Social and Personal Entropy in the Work of Samuel Beckett.docx

PLOVDIV UNIVERSITY „PAISII HILENDARSKY”
FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY
DEPARTMENT „Applied and Institutional Sociology"
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Antoaneta Loseva Dontcheva
Social and Personal Entropy in the Work of Samuel Beckett
Author's abstract of the dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Science.
Field of higher education. 3. Social, economic and legal sciences.Professional field.3.1.Sociology,
anthropology and cultural studies ( Sociology)
P l o v d i v
2022

The dissertation entitled "Social and Personal Entropy in the Work of Samuel Beckett" consists
of an introduction, four chapters, a conclusion and references cited . The length of the study is
459 pages (825 725 characters). Works of Beckett: Cyrillic 5 + Latin 35 = 40 , critical and other
literature: Cyrillic 66 + Latin 264 = 330, total: Cyrillic 71, Latin 365. Total: 436

CONTENTS OF THE ABSTRACT
1. Contents of the thesis.............................................................
2. Research topic........................................................
3. Aim and method of the study
4. Summary of thesis work
5. Contributions of the thesis .................................................
6. Scientific publications on the thesis topic ..............................

1. Contents of the thesis
Introduction
1. Relevance of the research topic
2. Why entropy?
3. Summary of critical research on the topic
4. Aim and method of the study
II. Language
1. Literature of non-words
2. The spirit of the age
2.1. Influences - Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Mautner
3. The disenchantment of the language
3.1. Aesthetics of the asymptotic point
3.2. Disempowerment of the language - ways of realization
3.3. It is a matter of words, of voices. Gilles Deleuze on Beckett's "exhausted" language
4. What is the word?
5. Prosthetic identity
5.1. Narrative identity
5.1.1. Paul Ricoeur
5.1.1.1. Status of the event
5.1.1.2. Temporality

5.1.2. Dan McAdams
5.2. Prosthetic identity
6. The Silence
6.1. After the end of language
6.2. Influences, parallels, reception
6.3 Le Neutre. Maurice Blanchot and Roland Barthes
6.4. Beckett. The role of objects is to restore the silence
6.4.1. Objects - the only possible path of the Self to Itself
6.4.1.1. Objects restore memory
6.4.2.2. Objects restore communication
6.4.3.3. Objects restore body movement and "revive" the character
6.5. Assault on words in the name of beauty
II. The Void. Modes of manifestation
1. Emptiness... There is no other word.
2. Emptiness as the absence of chronotope and self-talking Self
3. Everyday living. Impossible life and denied death
4. Worstward Ho
5. The Sublime
6. On the Limits of the Boundless Void
III. The Body
1. First the body
2. Ways of realization
2.1. Pain and the wounded body as ontology in Samuel Beckett's work

2.2. Being only pain and nothing else, how this would simplify things
2.3. Nihil in intellectu
2.4. Because of my pains, I glimpsed misery and grief.
3. The grotesque body - the alienated world
3.1. Ubi nihil vales. - Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon
3.2. Shock, Fear and Monsters
3.3. Becoming- animal
4. Between God and the devil, between Justine and Juliet
IV. Time
1. I know I've never been anywhere
2. Beckett: For the old half knowledge of when and where
2.1. Time as an external condition
2.2. Beckett - the trace of influences. Proust, Joyce, Schopenhauer
2.2.1. Arthur Schopenhauer
2.2.2. Marcel Proust and James Joyce
3. Time as an internal characteristic in Beckett's work
3.1. On one hand embers, on the other - ashes
4. Sempiternitas. General dynamics of time in Beckett
5. Function of time-space in Beckett's prose and dramas
6. Myth and ritual. Beckett and Dante
6.1. The Grey Angels of Idleness
6.2. Beckett and the influence of mythological-ritual imagery
6.3. The Myth of the Descent - Catabasis

6.4. Demythologization
7. The phenomenon of "Waiting for Godot"
7.1. Boredom and Hope in Waiting for Godot
7.2. Boredom
7.3. The hope of ‘Waiting for Godot”. Stylistics and mechanisms of suggestion
7.4. Beckett's humour
7.5. Hope
7.6. A fissure in time - the unique kairos "Waiting for Godot"
7.6.1. Stérēsis
7.6.2. Kairos. Waiting for Godot as kairos?
8. Endgame
8.1. Resolutions: Zero. Hope: Zero.
8.2. Attempts to signify
8.3. Between Scylla and Charybdis
8.4. Mene. Tecel. Fares
8.5. There is no longer a sedative and never will be.
9. The Absent
V. Conclusion
VI. Literature Cited

2. Research topic
The subject of the present study is social and personal entropy in the works of Samuel
Beckett, one of the most influential and innovative authors in the world and a Nobel Prize winner
in literature (1969). He proposes a new coordinate system of the subject-Being relationship that
has had a powerful impact on the contemporary cultural paradigm. Does Beckett dare to radically
ask what is the man when we are presented with only his negative? He makes chaos, confusion,
disintegration, emptiness аnd the inhuman into the aesthetic and meaningful center of his work,
confronting the status quo of literary norms and foundational aesthetic and ethical principles,
transgressing the boundaries of our traditional notions of what is "The Human" and the personal
binding of the Self to language, corporeal and temporality.
3. Aims and research method
This study is initiated with the ambitious aim to offer an interpretation of Beckett's texts through
the focus on social and personal entropy. The author hopes to discuss the most important changes
that the individual and society have undergone after the two world wars and how they underlined
the contemporary socio-political and personal drama of European man.
Beckett's iconic phrases "From nothingness come - to nothingness gone" and "Nothing is more
real than nothingness" are the starting point of this text, which will spiral along with the themes -
the inability of words to name - the exhaustion of language, emptiness as an existential modus
and the disempowerment of human body and will, the negation of temporality and the
logocentricity of the subject. All that makes impossible an existential relationship between the
Self for Oneself and the Self for the World and Others. The philosophical-aesthetic and social
dimensions of all these referents of Withdrawal will be interpreted through Beckett's prose and
dramaturgy. The core around which the exposition will move is the dislocation, the exhaustion,
even the attempt to the destruction of fundamental constructs in the subject-being relationship
that is essential to Beckett's work, as are the causes, methods, and messages. The effort will be
directed towards a reasoned exposition of the thesis that negation, absence, emptiness, and
silence can be the highest and most undisguised revelation of personal being. The task at hand is

quite ambitious and difficult for several reasons. Firstly because of the complexity, diversity, and
polyvalence of his literary legacy, secondly because of the huge amount of critical literature
devoted to him worldwide, and for this reason the danger of resonance, and the difficulty of
holding a line that is not vulnerable. Beckett`s critics have always been tempted to analyze his
work through different paradigms, from philosophy to mathematics and even music. Some of
them have even argued that the whole of twentieth-century philosophy can be explained based on
his dramas and prose. The present study will make no exception to this approach. Because it
seeks contact between sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, art, and literature it inevitably runs
the risk of eclecticism. This risk is taken, whereby a "systematic eclecticism" is methodologically
constructed, using within the horizon of an internally consistent basic position different methods
and theories to support the interpretation derived. From this perspective and only from this
perspective it is possible to argue that my interpretation will take the form of a "bricolage" in the
sense given to this term by Jacques Derrida in his "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of
the Human Sciences". According to Derrida, the literary critic becomes a bricoleur who uses
various methods and theories to support his interpretation.
4. Summary of thesis work
The first section focuses on the entropy of language. It is the most prominent representative of
writers who declare that speech is no longer capable of being an adequate mediator between Self
and Being. Beckett`s style and language delineate new fields of the search for meaning through
unexpected forms, impaired communicability of dialogue, discontinuity, pauses and outwardly
demonstrated meaninglessness, accumulation of non-senses - all of those elements characterize
linguistic and communicative entropy.
The focus of the second chapter is The Void. As a concept in this text, it will refer to - invalidity,
void, uselessness, barrenness, emptiness, absence. The modalities of its manifestation will be
analyzed as the absence of chronotope, absence of communication, and desire of Self to erase an
unbearable present. Its various incarnations of Void in Beckett's texts are a brilliant example of

what Blanchot defines as the Holy of Holies of literature: the ability of the writer, confronted
with il y a, who dares to represent at the same time this lifeless life and impossible death.
The third section of the monograph is devoted to the entropy of the body in Beckett's fiction and
dramaturgy. The exhaustion, decay, and impotence of the human body are one of how the writer
demonstrates the entropy of the corporeal and the personal but also attaches it to the effects of the
"arrow of time." The human is reduced to stirring still – from some still living matter - to almost
motionless, barely twitching flesh.
The fourth and final chapter of the study is devoted to the temporal entropy in Beckett's work.
According to Beckett not only physical conceptions of time have been altered, but they have also
influenced literature in general, which seemed impregnable territory before the appearance of
Marcel Proust's novel „In Search of Lost Time" . In his essay „Proust", which will be analyzed in
detail in the aforementioned section, the young Beckett brilliantly articulated temporal entropy
and its implications
I. Language
1. Literature of Unword
Language becomes for Beckett an obstacle to the revelation of truth and he sets himself the
uneasy goal of "blowing up" its foundation to bring to light the powerlessness of words to
express the self. This is the reason why the writer set out in his aesthetic program to create a
"Literature of Unword". Beckett has written in a letter to A. Kaun in July 1937 that it is his
desired form, satisfying the game of passing over the sacred seriousness of language, which must
be stopped. On the way to producing this much-desired Literature of Unword, Beckett set the
idea to pass through the stage of a kind of nominalist irony. He thought that an assault on words
is in the name of Beauty.
Fr. Jamieson draws attention to some implications after the time when Nietzsche proclaimed the
death of God in a study entitled "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism"(1991). The beginning of postmodernity begins with what Jamieson calls Beckett's
"schizophrenic writing" - the inability of the hero/narrator to represent his past and future as
coherent experience and to control a continuous play between signifier and signified. The result is

