Beckett lu par Adorno : La catastrophe du langage comme réponse à la catastrophe historique (original) (raw)

In this article, the notion of catastrophe is first treated as a metaphor for what happens to literary production when it is disrupted by twentieth century art innovations. I address this issue by looking at the exemplary case of Adorno’s reading of Samuel Beckett, whose writing renders traditional æsthetic processes obsolete, thus breaking the continuity between language and the meaning that it is supposed to convey. According to Adorno, the catastrophe operating in Beckett in terms of language is a response to the historical catastrophe of the Second World War and the way in which it broke the continuity between human suffering and the possibility to articulate it with language. By presenting the opposition between Adorno’s and Sartre’s approaches to literature, I will show that, while Sartre responds to the catastrophe of the Second World War with committed literature, Adorno, from his reading of Beckett, responds with what will be called the catastrophe of language.

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