson (1997). 57 Varela and Maturana (1980) describe the phenomenon of auto-generation and autoregulation by means of which living systems emerge from chaotic states. The concept of autopoiesis is adopted by Guattari in his late work, but in his view it requires at-

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The machinic Despite the claims introduced above and developed below it must be admitted that certain of the works of Beckett seem to lend themselves to what, for the purposes of argument, will here be called a ‘materialhistorical technology reading’, as opposed to the expanded understanding of the machinic which the thought of Deleuze and Guattari allows. Thus, for example, a given work might be cited as evidence of Beckett’s fears regarding the dehumanisation of beings through being supplanted or prostheticised by technology—The Lost Ones being the text most frequently cited in support of this interpretation.58 Alternatively, other work by Beckett might be read as a Heideggerian expression of the role of technology as standing reserve. Indeed often the same work —Krapp’s Last Tape for example—might elicit either or both responses. However the workings of the machinic, the technological and the corporeal in Beckett’s work (and in his late work in particular) seem to demand another approach which would keep his work in abeyance from such a reductive interpretation. The principal literary referent in the first pages of L’Anti-Œdipe is the work of Beckett. In themselves the references and allusions to Beckett’s work begin to sketch the outline of what will become the Deleuzoguattarian machinic approach to the literary. It is not the case that Beckett’s characters illustrate the interaction of the Body without Organs/abstract machine and the desiring-machine/assemblage; rather Beckett’s work enacts it—it is, as Beckett famously remarked of Joyce’s Work in Progress, that thing itself. Deleuze would later invent a category of artist-thinker which seems best to account for the specificity of Beckett in this regard: that is Beckett as half-philosopher whose work partly enables Deleuze’s own becoming nontenuation by another concept—allopoiesis. Guattari advocates then the “joining of Varela and [Pierre] Lévy”, giving the “machine both in its autopoietic character and in all its allopoietic developments, of interfaces, which grant it a kind of exterior politics and relations of alterity” (Guattari in Benjamin ed., 1995, 9). 58 For Welchman such a logic entails the thought of the “dissolution of the social under the impact of the economic [...] thought through a series of terms oriented rhetorically around this concept of the machine: rationalisation (Weber); calculation and technē (Heidegger); dehumanisation” (Welchman 1998, 214). Abbott’s aside, referring to the “stifling inhumanity of engineered lives” (Abbott 1996, 138), is an index of the widely held view—contested in this chapter—that Beckett’s work belongs to such a heritage. Cf. Oppenheim for whom it is “a harsh judgement of our mechanistic age” (Oppenheim 2000, 127).


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philosopher.59 Nonetheless it is the key role played by the work of Beckett in their initial outline of a machinic conception of desire that forms the logical bridge between the work of Deleuze and Guattari and that of Beckett which now follows. The late work of Beckett entails a progressive, but by no means teleological, inscription of the machinic. It is always there as a concern in his work, for what after all are the combinatories of Murphy’s biscuits or the meticulous arrangements in place in the Knott household in Watt but proto-machines (that is, they comprise a system of interfaces)? And this is not even to begin to think of the role of the bicycles, tin-openers, rocking chairs and other machines which are so prevalent in the work. However it is true to say that the so-called closed-space late prose works offer something altogether more distilled (many of them are indeed residua) in the way of machinic relations. But none of these many systems can be said to be quite as machinic as the ‘universe’ of The Lost Ones: Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one [...]. Inside a flattened cylinder fifty metres round and sixteen high for the sake of harmony. The light. Its dimness. Its yellowness. Its omnipresence as though every separate square centimetre were agleam of the some twelve million of total surface [...]. The temperature. It oscillates with more measured beat between hot and cold. It passes from one extreme to the other in about four seconds [...]. Floor and wall are of solid rubber or suchlike [...]. The ladders. These are the only objects. (1995, 202-3)

Here we encounter an explicitly machined world. The description offered by Deleuze and Guattari in the opening lines of L’Anti-Œdipe has often been applied to the work of Beckett. There we read the celebrated passage: “It [Ça] is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id [le ça]” (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983, 7/1). The desiring-machine, in the conception of Deleuze and Guattari as outlined in Chapter 1 above, is a locus of disjunction and bifurcation on the body without organs. Machinic loci enable syntheses to take place, and lead to the formation of a grid, a marked-off space with co-ordinates (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983, 18/12). The modus operandi of the schizoid upon 59

See, for example, Deleuze (1995, 140).

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this surface is not to move between immutable points or co-ordinates (later, in Mille Plateaux, striated space and movement of striation) but, rather, to cause the connections to proliferate––towards this point and/or that and so on in a system of permutation in the manner of Beckett’s Molloy and his sucking stones: “an infernal machine is being assembled” (9/3). The movement is one towards what the authors will later name the pure abstract machine.60 With regard to the distinction between the two sides of the machinic, in The Lost Ones the imbrication of flesh and technology means that on a “technological plane” the text presents a series of formed “substances”, with technological apparatuses appearing to control flesh and to meld with it in cyborg hybrids. Moreover there is a presiding and organising Form––known in the text as “harmony” (202). Substance and Form, however, only account for one stratum of the inscription of the machinic in The Lost Ones. At another level–– abstractly in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense––cutting across these strata of the technological standing reserve can be discerned a true and thoroughgoing machinic phylum of “intensities” and “unformed matters”. Of the light in the cylinder the text is at pains to point out that, although a contributing factor to the “climate”, it emanates from an artificial rather than a natural source. At once omnipresent and evanescent, the light is subject to being understood––as indeed are all operations in the cylinder––in terms of intensity. The omnipresent light (paradoxically not always as present as at other times it is) is inconstant since it is prey to the effects of a “vertiginous tremulo” (205), while the temperature––tied to the effects of variations in luminosity as it is––is said to be “agitated by a like oscillation”. All very good for harmony as the text itself would report. This concern evinced by the text for light, for quality, intensity and frequency of light of course is an abiding one in the work of Beckett, most famously in the sixth chapter of Murphy. It is partly in the context of this ongoing interest in the question of the clear and the distinct 60

“Schizoanlaysis does not pertain to elements or aggregates, nor to subjects, relations, or structures. It pertains to lineaments running through groups as well as individuals. Schizoanalysis, as the analysis of desire, is immediately practical and political, whether it is a question of an individual, group, or society” (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 249/203).


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(which has its origins in Beckett’s reading of Descartes and the postcartesian philosophers) that the deliberations on lux are to be understood as they appear in The Lost Ones. More specifically––and the text yields numerous prompts to motivate this link––given the tendency of the light in the cylinder to approach a state of obscurity, the thought of Leibniz on this issue is evoked: A created being is said to act (agir) externally insofar as it has perfection, and to react to (patir) [or “suffer” by] another insofar as it is imperfect. Thus action is attributed to the monad insofar as it has distinct perceptions and reaction (passion) insofar as it has confused ones. (Leibniz 1991, 168)

Any sense of a properly hierarchised relation between levels of being in the cylinder––although proffered by Beckett’s text––is immediately subject to ironic scrutiny and hence undermining. All categories are provisional, transitory, and even if perdurant, are so only within the ontological, luminal, and thermal slippage which characterises the arrangement of beings, lights and temperatures in the cylinder. Yet, undeniably, there are zones, thresholds and boundaries in the cylinder, even if these are subject to ongoing revision and reconfiguration. A stable economy of arrangements, however, seems at best called into question in the entropic space of the cylinder. Connor amply illustrates this point in his essay ‘Slow Going’: It is narrative itself which constitutes what Ilya Prigogine has called a “dissipative structure” in the otherwise chaotic succession of events. In one crucial episode, the narrating consciousness postulates the idea of a way out of the cylinder. The 2nd law of thermodynamics applies only to closed thermodynamic systems. If a new source of energy could be introduced into the system, or the system revealed as a sub-system of some larger system, the inexorable progress towards decay could be halted; the river could flow upstream. If there could exist a way out of the cylinder, then there would be the possibility of some new source of life and variation in it, something to hold together its slow unravelling. (Connor 1998, 7)

Connor goes on to suggest that such a suspension may only be momentary, a merely posited state with no more claim to metaphysical grounding than a hypothesis, and that what comes next is what always obtained in the first place (signifying that there is no first place after all), namely turbulence. Consider the final lines of the text which seem to describe the terminal state of the cylinder:

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Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze & Guattari He himself after a pause impossible to time finds at last his place and pose whereupon dark descends and at the same instant the temperature comes to rest not far from freezing point. Hushed in the same breath the faint stridulence mentioned above whence suddenly such silence as to drown all the faint breathings put together. So much roughly speaking for the last state of the cylinder and of this little people of searchers one first of whom if a man in some unthinkable past for the first time bowed his head if this notion is maintained. (1995, 223)

An eschatological terminus is in sight here by means of the text’s evocation of a zero degree, a freezing point (or an exit via or in eschatologoical dispersion). However, eschatology and entropy are merely present as illusory possibilities in Beckett’s text. Those slowings down, coalescences and stratifications which manage to come into being or operation within the cylinder are instances of what Deleuze and Guattari call “chaoïde” (Deleuze & Guattari 1991/1994, 194/206) states, loci of consistency, strata and assemblages cut across by the abstract machine. Such freeze-framings (assemblages) are halts and cuts within the larger machinic phylum. The ossifying, stratifying moment, then—the text’s possible terminus—is not all that it appears. At first glance it would seem to offer the potential for a via negativa. In a text which is––albeit with great irony––concerned with the promotion of a quasi-Leibnizian harmony and a Monadic One (which it is possible to allocate to a narrating consciousness)––the fall to zero may merely facilitate all the better the trajectory towards a Plotinian Intelligence. The figure at the text’s close, the final figure described as “if a man”––may represent the terminus as far as life in the cylinder is concerned. What, therefore, may be offered at the end is the possibility of taking up occupancy of a site, perhaps even an eschatological one. For Guattari, contemporary humanity “structures” itself relative to what he calls a “terminal” within the machinic-technological world. The locus or domus is terminal because it is circumscribed by a series of constants and limitations (for example, the speed of light, the Big Bang, the impossibility of going below absolute zero [Guattari 1995, 54-5]). At the level of micro-structures (the abstract machine), however, as Guattari asserts, an infinity of new fields of the possible is at work. In The Lost Ones, is it possible, then, in the state of deprivation that is equivalent to lost oneness (unity), that a specific type of zero––one not necessarily compatible with a via negativa––is attained? By


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crossing what Guattari calls “ontological thresholds”, a machinic emergence can “extract” a certain consistency (this is not in the least to be confused with the acquisition of the requisites for status as “being”). These thresholds, which could equally be described as phylogenetic and creative, also mark a moment of heterogenesis, a becoming on several fronts (multiplicity) and complex self-formation/constitution (autopoiesis modulated by allopoiesis). Fractal machines, Guattari states, cross substantial scales and in doing so, paradoxically engender them. We are in a domain bereft of Euclidean spatio-temporal co-ordinates and have fallen, slid imperceptibly into the realm of what Guattari calls “intensive ordinates” (51). Where “energetico-spatio-temporal coordinates” are jettisoned “everything becomes possible” (51).61 The science deployed by Beckett in this ‘science fiction’ includes the notion of Maxwell’s demon, a trope with which it is certain Beckett made himself familiar in the 1930s. The trope of the demon assists in gaining an insight into the understanding of the negotiation of the problem of the relation of the one and the many in The Lost Ones. Viewed from the point of view now of science as opposed to philosophy, it comes down to a problem of the simple and the complex (another way of articulating the question of Euclidean versus topological spatiality). In the tradition to which Maxwell and Laplace make their contributions, the demon is a hypothetical ‘creature’ introduced into experiments. In the case of Maxwell the demon can open a partition between two chambers containing gas, while in the case of Laplace a calculating demon serves to facilitate his proof of a deterministic universe. Beckett’s cylinder is an apparently closed system within which there are certain “amateurs of myth” (Beckett 1995, 207) who believe in a way out either via a tunnel or via a trapdoor. Maxwell’s demon, if introduced, would yield unproblematically the entropic end, with the temperature coming to rest and the last vanquished attaining his or its final state of completion.62 Writing in general of the demons of Laplace and Maxwell, Isabelle Stengers states that “the references to gods and demons that populate physics texts indicate a judgement in terms of 61

See Cache (1995). Beckett’s Whoroscope Notebook contains notes on Maxwell taken from Henri Poincaré. 62

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complication” (Stengers 1997, 10). The demons, Laplace’s and Maxwell’s in particular, are ultimately indicative in her view of “a more or less implicit dualism”, and are only posited the better to shore up the canonically scientific, in short the “simple”. By contrast, complexity occurs when the identification between one and one’s alter ego (the demon) is extended and becomes problematic. In the case of complication one is dealing with a more or less bounded set of probabilities; proliferation is controlled in advance; the identification of oneself with the demon does not threaten to go very far. In the case of complexity, however, given rise to by an extension of this identification––as is the case with so-called “strange attractors”––the set of probabilities is no longer bounded, the proliferation no longer predetermined in its potential extent. One possible retort, writes Stengers, is that given a demon capable of understanding and controlling with “positively infinite precision” a system governed by such an attractor, the turbulent system would be, for all that, just a system from the point of view of the demon. Should for such a hypothetical demon the system remain deterministic, Stengers nonetheless asks: “is this reference still relevant?”. For something has changed. The manageable manifold has become a heterogeneous multiplicity: We are not actually separated from the demon by a quantitative lack (we observe and manipulate less well), but by a qualitative difference: as long as our observations and manipulation do not have a strictly infinite precision, we are dealing with a system with nondeterministic behaviour. (Stengers 1997, 10)

Just as science, when it embraces complexity in the manner advocated by Stengers, encounters a destabilizing pulsion that renders the idea of a “simplifying” demon inoperative, so also does Beckett’s The Lost Ones—as has already been seen from a different perspective—open up the possibility of a many demoned space—a “pandemonium” (Beckett 1995, 209). It is the latter which keeps the abstract machine at work, destabilizing the reifying assemblages of narrating consciousness and critical exegesis. If Beckett is, as Deleuze argues, the most Spinozist of authors, then The Lost Ones is Beckett at his most Spinozist. The abstract literary machine is rendered actual, on the plane of literary composition itself: “So on infinitely until towards the unthinkable end if this notion is maintained a last body of all by feeble fits and starts is searching still” (Beckett 1995, 222).


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The Lost Ones configures a machinic edifice which on one level stages the human as it interfaces with a cybernetic dystopian terminus. However, on other levels the text provides the immanent conditions for a literary abstract machine, machinic phylum and proliferating machinic thresholds. The last critic to leave the text might feel compelled to extinguish the light, but the circuit is always reestablished, despite the critic, via the machinic phylum. The omnipresent yellow gleam is contagious.

3. From Monadology to Nomadology: Leibniz, Deleuze, Beckett

If the exact nature of the challenge presented to Beckett criticism by the philosophical intertexts of his writing remains the ground for significant divergence of opinion, few would dispute the fact that the work of Beckett engages on a variety of levels with the thought of some of the major figures in the history of philosophy. It is an interesting fact, however, that despite the many studies of his work which detail specific references or allusions to the philosophical canon, there has been relatively little research dedicated to detailing the many resonances of Leibnizian themes and concepts to be found there.1 In his correspondence with MacGreevy, in what is a formulation to interest a reader of Beckett with a knowledge of Deleuze’s book on Leibniz, Beckett describes his particular brand of solipsism as “baroque”.2 That Murphy’s suit renders him a monadic entity; that one of his abodes has been in a garret in the splendid building once owned by Leibniz himself (a mansarde the perfection of which succeeds—according to the French translation of the novel—in being doubled in Murphy’s later monadic garret); that Molloy’s description of his bees can be read as (among other things) a direct parody of Leibniz’s 1

The exception is Naoya Mori who has published two essays on Beckett and Leibniz (see Mori 1996 and 2004). 2 Letter to Tomas MacGreevy, March 10, 1935. Cited in Bair (1978, 198). Roig’s study of Beckett (1987) employs the term ‘baroque’ in a specific manner, detached from its historical associations, placing the philosophical emphasis on Schopenhauer. Anthony Uhlmann begins his essay on the philosophical image in Beckett by citing another often-quoted letter to MacGreevy in which the author expresses his admiration for Leibniz whom he finds “full of splendid little pictures”. See Uhlmann (2005).

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theory of preestablished harmony: these echoes of the philosopher are well known to Beckett scholars.3 Likewise, many have attested to the “monadic” quality of both the space and the language of Beckett’s fictional universe.4 Germaine Brée has gone so far as to suggest that Watt is a “grotesque parody” of the Monadology and that Watt himself is a reincarnation of Candide, that other (and first) parody of Leibniz (Brée 1976, 322). In the same spirit, it has been suggested that How It Is, The Lost Ones and Worstward Ho all, to varying degrees, parody Leibniz’s concept of the “best of possible worlds”. Naoya Mori has examined the idea of windowlessness—at the core of Leibnizian metaphor—as it pervades the work of Beckett generally (Mori 2004), while, taking Beckett’s own lead, any number of Beckett characters or aesthetic figures have been likened by commentators to monads, the example of James Acheson’s essay ‘Murphy’s Metaphysics’ (Acheson 1979) having been supplemented by many others.5 Elsewhere, of course, the readings of Beckett through the lens or lenses provided by particular philosophers or groups of philosophers which would perhaps keep Leibniz out of the frame have been far from in short supply. Lance St John Butler, for example, makes of Beckett’s characters em3

The reference to Leibniz is explicit only in the French edition of Murphy: “Murphy avait occupé à Hanovre, assez longtemps pour faire l’expérience de tous ces avantages, une mansarde dans la belle maison renaissance de la Schmiedestrasse où avait vécu, mais surtout où était mort, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz” (1953, 119). In amplifying the reference to Leibniz in the French translation Beckett produces a kind of memorial to replace the building, itself destroyed in the war which intervened between the publication of the original and the translation. One cannot help wondering if Beckett knew (from sources such as Latta, 1898) that Leibniz died an isolated and neglected figure (as far as the Court was concerned), defamed as Lövenix (“believer in nothing”), or indeed that the philosopher, who suffered from gout, used wooden splints in order to bind his legs to his chair and thus to ease his discomfort while working seated (the better, then, like Murphy, to “come alive in his mind”). Beckett certainly visited the house in 1936 while it still stood. Peter Fenves has written a remarkable text addressing the question of memorial in Leibniz (Fenves 1990). There are copious illustrations and photographs of the house in both its intact and ruined states in Meckseper (1983) and Krüger (1985), while the façade of the destroyed building has since been replicated in a different location fronting a modern block of university accommodation. On the theme of pre-established harmony as echoed in the work of Beckett, see for example Fletcher (1971, 136). 4 See for example Debevec-Henning (1988, 117), Bersani and Dutoit (1993, 68). 5 P.J. Murphy’s contention that Leibniz is used in Beckett exclusively to provide “ironic counterpoint” and/or for reasons of “structural convenience” is perhaps overly emphatic. See Murphy (1994, 239 n.33).

From Monadology to Nomadology

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bodiments of Heideggerian Dasein, or “being-there”—a move previously made by Alain Robbe-Grillet in his essay on Beckett’s theatre.6 In approaching the question of Beckett and Leibniz, then, after Deleuze, while there may on one level be a tension between, say, the links with the Spinozist conception of immanence explored in the section of Chapter 2 above on Murphy, and the overwhelming commitment to transcendence which one associates with Leibniz, in a Deleuzian spirit motivated by the pursuit of the formula and the affect, this tension is here regarded as productive rather than as a doctrinal impasse. Martin Joughin’s translator’s preface to Deleuze’s book Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (originally published in French in 1968) succinctly identifies the affinities and divergences between the two essential post-Cartesian philosophical systems in the following terms: The principal affinity lies in the central role played by expression in each...just as each monad expresses infinity, substantial existence and eternity, so also does Spinoza’s attribute. (Joughin 1990, 13)

Expressionism, moreover, is the ground of each philosopher’s anticartesianism. The principal difference, at this level of generality, lies in relation to, precisely, relation. Leibniz’s monad is the basic substantial unit of existence, as will be shown in what follows. There is a 6

Lance St John Butler in Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being) reclaims the work of Beckett for Phenomenology (Butler 1984). Robbe-Grillet, for his part, opens his essay on Beckett by equating the condition of “man” in Beckett’s plays with the “thrownness” of Heidegger’s Dasein (Robbe-Grillet 1965, 119). Butler suggests that the relation of Malone to his room is comparable to Being-in-the world (18). Butler feels that the obligation (to go on, for example) is an expression of Sorge (30). This conception—that of being-in-the-world—however, is open to dispute, as the present chapter will go on to argue. Beckett’s characters are arguably more Leibnizian than they are Heideggerian in this: they are beings-for-the-world; examples precisely of what remains when there no longer endures a Dasein: neo-Leibnizian monads in neobaroque solipsistic postures as opposed to pivotal Heideggerian positions. Blanchot of course, without ever mentioning Leibniz or the baroque, had already formulated a position on the trilogy which placed it outside the reach of Heideggerian ontology (and of phenomenology in general, and this despite Blanchot’s own proximity to Heidegger). In ‘Où maintenant? Qui maintenant?’ the Beckettian subject is made to err far from the anthropomorphic confines of Dasein and Sorge (“care”). More recently Jonathan Boulter has offered a reading of Beckett in large part derived from the hermeneutical-phenomenological tradition (Boulter 2001).

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multiplicity or a manifold of such units and each expresses the world according to its capacity for clear expression. In Spinoza the relation is more or less inverted. God is absolutely infinite, according to definition 6 of Part 1 (‘Of God’) of the Ethics (Spinoza 2001, 6), and is a substance which consists of an infinity of attributes, each of which expresses the one substance. Clearly, then, the relation between the One and the Many is distinct in the view of each philosopher. In addition Leibniz adds to the equation the possibility of unconscious perception (hence the monad comprises data of which it can have no knowledge), whereas for Spinoza the degree to which modes (the subordinate expression of attributes) express the conception of God is still according to the extent of their (conscious) knowledge. In this respect alone Spinoza would remain more Cartesian than Leibniz. Both philosophers owe a debt to neo-Platonism and in particular to the latter’s adherence to the model of complicatio-explicatio-implicatio. Implication and explication, Deleuze points out, are not opposed but related in a mode of linkage known in the neo-Platonic context as complicatio, or mutual implication-complication. Expression both implicates and explicates that which it expresses. In the neo-Platonic tradition, as Chapter 2 has shown, God is ‘complicative’ in so far as he (the One) implicates (involves, envelops) all things (the Many) which in turn explicate (evolve, unfold) Him (the One). From the evidence of Beckett’s notes taken in the 1930s he had a pronounced interest in philosophy both in its own right and as a means of inflecting his developing voice as a literary author. Notes, whether taken from primary or secondary sources, on ancient Greek philosophers, Plotinus, Augustine, Descartes, Geulincx, Malebranche, Spinoza, Berkeley and Leibniz abundantly attest to this.7 This claim is of interest, however, less in so far as it can provide boundaries within which one might track down references to the philosophers in question (which project remains nonetheless inviting and on its own terms extremely rewarding, as, among others, Ackerley [1998] and Uhlmann [2004] have shown), than in how it illuminates the position of Beckett’s work in relation to the history of philosophy. Beckett’s quite 7

To this list one must of course add Schopenhauer whose aesthetics informs much of Beckett’s art criticism. P.J. Murphy argues convincingly that Kant’s importance to Beckett has long been underestimated (Murphy 1994, 229).


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explicit interest in, and engagement with, seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century thought as it is manifest in his literary writings— Berkeley in Film, Descartes in Whoroscope and so on more “allusively” in the rest of the work—shows a predilection for the various conceptual impasses to which the eminent figures of the Age of Reason took philosophy.8 Quite often of course such impasses were not irremediably the black holes they at first seemed. Beckett’s œuvre can profitably be read as a literary return to these impasses and their paradox-laden contours. Effectively, his work re-performs—in what amounts to a working-through—certain of these paradoxes and deadends.9 In its habitation of a hybrid zone between literature and the philosophical Deleuze identifies Beckett as one of the acrobatic halfphilosophers who facilitate philosophical thought as a thought of the outside. This “intimacy of the exterior”—a notion close to and in some ways derived from Blanchot10—is indeed a way of describing a monadic architecture such as is found in Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz. Leibniz: Crowning the Monad Leibniz inherited a specific challenge from Descartes: how to escape the solipsism and scepticism to which the former had, despite his efforts to the precise contrary, seemed to consign the discipline of philosophy. In enshrining reason as foundation, in the shape of the thinking and doubting subject of the cogito, Descartes had created a subject-centred metaphysics. This was uncontroversial if one could believe, along with Descartes, in that subject as a given—as divorced from matter/world—but not so auspicious when it came to “being-forthe-world”.11 It is precisely the latter possibility that is ruled out by 8 Many commentators have correctly pointed out that the concern in Whoroscope is less with Descartes’ philosophy than with his biography. 9 The term working-through is employed here in accordance with the definition given it by Freud (Durcharbeitung). Working-through is the reworking, in involuntary memory, of a ‘forgotten’ traumatic event. 10 An exemplary formulation would be the following from La Part du feu (1949): “(L)iterature does not confine itself to rediscovering in the interior what it tried to leave behind on the threshold. Because what it finds, as the interior, is the outside which has been changed from the outlet it once was into the impossibilty of going out—and what it finds as the darkness of existence is the being of day” (Blanchot 1995, 331). 11 The idea of contrasting a Leibnizian “being-for-the-world” and a Heideggerian “being-in-the-world” has been developed here from Deleuze (1988/1993, 35-7/ 25-6).

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Descartes’ system. The world necessarily exists for Descartes if it is the object of a clear and distinct idea. Between the subject and the object, according to the Cartesian model, there is a relation of projection rather than of inclusion, envelopment or expression. The subject’s consciousness—the principle of which appears in the cogito, the “I think”, of the cogito sum has a revelatory role which is quite distinct from the natural objects of its awareness. Things (objects) are raised to the status of the necessary only when to their contingency is added the clarity and distinctness offered by the projective power of the thinking (rational) subject. As he states in the Principles of Philosophy (1644): It is certain, however, that we will never mistake the false for the true provided we give our assent only to what we clearly and distinctly perceive. I say that this is certain, because God is not a deceiver, and so the faculty of perception which he has given us cannot incline to falsehood; and the same goes for the faculty of assent, provided its scope is limited to what is clearly perceived. (Descartes 1985, §43, 207)

For Descartes, the “I” is conceived of as the thinking, representing principle which defines the limits and parameters of what “being” is to mean: it is established by means of what Lyotard calls “the ontological axe” whereby (in the case of Descartes) the I cuts itself off from, and on the basis of, what it is not (Lyotard 1985, 66). Expressionism: envelopment and development Prior to Descartes, Giordano Bruno had rejoiced, with a “demonic” delight which was to carry him to the stake, in the collapse of the closed world of Aristotelianism. Indeed Leibniz, later describing one stage of his own intellectual development (in New System and Explanation of the New System), expresses his relief at being freed from the “yoke of Aristotle” (Leibniz 1979, 116)12 In fact the new sciences, as they had emerged in the early seventeenth century, had left the human

Here, as in all subsequent quotations, the translation is my own. Andrew Goffey also explores this point (following Deleuze) in his essay (Goffey 1992, 67-79). 12 Unless otherwise stated all references to Leibniz’s writings will be to the Parkinson edition (1979). If the reference is to one of those works now generally referred to by paragraph numbers (notably The Monadology and Principles of Nature and of Grace) according to the convention §1 etc., in such cases both the paragraph number and the page number will be given.


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subject in a conceptual abyss.13 The resultant horror vacui was expressed most succinctly by Pascal. In his Pensées he was to speak of the fears aroused in him by “the silence of infinite space”.14 In much the same frame of mind, Henry Vaughan, in his poem entitled, precisely, ‘Man’, would write Man hath stil either Toyes or Care, He hath no root, nor to one place is ty’d, But ever restless and Irregular About this Earth doth run and ride. (Vaughan 1967, 70)

In sundry ways, then, the thinkers of the seventeenth century were forced to address the problem of site. The problem—for these thinkers and literary authors, as much as for Leibniz—was how to re-relate human to world, how to re-negotiate the relationship between finite understanding and infinite existence—in short how to reinstate an enunciative centre, or site, in the aftermath of the collapse of what Lacan has characterised as: “le règne aristotelien de la classe, c’est-àdire du genre et de l’espèce, autrement dit de l’individu consideré comme specifié” (Lacan 1975, 96).15 In order to attempt to surpass the problems created by the Cartesian “solution”, in the shape of its mind-body dualism, Leibniz—just as Spinoza had been before him—was led to revive the neo-Platonic system of micro- and macrocosm. Under the auspices of the complicatio, in the thought of such as Bruno and de Cusa, the microcosmmacrocosm relation permitted an analogy to maintain a stronghold for an enunciative centre. The complicatio finds its most succinct expression in Bruno’s famous “l’âme du monde qui complique tous.”16 It 13

For a detailed account of the place of ‘man’ in relation to the new sciences see Koyré (1958). My references are to the French translation by Raissa Tarr (Koyré 1962), Du monde clos à l’univers infini. See also Lovejoy (1960). 14 “L’étérnel silence de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” (Pascal 1968, §201). Kepler shared this horror. For a detailed account see Koyré (1962, 63-88). 15 Tr.: “the Aristotelian reign of genre and of type: put otherwise, of the individual considered as if specified”. Interestingly, Lacan takes the opportunity to declare his own affiliation to a certain “baroquism”: “je me range [he writes] plutôt du coté baroque” (Lacan 1975, 97). 16 Cited in Deleuze (1988/1993, 33/24). For a summary of what is entailed in the complicatio for Bruno and de Cusa see Friedman (1962, 269). See also, on the microcosm-macrocosm relation, Foucault (1966, 45-7). As for de Cusa’s explicatio: “He posits an infinite, transcendent God in whom all truth and all reality is concentrated.

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was not simply that Renaissance thinkers had sought to replace the divine centre with a human one: rather they had sought to imitate the divinity thanks to the deployment of an analogy which for them existed between the macrocosm and the microcosm. While the enunciative centre seemed to have been loosened from its site, by a restorative analogy it could be returned to its erstwhile shelter. Hence, from de Cusa and Bruno, throughout the metaphysical poets; in Rabelais (“prince of the French baroque”17), and in Pascal, there recurs a refrain which was to find its most sophisticated statement in Leibniz’s pronouncement (in the Principles of Nature and of Grace): It has been very well said that he (God) is like a centre who is everywhere but whose circumference is nowhere, since everything is present to him immediately, without being removed from this centre. (Leibniz 1979, §13, 201)

For Leibniz, no monad can perfectly express or represent the entirety of the universe, and yet that elusive totality is included in the form of a potentiality. It is in this special mode of inclusion that one sees the emergence of the Leibnizian unconscious: “a created soul has many confused perceptions, presenting an aggregation of innumerable external things” (Leibniz 1979, §13, 201). Elsewhere, in the Monadology Leibniz explicitly points out the advance which a recognition of the role of the unconscious perception represents: “herein [he writes] lies the great mistake of the Cartesians, that they took no account of perceptions which are not apperceived” (§14, 180). By contrast to Descartes, then, for whom such knowledge arose solely from conscious perception, knowledge of the infinite (and by definition, the Divine) is here included at the level of the unconscious. If, then, as was suggested at the outset, the requirement for seventeenth-century thinkers was to attempt a renegotiation of the relationship between the finitude of human understanding and the infinity of the universe (with or without a divine architect), then Leibniz’s response is the following formulation: “each soul knows the infinite, knows everything, but confusedly”. The Principles of Nature and of Grace furnishes the quintessential illustration of this point:

The world is the “explication” of God: every created thing existing in essence in the divine intellect in which the human can participate by way of love” (Julia 1991). 17 Alejo Carpentier writing in 1975 (Carpentier 1992, 27).


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Just as when I am walking along the shore of the sea and hear the great noise it makes, though I hear the separate sounds of each wave of which the total sound is made up, I do not discriminate them one from another; so our confused perceptions are the result of the impressions which the whole universe makes on us. (Leibniz 1979, §13, 201)

The domain of these confused perceptions constitutes a kind of “basement”. Within the monad’s dim recesses and folds lie the impressions or inscriptions left in it by the entirety of existence. Yet the phrase most often associated with Leibniz is “Monads have no windows by means of which anything can enter or leave”. In short, a paradox looms: there is an anomaly between on the one hand the idea of an archive of what are explicitly referred to as inscriptions or impressions, and on the other a monad of which this archive forms an intrinsic part but which, for all that, is self-sufficient and hermetically sealed. For Leibniz the paradox—of impressions in the monad of the external world but a monad which is precluded from receiving those impressions from that world—is negotiated by way of a particular manner of understanding virtuality. Leibniz selects the figure of God to play the role of absolute archivist, the sole being capable of storing the imprints of all the heterogeneous and manifold phenomena which constitute the universe. But this archivist is also a shrewd programmer, selecting in advance all that will happen in the universe over time. Thus while each monad expresses the universe in its entirety, it does so only virtually, in direct proportion to the expanse of what Leibniz describes as its clear zone. Aside from what comes under the jurisdiction of the clear zone of perception, everything remains in the archival basement and is not brought into conscious perception. One of the most notable aspects of this architectonic is the fact that while the God posited as the architect of the universe, composer and conductor of what Leibniz calls “pre-established harmony”, is transcendent and static above the monadological milieu, the monads themselves are in a continual state of flux and movement. Across the thresholds between the unconscious realm of confused perception (the base level), the conscious realm of relatively clear perception (the middle level) and the self-conscious realm of apperception (the upper level), monads continually shuttle or zig-zag. They are propelled in their envelopment or contraction into lesser, more base,

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monadological states (stupefaction) or in their development/expansion into higher, more enlightened monadological states by means of what Leibniz calls appetition. Hence death for Leibniz does not even amount to a cessation of appetition or perception: death, he states, is nothing more than the contraction of a living creature. This leads on to the second part of this introductory sketch. Leibniz’s system can be seen as an attempt to re-establish an “enunciative centre”, or subject position, amid the contemporary and proliferating dynamism represented by developments in science. Leibniz, then, shared the horror identified by Kepler when he wrote: This thought—the infinitude of the universe—implies I do not know what secret horror; in effect, one finds oneself in the midst of this immensity to which one is refused any limit, any centre, that is to say any determined place. (cited Koyré 1962, 66)

The horror of the void which is so frequently manifest in baroque thought, art and architecture, led Leibniz to install a plenum wherein everything is full, and everything is full of everything else. To put it another way, each monad expresses the entire universe, thereby becoming replete, while exhausting, at least virtually, that universe. But this drive to enfold and to become replete has problematic consequences for the areas invested in, whether these are places of counterpoint in the music of Bach, folded masses in the sculpture of Bernini or the complex textures of Leibniz’s own monad. Among the consequences is the fact that the areas invested in, or the supports which permit the folding, embellishment or configuration, become themselves overburdened. In attempting to furnish a plenum the baroque can introduce the voiding effects of supplementarity in Derrida’s sense (Derrida 1967). The penultimate chapter of Deleuze’s book on Leibniz focuses on what is frequently considered a piece of marginalia in Leibniz’s work: the so-called vinculum substantiale.18 The vinculum substantiale is, according to Leibniz’s letters, a substantial bind or bond (a kind of metaphysical sinew) by means of which dominant monads (such as souls) exercise their dominion over dominated monads (such as bodies 18

See however Laerke (2001) for a discussion of Deleuze and Leibniz centred on the role of the vinculum. For Michel Serres the theory of the vinculum is of such import that it would have been Leibniz’s “second monadology” (Serres 1995, 4).


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or less enlightened souls). For Deleuze, however, it is somewhat more: in his view the vinculum is a “superfold” not alone standing between the two tiers of “la maison baroque” (Deleuze’s term for the ensemble formed by Leibniz’s kingdoms of Nature and Grace) but also passing into each individual monad. Following Yvon Belaval, Deleuze describes the vinculum as a “paroi réflêchissant” the effects of which reverberate on both tiers, and in the interior as well as along the exterior of each monad. In this respect the vinculum is further evidence of a contamination by distance, an infiltration of the interior by a constitutive outside. The primary cause of this contaminating distance and doubling has to do with the compensatory procedures associated with Baroque thought and practice. The outside which is constitutive of a monad—the world included in its base—must not be permitted to compromise the interiority of that monad. Multiplicity (of, for instance, points of view) must not be allowed to call into question the presupposed integrity of the whole. In its deterritorializing measures the Baroque was forced, however, to ‘contaminate’ itself. Baroque thought and practice can only bridge the void they so much fear (whether that void comes in the form of Kepler’s absence or Pascal’s silence) by “overpeopling” their supports (folds within folds ad infinitum chez Leibniz) and simultaneously by fashioning substantial bonds (vincula) to coordinate the relations between the proliferating cells or points of view. But this re-territorialization presents an essential challenge to the Baroque: doubling creates an excess, a residuum and possibly a population of simulacra. Daniel Klébaner, in his L’Adieu au baroque, summarises as follows: “by its excess of recalled presents [the Baroque] creates a façade sent back to (a) distance: monumental amnesia, amnesiac monumentality” (Klébaner 1979, 50). Leibniz’s subject (monad), advocate by definition of the existence of God, is a double of that God; it is a little divinity with the entirety of the information available immediately to the divine understanding confusedly known to it too (“Every mind is omniscient but confused”). Each point of view produced by the monad-subject must testify to the existence of this all-surveying, allprogramming divinity. Each must therefore, in a very real sense, double (represent) that divinity: even Judas after all is a little divinity presiding over a contracted clear zone stamped with the expression “Hate God”. There will be found no lacuna where the existence of the divine being is not expressed or advocated. Excessive and

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multiplicative “peopling” will confirm, then, Leibniz’s own dictum in New Essays: “nature does not make leaps” (Natura non facit saltus) (Leibniz 1979, 16). In the final analysis, however, there is simply too much presence; more specifically, there are too many presents to synthesize. Even God, possessor of the absolute archival capacity, cannot synthesize temporally the supplements furnished in his name. The Cuban author and aficionado of the baroque Severo Sarduy is enlightening on this issue. Baroque supplementarity in Leibniz contradicts the principle of the economy of communication in doubling the communication of monads between themselves, in obliging them to pass through its intermediary. Contradicting the principle of the least wastage [dépense] possible, the crown (the Monas Monadum), which thus obliges wastage, on the most circuitous route [chemin le plus détourné possible]), functions in its turn as a baroque entity. Whence its paradox: the crown contains the baroque—in preventing plurality without links [liens]—by way of the baroque—in imposing wastage. (Sarduy 1991, 36-7 n.85)

Beckett of course read works by and/or about Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant and many of the postcartesian philosophers in the 1930s, and all of these philosophers have an impact on or a presence in his writings to a greater or lesser extent. It is less the case that Beckett in Malone Dies and The Unnamable systematically works a Leibnizian thematic into his fiction, than that in the return made in these works to a conceptual detritus common to the entire postcartesian milieu, Leibniz’s architectonic resounds in an insistent manner which demands critical attention. Malone Dies: inventory and series Of all of the statements made by Deleuze and by Deleuze-Guattari on Beckett, what Deleuze says of Beckett’s Malone Dies is perhaps the most comprehensive and direct link he establishes between a philosophical concept and its sensation(al) equivalent in Beckett’s writing: The great inventory of Beckett’s Malone is consummate proof. Malone is a naked monad, or almost naked, scatterbrained, degenerate, whose zone of clarity is always shrinking, and whose body folds upon itself, its requisites always escaping him. It’s hard for him to tell what remains in his possession, that is, “according to his definition,” what belongs to him only partially, and for what duration of time. Is he a thing or an animalcule? If he does not have belongings, then to whom does


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he belong? That is a metaphysical question. He needs a special hook, a sort of vinculum on which he can hang and sort through his different things, but he has even lost his hook. (Deleuze 1988/1993, 147/109)19

“I wonder what is proper to me”: these words might be used to describe the project of any of Beckett’s characters. However, in Beckett, projects are usually subject to an unfaltering errancy: a project is painstakingly pursued until such point as the subject, although “going on” (as at the close of The Unnamable), finds all teleology linking it to its object (the project) broken down. Such fugal projects are those of waiting in Godot, fabulation in Company, remembrance in Krapp’s Last Tape, inventory in Malone Dies, work in Watt and death in The Lost Ones. Hence, although Beckett’s characters seem never to cease from asking “what is proper to me?”, the answer provided by his work is a kind of laughter which seems to announce: what belongs to you flees you; what happens to you is not your property, and yet, by a cruel paradox, you remain “the creature of your misfortunes”.20 Hence, in order to explore this paradox, the two great Beckettian models, that of the inventory and that of fabulation. The question has two parts: what belongs to me, and to what do I belong? As this dual question pertains to the subject-monad, Leibniz’s response is as follows: the subject-monad possesses virtually the series expressed in its clear zone, while the series reverses the possession by claiming the subject monad as part of its prolongation. The reversibility in question is the result of the operation of the vinculum, the substantial intermonadic and transmonadic bond-ligament. The vinculum is, it has been shown above, a kind of Superfold which passes between the folds themselves. It is also the fold which at once separates and conjoins the soul and the body—which accounts for the paradox in Leibniz of a porous façade which has nonetheless a 19

Cf. Butler who makes the point that Miss Carridge is extended via her lead to her Dachshund, just as Malone extends to his possessions via his stick. 20 This phrase is borrowed from Deleuze’s discussion of the event as it is operative in the work of Joe Bousquet. This work, Deleuze finds, is disposed toward the a-logic of the event (l’événement): it avoids neutralisation and affirms that part of the event which is not reducible to its spatio-temporal actualisation. Such a disposition involves the overturning of the notion of the proper in terms both of propriety and property (indeed of identity itself). See Deleuze (1969/1990, chapter 22). For their part Deleuze and Guattari return to the point in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Deleuze & Guattari 1991/1994, 150-1/159-60).

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closed interior. The vinculum, then, facilitates a double-belonging of two monad-subjects in a given ensemble. However, for Leibniz, such a double belonging does not compromise the identity of either monad in that ensemble. This is because the monad is without windows and therefore not susceptible to externally-modulated change or influence. Instead it has an internal principle—preestablished harmony—which causes it to fold with those monads whose implied series converge with the series it itself implies (implication in French is of course one of those many words deriving from the root plier). The agent of this folding is the Fold or the vinculum.21 The landscape of Malone Dies, when confined to the site of the narration and not the narrated (although it can be argued that these two in fact occupy the same site: that of the narrator’s head), in many respects echoes the architecture of Leibniz’s monad. The only opening from Malone’s room is a window of uncertain transparency, the view through which, like Malone’s possessions, is decidedly irregular. Such indeed is the light—which produces an overall greyness in the interior—that it is said to be “against” the window, deflected rather than admitted by the glass: “the light is against my window, but it does not come through” (Beckett 1979, 202). The room is “bathed” in this “leaden light” (which prefigures in certain respects the omnipresent yellow gleam of The Lost Ones), a light so unlike anything Malone has ever known, that he is forced to conclude that it is not quite the light of the “outer world”: its dawns and dusks do not always appear in the correct (accustomed) sequence. Nor is this light capable of casting shadows: the same light exists, Malone feels sure, under as over his bed. Such a light, then, although apparently issuing from an external source, does not offer any certainty that there is a window per se to Malone’s abode. The only other point of egress, although not leading to the outside as such, is the door through which every day a hand deposits Malone’s food and removes his pot. And yet, a monad with windows? Not in Leibniz’s monadology, and not, despite the apparent perspective of its occupant, in Malone’s. Malone’s reflections on the nature of his abode are lacking in consistency. Like the moon which he claims has never cast its light upon his 21

Something of the double and paradoxical functioning of the vinculum can be highlighted by referring to the etymology of the word itself which offers the alternatives of “stricture” on one hand and “ligament” on the other.


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face, the environs wax and wane before his decidedly non-Cartesian gaze (the only thing which Malone’s perception shares with Cartesian projection is doubt). The fact that he can see other windows (and even in one of them a couple “loving”), view stars and hear the sounds of cars and of aeroplanes does not always convince Malone that he inhabits a room with a window onto the street. First the window pane may be merely painted in order to evoke an exterior vista (216); second, Perhaps after all I am in a kind of vault and this space which I take to be the street in reality no more than a wide trench or ditch with other vaults opening upon it. (201)

This would place Malone in an architectural structure reminiscent of Leibniz’s great pyramid in the Theodicy, although Malone’s would be an edifice decidedly without the transcendent verticality, and unproblematic embrace of infinity peculiar to that baroque structure: The halls rose in a pyramid, becoming even more beautiful as one mounted towards the apex, and representing more beautiful worlds. Finally they reached the highest one which completed the pyramid, and which was the most beautiful of all: for the pyramid had a beginning, but one could not see its end; it had an apex but no base; it went on increasing to infinity. (Leibniz 1954, §416)22

The verticality intrinsic to Leibniz’s monadology is precisely lacking in Malone’s nomadology. Despite feeling certain that if he were capable of standing he would “fill a large portion of the world,” Malone is in fact supine on his bed (he is, as shall soon become clear, no less “nomadic” for this). If Malone’s location has any connection with a structure bearing the imprint of a Leibnizian architectonic then it is because he inhabits, decidedly, the base (but of a structure which is nothing but base and which can be a foundation for nothing other than base). Malone is found, in words used to describe certain of the inhabitants of the cylinder in The Lost Ones, “in an attitude which wrung from Dante one of his rare wan smiles.”23 22

Cf. Maurice de Gandillac who once asked Deleuze: “Is your dramatisation a Theodicy, this time situated not in the celestial palaces to which the famous apologists for Sextus alludes, but rather with the lemurs from the second Faust?” (Deleuze 2004, 107). 23 In fact this phrase—alluding of course to the Divine Comedy—held a particular

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Clear-obscure There is nothing to be gained by my saying I am in a basement if there are tiers of basements one on top of another. (Beckett 1979, 201)

In Leibniz’s hierarchy of Being, the base of the pyramid is the province of the damned and of those creatures who or which lack reason sufficient to possess a soul properly speaking, and who or which lack therefore the ability to ascend to the upper echelons. Considered in the context of the baroque architecture of horizontal breadth and vertical height—existence in two tiers—the monad represented by the room occupied by Malone would belong to the lower floor. Lower monads are mere receptors and lack the power rationally to project beyond themselves. They receive only vibrations, shocks which indicate their being-in-accord with a series which includes them, namely their being-for-the-world. Such then are the diminished perceptions “available” in Malone’s room: visibilities are reduced to a “grey incandescence” while audible material is no more than a congeries of vibrations: “The noises too, cries, steps, doors, murmurs cease for whole days, their days. Then that silence ... And softly my little space begins to throb again” (203). Of his stick Malone says “I would identify them [possessions] by touch, the message would flow all along the stick” (229). Monads of the lower echelons have diminished zones of clarity, zones wherein their accords with other monads in the series of which they form part are expressed. Appropriately, then, Malone himself shares something of the “baseness” associated with his room. He is synonymous with it to such an extent that You may say it is all in my head, and indeed sometimes it seems to me I am in a head and that these eight, no six, these six planes that enclose me are of solid bone. (203)24

With his diminished clear zone Malone receives mere vibrations or shocks which he cannot properly trace backward or forward into the fascination for Beckett, appearing as it does in almost identical form in at least three texts. 24 On the skull in Bacon as linked by Deleuze to the work of Beckett see Deleuze (2002).