a heterogeneous and fragmented narrative that has become a characteristic feature of the literature
of the postmodern era. Much more explicit is the well-known philosopher and ideologue of the
postmodern era, Ihab Hassan, who suggests that the publication of Beckett's novel "Murphy" in
1938 should be taken as the beginning of European postmodernism. For Hassan, one of the most
important characteristics of the literature of this period is that it is a "literature of silence." St.
Connor places Beckett's texts between modernism and postmodernism, considering the new
approach to the use of language-a move away from logocentrism and legitimation of ineffable
and unknowable. Beckett's work is a charismatic example of this "coming out" from the classical
era of the primacy of language.
2. The spirit of the time
Nietzsche wrote "Twilight of the Idols" in 1889 and his words unwittingly or willingly mark a
turning point in attitudes toward language. Starting from his words Blanchot would write:
language presupposes metaphysics and every word we speak binds us to Being. But does not
Nietzsche's statement indicate that the time has come for us to understand that we are on the
threshold of a change- a turning point that is now necessary and inevitable and that in place of
our language, of this form of signification, another form of exteriorization will come and in it, in
the disunity it will cause and the chasms it will open the uninvited guests will no longer exist,
because they are too ordinary and common, too sure that the divine is in the form of logos or
nihilism, masquerading as reason.
Beckett joins the ranks of modern writers such as Kafka, Proust, Joyce, and Bataille, who became
exponents of the idea of the sublime in unconventional and inimitable ways.
They give Lyotard the reason to state that the sublime is an expression of the artistic sensibility of
modernity because the main topic for reflection in this period is the ambivalent emotion that
connects them to indeterminacy. Novels such as "The Unnameable" and "Watt" and other
Beckett's dramas - especially his later fictions- have embodied Wittgenstein's philosophical ideas
about language as a labyrinth in powerful creative images.
For Heidegger and Beckett the main existential problem is the unbearable burden of human
existence, the subject's encounter with nothingness, boredom, rejection, the terror of the

meaninglessness of life and death. They both share the idea that language is not only a means of
communication and information transmission, but a dimension in and through which the subject
responds to existence and becomes belonging to it.
Fr. Mauthner and his ideas about the role of language also strongly influenced Beckett. One of
Mauthner's main arguments is based on the idea that there is only language but no real, natural or
innate meanings to support the search for transcendent knowledge. Since words have no universal
meanings, they mean different things to different people, making communication through
language impossible. According to Mauthner, all people are convinced that they express through
speech what they think, but they are really just talking and are far from true knowledge. This
undermines the Cartesian cogito, which presents thought as an indicator or condition of human
existence. The novels of the Trilogy and "Watt", the drama "Not I" and the prose of "Worstward
Ho" explicitly and unambiguously reveal how strongly Beckett was influenced by Mauthner's
ideas.
3. The disenchantment of Language
3.1. Aesthetics of the asymptotic point
I define Beckett's artistic style as the aesthetics of the asymptotic point. An asymptotic point of a
curve is a particular point around which the curve "coils" spirally, with countless many coils,
approaching it indefinitely without reaching it. In the context of the social sciences and
humanities, let us assume that it is some desirable goal, value, or state that we are continually
approaching but can never attain. I find justification for such a definition in Beckett's own
repeatedly emphasized statement that the key to deciphering his work is the adverb perhaps - a
word whose semantics refer to uncertainty and liminality, to a temporal tension, frozen at a point
of expectation, in a state of reflexive perplexity, between yes and no, know and don't know.
According to the well-known scholar of Beckett's work John Pilling, the writer stands firmly
behind the idea that the artists' drive to reflect and describe the phenomenal reality should be
abolished altogether. Their task is to bring the forcedly deeply hidden invisibility of external
things to the point where it becomes a tangible thing.

Beckett's entire oeuvre is subservient to the "aesthetics of the asymptotic point," which we might
expressively describe as a solitary figure, neither young nor old, moving slowly and with effort in
an indefinite time-space dimension - between day and night, between light and dark in the misty
haze of greyness, always moving but never arriving, always speaking but never reaching the
story's conclusion - a narrative between words, an existence on the edge of Being and Not-Being
- stories of people and things built and destroyed by words. A narrative of silence, but not quite -
a compulsive movement towards the revelation of truth, the essence and meaning of human
existence, longing for self-identity, and the impossibility of realizing this by way of speech -
words tending towards the phenomenon of the authentic Self, but never reaching that point and
the impossibility of placing the subject in a temporal vector - the here and now, and at the same
time the impossibility of living anywhere else but here and now.
3.2. The disempowerment of language - ways of realization
Eight postulates have been identified on which normal communication is always built:
determinism, shared memory, same future prediction, informativity, identity, truthfulness,
incomplete description, and semantic proximity. There is none of all of the above that Beckett has
not profaned to one degree or another. Pursuing extreme minimalism and expressing himself as
concisely and simply as possible, he began writing in French and then translated his texts into
English. Going through this process led to an even more serious simplification of his style and, as
a consequence, a crystallization of the meaning of words. The nonsense, repetition, neologisms,
illogical dialogue, pauses, and distorted temporality in Beckett's prose and dramas "strip" the
language of its essential characteristics. Having chosen words as his main target, Beckett
"attacks" them from all possible sides and in all possible ways. Some of his strongest weapons
are "killing" of the character's imagination, their impaired memory and alienation from human
valuest, a missing chronotope, and last but not least, the presentation of the character in a state of
aphasia. The broken syntactic structure of the sentences and the endless language repetitions
swirl a destructive tornado that "sucks in" the syntax, phonetics, and morphology of the language.
Through a deliberately limited vocabulary and a "dry" style, far from the deep multiple meanings
of words language in Beckett's texts ceases to be able to render the nuances of human experience,

the infinite labyrinths of suffering, passion, or joy - all dimensions in and through which the
subject responds to Being and becomes belonging to it. The writer's aim is achieved.
Beckett`s short story "Imagination Dead Imagine" is also the most concise and suggestive
representation of the writing process defined by the writer as deanthropomorphization. Beckett
argued in an early essay that this effect is best achieved by exploring the actual breakdowns in the
process of communication resulting from the disintegration of the object on the hand and the
author's alienation from his own existence - on the other. The texts of the so-called Second
Trilogy (Company, Ill seen, Ill said, Worstword Ho) illustrate the achievement of this effect. The
narrator/author is not only alone and alienated from the world, but also residing in a kind of
anonymous indeterminate state, rather schizophrenic and paranoid: he sees badly, speaks
incoherently - a marginalized voice on the edge between imagination and dead notions, powerless
to express himself because of this exterior superficiality of language and the hollow sounds of
blank designation. Writers like Beckett, according to Blanchot, who seeks to represent the liminal
experience of the subject, use language that no one speaks and is addressed to no one: it has no
center and reveals nothing. In those texts Being speaks itself, which means that language no
longer expresses but just – it is. Being, on the other hand, is always non-signifying, non-
dialectical, and non-relational: it is, therefore, impossible to speak about it.
3.3. This is a matter of words, of voices. Gilles Deleuze on Beckett's "exhausted" language.
By "exhaustion" or desolation, Deleuze means the emptying or exhaustion of the Possible - God,
Future, Other, Meaning - achieved through all-encompassing disjunctions. One of the most
famous critical texts on Beckett's work belongs to the French philosopher Deleuze. He (also co-
authored with Félix Guattari) found in Beckett's work the manifest power of the art and literature
of the Postmodern Age. Deleuze is convinced that Beckett's prose and dramas are revolutionary
in many respects and should be scrupulously analyzed and studied because they are emblematic
of the moods and trends circulating in Post-World War II Europe. For the philosopher, the
writer's life and work became a platform on which to discuss the beginnings and ends of
Modernism, the distinctive features of Postmodernism, and the complex issues that emerged and
developed in the opposition between them. In his last book "Essays Critical and Clinical" (1993),
there is a small essay of seven pages called "He Stutterеd". Starting from Austin's idea of the

performative function of language, Deleuze proposes a theory according to which certain
linguistic utterances function as performative acts, thus influencing the non-linguistic aspect of
reality. If speaking is an act, then in stuttering it is the language that stutters, not the person, and
the result is a stuttering reality. In texts, this stuttering cannot be attributed to the character but
only to the author, because the author is the stutterer in the language of the text. Deleuze
emphasizes that stuttering is due to the effects of language, not of speech and manifests itself in
the following ways: a) decomposition of language - achieved by pressing on it and creating
tension; b) through the process of deterritorialization - when everyday concepts, thoughts,
movements, and words are brought into new use;
The philosopher argues that Beckett "makes" language "stutter" by leaving free zones of
vibration and shifting differentiated positions that mark changes in the functioning of his system.
This is how the third level of "stuttering" is reached - language is pushed to a zone of liminality,
to a threshold where it becomes something else under the influence of non-linguistic phenomena.
"Stuttering" is not only a consequence of speech problems, it is a reflection of the author's overall
vision of the Subject-Being relationship: the sick and decaying body of his characters, their
difficulty or impossibility of movement, their lack of memory, the claustrophobic space they
inhabit in most cases - all these circumstances push language to its extra-linguistic limits and
"make it stutter." Deleuze analyses the writer's style as a dynamic process that passes through
different stages and defines three phases through which the "exhaustion" of language in his texts
passes, conventionally naming them Language I, II, III. The first language is the stage in which
words signify and name objects - this is the first stage in which Beckett, according to him,
exhausts the possible through a strategy that can be compared to mathematical combinations and
modifications. In the second language words are no longer discrete units, but a mixture of voices,
something like waves or streams, that govern and distribute the movement of language. It is
something like a game without rigid rules between the objects of reality and their signifiers,
which creates an infinite chain of possible ramifications. An emblematic text for the second
language is the novel "The Unnameable" in which the narrator`s voices create parallel worlds and
the effect of mise en abyme is achieved. Language (III) is the most complex because the aporia is
implicit in this inexhaustible series of exhausted protagonists: it separates words from objects,
language from reality.

