Abstract

It is in the formal procedures and their rigorous logic, not in any contingent eventuality in Beckett’s life or acts, humanly fascinating as they may be, that we must look for the political, ethical, and even aesthetic implications of his oeuvre. Politics is above all the domain of expression and of representation, undergirded alike by the notion of an integral voice that gives utterance (outerance) to an inward essence, whether conceived as interest or identity. Neither what he experienced nor what he expresses gives us a way into the political and ethical implications of Beckett’s forms. Beckett takes the famous “formality” of bourgeois freedoms at their word, evacuating both freedom and duty of any content and reducing progress and development to the single, recurring word “on.” Likewise, the bodiless voice that imprints Beckett’s plays from Krapp on is not the guarantor of the fullness of the subject in its Mundigkeit, finding authentic expression of its inner essence in its utterance, but the manifestation of the lacuna inscribed by the “suffering of being” in the state-oriented formation of an ethical-political subject through aesthetic culture. The little syllable “on” that echoes though his work from Godot to Worstward Ho, which could be mistaken for a categorical imperative, nonetheless does not interpellate its auditor as ethical Subject; rather, it insists on bringing the subject face to face with its own thingliness, a thing for the thing that is this unowned voice buzzing in the ear.