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series of which those vibrations and shocks form part. Such are the soup and the pot, evidently arriving in and being taken from Malone’s room, but inscrutable as to their source. His reduced clear zone offers but two poles: dish and pot, pot and dish. These “emissions” he receives both blindly and deafly like the (multisensorial but defective) vibrating tympanic surface described in the final instalment of the trilogy, The Unnamable. Diminished though his clear zone may be, Malone sets out to tabulate what he can perceive—those vaguely perceptible prolongations of the series of which he (dimly) feels himself to be a part. To this end he establishes a twofold programme: to tell four stories and to make out an inventory of his possessions. However in pursuit of this goal Malone knows he will be thwarted: “they think they can confuse me and make me lose sight of my programmes” (236): although “the way is well charted” there is “little hope of coming to its end.” His programme has two parts, then, one related to that which happens and another related to that which belongs. Malone possesses, like every monad in this respect, a vinculum to aid him in his endeavours. In fact he has two vincula, one pertaining to each portion of his programme—a pencil for what happens and a hooked stick for what belongs. In Leibniz’s theory the vinculum, due to its dual function, defines the monad on one hand as absolutely distinct and on the other as tending to be locatable only in zones of indiscernibility. Malone’s pencil and stick are substitutes for the Leibnizian vinculum in each of its respective guises. But first, in order to employ his vincular apparatus—to the end of pursuing his programme—Malone must (in the absence, as it were, of sufficient reason) invent a definition of what belongs to him, of what is proper to him. Thus he decides that the “shocks” emitted by the soup and pots do not after all belong to him: he can neither clearly perceive them, nor prolong the series they represent beyond the arm which alternately deposits and withdraws them. Neither indeed do the vibrations of planes nor the loving of lovers come under his jurisdiction. Even certain objects which he believes once to have been his, and which may still be in the room with him, are excluded from the list of his possessions “according to his definition”: “For only those things the whereabouts of which I know well enough to be able to lay hold of them, if necessary, that is the definition I have adopted, to define my possessions” (229).

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And yet the pots “answer to the definition of what is mine, but they are not mine” (231). There is a problem, then, with the definition. However, to adapt a phrase from Company, for Malone, better a charlatan definition than no definition at all.25 The limited certainty which the field of his vinculum-stick surveys offers at least the following features: pencil, exercise-book and the stick itself. But within the compass of this stick, and concomitantly of the definition, there are things which seem to cry out for another definition, and for a vinculum which would enable Malone to perceive clearly the series formed by these objects in their prolongation beyond the boundaries of his room: For I have sufficiently perished in this room to know that some things go out, and others come in, through I know not what agency. And among those that there are some that come back, after a more or less prolonged absence, and others that never come back. With the result that among the things that come in, some are familiar to me, others not (...) I cannot account in any other way for the changing aspect of my possessions. So that, strictly speaking, it is impossible for me to know, from one moment to the next, what is mine and what is not, according to my definition. (230)

Even the relative clarity of the zone surveyed by the stick is obscured by these shadows of dispossession. In place of Ernst’s bobbin-spool, then, Malone has a stick-vinculum with which he plays fort-da.26 However the list of objects sent away and then retrieved does not constitute an index of return of the same as the same: there is an irrevocable supplement of otherness in the revenants. Malone’s Reality Principle—loss of possessions, “difficulty of attribution” (230)—is not, therefore, subordinated to the Pleasure Principle: identity is not established negatively on the basis of a lack. The finale of Malone Dies does not present us, unproblematically, with the “gone” position of the fort-da game. To locate the novel’s emphasis in a moment of resolution such as this would be to reintroduce the spectre of the dialectic.27 However what the Beckett of ‘Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit’ called “the pathetic antithesis possession-poverty” also des25

This reference is to the French edition (1985, 33). The English version offers “deferred hope” in place of espoir charlatan (Beckett 1992, 20). 26 See Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud 1955, 7-64). 27 On the relation between the concept of lack and the dialectic see Deleuze and Guattari (1972/1983, 32-3/25).


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cribes the anti-dialectical vigilance of his fiction (1987, 123). For, the answer provided in Malone to the allied questions of property and propriety, possession and identity is: what happens to the subject does not belong to it, what belongs to it flees it. What occurs comes without ever arriving, since its approach is already multiplied in advance and therefore freighted with the force of abeyance, molecularizing the locus upon which these ‘gifts’ convene. This is a point emphatically brought home in the final lines of the novel where inventory and programme merge in a crystalline moment: the virtual, the possible, inventoried, world of Macmann, merges with the actual—Malone in his role of archivist: or with it or with his hammer or with his fist or in thought in dream I mean never he will never or with his pencil or with his stick or or light I mean never there he will never never anything there any more (264)28

The Unnamable: “fingers in other latitudes” That which is enveloped within the monad, or its equivalent, is there to be developed, what is folded to be unfolded. It is in this respect that one must reconsider briefly Beckett’s reflections on, and differences with, the work of Proust. Here it is not simply a question of peopling (Proust) as against unpeopling (Beckett). In their respective approaches to peopling literature’s plane of immanence-consistency, both Proust and Beckett share an optical imagination at once microand macroscopic. While both operate on the basis of series—Proust with his “séries d’Albertines”, Beckett with his programmes—their approach to resolution differs. Beckett takes what he discerned as the ultimate (albeit accidental) lack of synthesis in the Recherche somewhat further. “If Proust had lived, [he commented] he would have so altered the original writing as to remove all discord and dissension, a beautiful unity of tone and treatment would have, as it were, embalmed the whole”: this is Beckett’s judgement on Proustian synthesis in his 1934 review for the Spectator (Beckett 1984, 64). For, much in 28

For an account of what is at stake in crystalline narration see Deleuze (1989, 82).

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the manner of Leibniz’s system, Proust’s great novel produces the closure and striation required to “reterritorialize” its series (which procedure Deleuze has described in terms of “spider-captures”29) and translate dissonance into accord. In The Unnamable one instance will be encountered of how Beckett furnishes series which by contrast remain in disjunctive relation, across a “smooth” and deterritorialized space. One of the striking characteristics of Malone Dies which resonates with Leibniz’s philosophy, and especially with aspects of his thought emphasised in Deleuze’s treatment, is the extent to which it is concerned with series whether converging or divergent.30 It has already been shown how this concern is evoked in Malone Dies with the narrator’s dual project (inventory and fabulation). Of all of Beckett’s works it is this which most thoroughly delineates a world in which the narrator or protagonist attempts to draw up a “definition”, and thereby to trace and control the series of which s/he forms part. The project is repeated to some extent in The Unnamable. Here, however, the narrative voice is less troubled by the teleological concerns (albeit severely restricted) of its antecedent in the Trilogy: with regard to definition, the unnamable has given up the ghost. After all, even for Malone, the definition is little more than a spectre: the initial distinction made by Malone—between what happens and what belongs—is effectively nullified in the final lines, where inventory and story merge in a kind of revenge of chaos over the order which Malone had thereby hoped to introduce to his world. Having briefly entertained the hope that from them he might salvage something more essential in the way of clear and distinct perception, both what happens and what belongs are reduced to the status of mere “shocks”. What more dulled and reduced perception, after all, than that of the shock of Lemuel’s hatchet resonating in the chaos of the day-trip with Miss Pedal, and in the closing words of the narrator? The starting point of The Unnamable is a comparable and contigu29

For Deleuze, it must be stressed, such reterritorializations are always partial in Proust. See ‘Presence and Function of Madness: The Spider’ in Deleuze (1986a/2000, 205-19/170-82). 30 Omar Calabrese foregrounds seriality as a neo-baroque phenomenon in certain cultural productions of contemporary cultural history. For an outline of different “serialities” in television see Chapter 2 of his Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (Calabrese 1992, 27-46).


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ous chaos. The unnamable’s world, like that of Malone, is the meeting-point of a range of intersecting series. Like Malone, the unnamable attempts to “unfold” elements in its immediate environment, that is: by exercising reason to project himself/itself, through the agency of unfolded elements or monads, and to trace possible series of which he/it may or may not be part. This project can be summarised as the determining of which world(s) his/its is a being-for. Like Malone’s, the unnamable’s “exploration” or unfolding of monads within his/its apparent compass takes the form of a hypothesis: if he/it had a javelin the latter could be thrown against what may or may not be the wall by which the unnamable is confined (or not) in order to establish whether he/it inhabits the “old void or the plenum” (which is the quintessential Leibnizian question). But, in what is certainly an allusion to Malone Dies, for the unnamable “the days of sticks are over” (275). Therefore it is to be concluded that, lacking vincular apparatus, the unnamable’s projective and rational capabilities are more reduced even than those of Malone, who nonetheless was still unable to develop a definition which would adequately account for the changing aspect of his possessions. What both Malone (ultimately) and the unnamable (to begin with) lack is a “differential mechanism of reciprocal determination” capable of producing a system or regime of light to delineate and trace the topography of the spaces they inhabit.31 The “unbending figure of light” characteristic of classical reason is not available to either.32 And yet the unnamable (taking the form of Mahood in this case and thus a gendered pronoun) feels that he has been taught to reason according to such a differential mechanism: in response to his selfaddressed question—how to proceed—he plans: “First I’ll say what I am not, that’s how they taught me to proceed, then what I am” (299). Mahood, then, has a dim memory of the procedure required to “humanise” himself—that is to become a creature of reason sufficient to enable him to ascend to the upper ranks of the hierarchy of being. Mahood/Worm is vaguely cognizant of a “them” who instill in him/it goals of some sort, place obstacles in his/its way, issue instructions 31

Stripped monads lack a “differential mechanism of reciprocal determination to come and select certain of the micro-perceptions (in order) to draw from (them) a clear perception” (Deleuze 1988/1993, 122/92). 32 The quintessential analysis of classical reason remains Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses (Foucault 1966).

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(although perhaps “without pedagogic purpose in view”) and observe him/it, perhaps from the very position of beings possessed of precisely the reason unknown, forgotten or misplaced by Mahood/Worm: it is difficult not to suppose them sustained by some kind of hope. And what is the nature of the change they are on the lookout for...they have no pedagogic purpose in view, that’s definite…let him move, try and move, that’s all they ask, for the moment (...) Then the voice will begin again, low at first, then louder, coming from the quarter they want him to retreat from, to make him think he is pursued and struggle on, towards them. In this way they’ll bring him to the wall, and even to the precise point where they have made other holes through which to pass their arms and seize him (...) But Worm will never know this joy but darkly, being less than a beast, before he is restored, more or less, to the stage in which he was before the beginning of his prehistory. Then they will lay hold of him and gather him into their midst. For if they could make a small hole for the eye, then bigger ones for the arms, they can make one bigger still for the transit of Worm, from darkness to light. (328-29)

This project, to reach a wall and possibly to penetrate it, remains for Worm on a par with Mahood’s plan to launch a javelin at his own imagined boundary: purely hypothetical “since he cannot set himself in motion.” Nor it seems can others set him/it in motion: “he is far, too far for them to reach him even with the longest pole.” For Worm then, as for Mahood, “the days of sticks are over.” Worm will not emerge into the light of reason. That particular regime will remain beyond his/ its reach, and with it the system he/it requires to proceed. The organic body and the body without organs In order to proceed along the path of “humanisation” or ascent to the higher ranks of being (transit through the hole made by “them”), Worm must acquire a particular type of body, specifically the body associated with what is termed his/its “prehistory”. Such a return however will mark not so much a regression (Worm cannot regress much further down the chain of beings) as the endurance of what Leibniz calls the “organic body”, namely: the perseverance, through the passing states of the monad, of the soul. For Leibniz the body is always “organic”, in so far as each living being, from the most debased to the most exalted, is preformed, and contains the imprint within it of what it may become (this of course is another way of explaining the concept of the best of possible worlds). However the anamnesiac (in the Platonic sense) relation which Leib-


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niz requires beings to have with their prehistory can be read under a radically different emphasis. In Leibniz’s “organic body” the passing states lodged there (and which are later to be developed and unfolded) are controlled. The organic body is, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, territorialized. It is not only because of a terminological echo that the concept of the Body without Organs (BwO) as developed in Deleuze and Guattari’s L’AntiŒdipe is of relevance here.33 While the (Leibnizian) organic body is territorialized and subject to an encompassing fold, the BwO is deterritorialized and operates in such a way as to liberate the fold, freeing it of closure. Variations on the body thought of as organised along the lines espoused according to Leibniz’s theory of preformation have reappeared in many contexts. In Mille Plateaux, Deleuze and Guattari develop a particular model to describe the contrast.34 The organed body is one which is centred upon what the authors call a “General”. It generates hierarchies and imposes strictures. The organed body is striated. The domain of its existence is that of one or other of the spatio-temporal reference points in, for example, a monadic assemblage. It is to be located either at point/site A or at point/site B, essentially integral to itself. In this regard the organed body possesses the differential mechanism of reciprocal determination which has been found lacking in Worm/Mahood. Not so the BwO. Here the arborescent model is inoperative. The BwO is, instead, rhizomatic. Between monadic substances, on this model, there operates a system of multiple connection and mutual expression. The result is the creation of a smooth space of nomadic forays, distributions and alli33

Mary Bryden was among the first to pursue the structural affinity of the corps sans organes and Beckett’s “intense” and “molecular” bodies (Bryden 1993). In my view David Watson too readily dismisses Deleuze and Guattari’s position on the work of Beckett (to which they frequently refer and allude in L’Anti-Œdipe) as being based on simply a binary logic. See Watson (1991, 6-7). Elsewhere however Watson does more favourably refer to the potential relevance of the corps sans organes (see 94-6). 34 While the authors make no explicit reference—in this specific regard—to Leibniz’s theory, however, the link seems particularly pertinent. Evidence that the authors would sanction the link comes in Mille Plateaux where they refer to Reimannian space (the reference is to the concept of the manifold [the French translation of which term in mathematics is multiplicité]) as effectuating a move from monadology to nomadology (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 616 n. 26/573-4 n.27). Both Reimannian space and morphogenesis describe dynamic, multiple and fluctuating ensembles which possess characteristics of Leibnizian monadology albeit without preestablished harmony.

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ances as opposed to a striated one of monadic projections, attributions and filiations.35 The rhizomatic BwO exists between rather than at point A and/or B. In Beckett’s earliest fiction there is evidence that he already saw a rhizomatic-rhizomorphic as opposed to an arborescent disposition in his work. Dream of Fair to Middling Women (which remained unpublished until 1992) offers the now famous description: “The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement” (Beckett 1993, 137). This statement also testifies to an affirmative rather than a dialectical use of disjunctive synthesis, a conclusion which one feels strengthened by Beckett’s praise for the (ultimately non-teleological) Proustian approach to synthesis discussed above. The words which Deleuze and Guattari employ to describe the ‘shape’ of the rhizome could be used to describe the contrast between Worm’s own deterritorialized body without organs, the one which simply “goes on”, and the organic body he/it would have to adopt, in accordance with his/its “prehistory”, if he/it were to venture into “their” midst, the one which would “proceed” according to the famous mechanism no longer (or not yet—one is never quite sure with Worm) remembered or practised by Worm: A rhizome doesn’t begin and doesn’t end, but is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation but the rhizome is alliance, exclusively alliance. The tree imposes the verb “to be,” but the rhizome is woven together with conjunctions: “and ... and ... and”. (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 36/25)

This contrast is marked in The Unnamable between the following two descriptions: without an ear I’ll have heard it, and I’ll have said it, without a mouth I’ll have said it, I’ll have said it inside me, then in the same breath outside me, perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I’m neither on one side nor the other, I’m in the middle, I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand 35

As Deleuze and Guattari point out, specifically with regard to the work of Beckett, “projection enters the picture only secondarily” (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983, 15/ 9).


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the mind, and on the other the world, I don’t belong to either (352); would not a little stir suffice, some tiny subsidence or upheaval, that would start things off, the whole fabric would be infected, the ball would start a-rolling, the disturbance would spread to every part, locomotion itself would soon appear, trips properly so-called, business trips, pleasure trips, research expeditions, sabbatical leaves, jaunts and rambles, honeymoons at home and abroad. (353-4)

The first passage is a description of the organless body, the second the organed, preformed body. When Worm is characterised as the tympanum the description is akin not only to the organless body as understood by Artaud and by Deleuze and Guattari but also to what can be identified as a “baroque façade”, that is as a “frontier between the molar and the molecular.”36 This tympanic partition must be thought of as being without depth. However, it is more than a surface: it is a folded surface which of necessity is exempt from localisation. It vibrates, as Mary Bryden suggests, with “the tension of bilateral pressure” (Bryden 1993, 60). For, localisation, as the unnamable knows, is linked to filiation, and therefore to the procedure which will endow him/it with an organed body: “I don’t know how to move, either locally, in relation to myself, or bodily, in relation to the rest of the shit ... I don’t know how to want to, I want to in vain. What doesn’t come to me from me has come to the wrong address.” The folded, indeterminate and obscure zone with which Worm identifies is beyond the sphere of influence of rational projection. It is not subject to the differential mechanism of reciprocal determination: unable to locate himself/itself either inside or out, in the mind or in the world, Worm can only think of himself/itself in the role of the mobile partition as such, the tympanum which receives vibrations, the organless body without locality, without the capacity to cross the threshold into the realm of reason. The second passage describes another of the many hypotheses entertained by Mahood/Worm: this time that he/it acquire the organic body which “they” seem to demand of him/it (‘they’, to all intents and purposes, form a tribunal of reason, a “court which sits in the head”— to which theme the next chapter turns its attention). With a body endowed with mobility he/it would be capable of reciprocal determina36

This is how Deleuze and Guattari describe the BwO. In many respects this conception is linked to the filtering mechanism in Leibniz which facilitates the synthesis of micro- into macroperceptions.

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tion. He/It would then be able to differentiate the “home” from the “abroad”, the inside from the outside, reciprocally, on the basis of their essential difference. Worm would become, in the words of Leibniz, “a little divinity in his own department.” The question however arises, how could this programme of personal and professional development be derived from a mere “tiny subsidence”? Worm, as it happens, is not totally immune to the effects of little stirs and tiny subsidences. As a façade or surface of inscription he/it is the receptor of the vibrations produced by words which “swarm and jostle like ants” (326). Indeed Time itself is not impervious to the receptive powers of Worm: “the seconds pass, one after another jerkily, no flow, they don’t pass, they arrive, bang, bang, bang, they bang into you” (364). What is lacking, however, is the force to gather these indistinct perceptions and to marshal them beyond the threshold which marks the distinction in Leibnizian terms between the possession of mere consciousness and the possession of powers of “apperception”. This (lacking) capacity to synthesize is but one of the requirements of any monad which is to “evolve” beyond the status of the brute or relatively debased monad (and why else is Worm called “Worm”?). A further requirement is that the monad in question possess an “archival” capacity. Finally, the monad with pretensions to “humanity”— that vague and errant goal of Worm—must have the ability to be “reflexive” (the faculty of apperception or self-awareness). “Stripped monads lack a differential mechanism of reciprocal determination to come and select certain of the micro-perceptions (in order) to draw from them a clear perception” (Deleuze 1988/1993, 122/92): this is Deleuze’s description of the synthesis required for the evolution of a given monad. Such synthetic capabilities are not the province of Worm who is alien to what is termed “the blessed pus of reason.” The perceptions to which Worm plays host rarely rise above the status of vibrations, vibrations which for Leibniz would belong to the domain of the body as distinct from the mind: “I only think, if that is the name for this vertiginous panic as of hornets smoked out of their nest, once a certain degree of terror has been exceeded” (322). Such vertigo for Leibniz is the lot of those monads which remain within the stupor from which others by contrast succeed in awakening. However the threshold of terror to which the unnamable refers would only (for Leibniz) qualify a pretender for transit into the animal kingdom. The second evolutionary requirement of monads is that they have an archi-


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val capacity. As Leibniz states in The Principles of Nature and of Grace: When a monad has its organs adjusted in such a way that by means of them the impressions they receive, and consequently the perceptions which represent them, are distinguished and heightened ... this may amount to sensation, that is to say, to a perception accompanied by memory—a perception, to wit, of which a certain echo long remains to make itself heard on occasion. (Leibniz 1979, §4, 196-7)

Without memory, then, synthetic capability would be worthless. Leibniz’s example to illustrate this point is that if one were suddenly to become “king of China”, on condition of forgetting everything concerning the less elevated roles one had previously occupied, it would be equivalent to annihilating one’s previous life and creating an entirely new being.37 Not surprisingly, the example is designed to illustrate a matter of morality: becoming king here is the reward for a certain action—forgetting—but for Leibniz the concepts of reward and punishment (the foundations of his moral system) only function if the rewarded or punished subject remembers who he or she is, in this case what he or she has been. For Leibniz the monad must “subsist” in the individual’s second life. Expressed otherwise: the soul must subsist throughout the passing states through which it moves. Without this anamnesiac (again understood only in Leibniz’s sense) manner of relating, the individual cannot be distinguished in any way which would be meaningful for morality from (the example is Leibniz’s own) the caterpillar, which, in changing into a butterfly, passes through a “thousand transformations”. Such a passage, unaccompanied in the case of the caterpillar by memory or apperception, is for the Leibniz of Discourse on Metaphysics, “morally or practically the same as if it were said to perish” (Leibniz 1979, §34, emphasis mine). Whether or not Worm will awaken from such a stupor depends largely on how he/it develops or not his/its attitude toward his/its “prehistory”. Despite the fact that Worm at one point compares his/its memory to “flypaper” (351) the mechanism which allows him/it to end up Worm rather than Mahood (or indeed, more comically, the generic “Jones”, which is the other possibility entertained) is in fact closer to 37

Following the argument as it is developed in Discourse on Metaphysics (Leibniz 1979, §34).

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the “thousand transformations” of caterpillar to butterfly, or indeed of worm to fly (which is the other example chosen by Leibniz to illustrate metamorphosis without memory), than to the “subsisting monad” which would characterise the individual, this time in the absence of the condition, suddenly taking up the throne of China. Thus Worm declares of his/its former life (as Mahood, whom he/it says he/it “felt a little”): “I felt the cang, the flies, the sawdust under my stumps, the tarpaulin on my skull, when they were mentioned to me. But can that be called life which vanishes when the subject is changed? “(325). Just as Worm’s thinking fails to cross the threshold of reason, his/its sensation is analogously debilitated: he/it lacks the accompaniment of memory. Worm’s archival capacity, then, is severely restricted. Unlike memorising and archival monads, Worm cannot become a little divinity in his/its own department. Although words may “swarm” about him/it, they are “too light to leave a mark” (326), too indistinct to leave a record or an echo “to make itself heard on occasion”. In explaining what he means by “memorising monad”, Leibniz states that “when dogs are shown a stick, they remember the pain which it has caused them in the past, and run away”. One does not have to look very far for Beckett’s equivalent. In Malone Dies, that universe where the days of sticks had not yet expired, Malone reflects: “How great is my debt to sticks, so great that I almost forget the blows they have transferred to me”. For Worm, however, such memory (although incomplete for Malone, memory it remains) would only arise if the “subject” (of conversation) were “mentioned” and would endure only until such time as that subject were to be “changed”. The dog, then, has an archival capacity. While it represents an (evolutionary) advance on, for example, the tick or the leech, its archive is not sufficient to make of it a rational animal. The final requirement for passage to this state is the capacity for reflexivity, as Leibniz states in The Monadology: It is by knowledge of necessary truths and by their abstractions that we are raised to acts of reflection, which make us think of what is called the self, and consider that this or that is within us. And it is thus that in thinking of ourselves, we think of being, of substance, of the simple and the compound, of the immaterial and of God himself, conceiving that what is limited in us, in him is limitless. And these acts of reflection provide the chief object of our reasonings. (Leibniz 1979, §30, 183-4)


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It is not enough to be able to synthesize the infinite number of “small perceptions” (§21, 182) into apperceptions and to accompany this process with memory. If this were to be the case then the differential mechanism which selects those perceptions from the confused amalgam could be common to a range of monads which would include some representatives of the lower ranks of the ‘Kingdom of Nature’. For Leibniz each monad expresses the entire world but only according to its manner or its perspective. As a result, each monad is capable of clearly expressing only its own department. Each department is unique to the monad, the little divinity, at its centre. Likewise the particular degree to which a differential or filtering mechanism is operative belongs to that monad and to that monad alone. Everywhere in nature there are differences of degree for Leibniz. And if no two monads are to be indistinguishable (according to the principle of indiscernibles) then it follows that difference (uniqueness) must be found, ultimately, to rest in degrees of clarity (a principle Deleuze has described in terms of the “remarkable”38). The possession of a clear zone is what comes of having synthesising, memorising and reflexive capacities. The more closed the clear zone, the more perfect the monad, the more aware the monad is that this clear zone is unique to it. It is in this context, of the relation between clarity and reflexivity, that Worm’s statement is to be placed: how I manage, without feeling an ear on my, or a head, or a body, or a soul, how I manage, to do what, how I manage, it’s not clear, dear dear, you say its not clear, something is wanting to make it clear, I’ll seek, what is wanting to make it clear. (356)

Here Worm describes the essential characteristics of the (Leibnizian) body if it is stripped of its synthesizing, memorising and reflexive capacities. What is described, in other words, is the Deleuzoguattarian body without organs. Of course for Leibniz the body does not, strictly speaking, synthesize: rather, it contracts the vibrations which it receives. The act of contraction in the physical domain, however, resembles, mutatis mutandis, that of synthesis in the mind.

38

On the question of the remarkable in Leibniz’s system see Deleuze (1993/1988, 8892/117-121).

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In memory of worms According to Deleuze, Leibniz deduces the body morally. For Leibniz (in Discourse), between the perceptions of the monad and the motions of the body there is pre-established harmony. Perceptions must arise from the monad’s ‘own nature’ in such a way that, of themselves, they correspond to what happens in the whole universe, but more particularly and more perfectly to what happens in the body which is assigned to it. (Leibniz 1979, §33, 42)

More perfectly to what happens in the body? Herein lies Leibniz’s moral deduction of corporeity. The soul expresses the entire world, but only a portion of it clearly, the remainder obscurely. Because there is this obscurity in the soul it requires a body, in order more perfectly to define the clear zone that it has. But the argument is reversible: “I must have a body because there is clarity in me”. Which for the unnamable is the reason “they want me to have a mind where it is known once and for all that I have a pain in the neck” (324), a mind where it is known that this pain belongs to him/it (the unnamable) and to him/it alone. For Worm, however, not alone is there no soul, and no clear zone of expression which could be the exclusive province of that soul, there is no organic body to begin with. There is nothing but a deterritorialized body, dispersed and non-localisable: the “porous and agonising I” spoken of by Blanchot.39 Worm reflects that if an end were put to his/its lack of organs, that is, if his/its body could be reterritorialized, given a locality (in Leibniz’s terms, a department) “that would be an end to the wordy-gurdy,” the emergence of that which is “wanting”: “it would be mine, it could be black dark, I could be motionless and fixed, I’d get to know it, I’d get to remember it, I’d be home” (367). Out of the darkness and obscurity would emerge a clear zone of expression; out of the mass of micro-perceptions could be gathered a selection of macro-perceptions. Worm would thereby become a reflexive animal. Not alone recognizing a department, he/it would recognize himself/itself as divinity in that department. However, as always, these reflections remain, for Worm, hypothetical. The problem is twofold: firstly, “how can I recognize myself who never made my acquaintance,” and secondly, “I feel no place, no place 39

See Blanchot’s essay ‘Ou maintenant? Qui maintenant?’ (Blanchot 1959, 290).


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around me, there’s no end to me, I don’t know what it is, it isn’t flesh, it doesn’t end, it’s like air” (366; 367). This of course is the reverse of what Leibniz requires of the soul and the body (in the Principles of Nature and of Grace), between which there must be a “concord” as well as a “physical union”. This concord however operates in such a way that one is “unable to change the laws of the other” (Leibniz 1979, §3, 196). In short it is the result of what Leibniz identifies as reflexivity. On the basis of such reflexivity Worm should, according to the Monadology, “conceive that what is limited in us, in him (God) is unlimited” (§30, 184). In the absence of such powers of reflexivity Worm persists in the étourdissement or stupor whereby, in Leibniz’s terms, it can “no longer distinguish anything at all” (§21, 182), having no choice but to conceive of itself as unlimited. What is lacking is a conception of finitude which would be concomitant to the reterritorialization and localisation of its body. It has already been suggested that Beckett shares with Leibniz and with Proust a dual ‘optical imagination’ which may be characterised as being trained differentially on visual microperceptions and macroperceptions. The former operates in the obscure zone of metaphysical stupor, while the latter surveys the clear zone of necessary truths and their abstractions. It is a question as always of folds, of viewing microperceptions as folds to be unfolded or developed, and of macroperceptions as re-foldings or envelopments.40 Each microperception is a fold, the result of the inclusion in the monad of a representation of the external world, which by virtue of being “unfolded”, brought from obscurity into clarity, can be refolded in the architectonic domain of macroperceptions (which formulation can be summarised in the dictum: the monad exists only under a force of closure). ‘Microscopic’ scanning can reveal that even in the most miniscule components of bodies there lie other bodies. Leibniz’s example is well known: in the water which lies between fish there swim other fish and so on ad infinitum. However this is not an atomistic conception, but a mechanistic one which concerns a succession of infinitely smaller and smaller “machines”.

40

On the questions of development and envelopment, which Leibniz describes in terms of his “architectonic” see, respectively, The Monadology, §13 and §14.

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Given the apparent “evanescence” of matter in Leibniz, it is hardly surprising that liquid metaphors abound in order to describe it.41 However, to confuse the characteristic of matter—to be reducible to ever-smaller components which would exist in a flux-like state—with an intrinsic evanescence of that matter and its components would be to remain, once more, in a metaphysical stupor, as Leibniz argues in Principles of Nature and of Grace: Just as when I am walking along the shore of the sea and hear the great noise it makes, though I hear the separate sounds of each wave of which the total sound is made up, I do not discriminate them one from the other; so our confused perceptions are the result of the impressions which the whole universe makes on us. (Leibniz 1979, §13, 201)

It is in just such a stupor that Worm remains, constituted as he/it is by that most evanescent of all material, words themselves: I’m in words, others’ words, what others, the place too, the air, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all words, the whole world is here with me, I’m the air, the walls, the walled-in one, everything yields, opens, ebbs, flows, like flakes, meeting, mingling, falling asunder, wherever I go I find me, leave me, go towards me, come from me, nothing ever but me, a particle of me, retrieved, lost, gone astray, I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing. (355-6)

Worm, then, senses the folded quality both of his/its habitat and of his/its body (which are at any rate indistinguishable). Like the monad he/it (Worm) expresses the entire world (“the whole world is here with me”), which is contained or folded within “this dust of words”. He/It even seems capable of developing, of unfolding the microperceptions which the dust constitutes: (with echoes of Heidegger) “everything yields, opens”. “Once launched”, he/it asks, “should I normally not unfold ad infinitum” (290). Moreover, he/it subscribes to a harmonic ordering principle which shares something with Leibniz: in finding resonances of everything within himself/itself, and in finding that he/it resonates elsewhere. However, Worm’s ubiquity is not quite that of the God supposed to perform the function of archivist and programmer in the Monadology, that God of whom “It has been 41

In his phenomenology of “slime”, Sartre has called this the “secret liquid quality in solids” (Sartre 1972, 601).


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very well said that he is like a centre which is everywhere; but his circumference is nowhere, since everything is present to him immediately, without being removed from this centre” (§13, 201). For Worm it is not a question of being here or of being there (of Dasein). As he/it points out, having dismissed (as with all fleeting entertainments of notions which might confirm his/its having become a little divinity, a sovereign self, a “King of China”) the latter possibility: “here is my only elsewhere” (371). In Worm, then, there is no synthesis, that is to say no differential mechanism of reciprocal determination. There is reflexivity, but it is a reflexivity without the closure which Leibniz employs to excise anarchy, replacing it with ‘crowned monads’. Worm is open to the “thousand transformations” of his/its namesake in the kingdom of invertebrates. His/Its habitat, the one he/it cannot himself/itself quite come to people, bereft as he/it is of an organic body, of locale, of memory properly speaking, is the Outside. It is, in the words of Blanchot from L’Espace littéraire (1955), the space of Beginning again, repetition, the fatal return—everything evoked by the experience where estrangement is allied with the strangely familiar, where the irremediable takes the form of an endless repetition, where the same is posed in the vertigo of redoubling, where there is no cognition but only recognition—all this alludes to the initial error which might be expressed as follows: what is first is not beginning but beginning over, and precisely the impossibility of being for the first time. (Blanchot 1982, 243)

A repetition without end “like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts” ad infinitum. It is in his painstaking spirit of antifoundational vigilance that Worm avoids precisely the error spoken of by Blanchot. In search of a first time (which corresponds to Leibnizian anamnesis) Leibniz, in the Monadology finds not only that the organic body was already present before conception, but also that there was a soul in this body ... we can see something of this kind apart from birth, as when worms become flies. (Leibniz 1979, §74, 191, emphasis mine)

Entertaining a similar concept of preformation (but different conclusions), Artaud offers the image of an “egg”: “in each one, a limpid but inhuman teeming goes on, the stratifications of an arrested

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universe” (Artaud 1968, 57).42 Deleuze and Guattari’s development of this description is the following: The BwO is like the cosmic egg, the giant molecule swarming with worms, bacilli, lilliputian figures, animalcules and homunculi, with their organization and their machines, minute strings, ropes, teeth, fingernails, levers, pulleys, catapults. (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983, 334/281)

Having already entertained an image of him/itself in terms of the egg (279), Worm offers his/its own theory, as it were, of worms (corresponding to the adapted model of anamnesis as outlined above): And yet I have memories, I remember Worm, that is to say I have retained the name, and the other ... Mahood, I don’t see him anymore, I don’t know how he lived any more, he isn’t there any more, he was never there in his jar, I never saw him, and yet I remember, I remember having talked about him, the same words recur and they are our memories. It is I invented him, not knowing what I was doing, not one is of me. (364)

The “joy” of having an organic body, and of thereby possessing a locale and, consequently, reasoning and reflective powers will never be known to Worm but darkly, since he/it is “less than a beast”. He/It will not emerge into the light of this “joyous” state until such time as “he is restored, more or less, to that state in which he was before the beginning of his prehistory” (329).43 However the rhizomatic lines of flight which open as Worm peers into this prehistory offer the following fugal suite: the empty present of his/its history/story; prior to that a prehistory and prior to that again a time before the beginning of that prehistory. “a succession of local phenomena all my life ... but my fingers too write in other latitudes”: in this withdrawal of origin, in its vertigo of dédoublement, lies Worm’s affirmation that there was, after all, “no first time,” that is to say no first-inscribed time to which memory can gain access. This affirmation places invisible but very audible parentheses round the final words of The Unnamable: “I’ll go on.” 42

The original is to be found in L’Olimbic des limbes: “dans chaque cellule un oeuf est né tout à coup. Il y a dans chacune un fourmillement inhumain mais limpide, les stratifications d’un univers arrêté” (Artaud 1956, 65). 43 The narrative voice being no longer able to occupy the same place as its referent, the gendered third person pronoun is restored.

4. Matter, Judgement and Immanence in How It Is

To inventory and to foresee, such is the practical goal proposed by Leibniz the jurist for whom the ideal always was: progress in justice and in order. (Yvon Belaval, Études leibniziennes) What mode of being is symbolised by the slimy? (Sartre, Being and Nothingness) We have no cause to complain of sands and marshes, since there are so many places still remaining to be cultivated. (Leibniz, Theodicy) Reason is synthetic—a conjunction—a meeting of the Greek milieu and the plane of immanence. (Deleuze and Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?)

An enduring orthodoxy in Beckett criticism—one with certain admittedly unorthodox adherents—declares Comment c’est, which Beckett wrote between 1958 and 1960, to be a turning point in Beckett’s career. H. Porter Abbott is among the few explicitly to reject this convenient chronological taxonomy. For Abbott the turning point is already reached in Texts for Nothing of which How It Is should be considered the companion rather than the rival which dispatches it to the category of the pre-turn corpus. Deleuze, however, conforms to the pre- and post-How It Is distinction. For the Deleuze of his essay ‘L’Épuisé’, How It Is is the first occasion on which Beckett employs what he dubs Language III. Language III concerns the ‘image’, which

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Deleuze finds exemplified in the scraps delivered to the crawling protagonist of the novel. The image, Deleuze argues in a Bergsonian vein, is not a representation of an object; rather it is “a movement in the world of the mind. The image is the spiritual life, the life above” (Deleuze 1992/1998, 96/169). The context in which Deleuze makes his statements on How It Is is an essay the main concern of which— the piece is a postface to a volume of Beckett’s work—is to account for the specificity of the television plays collected in French as Quad. This context is important in any consideration of the claims which Deleuze makes for the rest of the corpus. In this regard it is worth considering whether there are two perhaps contradictory statements about How It Is at work in the essay. When Deleuze straightforwardly ascribes a spiritual dimension to the image and to the life above he appears to be in tension with his own description of how the image works in Beckett elsewhere in the essay: The image is not defined by the sublimity of its content but by its form, that is, by its ‘internal tension’, or by the force it mobilises to create a void or to bore holes, to loosen the grip of words, to dry up the oozing of voices, so as to free itself from memory and reason: a small, alogical, anmesiac, and almost aphasiac image, sometimes standing in the void, sometimes shivering in the open. The image is not an object but a process. (Deleuze 1992/1998, 72/159)

This is a description of Beckett’s writing as filtered through the ambition stated in the German Letter of 1937 and articulated in fiction in Dream of Fair to Middling Women which, it has to be said, sits a little awkwardly with the equation of the image with a spiritual supplement—if it is regarded as a supplement. The fact is, however, that the Bergsonian insight implicitly informing the discussion of the image in Beckett, would not construe the image as a (transcendent) spiritual supplement. As Keith Ansell Pearson has demonstrated, if Deleuze takes from Bergson the “unorthodox conception of matter as an aggregate of images” (Ansell Pearson 2001, 142), he also departs from Bergson in his positing of the reservoir of virtuality which this latter conception entails not as durée, but rather as a “becoming of the infinite at any moment” (Ansell Pearson, 151). Ludovic Janvier, writing in 1976, had already emphasised the manner in which How It Is entails an escape from the closure that vestigially besets the Trilogy:

Matter, Judgement and Immanence in How It Is

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monadic ... the texts of the trilogy enclosed the being without windows. To renew (one’s) errancy here [in How It Is] is to free oneself of that reflexive folding from which not even the errant Molloy escapes: there is an ambulative deployment/unfolding (déploiement) which will never (re-)close the loop (boucle). (Janvier 1976, 202)1

Memory and reason are the names given by Deleuze to the vestiges in question, while his ‘process’ is the equivalent of Janvier’s “ambulative unfolding”. That Beckett chose to locate his protagonist in the mud is a decision not without its intertextual echoes. The literary resonances have been thoroughly documented, with the seventh Canto of The Inferno, and Paradise Lost being clear influences. Less explored are the resonances of philosophical texts, though Sartre is frequently mentioned in this context (see, for example, Adelman 2001). One of the philosophical intertexts which might profitably be explored in this regard, therefore, is Sartre’s Being and Nothingness with its phenomenology of slime. Sartre says of the slimy [le visqueux]: it manifests to us a being which is everywhere fleeing and yet everywhere similar to itself which on all sides escapes yet on which one can float, a being without danger and without memory which eternally is changed into itself, on which one leaves no mark and which could not leave a mark on us, a being which slides and on which one can slide which can be possessed by something sliding…, and which can never possess because it rolls over us. (Sartre 1972, 607)2

The enduring place maintained in Sartre’s philosophical system for an anchored consciousness, however, seems fundamentally incompatible with Beckettian materialism and immanence.3 Numerous other accounts have elaborated other philosophical intertexts. Notably, as far as the present chapter is concerned, Alain Badiou has characterised the novel as having specifically Greek philosophical concerns (Badiou 2003, 47), while Brian Duffy has established evidence of parallels between The Unnamable and Plato’s 1

Cf. Bersani and Dutoit for whom “The Unnamable is a work that seems to believe in the ontology that it also mocks” (Bersani and Dutoit 1993, 51). 2 See Butler (1984, 74-113) for an extended discussion of parallels between Sartre and Beckett. 3 The most important statement on Sartre in relation to Deleuze is by Boundas (1993) while in Beckett scholarship Butler is more sanguine than I am about the affinity of Beckett and the author of Being and Nothingness (Butler 1984, chapter 3).

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myth of the cave as explored in The Republic (Duffy 1998). The image of thought and the tribunal of reason When Deleuze writes of how the image is just an image, he suggests in embryo a possible reading of How It Is which would expand upon the preliminary statements made in ‘L’Épuisé’ and link it to a key concern in the thought of Deleuze in particular, namely judgement. Moreover, this link would draw one into contact with his idea of the image of thought. Comment c’est, the French title of the book Beckett would translate as How It Is, blends together a question/answer of/to Being/being(s) and one of beginnings (the latter notion amply illustrated in Abbott’s discussion).4 In this sense the novel is about philosophical beginnings as much as literary beginnings and repetitions (Abbott 1996). For Deleuze philosophy begins when it pretends to have no presuppositions. However philosophy always conceals an implicit presupposition whereby the thinker, in imagining themselves as beginning with a natural knowledge, as opposed to a conceptual knowledge, in claiming lack of presupposition, in fact presupposed this alleged natural state (Deleuze 1968/1994, 129/169). One of the central tenets upheld by Leibniz, as the last chapter has shown, is that there exists a threshold which once successfully crossed by a monad imbues it with the ability to exercise reason. Undoubtedly one of the abiding concerns of Beckett’s work has been the examination of that threshold, or at least a rewriting of the problematic which its posing within the philosophical tradition establishes. Beckett’s work can be said to practise what will be referred to below as a vigilance the domain for the exercise of which is this threshold. In certain respects, Krapp’s Last Tape presents one with an “architecture” of such vigilance. Krapp can be seen as a version of Leibniz’s binary God, programming and surveying a past and present to which he appears to have immediate access. By contrast, however, as this chapter will argue, How It Is yields a vision of the anti-, or at least 4

Jonathan Boulter’s Heideggerian reading of the novel interprets the final ‘how it is’ as suggesting that “more than instantiations of the treadmill of Dasein, [it] recomposes the beginnings of the narrator as the beginning of Being and thus as the beginning of signification” (Boulter 2001, 123). His impressive study reads the vertical intrusions from the life above in terms of alētheia (112). The reading in the present chapter offers a quite different set of conclusions.


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post-archival “subject” whose thought and practice have decidedly more problematic status.5 Krapp and the larval creature of How It Is are here conceived of as types of witness. Certainly, the eschatological (not to mention scatalogical) moment evoked in its title by Krapp’s Last Tape indicates that Krapp provides a testimony, in the form of his tapes, before a tribunal presided over by Krapp himself in the dual roles of final arbiter and last archivist.6 Judging from the apparatus, at once ontological and juridical, operative in Krapp it may be concluded that, to quote Jean Baudrillard, “le rêve d’une conductibilité absolue [de l’information] ne peut être qu’excrémentiel” (Baudrillard 1985, 145).7 But How It Is presents a very different type of witness before a very different type of tribunal. In some ways it collapses the architecture of Krapp’s Last Tape, and presents the scatological eschatology as a flux unvisited (except vestigially in the manner of a séance) by lines perpendicular to its plane and plain of mud. In its ‘sewer’ How It Is posits the existence of a creature or an individual whose role it is to bear witness to that which resists or itself thwarts that act of inscription or recording. In this way How It Is serves to decimate the residual architectonics and the tribunal presiding over that which endures, albeit falteringly, in the play first performed two years prior to the French publication. The idea of a vigilance at a threshold beyond which one can be said to be rational receives its most complete formulation in The Unnamable, with its evocation of a resilient Worm struggling against the “them” associated with “the blessed pus of reason”. Reason or rationality is the “honour” conferred upon the subject when permitted to become an enunciative centre. Analogously, for Deleuze and Guattari, it is what happens when philosophy’s plane of immanence is subjugated to the operations of transcendence. This procedure has been activated in sundry ways by many philosophers, notably by Descartes in his Cogito, Leibniz in his positing of the monad as intellectual mirror, Pascal in his “warm nothingness” which still allows a privileged place for the subject, Kant in his synthetic unity at the level of 5

The distinction between arborescent and rhizomatic is borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1988). 6 Cf. Deleuze’s comment on the register (cadastre) and courtroom construed by Kant in Différence et répétition (Deleuze 1968/1994, 179/137). 7 Tr.: “the dream of an absolute conductibility [of information] can only be excremental.”