4. What is the word?
Beckett sets up insurmountable obstacles to linguistic communication in his texts, suggesting the
inevitability of its failure. Placed in the coordinate system of a "dead" time-space, caught
between the oblivion of the past and an impossible future, his protagonist is only able to exist
through and in the language constructing his illusory, external, deceptive identity, possible only
in an infinite present - defined by me as a prosthetic identity - belonging solely to the narrative
voice.
5. Prosthetic identity
This section will introduce the notion of prosthetic identity as key to understanding the relation
narrative voice-personal identity in Beckett's work. The ambition of introducing this conceptual
construct is to prove that the author offers an unprecedented creative invention, while at the same
time filling a significant gap in theories of narrative identity, of the whole philosophy and
psychology of the 20th century, at the center of which is the problem of crisis of personal
identity. Prosthetic identity contains within it the original meaning of the word prosthesis, as well
as Derrida's cited characteristics of the parergon, but is not exhausted by them. It is something "in
the middle, the thing that divides the world in two, one side outward, the other inward...there are
two faces and no density."( Beckett, The Unnameable)
Ricoeur, in his books "The Oneself as Another" and "Time and Narrative" lays the whole
problem of personal identity in direct relation to narrative. He argues that the Self can only be
understood through narrativity and its associated temporality because time becomes the subject's
temporality only insofar as it is articulated through narrative, which in turn reaches its full
meaning by becoming the condition for the self's temporal self-consciousness. This theoretical
framework ties the latter two together as indispensable conditions for the subject's identity and its
relation to self, being, and others. Beckett removes from the hero`s fictional world those tangible
coordinates through which the reader can normally orient himself in the chronotope and causal
relationships of the storyline. In his texts important and unimportant events are intertwined and
interchanged, times and places are spun as in a child's kaleidoscope, characters' names are
changed in the course of the action, sometimes whole paragraphs disappear or are denied

altogether and later reiterated. By these stylistic devices of a deliberate confusion of the reader
and viewer Beckett suggests his idea that the absence of eventfulness and the introduction of
deliberate chaos into the storyline are themselves occasions for creativity because the Existence is
a constant threat to form and I know of none that does not disturb the nature of being most
intolerably – the author claims. Ruby Kohn defines Beckett's style as progressive "withdrawal".
The goal is not to achieve a finished product but the process of creation itself. The subversion of
classical narrative form is not Beckett's invention. It is characteristic of 20th-century literature but
as A. Gibson has said when we speak of its exemplars, especially with the subject-matter of event
and incident, there is one author who is nec plus ultra and his name is S.Beckett. The novelty that
he brings to the unravelling and even "elimination" of the event is its continual cancellation of
which the drama "Waiting for Godo" t is an unsurpassed exemplar.
The existence of the chronotope as conditio sine qua non is not questioned by theorists of
narrative identity - nor the temporality-memory interdependence and a priori implied
recognizability by the subject of its own body. The core of narrative identity in all its
modifications is the transformation of human time into the narrative and of narrative into a
journey towards the Self and the achievement of personal authenticity. The narrator-character in
Beckett's texts is not sure that the events he narrates as part of his own life are experienced by
him: he cannot even say whether he has a body and to what extent he is aware of it as his own,
whether the voice he narrates is his own and most importantly we have a character who is devoid
of a sense of personal history and continuity memory.
The famous American researcher McAdams argues that narrative identity constructs and
interiorizes the personal history of the subject aiming to answer the key questions: Who am I?
How did I become who I am? Does my life make sense? The key elements of this construction
that McAdams speaks of are the following: the subject/character's capacity for agency,
communicability, desire for redemption and search for salvation, creation, interiorization and
transmission of meaning, the possibility for self-knowledge and self-actualization. The question
of why McAdams is drawn upon as an authority and reference in this study may be largely
resonant. The answer is that his claim allows me to take a step beyond Beckett's texts and affirm
that prosthetic identity is a kind of personal identity that emerged after the mid-twentieth century.
It is a phenomenon of postmodernity and needs to be discussed and analyzed. The main point that

is demonstrated through the model proposed by McAdams is that narrative undergoes continuous
processing and editing and the interpretation of events undergoes change under the influence of a
range of social and discursive influences. Nonetheless, as it unfolds over time, personal history
'builds' the narrator's narrative identity. All of the components listed by McAdams above are
invalid for Beckett's characters.
Prosthetic identity is not a singular concept whose ontology negates or profanes the basic
building components of narrative and personal identity but compensates them in a unique way. It
is an in-valid sign because there is a disintegrated signifier- but it is available-acting and because
there is a functioning signified. The prosthetic identity is form divided from content which
compromises the generation of meaning - I mean the syntactic, semantic, philosophical, and
ontological meaning of human existence and suffering. This is why Beckett favors slapstick as a
style of play in staging his plays because it forces us to see reality but does not induce catharsis.
What narrative and prosthetic identity have in common is the base - words, language, the
narrative that must answer the question of who I am, create a life project, and give birth to a
teleological vision. The ultimate goal is shared and common but everything else is different:
narrative identity seems to forget the complex mirror structure of the disintegrated Self, the
defective communication between subject and being, Self and Other - all irrefutable features of
modern consciousness that hinder and even make narrative identity impossible in many cases.
Prosthetic identity is woven from the loose fabric of a thinned and demythologized word, a
distant resonance from the biblical "In the beginning was the Word." It is the fornication with
words brought to ecstasy, a painfully crafted construction of language where the form is content
and the endless flow of words or sounds is of far greater importance than the meaning of what is
said.
Prosthetic identity is born of the mystical power of speech, it is the phenomenon Foucault speaks
of - an imaginative construct that becomes an effective mediator between Self and Non-self, Self
and Other, Self and Being - the only one possible, the only one available and the only one
attainable for Beckett's characters.
Homo ludens- the character most beloved by Beckett, is the architect of the prosthetic identity.
His characters find in language a means to control the chaos of existence and a protection from
the horror of an agonizing world last but not least the game of "same questions, same answers"

creates an illusion of life. Language in Beckett's texts has the power of a magician playing and
creating his own game of mirrors that have no limits and no end - the so-called mise en abyme
effect but only in correlation with the production of a prosthetic identity. Through language,
Beckett constructs the only possible identity of the subject in his work, the prosthetic, knowing
that it cannot be a referent of salvation, redemption, or authenticity but fills an existential void,
"concealing as well badly a porous, agonizing self". ( Beckett)
6. The Silence
The inability of language to express truth, guarantee an authentic relationship between
Self and Other and remain a valid mediator between man and being is the central cause of the
darkness and hopelessness in Beckett's world. In the history of culture, silence is always
associated with a limit, a topos that points to the boundary between verbosity and wordlessness,
sound and silence, life and death, some mystery or mystical experience. But silence in Beckett's
work is not the symbol of death, nor of withdrawal from the world, it is not the silence of hermits,
it has no guarding or protective function, it is not a way to the sacred, it is not the mythological
silence, it is not the silence of eternity, it is not the voice of God, it is not the silence of the
Ishihast, nor can it be negotiated in the spirit of Eastern religions, although there are not a few
such studies. Beckett does not allow for the possibility of transcendence by either word or
silence. "His style is anti-epiphanic. Likely, the "representation" of the non-representable and the
emphasis on silence was the goal Beckett aimed at, or- on the contrary, he used words as the
necessary and indispensable condition for the desecration and desacralization of silence.
One of the most influential theorists of Postmodernism Ihab Hasan notes as a characteristic
feature of what he calls anti-literature "the prevalence of reduction and apocalypse" and he
identifies Beckett's fiction as the most extreme example of the literature of silence. He is not
claiming that there is wordless literature but that artists like Beckett demonstrate a kind of
desperate and avant-garde gesture where silence is only a metaphor, expressing in raw and subtle
modulations the shock in art, culture, and the subject's consciousness, which unites both the
subject's self-destruction and self-transcendence.
6.2. Influences, parallels, reception

J. Knowlson calls Beckett "the great poet of silence." In his texts, it is to be seen as a
contemplative hermitage that allows him to hear that inner voice that is humming somewhere in
his head. Two geniuses of the spoken word permanently influenced Beckett's creative style. They
are Dante and Joyce. In post-war Europe, Bataille was one of Beckett's first and most famous
critics. In his essay " Molloy's Silence" he described Beckett's novel as the world's most
intractable and disturbing story-an emanation of the non-human and the silence, and the essence
of anonymous human existence-wordless as death. For Sh. Wolosky silence in Beckett's texts is
unable to solve the eternal problem of man and the oldest of all: the existence between tears and
words and even if the silence possessed some transcendent power it would not be able to deliver
man from his sense of doom and meaninglessness.
6.3. Le Neutre. Maurice Blanchot and Roland Barthes
Blanchot's concept of Le Neutre will be drawn upon to clarify the function of silence in Beckett's
prose and dramas. Le Neutre is nameless, irrevocable, fragmentary, neither distinct nor
determinate, simultaneously dislodging and transgressing any form of determinacy towards
indeterminacy. Le Neutre is different from everything visible and invisible, from everything
present and absent, and can be commensurable with both object and subject. Le Neutre does not
refer to any particular reality, it is beyond everything: a thought that draws every word and every
concept to its other or beyond, ceasing to signify what it signifies and beginning to flow into the
indeterminacy of a multiplicity of meanings (but does not imply transcendence), denying itself,
withdrawing or changing the very moment it is spoken or written. Le Neutre unravels all
manifestations of Self-identity, meaning, and truth, and can certainly be said to define very
precisely who or what is speaking in Beckett's texts. The silence in the present analysis stands
somewhat apart from Blanchot's definitions because it is not considered here as a member of the
verbosity-verbosity opposition, since the author does not actualize one of the elements to
generate meaning. In his texts, this paradigm opposes two equally operative terms, one of which
is actualized in the act of speaking or writing to produce meaning.

