Horsemeat and Shame in Beckett's Nouvelles (original) (raw)

Not Rightly Human: Beckett and Animality

Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, 2008

This essay examines Beckett's treatment of the distinction between human and animal, a distinction that is certainly not one among others, since it arguably founds an entire philosophico-religious tradition running from Aristotle to Levinas, and including Descartes, Malebranche, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. I focus in particular on the impact on Beckett of his reading about Wolfgang Köhler's experiments on chimpanzees during the First World War and aim to show that Beckett submits the human/animal distinction to a double pressure, thereby producing a new conception of the so-called 'political animal.'

'living flesh': The Human-Nonhuman Proximity in Beckett's Four Stories

Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, 2020

This essay examines the human-nonhuman proximity emerging from Beckett’s representation of a deconstructed human being and his encounters with nonhuman animals in the “The Expelled”, “The Calmative”, “The End” and “First Love”. With reference to Simone Weil’s categories from The Need for Roots, I show how Beckett’s narrator is lacking physical, psychological, socio-political and philosophical aspects associated with normative human being, which result in a precarious, imprecise identity. In light of this dehumanisation, I close read passages featuring nonhuman animals to argue that while they emphasise the narrator’s marginalisation from human community, they also reveal profound alienation from other animals too. The destabilisation of specific identity, I argue, initiates a reevaluation of the narrator’s place among living beings in general and prefigures the multispecies connectedness advocated in twenty-first century ecocritical reviews of the human-nonhuman divide, such as Donna Haraway’s ‘chthulucene’.

Earth, World, and the Human: Samuel Beckett and the Ethics of Climate Crisis

Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, 2020

This essay reads the ungraspable relation to death in Beckett's works as a means to think through our contemporary era of climate crisis. Beckett's singular aesthetics of human finitude can be a powerful resource for thinking the unthinkable. By envisaging finitude in terms of the limits imposed on life by both space and time, this essay seeks to ground the existential framework of Beckett's oeuvre in terms of an always embedded self. Looking at the short story "The End," I show how such embeddedness may work to evade totalisation or abstraction in terms of a universal worldview, yet also how it poses problems for any privileging of materiality as such. Beckett's writings are thereby seen to produce a dynamic ethics between world and earth, the global and the local, life and death. Cet essai interprète la relation insaisissable à la mort dans les ouvrages de Beckett comme moyen de penser notre ère contemporaine de crise climatique. L'esthétique singulière de la finitude humaine chez Beckett nous aide à penser l'impensable. En envisageant la finitude en termes des limites imposées à la vie par l'espace et par le temps, cet article tente d'enraciner le dispositif existentiel de l'oeuvre de Beckett dans un soi toujours intégré. Nous examinerons la nouvelle "La Fin", afin de mon-trer comment une telle intégration pourrait permettre d'échapper à la totalisation ou l'abstraction d'une vision du monde universelle. Et pourtant, celle-ci rend probléma-tique la mise en avant de la matérialité comme telle. Les écrits de Beckett peuvent ainsi être considérés comme produisant une éthique dynamique entre monde et terre, global et local, vie et mort.

"Logoclasm": Subjectivity and Subversion in Beckett's Creatures

2018

In a famous letter written in 1937, Samuel Beckett articulates the most cogent description of his developing aesthetic, his well-known formulation that he might "bore one hole after another [into language] until what lurks behind it -be it something or nothing -begins to seep through" (Disjecta, 172). However, a neglected feature of this letter is a "clever pun [Wörterstürmerei]" crafted in German by Beckett, "[t]he most accurate, if not most elegant translation…[of which]…is logoclasm" (De La Durayante, 14). 1 This logoclasm, both a neologism and a pun in the original, simultaneously enacts and describes an undermining or subversion of language and the word, logos, but also, because of its etymological root, of logic and reason and even Law. Beckett had begun to reject the "apotheosis of the word" that he associated with Joyce, yet paradoxically the form in which he attempts to signal this rejection betrays his very absorption in language, about which it could be said he was ambivalent at best, as the expression of his new linguistic intention in logoclasm is symptomatically reliant upon a pun/neologism, perhaps the most distinctive feature of Joyce's Wakean language (Disjecta, 172).

SAMUEL BECKETT'S WAITING FOR GODOT: AN ECO CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE

IASET, 2021

This paper is an attempt to depict the demolition of nature due to the Second World War. Nature takes an integral part in the lives of people. The paper, by using the drama waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, illustrator how the unavoidable relationship between man nature are fragmental during the Modern Era. In this paper I have tried to show Beckett's duality in representing nature through Vladimir and Estragon; Firstly, it reveals the exploitation of nature, and secondly, it precariously exposes the disintegration of modern society.