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the subject, Hegel in the Transcendental Ego,8 and Heidegger by his adherence to the model of alētheia.9 In terms of his approach to the “pus” (of excremental memory) it seems that after Krapp’s Last Tape Beckett had achieved a provisional exhaustion. In The Unnamable, the convening locus which it is possible to designate as ‘the unnamable’ goes through all the possibilities of existence—those offered by Murphy and company—the better to end up Worm, or to sustain a state of inhumanity. Worm is a creature deprived of synthesizing capability, Beckett’s monade nue.10 In Krapp’s Last Tape the protagonist allows a sequence of virtual or possible worlds to unfold, which he then rejects (or ‘excretes’) the better to remain what he is—the last archival subject. The two works, then, present contrasting results to similar procedures wherein the lifeform/subject or its avatar in abeyance must pass through or unfold possible worlds. However, while through a violent resolution Krapp neutralises (or counter-actualises) his past (his virtual or “dark precursors”11), in The Unnamable Worm resists the similarly violent resolution attempted upon him/it by “them” (that is, by representatives of the Tribunal of Reason). If much of Beckett’s work can be read on one level in terms of a conflict between tormentors and victims (and it is important that such a narrative not be construed simply as one to enable the reclaiming of that work as testifying to the difficulties of the “human condition”) then it is in How It Is that this conflict is most complex.12 The trib8

A principle summarised in the following terms: “extract from rival opinions suprascientific propositions, able to move, contemplate, reflect and communicate in themselves and in the absolute” (Deleuze & Guattari 1991/1994, 77/80). 9 On Leibniz see Chapter 3 above, on Kant see chapter 6 below, on Heidegger see Chapter 5 below. 10 The term monade nue here refers to one tier in Leibniz’s hierarchy of Being. ‘Naked’ or ‘degenerate’ monads lie at the lowest level while God, the divine architect, occupies the position of highest elevation, with other monads, such as the human mind being situated somewhere in between. 11 From Différence et répétition (1968): “Each faculty, including thought, has only involuntary adventures…the point of departure—namely, sensibility in the encounter with that which forces sensation—presupposes neither affinity nor predestination…The dark precursor [sombre précurseur] is sufficient to enable communication between difference as such, and to make the different communicate with difference: the dark precursor is not a friend” (Deleuze 1968/1994, 189/145). 12 On the juridical framework in Beckett see Tyrus Miller’s essay on Beckett’s “political technology” (Miller 2000).


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unal and, loosely speaking, the juridical framework of course also have a long history in the work of Beckett. The pursuit of the protagonist by the marionettes of Murphy and the research presentation made by Louit concerning Mr. Nackyball in Watt before the university committee suggest an interest in the framework of ‘justice’ prior to the more explicitly “political technology” (to use Tyrus Miller’s phrase) of several of the later works. The Unnamable, which the previous chapter has discussed, moves progressively toward the hypothetical juridical locus of the suspended (or abeyant) narrator/protagonist with its photograph and file (“no convictions” [Beckett 1979, 377]). In Leibniz, existence itself is the tribunal with humanity playing the role of advocate.13 Here even the damned—indirectly but necessarily—testify to the existence of God: the obscurity which they visit upon the world has the result of increasing the clarity elsewhere. While not dispensing judgement directly, since this is not required, God, in having willed an All that exists (including the damned), by programming a morality of chiaroscuro, in fact installs a perpetual Tribunal. God is not quite the judge in Leibniz’s system, since he has, effectively, willed existence. However his tribunal still succeeds in traversing the whole of existence. By coinciding with each spatiotemporal instantiation of the latter, God is the condition of possibility of each such instantiation. He has ruled in advance on the basis of the principle of the best. The convergence of series or the resolution of conflicts is programmed in advance. For this reason monads are often compared to automata (and by Deleuze to schizophrenic automata). Automatism is one of the themes of How It Is, with the narrator’s frequent reminders: “that’s not how I am told this time”. The narrator of How It Is repeatedly describes the role played by a formative, controlling input deriving from the life above which, in pronouncing, wills the larval creature into existence, gives shape to it, and imbues it with scraps of life. This amounts to a regulatory schema which is coextensive with the system of justice operative on the plane of the mud. A programming function is associated with what is called “the life above”: it is from this source (which is also the source of the voice which “tells”) that the larval creature of How It Is gets its “scraps of 13

Deleuze develops this point further in Le Pli. See Deleuze (1988/1993, 92-4/68-9). The second parenthetical page reference in all citations of this book are to Tom Conley’s English translation. Translations themselves, unless otherwise stated, are my own.

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life”. Meanwhile, below in the mud, both the movements and actions of its inhabitants appear to be regulated and calibrated in the manner of automata: at the instant I reach Pim another reaches Bem we are regulated thus our justice wills it thus fifty thousand couples again at the same instant the same everywhere with the same space between them it’s mathematical it’s our justice in this muck where all is identical our ways and way of faring right leg right arm push pull. (121)

In a structural relation along the lines laid out in Plato’s Timaeus, the mud (including its inhabitants) in this formulation at least is an amorphous plane which is imprinted, ordered and shaped by way of an application of principles originating “above”.14 How It Is begins by positing the existence of an archive or a programme (the dual possibility is important, as shall soon become evident) as the source of a voice to which the narrator must respond by repetition: “I say it as I hear it (...) an ancient voice in me not mine (...) recorded none the less ... someone listening another noting (...) more or less I learn it I quote” (7). The narrator exists only at the expense of an ongoing obligation, and this obligation is precisely to be “told” or narrated. The narrator is addressed by a voice which places him under an obligation, and this obligation is to become himself an addressor (the chain of victim-tormentor which will reappear later in the novel here makes an early appearance). But the manner in which the task of addressing is approached in the mud is not the same as the manner in which it is undertaken in the light. There in the mud, in the midst of what is at one point described as “the primeval impenetrable dark”, things are ill-seen and ill-heard (which theme of perceptual opacity or ‘murk’ is explored in detail in Beckett’s Ill Seen, Ill Said, The Lost Ones and Worstward Ho), the result being not the resolution associated with the synthesising and archival functions of the life above but rather with the discord resistant to synthesis associated with what Deleuze has called the affirmative use of la synthèse disjonctive.15 14

“We should think of the most authoritative part of our soul as a guardian spirit given by god, living in the summit of the body, which can properly be said to lift us from the earth towards our home in heaven” (Plato 1971, 119). 15 For Deleuze's discussion of disjunctive synthesis (also known as the disjunctive syllogism) in both its affirmative and nihilistic guises see Deleuze (1969/1990, 2027/174-6) and Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1983, 89-90/75-80).


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Life above: “the humanities I had” Reference is made throughout the novel to an anterior life lead above in the light. It is during the course of this life that there have been, inter alia, a wife, mother, father, geography, history—in short sundry “humanities”. But the narrator lacks memory, as the text reports: “I haven’t been given memories this time” (11). The narrative voice describes itself as having been “marked”, like Worm in this respect, in some fashion by this previous life (the preformed organic one of its prehistory) but lacks the necessary support to store the information in question: it’s not said where on earth I received my education acquired my notions of mathematics astronomy and even physics they have marked me that’s the main thing (45, emphasis mine)16

The narrator merely reports matters in line with the audited version and repeats the voice’s claim that indeed there has been an experience of a life above. Under the force of this dictating voice, the narrator must undertake the formative activities of the fledgling subject. By contrast to the “them” of The Unnamable, here “they” do seem to have “pedagogic purpose in view”. The enunciating subject is under obligation to tell how it was before Pim, with Pim and how it is after Pim. Furthermore, part of the pedagogic exercise is to learn how to reason (again the echoes of The Unnamable are noteworthy), presumably in order that the narrator be permitted to return to a putative anterior state, and to cross once more the threshold (of reason, of being). So it is that the novel performs a parodic inscription of dialectical method: thesis, antithesis and synthesis.17 This trinitarian structure is also suggested by the requirement that “how it is” be told in three parts—the first marked by a solitude, the second by a conflict and the third by a resolution of that conflict. The progress of the fledgling subject is monitored. If all of its actions are ‘dictated’, the actions which result from this remote-control16

Sartre says of the slimy: “it manifests to us a being which is everywhere fleeing and yet everywhere similar to itself ... a being without danger or memory ... on which one leaves no mark and which could not leave a mark on us” (Sartre 1972, 607). At this point of the novel the slime-worm attributes to itself archival and receptive powers which elsewhere are called into question. 17 For H. Porter Abbott How It Is is, by contrast to the Trilogy, expressly lacking in directedness, a change prepared for by Texts for Nothing.

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ling are in turn registered. The creature is both a recording of that which is dictated (words into action) and that which causes a recording in turn of those dictated actions (including any verbal articulation). If the creature is merely the outcome of utterance and has no status independent of this, then its actions are likewise produced by the voiced injunction. Actions in the mud, on one level, are no more than responses to commands, while, paradoxically, on another level, they are somehow in excess of what the dictating voice ordains. This is suggested by the description of “one bending over me noting down one word every three” (95, emphasis added). Early in the novel, despite doubts (which will recur) to the contrary, the narrator refuses to believe “that no one will ever come again and shine his light on me and nothing again of other days other nights” (16). However, the narrator’s belief that he/it is, as it were, remote-controlled by a voice is far from constant. Occasionally he/it feels himself/itself to be the only voice, or the “sole elect” in the domain of utterance, as when he/it contemplates the prospect of an interrogation (or trial) “under the ideal observer’s lamps” (105). Such moments could in some ways indicate his/its progress towards the threshold of reason. If, however, he/it were to remain in this state of perspicacity, being addressed by a voice, becoming in turn an addressor but forgetting the fact that he/it has himself/itself been initially the destination of an address, the narrator would be nothing other than the advocate or defence attorney for those above. In Leibniz’s terms he/it would behave as a rational creature. The “pedagogic aims” would be achieved and he/it could return to his/its anterior state: he/it would, as it were, “speak his own mind”. The first section of the novel explores this possibility—involving a particular mode of forgetfulness (a forgetfulness of what Lyotard calls the “addressee instance” [Lyotard 1988])—of (re-) becoming a subject. When he/it feels under the obligation to privilege the life above as either a founding principle or as a goal to which he/it must aspire— as at the outset—the narrated narrator is optimistic. But the optimism persists only on the condition that he/it subjugates his/its role as addressee to that of addressor. The only way to achieve such a feat is to believe in the life above, in other words already to ascribe to that life a foundational role. that’s the speech I’ve been given part one before Pim question do I use it freely it’s not said or I don’t hear it’s one or the other all I hear is that a witness I’d need


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a witness. (19, emphasis mine)

If a witness from the life above could be relied upon, the life below could be modeled by the application of principles of transcendence. It could be rehabilitated in a sense (since there would be proof and the possibility of verification). Such an observer, it is later stated, “would need good eyes the witness if there were a witness good eyes a good lamp he would have them” (50). Notwithstanding the fact that the narrator’s belief in the existence of this witness is far from constant, when under the sway of the life above, for the narrator, that witness not only exists but has a companion and an archiving apparatus: he lives bent over me that’s the life he has been given all my visible surface bathing in the light of his lamps when I go he follows me bent in two his aide sits a little aloof he announces brief movements of the lower face the aid enters it in his ledger (19-20)

The life above, on this model, contains the two elements of the archive as analysed by Michel Foucault: a system of light for visibilities and a discursive system for énoncés. However, without the necessary vigilance, these visibilities and énoncés can be subsumed under the categories respectively of things and words. The imperative which it implies could be described in these terms: become a narrator while simultaneously forgetting that you yourself have been narrated, and thereby make your headway crawling towards that threshold of reason. It is in precisely such a context that the following retrospective account must be placed: the morale at the outset before things got out of hand satisfactory ah the soul I had in those days the equanimity that’s why they gave me a companion. (27)

Neither witness nor scribe, the companion identified here is Pim, towards whom the narrator journeys according to a “direction imparted by chance or necessity” (45). The wavering here, precisely between the alternatives of chance and necessity, is a further instance of the narrator’s uncertainty as to whether he/it alone speaks or is spoken (to) by another. But it is generally true of How It Is that in the first part—before Pim—the optimism associated with the outset or with the

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setting-out, the optimism of “the old days”, prevails: the “marks” of his/its “humanities” generally suffice to orient the narrator according to the perceived demands of an anterior and possibly a future life in the light. Such optimism is evident in remarks such as “humanity regained”; “can’t have deviated more than a second or so from the direction imparted to me one day one night at the inconceivable outset” (45); “I’ll fall asleep within humanity again just barely” (50). Whether or not the narrator might as easily place his/its existence before his/its essence as the reverse, the first part—before Pim—sees him/it clinging, albeit apologetically, Latin or no Latin, to the antique species: part one before Pim the golden age the good moments the losses of species I was young I clung on to the species we’re talking of the species the human (52)18

A Greek coupling: “thus our life in common begins” In the first part, before Pim, the narrator charts the mud in the manner of the ‘quantity surveyor’ evoked in Plato’s Phaedo: Nothing worth mentioning grows in the sea; nothing, one might say, that is fully developed, but there are caves and sand and endless slime and mud wherever there is earth, not comparable in any way with the beauties of our region. So those things above are in their turn far superior to the things we know. (Plato 1990, 106)

As in the Phaedo, the “primeval impenetrable dark” of this mud and the unformed larval nature of its inhabitant do not seem, as has been shown, to preclude the domination of an upward orientation, with the links therein to a time and site of synthesis (the life above), and to the belief that in “part three [after thesis and antithesis] it’s there I have my life.”19 Part one, then, comprises the “travelling days”, the exploration of the horizontal domain of the mud, and the tracing of a path within that mud. The path may be labyrinthine, or, in accordance with “wormy” logic, from west to east, or indeed entirely fugal and not oriented to18

The status of the narrator’s “humanities” is somewhat confused: occasionally he has “flashes of geography” while at other times he is bereft of geographical resources (there is much ado about resources in How It Is: see for example 30-31). Of one humanities subject however, he retains certainty: he has without doubt lost his Latin. 19 For Abbott, How It Is presents an upended Platonism.


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ward a destination. Part two, with Pim, is, however, a sedentary time. It also furthers the attachment to the antique species (humanity or the community of rational beings) with which part one ends. Here, in part two, the narrator enters what can be termed a ‘Greek’ phase, specifically the Greece of Plato and of Socrates: in part two the travelling days are over and it is time to sit down, if not in the marketplace favoured by the latter pseudocouple, then in the equivalent of that venue in the mud. For are we not indeed, in part two, in the world of coupling and, therefore, of dialogue?20 Several questions suggest themselves: What qualifies the narrator to adopt the Socratic role? Nostalgia for his/its antique state? Platonic reminiscence? Remnants of a programme learnt in the life above? The slime-worm begins the time of part two with Socratic panache, that is in educating its opponent by means of superior reason; although here, Socratic irony has been replaced by a tin-opener, the sharp end of which is applied to the interlocutor’s buttock with a view to procuring from him/it a scream, the latter to be silenced by a blow to the head.21 In reducing Platonic dialogue to the exchange of brute acts of violence How It Is can be said to reveal the image of thought which underpins Platonism itself.22 As Duffy has demonstrated, the link between truth-seeking and coercion which is amply exemplified in Plato’s dialogues finds a distinct echo in the Worm section of The Unnamable.23 But How It Is in fact inverts Platonism (a point also made by Abbott, 1996). The violence of the encounter is not in How It Is preceded by Socratic irony, which in Plato, according to Deleuze, at once provokes, gives rise to (suscite) and organises it (the encounter) (Deleuze 1986a/2000, 101/123). The abstract architecture of How It Is, in collapsing the life above (the transcendent) into the life below, can be said to characterise 20

Derrida’s extended discussion of Plato and Socrates as a kind of pseudo-couple in La Carte postale may be mentioned in this context (Derrida 1987). 21 On the education of the philosopher see Plato, The Republic, Part VIII, 'The Education of the Philosopher’ (Plato 1974). 22 For Deleuze Proust is a Platonist because he presents an image of thought under the sign of encounters and acts of violence: “The sensible sign does us violence: it mobilises the memory, it sets the soul in motion; but the soul in its turn excites thought, transmits to it the constraint of the sensibility, forces it to conceive essence, as the only thing that must be conceived” (Deleuze 1986a/2000, 123/101). 23 Indeed Duffy quotes du Bois’ Torture and Truth in support of his link between coercion and the Platonic dialogue. See Duffy (1998, 65-6).

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Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze & Guattari du transcendantal comme extra-être subsistant à la surface des choses, pure virtualité qui aura à s’actualiser dans la sphère de l’effectivité, sans jamais pourtant que celle-ci ne parvienne à l’épuiser totalement: il faut penser le monde à partir d’un potentiel qui le déborde et l’excède, sans pour autant exister en dehors, comme sa propre limite ou la réserve obscure dont il tire sa force. (Buydens 1990, 14) [the transcendental as extra-being subsisting on the surface of things, a pure virtuality which would actualise itself in the sphere of actuality, without however ever leading the latter to be completely exhausted: it is necessary to think the world on the basis of a potential which overflows and exceeds it, without for all that existing outside, as its own limit or the obscure reserve from which it takes its force.]

Extra-Being, as Ansell Pearson has shown, “is not a transcendence of, or supplement to, Being, but denotes a becoming of Being in its very virtuality” (Ansell Pearson 2001, 153). The manner in which these aspects of How It Is elicit the interest of the philosopher or enter into a mutually contaminating association with philosophy (Bennington 2000) relates to the link explored in brief in Chapter 1 of the present study, but which is now addressed from a specific point of view, that of judgement. The problematics of form and the problematics of judgement are articulated together in How It Is. In Plato’s Phaedo the terrain which cannot be judged to have anything of beauty according to our standards is the irrecuperable remnant that is base matter. The uncultivatable, the ‘abject sublime’, is, however, still judged, but by virtue of an exclusion. On the foundations—as Deleuze shows with respect to another exclusion (that of the simulacra)—of this exclusion, our standards find themselves installed, the imitations of the world above.24 It is not until Kant, in Deleuze’s view, that the conceptual persona of the judge is elevated to the extent that it stands in for the philosopher while the courtroom does the same for philosophy. Immanence, a life Like so much of the theoretical apparatus developed by Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of the plane of immanence is in some ways interchangeable, mutatis mutandis, with others. Among these others can be placed, inter alia, the Body without Organs, smooth space, the 24

On ‘The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy’ see Deleuze (1969/1990, 292324/253-79).


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rhizome and nomadology. By contrast to the installation of a courtroom across philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari advocate an immanence which is not susceptible to the tribunal of reason—theirs is what has been described above as a collapsed architectonic.25 While Deleuze’s chapter on the image of thought in Différence et répétition contains in embryo such a commitment to immanence in philosophy and as a principle upon which philosophy is practised, it is in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? that the role of the plane of immanence in such a context is fully developed. The plane of immanence as it is described at length in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? is “not a concept, nor the concept of all concepts”. It is an abstract plane, “neither surface nor volume,” which concepts come to ‘populate’. The plane of immanence is composed of “diagrammatic traits”, while the concepts that come to people it are “intensive traits”. Concepts are the mouldings, cuttings and foldings which at once take place upon and constitute the plane (it is to concepts that the plane owes its “consistency”). The plane is an example of a “smooth space” as understood by the composer Pierre Boulez; it is “occupied without counting” and is not susceptible to temporal synthesis or resolution (Boulez 1963, 107). The plane of immanence is as old as philosophy, as old then as the Greek figure of the friend/rival, the interlocutor of the Platonic dialogue. And yet this ancient figure (the plane of immanence) is new to philosophy, a coinage of the authors of L’Anti-Œdipe. Writing in 1988, Robert Maggiori is therefore correct in his assertion: Deleuze and Guattari’s book is not assimilable by philosophy today. For, if it were assimilated; that is, if the concepts it manufactures and employs entered into resonance with the plane whereon is inscribed the history of philosophy, philosophy would no longer have the same history or face by which it is recognized. (Maggiori 1988, 19, my trans.)26

In short, the coinage “plane of immanence”, along with the others in 25

Crawford, in a study of the poetry of William Carlos Williams, echoes this point: the “abstract machine does not provide a passage to pure universals, abstracted from the detritus of the material world…but instead is a drawing together of the strata so strenuously divided by rational thought” (Crawford 2000, 61). 26 Cf. the comment by François Châtelet writing in La Quinzaine littéraire in 1972: “What strikes me as important here is the eruption of such a text among books of philosophy…Anti-Oedipus smashes everything” (in Deleuze 2004, 220).

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the book in question, implies a new way of reading the key texts of philosophy. The plane—which by definition is “unthinkable”—must be thought of, Deleuze and Guattari argue, as feuilleté, as composed of a multiplicity of sheets or layers.27 Concepts, then, are intensive zones existing on one or “across” several of these sheets. Hence a new temporality inadmissible to the “masters” of the history of philosophy: “philosophical time is ... a grandiose time of coexistence, which does not exclude the before and the after, but superimposes them in a stratigraphic order (Deleuze & Guattari 1991/1994, 59/58). The lives of the philosophers still succeed each other according to chronology. However the same cannot be said of concepts. The plane of immanence, and the approach to the matter of philosophy that it requires, leads one to speak of the co-existence of planes rather than of the succession of systems (Deleuze & Guattari 1991/1994, 59/59). The plane of immanence is the ground of philosophy, and yet it does not consist of a “programme, design, goal or means.” It is the abstract plane where philosophy “happens”, and in this sense it is “pre-philosophical”. But this is not to say that the plane of immanence has always been treated in this way. On the contrary: “abuse” of the plane of immanence has led to all sorts of injustice, so to speak, in the realm of philosophy. The “enemy” of the correct use of the plane of immanence is, for Deleuze and Guattari, transcendence. And it is precisely the innumerable attempts to salvage the latter that have dogged philosophy ever since the Greeks, and which, as it transpires, have left it incapable (in Maggiori’s view) of assimilating Deleuze and Guattari’s book. Salvaging transcendence The “modern manner” of saving transcendence begins with Kant. Spinoza, however, remains the exemplary figure in resisting the lure: he is, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, perhaps the only philosopher entirely to avoid compromise with transcendence (Deleuze & Guattari 1991/1994, 49/48). The problem begins, as much for Kant, as for Plato, each time immanence is interpreted as immanent to something. 27

The folded ensembles which, at the time of the publication of Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?, Deleuze had recently attributed to Leibniz here make an appearance, which fact throws a retrospective light on the place of the book on Leibniz in the context of Deleuze's œuvre, with and without Guattari.


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This move is the result of a confusion of the plane of immanence and the concept (say, the subject as being that to which immanence is immanent) which gives the plane its consistency. The end-product for the authors is the “re-launching of transcendence” (47/45). The plane of immanence is in a continual state of flux. It has only absolute and not relative horizons. Relative horizons would recede upon the approach of a subject, thereby forming that subject to some degree. On the plane of immanence, by contrast: each movement crosses the entire plane in making an immediate return upon/to itself; and in folding upon itself, but also in folding others or in letting itself be folded, engendering retroactions, connections, proliferations, in a fractalisation of this infinity infinitely refolded. (41/38)

The salvaging of transcendence begins by “freezing” this flux, by which action from the plane of immanence can be torn, so to speak, the forms, organs, substances and functions required of a philosophy which subscribes to transcendence.28 Such a freezing allows Kant to surpass Platonism, where it was a question of the transcendence of something, of One superior to all things, while re-installing transcendence under another guise: “that of a subject to whom the field of immanence is attributed only by belonging to an I who represents to itself such a subject” (Deleuze & Guattari 1991/1994, 48/46). While Kant indeed does challenge the validity of transcendental use of synthesis (Platonism) he nonetheless “ascribes immanence to the subject of the synthesis as a new, subjective unity” (48/46). In an earlier book on Spinoza—the exemplary philosopher of immanence—Deleuze placed under the heading “theological plane” (Deleuze 1981/1988) any organisation which comes from “above”, from a transcendent authority (even a hidden one, as is the case with Kant). Such a plane concerns “forms and their development, subjects and their formations” (172/128). It is a question of a supplementary plane, which comes to reterritorialize or striate the plane of immanence. It is easily observed how the philosophy of Leibniz achieves this, although the conflict on (and resistance of) the plane of immanence is more marked in Leibniz than in Kant (for which reason Nietzsche could feel so close to the former while despising the latter). 28

Alternatively this action can be read as the subjugation of smooth space to the effects of striation (Deleuze & Guattari, 1981/1988, Plateau 14).

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The reference here is to the resistance of the plane of immanence as it appears in Leibniz (as it is peopled by his concepts) to being frozen under the necessity of saving the transcendent. Leibniz’s world is an extraordinarily fluid one, the “deranged” proliferation of which is controlled only by the (problematic) imposition of closure (pre-established harmony). No matter how one considers the interesting tensions in the thought of Leibniz, it remains true nonetheless that his philosophy does subscribe, unapologetically, to the “theological vector”, since, as Deleuze indicates, transcendence can even include “evolution in the supposed depths of nature” (Deleuze 1981/1988, 172/128)—therefore even if one were to forget the divine in Leibniz, transcendence would still lurk in his mud. In ‘L’Épuisé’ Deleuze makes reference to what he calls Beckett’s “spinozisme acharné” (Deleuze 1992/1998, 57/152). A more potent literary version of the plane of immanence than the smooth space of the mud inhabited by the larval creature who hears and quotes the voice from above while moving across that mud towards a goal “imparted by chance or necessity” would be difficult to envision.29 For Deleuze and Guattari the plane of immanence gains its consistency from the concepts which people it. However between these concepts and the plane, philosophy requires “mediators” or intermediaries.30 Such mediators are what the authors term personnages conceptuels.31 One of the most enduring of conceptual personae is the friend or rival beloved of Greek philosophy, against whose opinions (doxa) is tested the superior knowledge of such as Socrates.32 29

See the comments on speed in Deleuze (1981/1988, 165-169/123-6) and Chapter 2 above. 30 Brian Massumi (2002) has pointed out how unavoidably ineffective the standard translation (that is, “mediator”) of Deleuze and Guattari’s term has been. 31 This term seems to have been derived from the composer Olivier Messiaen's concept of personnages rythmiques. See Bogue (1991). It should be noted that the plane of composition, which is, strictly speaking, literature’s equivalent of the plane of immanence, can also be peopled by personnages conceptuels. See Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994, 65/67). Rajchman comments that “such conceptual personae as Descartes’s Idiot or the (sic) Leibniz’s Defence Attorney for God may well…have resonances in the arts, as well as with social or political figures, but the problem in creating a style in philosophy is never to simply adopt such figures from other fields” (Rajchman 2000, 117-18). 32 For Plato’s account of the role of the dialectic in eliminating the simulacrum or the false pretender see The Republic, Part VIII §3, ‘The Dialectic’ (Plato 1974, 341-347).


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In philosophy as Deleuze and Guattari view it, conceptual personae are the conduits for concepts. In this regard they are not simply extrinsic to thought, but inhabit its contours “intimately”. The friend, such as he appears in [Greek] philosophy, no longer designates an extrinsic character, an example or empirical circumstance, but a presence intrinsic to thought, a condition of possibility of thought itself, a living category, a transcendental lived reality. (Deleuze & Guattari 1991/1994, 9/3)

Opinion (doxa) must be heard before it can be discounted or discredited, and it is in discussion with the friend or rival that Socrates hears the opinions in question. Indirectly, then, the encounter with the friend/rival facilitates a route to the essence, Truth and the Good. For, although they may fall prey to simulacra, these phantasms are neutralised in the consensus which is the goal of “western democratic conversation”. Hence in Deleuze and Guattari’s account, the concept for the Greeks resembles “a bird-like ironic soliloquy which surveys the field of battle of annihilated rival opinions (the drunken guests at the banquet)” (12/6).33 A similar insight informs the renowned Italian Beckett had an interest in the genre (and conventions) of the philosophical dialogue, as his ‘Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit’ makes (comically) clear, with its humorous echoes of Berkeley’s Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philanous (Berkeley 1954). Where Berkeley gives us polite promises of continued dialogue the next day: “I will not fail to attend you” (Berkeley, 72), Beckett gives us a stunned silence followed by an abrupt cessation (139) or “Exit weeping”; where in Berkeley the debate is stimulated by adversarial invitations to ponder problems from specific angles (“In the meantime you may employ your thoughts on this morning’s discourse and try if you can find any fallacy in it, or invent any new means to extricate yourself” (50)), in Beckett we have put downs (“But that is a violently extreme and personal point of view, of no help to us in the matter of Tal Coat” (139)); where the interlocutors in Berkeley, as friends of wisdom, are united in pursuit of knowledge, and are prepared to assist one another in recalling forgotten contexts or half-abandoned theories and to bring them to fruition, in Beckett D. assists B. in reminding him that his “number was to have two parts”, only one of which he has performed, to which B. responds (warmly) “Yes, yes, I am mistaken, I am mistaken” (145). 33 Le Banquet is the title given to what in English is known as The Symposium. Dogmatic or pedagogical philosophy was identified early by Michel Foucault in his review of Logique du sens and Différence et répétition, as was Deleuze’s desire to break away from the milieu of doxa: Common sense extracts the generality of an object while it simultaneously establishes the universality of the knowing subject through a pact of goodwill. But what if it gave free rein to ill will? What if thought freed itself from common sense and decided to function only in its extreme singularity? What if it adopted

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film director Marco Ferreri’s television film (Le Banquet, 1989) based on the Symposium: here Socrates is played by Philippe Léotard, a French actor noted more for his portrayal of hoodlums and flics with Gitanes-ruined voices than of masters of dialogue. (Perhaps however it is appropriate, since Socrates is a kind of cop). Furthermore Socrates as portrayed in Ferreri’s film seems impervious to the debilitating effects of alcohol: as dawn breaks he remains awake, watchful, while inside the friends/rivals nurse acute hangovers (Plato, in the text of the Symposium, has him still drinking from a large cup). Socrates, the Symposium informs us, despite his all-night carousing and vigil, goes directly to the place of dialogue, his precinct of reason, to dispense judgement with all of his customary alacrity (Plato 1951, 114).34 Other conceptual personae have played their part in the history of philosophy, Leibniz’s advocate and Kant’s judge to name but two. The couple is another such conceptual persona.35 What then of Beckett’s couple in the mud, Pim & friend, victim & tormentor? Do they save transcendence? Has the narrator been given a companion, as he wonders himself, because there is hope of a return to the antique days? The problem with Pim, the problem which he presents to the narrator, is effectively a Socratic one: how to have “western democratic conversation” or how to create a community—albeit in the mud—of rational beings (one is tempted to add: how to create a republic): problem of training and concurrently little by little solution and application of same and concurrently moral plane bud and bloom of relations proper (63)

The task of regulating this activity is variously attributed. In this instance it is attributed to the narrator, the figure or figment who has been given the companion Pim. But alternatively the task of regulating is ascribed to Krim and Kram, the now-named witness and scribe the disreputable bias of the paradox, instead of complacently accepting its citizenship in the doxa? (Foucault [1970] 1977, 182) 34 In an interview with Claire Parnet (L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze), Deleuze makes clear that an approach to philosophy which seeks merely to expose the work of a philosopher to his or her errors falls into the trap of being mere philosophical chitchat, the type of “edifying philosophy” of someone such as Rorty. 35 See Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994, 69/70-1), for a discussion of the couple as conceptual persona.


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respectively from the life above, from whose vantage point the activities of the creatures below are observed. In fact, the I of the novel fluctuates between a variety of “positions”, which seem to make of it, inter alia, a creature in the mud, the addressee of a voice, and the source of that voice, the witness both of activity and voice (Kram with his lamps), the scribe (Krim with his ballpoint pen [90]) who transcribes the utterance of this voice (noting “brief movements of the lower face” when that utterance is inaudible). One of these transitions—to the position of Kram-witness—is motivated in the text by the announcement that what are to follow—the phrases describing the observation of the couple below—are samples or extracts (88). However, no sooner has it been announced than that motivation is removed: that’s enough end of extracts yes or no yes or no no no no witness no scribe all alone and yet I hear it murmur it all alone in the dark the mud (92)

Of course the very undecidability pertaining to the position occupied by the narrator is central to the elaboration of the novel’s paradox: a plane—horizontal domain of the mud—which shows traces or residues of the life above. This is a paradox which might be resolved in the possibilities offered by the “life in common” presided over by the “soliloquy” of the simultaneously programming and archival function or otherwise in a synthesis at the level of the subject, where there is “no voice in the world but mine” (84). Both possibilities remain on offer at the close of the second part. It is a question once more of how the plane is deployed, and of whether or not the immanence which it is argued characterises the plane is subjugated to “organs, functions, subjects and goals”, of whether or not, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, transcendence is salvaged. Does one witness an “evolution” in the mud, during the “travelling days”, the narrator returning like Molloy to his/its home or “native land” (93)? Or, by contrast, is what one observes here another type of evolution, through the agency of the friend/rival, in the sedentary days? Do these days constitute in themselves the halting of the flux which would allow transcendence to emerge? Or, as Sartre would say, will the slime succeed in being appropriated? Will the narrator thus cross the threshold of reason in the third part after Pim and emerge triumphant (“wins life here” [105]) from his/its larval

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state? These disputes cannot be settled, for, while the narrator confirms that “there’s reason in me yet” (146), he/it is doubtful as to the wisdom of having undertaken his/its Greek phase, the phase of discussion and of rivalling opinions: when I think that I could as I did train him up as I did that system then apply I can’t get over it make it work my undoing for ever since it’s clear eyelids part close again quick I’ve seen myself quite clear ever since nothing left but voice (103)36

To an extent this passage recalls the terror of auto-perception as evoked in Beckett’s own Film. What it foments here, however, seems to be the subjugation of the field of immanence to the subject (Socratic crawler with tin-opener)—the subject itself becoming the field of immanence of all possible experience. An I represents itself to itself.37 Perhaps then it will be true after all that “in part three that’s where I have my life.” Will How It Is thus have moved transversally across the planes and mudflats as they are arrayed respectively in prehistory, ancient Greece and now the Enlightenment? Possible worlds; disjunctive synthesis: “what more can you ask a possible thing than see it name it name it see it” The testimony of the nameless witness in How It Is addresses the alternatives of remaining on the amorphous plane of the mud (and retaining immanence) or of permitting transcendence—in the shape of the subject, function, organs and goals—to insinuate itself back into the amorphous plane (the effect of the “theological plane” of the life above). This dichotomy can also be read as a dispute, which the testimony of the nameless narrator can either resolve or prolong, depending on which of the options it chooses, these options being either the negative or the affirmative use of the “synthèse disjonctive”. Once more Leibniz is important as a frame of reference here.38 36

On training at the Lyceum see Plato (1951, 103-4). Here I summarise Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of Kant's manner of saving transcendence by “hiding” it in the subject. See Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994, 489/46-7). 38 For Pilling How It Is is a “savage parody of the Leibnizian idea that this is the best of all possible worlds”, and the invoking of the notion of justice to which this apsect of the novel is linked provides evidence that herein lies a key to our understanding of the novel (Pilling 1976, 119). 37


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Within the logic of possible worlds, the other is an expression of a possible world, rather than an object or another subject: for Deleuze this is Leibniz’s most enduring lesson.39 To the expression of possible worlds there are, essentially, two responses: one can resolve disjunction, by excluding the incompossible (which is what Leibniz practised) or one can sustain that disjunction by an operation of inclusion (which is what Leibniz did not practise, but for which option nonetheless his thought seems to create the potential). Several of the possible worlds of which the nameless narrator of How It Is forms the point of contact have already been delineated. These possible words (not all of which are incompossible) can be summarised as follows: I am addressed by a voice whose words I repeat; I have had a life above; I remain within humanity; I am the sole elect; I do not hear a voice; I have never had a life above; I am no longer, nor ever was within humanity; I hear different voices; I hear one voice multiplied, amplified by megaphones; I am a variable, sometimes victim, sometimes tormentor; I am therefore part of a series in which I occupy a shifting position (I am nothing other than a conjunction); I am part of a series in which my role is always to be “between”; Therefore, I am permanent, if only as a function; I am a subject; I am an anonymous individuation (a habit of saying “I”); My words are recorded; They are not; There is a witness; I am a witness ... This list cannot be exhaustive. However it does begin to suggest that part of the meaning of the novel’s title is the delineation of possible worlds, of different modalities—at the level of the virtual—of where “how it is” is a question of “stringing them together...and see how it 39

See Deleuze (1969/1991, 200-1/172).

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can possibly have been” (118). Furthermore, in its pursuit of such assemblages, How It Is suggests that there is no tribunal for settling the disputes between incompossible worlds, that there is no universally valid manner of resolving the disjunctions between them; that is, that there is, therefore, no Tribunal of Reason. It is indeed true, as Deleuze argues, that the Other as the expression of possible worlds has a different status in How It Is, as compared to The Unnamable. The previous section of this chapter attempted to pinpoint this difference by invoking the conceptual framework of the plane of immanence, which latter offers a theoretical path, corresponding to Beckett’s work’s own emergence, out of the closure of the monadic rooms and vaults. There is, after all, and to return to a point made by Janvier (and commented on above) perhaps a residue of transcendence even in The Unnamable, and even if this transcendence is decidedly “spectral”: Mahood becomes Worm and by so doing returns to Mahood, or vice-versa. In this respect Deleuze is correct to assert— echoing it transpires Janvier’s judgement—that the “great theory” of The Unnamable seems to fall into a circle. The different voices which give reality to the possible worlds are attributed in some fashion to “masters” distinct from the characters who utter. In this sense perhaps these masters can be said to remain, despite everything, Leibnizian “little divinities” in their own departments. The verb “to be” is somehow imposed upon the possible world presided over at a remove by these figures of mastery.40 Judgement and threshold vigilance In its systematic avoidance of the “ontological axe”, however, How It Is leaves no site or time—however relative—for the operation of mastery (synthesis), for the “judgement of God”. The voices are no longer attributable, no longer prone to being circumscribed by a structure of filiation. They can no longer be traced even to a once present but now absent site: “this voice, these voices as if borne on all winds ... a few old words on and off string them together make phrases” (114). The transcendent lure of the life above dwindles as the novel proceeds. There is a necessity to form phrases but it is not 40

“AND…doesn’t just upset all relations, it upsets being, the verb…and so on. AND, ‘and…and…and…’ is precisely a creative stammering, a foreign use of language, as opposed to a conformist and dominant use based on the verb ‘to be’” (Deleuze 1995, 44).


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known how these phrases should be formed, just as it is not known whence they come nor whither they go. The description by JeanFrançois Lyotard of the operation of ‘phrasing’ in The Differend are especially pertinent here: for there to be no phrase is impossible, for there to be And a phrase is necessary. It is necessary to make linkage. This is not an obligation, a Sollen (an ought to), but a necessity, a Mussen (a must). To link is necessary, but how to link is not. (Lyotard 1988, 66)

The porous I of How It Is has kept immanence operative in a more complete way than the almost equally porous subject of The Unnamable: it is a sounding chamber where accords enter into dissonant relations: “this voice these voices meaning a choir no no only one but quaqua meaning on all sides megaphones” (145). On the plane of immanence peopled by the narrator, the question of the One and the Many is no longer valid: there may indeed be one voice, but it is a voice worked by multiplicity—megaphones multiply and therefore divide that voice. The phrases are “what happens” on the plane of immanence but their status as events exempt from actualisation (effectuation) is maintained. For these reasons the narrating voice of How It Is has been described here as vigilant. If voices foist upon it the task of the verb “to be”, its constructionist vigilance does not permit the actualisation demanded by the verb. Neither the stain of reason nor of memory, but rather the vigilance of the threshold is its modus operandi on the plane. How It Is explicitly addresses this problem in the following terms: a little less of to be past future and conditional of to be and not to be come come enough of that (42)

For as long as the source of the narrative voice continues to delineate possible worlds it will be forced to bear in some fashion the burden of the verb “to be”. It will be required to adopt the position of judge, the wielder of the ontological axe, in order to separate incompossibles. There will be a Tribunal of Reason in the mud—a Kantian continuation of what began in the Greek phase of “with Pim”. In the preface to the Critique of Pure Reason Kant describes the role of the tribunal thus:

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Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze & Guattari a call to reason, again to undertake the most laborious of all tasks—that of selfexamination, and to establish a tribunal, which may secure it in its well-grounded claims, while it pronounces against all baseless assumptions and pretensions, not in an arbitrary manner, but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws. This tribunal is nothing other than the Critical Investigation of Pure Reason. (Kant 1934, 3)

The role and provenance of justice in the mud are extremely complex. Justice pertains to the manner in which existence in the mud is regulated: it is never in doubt that there is regulation in the mud; what is in doubt however is the nature of this regulation. Two choices seem on offer: either the mud is a realm presided over by the archival function (with its twofold function of surveillance and programme) furnishing a supplementary plane to transform the plane into the territories of, inter alia, subjects, goals, and organs, or it is, rather, the principle which maintains the plane itself.41 Part three therefore considers the option which arises in the Greek phase, the option of the plane considered as the site of rivalling opinions and of copies and simulacra in contention. It is never denied, least of all by Plato, that the copies and simulacra must move and contend. Nonetheless the displacement effected upon the simulacrum (the false claimant), in the model offered by Platonism, is only that negative displacement which they will suffer at the hands of the rightful heirs (copies proper). Platonism consists of the operation whereby the supplementary plane (the world of Forms) freezes the plane of immanence, arranging it in a hierarchy which must be considered as prearranged.42 Having emerged from the Platonic-Greek phase the narrator considers adopting this model in order to conceptualise the nature of its own existence. This would, it is surmised, entail a world perhaps “not as exquisitely organised as ours” (156). Moreover what it would require is that the acts of abandon, coupling and waiting integral to life in the mud or on the plane be conceived of not as rhizomatic alliances and nomadic distributions but rather as filiations and hierarchical positions. A sort of movement would be possible but only of a type preordained, hence restricted, by a transcendent and 41

The archival-recording function is referred to in How It Is in the following terms: “recordings on ebonite a whole life generations on ebonite one can imagine it” (115). 42 An existence which would be at once “frozen” and “prearranged” is elsewhere singled out as being a definition of injustice itself (149). A similar proposition is made on page 135.


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supplementary plane. If, as is clear from the Greek phase of How It Is, this second model would deprive one of the possibility of being both victim and tormentor (good copy and simulacrum) then it would rule that one must be either one or the other, and if the latter, banished. In the first model where the supplementary plane is inoperative, the mud resists transcendence and cannot be rehabilitated: the reversible alliances between victims and tormentors will be free of hierarchy. The differends between rival claimants will go unresolved. In the second model a supplementary plane comes to territorialize the plane, to rehabilitate it and thereby resolve the differends between the rival claimants. This problem, then, pertains to the question of the maximal and the minimal, the relation of part and whole, the One and the Many. The problem is at the heart of How It Is, but becomes more critical (in the Kantian sense too) in part three. Here two figures loom, offering two contrasting responses—one maximal, the other minimal—to the problem. The first of these is the skull, the eight plates of bone which function as a site of resonance for the voices without: in me the vault bone-white ... ill-heard ill remembered ill-heard ill-recorded my whole life a gibberish garbled sixfold in the little chamber all bone-white if there were a light oakum of words ill-heard ill-murmured that murmur those murmurs (147)

The alternative is that of a figure who is “not one of us” and who exists outside the life in the mud, howsoever that life is regulated. The second figure is maximal, the first minimal. The first has multiplicity as the condition of the possibility of the One, while the second reverses the causal dependence. This would seem to return to a monadological conception according to whose terms the previous chapter addressed the Trilogy. The minimal version posits a receptor and echo-chamber which receives and then repeats an “antique rigmarole”, this in turn ascending “to where there is an ear to understand”. In this version the creature in the mud is a degenerate monad without synthetic capability: in the terms of The Unnamable, it is an organless body. The “ear” above, here, can be read in terms either of the upper floor of la maison baroque, as analysed by Deleuze, the province of the soul and of the mind, or in terms of Leibniz’s archival God (Deleuze 1988/1993). It matters little however, since the concern at

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this point is with the minimal option, that of the monade nue incapable of synthesis, but capable of emitting and receiving vibrations. “Above in the light ... their space is measured,” whereas “no one here knows himself it’s the place without knowledge whence no doubt its peerlessness” (134). But the problem of the sacks, as it is presented to the narrator, seems to rule out this minimal option, since it raises the question of belonging and therefore of ‘clear zones of expression’.43 The problem of the sacks is the following: if we are to be possible our couplings journeys and abandons need of one not one of us an intelligence somewhere a love who all along the track at the right places according as we need them deposits our sacks (150)

This intelligence of divine proportions is in one respect distinctly Leibnizian (in others it is Occasionalist) since it operates according to a “principle of parsimony” (150).44 Is that how it will have been after Pim then? Multiplicity and discontinuity rehabilitated in the name of the One? The narrator further ponders this solution, this particular manner of using the plane of immanence, in terms which recall the Leibnizian formula of monads which express the divinely ordained entirety of existence: there he is then at last that not one of us there where we are at least 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 ill-inspired ill-told and so ancient so forgotten at each telling that ours may seem faithful that we murmur to the mud to him and this life in the dark and mud its joys and sorrows journeys intimacies and abandons as with a single voice perpetually broken now one half and now the other we exhale it pretty much the same as the one he had devised (151)

In this vision the creature in the mud would be nothing other than the advocate of a God, where every utterance would serve to confirm the existence of the divine being, where life “exhaled” would be “pretty much the same as the one he had devised” (151): “the voice of him who before listening to us murmur what we are tells us what we are” (152). The narrator goes further to describe existence—quite in a Leibnizian flourish—in the mud in terms of the folds of an unfolding 43 44

Of the phenomenon of the sacks it is said “it's a possible thing in this world” (113). For Leibniz “there is nothing waste, nothing sterile in the universe.”