This claim can be much more clearly explained and understood through Barth's concept of the
Neutral. It is everything that disturbs and refutes the paradigm, refers to impressions and feelings
awakened from the greyness of indifference and passivity to intense, strong, and unprecedented
states. To transcend the paradigm is a passionate and searing activity. Barthes' desire for Neural
is identical to Beckett's desire for silence - it is the individual's tearing pull to move along the
edge of being, where longing and fear, language and its absence, time and timelessness meet, and
the pulse of life is fastest. Such an ecstatic state brings the Self closest to itself, stops death and
the flow of time. Then, and only then, when silence becomes a powerful indicator of action in the
zone of non-happening and ineffability does it take on new significance for Barth and Beckett.
6.4. The role of objects is to restore silence
And the objects? What is the proper attitude in perceiving objects? First, are they necessary?
Those questions will be asked on the very first page by the protagonist of the novel "The
Unnameable|. Beckett has answered this query in his novel "Molloy": The role of objects is to
restore silence.
The above quotations define not only the core of Beckett's idea of subject-object relations but
also their function throughout his work. Objects in Beckett's fiction produce complex
metaphorical relationships and generate metaphysical messages. The author entrusts them with a
very complex and important task: by restoring silence, they will prove to be the only
"uncorrupted" mediators between the Self and Being, the Self and the Other, and the subject's an
only possible path to the Self. Beckett is also influenced, willingly or unwittingly, by the
philosophy of Husserl, for whom objects are intentional and constitute themselves through
consciousness. In his later fiction, they increasingly become aids to represent some aspect of the
character's consciousness or to deepen and complicate the reality-illusion game. Another
significant feature of the subject-object opposition in his texts is the shifting of one member of
the opposition to the other to the extent that the latter proves to be determinative of the existential
availability of the hero as in the novel "The Unnameable".
The role of the objects is to restore silence-the author will state-and silence is the topos where
alone the manifestation of the authentic self is possible.

How do objects restore silence?
1. They restore memory: the objects function as signs, unlocking the memories of the characters.
Their restored memory rehabilitates the chronotope, which becomes valid and operative in the
text again, and the life story gains continuity in the few cases where this is possible. The objects
also stand-in for the absent Other and thus sanction the presence of the self.
2. They restore the hero's communication with Self and Others and revive his moribund
relationship with reality and life, becoming a valid mediator between Self and Being,
compensating to some extent for the disappearance of language as mediator.
3. The objects restore the movement of the body and "revive" the character. The Cartesian
centaur -the "actor-network relationship."
The tandem man-bicycle brings life, melts sadness, and evokes love in Beckett's characters. Only
in this symbiosis, they can "acknowledge" and embrace their bodies, and only then is the diseased
flesh forgotten. H. Kenner defines this vision as the "Cartesian centaur" and argues that it is the
product of Beckett's idea of the ideal human-machine relationship in which the body works
perfectly, defying the existential crises of consciousness. The bicycle-human relationship in
Beckett is explicit for Bruno Latour's theory of the Acting-Network (ANT), developed in the
1970s by a group of researchers united around him and Michel Callon. ANT asserts a principled
symmetry between human and (non-)human actors within the networked activity. The world is
seen as an interactive network dynamically constructed by human and non-human beings. The
model by which social and any other kind of action is thought of or interpreted changes
completely.
6.5. An assault on words in the name of Beauty
Beckett incorporates the traditional binary oppositions of "language-silence" and "subject-object"
into a labyrinth and encodes the key to unraveling it in objects. The objects restore silence by
replacing the Other, thematizing in a new way the boundary of separation between Self and
words and compensating for the invalidity of language. Silence is the final, ultimate
manifestation of language and always refers to this boundary, which recalls another experience
and another obviousness, the epistemological boundary between reality and imagination, reality

and wonder. For Beckett, the authentic Self is unattainable through language and an anchoring
force is needed to contain the narrative and something to perform this function. He assigns this
task to objects or things delegating to them the uneasy task of tracing the Self's path to itself.
II. The Void
1.Modes of manifestation
The void in Beckett's texts is a complex sign with multiple and mutable signifiers and for this
reason, cannot be defined or indicated by a radical gesture. The writer creates stories about the
subject's "unbearable present," determined to tell them by way of the exhaustion of language as a
kind of "punishment" for the betrayal of words that are unable to express the subtle layers of
human thought and consciousness - so-called by Beckett "literature of the Unword."
"Loneliness, emptiness, nothingness, meaninglessness, silence - these are not the givens of
Beckett's heroes, but their purpose, their new heroic initiative."( S. Cavell) Each of these nouns
refers to a semantic nest signifying the absence of something essential. In this text, emptiness as a
concept would also refer to voidness, invalidity, uselessness, barrenness, absence.
Replace emptiness in Beckett's texts with silence and emptiness, with a reality beyond the
pleasure principle- writes H. Bloom- and you may grasp that the metaphysical or spiritual reality
of our existence is finally revealed- beyond all illusion.
2. Emptiness as the absence of chronotope and self-talking Self
One manifestation of the void in Beckett's texts is the gradual reduction of Spatio-
temporal coordinates. Combined with the author's incremental assault on all linguistic norms the
first members of the oppositions Being-Non-being and I-Not I are completely eradicated or
replaced by some kind of ersatz. The absence of a self-speaking Self and chronotope in Beckett's
fiction is a phenomenon unprecedented in its power and suggestiveness in the literature of 20th-
century Europe. In the years when “Waiting for Godot”, “Endgame” the novels of the Trilogy,
were produced Beckett adhered to certain Spatio-temporal characteristics of a narrative, however
ambivalent and thinning they might be. In his later fiction, even the mythological time of

“Waiting for Godot” is transformed and has much in common with Blanchot's idea of time as a
disaster or catastrophe that is absent and the Self is devoid of Selfness.
3. Everydayness - impossible life and denied death
In Beckett's texts, the everydayness of living is the saddest manifestation of emptiness but also
the most effective anesthesia. His hero is most often pitiful and impersonal, his existence if we
dare to use that word, devoid of vivid events. Beckett's man is without qualities - an empty
human corpse; he is Heidegger's das Man, whose characteristic features are inferiority and
impersonality and whose everyday existence is insincere, impersonal, unfree, and full of idle
chatter. Das Man is an illustration of Beckett's philosophy of man's position in the world: he is
both a generator of prosthetic identity and a revealer of the emptiness of being.
Habit and ritual are the main pillars of everyday living, ensuring equilibrium in the subject-Being
opposition, but also the quagmire into which every possible effort to achieve personal
authenticity slowly, imperceptibly, and surely sinks. Beckett's texts are an illustration of the
philosophical topos il y a - first used by Levinas and continued by Blanchot: il y a is the
indifferent, passive, empty existence - living "without or outside" language, time, and the Self,
outside any causal chain. Blanchot calls this existence a movement towards an infinite negation
and for Levinas il y a is our involvement in Being, understood as anonymity and lack of form: a
Being in which the subject as personally conscious Self is absent. Existing in the topos il y a,
Beckett's hero is dead before he is born.
In those conditions, the subject is seized by terror but not the terror of death, but that of endlessly
living in non-life. The question "Who?" in this modus of existence is irrelevant because all are
the same, unoccupied, unstable, immobile: everyday life is devoid of events, and questions of
values are not posed in it as Blanchot writes.
4. Worstward Ho
The movement towards a complete reduction of literary canons would be continued by
Beckett until he died in 1989. The culmination of this process is "Worstward Ho". This text is
representative of Beckett's late fiction and is the literary equivalent of Malevich's "White Square
on a White Background" or "Black Square." "White Square on a White Background" (1918) and

"Worstward Ho," written 65 years later, reach the limits of abstraction in an unprecedented way
and are representative of the movement of artistic, socio-cultural and philosophical ideas of the
entire 20th century Europe. S.Critchley defines it as a language style, suggesting absence,
exteriority, night, neutrality, dying, or il y a. "Worstward Ho" is an emanation of emptiness
because the very idea of space-time and movement, of the presence of a body, is canceled. Such
incremental reduction and minimalism are characteristic of texts that Foucault defines as reaching
the threshold of language. It is in this liminality that the various modalities of emptiness manifest
themselves. Beckett aims to present a vision of total absence, but he enables the recognition of
this signification. In “Worstward Ho” human experience and happening are negated, becoming
the non-experience of a disembodied Self.
5. The Sublime
The radical negativity suggested by Beckett's later texts, culminating in Wurstwood Ho, is
a manifestation of the sublimе in the sense of Lyotard's theory. He starts from the Kantian notion
of the sublimе as "deprivation"-the loss or absence of something. For Lyotard indeterminacy and
the representation of the unrepresentable are the manifestations of the sublime in Postmodern art.
He develops his theory by building on Burke's idea of the sublime as an experience of fear and
threat, a deprivation of harmony, a confrontation with and detachment from the beautiful, and an
asymmetry in the subject-object relationship. In Beckett's texts, the sublime is explicated through
its negative. Lyotard argues that the "inhuman" is the secret source of what constitutes the human
and it is the element of Beckett's characters- there "the soul remains mute, motionless like the
dead" and through art it returns to the ecstatic state between death and life that is defining of life
itself. “Worstward Ho” is an illustration of Foucault's definition of the so-called discourse of "I
speak": it is devoid of propositions and notions, of truth and proof, of conclusions and
affirmations, it is freed from any center and it is unrelated to anything - birthless.
The main task of this study is to seek an explanation of this phenomenon and how it occurs. One
of them is the aporia (impasse) of which Derrida speaks. An aporia is a situation in which the
very elements that make something possible are at the same time the same elements that make
things impossible. It etymologically refers to spatial and epistemological relations, signifies
impasse, and indicates a problem present in something or in the concepts explaining it, leading to
opposite or contradictory effects. The atmosphere of alternativeless melancholic doom in

Beckett`s last text is a manifestation of the strong influence of Schopenhauer's philosophy,
which Beckett weaves like a rebus and a key to his texts with the conviction that life, as it is
given to us, is "a non-existent center in a formless place."
6. At the limits of the boundless Void
The void functions in Beckett's work on all levels: it is explicitly represented in the
impossible communication between characters, in the absence of chronotope, in the breakdown
of linguistic norms, in the absence of a hero in the traditional sense, "it is the long sonata of the
death", the journey of the hero/author towards otherworldly things - towards a universe devoid of
referentiality. Beckett is not looking for metaphysical or ontological messages, because for him,
as for Lyotard, the art of Postmodernism does not discuss the unrepresentable and unsayable
characteristics of modernism, but the reasons for this impossibility.
The emptiness in Beckett's aesthetic program as the absence of care, ambition, reflection, light,
sun, objects, body, dependence, place and time, knowledge, love, death, and life is a sign marked
not only by negation but refers -paradoxically-fascination and longing: it is a haunting artistic
image of wanted but denied euthanasia, of the unattainable silence and stillness. As a complex
sign, the Void should not be seen merely as a consequence of the crisis of modern consciousness
and of the prevailing pessimism that has overwhelmed European man, the survivor of two world
wars. Its various incarnations in Beckett's texts are a strong example of what Blanchot identifies
in his essay "Literature and the Right of Death" as the Holy of Holies of literature: the ability of
a writer confronted with il y a who dares to represent this dead life and impossible death.
III. The Body
1. First the body
This chapter is devoted to "the world of the body - dismantled into pieces like toys" in
Beckett's work - the body as boundary and mediator, the thing "thin as a blade" that "divides the
world in two, one side out, the other in," where the self is in the middle...”
The growing interest in corporeality in the 20th century is the result not only of the emergence
of psychoanalysis-the theories of Freud and Jung but is also a consequence of the radical change
in the representation of the human body in the art and philosophy of the modern era,
characterized by the tendency to dehumanize the artistic image. Another important consequence

of this new view of corporeality is formulated vividly in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's
“Phenomenology of Perception”, which appeared in 1945, according to which the human being
consists of a body that does not mind, matter or any kind of essence but rather must be thought of
as an element similar to the original four elements in the ancient Greeks - air, fire, water, and
earth - i.e., it is an ontological substratum, a "connective tissue" through which the personality is
realized.
The problem of the human body and its functions in Beckett's work will be analyzed
through the philosophical categories introduced by Husserl: Körper (body) - as a spatially present
material and physical body, res extensa, which is perceived by the subject as a body-object, a
thing external with the Self and the notion of Leib (living body) through which the body (Körper)
is perceived as flesh and experienced by the subject as part of the self, presented to others,
involved in the action, visible to me and the Other.
2. Paths of realization
2.1. Pain and the wounded body as ontology in Samuel Beckett's work
Physical pain and the wounded, suffering body are persistent images in Beckett's work. They are
integral to the subject's effort to sustain itself in the human-world opposition with all the variety
of functions these signs perform. In Beckett's poetic they are sub-themes of the larger theme of
pain and wound as a liminal state - a threshold between the Self and its disembodiment and
disappearance, between the Self and Being, of bodily suffering as catalyzing dialogue with the
Self through speech. For Beckett physical suffering explicitly “holds” the subject in the world: it
compacts and gathers the “decaying and moldering“ human body, giving it a sense of spatial
presence. The "physical pain, suffering body-fear" relation in Beckett's aesthetic program pursues
far deeper and more ambitious goals. Fear, according to Heidegger, discovers in Da-sain the
most authentic can-be, that is, the liberation to choose freedom and master oneself. "The sick and
wounded body in Beckett`s texts leads to suffering - prolonged, unceasing, eternal. It is a fateful
encounter of the spiritual and the corporeal but first encrusted in the flesh because the wounds are
violence to convention and a nuclear blast into everyday ritual, a disruption of habit, a carved
notch in memory.

To be here and now, to be in Dasein for Beckett's characters is to be-in-pain, for it alone among
all bodily sensations is something like an unceasing stream that draws you into the sea, it alone is
the link between worlds as Benjamin writes.
If the habit is what "keeps the dog close to its vomit" (Beckett, Proust), then pain is the lash that
can drive the dog away from its vomit because the obedience of habit consists in the constant
adjustment and adaptation of our organic sensibility to the conditions of the world of habit. The
suffering of pain and wounding is a break in this obligatory routine and boredom now finds itself
deprived of its adequate representation. Thus it opens the window to reality and becomes the
main condition for the existence of experience.
Pain turns out to be the only modus vivendi for Beckett's character.
2.3. Nihil in intellectu
Pain is conditio sine qua non for the existence of narrative in Beckett. His characters are
physically grotesquely repulsive: human flesh is molting and terrorized, its wounds like an
undercurrent - invisible and deadly to the unknowing and unseeing. The characters observe how
disease, wounds, and old age corrode them and with the unruffled detachment of schizophrenics,
they describe their bodily characteristics in detail. Physical pain is not amenable to the narrative,
it is difficult to articulate its intensity but Beckett's personages feel an insatiable desire and
addiction to verbalize their physical pains, wounds, and suffering because they are the mediator
between body and soul, language and silence, the Self and the world. "Being only pain" for them
transforms the centrifugal forces of language into centripetal -it is the thin sliver of a pulsating
epistemology.
2.4. Beckett and Christianity. Book of Job.
Beckett's conception of the function and place of pain and the wounded body in the
aesthetic-philosophical foundation of his work undoubtedly reveals the influence of Christian
theology through three main sources: the Bible, Protestant notions of the body, and Dante's
“Divine Comedy“, particularly the chapters „Hell“ and „Purgatory“. In Beckett's characters, the
desire to remain in suffering seems gratuitous but it solves the great problem of personhood

because for the author, discovering the meaning of life and answering the question of who I am
and why I exist are directly related to the search for the cause of human suffering.
Job's life is envisioned by Beckett as a story of a man abandoned, rejected, suffering senselessly,
and punished. It is a story of meaning (or meaninglessness) of suffering as are the stories of
Molloy, Malone, the Unnameable, and many other Beckett`s named and unnamed characters.
Their pains are incomparable to Christ's sufferings mostly because of the absence of meaning, of
a shooting vertical vector to the questions and answers about the spirit and will of man - the
impossibility of transcendence. Not only bodily pains but also the sufferings of the soul align
Beckett's characters, as well as the author himself, with the biblical figure of Job - the burden of
loneliness and abandonment, the misunderstanding of the plight that has befallen him, the
disembodiment of the human-God, subject-being relationship and, consequently, the loss of
meaning. The strongest influence of Job's story in Beckett's fiction is the function of language
both as the last refuge and a "bully" and the topos of Waiting.
3. The grotesque body - an alienated world
In his work "The Grotesque in Art and Literature" V. Kaiser writes that the absurd world
of the grotesque involves the subject in a dreamlike state, in a kind of existence - on the edge
between illusion and reality and defines it as a structure whose nature can be expressed in two
words - an alienated world. The carnivalesque body, a contemplation of life and death, an
expression of cyclical time and the ever-emerging new, of which Bachtin speaks, undergoes a
metamorphosis in Modernity, where the grotesque body loses its positive pole - the focus turns to
the destructive forces of the unconscious and the personal crisis: its dismembered and amputated
vitality legitimates meaninglessness, emptiness, and faithlessness.
Psychologically and socially the loss of meaning or absurdity is always experienced as the lack
and futility of Being, hopelessness and decay, as a threshold boundary between order and chaos.
Timelessness blurs the distinction between "epistemological subject and objects." It is this topos
that is the realm of the grotesque image. The signifying timelessness, the atemporality
characteristic of the literature of the absurd, is largely inherited from the grotesque.

Some of the finest, most provocative, and most powerful examples of the grotesque in twentieth-
century art belong to the artist F. Bacon and the writer S. Beckett.
3.1. Ubi nihil vales. - Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon
The body is the topos of interpenetration between the world and the subject, between the Self and
the Other, the body both as Körper and as Leib is a boundary. The bloody, decaying, wounded
flesh of Bacon's figures and the impotent, disabled, and disappearing body of Beckett's characters
will be examined in a comparative discourse subordinate to the general idea of the genesis and
philosophical and aesthetic messages of the reduced to unhuman human body, of the world of
"darkness", |” without love, without hate, without any clear principle “ ( Beckett)
The grotesque body in Beckett and Bacon is a condensed definition of the modern notion of Self
as fragmentary and elusive corporeality, directed towards and dependent on the Other,
characterized by ambivalence and diffusion between subject and object. The artist achieves his
goal by reducing the Self to some form of flesh, often named by him as "meat", while the writer
alienates the Self of the characters from their bodies to the point of an unknowable otherness -
making it just an object.
The horrifyingly repulsive grotesque imagery in Beckett and Bacon's work generates a problem
that seeks its answers: in the oppositions characteristic of the grotesque body-death/life, old
age/youth, inanimate/animate, ordinary/horrible-the second member is bloodied, blurred, and
effaced. The consequences have a shock effect because the first member of the chain begins to
compensate by imitating them - a kind of pseudo-life, pseudo-youth, and pseudo-reality, pseudo-
self. By turning disgusting and absurd into a game, Beckett and Bacon confirm Bachtin's theory
that the grotesque and the sublime are interdependent and complementary. Their work gives
Lyotard reason to argue that Postmodernism is fundamentally a vehicle for the sublime, because
of its risky attempt to represent the unrepresentable and especially because it refuses the
consolation of the good form. The grotesque figures in Beckett and Bacon are a vivid, literal,
emphatic display of corporeality that brings the body into focus with all its manifold functions,
shyly concealed and consciously repelled by men: they are a monstrous blow to the mind, an
incandescent fear - confusing, unnamable, formless and all-encompassing.