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developing continuum: “a vast imbrication of flesh without breach or fissure”. But the threshold vigilance with which the source of the narrative voice is associated has not fully been abandoned. It speaks of the “need to have done with this not one of us”, and of another solution: “has he not staring him in the face I quote another solution more simple by far and by far more radical” (157). The solution is to say, as the narrator does, that it has all been “balls”—the talk of voices, of the life above, of journeys, couplings and abandons: all equally false: “all these calculations yes explanations yes the whole story from beginning to end yes completely false” (158). The other worlds are not possible but incompossible: to say “yes” to their falsehood (“Yes to the mud, yes” [158]) is to reinstate them to their status as incompossibles impervious to neutralisation—to synthesis and convergence. It is to keep the plane of immanence free of the plane of transcendence. Thus the plane of immanence is restored, and the mud is nothing other than the abstract plane where pre-individual singularities emerge, where points of intensity can be discerned, where incompossible times and places enter into dissonant arrangements, in a “procession without head or tail” (135). As Deleuze says of Spinoza’s own plane of immanence, in the mud of How It Is “there is no longer a subject, but only the individuating affective states of the anonymous force” (Deleuze 1981/1988, 172/128). What, then, are the “effects of our justice” (156)? “Justice in impiety” ... Lyotard’s term seems to apply well to How It Is. Justice in the mud consists in resisting transcendence under all its guises. Its manner of linking phrases can also be thought of a way of restoring to literature its abstract machine. The final act in this restoration must mark only an intensive point on this plane, not its horizon or term. To this end it will all have been false: a transversal communication within a falsifying quotation: “good good at last of part three and last that’s how it was end of quotation after Pim how it is.” As the nameless narrator of How It Is testifies, literature’s obligation is to “string phrases together” (“Speak, pig!” as Godot has it). In the absence of a teleology or a founding principle for this act of “stringing”, however, there is no Tribunal of Reason. In place of the tribunal, as an early poem by Beckett indicates (and to which this volume will return in another chapter), there is nothing but a threshold vigilance:

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Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze & Guattari cher instant je te vois dans ce rideau de brume qui recule ou je n’aurai plus à fouler ces longs seuils mouvants et vivrai le temps d’une porte qui s’ouvre et se referme my peace is there in the receding mist when I may cease from treading these long shifting thresholds and live the space of a door 45 that opens and shuts (Beckett 1948/1978, 96/22)

In Beckett the disputes between contending phrases—how it is (part one), how it is (part two)—strung together in disjunction will not have been resolved; these are “antinomies of reason” (Kant) without a synthetic third term. Part three then does not offer a way out of the conflict of part two. The effect of justice in the mud is to sustain the differend, to keep at bay operators which would restore transcendence, and, finally, therefore, to “have done with the judgement of God”. Coda: Badiou If, prompted by Deleuze and Guattari, How It Is has been said to possess a “Greek phase”, this is quite a different Greece than that to which Alain Badiou has linked the novel. Characteristically, for the philosopher whose work is devoted to a reconfiguration of Platonism, in approaching How It Is, Badiou revisits the five categories or genera of Plato’s Sophist—movement, rest, same, other, logos—stating quite emphatically that only these can enable one to understand what the questions appropriate to the work of Beckett are, adding that these latter are those which “organise the fiction of a humanity treated and exhibited by a functional reduction oriented toward the essence or the Idea” (Badiou 1992/2003, 332/4). In this context Badiou declares that How It Is is the turning point in Beckett’s career away from Cartesian solipsism and towards “the category of alterity, of the encounter and 45

See Chapter 6 below for a detailed reading of this poem. It is worth comparing Beckett’s with Leibniz's own shifting littoral: “I thought I was arriving in the harbour but I was, in fact, being thrown into the open sea.” In his book on the painter Francis Bacon Deleuze invokes for both of them a ‘sensation-conceptual persona’ similar to what I here call the ‘invigilator’: “the round area, the isolator, the Depopulator; the series of spastics and paralytics inside the round area; the stroll of the Vigilambulator” (Deleuze 2002, 49-50).


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the figure of the Other, which fissures and displaces the solipsistic internment of the cogito” (16/344). But this is not just any encounter. The reading of How It Is which Badiou proposes emphasises that aspect of it which delineates the space of the encounter in a strictly Platonic mode. This is an aspect of the novel which equally suggests the pertinence of a response from a Deleuzian perspective (such has been the attempt above, especially through consideration of Deleuze’s comments on Platonism and the encounter in Proust). It has been shown to what extent the encounter in How It Is is anti-Platonic, despite the resonances of, say, The Symposium. This is not the view of Badiou, however, for whom How It Is embraces a broad range of Platonic themes (here not disputed) and orientations (here disputed). Badiou is at pains throughout his (quasi-Platonic) discussion of sexuate polarity in Beckett: L’increvable désire to lay stress on his non-normative use of the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’—these and their correlates are placed in quotation marks in almost every instance in order emphasise the technical manner in which they are being used—viz. not to signify physically embodied, constructed, biological gender identities (and a departure then from Plato’s Symposium). The masculine is aligned with the imperative and with immobility while the feminine is aligned with errancy and narrative (Badiou 2003/1995, 66/58). However, despite his insistence on the hesitation marked in these quotation marks, while one may be prepared to accept that Winnie in Happy Days is ‘feminine’ in Badiou’s sense—she desires to be free of her current predicament and to continue the narrative in her monologue—it is quite contentious to assert that ‘feminine’ pole is to be found in the same way in How It Is. As Badiou correctly points out, Beckett is meticulous in his avoidance of unambiguously gendered identities in this novel (the “images” of the first part notwithstanding), as when the narrator locates on Pim “finally what seems to me a testicle or two” (Beckett 1964, 60, my emphasis). How legitimate is it, one might ask, to ignore this distinction, even as Badiou points to it? If the sexes for Beckett do not exist except insofar as the amorous encounter manifests them (Badiou 2003/1995, 27/56), is Badiou not presupposing that the encounter is amorous (and normatively heterosexual) in How It Is in order to verify a prior position which he holds on the centrality of ‘love’ to Beckett’s

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work?46 For, it seems that if a work such as How It Is is exempt from the polarity disclosed by the amorous relation, then it will—in Badiou’s hands—be overdetermined regardless and delivered in reverse to that polarity. If this is a problematic “substantialisation” (Rabaté 2002, 415), another example arises in Badiou’s account of the operation of what he calls “love” in Beckett’s work. Now, even if the latter has a philosophical specificity in the hands of Badiou which might be resistant to criticism coming from literary studies, Badiou effectively elides the literary specificity of Beckett’s text in order to establish his illustration.47 In so doing he is enabled to rewrite Beckett on (to borrow from the latter’s study of Proust) “the clothes line” of memory (Beckett 1987, 30). The punt scene in Krapp’s Last Tape functions, in Badiou’s analysis, alternately as sentimental detritus in the author’s (Beckett’s) own memory and as a fixed, “habitually enforced” (30) analepsis in a play stripped of its temporal and spatial complexities. It is hardly surprising that Badiou should read How It Is as a novel of coitus interruptus, but what is problematic seems to be the presupposition of a normative situation (and not just the grey-black upon which Badiou would insist in the case of Beckett) into which the event 46

For an alternative reading of sexuality we might turn to Fredéric Gros’s Deleuzian reading. He gives the example of “le sexe” as the molar instance around which microsexual forces stratify. Thus in Proust beneath two given levels, that of “normal” heterosexuality and “guilty”/culpable (coupable) homosexuality, there is molecular sexuality without “sex” locatable in bodies and pleasures (in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms this is the ‘non-statistical’ order of the sexes [Deleuze and Guattari 1972/1983, 352/296]). See also Gros (1995). Mary Bryden’s essay on Beckett, Deleuze and Guattari asserts that molar gender in Beckett, in the late drama (especially) and prose is subjected to molecular ‘processing’ (Bryden 1993). Deleuze and Guattari’s own statement on ‘microscopic transexuality’ in the context of schizoanalysis as the “variable analysis of the n sexes” in a subject is in Deleuze and Guattari (1972/1983, 351-2/295-6). On the manner in which psychoanalysis deals with molar sexuality see Gatens (1996, 177ff). 47 For Rancière the elision of specificity is comprehensive in Badiou’s treatment of literature. In considering Mallarmé for instance (though the judgement applies equally to Badiou’s treatment of Beckett) “Du coup, le poème mallarméen, qui est déjà une allégorie du poème, devient, chez Badiou, une allégoire de l’événement en général et du courage de la pensée qui en soutient l’épreuve. Tous les poèmes disent alors une seule et même chose” [Suddenly the Mallarméan poem which is already and allegory of the poem, becomes in Badiou’s hands an allegory of the event in general and of the courage of thought in which it sustains the experience. All poems thus say one and the same thing] (Rancière 2004, 108).


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intervenes. The normative situation is projected onto How It Is when it seems Beckett expended considerable energy in eradicating it from its inhuman landscape. There is also a tension deriving from the fact that Badiou takes his account of ‘love’ directly and without much alteration from Lacan’s ‘God and Woman’s jouissance’ (Lacan 1975). Whereas Lacan, in figuring woman as that which can but be excluded, might cross the word out (as he does in his title), he is at pains to indicate the normative context in which he is employing the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’. When Badiou for his part writes of how Beckett’s work is characterised by a move towards a limit which itself becomes the ‘hope’ or the ‘courage’, it is difficult not to feel this being haunted by the Lacanian figure of castration and with it the entire apparatus of the symbolic. In short the addition of quotation marks may not in itself be enough to convince one of the extent to which his ‘sexuate’ positions are free of their baggage. Correlatively the larval beings of How It Is are in Badiou’s account the “larvae of an essential humanity” (Badiou 2003/1992, 6/344). Why the seeds of an essential humanity?48 Why should the inhumanities—and by inhumanities we mean the animal, vegetable, mineral and the machinic49—play second fiddle here to essential humanity? It is as if Badiou wants humanity to play in advance, even in his Beckettian (primeval) mud. How It Is itself foregrounds the question of humanity and “the humanities” in the context of its status as an “antique rigmarole”: it is something to which the creatures have a nostalgic but ambivalent relation, so much so that they are indeed not related. Evolution in Beckett, as in Deleuze and Guattari, is replaced by involution:

48

In a short text entitled ‘Ce qui arrive’ Badiou isolates three Beckettian regimes— “douceur”, “sarcasme” and “métamorphose”—and repeats his claim that here we locate a fundamental Beckettian ‘humanity’, a claim which he backs up by citing Godot: “But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is, whether we like it or not” (Badiou 2003/1998, 117/12). In terms compatible with those of Badiou (under a Lacanian inspiration) Philippe Mengue has criticised Deleuze for his insistence on an abstract ‘inhumanity’ and argues that it is necessary to recall “ce que lui [language] donne son vrai sens, soit la révélation d’un aspect de la condition humaine et de son irrémissible désir” [that which gives it its true meaning, is the revelation of an aspect of the human condition and its inexorable desire] (Mengue 2000, 92). 49 “In truth there are only inhumanties, humans are made exclusively of inhumanities” (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 233/190).

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Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze & Guattari a plane of proliferation, peopling, contagion; but this proliferation has nothing to do with an evolution, the development of a form or the filiation of forms....it is...an involution, in which form is constantly being dissolved, freeing times and speeds. (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 327/267)

In an important essay on Deleuze, literature and the question of the status of ‘inhumanities’ in both, Alan Bourassa begins by considering the orthodox vision of literature as inherently human.50 It is language, however, which opens up the dimension of the non-literary in literature as well as of the non-human in the human (Bourassa 2002, 61, a point made in another context by Giorgio Agamben [1999]). Language is seized by forces, by affects and sensations which have the qualities of not-belonging-to and impropriety: theirs is a mode of perpetual incursion. These forces are ‘inhuman’ and virtual. The human, then, is an actuality springing from a virtuality. It is necessary, therefore, to trace the human back to its paradoxical inhumanity, “to the non-human forces that have followed a ramifying line of differentiation to cross, perhaps only for a moment, the threshold of humanity” (75). This dynamic comes much closer than does Badiou’s Platonic template to accounting for the specificity of Beckett’s achievement in How It Is. For Bourassa—who does not mention Beckett—to conceive of the novel (as a form) in this way generates a demand felt by criticism. It is precisely such a demand that the present study characterises as ‘facilitating’ the Abstract Machine: so the novel becomes a great virtuality and criticism becomes the problem of differentiating the virtualities contained in the novel, of bringing the novel beyond its own thresholds, of making the novel into the most perfect diagram of the forces and events that intersect with it. (Bourassa 2002, 75)

This would be an example of the immanence often associated with the name of Deleuze—the very concept for which Deleuze is taken to task by Badiou. The emphasis placed upon our world and the virtual which maintains it in a state of involution rather than evolution is one aspect of Deleuze’s Spinozist side. Keeping in mind the claim made by 50

Claire Colebrook may be ascribing rather too much (Sartrean) consciousness to Beckett’s writing when she suggests that in his work we find a “description of the inhuman from the viewpoint of a speaking subject” (Colebrook 2000, 127). Cf. Blanchot’s essay ‘La littérature et le droit à la mort’ (1949) where literature, due to its lack of being, is said to “refer to an existence that is still inhuman” (Blanchot 1995, 349).


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Deleuze that Beckett wrote the novelistic equivalent of Spinozism, on the one hand, and Badiou’s critique of the Deleuzian perspective on Spinozist univocity on the other, it is possible to show how not only a relatively late text such as How It Is, but also Beckett’s first published novel Murphy, can be described as ethological studies: like Spinoza, Beckett asks what affects is a body capable of? How is it in turn affected? Beckett’s theatre of cruelty in the mud with the shade of a Kantian tribunal conducted in the light ‘above’ is Spinozist in its concern with the continuum of mud and matter, and the emergence of singular beings (Spinozist ‘modes’) out of and within this continuum.51 Returning now to the specific account of coupling put forward by Badiou: in order to advance his systematic overview of Beckett’s work in terms of love, where in the case of happiness this void is an interval; it is captured in the between [l’entre-Deux], in that which constitutes the effective character of the Two. This is its separation, that is, the difference of the sexes as such. (Badiou 1992/2003, 364/33-4)

Badiou ignores the complex ‘machinic’ aspects of How It Is, with its curious system of breaths, ‘subjectless action’ (in Guattari’s sense) and conjunctions (not to mention the question of base and irrecuperable matter central to the novel), to speak of sexuate beings, male on the one hand and female on the other. There may be many Beckett critics who, reading this passage, will feel very much in the position of Malone who spies outside his window what may be “a couple loving”. In other words they will not recognize the congress as belonging to the world of the novel under scrutiny. 52 In his commentary on Badiou, Hallward (1998) is quite correct to point out that the sexuate positions—far but perhaps not all that far from the sexuate genres of Irigaray—are somewhat unfashionable when viewed from the point of view of recent French philosophy and 51

In its attempt to show the link between Bergson and Spinoza (in relation to a reading of Beckett), Uhlmann’s chapter 2 is especially useful, as is the analysis, in a nonliterary context, of Ansell Pearson (in Bryden ed., 2001). 52 Jean-Jacques Lecercle reminds us in a review of Badiou that the latter begins his review of Mallarmé by paraphrasing the work of the great poet (Lecercle 1999, 11), for Badiou makes no bones about his desire to free philosophy from the “tyranny of language”.

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the critical and cultural theory it helps sustain. Indeed there are some for whom an explicit sexuate polarity in Beckett’s work is a characteristic of the sometimes misogynistic points of view rehearsed by his characters or narrators (where present or locatable) in his early writing that no amount of theoretical reworking in terms of schizoanalysis or a politics of alterity can ever elide.53 Be that as it may, however, Badiou imposes his (molar) concept of sexuate polarity on a text in Beckett’s œuvre which, at the very least, resists such moulding. He can therefore be said to neglect the abstract machine (molecular operation) of Beckett’s writing which actively dismantles these along with other positions and coalescences. It is Badiou’s insistence on the event as supervening and punctual which accounts for his absolute refusal of the continuum of the abstract machine upon which Deleuze and Guattari insist. In his major work, L’Être et l’événement, the event supervenes as, in his words, an “ultra-un”. The event is the process whereby the ‘situation’ is dehistoricised into truth (Joubert 2004, 3). In short the One “n’est pas” (Badiou 1988, 31). The one, which is not, therefore, exists only as an operation, and not as an entity. Put another way, there is no “one”; rather, there is only what counts for one (32). In this respect presentation is multiple; that is, that which is presented is, of necessity, multiple: [L]e multiple est le régime de la présentation, l’un est, au regard de la présentation, un résultat opératoire, l’être est ce qui (se) présente, n’étant, de ce fait, ni un (car seule la présentation elle-même est pertinente pour le compte-pourun), ni multiple (car le multiple n’est le régime que de la présentation). (Badiou 1988, 32) [the multiple is the regime of presentation; the one is, with regard to presentation, an operational outcome; being is that which presents (itself), and thus is, by virtue of this fact, neither one (since presentation alone is pertinent to the “counts-asone”) nor multiple (since the multiple is the regime of nothing but presentation).]

The operation at issue here, the counting-as-one, is equivalent to what Badiou calls “structure”. This latter is indicative, he states, of the “omnipertinence” of the one/multiple. That which is classified by Badiou in his idiom as a “situation” is a “présentation structurée”. To 53

Shane Weller has made a convincing and highly original intervention in this debate (Weller 2006, 164-191).


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say that Ontology is “not a situation” paves the way, necessarily, for the positing of something outside or beyond all structure, and this would be Platonism as the “ethical no-man’s land of genericity” (Joubert 2004, 15). For Plato, the Good functioned as the identity of the Idea (Badiou 1988, 34), where presence was the exact opposite of presentation (35). Ontology for Badiou is the science of the multiple as multiple (36). If presentation is to remain presentation it needs to ‘respect’ the multiple and only admit a “counting-for-one”—hence it can be nothing other than a presentation of presentation. In summary: 1. The multiple is only composed of multiplicities—every many is a multiple of multiples (37); 2. Counting-for-one is only a system to permit the multiple to let itself be recognized as multiple (37). Badiou’s readings of Beckett and Deleuze respectively convene upon the locus of what he posits as a Platonic framework (the generic for Beckett, the sovereignty of the One [Badiou 1997, 69] for Deleuze) in each separate case. Confident that Beckett’s work has illustrated his theory of generic writing, Badiou concludes that it presents itself as the art of going from the unhappiness of life and of the visible to the happiness of a “suscitation véridique du vide” [“truthful instigation of the void”] (36/366, trans. adapted). In their appraisal of Badiou’s L’Être et l’événement, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the Badiouian event may require a return to “higher [that is metaphysical] philosophy”: By starting from a neutralised base, the set, which indicates any multiplicity whatever, Badiou draws up a line that is single, although it may be very complex...philosophy...seems to float in an empty transcendence, as the unconditioned concept that finds the totality of its generic conditions in the functions (science, poetry, politics and love). Is this not the return, in the guise of the multiple, to an old conception of the higher philosophy? (Deleuze & Guattari 1991/1994, 144/152)54

Keith Ansell Pearson’s succinct riposte to Badiou’s dismissal of Deleuze’s own theory of the event is of assistance here. For Badiou, Deleuze’s theory of the event is inadequate since it is, in his view, 54

I fail to see how, as both Hallward and Badiou himself assert, this statement is incomprehensible. See Badiou (1995, 11) and Hallward (2003, 381-2, n. 68).

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ultimately founded upon the One, and therefore upon a misrepresented multiplicity. However, as Ansell Pearson argues, Badiou’s own conception of the event depends on a normative situation in which the event intervenes (Ansell Pearson 1999). Ansell Pearson’s book on Bergson has indirectly taken the critique of Badiou’s position on Beckett further. Badiou, in the eyes of Ansell Pearson, seriously misinterprets Deleuze’s interrogation of the neo-Platonic concept of emanation (derived from Plotinus and of interest to Deleuze not least because of the central position in his thinking held by Bergson—for whom Plotinus was crucial): Badiou’s reading of the alleged ‘Platonism of the virtual’ does not persuade…for a number of reasons. It does not adequately comprehend the nature of the commitment to univocity or what is at stake in thinking a simplicity of the virtual. On Badiou’s reading the actual becomes a mere simulacrum of the virtual and, as such, represents little more than a degraded, and even expendable, expression of an eminent power. (Ansell Pearson 2002, 103)

In addition the misreading of Deleuze’s understanding of the virtual leads Badiou to ignore its commitment to “the ceaseless invention of forms to be thought on the level of the open whole of evolution…a ‘plane of immanence’ in terms of a ‘machinism’ as opposed to a mechanism” (Ansell Pearson 2002, 104). One criticism, then, which can be levelled at Badiou’s reading of Beckett is that the work of the latter serves as neutralised base above which the philosopher rises to float in an empty transcendence, while the individual works, deprived of their specificity except in the form of a highly contentious “turn” upon the fulcrum of How It Is, function merely as ossified cyphers to express the event’s interruptive force.55 As far as the radical divergence between Badiou and Deleuze (and Guattari) on this point is concerned, the dispute may be characterised as one between “stellar separation” (Badiou), with its logic of supervening, and the abstract machine, with its logic of continuum or phylum. For the reason that it is the primary Beckettian text displaying, according to the two divergent perspectives respectively, these opposed credentials, it is appropriate that the next chapter turns its attention to Worstward Ho. 55

For Stephen Clucas “Badiou ultimately reduces poetry to a function of his own philosophy of the event” (Clucas 2001, 49).

5. “Vasts apart”: Deleuze, Phenomenology and Worstward Ho

Thomas Trezise, in his book Into the Breach, writes of his conviction “that the phenomenological approach gains whatever insight it may afford from a conspicuous blindness to the dimension of Beckett’s prose that signals the exhaustion or failure of phenomenology itself” (Trezise 1990, 5). Not all are in agreement on this point. Most notably Carla Locatelli, in her book published in the same year as Trezise’s, demurs quite conspicuously, arguing that in Beckett’s late work in particular an “exquisite hermeneutics” is at play or offered up for our consideration (Locatelli 1990). In his own reading of Beckett, developed in the decade following the publication of these studies, Alain Badiou claims to find a curious Husserlian impetus at work. The Husserlian époché in Beckett is, however, subject to a structural inversion whereby the ‘reduction’, no longer subtracting and suspending the ‘there is’ (il-y-a) in order to turn toward the movement of the pure flux oriented toward this “there is”, involves, rather, a process of “subtracting or suspending the subject so as to see what then happens to being” (Badiou 2003, 108 and 2005, 108).1 What follows is a reading of Worstward Ho’s inherent resistance—standing in for the rest of the work one might venture—towards phenomenological rereadings (of Beckett and to a lesser extent Deleuze). 1

In this expanded Husserlian context it must also be noted (bearing in mind our concern with abstract machines) that Mark Hansen’s critique of a range of thinkers, among them Deleuze and Guattari, has suggested that the “machine reduction” allegedly at work in these thinkers is a Husserlian époché de nos jours (Hansen 2000).

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Appearance anxiety In order to place this debate—which will prove central to the reading of Beckett’s Worstward Ho to be developed below—in its context, it will be necessary to consider the phenomenological tradition and the alleged privileging of sight at work there. To begin with, however, this chapter adopts the view expressed by Heidegger when he claims that phenomenology should be thought of less as a doctrine than as a method, namely “the process of letting things manifest themselves” (Heidegger in Richardson 1963, xiv).2 As Dermot Moran explains: Phenomenology is best understood as a radical, anti-traditional style of philosophising, which emphasises the attempt to get to the truth of matters, to describe phenomena, in the broadest sense as whatever appears in the manner in which it appears, that is as it manifests itself to consciousness, to the experiencer. (Moran 2000, 4)

That being granted, however, the plenitude surveyed by the Husserlian transcendental ego is replaced by a somewhat more bereft landscape in Heidegger, who took many opportunities explicitly to distance himself from phenomenology as embodied in the thought of his former teacher (xiv).3 For the Heidegger of ‘What is Metaphysics?’ human beings hover in a state of anxiety confronted by a situation within 2

As glossed by Véronique Bergen, Deleuze reproaches Heidegger for having restored the equivocacy of a Being “se disant en deux sens—selon la transcendance du Dasein et selon le monde, selon le parler et selon le voir” [said in two ways—according to Dasein and according to the world, according to the spoken and the seen] (Bergen 2002, 444). The present chapter is based on a paper first delivered to a conference held in Sydney in January 2003 to mark the 50th anniversary of the first performance of En attendant Godot. 2003 was also the 50th anniversary of the publication of two seminal and celebrated works of Beckett criticism by Alain Robbe-Grillet (RobbeGrillet, 1965) and Maurice Blanchot (Blanchot, 1959) as well as of Gilles Deleuze’s first book, Empirisme et subjectivité: Essai sur la Nature Humaine selon Hume, in which Deleuze can be seen to adopt a critical position on phenomenology, partly enabled through an attention to Hume’s empiricism as oppositional to “all forms of transcendental philosophy” (Boundas 1991, 2). Edith Kern adds an early voice to the Beckett-Heidegger question in 1962 (I am indebted to Mary Bryden for this reference) by echoing Robbe-Grillet in finding Beckett’s work to exemplify “the drama of man as Dasein in the Heideggerian sense of the word” (Kern 1962, 51), and describing Winnie from Happy Days as “thrown” (geworfen). Dasein has an enduring appeal for Beckett theatre scholarship (see Garner 1994, 6 for example). 3 For a detailed study of the complex interplay of indebtedness and dismissiveness as these inform Heidegger’s statements, both overt and covert, on Husserl see Overgaard (2003).

“Vasts apart”: Deleuze, Phenomenology and Worstward Ho

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which beings—qua beings—slide from themselves, thus remarking the loss of their very ‘being-ness’. It is not, however, Heidegger writes, “as though ‘you’ or ‘I’ feel ill at ease; rather, it is this way for some ‘one’. In the altogether unsettling experience of this hovering where there is nothing to hold onto, pure Da-sein is all that is still there” (Heidegger 1993, 101). The occurrence of anxiety, and its coextensive relation with the nothing, have the consequence for Heidegger that, in lifting the human being out of the confines of its facticity, we “complete the transformation of man into his Da-sein” (102). In its emphasis on the appearance of the phenomenon, phenomenology is in the opinion of Derrida essentially a treatise on light, abetted by the inevitable domination of the concept of form upon which such a “photology” is founded (Derrida 2001, 31).4 It is on the basis of such a premise that, for Merleau-Ponty, language is subject to a universal anonymous visibility. Speech is, in the words of the unfinished book Le Visible et l’invisible, a “gaze of the mind” (MerleauPonty 1969, 154, italics added), while “the whole landscape ... is […] but a variant of speech before our eyes” (155). The primordial flesh of the world, in which for Merleau-Ponty the rawness of the encounter is sustained, nonetheless is articulated according to the formative template of the visual.5 As Derrida shows, phenomenology entails “a submission of sense to sight, of sense to the sense-of-vision, since sense in general is in the very concept of every phenomenological field” (Derrida 1982, 158). 4

See also Lingis (1991, 114). In being fundamentally tautological, Heidegger’s thought is inherently and defiantly—despite Heidegger’s doubts about phenomenology as a technique—phenomenological according to Moran (Moran 2000, 218). After all, as he comments, the aim of phenomenology is “to let something show itself as it is” (218, my emphasis). 5 In the Primacy of Perception Merleau-Ponty would write that “matter is ‘pregnant’ with form, which is to say that in the final analysis every perception takes place within a certain horizon and ultimately in the ‘world’” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 12). As glossed by Moran, “against the notion of intentionality as a voluntary, primarily cognitive act, Merleau-Ponty lays great emphasis on Heidegger’s notion of ‘functioning’ or ‘operative intentionality’…Our bodily intentions already lead us into a world constituted for us before we conceptually encounter it in cognition” (Moran 402). In relation to phenomenology and the work of Beckett, Trezise shows that it is because speech is in the phenomenological sense not involved in mediation that it is privileged within phenomenology: “in its transparency or self-effacement, it re-presents the signified immediately or ‘im selben Augenblick’”. Thus, Trezise argues, it serves to maintain “the phenomenal interval between subject and object” (Trezise 1990, 123).

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Despite his deep indebtedness to the philosophy of Heidegger, Blanchot’s thought has to be understood partly in terms of its critique of a cornerstone of phenomenology (hermeneutic and otherwise), a critique which can be encapsulated in one phrase, appended to an essay in L’Entretien infini (1969): “Parler ce n’est pas voir”. There, against the grain of phenomenology, Blanchot sets up “speech” as the defiant locus of a resistance towards the privileging of light in the specific context of the Western tradition.6 To grant pre-eminence to speaking at least serves to reverse the prejudice in question: Speaking [in Blanchot’s words] frees thought from the optical imperative that in the Western tradition, for thousands of years, has subjugated our approach to things, and induced us to think under the guarantee of light or under the threat of its absence. [In the tradition] one must think according to the measure of the eye. (Blanchot 1993, 27)

Although Blanchot’s distinction remains contentious in its presumption of receptive passivity on the part of seeing, whereas speaking is figured as active, the fundamental assertion that “to speak is not to see” has been a rich resource for both Deleuze and Foucault. Foucault’s fold Insofar as the question of the interrelationship of seeing and saying specifically is concerned, Martin Jay has argued that, considered together, all four of Foucault’s books of the so-called archaeological period—Les mots et les choses, La Naissance de la Clinique, Raymond Roussel, and L’Archéologie du savoir—present an “unsublatable dialectic” in which phenomenology’s “imbrication of the eye in the flesh of the world” is sharply contested (Jay 1994, 398). Unsublatable or not, Deleuze eschews the dialectic in his retrospective appraisal of these works, finding that they pivot round the concept of the fold (pli) and derivatives such as unfold (dépli). As a conceptual operator, the fold will ultimately prove felicitous both in considering the partial affinity between Foucault and his philosophical ‘adversaries’ and in clarifying areas of disagreement between them. Although he states that his philosophical development comes down to his encounter with the thought of Heidegger, Deleuze’s Logique du 6

“Parler” in Blanchot”s idiom is quite distinct from the sense in which Derrida employs the term, not least in the context of the latter’s critique of phonocentrism.


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sens is identified by Foucault accurately and affirmatively as the least phenomenological work of philosophy across which one is likely to come (Foucault [1970] 1977, 170; although the specific reference is to Merleau-Ponty).7 Foucault thereby underlines the extent to which, for the generation of French philosophers to which both he and Deleuze belonged, the question of one’s relation to phenomenology—in some guise—was fundamental and divisive. That there is an indebtedness in Deleuze to one aspect of Husserl is clear from Deleuze’s own generous statements in Logique du sens. Suffice it to say that, although this is true, it in no way counteracts the strong line against phenomenology in Deleuze’s work, and while Foucault makes this statement, one clearly endorsed by Deleuze in his reading of Foucault (118/113), that alone does not provide sufficient evidence to claim Deleuze for a merely ‘perverted’ phenomenology. The fact that the relation to phenomenology remains central to the surviving philosophers of that generation is attested to in an exemplary fashion by the importance placed by Alain Badiou on characterising his own thought as in opposition to Heidegger and Heideggerianism, with what he sees as its problematic reduction of philosophy to hermeneutics (Badiou 1999, 74).8 The fold is a trope found in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault. While some affinities and areas of overlap can be identified, it is because the Foucaultian fold is itself a concept which disavows intentionality and dialectical sublation—however hidden intentionality may be in both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty9—that it can be used to show up the shortcomings in how the concept of the fold itself is operative in both Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s systems, thereby allowing what is, in Deleuze’s terms, the necessary corrective of the Foucaultian version to emerge. Part of what distinguishes the fold in Foucault is the historical specificity which it possesses in his analysis. Hence one of the central conceptual operators in classical reason as envisaged by Foucault is the unfold. By contrast to the configuration of forces which 7

For Deleuze’s own appraisal of the divergence of Foucault from a broadly phenomenological tradition see Deleuze (1986/1988, 115-20/108-14). 8 The fundamental incompatibility of Deleuzian and Badiouian readings of Beckett is addressed in Chapters 1 and 4 of the present study. 9 “Consciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the intermediary of the body” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 138-9). See Laruelle (1976, 281 ff.).

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characterised the Renaissance, Deleuze states in his appendix to Foucault that: in the classical historical formation, the forces within man enter into a relation with forces from the outside in such a way that the compound is a God-form, and not at all a man-form. This is the world of infinite representation. (Deleuze 1986/1988, 133/125)

The ‘family’ of classical énoncés can be defined, Deleuze continues, in the following terms: “continual development towards infinity, formation of continuums, and unveiling of scenes [tableaux]: the continual need to unfold [déplier, toujours déplié] and ‘explain’” (Deleuze 1986/1988, 133/126). This holds true as much for the medical gaze (regard) of the early seventeenth century as it does for Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza and Leibniz. Two parts of a given archive must be distinguished in Foucault’s archaeological analyses of historical formations: the historical and the current. This distinction suggests that, in Foucault’s special sense, the word archive does not simply refer to a reserve which can be borrowed from or accessed. A key passage from L’Archéologie du savoir makes it clear that for Foucault the notion of the fold entails a differential operation (a critical strategy), and does not simply function as a designator of the precepts of classical reason. The analysis of the archive comprises a privileged region which is at the same time close to us, but different from our present; it is the border of time which surrounds our present, jutting over it and describing it by means of its otherness; it is that which is outside us and delimits us. To describe the archive is to set out its possibilities (and the mastery of its possibilities) on the basis of forms of discourse that have recently ceased to be our own; the threshold of its existence is established by the break which separates us from what we can no longer say, and from that which falls outside our discursive practices. In this sense it becomes valid as a diagnostic for us. This is not because it makes possible for us to paint a picture of our distinctive traits and to sketch in advance what we will look like in the future. But it deprives us of our continuities; it dissolves this temporal identity in which we like to look at ourselves in order to conjure with breaks in history; it breaks the thread of transcendental teleologies; and at that point where anthropological thought questions the being of man or his subjectivity, it vividly draws attention to the other, to the outside. Understood in this way, the diagnostic does not establish the facts of our identity by means of the interplay of distinctions. It establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of forms of discourse, our history is the difference of times, that our selves are the difference of masks. (Foucault 1989, 130-1)


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Foucault chose in his other works of this period to isolate a particular archive—the clinic of the eighteenth century or the prison of the nineteenth—and to articulate “the general system of the formation and transformation of énoncés” which can be specified there (Deleuze 1988, 131). The task combines analysis of the formation and the diagnosis of transformation. In other words he isolates those factors which permitted a statement to be made, those strategies which allowed it to be stratified, to be, but he also identifies those factors which allowed it to no longer be, which forced it to be de-stratified, to become other. It is the double utility of the archive which facilitates, as will be demonstrated below, the use to which the distinction between Saying and Seeing will be put in our reading of Worstward Ho. However, a further distinction must be made between two ‘modalities’ of the archive. It is, as Deleuze has indicated, both audio and visual (Deleuze 1995, 97 and 1986/1988, 71/64). The title of Foucault’s Les mots et les choses indicates such a focus.10 When confronted by a given historical formation, the archaeological task is to distinguish two regimes—the systems of language and of light, respectively—which pertain to the formation in question. Having been thus isolated the subsequent task is to “split” (“fendre”) the words and things operating within their respective regimes. From these splits will emerge the énoncés and visibilities with which the archaeologist is concerned, those at once made possible, and caused to mutate, by the archive in question: “isolating the occurrence of the statement-event is the manner in which one avoids the synthetic operations which must be set aside” (Foucault 1989, 29). However, this aspect of Foucault’s analysis is historically specific. In his analysis of Las Meninas, for example, or of Rabelais, the work becomes the index of an epistemic rupture. In Las Meninas Foucault finds, scintillating from within the crevice caused by the painting’s “faultline”, a “visibility” which ruptures the continuity of the projective geometry of the Cartesian gaze. Foucault points out that in the painting no-one looks at “that tiny glowing rectangle which is nothing other than the visibility, yet without any gaze able to grasp it, to render it actual, and enjoy the suddenly ripe fruit of the spectacle it 10

This focus of course is lost in the title given to the English translation. Ironically, Foucault himself originally considered ‘L’ordre des choses’ as a possible title, and subsequently came to prefer it (Eribon 1989, 154).

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offers”(Foucault 1970, 23). The object is not seized, the thing remains in essence unrevealed: our gaze is caused to “disappear at the moment of our looking” (Foucault 1970, 20). Hence Las Meninas functions in the opening pages of Les mots et les choses as a diagnostic tool to facilitate the articulation of the collapse of the episteme associated with the classical age, by prying loose “the limits of practical knowledge that find expression equally in aesthetic practice and in institutional foundations of that practice” (Rodowick 2001, 58). Its examination of the particular manner in which the age in question handled the correlation of seeing and saying is primarily connected to this larger project. However, in the more localised and discrete analysis of Magritte’s well-known works featuring the inscription Ceci n’est pas une pipe (La trahison des images from 1929 and Les deux mystères from 1966), for Foucault the relationship between the regimes of language and light comes to rest in a context no longer determined primarily by the question of epistemic rupture in a strictly historical context. Here, to a certain degree, the handling of the relationship between seeing and saying, forms—as far as our purposes are concerned—a bridge between specific diagnostics in a historical context (Les mots et les choses) and a way of reading Worstward Ho as a contribution to a reflection on that relation detached from the specific question of epistemic rupture.11 In his condensing of the visible and the linguistic, Raymond Roussel would, according to Foucault’s later study, succeed in creating the “sun of language”. Roussel’s twofold fictional world consisted of, on the one hand, the qualities of the visible which he summarised as metamorphosis, and, on the other, qualities of the linguistic which can be summed up in the term labyrinth. In the words of Simon During: in Roussel’s work, the visible (metamorphosis) and the linguistic (the labyrinth) fall away from one another in their coming together. The sun, source of light, cannot be looked at; language, source of sense, can’t be made sense of. (During 1992, 78-9)

What the experiments of Roussel furnish is a visibility outside the gaze; this visibility is not defined by sight but is rather, in Deleuze’s Foucaultian formulation, a complex of “multisensorial” impressions equally defined by hearing and touch (Deleuze 1986/1988, 66/59) and 11

For a reading of Beckett and Magritte see Bryden and Redfern (1999).


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which is co-extensive with the “blindness” of that hearing or touch (Baross 2000, 30). In short “the unique limit that separates each one [language and sight] is also the common limit that links one to the other, a limit with two irregular faces, a blind word [parole] and a mute vision” (Deleuze 1986/1988, 72/65).12 In Roussel is to be found the “visually opaque dimension of language itself” (Jay 1993, 399). Never in a full light at the same time can being and representation be staged: there will always be a (residual) void or an absence. Thus for Foucault “it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say” (Foucault 1970, 25).13 That operation summarised as the folding of “one over the other (the space where one speaks and the space where one looks) as though they were equivalents” becomes no longer valid, a failure of the sort famously remarked upon by Beckett in Watt: Looking at a pot, for example, or thinking of a pot, one of Mr. Knott’s pots, it was in vain that Watt said, Pot, pot…It resembled a pot, it was almost a pot, but it was not a pot of which one could say Pot, pot, and be comforted. (1976, 78)

The failure of a correlation of being and representation exemplified in the story of Mr. Knott’s (non-)pots is at the heart of the concerns of Worstward Ho. “Blind word, mute vision”: seeing and saying in Worstward Ho At a certain level Worstward Ho exemplifies an anxiety towards what Steven Connor has called “economies of nothing” (Connor 1992, 85) of Heideggerian dimensions, while its encounters with that nothing might be said to recall the operation essential, in the thought of Heidegger, to the transformation of man into his Dasein. In addition, the “on” of Worstward Ho is of course, as well as a state of being switched on, also, via the Greek, Being itself (notwithstanding the preposition’s “grim” palindromic relation with “no” [Connor 1992, 83]).14 Finally, as if to reinforce this Heideggerian template, if nothing is the slipping away of the whole, Beckett’s text seems to permit the observation of this fleeing scenery, and what is more to offer us snap12

Cf. Beckett’s “blind voice” and “blank words” in The Unnamable (1979, 342; 375). On this point see also Lorraine (1999, 193). On the Foucaultian formula as it pertains to other works by Beckett see also Clément (1994, 71-74). 14 For Krance “On is the one right wrong word” (Krance 1990, 132). 13

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shots of its disappearance, in the manner of the Heideggerian formulation (in ‘The Way to Language’): “saying lets what is withdrawing into absence vanish” (Heidegger 1993, 415).15 Expanding from Heidegger to the phenomenological tradition more generally, the much commented upon notion of ‘onwardness’ (see for example Krance 1990 and Abbott 1996) in Beckett’s text for example might easily be read as the inscription of the equivalent of intentionality (every loving is a loving of something) as understood by Husserl, or as later reconfigured by Merleau-Ponty in his focus on Husserl’s understanding of operative intentionality conceived simply as: “Our relationship to the world, as it is untiringly enunciated within us” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, xviii). The ‘ward’ of ‘Worstward’ might then suggest ‘word’ on the one hand and orientation (or directedness towards) on the other, in short the ‘aboutness’ identified as intrinsic to the phenomenologies of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (Moran 2000, 16). Let us now test the degree to which Worstward Ho allows this interpretive grid to be placed upon it. The text opens in the domain of what Foucault calls l’énonçable (the articulable) with the words: On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nowhow on. Said nohow on. (1972, 7)

Once it has been announced that something may be underway and/or exist, the prose stammers and staggers16 over the elements of conjured spaces, bodies and locations—all hypothetically posited under the demands of what would appear to be an imperative. Each of the oscillations or vibrations which will in due course be felt between saying and seeing comes under the inaugural injunction: “Say.” Between the first instances respectively of the verbs to say (paragraph 1) and to see (paragraph 12) the only notable activity is concentrated in “it stands” (paragraph 6)—an aspirant act of self-assembly presided over by a quasi-Heideggerian Sorge: “With care never worse failed” (9, paragraph 7).17 15

Beckett’s letter to Kennedy of 1967 on the theme of “nothing” is in Disjecta (1984, 113). 16 See Butler (1984, 29-33) for a reading of Beckett in terms of Sorge. 17 For Deleuze Beckett’s writing succeeds in a reversible transfer between form of expression and form of content precisely in the manner in which a stammer is in some


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The dim light (paragraph 8) that emerges following the recapitulation to a programme of failure, recalls in part the omnipresent gleam suffusing the interior of the cylinder of The Lost Ones. There are, likewise, echoes in this paragraph of a Plotinian, or more generally neo-Platonic, conception of light and illumination.18 However, while it is feasible to associate the ‘fallen’ body with a specular narcissism, with the body conceived of as the tarnished reflection of a Plotinian Intellect/One, it seems to be going too far to claim, with Amiran, that Worstward Ho itself is the journey identified by Plotinus of the (fallen) emanated being(s) towards the One (Amiran 1993).19 Nonetheless, an attempt at standing is made again without avail, the effort culminating in the emergency of “groan”, and then “pain”. It would, however, be to neglect something fundamental to Worstward Ho to fail to notice that, before the next instance of the word “say”, “see” appears as in the sequence: “Try see. Try say. How first it lay” (10, paragraph 9). First, then, there has been a flicker of the visible with “dim light”, followed now by a fully-fledged act of sight, or at least injunction to see, or to try to see (paragraph 9). The status of the “Another” announced in the subsequent paragraph (paragraph 10) is, not surprisingly, unclear. It is introduced in a sequence that follows the pattern of the opening sentence of the text, with the word ‘another’ now taking the place once occupied by “on” or on. Quite abruptly, however, here there is what amounts—at least for an instant—to quite a humanoid, quite substantially more than a mere bag of hypothetical bones. Suddenly everything—head, hands, and eyes—seems possible: an entire evolutionary unfolding promised in the phrase: “Seat of all. Germ of all” (10). The text is swift, however, to dispel the solace of teleology before revivifying it equally

way also a stagger (Deleuze 1993/1998, 139/111). On Dasein as care (sorge) see Heidegger (1996, 178-183). 18 See Chapter 2 above for further discussion of Plotinian echoes in The Lost Ones. 19 It is beyond the scope of the present chapter to do other than suggest that the concept of Beon—the Anglo Saxon term used to translate Heidegger’s archaic spelling of Seyn (for the modern Sein) —in the short text ‘The Pathway’ (Der Feldweg, 1949) describes a journey out of the fallen state (without the Christian associations, the fall in Heidegger is into “technicity”). See Richardson (1963, 559-561) for an account of the place of Beon in ‘The Pathway’. It should be noted that the O’Meara translation (Heidegger 2003) does not opt to translate the term in this way.

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abruptly: “No future in this. Alas yes” (10).20 Despite the setback, the visible is at last vying for position with the articulable: “It stands. See in the dim void how at last it stands. In the dim light source unknown” (10, paragraph 12). In the void which is helpfully, if impossibly, illuminated—in the void equivalent to light— the apparition stands. But it stands “at last” only when ‘to say’ and ‘to see’ coalesce. Matters then have—albeit minimally (meremost minimally?)—progressed. With a said and a seen confounded, melded “at last”, “That shade” can be introduced (11, paragraph 13). A figure identified as “The first” is clothed. The text is at this point occupying a zone comparable to that in which the narrator of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu finds himself, whose magic lantern enables him to be pulled up out of le néant (Proust 1954, 12). Indeed, if the magic lantern in Du Côté de chez Swann facilitates “le souvenir—non encore du lieu où j’étais, mais de quelques-uns de ceux que j’avais habités et où j’aurais pu être” (12), then the equivalent apparatus in Worstward Ho can also be quite potent in its summonsing. A figure identified as “The first” is clothed with a hat and the remains of a black greatcoat. The two (who have the good fortune to both be robed in full-length rather than cut-off greatcoats), who augur future sundering by means of the archaic word “twain”, will eventually not only diverge (equal plod maintained as a sideeffect of erstwhile union), but also be reduced to one ambulant headless, legless trunk (albeit still capable of persevering with a plod equaled by its other half, so to speak). Appending numbers to these figures, images or shades, yields 1, the back turned shade, 2, the man and child and 3, the skull. The text busies itself by switching back and forth among these as if they were so many images activated by a slide-projector. There is, however, momentary respite from the projectionist frenzy, as the “seat and germ of all”, in a manner more promising as far as ontological stability is concerned than anything else encountered in the text up until this point, becomes “Scene and seer of all”. Both set and camera are in place. It is almost time to shout “Action!” (or to prod something into life in the manner of Act Without Words II).

20

As Renton has pointed out, though not a bildungsroman, Worstward Ho involves “similar educational experiences” (Renton 1992, 115).


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However ‘to act’ is not one of the verbs available to the text. To stare, to say, to see, to secrete, to ooze: these are available, and it is indeed to this last that the second half of Worstward Ho will soon turn.21 What it is here proposed can be called the second half (that is, after paragraph 47) opens with a very insistent positing of “Stare” in place of the corresponding verb (“Say”) in the first paragraph in section one. Instead of a “say” undercut by the passive modulation “be said” (as in the first paragraph of the first half), section two gives in sequence: “Stare on. Say on. Be on” (paragraph 48). Such a sequence, with a verb of vision, the imperative and/or infinitive of the verb ‘(to) say’ synthesized into the imperative/infinite ‘(to) be’ might confirm that Worstward Ho will, finally, conjure Dasein. Indeed it could bear out Carla Locatelli’s insistence on the outlines of what she calls Worstward Ho’s “phenomenological hermeneutics of experience” (Locatelli 1990, 264), wherein a supposed “ineliminable residuum of a deconstructed but irrecoverable representation” (263) is abetted by the central organising principle of the text, in the guise of its quasi-phenomenological cipher and touchstone: the word somehow, or as Locatelli glosses it, the intentionality of thought (260). In contrast to Locatelli, however, the consideration here of the disjunction of seeing and saying (things and words, in the distinction of Foucault’s book of 1966) in Worstward Ho does not support the claim either that there is a sublation and eclipse of one regime by the other, nor does it uphold the more tentative but equally problematical claim that there obtains, at the very least, a consonant liaison between them that is tantamount to the birth of intentionality. The lesson of Foucault as passed on by Deleuze is that intentionality must collapse in the space that opens up between two regimes that are effectively monadic in their maintenance of a relation of non-relation (Deleuze 1986/1988, 117/109). The monadic relation of non-relation (no stranger to the works of Beckett) means that, held apart from one another, like two Leibnizian monads, the regime of light (seeing) and the regime of language (saying) cannot operate causally upon one another, and yet, like the monads in this further respect, they do, nonetheless, contaminate 21

For Connor “secrete” is the verb favoured to describe articulation in the second half (Connor 1992, 88). It might be argued, however, that a related verb “to ooze” is more dominant, if only because articulation proper is becoming lost in a pervasive slippage (see Beckett 1984, 128). Andrew Renton reports that Beckett originally drafted ‘drip’ for ‘ooze’ (Renton 1992, 128 n.27).