3.3. Becoming Animal
One of the results of Beckett and Bacon's rejection and profanation of the human body -
unsanctioned by the Self and the Other - leads to a phenomenon that Deleuze and Guattari define
as 'Becoming Animal' (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia)- a state in which
the subject exists as a nomad, outside all stability, in an anomaly that defies description. It is the
movement from the body to the flesh, where the former is wholeness and stability and the latter is
inarticulable and devoid of stable form matter. This process is not the result of a superficial
artistic metamorphosis (of man into an animal) but a manifestation of the impossibility of
achieving personal authenticity. The contemplation of animal and human traits without clearly
demarcated boundaries in a kind of turbulent play of signs is obviously and purposefully
employed by Bacon, whereas in Beckett it manifests itself in the reduction of the body to primal
instincts.
3.4. In the dash between God and the Аevil, between Justine and Juliet
The theme of the representation of the human body in the work of Beckett and Bacon constitutes
a field of study in which the most fundamental problems of the modern subject have been
germinated. The grotesque imagery in both is representative of the new attitude to corporeality.
The function of the 'wounded body', of physical pain in Beckett's prose draws attention because it
is meaning-driven and meaning-inducing: in the first place it alienates the character from himself
and in the second place the pain of the wounded body manifests the subject in the world: as an
intense physical sensation it is contrasted with the feeling that overwhelms most of Beckett's
characters, the slow withering and sinking into the mists of Non-Being. In the agony of
uncertainty, the pain of physical suffering serves as an axis that fixes the subject in the world,
fills the space between life and non-life, effaces the ability to look at details, and deepens the
vertical tip downward toward reflection. In Beckett's work the body-spirit, body-flesh opposition
manifests itself in "a kind of dismemberment, a sudden collapse of all that protects me from
everything else I was condemned to endure in my existence."( Beckett)

The modus vivendi of his characters lies in the dash between God and the devil, between Justine
and Juliet. Shock, fear, violence, alienation, and repugnance from the human body are means by
which the artist and the writer demonstrate the rupture of the Self, of its absurd existence that
oppresses us from the outside - through the Other's abrogation, through the Other's averted or
unreceptive gaze - and from the inside - of the man who has seen his reflection in the mirror
placed by the artists in the most inappropriate corners. These are the moments when we are
overwhelmed by the fear that discovers the nothingness and nowhere of the world, defined by
Heidegger (Being and Time) as displacing our entire existence. Their goal is to get at meaning,
truth, the transcendent by striking brutally right at the core of physical existence. The
consequences of this blow create the mirror image of Cartesian philosophy.
IV. TIME
1. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere. ( Beckett, The End)
According to Lyotard, the end of Modernism causes three kinds of social disorder or
cultural vacuum: the breakdown of social bonds, a crisis of personal identity, and the loss of a
sense of temporality. At its core anti-realist Modernism is nihilistic because it is a reactionist
form of "religious atheism," in which one transcendent signifier is simply replaced by another-
Non-being replaces God as the object of hope for salvation. All that happened in the realm of art
and literature is parallel to the natural sciences of the time, especially physics. The Western
European philosophers dealing with the problem of time were also aware of the fundamental
changes taking place in bourgeois society in the first decades of the 20th century: on the one
hand, a profound crisis of traditional values was taking place and on the other hand- the
impossibility of discovering a new historical perspective became apparent, which intensified the
sense of rootlessness, transience, catastrophe, and transience, and exacerbated the human
sensitivity of personal time as rapidly passing. Bergson's theory of duration (la durée), Husserl's
phenomenology, and Heidegger's “Being and Time” shake up the highly resistant characteristics
of the Human-Time paradigm in the Humanities.
In his famous study "Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western European Literature,"
E. Auerbach defines this change as a disintegration of the reality of polyvalent reflections of

consciousness, a stratification of times, and a loosening of the connection with external events.
The category of time and the temporality of the subject as well as man's relation to the ideas of
Spatio-temporal relativity became the main themes of the artistic manifestos that appeared in the
first decades of the last century. A. Glauze and J. Metzanget's book “On Cubism” (Du Cubisme,
1912) became the creative manifesto of the eponymous modernist movement, in which the
categories of time and space were a generative factor. The ideas presented in “On Cubism” had a
wide resonance among writers and artists.
2. Beckett: For the old half-hearted knowledge of where and when!
2.1. Time as an external condition
Beckett is strongly influenced by Bergson's philosophy, especially in the part about the
distinction between "intellectual understanding" and "intuition". The philosopher's strongest
influence on the writer is found in his conception of Nothingness not as emptiness itself but as a
form of ontological interrelation between Existence and Non-Existence and between the inner
and outer states of Non-Existence: Nothingness manifests itself not as absence, but as a tendency
towards absence that never reaches a total finality. In Beckett, too, the existential reduction
having as its limit bare existence is never allowed to be complete: Nothingness is never actually
reached. Beckett distances himself explicitly from the hypothesis of the existence of absolute
time (to which Bergson is not entirely alien) but together with this, he accepted Bergson`s basic
theses on temporal perception but reduces to the minimum its first grounds- among them
memory, bringing the temporal dimension closer to the limit - to the void. Most akin to Beckett`s
understanding of temporality is The Theory of Relativity and Quantum theory, which have been
popularized since the 1920s.
2.2. Beckett - the trace of impacts. Proust, Joyce, Schopenhauer
Tracing the influences that major philosophers and artists of art and literature have had on
Beckett focuses on possible fields of influence, which are not identical to the field of direct
receptions. The history of influences does not necessarily imply a study of the works bearing the

influential positions, but an engagement with that "virtual library of humanity" which is also
structured through complexly mediated relations and dependencies.
Beckett accepts Schopenhauer's central idea of the manifesting world as a prison of Being and a
cycle of eternal torture but goes beyond the philosopher's idea, insisting that there is no possible
salvation or exit (or at least not so categorically stated). Schopenhauer's influence on the writer is
related to the widespread idea of melancholy and pessimism characteristic of “In Search of Lost
Time”. This is, of course, no coincidence, for the German philosopher's ideas dominated
philosophical circles at the time Proust began writing his novel - in 1890. Permanent suffering is
most essential to life - a Schopenhauer's idea Beckett accepts without equivocation. Almost his
entire postwar oeuvre revolves around the idea of meaning or meaninglessness of suffering. To
the German philosopher, the writer also owes his now-famous comparison of time to the disease
cancer, which eats away at a person but slowly and under the influence of tranquilizers-ritualized
everyday life and incessant, banal chatter.
Proust and his novel“In Search of Lost Time” were other important centers of influence
for the young writer, who sought models of aesthetic and philosophical writing. In his essay
“Proust“ Beckett does not consider either biographical or literary sources: it is largely basic
conceptually and makes it possible to understand how the idea of the role of time in personal
existence crystallized in him. For Beckett, time is “the two-headed monster of damnation and
salvation... and a hostile superior force with man”. ( Proust)
Joyce is undoubtedly the writer who played the most significant role in shaping Beckett as
an artist and a virtuoso master in rendering the subtlest nuances of the man-time relationship. The
author of the novel “Ulysses” created a universe- a fictional world constructed in the matrix of a
previously unknown idea of time in literature.
Both Joyce and Proust define time as the dominant factor in human life. Beckett is strongly
influenced by both writers but at the same time remains a step removed from their ideas.
3. Time as an internal characteristic in Beckett's work
For Beckett existence is devoid of an acceptable metaphysical solution and the subject seeks "the
obliteration of an unbearable present" because time dictates and subordinates its days and reality,
whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains always hermetically sealed. The

internal personal time of his characters is characterized by a sense of discontinuity - an incurable
disease and indefinite torment that overwhelms and corrodes the human being, a marginal state
between Being and Non-being - an existence in the absurdity of an infinite, uniform, and
meaningless present. In Beckett's prose and dramas temporality is the root of anxiety and
suffering, for time "buries you with an eyedropper." The only palliative for this pain is the drug
of habit: it is the "great killer" of time, and the writer focuses on its "pernicious effects."
4. Sempiternitas. General dynamics of time in Beckett
If one looks for a conceptual designation of the convergence between internal and external time
in Beckett's texts, it seems to have to be "sempiternitas".
The term occurs frequently in Augustine's “On the City of God”, showing that he borrows it from
Varon, the Platonists, and App. Paul. Yet, Varon, Augustine reminds us, speaks of the subject
matter studied by the ancient philosophers, that is, the things contained in the cosmos,
characterized by time, but some of them are also bearers of sempiternality (Ibid., VI, 5). Thus the
instance "sempiternitas" is introduced, which is not at all identical to eternity. It is by being
bound up with temporality, without being identical with it. Its bearers are not the world as a
whole, the earthly bodies, the animals, or the men in this world, because of their materiality and
their composition of cosmic elements: all visible things in the cosmos are temporal.
Sempiternality is temporally unending but each of the entities residing in it has a history: both
past and imminent. They are not of eternity, but their existence has no possible end. In Beckett's
world, there is no birth and no death, no beginning and no end - time does not flow, it pulses at a
swelling point.
Also in perpetual flux is "the negation of death - it is dead because time is dead." (Beckett,
Proust) In the constant duration of a "now" in the mode of perpetuus cursus human life moves
between boredom and suffering. A permanent peregrinantia in miseria sempiterna - "time without
event, without projects, without possibility". Time - the convergence between inner and outer
temporality - in Beckett has a course that sustains the character of perpetual arrival in a mode of
sempiternality, and that of miseria sempiterna.