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one another across the obscure ‘basement’ of which each of their monad selves virtually partake. It requires a monadology subject to an acknowledgement and a retrieval of the occluded (by Leibniz) internal tensions of Leibniz’s thought to facilitate this paradox of a monad with a porous façade that will enable leakage between two monads held in a relation of non-relation. Hence, although Deleuze upholds the Foucaultian principle of the fêlure, words are split to allow the secretion of l’énoncé, and things are riven to permit the scintillation of the visible, that is not the whole story. Foucault’s study of Roussel had already shown how l’énoncé does not only “ooze” out of the split in words, and the visibility22 does not only scintillate from within the breach in things. Rather, there is an underground criss-crossing, a transversal interanimation of each regime which cannot be resolved into a consonant relation. In Worstward Ho words and things operate as forces upon oneanother, bending and countermanding each other. A fault divides visible form from the form of what can be uttered, and they are thus held in irreducible relation (that is to say, non-relation). While it is quite right to point out that in the phrase “nowhow on” Beckett gestures towards the problem of knowledge (‘knowhow’)—epistemology being indebted to the metaphor of light under discussion here—this is a transitional manoeuvre.23 At a key point in his study of Foucault Deleuze reproaches phenomenology for its dream of a “savage” experience— most famously characterised by Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, but equally contained in Merleau-Ponty’s primordial flesh (Deleuze 1986/1988, 120/112). Beyond epistemology, Beckett’s archive takes us to a stage where as forces, words and things act upon one-another strategically (in Deleuze’s terms). As Evelyne Grossman so convincingly puts it le corps de la phrase est littéralement lacéré, des césures s’y découpent, des segments s’insèrent en incise; des entrelacs de syntagmes devenus indépendants démantibulant la syntaxe et la réparent dans une alternance rythmée des blessures et de suturation des plaies qui donne à ce texte ce rythme si particulier de halètement suspendu entre vie et mort. (Grossman 2004, 72) 22

“Visibilities are not forms of objects… but… forms of luminosity” (Deleuze 1986/1988, 60/52); “Visions or sounds: how can they be distinguished…they are said to be ill seen ill said whenever words pierce themselves and turn against themselves so as to reveal their outside” (Deleuze 1992/1998, 105/173). 23 Cf. Murphy (1994, 237).


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[the body of the sentence is literally lacerated, caesura cut it up, segments are inserted into the incisions; intertwinings of syntagms which have become independent demobilise the syntax and repair it in a rhythmic alternation of wounds and stitching of wounds which give to the text its so particular rhythm of gasping suspended between life and death.]

If “nohow”—the coinage which appears in Worstward Ho and which now acts as a title for the ‘late trilogy’—gives on, as most commentators agree, to the word ‘knowhow’ and hence the problem of knowledge or epistemology, then the lesson is clear. Because there is a dislocation or breach between seeing and saying, and a “vastness” which maintains them “apart” in a relation of non-relation, Beckett’s text accords with the judgement Deleuze discerns in Foucault: that “you can’t solve the problem of knowledge ... by invoking a correspondence or conformity of terms” (Deleuze 1990/1995, 132/96). Which may serve to explain why that word ‘knowhow’ is occluded in a partial negation; the residual “_no_how” which emerges via a process of puncturing—a dehiscence as announced in the German letter of 1937—exposes the word to an “outside”. Said (i.e. verbalised) “nohow on” (which includes ‘knowhow’) is not the same as seen “nohow on” (which excludes it). Yet there remains a transversal threading together of the two regimes, but in what Deleuze calls “another dimension”.24 This is the dimension of the “outside”, an outside that is “further from us than any external world, and thereby closer than any inner world” (Deleuze 1990/1995, 133/97). It is the dimension where “one speaks” or, in Beckett’s terms (straddling English and French), where ‘on’ speaks. Appropriating Deleuze’s own formulation apropos of Foucault’s disagreement with phenomenology, addressed via his celebration of the procedures of Roussel, what Worstward Ho illustrates is that: rather than any agreement or homology (any consonance), you get an endless struggle between what we see and what we say, brief clutchings, tussles, captures, because we never say what we see and never see what we say. The visible bursts out between two propositions, and an utterance bursts out between two things. Intentionality gives way to a whole theatre, an endless interplay between the visible and the utterable. Each breaks open the other. Foucault’s criticism of phenomenology is there, unannounced, in Raymond Roussel. (Deleuze 1990/1995, 146/108) 24

Deleuze is following Foucault here in This is not a pipe (Foucault 1981, 33-4). See also Deleuze (1988, 143 n. 24).

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Worstward Ho, then, can be considered as a contribution to a ‘nonphilosophical’ exploration of a problem, via sensations of concepts, which as concepts proper lie at the core of phenomenology: what it is to appear.25 The language of apparition, revealing and glimpsing as well as of occlusion, dimming and shading is pervasive. Likewise its landscape is populated by—and to some degree equivalent to— shades, blurred objects or images. The “narrow field” coextensive with this landscape is said to be “rife with shades”. Words in the text are said to ooze from a “soft of mind”. Resonant or not of the expression “soft in the head”, it is undeniable that a rationalist conviction that reason is in any fashion sovereign with respect to the contents, operations or products of this mind, is severely compromised in what Worstward Ho proposes. While the jettisoned (“shed”) words ooze in a fluid continuum and are notable for the extent to which they are never quite got rid of, the outward-directed gaze is itself subject to never quite being total or able to capture: “Stare by words dimmed” degrades so that it becomes “dim dimmed”. Accumulations of discrete events of dimming remind one that in general here accumulations are ambiguous: do they have the effect of subtraction, proliferation, reduction, and purging—all of which processes allow a progressive or regressive (as Locatelli argues) linearity to be felt by the reader? For Locatelli this “powerful apotheosis of subtraction” is “an epistemological instrument” (Locatelli 1990, 225); at the very least, as Connor remarks, the frequent redundancy of negation “creates a tiny surplus, the first smear of what will build into an Augean deposit of negative affirmations” (Connor 1992, 84). The stare is dimmed by words, but while freshly undimmed several lines later, having fallen into that dimness for a duration, or for an instant, due to commerce with words: vision is obscured, or is rendered inefficient, by words—in Foucaultian terms the regime of light is hampered by the domain of language. As Hill put it “Words squint at themselves and divide into antagonistic doubles of each other, the one meaning postponing the other, contradicting it, making it different, losing its own stability in the process” (Hill 1990, 160). 25

Colombat argues that literary critics deal with “sensations of concepts” whereas “the philosopher deals instead with the concepts of sensation that can be derived from a writer’s work” (Colombat 1997, 591). For Pierre Macherey, by contrast, at least on this point, literature is a “pensée sans concepts” (Macherey 1990, 198).


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Paragraph 81 performs a reverse debilitation, this time of vision by words: “Back unsay shades can go”: the apparitions—the shades, themselves possibly already owing their shadiness to their necessary commerce with words (with these words, the worst or “worse words” [paragraph 83, 41])—are unsaid by the text’s winding back. It seems that while words can go (leaving blanks), shades cannot go; they can only fade or blur. When words are gone and blanks remain then the seen is unsaid, and there is, moreover, no ooze (associated with words as secretions from the “soft of mind”) to speak of. Ooze can only be equivalent to “seen”, the text reports, when it is seen with “ooze”, which would mean when it is seen with words (“with” here could mean “in the company” of or “by”), but ooze is not equivalent to words; rather, ooze is the modality of words, their manner of being projected, expelled or shed. Hence to be seen with ooze would be a) to be seen alongside the process of oozing, or b) to be seen in conjunction with the outcome of oozing (words), or c) to be seen by ooze, or by the process of oozing—a process which although associated by the text with words need not be solely associated with words. But when the seen is undimmed—that is, not in the presence of, or not caused to appear by way of, words—there is no ooze. To be seen is also possibly posited here as equivalent to “nohow on”. This would mean that when “nohow” is ‘switched on’, i.e. when the occluded problem of knowledge (the first of the three essential Kantian questions—“What can I know?”—and its repetition and reduction in Beckett) is ‘on’ as opposed to ‘off’ the terrain of enquiry, it is in the service of the privileging of light identified by Blanchot (Blanchot 1993), or of the gaze as identified by Foucault (Foucault 1976, 166). An undimmed seen—arrived at by the demotion of words—would be one wherein ooze (and the processual, fluid nature of that medium) itself was deleted or “gone”. If the ooze is arrested by the need to have an undimmed seen, that, however, does not remove entirely from the “scene”—itself a highly resonant word—the “soft” which has been its point of origin, or, at least, prolongation (“seat of all scene of all”). Worsened words, or the better-worsened words, will produce blanks. The text gets to work on the images (paragraph 83), or on how the images are said in words, so that when it states “Back worse worsen twain” it means that the way in which whatever is said is said (whatever it is reported to be said) must be worse said.

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The semiotic parasitism finds an echo at another level in the shape of a newly introduced verb: to prey.26 What is attempting to prolong itself here? Is something trying to stay on, or be off? Words perhaps, those which prey upon each other (the already attempted words eaten by the newly worse said versions of or replacements for those not-illenough said words) in order to worsen themselves. The preying itself cannot be arrested (“No stilling preying”). Why, however, is it a case of “faintly preying” (my emphasis)—in other words why this sense of a preying that is blurred or indistinct? Perhaps it is because the battle of regimes is still at work—dimming being the effect of words, or of ooze of words, upon the seen. Saying—or ill-saying—is the only way to worsen the said seen, and thereby to “be gone”. With the project gathering a momentum that is palpable, the gnawing, the preying, the worsening, in short the series of operations which are either cumulative or dissipative eventually yields three pinholes separated by “vasts” at the bounds of a void which is also boundless—at impossible locations, unlocatable, unseeable and unsayable loci. The way to attain the unsayable and the unseeable is to refine the ooze of any vestige of an intentionality: agency, location, summonsing up, conjuring—all of these are such vestiges. If this is a reduction then it has nothing of Husserl’s reduction: a hylē that cannot be inventoried (an inventory is based on attribution, ascription, and being accounted for in terms of value and location). If the soft is in some ways close to Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh”, then it is a flesh subject to the workings of forces across it, depriving it of its aspirations to form. Finally, if it has an affinity with Heidegger’s Dasein, the “thenceless, thitherless there” of the impossible site of the three pinholes is without the comforts of his Lichtung (clearing).27 This is the “Outside”; this is the other dimension, because the outside is where the threads between the regime of language and the regime of light are located: in this narrow field, the field towards which Beckett’s work is always to some extent moving, there is still an ooze, an oozed said (an énoncé), still a shaded seen (a visibility). The final words of the text, then, “Said nohow on” are an oozed said, not a said said. 26

Cf. Bersani and Dutoit for whom to “say on” is to “gnaw on”: “it eats what it refers to” (Bersani and Dutoit 1993, 83). 27 On the distinction between the Open and the Outside see Deleuze (1988, 108-113). See also the informative ‘The Transitions of Lichtung’ in Krell (1986, 80-91).


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Thus, in the form of words which pierce themselves and visions confronted by their own blind-spots—in short in ill saying and ill seeing—in a work of prose directed not towards a “somehow” (meaning ascription, retrieval of the deconstructed subject or object) but implicated in a debilitating spiral of worstwardness, both saying and seeing are exposed to their constitutive outside: “ooze” (or matter not rendered into hyletic data).28 The principal contention of this chapter, then, has been that the uneasy alliance of seeing and saying is subjected in Worstward Ho to a thoroughgoing and meticulous interrogation. What results has suggested to some the viability of a hermeneutical-phenomenological reading of Beckett. If it is true, as Garner comments in respect of Thomas Trezise’s broadside against phenomenology in his book of 1990, that the study is a “polemical construction, narrowly derived from a single reading of historically limited texts [essentially Husserl]” (Garner 1994, 23), it is hoped that this chapter has gone some way towards presenting the argument that, insofar as it insists on thinking under the guarantee of light or the threat of its absence, a broader phenomenological tradition, encompassing Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, finds itself scarcely better off in Beckett’s Worstward Ho. Coda: abstract machine or stellar separation? That Worstward Ho occupies a crucial place in Beckett’s body of work beyond its culminating position in chronological terms (‘Comment dire’ and Stirrings Still notwithstanding) is an opinion with widespread support. It is the work which the author himself deemed to be untranslatable and he did not undertake to attempt the task he thought impossible.29 Yet translated it was—as Cap au pire—, and admirably so, by Édith Fournier. Badiou commences his preface to the English collection of his writings on Beckett (Badiou 2003) by referring to this unique status. If this text is bracketed in this manner it also finds itself further under special scrutiny in Badiou’s “système Beckett” by virtue of its extraordinary claim on the terrain usually reserved for philosophy. Deleuze, for whom the questions of the specificity of the philosophical and the alliance of philosophy and non28

Cf. Bersani and Dutoit for whom Worstward Ho offers only “impeded reading” (Bersani and Dutoit 1993, 87). 29 He remarked to André Bernold that even the first word was untranslatable, adding “à moins de grands sacrifices” (Bernold 1992, 99).

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philosophical creation (literature included) elicited quite a different response, also finds in Worstward Ho a crystallisation. Where Deleuze finds ‘the image’ and, arguably, therefore, something which could not be thought without Beckett, Badiou, for his part, finds philosophy itself. The manner in which Beckett is a ‘half a philosopher’ for Deleuze does not rule out the possibility that Beckett’s work may be capable of philosophising better than a ‘professional’ philosopher. By contrast to Deleuze, Badiou’s critique of the suture of philosophy to its conditions commits him to a vigilant attention to the mutual limit of the philosophical and the literary. If Beckett cannot, then, be demiphilosophe, how is it that in one text he suddenly finds himself, or his text at least, on the other side? The reader of Badiou might say that this is in some ways for him the event of Beckett; that the work intervenes as an interruptive rupture, as Badiou himself reports in his account of how the work of Beckett made a profound impact on him when he was like Krapp a “jeune crétin”. It installs between itself and its conditions a gap, a spacing. That gap, the one left when Worstward Ho makes its leap, is the very gap between literature and philosophy. He is explicit on this point in both Beckett: l’increvable désir and ‘Being, Existence, Thought’: Worstward Ho is a “philosophical treatise” in which there is no latent poem (1995/2003, 11/40, & 2003, 80). It is perhaps no coincidence that, of the work collected in On Beckett, the essay on Worstward Ho (though, strictly speaking, it is, as Badiou himself points out, an essay on Cap au pire alone, while through re-translation—and the re- is of course problematic—it necessarily loses its bearings [Badiou 2003, xxxvi]) is, arguably, the most persuasive and the most complex. Oddly, however, the powers of persuasion are directly proportional to the practice of a selective application of his own statement about the existence of intertextual traces in Worstward Ho of the entire œuvre, to the extent that it is a “table of contents” (81) of the corpus.30 By “subtracting” that which he himself acknowledges as

30

A comparable point is made by Brater: “Far from being abstract, however, the piece involves nothing less than an ‘inventory’ and a reconsideration of the complete Beckett vocabulary” (Brater 1994, 136). For Gibson it is a “résumé, even a mise-en-abîme of the Beckettian trajectory” (Gibson in Lane 2002, 99). For Bersani and Dutoit, the work is in this respect an “opaque monad” (Bersani and Dutoit 1993, 84). Equally, for Hill, Company is the “cryptic memorial to all the texts that have gone before” (Hill


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inescapable (namely these traces), Badiou is enabled to advance, further than would otherwise be possible, his own strong reading tethered to the Platonic coordinates of the One, Being and the Two of Love. Whereas inserting the work into the context which he denies in fact renders Worstward Ho, while no less unique, less susceptible to the promotion of these Badiouian preoccupations. Worstward Ho becomes, to mimic Badiou’s analysis of the void, that text which cannot move. Fixed into a constellation, anointed in the Mallarméan sense, it cannot be translated, cannot be leant a metaphorical interpretation. It is not literature but a philosophical treatise. Thus Worstward Ho is an instance of the work of one of the conditions of philosophy which somehow slips from ‘suture’ to the very place of philosophy itself. Badiou’s justification for his manoeuvre seems, in all cases where it becomes crucial, to involve him in a critical posture whereby he is permitted to stand “outside”. A complex problem arises when the “outside” in question feels like literary criticism or commentary, or literature itself (as when one has a feeling, and Badiou often does, that matters “ring true” as he puts it in the 1998 text ‘Ce qui arrive’ [2003, 115]). When things ring in this way, he is free to seize on the felicitous consonance. As Lecercle points out, there is a tension in Badiou’s work on literature wherein he disavows the tyranny of language in moves which are at odds with or do not quite present the case for such disavowal. Once Badiou moves out or talks the talk of stepping outside in order to argue that Beckett’s text demands that the step cannot be taken (non-suture) the suture seems to be established. Once established, it has been there all along and Worstward Ho loses the very “essence” Badiou requires of it if it is to promote his agenda. One of the many refrains in Badiou’s essays and chapters on Beckett is constellation—an index of his predilection for Mallarmé and in particular the final image of his Un Coup de dés. In Mallarmé’s poem we discover: UNE CONSTELLATION froide d’oubli et de désuétude pas tant qu’elle n’énumère 1990, 160), and for Boulter How It Is “ties up all the hermeneutic threads that make up the previous novels” (Boulter 2001, 109).

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Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze & Guattari sur quelque surface vacante et supérieure le heurt successif sidéralement d’un compte total en formation (Mallarmé 1976, 429)

In contemplating the heavens, however, the problem, as Beckett’s Malone identifies it, is that if the celestial bodies he takes to be visible through the window of his abode should turn out to be merely simulacra painted on an ersatz window pane, the place in his world of astronomical movements will remain a mere projection without any hope of the working out of neo-Platonic emanation. Despite the claims made by Badiou for a direct influence on Beckett, the latter (or his young cretin) reports (in 1932) in his correspondence with MacGreevy that Mallarmé was “too Jesuitical” for his liking.31 It is true nonetheless that Dream of Fair to Middling Women invokes “the demented perforation of the night colander” (Beckett 1993, 44) as a metaphor for the non-punctuation of poetry and music; the cylindrical vault of The Lost Ones/Le Dépeupleur contains searchers who find themselves mesmerised by a dreamed of access to light and stars; Ill Seen Ill Said begins with Venus rising. Company, likewise, delivers its own constellation—a word of course used by Beckett in that text—as Badiou reports in Conditions (Badiou 1992/2003, 360/31).32 As with Malone Dies, in hermeneutic terms, much hinges on the matter of to what extent(s) one is either ‘on’ or ‘off’ Beckett (in the manner in which skiers can choose between on- or off-piste) in, as a critic, believing in this egress (or as Dream puts it, ‘exitus’: 1993, 44) and that to which it gives on. While, in his collected translated writings on Beckett’s work, Badiou may be circumspect regarding his location in relation to its famously treacherous slopes, he is, unlike Murphy in this regard, unambiguous in his devotion to star-gazing. Conditions gives us a ‘two’ thrown together in Enough such that “the multiple of Constellations is held in the opening of the Two” (Badiou 1992/2003, 361/31); the “astral pin” which embroiders the dark tapestry of Worstward Ho is endowed with salvific potential (salvation in Badiou’s formulation being no less fraught with irony than it is in Beckett’s). Such stellar 31

Letter to MacGreevy 4th of August 1932. Mallarmé is, however, said to have featured in his reading in the 1970s. 32 The constellation of Company is only fixed and open to being possessed in the French version (as the editors are careful to point out in their endnote [143, n. 51]).


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phenomena, wherever they are present signal generally (and Platonically) “the nocturnal fissure [refente] of the grey-black of being” (361/31). For the Beckett reader coming to Badiou’s work for the first time, when the philosopher finds himself in the spare “company” of the three pinholes of Worstward Ho, the moment may not appear exemplary of a particular system. The ease, however, with which Badiou stitches a constellation into the fabric of Worstward Ho, is perhaps evidence, in the end, that for all his avowal of the de-suture of philosophy from its conditions, in writing philosophy out of poetry (and out of the impasse of the suture) Badiou finds himself more a poet than a philosopher (appropriate perhaps for a philosopher who is also a novelist, dramatist and librettist). In what may be Badiou’s most enduring tribute to Beckett and offer a thread of hope to the suturists among Beckett scholars, the question of whether the philosophy of Alain Badiou as represented by his disparate writings on Beckett finds itself more sutured to literature by virtue of being collected, rather than the constitutive elements being left in their four respective contexts, remains to be decided. The concept of a suture to literature which philosophy must avoid (in Badiou’s anti-Heideggerian gesture) is itself one of the polemical tenets of Badiou’s philosophy that comes under pressure in the specific and unforeseen demands which Worstward Ho makes on him (though he is not the only one to have felt these demands). Deleuze, in his Proustian formulation, characterises the relation in terms of philosophy’s susceptibility to the “secret pressures of the work of art”. Since, for Deleuze, this conjunction is manifest through what he calls the “formula”, the next chapter derives its main impetus and trajectory from a key essay by Deleuze which, arguably, most comprehensively exemplifies the pressure of literature on and in his philosophy. Moreover it offers an alternative manner of articulating the operation in Beckett’s œuvre of the ‘latent poem’ (having first discussed one of Beckett’s ‘manifest’ poems, ‘je suis ce cours de sable’).

6. Beckett’s ‘Dislocations’

It has often been remarked—not least by Deleuze himself (1995, 6)— that Kant and Deleuze make for a highly incongruous pairing. Yet it is in Deleuze’s reading of Kant (the “enemy”), in what would become the preface to the second edition of his book of 1963, that we find one of the most thoroughly delineated portraits of a philosopher under the yoke of Deleuze’s celebrated ‘methodology’, or schizoanalytic genealogy, whereby a monstrous conceptual ‘offspring’ is created for a philosopher by way of a peculiar mode of fecundation “dans le dos” (15/6).1 Kant, in the essay ‘Sur quatre formules qui pourraient résumer la philosophie kantienne’ (first published in English in the 1984 translation), is to be found in the unlikely company of Kafka, Rimbaud, and Shakespeare. In the terms employed by Deleuze in his Logique du sens, this is the history of philosophy as configured under the auspices of Aion rather than of Chronos (Deleuze 1969/1990, 19097/162-8). It is also an especially emphatic example of what Tom Conley has described as literature operating in Deleuze’s thought as 1

Deleuze’s work on the history of philosophy often explores unarticulated elements or consequences of the philosopher’s thought, as opposed to an intended and fully articulated position in that thought. See Deleuze (1995, 6). Foucault in a review for Critique (1970) was one of the first to identify what lay at the heart of the Deleuzian project: “registering, as if in passing ... [Western Philosophy's] oversights” (Foucault 1977, 172), or ‘giving’ philosophers concepts perhaps refused by the overall orientation of their philosophical position. A notable example in this context is the portrait of Heidegger skewed by the pataphysician Alfred Jarry (‘Un précurseur méconnu de Heidegger’) in Critique et clinique (Deleuze 1993/1998, 115-125/91-8).

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“the difference that sustains the recurring issues of philosophy” (Conley 2000, 263). 2 This is another way of describing what has, elsewhere in the present study, been called the “encounter” between literature and philosophy. In essays such as that on Kant the traffic goes in both directions. Poetic formulas—deriving from literature— serve to sum up Kant’s philosophy, but equally it might be stated that philosophical concepts assist Deleuze in making incisive literarycritical commentaries—albeit terse ones—on three literary authors. The resultant summary of Kantian philosophy thus offers a skewed portrait the better to enable Kant’s concepts to respond to problems that are no longer Kantian. Nowhere more so than in the work of Beckett is the inverse relation operative. To the end of registering in part the articulation of a philosophical problem embedded in Beckett’s poetry, this chapter will attempt to graft the Deleuzian strategy to the domain of literature. The first section, then, through a reading of Beckett’s 1948 poem ‘je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse’ (Beckett 1977, 56-7), will show how the four formulas patented by Deleuze in his preface to Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties might also be used to sum up the salient features of Beckett’s poetry.3 The four formulas, then, become a conduit between 2

For another approach, compatible with that developed here, see Timothy S. Murphy’s ingenious reading, via chapter 4 of Deleuze’s Différence et répétition, of Beckett’s ‘late trilogy’, wherein he argues that “Deleuze’s thought stages or dramatises (rather than reads or explicates) Beckett’s prose, ... Beckett’s prose stages Deleuze’s thought” (Murphy 2000, 229). Simon Critchley insists that in all philosophically-informed readings of Beckett’s work “the philosophical hermeneut becomes a rather flat-footed puppet dancing to the author’s tune” (Critchley 1997, 144). It is true that philosophical echoes in Beckett always run the risk of leading the interpreter astray and of abandoning the unwily in the vacuity of self-generated allusions and hermeneutical illusions. This abandonment and its attendant sense of futility, however, do not necessarily demand silence when it comes to thinking-through Beckett philosophically, to thinking philosophically about his work or to thinking the work via and in relation to the philosophical. 3 Deleuze developed the ideas presented in the preface to the English edition (Deleuze 1984) during his seminar on Kant at Vincennes in 1978 (in the seminar only three formulas appear). The Kant preface is revised and reprinted as ‘On Four Poetic Formulas that Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy’, in Essays Critical and Clinical (Deleuze 1998). Quotations from Deleuze’s seminar appear in Melissa McMahon’s translation which is available on-line at . See also Deleuze’s translated 1963 Kant essay, ‘The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Aesthetics’ (Deleuze 2000). The Kantian links would perhaps be more motivated if this poem were one of those in the pages found by the painter Avigdor Arikha in the copy of

Beckett’s ‘Dislocations’

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philosophy and literature; but in this they do not function as a harmonious common ground. Rather they serve as a site of contestation and thus as the space-time of a discordant accord between the philosophical and the literary themselves. The key to the pertinence of the conjunction of, respectively, a ‘Beckettian’ and a ‘Deleuzian’ Kant lies in the fact that Deleuze’s philosophical use of Kant and literature finds a miniature mirror image in Beckett’s literary use of Kant and philosophy. The conjunction is an instance of the aporia of recognition, or shadow hospitality, discussed in Chapter 1 above. Indeed, in this respect, it is necessary to qualify the term “use” in the case of Beckett. After all Peter Murphy has, correctly, pointed out the limited extent of the direct use to which Kant is put in Beckett’s work. Kant is rarely present in Beckett’s work in a way that would enable the time-honoured procedure of intertextual exegesis which, in this instance, would entail the putting into sequence of a quotation from Kant and a passage from the corpus supposedly responding, referring or alluding to that quotation. Kant and Kantian aesthetics, however, it will be proposed, provide Beckett with one or two ‘philosophical formulas’ which are strikingly rendered, specifically in his poetry. There are aspects of several of Beckett’s poems that can be said to resonate with Kantian aesthetics but also with aesthetics and poetics in general. If Deleuze finds a poetic formula in Rimbaud, the philosophical formula discernible in certain poems by Beckett is in fact partly filtered through Beckett’s own reading of, translation of (Le Bateau ivre), and intense early interest in the work of the French poet. Both the poetic and poetics therefore are in dialogue here. A concluding section expands from the Kantian context, while retaining a focus on a spatial or figural trope very much in evidence in his philosophical thought, namely the threshold. In exploring a variety Kant given to him by Beckett. For indeed the philosopher does put in an appearance in one of these poems—‘ainsi a-t-on beau’—as a gigantic figure “froidement penché” over a “lisbonne fumante”. John Pilling traces this line to Ernst Cassirer’s survey of the life and works of Kant as this appeared in the 11 volume complete works purchased by Beckett in the 1930s. On the Arikha story see Knowlson (1976, n. 161 and n. 162). Peter Murphy (1994) traces Beckett’s allusion in the poem in question (which is repeated more cryptically in Watt) to Kant’s pre-critical work De Igne. It is known that Beckett did devote much energy to his “antediluvian edition” of Kant’s Complete Works, acquired in 1938 (according to Brian Coffey), 1937 (according to Knowlson) or 1936 (Pilling 2006) before passing it on to Arikha.

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of deployments of this trope in several prose works by Beckett, before returning to ‘je suis ce course de sable’, the concluding pages of both chapter and book position the vestigial architectonics and ruinous architecture of Beckett’s poetic and fictional worlds which share a Kantian horizon in the overall framework of the Abstract Machines which have been convened over the course of this study as a whole. On Four Kantian Formulas “I don’t feel a body on me” (Beckett 1979, 379): this is an expression of the collapse of the structure of self-recognition on the part of the subject. It is in this moment of loss, lapse, or rupture that there is a failure to exercise in a harmonious manner all of the faculties in unison. If Descartes’ wax can be seen, touched, remembered, imagined and conceived, it is only by means of a supplementary surveillance of these disparate properties (Deleuze 1968/1994, 174/133). Recognition is the category assigned to this procedure in Deleuze’s Différence et répétition. Recognition in the Kantian cogito, he points out, relies upon a concord of the faculties, while for the philosopher “the form of identity in objects relies upon a ground in the unity of a thinking subject of which all the other faculties must be modalities” (133/175). Thought, according to the image implied here, is in a sense “upright”, regulative and informative: it surveys and ordains, or, as Deleuze puts it, “form will never inspire anything but conformities” (134/176). It is in this particular focus—on the problematics of form—that the present study addresses the notion of the Abstract Machine, but it also holds together the series of reflections which follow below. Kant’s three critiques establish three interrelated modes of the dogmatic or upright image of thought. In the case of the first Critique it is, Deleuze argues, understanding which performs the legislative role: it “provides the speculative model on which the other two [faculties] are summoned to collaborate” (137/178). In the second Critique it is the turn of reason to act as legislator, this time over the moral common sense. The third Critique, however, casts an aesthetic common sense as the locus in which the faculties find themselves in accord (137/178). The theme of legitimation itself, in the context of aesthetic judgement, is articulated in the third critique. Although Beckett’s work is clearly interested in the sorts of philosophical questions laboured over by Kant in the other two critiques, not least in the


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generalised unity of legislator and subject (a specifically Protestant aspect of Kantian thought [Deleuze 1983, 93]) which so animates the ‘juridical’ texts such as the fifth of the Texts for Nothing and How It Is, it is in the third critique that the question of this unity is conjoined with a thinking about the status of the work of art (with its attendant problematics of form, boundary, and limit), and with the allied problematics of the subject-object relation such as it lies at the heart of the former on the one hand and such as it must be hauled on to the scene of any hermeneutic exercise on the part of a critical (Kantian or otherwise) reader of Beckett’s work on the other. Kant enables Deleuze to develop a thinking of the encounter—not in its phenomenological ‘rawness’ as in Husserl—wherein “something in the world forces us to think” (Deleuze 1968/1994, 182/139). The object here however is not, as in its Cartesian and later Kantian, configuration, an object of recognition; rather the object remains lost in the encounter as encounter. Under the auspices of the model of recognition such as that adhered to by Kant, the experience via sense (sensibility) of an object is not exclusive and unique: the object can be experienced by other faculties; indeed even though the encounter may take place under the auspices of sense, that encounter is always circumscribed by a pre-exisintg accord between those faculties (including sensibility) under the banner of common sense. That centripetal force is in abeyance in Deleuze’s Nietzschean version of the encounter. Nietzsche, Deleuze points out, opposes judgement as it is embodied in Kant’s “fantastic subjective tribunal”. For, the latter model depends upon the prior inscription (in short, the prescription—the writing in advance and ordaining) of a form (to inspire conformity). To this is opposed Nietzschean transvaluation, giving rise to a “justice beyond all judgement” (Deleuze 1993/1998). Such a modality of justice as opposed to judgement as figured in How It Is has been discussed in Chapter 4 above, albeit there with an emphasis on the question of the legislative (and juridical) somewhat removed from the realm of aesthetics with which the present chapter deals. That difference notwithstanding however, what one might call the legislative per se and the legislative in aesthetics do overlap—in Kant as in Deleuze, Nietzsche and indeed Beckett. To take Deleuze first, his “superior empiricism” will, in direct confrontation with the Kantian dogmatic image of thought, not be concerned to provide a template in the form of recognition to police the encounter and its ramifications. Superior

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empiricism, correctly called a “logic of sense” by Keith Ansell Pearson, is, by contrast, the name of a philosophical opening onto the “unknown, the demonic, the anarchic” (Ansell Pearson 1999, 89). The proto-subjects of the Trilogy and How It Is can be said to find their Body without Organs in order to escape judgement (Deleuze 1993/1998, 163/130), negotiating a dilemma present also in Kafka as identified by Deleuze: on the one hand a body of judgement but on the other a body of justice or intensities. Kafka’s protagonist is subject to judgement, but counteractualising this subjection and subjectivation is the body of intensities and pre-individual singularities. In Kafka this force of counteractualisation is most often felt as the “uncertain zone” of metamorphosis (Deleuze & Guattari 1975/1986, 80/41). The latter, within the constrained parameters of the Kafka protagonist, is where a new mode of existence emerges. Such emergence is precisely what judgement and the dogmatic image of thought foreclose by their perpetual declaration of a state of emergency on the encounter. If not monitored by recognition, what is it about the encounter that can be so troubling for Kantian thought? Deleuze answers that in the encounter the object “really gives rise to sensibility with regard to a given sense” (Deleuze 1968/1994, 182/139). The challenge to thought which sensibility represents lies in the fact that there is a necessary imperceptibility in what Deleuze calls the “sign” which recognition cannot map (140/182). When sensibility, then, is in the presence of that which can only be sensed and not thought as such, as is the case here, it encounters its own limit. The limit Deleuze calls the “being of the sensible” or the sentendium. For the faculty of memory the equivalent encounter with its own limit is called the memorandum (or memory in the presence of that which can only be recalled and not retrieved). For the faculty of understanding, the intelligible encounters its limit in the unthinkable, and this limit he calls the cogitandum. The equivalent limits for the imagination and the faculty of language are dubbed the imaginandum (the unimaginable) and loquendum (silence) respectively. Deleuze begins his ‘Four Poetic Formulas’ essay by turning first to Shakespeare. Hamlet, Deleuze believes, produces the first truly Kantian hero, one who needs time in order to act. There is in this formulation a reversal of the time-subject relation as it had previously been conceived of in philosophy. Up until Kant time had been regarded as the number of nature and, thus, the number of periodical


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movement. Deleuze invokes the metaphor of a door, specifically a revolving door: “the door of the world swings and passes through privileged moments known as the cardinal points—namely North, South, East and West” (Deleuze, Seminar, March 14th, 1978). He goes on to note that the word “cardinal” comes from cardo or hinge: “the hinge round which the sphere of the celestial bodies turns, and which makes them pass time and again through the cardinal points” (Deleuze, Seminar, March 14th, 1978). In place of a time subordinated to nature, in Shakespeare “the time is out of joint”: time has come off its hinges; it is no longer, as Deleuze puts it, coiled up, but is instead “déployé,” or stretched out.4 The consequences for the human subject of this unhinging are registered in the second formula, which Deleuze takes from Rimbaud: “Je est un autre.” This celebrated phrase has been something of an implicit refrain in much subsequent French poetry, as indeed it has been in diverse philosophical and theoretical projects concerned at one level or another with challenging foundational models of human subjectivity.5 Deleuze however, somewhat against the grain of this general co-option of the formula, in his seminar at Vincennes of 1978, points out how, taken in its context (or the context provided by one of the phrase’s two iterations in the letters of 1871), an insight emerges which is strictly speaking Aristotelian in its adherence to a very orthodox, that is hylomorphic, conception of the relation between form and matter: For I is another. If brass wakes up a bugle, it is not its fault. This is obvious to me: I am present at this birth of my thought: I watch it and listen to it: I draw a stroke of the bow: the symphony makes its stir in the depths, or comes on to the stage in a leap. (Rimbaud [1871] 1966, 304—trans. adapted)6 4

Cf. Bernard Cache: “‘To be late,’ says the Greek usterein. Hysteresis is a gap in the time of the world through which we perceive pure instantaneity. It is the time of a universal lapping of waves that cannot be represented by a straight line or even a swirl, but only by a surface of variable curvature that is perpetually out of phase” (Cache 1995, 39). 5 As noted by Marjorie Perloff, it became “a cornerstone of the new poetics of indeterminacy” (Perloff 1981, 62). The second part of Perloff’s chapter on Beckett is also published as ‘Between the Shingle and the Dune’ (Perloff 1978). 6 Matter, according to the hylomorphic view, is an inert receptacle for forms that come from the outside, these taking the form of transcendent essences. For an account of Deleuze’s critique of Rimbaud’s Aristotelian presuppositions see Simont (1997, 333-4).

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While there is in this assertion a surrender of human volition at a perceived causal point of departure for the production of form, it is only displaced to another agency, namely that of thought itself. Nonetheless the formula exceeds its context—not least in its second iteration—and what emerges is subjectivity as a site of contestation, as operative at a threshold of alterity. It is in this respect that the crucial invention of Kant—the transcendental—becomes important. It is not the case that Kant himself wishes to problematise the subject, or to contest its pre-eminence. He does, however, more accurately, wish to attempt to reconfigure it in a manner which will remove it from the realm of Descartes’s cogito. Until Kant, Deleuze points out, the transcendental and the transcendent had effectively been interchangeable. A transcendent principle, such as God or the Good, acted as guarantor and underwriter of terrestrial exchanges. The human subject negotiated a world of appearance within which its goal was the establishment, or recognition, of essence. Deleuze points out that for the disjunctive couple appearance/essence, Kant substitutes the conjunctive couple apparition/sense. While the human subject for Kant is still operative in an empirical world, there remains another subject “which is neither you nor me, which above all is not reducible to any empirical subject” (Deleuze, Seminar, March 14th, 1978). This other subject is the transcendental subject, or the unity “of all the conditions under which” an apparition is possible. “(T)he form of identity in objects relies upon a ground in the unity of a thinking subject of which all the other faculties must be modalities” (Deleuze 1968/1994, 174/133). In the light of Kant’s hesitation confronted by the question of subjectivity, and bearing in mind the problematic elision of the conflict between the faculties (about which more later), there is space here for a further Kantian “poetic formula”, which is linked in this instance to the work of Kafka. In Deleuze’s view, Kant’s “fantastic subjective tribunal”—coordinated in three guises in each of the Critiques—attained continuity with the entire Judeo-Christian tradition for which, through “the consciousness of being in debt to the deity,” debt became infinite and thus unpayable (Deleuze 1993/1998, 158/126).7 As Kafka explores this quality of judgement, the infinite debt comes to be felt in the form of “apparent acquittal” the other side of which is “unlimited 7

In the first Critique understanding is the legislative faculty, in the second it is reason, while in the third an aesthetic “common sense” holds the faculties in accord.


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postponement” (the fate of Josef K). In effect this combination means that judgement and the sphere of judgement (again this is the case in The Trial) remain “beyond our experience and our comprehension” (Deleuze 1993/1998, 159/127). In fact, Deleuze points out, it is “the act of postponing, of carrying to infinity, that makes judgement possible” (Deleuze 1993/1998, 159/127). Judgement pertains to, is attributed to, or is in the sphere of competence of, only that which can occupy the space of the relation between “existence and the infinite in the order of time” (Deleuze 1993/1998, 159/127). This would amount to an occupation of the position of judge, that judge who remains, according to the Kafka formula, beyond our experience and our comprehension. In other words such a position implies, in Deleuze’s words, “a prior moral and theological form, according to which a relation was established between existence and the infinite following an order of time: the existing being as having a debt to God” (Deleuze 1993/1998, 159/127). There is, however, another way of conceiving of judgement. Deleuze explains the distinction between judgement and its other by referring to the distinct quality of temporality by which each is in turn to be identified. In place of a judgement which lies in a relation between existence and the infinite in the order of time, the “antijudicative” entails existing beings confronting each other, operating finite relations through which to obtain redress, the whole occurring and constituting the course of time. At stake then is the distinction between an order and a course of time. In Beckett’s poem, it will be argued below, there is a definite engagement with the distinction between conformity within the first model (that of Kant proper) and l’informe (that of the Kant “poetic formula”) within the second, judgement being the name for Deleuze of that which prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence by imprinting a prior form upon the yet to be.8 Time, Subject, Judgement: these, then, are the first three themes which find their formulas in Shakespeare, Rimbaud and Kafka respectively. The occasions on which Beckett reveals a time that has come off its hinges are numerous, but in examining more generally the lack in Beckett’s work of any transcendent point of view from which imperiously to survey the passage of time, the examples proliferate. In particular, however, The Lost Ones deliberately foregrounds a residue 8

“Form will never inspire anything but conformities” (Deleuze 1968/1994, 176/134).

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of the classical conception of time, only to disavow it, on the one hand by ruling out of court any transcendent locus (that, for example, of a prime mover) from which operations in the cylinder might be observed, and on the other, by rendering the celestial immanent to the circulating bodies of the cylinder. With regard to the second formula, Beckett shows his profound affinity with the work of Rimbaud both in his Trinity College lectures and by translating Le Bateau ivre; but more generally the speaking “I” of any number of the works in prose, drama and poetry is often little more than an interval in a process of evaporation-coalescence or dissipation-consolidation (the “incoherent continuum” of Rimbaud as identified by Belacqua comes to mind, as does the celebrated description of the “experience of the reader” in the same volume [Beckett 1993, 138]) rather than a self-identical subject in the Cartesian sense.9 As for the third, the juridical theme is well known in Beckett’s work, but a clear sense of apparent acquittal and infinite postponement is felt in How It Is in particular, albeit in a form challenged by the novel as a whole. Indeed the novel can be read as a sustained challenge to the image of thought based on the “tribunal of reason” whether convened by Leibniz or by Kant. Deleuze’s fourth poetic formula is authored by Kant himself in the Critique of Judgement—specifically in the section on ‘The Dynamically Sublime’. “Discordant accord” is the name given by Kant to the manner in which the sublime enables a resolution of the tension between the faculties. It is the culmination of the labour of the critical method, the task of which is both self-critical, and also, inevitably, restorative and salutary. Only Critique, in Kant’s view, could assist in the proper negotiation of the tension between the “coastal” demands of reason and the insistence of the “shoreless ocean” of nature. Indeed, the entire transcendental philosophy, one commentator has noted, can be described in terms of a fear of the sea (Land 1992, 106-7).10 In the section on ‘The Dynamically Sublime’ the ocean takes its place in a list of awe-inspiring and disquieting natural forces: 9

See John Pilling’s essay on ‘Beckett’s Poetry’ (Pilling 1976, 182). In the estimation of Perloff Beckett’s translation of Rimbaud—though effectuating a more sombre journey into otherness than the original proposes (Perloff 1981, 221)—in places (especially the sixth stanza) Beckett’s translation more than any other succeeds in keeping the tone of the original intact. See Perloff (1981, 219) and cf. Caws, for whom Beckett is the best translator of Rimbaud (Caws 1999, 47). 10 On this point see also Morgan (2000, 130-31).


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Bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderous clouds piled up the vault of heaven, borne along with flashes and peals, volcanoes in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river, and the like, make our power of resistance of trifling moment in comparison with their might. But provided our own position is secure, their aspect is all the more attractive for its fearfulness; and we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the forces of the soul above the height of vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature. (Kant 1928, 110-11)

That which is experienced by the subject on the one hand as a defeat by the overwhelming might of the natural world, insofar as it can have no complete aesthetic comprehension of the object, is registered on the other as pleasure, since it gives rise, or rather the shortfall gives rise, to the subject’s awareness of its possession of “another nonsensuous standard” (Kant 1928, 111). Kant puts it thus: “the mere ability even to think the given infinite without contradiction, is something that requires the presence in the human mind of a faculty that is itself supersensible” (103), and elaborates on the “pleasure [viz.] to find every standard of sensibility fall short of the ideas of reason” (106). This is a profoundly recuperative move, as Kant’s subsequent elaboration testifies. What is revealed is “a faculty of estimating ourselves as independent of nature,” and thus is discovered a pre-eminence above nature that is the foundation of a self-preservation of quite another kind from that which may be assailed and brought into danger by external nature. This saves humanity in our own person from humiliation. (111)

The end-product is the human subject as site of synthesis, and thus retrieved as unit, as unified (despite the danger represented by the dissipative aspects of the sublime experience). It gives Kant, despite the experience of the sublime, the possibility, in Beckett’s metaphor (taken from Ernst Cassirer), of leaning over devastated Lisbon in the poem ‘ainsi a-ton beau’. In ‘The Anticipations of Perception’ Kant had expressed the problematics of fluidity in the context of the question of scale and limit:

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Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze & Guattari The property of magnitudes, according to which no part of them is the smallest possible, is called their continuity. Space and time are quanta continua, because no part of them can be given, without enclosing it within boundaries (points and moments), consequently, this given part is itself a space or a time. Space, therefore, consists only of spaces, and time of times. Points and moments are only boundaries, that is, the mere places or positions of their limitation. But places always presuppose intuitions which are to limit or determine them; and we cannot conceive either space or time composed of constituent parts which are given before space or time. Such magnitudes may also be called flowing, because the synthesis of the productive imagination involved in their production is a progression in time, the continuity of which we are accustomed to indicate by the expression flowing away. (Kant 1934, 136)

This regulative aspect which marks the human experience of nature, however, wherein the discovery of a limit on human understanding is actually a confirmation that as human qua human one is pre-eminent, and wherein one can thereby ever more securely police the boundary between the space of human rationality and the madness of the oceanic, the tempestuous and the volcanic, is undermined immediately in the opening lines of Beckett’s poem: Je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse entre le galet et la dune My way is in the sand flowing between the shingle and the dune (Beckett 1977, 56-7)11

The confrontation which the subject faces here comes in the form of a rather less extreme expression of geological (the meteorological and atmospheric come later) contingency than that which troubled Kant— 11

Mary Lydon suggests that the passage in Molloy evoking the keel not scraping on the shore on its non-return contains in embryo what for her is one of Beckett’s best poems, ‘je suis ce cours de sable’ (Lydon 1996). In a similar spirit, Marjorie Perloff also finds in the poem in embryonic form the ‘dream passages’ of How It Is. Jean-Clet Martin has devoted some wonderful pages to the manner in which Paul Valéry develops a line of ‘coastal’ thinking from which Kant recoiled, sealing his ears to “le tumulte et la fureur des océans. Sur cette plage, le Socrate de Valéry éprouve le même trouble que Kant face à son cinabre variable. En effet, il y fait une rencontre extrêmement insolite qu’aucune forme de recognition ne parvient à gérer dans l’usage concordant des facultés” [the sound and the fury of the oceans. On this beach, Valéry’s Socrates experiences the same trouble as did Kant faced with his variable cinnabar. In effect he creates here an extremely bizarre meeting which no form of recognition in the concordant use of the faculties can control] (Martin 1993, 51).


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a minor landslide at most, of the sort to which any beach, even the most protected, could play host. If, however, the Kantian foray into or towards the oceanic is conceived of in terms of a play of vectors, rather than a relation between subject and object, the affinity between Beckett’s poem and the philosophical problem (as outlined in Kant) of the subject becomes more readily apparent.12 The outward projection for Kant is always conditioned by a reflexive return, a clawing back into the interiority of the subject. The je or “I” which speaks in Beckett’s poem, however, would not appear to be conditioned in such a manner. Rather, there is a serial collapse or falling away which theories of non-equilibrium thermodynamics would describe in terms of dissipative structures, an analogy to which Deleuze himself is well attuned when he refers to Beckett’s late work for television: If the any-space-whatever cannot be separate from an inhabitant who extenuates some of its potentialities, the image, with even greater reason, remains inseparable from the movement through which it dissipates itself: the face inclines, turns away, fades or dissolves like a cloud or a puff of smoke. (Deleuze 1992/1998, 94/128, translation adapted)

In Beckett’s poem, in advance of the dissipative threshold to which it is tending, there is a littoral landscape to be negotiated.13 Sand and shingle are ‘aggregates’, materials which both derive from larger forms (via the process of erosion) and can go towards making larger forms (via the process of accretion). In a coastal space such aggregates blend and interact with water, but they also themselves approach the properties of the liquid and the fluid. This is an idea which would not be out of place in Kant himself who wrote: “The fluid state is, to all appearance, on the whole older than the solid and plants as well as animal bodies which are built up out of fluid nutritative substance” 12

On the rhythm of movement towards and retraction in Kant see Morgan (2000, 143). The trajectory spoken of by Beckett (in Dream), in a zone without terms as such, comes to mind here, as do his comments about the poetic being a mode in the gap between here and there. See Beckett’s ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ (1984). 13 Timothy Murphy has situated this movement, characteristic of Beckett’s work more generally of course, in the framework of the loquendum (derived from Deleuze’s Différence et répétition) or language taken to its limit, in the presence of its silence. See Murphy (2000, 143). Pilling is alert to the “threshold situation” of each of the four poems with which ‘je suis ce cours de sable’ is linked, as he is to “the philosophical problems of perception and identity” which animate them. See Pilling (1976, 178-9).

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(Kant 1928, 219). Without the guarantee—always shakily present in Kant—of the attainment of form, it is this breakdown of distinction facilitated by the liminal space of land-meets-sea that holds Beckett’s attention. The atopian thresholds proliferate as the poem progresses. Dune gives way to sand, which in turn cedes its place to shingle. My way is displaced by or becomes my life, which in turn metamorphoses into my peace. The whole series evaporates into mist or fog and finally comes to paradoxical, that is uneasy, rest, in the space (in the English) or the time (temps) of a door (one might venture, the spacetime of the threshold itself).14 je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse entre le galet et la dune la pluie d’été pleut sur ma vie sur moi ma vie qui me fuit me poursuit et finira le jour de son commencement cher instant je te vois dans ce rideau de brume qui recule ou je n’aurai plus à fouler ces longs seuils mouvants et vivrai le temps d’une porte qui s’ouvre et se referme (Beckett 1977, 56)

In the general glissement between and across thresholds which is operative here, there is evidence of a failure of co-ordinates. And yet both in the English and in the French versions a degree of harmony and synthesis is promised. After all, the French version puts the door back on its hinges, and, arguably therefore time back in joint, while the English version gives the same rhythmic (albeit spatial rather than temporal) solace of opening and closure allied to a (perpetual, and arguably therefore Kantian) peace. It may be worth considering to what extent, then, Beckett’s poem embodies its own poetic version of the Kantian “discordant accord”.15 When Deleuze writes of a discordant accord between the faculties he is referring to that aspect of Kantian thought which will regulate the interanimation and crossreferencing procedures of the faculties (Reason, Imagination, Sensation, Memory, Understanding) and which will impose a 14

Stephen Barker, writing on the topic of Beckett’s self-translation, has the poem come to a rest, after much agitation and passage, in “the solidity and locatability of a door that opens, closes, has time” (Barker 1992, 24). 15 Beckett alludes to the Kantian “free play of every faculty” in Proust (1987, 20).


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dominant tonality or harmony; this is the sacrifice of the impressions received by those faculties to common sense. The Kant in which Deleuze is interested, however, is the Kant who does not quite succeed in policing this operation—in other words Nietzsche.16 Without sketching the contours of such a philosophical monster, it should be noted that by “discordant accord,” Deleuze also understands deregulation and de-rangement. The interanimation of the faculties is subject to dissonance. Given the fact that the third critique engenders the discipline of aesthetics, and given that Kant’s concerns at this point centre on a consideration of aesthetic taste and judgement, Deleuze, in his consideration of the fourth poetic formula, positions it conceptually in relation to a deregulated synaesthesia. If, in considering the senses, the concern is with a subset of the discord identified by Deleuze in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, then deregulated synaesthesia would entail both a relativism of thresholds between sensory perceptions, and the dislocation of loci, zones and surfaces of perception.17 Taken to the conclusion from which Kant recoiled, in the experience of the sublime for Deleuze, “finally I can no longer say what it is, I can no longer qualify the any-object-whatever. My whole structure of perception is in the process of exploding” (Deleuze, Seminar, March 28th, 1978).18 A direct consequence of such a breakdown is a shortfall in the attainment of an overarching form. A deregulated synaesthesia entails the multiplication, implication and ‘perplication’ of the senses without the facility of recall and retrieval to the proper sense characteristics or co-ordinates (BeckettRimbaud’s “incoherent continuum”, the “dissonance” Beckett writes of in the letter to Kaun [Beckett 1984, 53])19 Thus, in his translation of 16

On this theme see Deleuze (1968/1994, 121-140/89-96). For Deleuze each faculty has only involuntary adventures, the point of departure for which in each instance is “sensibility,” which is part of “the encounter with that which forces sensation [à sentir]” (Deleuze 1968/1994, 189/145). 18 It is perhaps appropriate at this point to indicate to what extent Deleuze’s Kant differs from that of Lyotard. As Daniel W. Smith correctly points out, Deleuze’s theory of art hinges on sensibility, whereas Lyotard’s conception of art derives from the faculty of the imagination (hence from the sublime, or from the manner in which the sublime is negotiated). Whereas in the case of sensibility one appeals to an immanent idea, in the case of the imagination one has recourse to a transcendent idea. See Smith (1996, 51 n. 14) and Jean-François Lyotard (Lyotard 1994). Russell Smith links Beckett to a Lyotardian conception of the “postmodern sublime” (Smith 2004). 19 Perloff has argued that Beckett’s translation of Le Bateau Ivre is to be distinguished 17

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Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre, Beckett will accurately render “phosphors singing” (Beckett 1977, 97), while the poem “Alba” gives us the “white plane” of music, in tandem with “grave suave singing silk” (1977, 15), and another poem from 1937-39 brings to our attention “l’œil qui écoute” (1977, 41). An ambulant and fluid conception of the sensorium takes the place of one predicated on an idea of the senses governed by distinction and specificity. In Beckett’s work more generally the phenomenon of such deregulation leads to the situation wherein the proto-character must say “I don’t feel a body on me” (Beckett 1979, 379). In the poem, specifically, the “summer rain” (both a deictic and atmospheric signifier) evokes the sense of touch. Nonetheless this very substance falls on something which is ineffable (albeit relatively speaking perdurant), namely on my life. An abstract concept of orientation and/or predilection (“my way”) is lodged in a ‘concrete’ support—sand. By being so positioned the ineffable and the abstract are lent material associations. Cognate with my way and my life is my peace. This “cher instant,” as the French version has it, may presage either a bodily or a mental quiescence. If bodily peace—a sort of vital R.I.P. if the poem is to be believed—is at stake, any sense of corporeal solidity is subject to immediate and simultaneous derangement, since the peace evaporates—even as it is constituted by it—into mist or brume. In French the fog is lent a quasi-hylomorphic quality (“formication” as Winnie in Happy Days might call it) by being a rideau (or curtain) which withdraws, whereas in English the sense of dispersal is more emphatic, in mist which simply withdraws unadorned with drapery.20 If, on the other hand, the peace is peace of mind rather than of body then the process is reversed: the immaterial is lent a certain—albeit transient—materiality. A strong suggestion that this is a realm where tactility is to the fore is rendered (in the English version) in the word treading. Moreover, the evidence of vision is invoked to yield estimated measurements; the poem states that the concern is with long thresholds rather than short ones. What is lacking throughout this complex negotiation of the natural landscape, however, is a sense of the presence of the Kantian by its translator’s realisation that the ‘I’ does not merely drift or bathe in the “Poem of the Sea”. Rather the self fuses with its surroundings. Beckett’s, she reports, is a more sombre journey into otherness (Perloff 1981, 221). 20 Beckett’s attachment to the punning possibilities of this term is suggested by its use also in an early poem, this time in the variant “formicante” (Beckett 1977, 41).


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regulative principle and any possibility of a restored transcendental subject. Instead, every faculty is borne to the extreme point of its dissolution (the generative force of which, for Deleuze, is “sensibility” itself), while, within the domain of sense perception itself, all that might have passed for ground is mobile and shifting, carried along by the fractured “I”. There indeed has been enacted the Rimbaudian derangement of the senses as invoked in the 1871 letter to Georges Izambard: Now I degrade myself as far as possible. Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working to render myself visionary: you will not understand any of this, and I scarcely know how to explain it to you. It is necessary to arrive at the unknown by a deregulation of all the senses. The sufferings are enormous, but one must be strong, to be born a poet, and I recognise myself as a poet. This is not at all my fault. It is false to say: I think. One should say: one thinks me ... I is an other. (Rimbaud 1966, 304-5)

As a young scholar Beckett took quite seriously Rimbaud’s attempt to formulate the relation between author and work, and between site of enunciation and subject position. As Dream of Fair to Middling Women seems to confirm, the influence of Rimbaud in this respect was not confined to the poetry. However, having undertaken his own version of the deregulation of the senses, Beckett has gone somewhat further than Rimbaud.21 For, what is clear is that if the formula “Je est un autre” is to mean anything for Beckett, it will be in a version which does not embrace the residual hylomorphism which persists in the visionary programme outlined in Rimbaud’s letters.

21

Pilling has gone furthest in this direction. For him ‘Spring Song’ and ‘Home Olga’ are the first instances of Beckett practising a “dérèglement de tous les sens”. He continues: “It was in flight from observation, in flight from self-perception, and in flight from anything ‘visionary’ in poetry, that Beckett wrote a ‘Spring Song’ completely devoid of any of the conventional poetic accoutrements inspired by the season” (Pilling 1999, 20). Pilling points to a letter to MacGreevy dated 11 March 1931 in which Beckett quotes from Rimbaud’s ‘Les Poètes de Sept Ans’ (which he had taught to final year Trinity students) the line “Et pour des visions écrasent l’oeil darne”. As Pilling points out, the date of poem quoted is 11 days after the ‘Lettre du voyant’. In the letter to MacGreevy Beckett interprets Rimbaud to mean ‘eye suicide” (February 2nd 1931) which for him is tantamount to ego suicide and leads to the formulation “je est un autre” (20). Pilling then argues that under this inspiration Beckett gives up all thought of seeing to develop a new way of saying (21).

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“These properties”: habitation, occupation, dwelling Published at the half-way point in Beckett’s life, ‘je suis ce cours de sable’ is merely one, especially condensed, example of the enduring preoccupation in his writing with the ontological question of what it is to occupy space and time.22 Ten years earlier, Murphy is introduced to the reader and into Beckett’s fiction by means of a description of his position that gives him coordinates which can be described as extrinsic, as if he is there and not quite there in the fiction of which we are, nonetheless, already in the midst. Murphy sits “out of the sun” and thereby out of “the nothing new” which the light source serves to illumine (Beckett 1973, 5, emphasis added). Fifty years after the publication of Murphy, in Beckett’s last prose work to be published during his lifetime, Stirrings Still, the diurnal reference point is in abeyance, so that the light (still delivered, in Murphy’s ‘late style’, by a skylight) belongs neither to day nor to night. In this atopian zone of oscillation between closed space and “back roads”, it is equally as likely that one is here as elsewhere: “all places as the same. Or in another. Nothing to show not another” (1995, 260). The Lost Ones begins with the word “abode” (“séjour” in the French version) and ends with a state purported to be final where the if-a-man adopts a position and occupies a place in some way designed for him or accommodating of him: “finds at last his place and pose whereupon darkness descends” as the text reports this moment of location. For a Gaston Bachelard such a moment would be an instance of the felicitous coincidence of space and body—the most emblematic of which is the ‘uterine’ hospitality which his Poetics of Space (1969) so zealously delineates. In another philosophical idiom, namely that of Heidegger, what one might be said to witness here is Dasein, which in pervading space in advance, comes home to roost.23 In Freudian terms, there is in this terminal moment perhaps a quiescence suggestive of the operation of the death drive. However this moment in Beckett, 22 Of course Murphy is not the beginning. ‘Ding Dong’ in More Pricks than Kicks (1934) should also be mentioned in this connection: “But as for sites, one was as good as another, because they all disappeared as soon as he came to rest in them” (Beckett 1934, 35). 23 Dasein-like reciprocity, an example of the dwelling described in ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, where ‘homelessness’ “is the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling” (Heidegger 1993, 363). In this sense Dasein pervades space, as J. Hillis Miller observes (Miller 1995, 246).


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albeit said to be coterminous with a state of lastness, completion, or even, in Vitruvius’ terms, corpus perfectionibus, is not so much a state of terminality as one of germinality. One way in which this can be explored is through a negotiation of the problem of form, and more especially as this occurs in works of literature which link the question of their own status as works, in progress, or to be abandoned, in search of completion or continuation, to spatial and architectural images.24 In this way Beckett’s prose plays out, at another level than that of the bodies internal to their universes, the question of form and function. Indeed when notions of fragmentation, incompletion or abandonment (what Casanova calls the chantier aspect of Beckett’s writing) feature in the titles of these prose works, they manifest a highly emphatic instance of the phenomenon identified by Maurice Blanchot with literature itself when he writes of: Great works, greater than their creators [which] have a perceptible point which is the mark of the moment they decided that if they did not leave the work at that point they might never return to the light. (Blanchot 1993, 54)25

In this context the thinking of Deleuze and Deleuze-Guattari has often addressed the problematics of what they call the any-space-whatever (espace quelconque) in connection with the specificity of certain works of art. In his essay ‘L’Épuisé’ Deleuze applies the term directly to the work of Beckett. In accordance with a familiar association, he also draws attention to a certain inseparability of space and occupant. In Deleuze’s understanding of this complementarity, however, neither semantic nor subjective ‘holding’ and propriety/property are operative. Instead, inseparability is in fact that which gives rise to dissipation, and to an ungrounding as opposed to a founding, a dislocation as opposed to a location:

24

I have in mind not only the titles of obvious ‘chantier’ pieces such as ‘From an abandoned work’, Fizzles, the pieces including the words ‘Rough for’ but also Murphy, with its incomplete delivery of the Greek word for form, The Lost Ones, with its evocation of a constitutive loss within a closed space, and Lessness and Worstward Ho with their respective indices of quantitative and qualitative diminishment. 25 Cf. Deleuze and Guattari on Blanchot (1972/1983, 50/42). The important work of Dirk Van Hulle on the textual genesis of Stirrings Still lends empirical evidence to the claim made in this paragraph (Van Hulle 2004, 491).

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Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze & Guattari If the any-space-whatever cannot be separate from an inhabitant who extenuates its possibilities, the image is even more inseparable from the movement through which it dissipates itself: the face inclines, turns away, fades or dissolves like a cloud, like smoke. (Deleuze 1992/1998, 94/168-9)

The any-space-whatever is tethered to an intensive ordinate, rather than to spatio-temoral co-ordinates, much as Murphy is when he is “out” of the only world available to him, when the illuminating light source fails to locate him. It belongs to topological rather than to Euclidean space. It is anti-Cartesian in that it does not pertain to res extensa. It is, moreover, resistant to recuperation or retrieval within any dualism; this includes dialectical retrieval via negation, and overcoding by the de-ontology of Heidegger’s Dasein. While there are initial similarities between the any-space-whatever and Dasein, especially in their apparently shared sense of being-in-the-world, in Deleuze’s concept there is no recourse to the trope of revelation or unveiling: all is already actual. In Deleuzian ontology, there is nothing to reveal or to disclose. The disclosure is itself a dissolve. In this respect Jean-Luc Godard’s advice in the video scenario for his 1979 film Sauve qui peut (la vie) is close to Deleuze (so much so that he quotes it himself): Use dissolves. Begin not from an image, but from a chain of images as an image, from an image of concatenation, a moment in a chain, from somebody being drawn into something. The person and the thing that slides across the person, into which the person slides...Dissolves allow you to see if there isn’t something that will open up, or is closing...A dissolve as the idea of a scenario. (Godard cited in Dubois 1992, 179)26

This Godardian manifesto is echoed, it is not surprising to note, in Deleuze’s statement apropos of Beckett’s television plays: “the image concentrates a potential energy which it draws into its process of autodissipation” (Deleuze 1992/1998, 98/170). Architectonics, architecture and the Beckettian subject John Pilling, writing in 1976, draws attention to the theme of the threshold common to all four of the linked poems of which ‘je suis ce cours de sable’ is one. He points out how the named location of the 26

This is the preparatory video essay for Godard’s return to ‘traditional’ filmmaking after the ‘defection’ from cinema from the late 1960s through to 1979.


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first of these, ‘Dieppe’, gives way to unnamed locations in the other three, but “the threshold situation remains” (Pilling 1976, 179). The figure of the threshold, however, is important in the work of Beckett as it takes its place in a wider range of spatial configurations, among them the arena (in The Lost Ones), the ditch (Watt) the refuge (Ill Seen Ill Said), the ruin (Lessness), the niche (The Lost Ones), or, more abstractly, the limit (The Unnamable), the boundary (Watt), the zone (Ill Seen Ill Said), and the locale (Molloy). Thresholds are necessarily at once embedded within and blended with the spaces thus evoked. The threshold as an architectural and structural entity has not escaped the attention of philosophers. One of the most philosophically significant roles which it has to play is in the thought of Heidegger in his essay ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ (1951). The threshold— which exists only as passage, in passage, in passing—becomes in a formulation developed by Heidegger elsewhere (in ‘Die Sprache’ [1959]) not merely the shadow of what is traditionally regarded as (so to speak) the locus classicus of the doorway, the lintel, but the very ground of the structure itself: The threshold is the ground-beam that bears the doorway as a whole. It sustains the middle in which the two, the outside and the inside, penetrate each other. The threshold bears the between. What goes out and what goes in, in the between, is joined in the between’s dependability. (Heidegger 1971, 204)

This aspect of the threshold—namely that it “bears the between”— is familiar however not only to philosophers, architects and construction workers. That the threshold bears the between, for example, is known also to Sapo’s grey hen in Malone Dies. What is less certain, however, is that the latter creature would share Heidegger’s confidence in the “between’s dependability”. In Malone Dies: it sometimes happened, before he decided to go, before he went rather, for there was no decision, that a hen, taking advantage of the open door, would venture into the room. No sooner had she crossed the threshold than she paused, one leg hooked up under her breech, her head on one side, blinking, anxious (...) neither quite indoors nor quite out of doors, he waited to be on his feet again, and in motion, and while waiting noted many things, among them this big, anxious, ashen bird, poised irresolute on the bright threshold... (Beckett 1979, 187)

The bright threshold might illuminate for Sapo the presence of the grey hen, but if, following Heidegger’s logic, what goes out and what

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comes in are joined in the between, in the case of Saposcat’s hen it is far from certain that what is joined in the between is one and the same hen. For, whether it is a case of one or of many hens (as Sapo suspects), he neglects or fails otherwise to find out. The hen’s indecision on the threshold, then, is replicated in the undecidability of its number. Thus, against Heidegger, it might be objected that the alleged specificity of the threshold is the very lack, precisely, of specificity.27 The threshold is always, as the artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s architectural interventions serve to emphasise, site specific—and thus if the generic term “threshold” names something specific, say in architectural or structural engineering terms, it loses that specificity by the very proliferation of sites within which its exemplars will be engendered, engineered and take place (see Bois and Krauss 1997, 185-91). The very inability then of “threshold” as a word, as a material entity (or ground beam) to hold itself is deserving of note. 28 Despite the confidence displayed by Heidegger that a certain dependability (the threshold sustains the between) will obtain in the exchanges which it occasions, the threshold is also, then, conceptually, a place of leakage, a porous divider. Just what sort of cargo, then, is borne by the threshold and what sort of traffic, moreover, is it required to sustain in the work of Beckett? The opening passages of Worstward Ho evoke a threshold space in the sense identified by Derrida, namely of and as Being itself (Derrida 1987, 52):

27

Cf. Derrida’s statement in The Post Card: “The place is only a place of passage, and more precisely, a threshold. But a threshold, this time, to give access to what is no longer a place. A subordination, a relativisation of the place, and an extraordinary consequence; the place is Being. What finds itself reduced to the condition of a threshold is Being itself, Being as place” (Derrida 1987, 52). 28 It is for Matta-Clark that Yves Alain Bois has coined the term “threshole”. A final aside on ‘extra-curricular’—as far as the field of Beckett studies is concerned— thresholds and holes leads me briefly to refer to a film by Malaysian-born director Tsai Ming-liang (a director much concerned with the architectural) which offers a sustained cinematic reflection on this phenomenon, this strange proximity. In The Hole (Dong, 1998)—a film with a downpour which would meet with the approval of Macmann (Beckett 1979, 222)—the aperture of the title (occasioned by a plumbing accident) functions also as a threshold between architectural levels, levels of récit, as well as between genders and genres (culminating in an elaborate tribute to the star of Hong Kong musical comedies of the 1950s, Grace Chang).


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Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still. (1972, 7)

The challenge to any attempt to furnish even a hinterland already troubles the attempt to say a place there where that place would be. There may be coming and going, in the manner beloved of Sapo’s hen, but the threshold is too evanescent to yield Heideggerian comfort and dependability. The “still” here is compromised by a restlessness evoked on another threshold, in this case, in The Unnamable: Two holes and me in the middle slightly choked. Or a single one, entrance and exit, where the words swarm and jostle like ants, hasty, indifferent, bringing nothing, taking nothing away, too light to leave a mark. (Beckett 1979, 326)

In other instances spatial specificity is reduced to cardinal points or ‘vectorial’ dispositions, as operative together in the west to east and up-down arrangement of How It Is. No doubt the Heideggerian threshold would facilitate the perambulations of Dasein (which term it should be recalled is often translated as “being there”). However the place of passage in Worstward Ho offers only a “Thenceless, thitherless there” (1972, 12). In another late prose work, Ill Seen Ill Said, the figure is said to occupy the imagined centre of a formless place. The stones are spreading in a contagious colonisation of pasture. Boundaries are fluid and nominal, and, as the text reports, configurations such as an occupant in a landscape, edifice or country, as well as the task of establishing contours for the occupant and its environs are fraught with aporia: “crossing the threshold…Within her walls…Though she within them no more” (Beckett 1992, 62).29 Space/landscape The problem which a consideration of the threshold poses, both for Heidegger and Sapo’s hen, then, is one of a being in relation to its space. As far as the early and middle-period work in particular of Beckett is concerned, the question had been formulated in terms of an observer and a landscape (in the later works landscape becomes increasingly abstract until in the end topology supplants 29

For Goetz the general phenomenon of the moment of hesitation on the threshold is “profondément un affect architectural” (2002, 118).

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topography).30 The narrator of the first of the Texts for Nothing reminds us that there is much cause in Beckett’s work to consider the merits and demerits of mountain, hill, quag, heath, valley, lough, plain and sea (Beckett 1995, 100-4). These landscape features—or “settings”—serve to create, as the fifth of the Texts for Nothing informs us, “the atmosphere” (1995, 118). The narrator of the first of the Texts however on two occasions is at pains to report that he is averse neither to sea nor to plains—as if admiration for either or both of these items of scenery were an acquired taste rather than an eminently widespread predilection. In the poem ‘je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse’ both plain and sea are brought together, and more importantly as far this chapter is concerned, they are brought together by means of a threshold. This space, between the shingle and the dune, is liminal in more than one sense. For in the shifting zone (or atopian threshold) there are thresholds between not just plain and sea, but also between the posited observing subject and object—“all that fucking scenery”—between rain and sea; between rain and mist; and between door open and door closed. The very first line indeed establishes the fact of this generalised and pervasive liminality.31 Rather than being concerned to isolate points and poles, the poem furnishes becoming between positions, but also across what are emphatically figured as thresholds. In addressing the condition of the ‘site-specific’ threshold as it is operative in the poem it may be helpful to itemise what Molloy describes as “the advantages and disadvantages of the seaside” (Beckett 1979, 70). There are two principal benefits to be garnered 30

Topology is the science of those shapes which retain their unity despite deformation. For an analysis of Deleuze as topological and Derrida as algebraic see Plotnitsky (2003). See Barker (1992) for a discussion of landscape and its e-scape via the process of passage. Barker’s article also has a useful brief discussion of the poem in terms which are largely compatible with the reading offered here (Barker 1992, 24). 31 This it achieves by making the cours de sable at once the content and the form, and a form moreover which is formless, which is to be characterised by its very lack of form, or its at the very least mutant and hence fluid form. In an interesting coincidence Nick Land in his Bataille-inspired Thirst for Annihilation also uses Rimbaud as a way to emblematise the move beyond the “pieties” of Kant. Glossing the passage from Rimbaud’s letter of May 13th 1871, in which the famous phrase “Je est un autre” appears, Land writes in terms which are close to those I will later adopt in relation to Beckett’s poem: “A method or an antimethod, the will to chance, a voyage into loss of control, this impossibility is the desolate core of poetry, a space of slippage” (Land 1992, 203).


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from coastal sojourns, says Molloy. The first and most salient of these is that his vision and powers of nomination improve: And not only did I see more clearly, but I had less difficulty in saddling with a name the rare things I saw. These are some of the advantages and disadvantages of the seaside. (70)32

Of course the observing point of view in ‘je suis ce cours de sable’ is beset by certain atmospheric contingencies which render less than productive of clear and distinct impressions its powers of visual perception, first in the form of rain, later in the shape of mist.33 The subject does, nevertheless, at least lay claim to occupancy of the site, if not to the attendant perspicacity accruing to the latter state: my way, it is said, is in the sand flowing. It is worth examining in more detail, then, the relation established between subject and object in this instance, the relation between the I which speaks and the sand which furnishes it with a way. In the English version of the poem the sand affords to the subject a way and a path, that is to say governs it teleologically. Yet instead of a unified subject, the way, if followed, and in this respect unlike the cheminement made famous by Frank Sinatra, promotes dispersal and disjunction, rather than synthesis. The space occupied is dislocated, fluid and mobile, while the end result of following this way is evaporation and dissipation rather than consolidation and restoration. What sort of subject, then, functions as guide in this curious form of coastal tourism, and what, more precisely, is its curriculum vitae (this is a poem after all concerned with a life which flows)? Well, it is clearly not a subject in the sense promoted by the Cartesian cogito with its res cogitans laying claim to res extensa. Neither do we seem 32

It is noteworthy that Molloy’s definitions of positivity and negativity are subject to “tidal” variations and hence themselves are interchangeable and reversible. For more on Molloy’s thresholds see Amiran (1993, 110-111). The author also moves from the poem to The Unnamable, from thresholds to doors, and comments that in the novel as in the poem, the Mallarméan dictum applies: nothing will have taken place but the place (122). 33 It is interesting to note that the poem’s own threshold existence between English and French, occupying as it does a kind of coastline between them, challenges its own internal powers of nomination: in seeing and naming clearly in one language, on the other side obscurity and ambiguity can be produced—a phenomenon at work in all of Beckett’s self-translated work but explicitly marked, remarked and remarked upon by critics in respect of this poem in particular.

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to be in the company of the Kantian subject as site of transcendental synthesis, as has been observed above. If anything, the subject as figured in the poem is closer to the more Dionysian aspects which Leibniz’s Monadology permits, however fleetingly, to make an appearance through its penchant for microscopic processes and the curious traffic which occurs across the thresholds of the paradoxically sealed monads. In this context, not only has time come off its hinges in the poem, but the hinge has become the paradoxical index of what René Schérer speaks of in terms of a “new hospitality” (Schérer 1992). In Beckett’s case this would suggest that his work also moves beyond the postKantian context which ‘je suis ce cours de sable’ initially establishes, and indicates that he too—just as Deleuze did—is moving towards a more Nietzschean conception (it is relevant that the Eternal Return in Nietzsche is described by means of the trope of another type of door, namely a gateway). In the words of Schérer: Deviens ce que tu es, échappe à tes identifications qui ne sont que des titres jetées sur toi, des catégorisations dans un classement standard. Tu n’es pas ce numéro, cette façade, ce langue petrifiée. Devient ce que tu es, laisse passer les forces qui le traversent, ouvre-leur les portes. Ce que tu es n’est pas en toi, mais dans ta capacité à devenir autre, à accueillir l’autre que toi. Deviens ce que tu es; Je est un autre. La vertue de l’hospitalité tient dans ces formules simples et inépuisable de nos devenirs, devises de notre modernité. Elles forment un appel à une hospitalité permanente, sans réserve et sans borne, de nos maisons, de nos patries, de nos âmes, de nos corps. (Schérer 1992, 96) [Become that which you are; escape from your identifications which are nothing more than titles thrust upon you, categorisations in a standard classification. You are not this number, this façade, this petrified language. Become what you are, allow the forces which traverse you to pass through; open the doors to them. What you are is not in you, but in your capacity to become other, to welcome the otherthan-you. Become what you are; I is another. The virtue of hospitality lies in these simple and inexhaustible formulas of our becoming, devices of our modernity. They make an appeal to a permanent hospitality, without reserve and without boundary, of our homes, our countries, our souls and our bodies.]

The becoming which is indentified here suggests a proliferation of threshold-crossings in the manner described by Guattari in his final book Chaosmose, entailing the scrambling of the faculties and the


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senses, and of boundaries in general.34 Deleuze and Guattari on the threshold of sense If Kant is the Apollo of the threshold then it is Leibniz who is its unwitting Dionysius (Deleuze 1988/1993, 46/33). Leibniz’s famous illustration of how in being confronted by the sound of the ocean the human mind fails to distinguish the individual waves which together, concerted, form the dense noise, is taken up by Deleuze on many occasions, notably in his book on Kant, but also in his brief discussion with Guattari of Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves. It is a question, for Deleuze in Le Pli, of the crossing of a certain threshold: at least two waves must be minutely perceived as nascent and heterogeneous enough to become part of a relation that can allow the perception of a third, one that “excels” over the others and comes to consciousness (implying that we are near the shoreline). (Deleuze 1988/1993, 117/88)

The constitutive elements in the case of Leibniz, while clearly a multiplicity or manifold which will be formed into a unity or a One, possess, however, a recalcitrant force of self-dispersal. One thinks, to move to another novel by Woolf, this time To the Lighthouse, of the gnats which to an extent always escape (and exceed) the nets flung at them (Woolf 1992, 30). Converted back into the idiom of Deleuze and Guattari, ‘molar’ form, while always dependent on, is actually troubled by, ‘molecular’ forces and cannot supersede the dispersal operative on that level. The insight is, as has been argued above, anti-Kantian. Instead of having perception presuppose an object capable of affecting us and conditions in which we would be apt to be affected, the reciprocal determination of the differentials…brings about the complete determination of the object as a perception, and the determinability of space-time as a condition. (Deleuze 1988/1993, 118/89)

Considering the Kantian objection that the molecular, microscopic 34

See Smith (1998) for a further exploration of the ethical implications. As so often in these pages the shadow of L’Entretien infini encroaches once more: “Disarrangement, derangement is invisible; this means that it blocks the direct relation light seems to authorise and that unduly organises knowledge, just as it reduces all speech to the model of sight and the thing to be seen” (Blanchot 1993, 417-18).

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representation of the world—in the monad—reintroduces infinite understanding, Deleuze points out that this is not what happens, since reciprocal determination of differentials refers to “tiny perceptions as representatives of the world in the finite self...The infinite present in the finite self is exactly the position of Baroque equilibrium” (118/89).35 Of the threshold between sea and land proper it might be said that it marks the transitional zone between molar, stratified earth and the fluid—hence molecular—space of the sea.36 For Leibniz this would also be the case in the distinction marked by him between the torment of the open sea and the calm of the port, the latter circumscribed (and, therefore ‘molarized’) by its partial encompassment—and hence its general conditioning—by the relative stability of the land. The threshold between the molar and the molecular is a central preoccupation in Beckett’s œuvre (notably, as has been pointed out above in Chapter 3, in The Unnamable). At issue in these instances is at once a modality of population (as gestured towards—albeit negatively—in the French title of Le Dépeupleur) and a modality of definition (to give definition is to give contours, to circumscribe, to bring into being, hence to populate in an expanded sense of that term). In this respect a particular ‘deviation’ (from Capitalisme et schizophrénie) undertaken by Brian Massumi proves to be of assistance. His concept of the ‘supple individual’ may contribute to our understanding of the nature of the individuation or form with which one might be confronted in touring the space of the threshold between the molar and the molecular: “A supple [pliant] individual,” he writes, “lies between the molecular and the molar, in time and in mode of composition” (Massumi 1992, 55).37 If ‘je suis ce cours de sable’ is thought of as negotiating in some sense the space of 35

In this respect it is pertinent that Diane Beddoes has spoken of the Critique itself, that is of the critical method, of Kant’s critical method, in terms of what she calls a “threshold effect” (Beddoes 1997, 29). 36 See Uhlmann (1999, 61 and ff.) for a discussion of molarity and molecularity in Molloy. 37 On “supple segmentation” see Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1988, 250/204-5). We are, the authors often repeat, traversed by lines, the consideration of which leads to the necessity of a new “cartography”: The lines are inscribed on a common Body without Organs “as so many segments, thresholds, or quanta, territorialities, deterritorializations, or reterritorializations” (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 248/203).


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transition between molar and molecular, the je which speaks from within that space would seem an entirely adequate exemplar of the ‘supple individual’.38 Massumi has glossed Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the distinction between molarity and molecularity thus: An individual, supple or molarized, is stable only within certain limits. All things die, rocks crumble, genes mutate, universes are created and destroyed. Even within the limits of its stability, an individual is always changing. Muck rises and recedes, an atom’s electrons leap to and fro unpredictably, new laws are passed every day. A structure is at best metastable: stable on the whole (statistically) or as a whole (from the regularized point of view of its molarity). Stability is not fixity. It is variation within limits... An unusually wet season washes away part of a sediment deposit. A structure is defined by what escapes it. Without exception, it emerges from chance, lives with and by a margin of deviation, and ends in disorder. A structure is defined by its thresholds—the relative limits within which it selects, perceives, and captures, more or less consistently (its margins of deviation); and the absolute limits beyond which it breaks down (chance, chaos). (Massumi 1992, 57-8 emphasis his)39

Abetted by the telos provided by the way offered by the flowing sand, the subject is imbued with a quotient of predictability. Its way will be to flow, as the cours de sable does, and hence its custom to slide and to vary within the relative limits of the coastal ‘apparatus’. Within these limits the subject, or ‘I’ is able to say of itself that it is, precisely, an ‘I’—a fact better underlined of course in the French version. The space of sand, moreover—and this is clear also from Watt—retains a statistical stability on the whole (from the point of view of the number of its grains) while as a whole (from the regularised view of its molarity) it possesses metastability. But the aggregate of sand particles both in Watt and in the flowing sand here, if it they have structural properties and a certain metastability, are defined, still following Massumi on this point, on the basis of what escapes that structure—escapes be38

On the conceptual difference between the threshold and the limit see Deleuze & Guattari (1980/1988, 546/438); on the phylum see Deleuze & Guattari (1980/1988, 640/512); on limits and the sublime see Smith (1996, 33) and Patton (1996, 10-11). 39 Mark Halsey has recently articulated the precedents to machinic thought as these are to be found in the ancient Greek philosopher Thales: “water—through processes such as evaporation and osmosis—makes a mockery of the reactive forces of containing, trapping, fixing and dominating. Man, on the other hand, revels in being the object of such forces—that is, reactive man desires to be folded, subjugated, limited” (Halsey 2005, 34).

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cause exterior to it.40 A structure emerges, such as a cours de sable which in some respects ‘paves’ a way. But in a sense the way is already underway (as an atopian threshold), before it can become indicative of a way for the ‘I’ to follow; it already flows, namely by virtue of the very glissement which characterises that which one follows. The problem can be reframed, by way of reference to the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium systems, in terms of whole attractors and fractal attractors. On the one hand relative thresholds between, say, sand and shingle shift according to tidal variation, and sustain metastability—let us designate this the operator “whole attractor”. On the other hand an absolute threshold is that beyond which the structure breaks down into molecularity. Such a threshold is passed in Beckett’s poem via the mist, the arrival of which is heralded by the phrases “cher instant” in the French and “My peace” in the English.41 The relative threshold (margins of deviation in Massumi’s 40

Cf. Massumi’s reading of Kant’s concept of ‘drusiness’ (Massumi 1997). A dusting of miniature crystals appearing on a surface: the sparkle of an appealing roughness that lures the eye to extend the hand, goes the OED definition furnished by Massumi. Drusiness pertains to beauty and therefore to the aesthetic experience. The aesthetic experience for Kant occurs when the solace of good form is attained and experienced. Drusiness, however, partly names the temporal lag which arises in the course of the process of emergence of good form. Crystallisation is the trope deployed by Kant to describe the emergence of form. However, as Massumi goes on to point out, this emergence is not without residue. The residue (“in the case of ice, the water between ice crystals that have just formed is below freezing temperature. Yet it remains fluid, as if resisting its becoming” - 6) remains as a kind of memory (a memory of underdevelopment as it were, or of the informe, the indistinct, the obscurity of matter). There is a co-presence then of past and present, but the past cannot for all that be regarded as supplanted and superseded by the present. There is an invisible supplement within this sumptuary aquatics. Part of the water, Massumi reminds us, escapes being captured under the conditions of freezing and escapes directly by evaporating. Thus in two ways, and in two directions “The water-lag lies between two limits: the internalised limit of the ice crystals it bathes (access), and the enveloping limit of the mist (excess)” (7). 41 Stephen Barker makes some interesting points about Beckett’s self-translation. The two key alterations—and Barker provides his own transliterations—entail a loss of the clarity and specificity of reference to time and a slippage towards ambiguity on the one hand (from “cher instant” to “my peace is there”) and a complete turnaround, from time to space itself on the other (“le temps d’une porte” becomes “the space of a door”). His conclusion is insightful: “Thus do time and space fuse and dance, at play with each other, creating an atomic tension of gaps and crossings” (Barker 1992, 25). For Perloff Beckett fails to do justice to his own French poem which in her view remains the more important work. I would tend to agree.


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terms, atopian threshold as understood in the present study) will at this juncture cease to be operative and to function as the space within which the “je” or the “I” orientates itself. 42 However, the peace attained is paradoxical. Since it is occasioned by the breakdown of the boundary by means of which metastability was arrived at, the gain comes at the cost of a fall into molecularity and chaos. Thus when the poem states “when I may cease from treading these long shifting thresholds”, it is not only the traversal which is finished with, but also the ‘I’. Like the protagonist of Blanchot’s Thomas l’obscur, of Beckett’s je suis ce cours de sable it could also be said: “J'eus de moi une partie immergé, et c'est à cette partie perdue dans un constant naufrage que je dus ma direction, ma figure et ma necessité” (Blanchot 1951, 111).43 The supple individual has, in crossing an ontological threshold toward molecularity, moved from a passive to an active role. Guattari describes such a movement in terms of chaosmosis. In the book bearing that title Guattari lists a variety of thresholds, a vigilance towards which will answer the demands made by his commitment to “dismissal of the ontological binarism”: A machinic assemblage [or supple individual], through its diverse components, extracts its consistency by crossing ontological thresholds, non-linear thresholds of irreversibility, ontological and phylogenetic thresholds, creative thresholds of heterogenesis and autopoiesis. (Guattari 1995, 50)44

The crossing of an ontological threshold can be illustrated by means of an example of which Beckett would have approved: A heap of stones is not a machine, whereas a wall is already a static protomachine, manifesting virtual polarities, an inside and an outside, an above and a below, a right and a left. (Guattari 1995, 42) 42

However we are still in a precise reversal of the Kantian situation. If there is a certain sentiment with an elective affinity with (as far as) the Kantian sublime (is concerned) (“my peace”), that peace is not one marking the triumph of common sense. 43 Tr.: “there is a part of me which is submerged, and it is to this part lost in a constant shipwreck that I owe my direction, my form, my figure and my necessity.” Rabaté makes interesting links between Murphy and Thomas L’Obscur (Rabaté 1996, 167169). 44 What emerges here is a being of Being without being (becoming), or: “a processual, polyphonic Being singularisable by infinitely complexifiable textures, according to the infinite speeds which animate its virtual compositions” (Guattari 1995, 51).

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In the case of such a formal threshold, a machinic assemblage can, by crossing-over, “extract” its consistency. These thresholds, which are as much phylogenetic as they are creative, also mark stages of heterogenesis and/or autopoiesis; they are indexical of becoming on several fronts at once (multiplicity) and complex self-formation/constitution. Fractal machines, Guattari states, cross substantial scales and, in doing so, paradoxically engender them. Guattari’s ‘transmonadism’ reinforces the Leibnizian aspects of the concept developed by him, in conjunction with Deleuze, of nomadology (a concept which is central to Chapter 3 above), entailing, as he puts it, “so many monadic ‘points of view’ terraced or structured across fractal ascents and descents” (Guattari 1995, 118). This is a domain bereft of Euclidean spatial coordinates; there has been a fall, an imperceptible slide (like the “Glississ-iss” of Watt) into the realm of what Guattari calls “intensive ordinates” (51). Where “energetico-spatio-temporal co-ordinates” are jettisoned, “everything becomes possible” (51). The phenomenon, as far as it is operative in the work of Beckett, is not unique to the poem. A most interesting illustration of threshold-crossing occurs in Watt. The encounter between the narrator Sam and Watt takes place in the space (a “couloir”) between two fences which mark the mutual boundary zone between two properties. According to the arrangement, “No fence was party, nor any fence part of” (1976, 154). It would have been more convenient for either to have met the other in one or other of their respective gardens, it is reported. It was better, however, the narrator reasons, for them to meet in a space which belonged to no-one, in short on a threshold. No longer can either lay claim to the territory trodden upon: property and propriety, as well as direction and meaning (sens) cease here. Deleuze in Logique du sens, deploys the French sens to indicate both direction and sense proper. The generalised deregulation of each of these finds literary expression in Watt’s strange mode of walking and speaking (as it does in the bidirectional portal of ‘je suis ce cours de sable’).45 The modes of capture, or ‘improper’ coupling, are not regulated by the Ego or any other judicative persona or operation. Thus they do not entail that mode of encounter wherein molar subjectivity retains its contours, its form and its legitimation (this is not the Kantian “fantastic subjective 45

Begam refers to dérèglement in relation to Not I, especially as it is foregrounded at its ending (Begam 2002, 28).