5. The function of Time-Space in Beckett's prose and dramas
Beckett eliminates with a melancholic gesture the basic elements of chronotope in his prose and
dramas. Endowed with a life he never wanted Beckett`s personage is faced with the necessity of
"obliterating an unbearable present." This "erasure" is accomplished in a variety of ways but one
is most beloved by the author - the Forgetting - the sense of unpresence, timelessness, and bad
memory are recurring characteristics of his characters. His texts are narratives of "inaccessible
times", of (un)times and (un)places, of (un)Being. Beckett's character loses his capacity to be
present because the absence of a valid chronotope changes any relation between the components
of a plot: he is doomed to reside in an “anonymous, impersonal existence, a non-truth, and non-
reality, but which is always there.”( Blanchot)
6. Myth and ritual. Beckett and Dante
6.1. The grey angels of indolence
Why Dante? Why Bellacqua? Why Purgatory?
These three questions delineate major inner movements in the creative quest of the young
Beckett, who was deeply drawn to the ontological journey of a man in search of himself, his
authentic Self and the achievement of harmony as Dante's text suggests. His heroes are possessed
by indolence and willlessness like Dante's Bellacqua, forever waiting for something that may or
may not happen, but unlike him, endlessly reflecting, overwhelmed by a paralyzing sense of
meaninglessness and searching for its cause
Beckett's entire oeuvre is an epic of a man caught in the purgatory of the postmodern age, where
Monotony, Expectation, Laziness, Willlessness, Powerlessness are the elements that make up the
supporting structure - that of Absurdity. This is the reason why Belacqua has become Beckett's
favorite literary image. "The Divine Comedy” also casts its long shadow over Beckett's
dramaturgy. Krapp of "Eleftheria" thinks he's in the ninth circle of Hell, and Dan Rooney of "All
that Fall" suggests Maddie's moves are like the chastened magicians of the twentieth song of
"Inferno" who have fooled the world with divination and magic. Their faces are turned away and

they walk backward. In no small number of Beckett's dramas, the characters are confined in
buckets or boxes, in cylinders and dungeons, chained to wheelchairs or driven neck-deep into the
ground, immobilized or with their bodies sunken in plagues, invalids - such images, which
abound in Beckett's style, recall the agonies and hellish torments of Dante's sinners.
Waiting is presumably an element in the temporal chain of the future but the author transforms it
and its associated Hope into Purgatory. The identification of these two topoi is meaning-
provoking and he plays out a hypothesis: what if Purgatory is just part of Hell, and Hell is another
extension of Life? Therefore, man is involved in a Being-Purgatory and Beckett proves this
throughout his work.
6.2. Beckett and the influence of mythological-ritual imagery
Why did 20th-century writers return to Mythology as inspiring innovative creative solutions in an
age in which Nietzsche announced the death of God and man retreated as never before from
archetypal patterns of living? The mythological schema is simply a way of controlling, ordering,
and giving form and meaning to the vast panorama of meaninglessness and anarchy that is
modern history.
The mythological-ritual structure manifests itself in Beckett's prose and dramas not only through
temporality but also through language and the fetishization of non-things. The stones are the most
striking example in this respect: they are not ordinary objects - they are hierophanies.
6.3. The Myth of the Descent - Catabasis
Catabasis (databases from Greek κατὰ-down and βαίνω-go) is an epic narrative of the hero's
journey and obstacles overcome in the Underworld or descent into the Lower Land. The Myth of
the descent is always a story where there is transgression and rebirth. In the 20th century, the
katabasis has been charged with further interpretation by representatives of psychoanalysis and
anthropology. According to Eliade and Jung, the descensus ad inferos not only can but must be
seen as a mythological narrative or archetype of the sinking into the Unconscious and its
subsequent Self-discovery and Self-creation. The Myth of the descent in Beckett's texts follows
the mythological structure of catabasis - the hero moves through some space (often a forest), but
usually, this journey is symbolic - a vertical descent into the abyss of Self-reflection as a mirror

image of the mythological process of initiation or attainment of individuation (after Jung): Hell,
Hades or the Lower Earth are transformed into enclosed spaces or something resembling a post-
apocalyptic nightmare, sometimes into the character's "skull box." Catabasis is central to the
Trilogy novels but is also present in Beckett's later fiction. The liminal state between Life and
Death is a constant characteristic of his characters, who are overwhelmed by an abiding sense of
selflessness and unbornness, an idea the author "borrows" from a lecture by C. Г. Jung.
6. 4. Demythologization
The journey into the world of the dead from “The Divine Comedy” becomes in Beckett's texts its
mirror Other. The course of historical events in the 20th century and their aftermath modify the
nine circles of Hell into the horror of the subject doomed to inner exile and social disharmony
and inhabiting an absurd world that has lost its rational foundations. The myth of the descent in
Beckett is demythologized and is devoid of the rebirth and uplifting ending of catabasis, because
for 20th-century man Nothingness is in the bosom of Being, at its core (Sartre).
Demythologization occurs at different levels. Beckett replaces theocentrism with
anthropocentrism, the epic battles of the heroes with metaphysical quests that paint a picture of
the ontological alienation of the subject living in the postmodern age. In Beckett's drama and
prose, the mythological encounter between Good and Evil, between Eros and Thanatos, is
reduced and reduced to a parody picture or self-ironic confessions as a result of the poisonous
genius of the times in the science of misery. Unlike the epic battles of mythic heroes, those of
Beckett's characters are everyday impersonal and petty. The author imposes ritualized behavioral
patterns on them while at the same time depriving them of the value system that underlies rituals.
Beckett's men are Dante's neutrals of the 20th century-those who have never done either good or
evil, the willless and the indifferent- their sin is passivity. Beckett creates the myth of the
postmodern man- The Unhuman. The hero's victory, which ends the myth of the descent, is
transformed in his texts into an endless failure. The catharsis of the Self, the tragic and the
sublime, the deep purifying suffering, the transcendent, which the text of “The Divine Comedy”
implicitly carries are reduced by Beckett to a risus purus- in a bloodless, amputated catabasis.
The risus purus in Beckett's work is the laughter, which ironizes the haves and have-nots, the
sublimity and suffering of human fate, and is an expression of pleasure and pain - which is the

essence of humor. This is the risus purus, the highest laughter, the laughter that mocks at
laughter, that mocks at misery, the joyless laughter.
7. The phenomenon "Waiting for Godot"
7.1. Boredom and Hope "Waiting for Godot"
The phenomenon of waiting or expecting (Godot) is a vivid expression of two of the main issues
that emerged as central and fundamental in the search for philosophy and art of thе 20th century
and which continue to be reflected this day: these are "time" and "the Self" experiencing this time
in a unique and specific way. These are the two sides of the great theme in the cultural life of
Europe over the past century: the crisis of personal identity. Waiting is the topos of the meeting
of two opposing existential categories - boredom versus hope - the most powerful and
intoxicating medicine against the meaninglessness of existence. At the core of both beats the
temporality of man. Beckett puts on one side of the scale of life "the endless boredom of living,
the tedium of things that happen or do not happen, the terror of a world that is shaking and the
noise of time that batters the delicate feelings that are born of the thrill that makes us strangers to
ourselves" and on the other side – Waiting and Hope that goes with it, which is our intuitive
knowledge of the inviolable meaning of life, of its deep and mysterious origin: "And we are
blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing
alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot ... “(Beckett, Waiting for Godot)
The Waiting (for Godot) is mythic - a ritual promise of the revelation of a Secret and Salvation,
the going Beyond. There is also in the expectation a bounce from the possible and a grounding in
the actual, for which the Waiting waits for. In Waiting the possible is drawn into the actual
precisely from and towards the latter." Beckett places on the scales of Being the futility and
boredom, the crisis of the Self, the dramatic anxiety of man rooted in his temporality in
opposition to the inexorable light of hope, tinged by the resilient characteristics of Homo ludens.
7.2. Boredom

Boredom presupposes subjectivity, in other words, self-consciousness: the Self must perceive
itself as an individual seeking meaning - in the world and in itself. Without this longing for
meaning it cannot arise because it is the signified of its loss, the sense of the futility of all effort,
and the lack of a transcendent center. The man possessed by boredom loses himself, comes face
to face with the unnamable Nothing, for it is not only an intrinsic state but also an existentially
colored one, conditioned by the world around us. To illustrate the theme at hand, we will recall
Schopenhauer's interpretation of the Pandora myth, which says that at the bottom of the box,
boredom -not Hope- remains. For Beckett as for the German philosopher the pendulum of human
life swings between two opposing points - suffering, which is the window to reality, and
boredom, which is much more terrible than it, because it is the most enduring of all evils. He
thinks that instead of constructing utopias, contemporary authors should immerse themselves in
the "aesthetics of boredom". For Heidegger human existence are a first and foremost concern,
especially with how to alleviate the flight from ourselves. Existential situations such as horror
and boredom are a kind of counteraction insofar as in them Dasein is directed towards itself and
not the world. In the situation of boredom we are completely immersed in the present, it swirls
around the Self, "removing" the past and the future and covering the entire time horizon. And the
more encompassing it is, the more obvious and profound is the temporality in which we reside,
and the void that communicates itself in the space of boredom is our sadness for ourselves.
For the third kind of boredom that Heidegger describes(it is atemporal - de Profundis), Beckett's
characters are exemplary. In it, time is not manifest but becomes a vast expanding Void, a
Nothing. It is no longer present in the past-present-future coordinate system, and that is why this
"profound" boredom "reveals" the phenomenon of time in its true essence.
7.3. The hope of Waiting for Godot. Stylistics and mechanisms of Inspiration.

It is an undeniable fact that in the European cultural tradition Beckett's drama “Waiting for
Godot” has become a symbol of absolute waiting. The Spatio-temporal dimensions in the drama
are blurred because they are not placed in any coordinate system: the day can end without any
notice, time does not pass and the place is somewhere on Earth, the characters are memoryless of
their past and forget even their names. The chronotope in the drama is a null sign - it has no
referent and is sustained only in the topos of endless waiting. By situating his characters in the
topos of waiting, erasing Spatio-temporal dimensions, and creating a mythological present tense,
Beckett cancels out the time- cancer and the threat of the Other who steals from my existence and
fills this new atemporal dimensionality with hope. Behind the catatonic stupor of his characters
smolders a continual expectation (for Godot)-a unique temporal topos bearing the most powerful
manifestation of life and longing for salvation in all of Beckett's work.
7.4. Beckett's humor
The majority of critics, including famous and iconic names such as Blanchot or Adorno, ignore
the true role of Beckett's humor or compare its irony to the idea of the Eternal Return.
Nietzsche's laughter is the laughter of affirmation and ecstasy while Beckett turns the comic
ambiguity of language against itself to reveal the absurdity of human life and at the same time to
compromise the sense of Non-being and despair, a process we might describe with Hegel's notion
of Aufhebung (preservation by abolition, construction by destruction).
The humor in Beckett's work is on an idiomatic level, it is found in the fine dust of detail and its
purpose is nothing less than to attack the core of darkness. It also proves Bakhtin's thesis that the
dialogic quality of parody and irony is built on the fact that they hint at an internal debate
between the ridiculed and the ridiculing voice.
7.5. Hope
It is crucial to note that Hope as a concept is absent from most critical analyses of
Beckett`s art or is only of interest insofar as its absence is asserted. My disagreement with all
such interpretations is that it neglects the keyword that Beckett himself proposes to be used
by anyone interpreting his texts - namely perhaps and that almost all forget the exceptional place
of Hope in the cultural-temporal forms of Christianity with which Beckett associatively plays not