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tribunal”, not, as the fifth of the Texts for Nothing puts it, the court that sits in the head [Beckett 1995, 120]). Rather they unleash becomings which are registered at a ‘molecular’ level and entail the undoing of boundaries of propriety and ‘proper’ subjectivity. With the bizarre doubling enacted within this non-place, which is the site of interpenetration of interior and exterior, of sense and nonsense, of direction and disorientation, it is as if the narrator in Watt has experienced the phenomenon described by Guattari when he writes of the chaosmotic experience being that of a cursor part plunged into chaos (or “havoc” in the word which brings another of Beckett’s poems, ‘Saint-Lô’ [1946], to a close; Guattari 1995, 111). Swept into the mist the ‘je’ ceases to operate as je; it has left its coordinates, slipped its moorings. Via the encounter which forces sensation the Kantian cogito has been dissolved. Deleuze has remarked that All consciousness is a matter of threshold. In each case we would probably have to state why the threshold is marked where it is. Yet if we take thresholds to be so many minimal units of consciousness, tiny perceptions are in each instance smaller than the virtual minimum [le minimum possible] and, in this sense, are infinitely small. (Deleuze 1988/1993, 117-8/88)

The possibility of unconscious perception being regarded as constitutive, even though imperceptible and remaining below the threshold wherein it would be ‘selected’, is one of the principal advances made by Leibniz on the philosophy of Descartes (as Leibniz himself was the first to point out). There seems to be a return in this aspect of Beckettian threshold relations to a more Baroque conception, and thus towards a disavowal of a regulative and exclusionary Kantian mode. Swept into the mist, the je ceases to operate as je; it now lives via the modality named inflection (when co-ordinates fail) by Bernard Cache (1995, 14). The living of the space of the door, then, is a striking illustration of what happens when Kant’s insights are followed through to the conclusion from the brink of which he pulled them back. In the figure of (living) the space of the door which opens and shuts Beckett posits something which Massumi describes in the following terms: “There is no interiority in the sense of a closed, selfreflective system. There is only multilevelled infolding of an aleatory outside, with which the infolding remains in contact (as a dissipative structure)” (Massumi 1992, 80). The concluding lines confirm that for

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the poem such interiority is indeed impossible. The outside and its fleeing and dissolving strata are in contact with the ‘Je’ via the atopian threshold: the space and time of a door which opens and closes. Architecture, abstraction Constructivism has been described by John Rajchman in terms of “building from the space between”, that is, from the atopian threshold as the concept has been understood in this study. In the context of his more general endeavour in his Deleuzian reflection on architecture in Constructions (a project which echoes an earlier study by Jean-Pierre le Dantec [1992] and the other attempts to think architecture à la Deleuze, principally represented by the work of Greg Lynn [1995], Bernard Cache [1995] and a study by Benoît Goetz [2002]), Rajchman finds Deleuze and Guattari’s reconfiguration of the concept of abstraction particularly fruitful for thinking about the specificity of architectural space and materiality. The Deleuzian assemblage (a signifier which names, amongst other things, a conceptual placemarker where once the subject and its support systems abided) inhabits what Rajchman calls the natal of “moving places”. This atopian being-in-becoming therefore is tethered less to spatio-temporal coordinates than to intensive ordinates. That is, it can be thought of not as an individual circumscribing attributable and channeled energies, but as a singular concatentation-in-process of thresholds and intensities—a haecceity, or individuated entity on a plane of consistency constructed by an abstract machine (Bogue 1989, 134). With this conception one moves far from the logic of “regions and locales” towards an atopian conception (Rajchman 1995, 51) of space and of spacing. Region and locale fall away, but with them the subject and form abscond. What remains? The Beckettian question is formulated by Malone (as Chapter 3 observes above) in terms of the dual sense of the proper. What remains of me? What belongings? What effects? What is proper to me? What are my properties? It is genuinely a question of real estate. The question is explicitly asked in the trilogy, but of course is implicitly something of a refrain in the later work. It is in this context that Rajchman has written persuasively of the “sanctifying” negative theology of the blank canvas as this latter informs the lexicon developed in relation to abstract art in the twentieth century. There is, for example, the ‘pictorial-spiritual’ abstraction


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of Malevich’s White on White, or, the aspiration towards universality to which the abstraction from the particular expressed by Piet Mondrian is a contribution (Mondrian 1992 [1919], 284). In perhaps the most influential account of abstraction, Clement Greenberg praises modernism in art because it pares painting down to pure opticality (Greenberg 1965), and removes what another key commentator, Michael Fried (1967), called theatricality, namely the contaminatory force of temporality. In the Greenbergian account of abstraction in painting, then, temporality plays a structurally analogous role to that played by particularity (Benjamin 2000, 51) in relation to the abstraction sought by philosophy. In Rajchman’s variation on Deleuze’s concept of abstraction there is a deliberate subversion of the lexicon: an abstraction that consists in an impure mixing and mixing up, prior to Forms, a reassemblage that moves toward an outside rather than a purification that turns up to essential Ideas or in toward the constitutive “forms” of a medium. (Rajchman 1998, 56)

Mixing and aggregation: this abstraction is, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, machinic. The work is pushed outside and alongside itself, its idiom becoming resistant to what Guattari called “petrified systems of modelisation” (Guattari 1995, 68). Thus are inaugurated the stammering and stuttering which for Deleuze offer signal evidence of the presence of the machinic in desire. Writing of the “thresholds and doors where becoming itself becomes”, Deleuze and Guattari articulate the question of the connection between multiplicity and transformation and variation in the following terms: A multiplicity [they write] is defined not by its elements, nor by a centre of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible...its variations and dimensions are immanent to it. (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 14/8)

Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence on the horizontal over the vertical— a disposition suggested in the preceding quotations—is bound up with the assault on the ‘upright’ image of thought which characterises the Western philosophical tradition, and which finds its exemplary advocate in Nietzsche (Deleuze 1983). By contrast to philosophy’s system of judgement presided over by form, in a gesture inspired by

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Nietzsche, they (Deleuze in Nietzsche and both authors in Capitalisme et schizophrénie) advocate the evaluation of forces (Deleuze 1983, 198). In this way the planes of immanence of philosophy and of consistency of art resist the lure of transcendence and of the dialectical positivity which gives the upright image of thought its dynamic; they operate transversally, expanding by and in cutting across and intersecting with all the multiplicities and all the dimensions. The resultant manner of linkage and combination by proliferation and mutation entails the coexistence of any number of multiplicities and any number of dimensions. The plane of consistency, by virtue of emerging or being constructed out of the borderlines which connect multiplicities, proliferates by contagion. Moreover, by being the “intersection of all concrete forms”, it is “the ultimate Door providing a way out” for becomings. But on the other side of the threshold there is no beyond (cf. Nietzsche 1973). Spatio-temporal co-ordinates in Deleuzian ontology must cede their place to intensive ordinates. As Keith Ansell Pearson comments, The ‘beyond’ of the human denotes for Deleuze nothing transcendent but is implicated fully in the indefinite speed that characterises the movement of a plane of immanence. Deleuze’s avowed aim is to produce an ‘art of living’ in which the line upon which life and death exist in implicated and complicated movement can be mapped out in terms of the logic of the ‘Outside’. It is the forces of the ‘outside’ which impinge and impact upon us, upon what we think we are and what we think we are capable of becoming. It is the peristaltic movements of the outside which serve to destratify fixed and stable identities and produce through doubling processes new possibilities for an intenser and more creative existence. (Ansell Pearson 1997, 84)

Ansell Pearson is correct to point out that for Deleuze and Guattari “The ‘outside’ is the line of life that links up random and arbitrary events in a creative mixture of chance and necessity...[and] entails... an intensive and vital topology that folds the outside into the inside” (Ansell Pearson 1997, 85). The “Outside”, in this formulation, involves radical enfolding and implication such that the distinction between interior and exterior no longer holds sway. Abstract: this term for Rajchman inspired by Deleuze and Guattari is not equivalent to Form withdrawn from matter. That formulation after all allows pride of place—even if absconditus—for a prior determination. As Rajchman comments:


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For when form is no longer determined by a prior field or ground given to an independent or overseeing eye, it starts to operate in other, less systematic or predictable ways. The problem then becomes one of loosening up construction so as to ‘singularise’ a space, disposing it in a free manner not completely organised or determined. (Rajchman 1998, 107)

How can these insights be applied to the Kantian context in which Beckett’s poem has been framed? In fact Rajchman has already posed the central problematic of his own book in terms of the encounter between architecture and architectonics, that is between building and the construction of philosophical systems founded on a form of exclusion on the one hand, and the erection, maintenance and patrolling of strict boundaries on the other: What if the architectonic in Kant were not an overarching system but something that has itself to be constructed anew, in each case, in relation to fresh problems— something looser, more flexible, less complete, more irregular, a free plan in which things hang together without yet being held in place? (1)46

That having been asked, Rajchman briefly suggests the consequences which the correlate of such a release from architectonic thought would have in the domain of the subject. The latter would now need to be “prior to anything like the unified manifold of the Kantian ‘I think’”, and would, moreover, need to be positioned in the series of questions in the domain of the aesthetic thus: What if we then, through constructions, could free the whole idea of ‘aesthesis’ not only from the Kantian problematic of regulated faculties but also from the whole salvationist problematic of judgement or a judgement day, connecting it instead to another unfinished sense of time, peculiar to the city? (2)

In these respects, despite the fact that the sundry locations of Beckett’s moribunds or their remains are often decidedly ‘rural’, it is arguably the case that, from the generic coastal space of ‘je suis ce cours de sable’ (née ‘Dieppe II’) to the late-traversed tramping grounds of Company, Beckett’s work walks to an urban tempo as Deleuze understands this new modality (or ‘conduct’) of time.47 It discloses an 46

Cf. Goetz (2002a, 3). See Alliez (1996: preface by Deleuze) on “conducts of time”, with Kant, for example, as “the first philosopher of cities” (231) and Stengers (1997, 177-212) on the clock and the development of urban time. 47

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immensely protean space of which two sets of lines by the poet George Oppen are evocative. In his 1968 collection Of Being Numerous we read: The roots of words Dim in the subways There is madness in the number Of the living

But also: Obsessed, bewildered By the shipwreck Of the singular We have chosen the meaning Of being numerous. (Oppen 1975, 159; 151)

In ‘je suis ce cours de sable’, in the form of the positioning of the subject in time, and the manner in which movement is subordinated to time, there is a minor evocation of the Copernican revolution known as Kantian critique. However there is clearly—due no doubt to the anxiety of relation spoken of by Beckett in ‘Three Dialogues’—also an exfoliation of the Kantian regulated faculties and a collapsing of the edifice of judgement and of the ‘upright’ image of thought which such regulation upholds.


The concluding pages of Mille Plateaux suggest that artists are responsible for the generation of abstract machines operative in their names. For Deleuze, in his seminar at Vincennes on Kant in 1978, “true lived experience [le vécu] is an absolutely abstract thing”. Lived experience, Deleuze states, “represents nothing”. “I don’t live representation in my heart,” he continues, “I live a temporal line which is completely abstract. What is more abstract than a rhythm?” (Deleuze 1978). The withdrawal from representation—the abeyance of the mimetic—which is one facet of Beckett’s ‘abstraction’ is in part coextensive with the inflection by rhythms and conceptual affects (for instance the “little pictures” he finds in Leibniz) emanating from philosophy which is witnessed in his literary writing. For Deleuze and Guattari—and especially for Deleuze—correlatively, contact or encounters with the alterity of art, literature and music assisted their thought (in philosophy) in the task of maintaining machinic abstraction. This is an abstraction not from particularity (modus operandi of the ‘upright’ image of thought) but, rather, one which is

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capable of affirming the singular and the multiple (the multiple must be made, according to a key formulation in Mille Plateaux [13/6]). In these ways—in Wattish ways—in a couloir in which the genre characteristics and coordinates of each discipline are either in abeyance or contaminated, the respective œuvres of Samuel Beckett and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari find themselves in contact, confronting one another. When the one speaks the philosophical vernacular the other will not necessarily recognise the idiom. Beckett subjects philosophy to a becoming-minor; his is a ‘molecular’ philosophy. Time off its hinges, with which formulation the previous chapter dealt, in Gregg Lambert’s view, “describes the modulation of the philosophical genre itself and underscores the original interdisciplinary character of a philosophy of difference and repetition” (Lambert 2002, 16). In their complementary openings on to the ‘non-’ (non-philosophy in the case of Deleuze and Guattari, non-literature in the case of Beckett); in Beckett’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s convergence on the site of the riven ‘I’ of Rimbaud1, and in their shared commitment to (machinic) constructivism or abstraction as a modality of thought and artistic practice, the common coordinates seem to lie in problems first posed in the context of (Kantian) aesthetics. It is, therefore, in a display of hospitality to the shadow of the monstrous figure, characterised by Beckett as a gigantic presence in the line “sur Lisbonne fumante Kant froidement penché”, and by Deleuze as “the enemy”, that the present study ends. Where Kantian critique sought to regulate in a sens unique, the machinic abstraction of Beckett and of Deleuze and Guattari will embrace dérèglement in all directions and dimensions; where Kant seeks out limits and frontiers, Beckett and Deleuze and Guattari find thresholds and atopian spacings; where Kant privileges the transcendental subject as site of synthesis, in Beckett and Deleuze and Guattari there is only a process of “population” via contagion on a plane of immanence as locus of deregulated synaesthesia and of the people to come;2 where in Kant a recuperative move re-establishes the unified subject, and the manifold finds itself synthesized into a One, in Beckett and Deleuze and Guattari, in the manner of Rimbaud, “Je est 1

For Beckett the Trinity College lecturer this ‘I’ is equivalent, in a letter to MacGreevy, to “eye-suicide”. 2 See Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1988, 326/267).


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un autre”; the subject is irremediably multiple. Foucault, writing of Kant, sums up the contribution of the latter to the philosophical tradition in the following terms: ...that opening made by Kant in Western philosophy when he articulated, in a manner which is still enigmatic, metaphysical discourse and his reflection on the limits of reason. However, Kant ended by closing this opening when he ultimately relegated all critical investigations to an anthropological question...the granting of an indefinite respite to metaphysics...(Foucault 1977, 38)

Deregulated, partly unhinged, no longer subject to cardinality, with the Outside pressing along the atopian threshold, when Beckett’s door both opens and closes, the anthropological (and the anthropomorphic) question of the subject on its site, in its locale or pays natal, is caused to stammer in the langue étrangère of which all great literature in the view of Proust and Deleuze is composed. The Kantian respite is over, but more emphatically, the subject has only ever been intermittently discernible in what Watt calls the “Gliss-iss-iss” (1976, 41) of flowing sand, within which a certain habit causes it to say of itself that it is an “I”.3 In other words, the subject has become synonymous with its indiscernibility in a continual process of accretion-dissipation. Habit is of course the name given by Beckett to “the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects” (1987, 19). Beckett’s zone of engagement being the gap between “the means and its use”, his work occupies a set of spatio-temporal “ordinates” characterised less by 3

On such articulations as a habit operative on a plane of immanence see Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994, 49/46). See also the “dossier” section devoted to the topic of glissement in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 4.3 (1999): 133-230. Beckett’s own comments, in Proust, on the impossibility of the human subject enjoying exemption from the destabilizing effects of the intrinsic flux in respect of subject-object relations, and his reference to the slim pickings of a “series of partial annexations...never integrally and at once” (1987, 17-18) in intersubjective relations, already suggest the author’s own affinity for such a conclusion. In a letter to MacGreevy on the subject of Cézanne Beckett famously wrote of the relief he experienced in viewing the Mont St. Victoire paintings: “after all the anthropomorphised landscape—… or paranthropomorphised by Watteau…or hyperanthropomorphised by Rubens…; after all the landscape ‘promoted’ to the emotions of the hiker (what an impertinence, worse than that Aesop and the animals), alive the way a lap or a fist is alive” (Letter to MacGreevy September 8, 1934, cited Knowlson 1995, 187).

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Kantian regulative procedures (Kant 1934, 331), which ensure proper horizons, identifiable limits and a policed frontier, than by processes wherein “collapse, landslide and loss of horizons” are at play in an operation which is essentially one of effondement: what the Deleuze of Différence et répétition calls the “universal ungrounding [effondement]” (Deleuze 1968/1994, 92/67 and 1969/1990, 304/ 263).4 In the “zone of stones” The final plateau of the 15 which comprise Mille Plateaux is given the title ‘Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines’. Its sections are headed: Strata, stratification; Assemblages; Rhizome; Plane of Consistency, Body without Organs; Deterritorialization; Abstract Machines (Diagram and Phylum). In conformity with Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of a plateau the chapter serves to function within the book as an agent of “variation” (638/511) or “piece of immanence” (196/158) in communication with the other plateaus devoted more comprehensively to the headings in question. The section headed ‘Rhizome’ takes up again the topic of the first plateau of the book and thus the question first posed there returns: What is a book made of, according to Deleuze and Guattari? They answer that it is composed of very different times and speeds. As Bruce Baugh points out in his essay ‘How Deleuze can help us make Literature work’, this is the first Spinozist component of the Deleuzoguattarian approach to literature (Baugh 2000, 34). The lines on a book “produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration (précipitation) and rupture” (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 10/4). In this context, for Deleuze and Guattari, writing is a privileged manner of experimentation, capable of producing the new or the unprepared-for. As Stephen Zepke puts it in his study of the ontology and aesthetics of Deleuze and Guattari, “The abstract machine is the vital mechanism of a world always emerging anew” (Zepke 2005, 2). Nomadological, machinic or rhizomatic writing records, we have seen, the intensive ordinates of a ‘dislocation’ generated by and 4

Following here Paul Patton’s translation of effondement. Perloff’s reading of the closing words of ‘je suis ce cours de sable’ leaves us, I would contend, with rather more form than seems warranted, a case of what Lyotard calls “the current flow[ing] only in the ‘hold’ of what does not flow” (Lyotard 1994, 105). Shane Weller makes a compelling case for “the gap between the means and its use” in his essay on Beckett’s ‘comment dire’ (Weller 2000, 165-80).


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equivalent to such emergence. Under a slightly different emphasis, by means of such writing, that which is recorded is in an important sense equivalent to the process of loss of coordinates. Writing is a privileged mode of ‘expansion’ by deterritorialization. Moreover, as far as our present purposes are concerned, writing is in a unique position to flatten itself on to the plane of consistency and to render itself coextensive with the abstract machine: “Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency” (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 19/11). In this way writing as a process, and as a process with a privileged access to processuality, because transversal, does not possess a genetic axis or deep structure which might be disclosed or recovered (19/12). There can be no “tracing, on the basis of an overcoding structure or supporting axis, something that comes ready-made” (20/12). Machinic or Rhizomatic thought involves experimentation and “map-making”, where the map is itself part of the rhizome.5 Deleuze and Guattari are explicit about the performativity of the map as opposed to a (structuralist, psychoanalytic) tracing based on an “alleged ‘competence’” (20/12-13).6 Psychoanalysis is, in their view, the prime culprit in effectuating this form of tracing, overseen by what they describe as a “despotic” competence: “What the tracing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only the impasses, blockages, incipient taproots, or points of structuration”. In this respect psychoanalysis conforms to the upright image of thought, refusing forces in favour of form. By contrast, schizoanalysis “rejects any idea of pretraced destiny” (20/13). Therefore: The fundamental difference between psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis is the following: schizoanalysis attains a nonfigurative and nonsymbolic unconscious, a pure abstract figural dimension (‘abstract’ in the sense of abstract painting), flows-schizzes or real-desire, apprehended below the minimum conditions of identity. (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983, 421/351)

Schizoanalysis as a model of engagement serving to forestall totalizing interpretation or “tracing” (including in the domain of literature), 5

For a discussion of this aspect see Bogue (2003, 188-91). José Gil takes up the notion of surveying in his Metamorphoses of the Body (Gil 1998, 124). On performativity see Bogue (2003, 190-1). 6

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viewed in the context of Deleuze’s own work in the history of philosophy, comes to appear a natural ally in his pact with Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson against the upright image of thought. Literature, as manifest in his studies of Proust, Kafka, Tournier, Klossowski, Zola, Bene and Beckett and as evoked in many statements scattered throughout the corpus of his writings, both under his own name and with Guattari, with its “secret pressures”, functions to a certain extent as the schizoanalysis of philosophy itself, or at the very least, of Deleuze’s philosophy. In the retrospective glance from the posterity of Deleuze and Guattari, and, in particular from that part of their complex legacy which embraces their interest in the work of the author, Beckett’s writing in particular effectuates a threshold hesitation (and agitation) which can be seen (in hindsight) directly to impact on their approach to the history of philosophy and on their contribution to its ‘dis-edification’, molecularization and dislocation in the name of experimentation. Encountering and sensing Beckett’s universe in L’Anti-Œdipe, Molloy thus offers Deleuze and Guattari a portrait which is decidedly not that of the last of the Hegelian philosophers (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983, 91/76) with their penchant for trinitarian resolution and affirmation by negation. Equally the same novel offers a metaphor for a riposte to Kant’s antinomies of reason (Kant 1934). To both, Beckett’s writing replies with the embrace rather than the elision of inclusive disjunction (91/77). Beckett’s work, then, constitutes for Deleuze and Guattari an important point of reference in a critique of the system operative in the Western philosophical tradition, summarised as being presided over by the “judgement of God”. In a related way Molloy, by means of its genre coordinates, enables them to confront the presupposed structures guiding interpretation and tracing, in particular in the style of psychoanalysis. Expanded to the domain of literary criticism, the challenge becomes one directed, potentially, at any system of interpretation geared to providing the solace of good form obtained by overcoding or ‘tracing’ literature by means of reifying hermeneutic grids. If Deleuze’s history of philosophy and that announced in his final collaboration with Guattari in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? is a history, it is not quite that of a succession of systems (Deleuze & Guattari 1991/1994, 59/59). Rather, it is to be understood in terms of a coexistence of planes between and across which becomings are effectuated.


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The focus on the becoming of forces as opposed to succession of systems and forms, for which Deleuze praises Michel Foucault (Deleuze 1986/1988), finds its literary equivalent in the idea, developed in Critique et Clinique, of the author as untimely symptomatogist.7 For this reason, at one point in L’Anti-Œdipe Deleuze and Guattari are led to conjoin Nietzsche and Beckett. Here one is concerned not with the virtual companionship of two figures with apparently very little in common (Beckett, it is frequently said, had little or no interest in the work of Nietzsche). Rather it is one of Deleuze’s monstrous hybrids, in this case a ‘sensation of concept’ in Beckett and a conceptual persona (a notion Deleuze and Guattari would later develop in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?) from Nietzsche’s philosophy fused together. The parabolic sweeps without centre of The Unnamable prepare, in L’Anti-Œdipe, for the account of Nietzsche’s “every name in history is I…” (cited 28/21) and for the theme of the perpetual migration of the subject across constitutive thresholds of becoming (101/85). Such a migration is effectuated by the Beckett Abstract Machine, since part of what it achieves is a molecular revolution in two languages, with the bilingual œuvre which Beckett authored refusing to be held within national, geographical or linguistic boundaries, but instead insisting always on ‘bordering-on’, in the manner identified by Deleuze and Guattari as one of the qualities of ‘minor literature’: “No, I am not of your kind, I am the outsider and the deterritorialized” (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983, 125/105). A study of Beckett and philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari is compelled to negotiate the challenge, embedded in their legacy, to literary criticism claiming to operate in some way in their name. Schizoanalysis, one of the names for such a project, requires the subjection of scholarly competency to a destabilizing pulsion. For reading a text is never a scholarly [erudit] exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather it is a productive use of the literary machine, a montage of desiring machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force. (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983, 125-6/106)

What the preceding pages have attempted to show is that one of the 7

Cf. Deleuze & Guattari (1991/1994, 108/113).

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registers of this destabilizing force may derive precisely from the focus, developed here, on zones of encounter and confrontation, on spaces and times of becoming as these are operative in the work of Beckett, of selected philosophers and of Deleuze and DeleuzeGuattari. Montage, then, not in the Eisenstein mode (despite Beckett’s predilection for the film director and Deleuze’s own interest expressed with such élan in Cinéma 1), more in the sense of the Lapoujade’s coinage as adopted in Cinéma 2, “montrage” (Deleuze 1989, 41). As a reader of philosophy, disdainful of the “loutishness of learning”, Beckett effectuated his own brand of the extraction referred to above by Deleuze and Guattari. This facet lends to his writing some of its experimental force. A philosopher is read for the “little pictures” generated by his writing (literally in the case of Plotinus, as one of Beckett’s philosophy notebooks reveals) as much as for the sake of a supplementary ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ travail played out in the Long Room of Trinity College, Dublin.8 The Deleuze who surpassed his ‘perverted’ Kant (1984) with a Leibniz dallying with the Dionysian (1988) in part achieves what he did through an analogous fascination for the little pictures of philosophy (his own included) produced by Beckett’s published writings out of, in part, the notations made in his philosophy notebooks. Malone the stick-wielding bedbound Proust manqué is to some degree the creator of the virtual Leibniz so central to the striking analysis of the thought of Murphy’s ‘predecessor’ (on the Schmiedestrasse) in Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque (Deleuze 1988/1993). This is the Leibniz whose theory of the vinculum would have been his second Monadology if he had lived long enough (Serres 1995, 4): Is he a thing or an animalcule? If he does not have belongings, then to whom does he belong? That is a metaphysical question. He needs a special hook, a sort of vinculum on which he can hang and sort through his different things, but he has even lost his hook. (Deleuze 1988/1993, 147/109)

In short, between Beckett, philosophy and Deleuze and Guattari, to reprise the words of the celebrated Leibniz scholar Yvon Belaval, an abundance of “parois réfléchissantes” (cited Deleuze 1988/1993, 150/112) can be discerned in operation. 8

It is Leibniz who is identified by Beckett as “a great cod but full of splendid little pictures” (Letter to Thomas MacGreevy, December 6, 1933).


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In his essay ‘La Peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon’ Beckett had written: Ici tout bouge, nage, fuit, revient, se défait, se refait. On dirait l’insurrection des molécules, l’intérieur d’une pierre un millième de seconde avant qu’elle ne se désagrège. (1984, 128)9

To this statement he adds, at the beginning of his next paragraph, the phrase “C’est ça, la littérature”.10 In the long shifting thresholds between literature and philosophy, Beckett’s concept of literature— “l’insurrection des molécules”—registers the pressure of a philosophical impingement, while Deleuze and Guattari’s percept of (non-) philosophy savours the elements of Beckett’s literary régime: The schizoanalyst is not an interpreter, even less a director [metteur en scène]; he is a mechanic, a micromechanic. There are no excavations to be undertaken, no archaeology, no statues in the unconscious: there are only stones to be sucked à la Beckett, and other machinic elements belonging to deterritorialized constellations [ensembles]. (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983, 404/338, trans. adapted)

The Abstract Machine will neither save nor redeem literature, philosophy or exegesis, but building it while remembering that it, like the unconscious (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1988, 348/284), is (to be) constructed is one way, after Deleuze and Guattari, of being receptive to Beckett’s molecular revolution of both word and world.

9

Tr.: “Here everything moves, swims, flees, returns, dissolves and reforms. All ceases unceasingly. It resembles the insurrection of molecules, the interior of a stone a thousandth of a second before it disintegrates”. I concur with Ingo Berensmeyer in treating this passage, along with the phrase which follows it, more seriously than is customary in Beckett criticism (Berensmeyer 2004, 490). 10 Kant’s Critique of Judgement sought to resolve the problem of subjectivity by invoking the reflective judgement and the transcendental imagination. “The subject remains inaccessible to itself, representable only in the contemplation of works of art and in the self-formation (Bildung) of humanity as a whole, an infinite self-perfecting that indicates, symbolically, the ‘form’ (Bild) of the subject” (Parlej 1997, 5).

Works Cited

Editions of Works by Samuel Beckett English More Pricks than Kicks (London: Picador, 1974) [1934] How It Is (London: Calder, 1964) The Lost Ones (London: Calder, 1972) Murphy (London: Picador, 1973) [1938] Watt (London: Calder, 1976) [1953] Collected Poems in English and French (New York: Grove Press, 1977) The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable (London: Picador, 1979) [1959] Disjecta. Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, Ruby Cohn (ed.) (New York: Grove Press, 1984) Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986) Proust and ‘Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit’ (London: Calder, 1987) Nowhow On (London: Calder, 1992) Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Eoin O'Brien and Édith Fournier (eds.) (London: Calder, 1993) Worstward Ho (London: Calder, 1993) The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989, S.E. Gontarski (ed.) (New York: Grove Press, 1995) ‘Lettre à Georges Duthuit 9 mars 1949-10 mars 1949’, trans. John

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Pilling, in S.E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann (eds.), Beckett after Beckett (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2006), 1518 French Murphy, trans. the author and Alfred Péron (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1953) L’innommable (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1953) Comment c’est (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1961) Le Dépeupleur (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1970) Poèmes (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1978) Compagnie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1985) Quad et autres pièces pour la télévision, suivi de ‘L’Épuisé’ de Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1992) Cap au pire, trans. Édith Fournier (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1992) Archival sources MS 10402, Correspondence with Thomas MacGreevy, Trinity College Dublin MS 10962-71, Notes on philosophy, Trinity College Dublin

Critical and biographical works on Samuel Beckett Abbott, H. Porter, The Fiction of Samuel Beckett. Form and Effect (Berkeley: U of California P, 1973) —— Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996) —— ‘Beckett’s Lawlessness: Evolutionary Psychology and Genre’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 8 (1999), Poetry and Other Prose/Poésie et autres proses, Matthijs Engelberts (ed.) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999): 131-42 Acheson, James, ‘Murphy’s Metaphysics’, Journal of Beckett Studies 5 (Autumn, 1979): 9-23 Ackerley, C.J., Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy (Tallahassee, Fla.: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 1998) —— Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated Watt (Tallahassee, Fla.: Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2005)

Works Cited

275

Ackerley, C.J. and S.E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide to his Work, Life, and Thought (New York: Grove Press, 2004) Adelman, Gary, ‘Torturer and Servant: Samuel Beckett’s How it Is’, Journal of Modern Literature 25.1 (2001): 81-90 Amiran, Eyal, Wandering and Home: Beckett’s Metaphysical Narrative (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State UP, 1993) Anzieu, Didier, Beckett et le psychanalyste (Paris: Éditions Mentha, 1992) Badiou, Alain, Conditions (Paris: Seuil, 1992) —— ‘Ce qui arrive’, in Régis Salgado and Evelyne Grossman (eds.), Samuel Beckett, l’écriture et la scène (Paris: SEDES, 1998), 9-12 —— On Beckett, edited and translated by Nina Power and Alberto Toscano, Postface by Andrew Gibson (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003) —— ‘Being, Existence, Thought: Prose and Concept’, Handbook of Inaesthetics (London & New York: Continuum, 2005), originally published as Petit Manuel d’inesthétique (Paris: Seuil, 1998) Bair, Deirdre, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Cape, 1978) Barker, Stephen, ‘Paysage to Passage: Beckett's Poiesis of the World’, Journal of Beckett Studies 1.1-2 (1992): 15-38. Begam, Richard, Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996) —— ‘Beckett and Postfoundationalism’, in Richard Lane (ed.), Beckett and Philosophy (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 13-33 Beja, Morris, S.E. Gontarski, and Pierre Astier, Pierre (eds.), Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State UP, 1983) Berensmeyer, Ingo, ‘“Twofold Vibration”: Samuel Beckett’s Laws of Form’, Poetics Today 25.3 (2004): 465-495 Bernard, Michel, Samuel Beckett et son suject: Une apparition évanouissant (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 1996) Bernold, André, L’Amitié de Beckett 1979-1989 (Paris: Hermann, 1992) Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit, ‘Beckett: Inhibited Reading’, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard UP, 1993), 11-91 Blanchot, Maurice, ‘Ou maintenant? Qui maintenant?’, in Le Livre à

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venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 286-295 Boulter, Jonathan, Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2001) Bousseyroux, Michel, ‘Samuel Beckett: la Quad-rature du pire’, Figures du pire: Logique d’un choix, éthique d’un pari (Dante, Hölderlin, Beckett, Blanchot etc.) (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 2000), 175-203 Brater, Enoch, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theatre (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987) —— The Drama in the Text: Beckett’s Late Fiction (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1994) Brée, Germaine, ‘Les abstracteurs de quintessence de Beckett’, in Cahier de l'herne/Samuel Beckett, Tom Bishop and Raymond Federman (eds.) (Paris: Éditions de l'herne, 1976), 382-395 Bryden, Mary, ‘Figures of Golgotha: Beckett’s Pinioned People’, in John Pilling and Mary Bryden (eds.), The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives (Bristol: Longman, 1992), 45-62 —— ‘Beckett/Deleuze/Guattari: Gender in Process’, Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1993), 58-69 —— ‘The Schizoid Space: Beckett, Deleuze and L’Épuisé’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 5: Beckett & La Psychanalyse/Beckett & Psychoanalysis, Sjef Houppermans (ed.) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996): 84-93 —— ‘Beckett in the Archives’, The Beckett Circle, 23.2, Fall (2001): 8-10 —— ‘Deleuze Reader of Beckett’, in Richard Lane (ed.), Beckett and Philosophy (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 80-92 Bryden, Mary and Walter Redfern, ‘Pipedreams: Beckett and Magritte’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 4.3 (1999): 171-6 Butler, Lance St. John, Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being (London: Macmillan, 1984) —— Review of Simon Critchley, Very Little, Almost Nothing, in Modern Language Review 94:4 (October 1999): 1180-1 Butler, Lance St. John, and Robin J. Davis (eds.), Rethinking Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1990) Casanova, Pascale, Beckett l’abstracteur: Anatomie d’une révolution littéraire (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1997)

Works Cited

277

Caws, Mary Ann, ‘Samuel Beckett Translating’, in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 8 (1999), Poetry and Other Prose/Poésie et autres proses, Matthijs Engelberts (ed.) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999): 43-57 Clément, Bruno, L’Œuvre sans qualités: Rhétorique de Samuel Beckett (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1994) —— ‘Ce que les philosophes font avec Samuel Beckett’, After Beckett/D’après Beckett Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 14 (2004), Anthony Uhlmann, Sjef Houppermans and Bruno Clément (eds.) (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004): 219-235 Coe, Richard N., Beckett, revised edition (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1968) Cohn, Ruby, ‘Ghosting Through Beckett’, in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 2 (1993), Beckett in the 1990s, Marius Buning and Lois Oppenheim (eds.) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993): 1-12 Connor, Steven, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, Text (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) —— Theory and Cultural Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 80-9 —— ‘Between Theatre and Theory: Long Observation of the Ray’, in John Pilling and Mary Bryden (eds.), The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives (Bristol: Longman, 1992), 79-98 —— ‘Slow Going’ (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/eng/-skc/slow.htm), paper given at the Critical Beckett conference held in Birmingham on 26 September 1998. It has been published in print form in Yearbook of English Studies 30 (2000): 153-65 Cousineau, Thomas, ‘Anti-Oedipal Tendencies in the Trilogy’, in Bruce Stewart (ed.), Beckett and Beyond (Gerrard’s Cross: Colin Smythe, 1999), 70-77 Critchley, Simon, ‘Know Happiness-On Beckett’, Very Little…Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 141-180 Cunningham, David, ‘Aestheticism Against Colour, or Modernism, Abstraction and the Lateness of Beckett’, New Formations 55 (2005): 104-119 Davies, Robin J. and Lance st John Butler (eds.), ‘Make Sense who May’: Essays on Samuel Beckett’s Later Works, Irish Literary Studies 30 (Gerrard’s Cross: Colin Smythe 1988) Debevec-Henning, Sylvie, Beckett's Critical Complicity: Carnival, Contestation and Tradition (Kentucky: U of Kentucky P, 1988)

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Duffy, Brian, ‘The Prisoners in the Cave and the Worm in the Pit’, Journal of Beckett Studies 8.1 (1998): 51-71 Fletcher, John, Samuel Beckett's Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971) Garner, B. Stanton Jr., ‘Beckett, Merleau-Ponty, and the Phenomenological Body’, in Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1994) Gendron, Sarah, ‘“A Cogito for the Dissolved Self”: Writing, Presence, and the Subject in the Work of Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze’, Journal of Modern Literature 28.1 (Fall 2004): 47-64 Gibson, Andrew, ‘Badiou and Beckett’, in Richard Lane (ed.), Beckett and Philosophy (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 93-107 —— ‘Badiou, Beckett et le postmodernisme’, in Charles Ramond (ed.), Alain Badiou: Penser le multiple (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2002), 421-435 —— ‘Badiou, Beckett and Contemporary Criticism’, in Alain Badiou, On Beckett, edited and translated by Nina Power and Alberto Toscano, Postface by Andrew Gibson (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003), 119-36 Gontarski, S. E., On Beckett: Essays and Criticism (New York: Grove Press, 1986) Grossman, Evelyne, ‘Crée—Décrée—Incréé: les défigurations de Samuel Beckett’, La Défiguration: Artaud, Beckett, Michaux (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2004), 51-80 Harvey, Lawrence E., Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970) Hesla, David, The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1971) Hill, Leslie, Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) Houppermans, Sjef, Samuel Beckett et compagnie (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2003) Hutchings, William, ‘“Shat into Grace”: or, a Tale of a Turd: Why it is How it is in Samuel Beckett’s How It Is’, in Lance St John Butler and Robin J. Davis (eds.), Rethinking Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990) Janvier, Ludovic, ‘Lieu dire’, in Cahier de l'herne/Beckett, Tom

Works Cited

279

Bishop and Raymond Federman (eds.) (Paris: Éditions de l'Herne, 1976), 167-189 Joubert, Claire, ‘Badiou and the Ethics of Prose: Revaluing Beckett’, Polart – poétique et politique de l’art, November 21 (2004), 2004, 1-17, polartnet.freefr/papiers/papiers.php, accessed September 20, 2006 Katz, Daniel, Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1999) Kennedy, Seán, ‘“The Artist who Stakes his Being is from Nowhere”: Beckett and Thomas MacGreevy on the Art of Jack B. Yeats’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 14, Anthony Uhlmann, Sjef Houppermans and Bruno Clément (eds.) (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004): 61-74 Kern, Edith, ‘Beckett’s Knight of Infinite Resignation’, Yale French Studies 29, Spring/Summer (1962): 49-56 Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996) Kondo, Masaki, ‘Ill Seen Ill Said and Igitur’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 14, Anthony Uhlmann, Sjef Houppermans and Bruno Clément (eds.) (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004): 75-86 Krance, Charles, ‘Worstward Ho and On-words: Writing to(wards) the Point’, in Lance St. John Butler and Robin J. Davis (eds.), Rethinking Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 124-140 Lane, Richard (ed.), Beckett and Philosophy (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, ‘Introduction: Deleuze, Beckett, Même Combat’, Deleuze and Language (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 1-7 Locatelli, Carla, Unwording the World: Samuel Beckett’s Prose Works After the Nobel Prize (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1990) Lydon, Mary, ‘Beyond the Criterion of Genre: Samuel Beckett’s Ars Poetica’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 8 (1999) Poetry and Other Prose/Poésie et Autres Proses, Matthijs Engelberts (ed.) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999): 59-73 McCandless, David, ‘Beckett and Tillich: Courage and Existence in Waiting for Godot’, in Lance St. John Butler and Robin J. Davis (eds.), Rethinking Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays (New

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York: St. Martin’s P, 1990) McCormack, W.J., ‘Infancy and History: Beckett, Bowen and Critical Theory’, From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History, expanded and revised edition (Cork: Cork UP, 1994), 375-433 Miller, Tyrus, ‘Beckett’s Political Technology: Expression, Confession and Torture in the Later Drama’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 9 (2000), Beckett and Religion, Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics, Beckett et la religion, Beckett/L’Esthétique/La politique, Marius Buning, Matthijs Engelberts & Onno Kosters (eds.) (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2000): 255-78 Milne, Drew, ‘The Beautiful Soul: From Hegel to Beckett’ Diacritics 32.1, Spring (2002): 63-82 Mori, Naoya, ‘Leibniz in Beckett: Windowlessness’, Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences of Okayama U. 2 (1996): 1-22 —— ‘Beckett’s Windows and the Windowless Self’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 14 (2004), After Beckett/D’après Beckett, Anthony Uhlmann, Sjef Houppermans and Bruno Clément (eds.), (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004): 357-370 Murphy P.J., ‘Beckett and the Philosophers’, in John Pilling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Beckett (London: Cambridge UP, 1994), 222-239 —— Reconstructing Beckett: Language for Being in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Toronto: Toronto UP, 1990) Murphy, Timothy S., ‘Only Intensities Subsist: Samuel Beckett’s Nowhow On’, in Ian Buchanan and John Marks (eds.), Deleuze and Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000), 229-250 Oppenheim, Lois, The Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000) Perloff, Marjorie, ‘“The Space of a Door”: Beckett and the Poetry of Absence’, in The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981). —— ‘Between the Shingle and the Dune’, Parnassus: Poetry in Review 6.2 (1978): 170-84 —— ‘Between Verse and Prose: Beckett and the New Poetry’, in S. E. Gontarski (ed.), On Beckett: Essays and Criticism (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 191-206 Pilling, John, ‘Beckett’s Poetry’, Samuel Beckett (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), 159-83

Works Cited

281

—— Beckett Before Godot (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998) —— ‘Beckett and “The itch to make”: The Early Poems in English’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 8 (1999), Poetry and Other Prose/Poésie et autres proses, Matthijs Engelberts (ed.) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999): 15-25 —— ‘Beckett and Mauthner Revisited’, in S.E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann (eds.), Beckett after Beckett (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2006), 158-166 Pilling, John (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994) —— (ed.), Beckett’s Dream Notebook (Reading: Beckett International Foundation, 1999) Power, Nina and Alberto Toscano, “Think, pig!”: An Introduction to Badiou’s Beckett’, in Alain Badiou, On Beckett, edited and translated by Nina Power and Alberto Toscano, Postface by Andrew Gibson (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003), xi-xxxiv Rabaté, Dominique, ‘Continuer—Beckett’, in Charles Ramond (ed.), Alain Badiou: Penser le multiple (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2002), 407420 Rabaté, Jean-Michel, ‘Quelques figures de la première (et dernière) anthropomorphi de Beckett’, Beckett avant Beckett (Paris: PENS, 1984) —— ‘Beckett and the Ghosts of Departed Quantities’, and ‘Shades of the Color Gray’, The Ghosts of Modernity (Gainesville: U of Florida P: 1996), 148-87, 171-187 Rabinovitz, Rubin, ‘Watt and the Philosophers’, The Development of Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P: 1984), 124-150 Renton, Andrew, ‘Worstward Ho and the End of Representation’, in John Pilling and Mary Bryden (eds.), The Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives (Bristol: Longman, 1992), 99-135 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, ‘Samuel Beckett or Presence on Stage’, in Snapshots and Towards a New Novel, trans. Barbara Wright (London: Calder & Boyars, 1965), 119-130 Roig, Michel, ‘Malone meurt: Perspectives baroques’, Revue d'Étude du Roman du XXème Siècle 4, December (1987): 101-7 Schwab, Gabriele, ‘Cosmographical Meditations on the In/Human: Beckett’s The Lost Ones and Lyotard’s “Scapeland”’, Parallax 6:4 (2000): 58-75

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Shields, Paul, ‘Beckett’s Victors: Quests without Qualities’, PhD thesis, Florida State University, 2005 Smith, Russell, ‘“Someone” (The Other Beckett)’, Daniela Caselli, Steven Connor and Laura Salisbury (eds.), Other Becketts (Tallahassee, Fla., Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2002), 1-16 —— ‘Beckett’s Endlessness: Rewriting Modernity and the Postmodern Sublime’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 14 (2004), After Beckett/D’après Beckett, Anthony Uhlmann, Sjef Houppermans and Bruno Clément (eds.) (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004): 405-420 Stewart, Bruce (ed.), Beckett and Beyond (Gerrard’s Cross: Colin Smythe, 1999) Toscano, Alberto, see Power Trezise, Thomas, Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990) Uhlmann, Anthony, Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) —— ‘Image and Intuition in Beckett's Film’, SubStance 104, 33.2 (2004): 90-106 —— ‘“A fragment of a vitagraph”: Hiding and Revealing in Beckett, Geulincx, and Descartes’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 14 (2004), After Beckett/D’après Beckett, Anthony Uhlmann, Sjef Houppermans and Bruno Clément (eds.) (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004): 341-356 Van Hulle, Dirk, ‘“(Hiatus in Ms.)”: Watt and the Textual Genesis of Stirrings Still’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 14 (2004), After Beckett/D’après Beckett, Anthony Uhlmann, Sjef Houppermans and Bruno Clément (eds.) (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004): 483-494 Watson David, Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett's Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1991) Weber-Caflisch, Antoinette, Chacun son dépeupleur: Sur Samuel Beckett (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1994) Weller, Shane, ‘The Word Folly: Samuel Beckett’s “Comment dire” (“What is the word”)’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5.1 (2000): 165-80 —— Beckett, Literature and the Politics of Alterity (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

Works Cited

283

Wolosky, Shira, ‘Samuel Beckett’s Figural Evasions’, in Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (eds.), Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996), 165-186

Works by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Deleuze & Guattari Gilles Deleuze ‘Boulez, Proust and Time: “Occupying without counting”’, trans. Timothy Murphy, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 3.2 (1998): 69-74 (1998a) Cinema I: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Haberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1986). Originally published as Cinéma 1. L’Image-mouvement (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983) Cinema II. The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone Press, 1989). Originally published as Cinéma 2. L’Image-temps (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1985) Critique et clinique (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1993) Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, David Lapoujade (ed.), trans. Michael Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004) Deux Régimes de fous, textes et entretiens 1975-1995, édition préparée par David Lapoujade (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2003) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994) Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968) Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. and introduction Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia UP, 1991). Originally published as Empirisme et subjectivité: Essai sur la Nature Humaine selon Hume (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953) ‘L’Epuisé’, in Samuel Beckett, Quad (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1992), 57-106 Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998) ‘The Exhausted’, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel Smith and Michael Greco (London: Verso, 1998)

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Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books 1992) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Athlone Press, 1993) ‘Foreword’, Éric Alliez, Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996) Foucault (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1986) Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London & New York: Continuum, 2002). Originally published as Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions de la différence, 1981) ‘Having an Idea in Cinema’, trans. Marie Therèse Guirgis, in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000), 365-73 ‘The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Aesthetics’, trans. Daniel W. Smith, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5.3 (2000): 59-70 Interview conducted by François Ewald and Raymond Bellour in Magazine littéraire 257 (Sept. 1988) Kant’s Critical Philosophy (London: Athlone Press, 1984). Includes Deleuze’s Introduction to the English Edition [French version published in Philosophie 9 (1986) and reprinted in Critique et clinique]. Originally published as La Philosophie critique de Kant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963) Le Pli. Leibniz et le baroque (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1988) The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles J. Stivale (London: Athlone Press, 1990) Logique du sens (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969) Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia UP, 1995). Originally published as Pourparlers (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991) Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983). Originally published as Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962) Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (London: Athlone Press, 2000) Proust et les signes, expanded edition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de

Works Cited

285

France, 1986, 1986a) Spinoza, philosophie pratique, new edition (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1981) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988) With Félix Guattari L’Anti-Œdipe (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972) Anti-Oedipus, trans. Helen R. Lane, Robert Hurley and Mark Seem (London: Athlone Press, 1984) Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1975) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1986) Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980) Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988) What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (London: Verso, 1994) Félix Guattari ‘L’an 01 des machines abstraites’, transcript and translation of a seminar at Columbia University organised by Sylvère Lotringer, 1973, in Chimères 23, été (1994): 33-46 Chaosmosis: An Eco-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Sydney: Power Publications, 1995). Originally published as Chaosmose (Paris: Galilée, 1992) The Guattari Reader, Gary Genosko (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) ‘On Machines’, trans. Vivian Constantinopoulos, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts no. 6, Complexity: Architecture/Art/Philosophy (London: Academy Editions, 1995), 8-12 Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984)

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Deleuze in non-print media Seminar, 1978. Melissa McMahon’s translation which is available online at http://www.imaginet.fr/deleuze L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze (Éditions Montparnasse, 1996)

Works on Deleuze and Deleuze & Guattari Abrioux, Yves, ‘Diagramme, histoire, devenir. Ou, quand Deleuze fait de l’histoire de l’art’, Théorie, Littérature, enseignment 22 (2004), Penser par le diagramme de Gilles Deleuze à Gilles Châtelet, Noëlle Batt (ed.): 165-76 Agamben, Giorgio, ‘Absolute Immanence’, in Jean Khalfa (ed.), An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 151-169 Alliez, Éric, Deleuze: Philosophie virtuelle (Le Plessis-Robinson: Synthélabo, 1996). Translated as ‘Deleuze’s Virtual Philosophy’, an appendix to The Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy?, trans. Eliot Ross Albert and Alberto Toscano (New York and London: Continuum, 2004), 85-116 —— ‘Ontology and Logography: The Pharmacy, Plato and the Simulacrum’, trans. Robert Rose and Paul Patton, in Paul Patton and John Protevi (eds.), Between Deleuze and Derrida (New York and London: Continuum, 2003), 84-97 [originally published in French in Barbara Cassin (ed.), Nos Grecs et leurs modernes: Les stratégies contemporaines d’appropriation de l’antiquité (Paris: Seuil, 1992) —— ‘On the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction to Matter’, in The Signature of the World: What is Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy?, trans. Eliot Ross Albert and Alberto Toscano (New York and London: Continuum, 2004), 105-116 Ansell Pearson, Keith, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). —— Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) —— ‘Pure Reserve: Deleuze, Philosophy and Immanence’, in Mary Bryden (ed.), Deleuze and Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 141-55

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—— ‘The Simple Virtual: A Renewed Thinking of the One’, Chapter 4 of Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 97-114 Antonioli, Manola, Deleuze et l’histoire de la philosophie (Paris: Kimé, 1999) —— ‘Géophilosophie’, Concepts, hors série Gilles Deleuze, January (2002): 9-31 —— Géophilosophie de Deleuze et Guattari (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003) Badiou, Alain, ‘Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque’, in Boundas and Olkowski (eds.), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 51-69 —— Deleuze: “La clameur de l’être” (Paris: Hachette, 1995) —— ‘L’ontologie vitaliste de Gilles Deleuze’, Court traité d’ontologie transitoire (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 61-72 Baross, Zsuzsa, ‘Deleuze and Derrida, by way of Blanchot: an interview’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5:2 (2000): 17-40 Batt, Noëlle, ‘L’Expérience diagrammatique: un nouveau régime de pensée’, in Théorie, Littérature, enseignment 22 (2004), Penser par le diagramme de Gilles Deleuze à Gilles Châtelet, Noëlle Batt (ed.): 5-28 Baugh, Bruce, ‘How Deleuze can help us make Literature work’, in Ian Buchanan and John Marks (eds.), Deleuze and Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000), 34-56 Beddoes, Diane, ‘Deleuze, Kant and Indifference’, in Keith Ansell Pearson (ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 25-43 Bergen, Véronique, ‘A propos de la formule de Badiou, “Deleuze un platonicien involuntaire”’, Annales de l’institut de philosophie de sciences morales (Université libre de Bruxelles), Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Verstraeten and Isabelle Stengers (eds.) (Paris: Vrin, 1998), 19-31 —— Bergen, Véronique, ‘Pensée et Être chez Deleuze et Badiou (Badiou lecteur de Deleuze)’, in Charles Ramond (ed.), Alain Badiou: Penser le multiple (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2002), 437-455 Bident, Christophe, Reconnaissances: Antelm, Blanchot, Deleuze (Paris: Calmann Levy, 2003) Birman, Joel, ‘Les signes et leurs excés: La clinique chez Deleuze’, in

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Eric Alliez (ed.), Gilles Deleuze. Une vie philosophique (Le Plessis-Robinson: Institut Synthélabo, 1998), 477-494 De Bloois, Joost, Sjef Houppermans and Frans Willem Korsten (eds.), Discern(e)ments: Deleuzian Aesthetics/Esthétiques deleuzi-ennes (Amsterdam & New York: Editions Rodopi, 2004) Bogue, Ronald, ‘The Grand Proliferation: Regimes of Signs and Abstract Machines in A Thousand Plateaus’, in Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge, 1989), 124-159 —— ‘Rhizomusicosmology’, in Substance XX: 3.66 (Winter 1991): 85-101 —— ‘Gilles Deleuze: The Aesthetics of Force’, in Paul Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 257-69 —— Deleuze on Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2003) Boundas, Constantin V., ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. and introduction Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia UP, 1991), 1-19 —— ‘The Foreclosure of the Other: From Sartre to Deleuze’, The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 24.1 (Jan. 1993): 32-43 —— ‘Deleuze: Serialisation and Subject-Formation’, in Boundas and Olkowski (eds.), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 99-116 —— ‘Deleuze-Bergson: an Ontology of the Virtual’, in Paul Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 81106 —— ‘On Tendencies and Signs: major and minor deconstruction’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanties 5.2 (2000), special issue on Rhizomatics, Genealogy, Deconstruction, Constantin Boundas (ed.): 163-76 Boundas, Constantin V. and Dorothea Olkowski, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Boundas and Olkowski (eds.), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 1-22 Bourassa, Alan, ‘Literature, Language and the Non-human’, in Brian Massumi (ed.), A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 60-76

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Bourlez, Fabrice, ‘Deleuze/Merleau-Ponty: proposition pour une rencontre a-parallèle’, in Concepts January (2002): 231-257 Bryden, Mary, ‘Deleuze and Anglo-American Literature: Water, Whales and Melville’, in Jean Khalfa (ed.), An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (New York and London: Continuum, 2003), 105-13 Buydens, Mireille, Sahara. L'esthétique de Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Vrin, 1990) Chabot, Pascal, ‘Au seuil du virtuel’, Annales de l’institut de philosophie de sciences morales (Université libre de Bruxelles), Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Verstraeten and Isabelle Stengers (eds.) (Paris: Vrin, 1998), 31-44 Colebrook, Claire, ‘Inhuman Irony: The Event of the Postmodern’, in Ian Buchanan and John Marks (eds.), Deleuze and Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000), 100-34 —— ‘The Sense of Space…’. Postmodern Culture 15.1 (2004) Colombat, André Pierre, ‘Deleuze and the Three Powers of Literature and Philosophy: To Demystify, to Experiment, to Create’, South Atlantic Quarterly 96.3 (1997): 579-97 —— ‘Deleuze and Signs’, in Ian Buchanan and John Marks (eds.), Deleuze and Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000), 14-33 Conley, Tom, ‘From Multiplicities to Folds’, South Atlantic Quarterly 96. 3 (1997): 629-646 Crawford, T. Hugh, ‘The Paterson Plateau’, in Ian Buchanan and John Marks (eds.), Deleuze and Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000), 57-79 Davies, Oliver, ‘Thinking Difference: a Comparative Study of Gilles Deleuze, Plotinus and Meister Eckhart’, in Mary Bryden (ed.), Deleuze and Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 76-86 De Landa, Manuel, ‘Immanence and Transcendence in the Genesis of Form’, A Deleuzean Century, The South Atlantic Quarterly 96.3 (1997): 499-514 —— ‘Deleuze, Diagrams, and the Open-Ended Becoming’, in Elizabeth Grosz (ed.), Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999) —— Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (New York and London: Continuum, 2002)

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Martin, Jean-Clet, Variations: La philosophie de Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Éditions Payot et Rivages, 1993) —— ‘The Eye of the Outside’, trans. Tom Gibson and Anthony Uhlmann, in Paul Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 18-28 —— ‘Deleuze’s Philosophy of the Concrete’, trans. Alex Martin, South Atlantic Quarterly 96.3 (1997): 621-8 Massumi, Brian, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1992) —— ‘Deleuze, Guattari and the Philosophy of Expression: Involutionary Afterword’, Deleuze, Guattari and the Philosophy of Expression, special number of the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 24.3 (1997): 745-787 —— ‘Introduction: Like a Thought’, in Massumi (ed.), A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), xiii-xxxix Mengue, Philippe, Gilles Deleuze ou le système du multiple (Paris: Vrin, 1994) —— ‘Lignes de fuite et devenirs dans la conception deleuzienne de la littérature’, in Concepts, hors série Gilles Deleuze, January (2002): 33-93 —— ‘Proust/Deleuze: Mnemosyne, Déese ou usine?’, unpublished paper to the conference Beckett’s Proust/Deleuze’s Proust, University of Cardiff, March 10-11, 2006 Ménil, Alain, ‘The Time(s) of the Cinema’, in Jean Khalfa (ed.), An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 85-104 Mullarkey, John, Review of Constantin Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (eds.), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Representation, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 4.1 (1996): 166-9 —— ‘Deleuze and Materialism: One or Several Matters’, in South Atlantic Quarterly 96. 3 (1997): 439-463 Murphy, Timothy S., ‘The Eternal Return of “The seim anew”: Joyce’s Vico and Deleuze’s Nietzsche’, James Joyce Quarterly 35.4 (1998): 715-34 Nancy, Jean-Luc, ‘The Deleuzian Fold of Thought’, in Paul Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 107-

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Index Abbott, H. Porter, 120n, 163, 166, 172n, 174n, 175, 210 abstract machine, 13-16, 21, 32, 61-7, 61n, 73, 75, 75n, 81, 121, 124, 228, 269; as ‘between’, 95; body without organs and, 65, 120; criticism as, 63, 197, 198; desiring machine as, 120; and faciality, 91-3, 95-7; as germinal, 243; and haecceity, 258; literature as, 126, 191, 197, 198, 263; contrasted with technology as such, 117, 117n; and schizophrenia, 63-4; vs. stellar separation (Badiou), 200; vs. via negativa, 55. See also machinic; phylum abstraction: and apotropism, 55; in architecture, 255-6; in art, 259; and construction, 264; in literature, 51, 52, 70, 97, 116; machinic, 263; and mixing, 259; and negative theology, 57; in painting, 56, 57; in philosophy, 50, 56-7, 263; and possible worlds, 61. See also kenosis Acheson, James, 130 Ackerley, C.J., 79n, 82-3, 82n, 85, 99n, 132 Adorno, Theodor, 48n aesthetics, 15, 29n, 46n, 72, 83, 90, 132n, 226-7, 226n, 230, 239, 261, 264. See also inaesthetics, Handbook of Inaesthetics affect(s): and becoming of characters; contrasted with affections, 31, 44; and force, 98; and immanent plane of writing, 74; and language, 196; in literature, 39n; and machinic, 64, 64n; and percept, 44; and philosophical concept, 27, 263; psychoanalysis unable to understand, 44; in Spinoza, 80-1, 86, 101, 129, 195

Agamben, Giorgio, 112n, 194 Alliez, Éric, 15, 15n, 17, 28n, 68, 69n, 75n, 80n, 106-8, 110, 261n alterity: and encounter with Other, 26, 193; and entry into perception, 90; and interface, 119; politics of, 119n, 198; and shadow hospitality, 34. See also structure-other Amiran, Eyal, 20, 109, 211, 248n anamorphosis, 97, 99, 100, 100n, 101 anorganic, 16, 59. See also body without organs Ansell Pearson, Keith, 65, 103n, 117n, 119n, 164, 176, 197n, 200, 230, 260, 261 Antonioli, Manola, 53n, 97n any-space-whatever, and dissipation, 237, 244 a-parallel evolution: of literature and philosophy, 21, 34, 270; in encounter of literature and criticism, 34 apotropism, 55. See also abstraction; face Aristotle, 63n, 113, 134 art: abstract machine and, 13-4; abstraction and, 56; Badiou’s concept of, 71-2; baroque, 136; Beckett on, 132n, 265n, 270-1; and philosophy, 26, 27-8, 34, 36, 35, 40, 68. See also work of art Artaud, Antonin, 16, 28, 106, 114, 151, 159-60, 160n assemblage: becoming other as affect for, 64n; character and, 66; as collective, 64; connection and, 62-3, 93, 186; desiring machine as, 65; and desiring machine, 63; and enunciation, 32, 62, 63; and experimentation, 13; machinic, 64n; 117, 119-20, 126; monadic, 151; and narration, 126; of philosophy and literature, 75; as

310


place-marker for subject, 258; and politics, 13n; and strata, 124; and thresholds, 255-6 atopia, 34, 258, 260, 265; atopian threshold, 21-3, 60, 248, 255, 255, 257-8, 265 Bachelard, Gaston, 33, 115, 242 Badiou, Alain, 14n, 17-18, 18n, 23, 32, 35n, 49n, 55, 56n, 67-73, 68n, 69n, 70n, 71n, 72n, 77, 165, 192200, 194n, 195n, 197n, 199n, 200n, 201, 205, 205n, 219-23, 222n Baltrusaïtis, Jurgis, 99, 100 Barker, Stephen, 238n, 248n, 254n, 255n Baross, Zsuzsa, 209 Barthes, Roland, 49, 64, 91n Bataille, Georges, 17, 112, 248n Baudrillard, Jean, 167 Baugh, Bruce, 30n, 66, 266 Beckett, Samuel: and the arts, 56, 57n; correspondence with MacGreevy, 47n, 56, 265n; and genre, 60, 263; and philosophy, 17-23, 37, 50, 75, 78, 79, 129-31, 132-3, 140, 263-6; and philosophy after Deleuze (and Guattari), 18, 21, 26, 57n, 75, 77, 83, 131; resistance to philosophical interpretation of, 50, 50n, 226n; Works: Act Without Words II, 212; ‘…but the clouds…’, 60; Comment c’est, 33, 113, 163, 166; Company, 118n, 141, 145, 220, 222n, 262; ‘Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce’, 100, 115; Le Dépeupleur, 102, 105, 110, 222, 252; Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 26, 88, 89n, 152, 164, 222, 237n, 241; Film, 39, 57, 89, 133, 184; ‘German Letter of 1937’, 164, 215, 240; Ghost Trio, 60; Happy Days, 240; How It Is, 22, 60, 107, 130, 163-7, 169-72, 172n, 174-6, 174n,

184-7, 185n, 188n, 189, 191-7, 200, 220n, 228, 230, 234, 236n, 245; Ill Seen Ill Said, 222, 245; ‘je suis ce cours de sable’, 23, 223, 229, 236-41, 236n, 237n, 238n; 248-50, 252-5, 257, 261, 262, 266n; Krapp’s Last Tape, 59, 120, 141, 166, 167, 168, 194; Lessness, 245; The Lost Ones, 22, 57, 78, 101-2, 105, 109-26, 130, 141, 142, 143, 170, 211, 222, 234, 242, 245; Malone Dies, 22, 58, 140-8, 149, 156, 222, 245, 270; Molloy, 51, 121, 129, 165, 182, 236, 245, 248n, 249, 268; More Pricks than Kicks, 242n; Murphy, 21, 26, 35, 77-101, 93n, 109, 111, 116, 120, 122, 129, 131, 169, 197, 222, 260, 270; Nachte und Träume, 60; Not I, 257n; ‘La peinture des van Velde’, 271; Proust, 102, 283, ‘Proust in Pieces’, 50, 56n, 58, 154; Quad, 57, 60; ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, 237n; Stirrings Still, 242, 243n; Texts for Nothing, 171, 172n, 180, 238, 257; ‘Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit’, 57, 146, 153, 181n, 262; The Unnamable, 23, 102, 148-162, 171, 240; Waiting for Godot, 48, 191; Watt, 36, 50n, 58, 85n, 121, 130, 132, 141, 171, 209, 227n, 245, 256, 257, 265; Worstward Ho, 23, 49, 51, 52, 545, 57, 66, 68, 130, 170, 200, 201, 202, 207-23, 219n, 220n, 246-7 becoming: and abstract machine, 63, 21; animal, 97n; and assemblage, 64n; and Being in its virtuality, 174, 255n; bloc of, 32; encounter with other discipline as producing, 34, 36n; and faciality, 90; and literature, 44-6; and loss of co-ordinates, 248; -minor of philosophy, 264; ontology of, 13; and other Deleuzoguattarian concepts, 117; of philosophy,

Index 15n; and the One, 104; and threshold, 124, 248, 250, 255-8; and virtual, 164; -woman, 61n; of work of Beckett, 15 Beddoes, Diane, 252n Begam, Richard, 17, 60, 83, 85, 257n Being, 13-14, 39n, 53n, 58, 60, 77, 82, 86, 90, 102-5, 107, 110, 112, 115, 117, 117n, 120, 122-4, 12931, 131n, 133-4, 133n, 137, 144, 149-50, 153, 155-6, 159, 161, 163, 165-6, 166n, 168n, 171n, 176, 186n, 189, 191, 196n, 198, 201-3, 202n, 205n, 206, 209, 211, 216-8, 220-3, 230, 233, 246, 255n; beings, 77, 86, 103, 120, 123, 131n, 149-50, 175, 182, 195, 197, 203, 233, 246n, 255n; Dasein (Heidegger), 130, 131n, 161, 166n, 200n, 209, 211n, 213, 218, 242, 242n, 247 Belaval, Yvon, 139, 163, 270 Benjamin, Andrew, 35, 45n, 56, 259 Bennington, Geoffrey, 36n, 176 Bergen, Véronique, 68n, 202n Bergson, Henri, 27, 59, 60, 79n, 103n, 164, 197n, 200 Berkeley, George, 20, 56, 132, 181n, Bernold, André, 19n, 48n Bersani, Leo, 130n, 165n, 218n, 219n, 220n Bident, Christophe, 74n Blanchot, Maurice, 17, 33-5, 33n, 34n, 52, 57, 70, 74n, 131n, 133, 133n, 158, 158n, 161, 196n, 202n, 204n, 217, 239n, 243, 251n, 255, 255n ; on Beckett, 33; and phenomenology, 204 body without organs (BwO), organless body, 15n, 16, 39, 42-3, 65, 106, 114, 120, 152, 153, 157, 162, 177, 190. See also molecularity Bogue, Ronald, 38, 40n, 83, 180n, 258, 263, 267 Boulez, Pierre, 177 Boulter, Jonathan, 131n, 166n, 221n

311 Boundas, Constantin, 165n, 202n Bourassa, Alan, 197 Bousseyroux, Michel, 41n Brater, Enoch, 60, 105n, 220n Brée, Germaine, 130 Bryden, Mary, 17, 19n, 35, 39n, 53, 61, 61n, 85n, 94n, 151n, 153, 194n, 197n, 202n, 208n Butler, Lance St. John, 50n, 55n, 85n, 130, 131n Butler, Samuel, 66 Buydens, Mireille, 15-16, 46n, 176 Cache, Bernard, 60, 231n, 257, 258 Casanova, Pascale, 23, 51-5, 56n, 219, 243; on Beckett and abstraction, 51-5 chaos, 21, 27, 148, 257 character: as ‘between’, 252 Christ, 85, 86, 90, 94, 95, 98, 104 Clément, Bruno, 17, 17n, 48, 62n, 209n Clucas, Stephen, 200n Coe, Richard, 102n, 113 collective assemblage of enunciation, 32, 62 Colombat, André Pierre, 22n, 30n, 31, 53n, 216n conceptual persona (personnage conceptuel), 28, 90, 176, 180-2, 181n, 182n, 192n; couple as, 182 Conley, Tom, 27n, 39n, 169n, 225-6 Connor, Steven, 17, 49, 60, 102n, 118, 118n, 123, 209, 213n, 216 construction-souffle (Martin), 23, 30 constructivism: as building from the space between, 258 co-ordinates, loss of, 45, 60, 115n, 124, 238, 256-7, 258, 260 counter-actualisation (contreeffectuation), 14, 89, 115n, 168, 187, 230 Critchley, Simon, 50, 50n, 226n criticism, 20n, 37, 40, 47-52, 71n, 75, 77, 109, 129, 163, 194, 196-7, 200, 202n, 215, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271; Beckett and aporia of,

312

Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze & Guattari 48, 49n; Blanchot on, 34; in Critique et clinique (Deleuze), 44; literary, 33-4, 40, 48, 49, 75, 75n, 221; and solace of good form, 75n, 78; and subjectivity of critic, 48, 49, 49n, 51. See also interpretation, under language

Dante Alighieri, 105n, 115, 143, 165 De Landa, Manuel, 63 Deleuze, Gilles, works: L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, 37, 37n, 39n; Cinéma I, 34, 39, 45n, 270; Cinéma II, 34, 270; Critique et clinique (Essays Critical and Clinical), 37-40, 37n, 38n, 44, 46, 46n, 51, 58, 225n, 268; Desert Islands, 25, 28n, 31, 43n, 47, 53, 99n, 143n, 178n; Dialogues, 13n, 33, 39, 39n, 58n, 64n; Différence et répétition (Difference and Repetition), 30, 36, 59n, 77, 95, 165n, 168n, 182n, 226n, 237n, 265-6; ‘L’Épuisé’ (‘The Exhausted’), 38, 57, 58, 164, 166, 180, 214n, 237, 243-4; Expressionism in Philosophy, 131; Foucault, 206, 209, 213, 214; Francis Bacon, 27, 97, 144n, 192n; Kant’s Critical Philosophy, 229; ‘Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Critical Philosophy’, 229; Logique du sens (The Logic of Sense), 7, 14, 17, 29, 40, 44, 74, 205, 225, 256, 266; Nietzsche and Philosophy, 79, 114, 228, 260; Pourparlers (Negotiations), 37, 58, 186n, 215; Le Pli (The Fold), 22, 27, 117, 133n, 135n 141, 149n, 154, 169, 169n, 190, 207, 251, 255, 270; Proust et les signes (Proust and Signs), 39, 41, 42, 175, 176, 265; Seminar on Kant, 226n, 231, 232, 239, 263, 264; Spinoza: Philosophie pratique (Spinoza: Practical

Philosophy), 79, 81, 82, 179, 180, 191 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, works: L'Anti-Œdipe (AntiOedipus), 15, 16n, 31, 36, 37, 39, 42-3, 59, 62, 64-6, 66-7, 91, 114, 120-1, 151-2, 162, 177, 178, 194, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271; Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure (Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature), 32-3, 40-1, 41n, 42-3, 42n, 44, 46n; Mille Plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus), 13, 14, 21, 28, 32, 61-2, 63-4, 65-6, 73, 75, 80, 87, 89, 92-4, 97, 114, 121, 121n, 122, 122n, 151, 152, 196, 252n, 253n, 259, 264n, 266, 267, 270, 271; Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (What is Philosophy?), 22, 26-8, 32, 38, 44, 63, 86, 90, 124, 141, 163, 168, 177-82, 182n, 199, 264n, 268, 268n, 269 Descartes, René, 20, 79, 82, 122, 1324, 133n, 136, 165, 181n, 206, 228, 233, 257 Derrida, Jacques, 18n, 58, 68, 70, 116, 117n, 175n, 203-4, 204n, 246n, 246, 248n; on phenomenology, 203-4, 205; and supplement, 138 deterritorialization, 32-3, 91, 93, 97n, 119, 252n, 266, 267, 269, 271 diagrammatic, the, 92, 93, 177 disjunction, 13, 36, 42, 121, 192, 213, 249, 268 disjunctive synthesis, 170, 170n,, 184n; in ‘athleticism’ of ‘halfphilosopher’, 28 dislocation, 215, 239, 243, 266, 268 dissipative structure, 129 Doubrovsky, Serge, 42n, 43n dualism, 82, 125, 135, 244. See also Descartes Duffy, Brian, 165-6, 175, 175n Dumoncel, Jean-Claude, 39n During, Simon, 208

Index Dutoit, Ulysse, see Bersani emergence, 14, 31, 87, 136, 158, 186, 197, 230, 254n encounter: Badiou and, 193-4; of Beckett and Deleuze-Guattari, 20; as disjunctive, 86, 257; and failure of recognition, 229-31, 239n, 264; as forcing sensation, 168n, 239n; and friend/rival in Plato, 181; with landscape in Beckett, 227, 248; of literature and philosophy, 33-6, 50, 68, 77, 263-4, 270; loss of coordinates in, 257; phenomenology and, 203, 203n, 229; with possible world of an author, 45-6; and proliferation of series, 59; and shadow hospitality, 226; violence of in Plato, 175-6; violence of in Proust, 175n; Watt and narrator as metaphor for, 51n énoncés, 173, 206-7 ethology, 21, 78, 93n, 95-6, 197 event, the (Badiou), 35n, 141n, 194n, 195, 198, 199n, 200 face, the, 77, 85, 87-100, 89n, 91n, 93n, 97n, 116, 142, 173, 177, 183, 191, 209, 237; de-facialisation, 95, 97; evasion of figuration and, 101; and patriarchy, 92; physiognomy, 91; and form, 91; as Platonic Form, 93, 116; facialisation of other body parts, 94, 94n. See also faciality faciality (visagéité), 21, 77-8, 87, 8993, 95-7, 116; facialised, 93-5 faculties, the, 42, 228-30, 233, 233n, 234, 237n, 239, 250, 260 Feher, Michel, 106-8, 110. See also Alliez fold, the: in Foucault, 204-6; in Heidegger, 205; in MerleauPonty, 205 force(s): as agitating in archive, 214; amorphic, 66; anonymous, 191;

313 affect and sensation as, 196-7; body as composition of, 84-5, 88; as collection of held in bloc, 32; as deforming, 98, 250; vs. form, 61, 88; literature as generative of, 36, 36n, 75n; and material-force relation, 14; and outside (Foucault), 206; reactive human and, 253n; solace of good form and, 78, 218; in Spinoza, 80; as stalling phenomenological flesh, 218; subject and, 83; as traversing body, 250; zone of between literature and philosophy, 30 form: 87-91; abeyance from, 53, 55, 75n, 100; anamorphosis and, 98, 101; art-, 40; Beckett on, 53n, 57n; and conformity in philosophy, 228; of content vs. form of expression, 80; content, of expression, 211n; and faciality, 77; vs. fluidity of life, 119n; vs. flux, 96; vs. force, 61, 80, 84, 88, 89, 95; Greek word for, 79, 99, 99n; as inferred, 74; and involution, 73; and involution vs. evolution, 196, 200; and Kantian concept of ‘drusiness’, 254n; in Leibniz, 111n; literary, 78; and loss of co-ordinates, 258; matter and, 63n, 232n; moral and theological, 233; of novel, 99; operation of machinic phylum on, 78; Platonic, 176, 188; and privileging of sight in phenomenology, 203; Spinoza on, 101; subject as, 271n; and topology, 247n; and transcendence in writing, 74, 75n; as withdrawn from matter, 61; work’s interrogation of its own, 244 Foucault, Michel, 14-15, 23, 45, 83, 96n, 135n, 149n, 173, 182n, 20410, 205n, 207n, 209n, 213-17, 215n, 225n, 264-5, 268

314


Fried, Michael, 259 Freud, Sigmund, 64, 89, 133n, 146n, 242 Garner, B. Stanton Jr., 202n, 219 Gatens, Moira, 34n, 194n Gibson, Andrew, 17, 17n, 68n, 70, 220n Gil, José, 267 Godard, Jean-Luc, 73, 74, 244, 244n Goetz, Benoît, 216n, 247n, 258, 261n Greenberg, Clement, 259 Grossman, Evelyne, 56n, 95n, 214 Guattari, Félix, Chaosmosis (Chaosmose), 13, 45n, 119, 124, 250, 255-6; and crossing ontological threshold; and work at La Borde, 45n, 46; ‘Concrete Machines’, 90-1, 92, 92n; ‘On Machines’, 45n, 119n; ‘Subjectless Action’, 91-2 Geulincx, Arnold, 20, 83, 132 half-philosopher, literary author as, 28, 81, 133, 220 haecceity, 95, 258 Hallward, Peter, 70, 197, 199n Handbook of Inaesthetics (Badiou), 68, 72 Heidegger, Martin, 23, 51, 55n, 68, 70, 85n, 116-17, 117n, 120, 120n, 130, 131n, 133n, 160, 166n, 168, 168n, 202-5, 202n, 203n, 209-10, 211n, 218-19, 223, 225n, 245-6, 242-3, 242n. See also Dasein hermeneutical reading of Beckett, 201 Hill, Leslie, 17, 50n, 94n, 99, 99n, 100, 100n, 220n humanities, in How It Is, 171, 174, 196 humanity, 33, 91, 116, 124, 154, 169, 174, 175, 185, 193, 195-6, 195n, 235-6, 265n Husserl, Edmund, 201, 201n, 202, 202n, 205, 210, 214, 218, 219, 229 hylomorphism, problem of, 66-7, 75,

169, 170, 232, 232n image, the, 34, 37, 60, 104, 161, 164, 220, 237, 243 image of thought, 22, 25, 28, 29, 35, 37, 53n, 73, 75, 166, 175, 177, 228, 234, 259-60, 265; dogmatic, 182n, 230, 259-60; and philosophy’s self-recognition, 177; and recognition, 229-30 inaesthetics, 72. See also Handbook of Inaesthetics incompossibility, 45, 185-6, 188, 191. See also possible worlds l’informe, 16, 73, 233, 254n. See also unformed matter inhuman, 88, 95, 161, 168, 195-6, 195n. See also humanities; humanity intensity, 16, 33, 45n, 63, 74, 84, 90, 95, 114n, 119, 122, 191, 230, 258; and work of Beckett, 33 involution, 73, 196, 197 Irigaray, Luce, 114, 198 Janvier, Ludovic, 164, 165, 186 Jarry, Alfred, 38, 104, 225 Jay, Martin, 71n, 204, 209 Joughin, Martin, 131 Joyce, James, 27, 47, 99, 100, 115, 120 judgement, 22, 166, 169, 176, 182, 230, 233-4, 261; aesthetic, 228, 239, 271n; of God, 22, 106, 114, 115, 187, 192 juridical and legislative frameworks in philosophy, 162, 230 Kafka, Franz, 28, 32, 40, 41n, 44, 62, 63, 225, 230, 233-4, 267 Kant, Immanuel, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 80n, 132n, 140, 162n, 165n, 168, 176, 178-9, 182, 184n, 188, 189, 192, 197, 217, 225-6, 226-7n, 231, 233-40, 237n, 239n, 241, 248n, 246-9, 249-250, 251, 252n, 254n, 255n, 262n, 264-5, 268, 270, 271n

Index Katz, Daniel, 17, 99 kenosis, kenotic, 61, 75, 78, 95n. See also abstraction Kepler, Johannes, 138 Klébaner, Daniel, 139 Klossowski, Pierre, 40n, 101, 110 Knowlson, James, 19, 19n, 26n, 79n, 227n, 265n Lacan, Jacques, 14, 100; on anamorphosis, 99, 100n; and Badiou, 195; and the baroque, 135 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 70 Laerke, Mogens, 138n Lambert, Gregg, 40, 264 Land, Nick, 113, 235, 248n, 246n language, 31, 45, 269; and a-syntactic limit, 58; minor, 32, 45; and outside, 58; ‘stammering’, 30, 31, 44, 45, 58, 58n, 65, 186n, 210, 211n, 259, 265; ‘stammering’ in philosophy pressurised by literature, 27, 30, 265. See also collective assemblage of enunciation; style Laruelle, François, 102, 205n larval, larval subject, larval creatures, 31, 73, 84n, 165, 169, 170, 174, 180, 184, 195; phylum and, 65; egg as arrested universe (Artaud), 161-2, 162n Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 26, 31-2, 35n, 41n, 44n, 71, 71n, 100n, 194n Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 16n, 19, 20, 20n, 22, 41, 42, 43, 59, 59n, 83, 83n, 96, 106, 110, 111n, 115, 122, 124, 129-43, 129n, 130n, 131n, 133n, 134n, 138n, 147-51, 151n, 153n, 154-61, 155n, 157n, 159n, 163, 166, 167, 168n, 169, 172, 178n, 180, 180n, 182, 185, 185n, 186, 190-1, 190n, 192n, 206, 213, 214, 226, 234, 249, 251, 252, 256, 270; Deleuze on, 138-9; Descartes and, 133-4, 136;

315 Spinoza and, 131-2. See also monad Levinas, Emmanuel, 69 light, in Western philosophical tradition, 204, 217 Literature: and interpretation, 36, 41, 44, 47, 48, 50, 63, 67, 71, 75, 115, 118, 120, 126, 221, 222; minor, 46n; as mute, 48; and philosophy, 26, 27, 28, 30, 37, 38, 50, 53, 54, 68, 69-72, 77, 220, 226, 267-71; psychoanalytic approach to, 41n, 43, 44, 93, 194, 267, 268; schizophrenia and, 31n; and symptomatology, 42, 45, 45n, 47, 48n; and transcendence, 35, 36, 74; and writing as producing the indiscernible, 46 Locatelli, Carla, 17, 52n, 201, 213, 216 love, Badiou’s concept of, 42, 85, 104, 106, 135, 190, 194, 195, 197, 200 Lydon, Mary, 236n Lyotard, Jean-François, 30, 71, 72, 112, 113, 116, 117, 134, 172, 187, 191, 239n, 266n. See also ontological axe Macherey, Pierre, 26n, 54n, 55, 216n machinic, and assemblage, 62, 63, 119, 126, 255; as break with structuralist aporia, 17; and constructivism, 264; and desire, 65, 259; as diagrammatic, 93; épuisement and, 61; literary character as, 66; and machine agency of utterance, 92; nature as, 22; non allegorical nature of in Beckett, 120-1; as ontologically contingent, 16; and phylum in Beckett, 122, 124, 126; in Proust (Deleuze), 39n, 42; schizoanalysis as, 64; vs. technically machinic (mechanistic), 62, 64, 78, 117, 117n, 200, 120n; as transversal, 45; vitalism and, 119n

316


machine, 14, 15, 195, 267. See also abstract machine; phylum Mallarmé, Stéphane, 28, 31, 68, 71, 71n, 194n, 198n, 221-2, 248n Martin, Jean-Clet, 23, 30, 236n Massumi, Brian, 92, 94, 98, 117n, 180n, 252-4, 254n, 255 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 246, 246n matter: as anonymous, 74; Bergson’s concept of as images, 164; cogito as separated from, 133; and ‘drusiness’ (Kant), 254n; and form, 61, 84; and hylomorphism, 63n, 65, 66, 67, 232n; in Leibniz, 111n, 160; mud as in How It Is, 197; in phylum, 16; in Plato, 176; pregnant with form (MerleauPonty), 203n; prepared, 84; and soul, 104; unformed, 62, 67, 73, 93, 122; words as in The Unnamable, 160. See also hylomorphism McCandless, David, 113, 115 Melville, Herman, 28, 30, 30n, 38, 39n memory, vs. bloc, 90; conversion of to nostalgia (Badiou),195; and Deleuze’s three languages, 165; faculty of, 231; image as void of, 164; imagination stained with, 59, 187; in Leibniz and Malone Dies, 155-8, 161-2; Platonic dimension of in Proust, 175n; Platonic, 107; in The Unnamable, 168, 171; of underdevelopment as metaphor for ‘drusiness’ (Kant), 254n Mengue, Philippe, 14n, 16, 38n, 39n, 41n, 42, 43, 120n, 195n Ménil, Alain, 40 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 205, 210, 214, 218, 219; phenomenolo-gical privileging of vision in, 203-4 Miller, J. Hillis, 100n, 242n Milne, Drew, 48n Milton, John, 66 mimesis, 15, 16n, 29, 46, 263. See also representation

molarity: and Badiou’s concept of sexuate polarity, 198; and form, 252; and molecular, 44, 74, 117, 117n, 153, 194n, 252-5, 268; and subject, 34n, 257 molecularity, 44, 46, 63, 64, 65, 74, 117, 117n, 147, 151n, 153, 194n, 198, 251-5, 256, 266; sex, gender and, 194n, 197 monad, monadology, 82, 83n, 84, 101, 105, 105n, 110, 122, 124, 129-33, 131n, 134n, 136-51, 154161. See also Leibniz Mondrian, Piet, 56, 256 Mopsik, Charles, 104 Moran, Dermot, 202, 203, 210 Mori, Naoya, 20n, 129n, 130 Mullarkey, John, 15, 117n multiplicity, 68, 125, 259-60; Badiou on, 198-200 Murphy, Timothy S., 226n, 237n negative theology, 59, 105, 113, 114, 115, 259, 261; and abstraction, 57; readings of Beckett in manner of, 55n. See also via negativa Nietzsche, Friedrich, 14, 27, 30, 79n, 81, 113, 114, 180, 230, 239, 250 nomadology, 'nomadism', 52, 129, 143, 151, 189, non-philosophy, 18, 20, 35, 36, 81, 82n, 120, 216, 264. See also half-philosopher; shadow hospitality One, the, ‘oneness’, 34, 69, 101, 1025, 124, 107-9, 111-14, 116, 132, 187, 189-90, 198, 200, 211, 264; the one and the many, problem of, 78, 82, 102-4, 105, 132, 185, 189; in monotheism 103, 104, 105, 112, 114 ontology: of becoming, 13-16, 255, 260, 266; problem of in philosophy, 19, 22, 29, 80n, 90, 114, 124, 131n, 165n, 199, 244; of virtual, 69n; ontological axe,

Index 134, 186-7; de-ontology (Heidegger), 244 Oppen, George, 262 Oppenheim, Lois, 56n, 120n organic: vs. machinic, 16, 42, 64; body, 150-3, 158, 161-2, 171. See also molarity organless body. See body without organs Outside, the: atopian threshold and, 265; Foucaultian exteriority and, 206; intimacy of (Blanchot), 31, 34; and language, 57, 58, 60, 218; as loss of coordinates, 161, 260; monad and, 139; and possible, 176; thought of, 133, 133n; vital topology and 260; writer and, 31 Pascal, Blaise, 103-4, 135, 139, 168 Patton, Paul, 253n, 266n people to come, the, 26, 33, 64n, 264 percept, 31, 44, 86 Perloff, 231n, 234n, 240, 255n, 266n phenomenology, 23, 131, 160, 165, 201-5, 210, 213, 214, 215, 216, 219, 229; privileging of light in, 219; privileging of vision in, 203 philosopheme, 17, 23, 57n. See also sensation of concept phylum, the, 16, 62, 66, 78, 117, 122, 124, 126, 199, 253n; abstract machine as, 93; the larval and, 65. See also machinic Pilling, John, 78, 79, 185n, 227n, 234n, 237n, 241n, 244 plan(e) of composition, 14, 24, 27, 28, 80, 80n, 126, 180n plan(e) of consistency, 44, 66, 93, 255, 258, 260, 266, 267 plan(e) of immanence, the, 14, 15, 22 27-8, 63, 74n, 80-1, 96, 147, 163, 165, 186-91, 200, 258, 260n, 264, 266; philosophy and, 177-180 Plato, Platonic thought, Platonism, 25, 28-30, 39n, 57, 57n, 63n, 68, 69n, 71-2, 78, 82, 91n, 93, 103, 107, 108, 108n, 109n, 111, 114n,

317 132, 135, 150, 165, 170, 170n, 174-7, 174n, 175n, 179, 181n, 182, 184n, 188, 192, 196, 199, 211, 221-2; image of thought and, 175; on philosophy and poetry, 28-9 Plotinus, 19, 20, 103-111, 115, 200, 211, 270 Plotnitsky, Arkady, 248n possible worlds, 34n, 41, 59, 61, 130, 150, 168, 184-6, 185n, 188; and body without organs, 42-3; Other as expression of, 59; in Proust, 41-2; symptomatology and, 45. See also incompossibility; virtual Power, Nina, 70 power(s) of the false, 14, 29-30 Proust, Marcel, 7, 9, 30, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 51, 53, 59, 97, 98, 105, 148, 159, 175, 193, 265, 267, 270; Beckett and, 147; molecular sexuality and, 194n, 195, 212, 239 Psychoanalysis: as institution, 93n; and interpretation, 267, 268 Rabaté, Dominique, 52n, 57, 69, 194, Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 70n, 83n, 86n, 99n, 255n Rajchman, John, 16n, 57, 59, 61, 180n, 258-9, 261 Rancière, Jean-Jacques, 25, 29, 30, 45n, 47, 48, 70, 72, 194 relation of non-relation, 34, 35, 213, 214, 215 Renton, Andrew, 212n, 213n representation, challenge to, 13-14, 16n, 29, 41n, 53, 55, 62, 77, 90, 92, 206 rhizome, 151-2, 152, 161, 162, 170n, 177, 189, 266-7 Rimbaud, Arthur, 28, 85, 225, 227, 231, 232n, 233, 234, 234n, 239, 240-2, 248n, 264, 264n Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 131, 131n, 202, 202n Rodowick, D.N., 208

318


Roussel, Raymond, 208-9 Royle, Nicholas, 18n Sarduy, Severo, 140 Sarraute, Nathalie, 73-4, 74n Sartre, Jean-Paul, 165, 183-4, 160n, 165n, 171n, 195n Schérer, René, 73n, 250 Schulz, Bruno, 116 schizoanalysis, 15, 42, 225, 267-9 sensation(s) of concepts, 22, 22n, 53, 53n, 57, 216. See also philosophemes Serres, Michel, 138n, 270 shadow hospitality: as metaphor to describe relation of terms, 21, 34, 35, 101, 226. See also Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari; literature Shakespeare, William, 225, 231, 232, 233; Hamlet, Kantian dimension of, 230; King Lear, 66 Simont, Juliette, 68n, 232n simulacrum, simulacra, 30, 108, 139, 176, 181, 188, 200, 222 Sinatra, Frank, 249 singularities, 14, 15, 191, 230 Smith, Daniel W., 251n, 253n Smith, Russell, 49n, 239n Spinoza, Baruch, 20, 21, 27, 69, 77, 78, 79, 79n, 81-3, 81n, 95, 96, 101, 131-2, 135, 140, 179, 191, 197, 197n, 206, 266, 267 stammer. See language stellar separation, 199, 219 Stengers, Isabelle, 28n, 125, 126, 261n Stivale, Charles, 28n structuralism, structuralist, 16, 17, 44 structure-other, 20, 20n, 23, 34n, 35. See also alterity style, 26, 27, 27n, 31n, 32; non-style as, 231. See also language subject, the: annihilation of, 99; in Beckett’s ‘je suis ce cours de sable’, 236-7, 254-5; and Bildung, 266n; cogito and, 134;

complementarity of dwelling and, 260; face and, 193-6; failure of self-recognition and, 228; forces and, 84; in idea ‘Je EST un autre’, 264; loss of coordinates and, 258; machinic and, 43, 63; monad as, 141; non-Kantian, 261; postarchival, 165; as problematised in collectivity of utterance and action, 92; in relation to object in Beckett, 85, 89, 228, 249, 265, 265n; in relation to object in Tournier, 20; synthesis and, 179, 183; unified (Kantian), 179, 184n, 233, 235-6, 249; and viewing work of art according to Beckett, 265n. See also larval subject suture: of philosophy to the poem, 6972, 79, 220, 221, 223; vs. “secret pressures of the work of art”, 223 symptomatology: 42, 43n, 47, 48n, 268 teleology, teleological, 17, 35, 35n, 45, 60, 71, 120, 141, 148, 152, 192, 206, 212, 249 territorialization, territoriality, 62, 63, 91, 92, 92n, 252n, 269. See deterritorialization. threshold: and alterity, 26, 33; on to another discipline, 34, 40; and architectural, 227; as atopian, 254; and becoming, 45; of being, 52; body without organs as, 65; and constrast between relative and absolute limits, 254; and contrast with limit, 252n; crossing as selfformation, 255-6,; dissipative, 237; and door in ‘je suis ce cours de sable’, 257-8; in Heidegger, 245-6; of humanity, 196; in Leibniz, 137, 153, 154, 156 , 166, 165, 171, 172; between molar and molecular, 251-53; in Molloy, 248n; moment, 90; and multiplicity of in ‘je suis ce cours de sable’, 248; ontological 124,

Index

319

133, 255-6; other spatial tropes and, 245; Outside and, 258; and protosubjectivity, 92; reason in How It Is, 172-3, 184; situation in Beckett’s poetry, 244-5; thermodynamics of nonequilibrium systems and, 254; and ‘threshole’, 246n; of unity, 96; vigilance of in How It Is, 165, 187, 191, 192; in Watt, 256. See also atopian threshold Toscano, Alberto, 17, 68n, 70 Tournier, Michel, 20, 23, 34, 39n, 40, 46, 46n, 59 transcendence: Badiou and, 199, 200; celestial as analogous to, 111, 118, 135; vs. ‘extra-being’, 178; and Form, 14; and God, 110, 233; vs. immanence, 74, 118, 178; judgement of God and, 192; Kant and, 179; lack of in Beckett’s conception of image, 164; Leibniz and the, 131, 143, 180; life above in How It Is and, 173, 176, 182-4, 187, 189, 191; literature and, 356; Outside as challenge to, 260; philosophy and, 36, 63, 75; point of view, 234; and pre-established harmony, 137, 143; residue of in The Unnamable, 186; subjectless action as problematising, 92; writing and, 85, 95; zero and, 114 Trezise, Thomas, 17, 201, 203n, 219 tribunal of reason, 22, 153, 165, 168, 177, 186, 188, 192, 234; court in the head and, 153, 257. See also judgement Tsai Ming-liang, 246n Two, the (le Deux), 197, 221, 222

Valéry, Paul, 25, 35, 236n Vaughan, Henry, 135 Varela, Francisco J., 119 velocity, velocities, speed, 27, 74, 77, 80, 81, 83, 96, 97, 98, 101, 124, 180n, 260, 266; writing and, 74, 266; in Spinoza, 80-1 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 103, 111n via negativa, 55, 113-5, 124, 257, 259. See also negative theology virtual: abstract as, 69; Badiou on Deleuze’s, 200; Beckett’s late theatre and, 60; becoming and reservoir of, 164, 168, 176; concepts in philosopher’s œuvre, 22, 30; contrasted with actual, 16; criticism and the, 197; criticism as, 48; in How It Is, 186; inhuman and, 196; Leibniz on, 137, 138, 141, 214; the novel and, 197; polarities, 256; and possible, 61, 147, 168; practice at La Borde and, 46; Proust and, 41; thresholds in consciousness and, 257. See also incompossibility; possible worlds

Uhlmann, Anthony, 17, 19, 22n, 50-1, 53, 53n, 129n, 132, 197n, 252n unformed matter, 32, 62, 65, 66, 73, 74, 81, 93, 122, 174. See also l’informe untimely, the, 27, 35, 37, 231, 231n, 268

Zepke, Stephen, 13, 15, 64n, 266 Žižek, Slavoj, 18n, 32, 36n, 117n

Weber-Caflisch, Antoinette, 111 Welchman, Alastair, 66n Weller, Shane, 198n, 266n Widder, Nathan, 84 Williams, Michael A., 110, 177 Wolosky, Shira, 17, 50, 55, 78, 101, 113, 118 Woolf, Virginia, 65-6, 247, 251 work of art , 14, 30, 32, 35-6, 42, 46, 68, 72, 223, 228, 259, 260, 263, 271n writing plane, 73-4

Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari. (Faux Titre)

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After Beckett - D'apres Beckett

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