only in the drama Waiting for Godot but throughout his work. Critics seem to pass over this fact
with ease and move only on one side of this liminal time-space - the Waiting (for Godot),
ignoring Beckett's complex strategic move: his characters exist between Hope and Boredom and
the substance of boredom is time - hence, by "eliminating" his characters' sense of time-passage
and locating them in a mythic present - boredom loses its potential possibility of manifestation
and is replaced by the hope of expectation.
Between Boredom and Hope of Waiting are layered all the colors and shades of the
subject's temporality, and while boredom is the most elemental form because in it time is timeless
and memoryless, hope is a kind of additive time, colored by meaning-making impulses because
of its implicitly embedded project of future happening. To hope (endlessly) for the coming of
Godot is not merely to wait and believe that you will be saved by a merciful God or will step into
a true and ideal world where your sins will be forgiven and justice will reign. It is an answer to
the question "What do we do?” And at leats two of Beckett's personages know the answer: “We
are waiting for Godot to come."
7.6. In the fissure of time: The unique kairos "Waiting for Godot"
In this chapter the aim is to be proven that waiting (for Godot) as a temporal and signifying
structure is unique to Beckett's work because it is there and only there that the author takes his
characters out of the timelessness of their existence and involves them in a kairological whirl that
inverts the meanings and messages of the drama.
7.6.1 Stérēsis
It will be drawn upon the commentary of Aristotle's notion of στέρησις (deprivation) made by
Heidegger, who used it to show that the structure of στέρησις entails a privilege of non)Being,.
The philosopher makes στέρησις an important starting topos for achieving the authenticity of
Dasein through kairos. For him, the structure of στέρησις implicitly contains and leads to a
movement of what kairos reveals to Dasein - its authenticity and Selfhood. The final section will
argue why the drama “Waiting for Godot” is unique in Beckett's oeuvre: here, for the first and
last time he involves his characters in a kairological temporal structure and through it transforms
time from a monster of doom and damnation into salvation.

If we examine the drama “Waiting for Godot” through Aristotle's category of stérēsis we arrive
at the following intriguing observations: both Didi and Gogo are deprived of memory, of personal
past, of memories, of the future; Pozzo is deprived of sight, and Lucky is deprived of freedom.
They are all deprived of Being. The drama is devoid of all the characteristics it should possess as
a literary form defined by Aristotle in “ The Poetics” - chronotope, hero-antihero, prologue-
climax-dissolution, catharsis.“Waiting for Godot” is, therefore (not) a drama, about (not)
characters with (not) being, whose (not) action takes place in (not) time and (not) place.
In his essay "On the Essence and Concept of φύσις, Aristotle, Physics B, 1," Heidegger also
comments on his concept of στέρησις. For him, it is not simply absence. For the philosopher, it is
in the clash between Chronos and kairos that the authenticity of the Self manifests itself because
στέρησις is the category through which kairos unfolds and reveals itself and the latter is the Being
of Self hidden in Non-being. The time for Godot's waiting is this gap, this black hole in time -
where Chronos and kairos meet: a liminal topos of a timeless present. In the drama the author
cuts off one of the heads of the two-headed monster Chronos- that of damnation: he takes away
its objective power through stérēsis, opening up space for kairos to appear. He facilitates this
emergence and manifestation - so impossible and difficult in his work - through the project of
future salvation posited and the choice of Beckett's characters to realize this possibility. And
Dasein, according to Heidegger, is what can be.
7.6.2 Kairos. The Waiting for Godot as kairos?
Having undergone metamorphoses over the millennia, involving at least ten meanings, today the
concept of kairos functions primarily in its meaning of the unique, singular, proper, intensely
normative point in space and time when something can be done.
Most critics believe that one cannot speak of kairos in Beckett's texts because the temporal
structure in him is a sequence of ordinary moments in which the preceding one is questioned,
undervalued, canceled, or forgotten. This conclusion is true but there is one crucial chain-
breaking exception to this valid rule for Beckett's work and that is kairos- the time of waiting for
Godot. This statement cannot be refuted by arguments such as the one that expectation can go on
forever - Beckett freezes time and shrinks it to a pulsating point. It is at this point that the

weaving together of past, present and anticipated future is seen and it is only there that the writer
offers us the uniquely paradoxical dance of Chronos and kairos: clinging to and flowing into each
other, negating and complementing, simultaneously enriching and detracting from their
significance. In the fissure of time, where Beckett's wanderers await their salvation, monotonous,
dull moments swell with transcendent charge, filled with a future project. This surplus of reality
(surplus as Adorno calls it), which is the Waiting for Godot is not its sunset, "where, killing the
subject, it becomes dead." And if this view of Adorno's is valid for the rest of Beckett's work it is
not valid solely for the time when Beckett's two wanderers wait for their salvation, waiting for
Godot, which gives me ample reason to define it as kairos. Similarly, the time of waiting
suspends and rejects the objective sense of time passing. Its uniqueness exists due to its
difference from Chronos, but this difference only manifests itself in the interruptions, the blank
spaces. This dividing place, this gap in time that is full of intensity and that Adorno identifies as
"the smallest difference" (die kleinste Differenz) within the negative-between Non-being and
Rest-Beckett's ingenious conceit transforms into kairos, eliminating Newtonian time through
forgetfulness and the characters' distorted memory.
The Waiting for Godot is the awaited and wished-for salvation, it is salvation itself par excellence
- the categorical imperative of Beckett's characters, who existentially withstand their
disintegration only in this (in)utterly paradoxical kairos moment, because of its relativity to the
End. The anticipation for Godot is a metaphor for being alive, it is the calm gazing into the void,
for ”when one acts in a kairos moment without even realizing it, one set in motion a new
chronology. In this breakthrough new historicity is born, something new manifests."
8. The Endgame
8.1. Resolution: Zero. Hopes: Zero.
What happens to Beckett`s personages if Hope and Waiting fall away without something
to replace them and when waiting for Godot in the open space under a tree somewhere and
sometime is followed by the claustrophobic doom of the drama " Endgame"?
The Space without sky and time without depth - this will be the theme of interest and analysis in
the following chapters because in ‘Endgame” the End is postponed. Beckett refuses it. His

characters are never far enough away from horror, nor close enough to be spared. This is the end
of the game and it doesn't matter what other words we might substitute for the noun game - life,
world, person - because from this point on Beckett will indeed take away all the predicates before
the names subject and Being that can be semantically placed in the optimistic-bright range of the
language and become direct, illustrative, relentless, undisguised and obscenely declarative, even
brutal in his use of dark-melancholic symbolism. His great discovery as a technique and subject,
according to S. Cavell, is not the lack of meaning, but in its total, even totalitarian happening.
8.2. Attempts at signification
With ‘Endgame” Beckett inaugurated the kind of literary and dramatic character of whom
Bataille, commenting on another of his characters, would write that he is in some sense the
horizon to which the human show must eventually fade, veil itself in oblivion, or become aware
of its impotence. ( Bataille, Molloy’s Silence)
Any interpretation of “Endgame” cannot get around Adorno's famous essay “ Understanding
Endgame." Adorno sees it not so much as an implication of the existential "catastrophes" that the
Self undergoes in the new millennium but above all as a consequence of the Holocaust. In his
view, Beckett's drama provokes the viewer with Kafkaesque symbolism because nothing is what
it is supposed to be or has been and everything becomes signs of interiority but with an absent
signifier. Adorno also defines it as the most adequate reaction to art and literature in the post-
World War II era. The majority of interpretations of ‘Endgame” and critical analyses that have
appeared since the play's publication regard it as the most evocative text in 20th-century
dramaturgy about the end of the world and the existence of man, an epitaph on the grave of the
last man, written on the last day of the world's existence.
8.3. Between Scylla and Charybdis
In "Endgame" desire is mortified and there Beckett presents a "negative eternity". In contrast to
"Waiting for Godot” here the waiting is doom. It is waiting-death and, to stay in Barthes's
terminology, in a third phase-that of abandonment and the absence of hope.

“Endgame" begins with dying in the hope of achieving any kind of existential meaning. Beckett
stretches the escape route from the liquidation of the subject to the point where it shrinks to "this
here" (dies da), whose abstractness, due to the loss of all qualities, expands ontological
abstraction ad absurdum. The lack of the characters' Spatio-temporal (concrete) availability is one
of the most powerful tools by which Beckett deprives them of all existential-ontological
constituents, respectively their personhood. “Endgame” is a drama about the Beyond - beyond
time, death, love and life, the human, the tragic, beyond any end, beyond any form. Beckett was
right when he said that in his work the horror is behind the form- not in the form."
This writer's revelation is one of many reasons for my resistance to the apocalyptic-tragic
unraveling of “Waiting for Godot” and especially “Endgame”, which "takes place in the zone of
indifference and indistinctness between inside and outside." Both dramas " are the poetic
testament - an implication of Beckett's metaphor of time as "the two-headed monster of
damnation and salvation" - the unmasked truth nestled between their deadly embrace:
“Endgame” - the Damnation, “Waiting for Godot” - the Salvation.
8.4. Mene. Tecel. Fares.
Beckett never refers superficially to the sacred texts. References and allusions to the Bible are
known to exist abundantly throughout his work. The result is - a vertical pull towards familiar
fields of meaning but also an achieved effect of entropy, where indicative signs play the role of
mediator between the idea of order and the idea of disjunction. Mepe. Tecel. Fares - these three
fatal words contain within them the drama of all human destinies, and Beckett whispers them in
our ear whenever we encounter his work, sometimes quietly, almost indistinguishable as sounds,
as in “Endgame” loud and clear.
The category of "stérēsis " which was given a special place in the analysis of “Waiting for
Godot” expands its scope in “Endgame” and now we have to face the absence and emptiness.
Absent is the subject itself.
My aspiration here is to enter into the web of coded meanings and to make a cut - horizontal and
vertical -of the tools that a genius artist provides to prepare us for an encounter with emptiness,
meaninglessness, or human suffering. To be able to glimpse the "fun of misery" that Beckett's

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