Introduction: ‘I Only Have One Language; It Is Not Mine’ or Khôra & The Sovereign

Ensconced within another quote, the only textual fragment of Samuel Beckett’s work within Jacques Derrida’s published corpus appears in Clang. It is a quote from Molloy where the homonymous character discusses how he named his mother:

As this Element will show, it is appropriate that the literary and printed crossroads between these two authors takes place at a point where language, origin, and the maternal body coincide: the khôratic space. For it is the question of the literary, philosophical, writing, and/or written subject in front of the possibility of pronouncing its own origin that is at the heart of the modernist coincidence we can call ‘Beckett and Derrida’. This significant coincidence has been differently remarked, in the past couple of decades, by scholars such as Steven Connor, Nicholas Royle, Shane Weller, Anthony Uhlmann, Daniel Katz, and even Coetzee, who, in 2006, called it a ‘sympathetic vibration’ (Coetzee, Reference Coetzee and Beckett2006, xiii). Asja Szafraniec’s formidable comparative analysis of their oeuvres, Derrida, Beckett, and the Event of Literature (2007), is an obvious predecessor of – and interlocutor to – this Element. Its short epilogue connecting Derrida’s and Beckett’s desire for a writing beyond mastery was an initial point for this study. Nevertheless, even though it identifies some points of transaction, by focusing more on the philosophical reasons for Derrida’s ultimate dismissal of Beckett as an exemplary ‘literary event’, it disregards its own insights as to the exact nature of their positive ‘sympathetic vibration’ (Coetzee, Reference Coetzee and Beckett2006, xiii). Such a sympathy lies at the aforementioned zone or khôratic space, foundational surface and abyss where language, origin, and the maternal body coincide. Its importance appears – beyond a shared focus on the feminine/maternal body and on its links to the mother tongue and the writer’s self-created style – in the ways it opens up the question of the (male) sovereign subject in the second half of the twentieth century. It is precisely this question that, from works like Richard Begam’s Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity (Reference Begam1996), up to Daniela Caselli’s Insufferable: Beckett, Gender and Sexuality (Reference Caselli2023) – passing through many other recent studies focused on posthumanism, embodiment, and the Anthropocene – points to Beckett’s and Derrida’s importance as critics of phallogocentrism as a schema founded on a supreme, total, and ultimate totalitarian subject; or, in other words, as deconstructors of the closure of Western metaphysics. While all the previous and contemporary works resonating the vibration between Beckett and Derrida examine or underscore indirectly an angle of their shared space of questioning, this Element proposes to focus directly on one of their and our most urgent ones: khôra or the m/other space of chorology as the unthought counterpart and ground of the sovereign modern subject and its logic of presence, power, and oppression, or of what Derrida (Reference Derrida2000, 47) called Bemächtigungstrieb (from the German bemächtigen: to seize, possess, overpower). This chorology facing sovereignty and totalitarian drives is ‘the différantial space that lies between modernism and antimodernism’ described by Begam (Reference Begam1996, 7), the space where the modern subject confronts its genetic, metaphysic, sociopolitical, and literary aporias. It is also the ‘breach’ or the space ‘prior to separation’ that Trezise (Reference Trezise1990, 28) saw in his Derridean reading of Beckett’s impossibility to express, as a shared critique of the sovereignty of the phenomenological subject, or of the power to express by completely separating itself from the khôratic ground.Footnote ² Therefore, in order to begin to listen to this sympathetic vibration in its complex khôratic space, and since khôra designates as well a region or land, we must look at the biographical and cultural context of both authors, while focusing on the questions of their languages, origins, and cultural identities.

Born in El Biar, in French Algeria, on 15 July 1930, Jacques ‘Jackie’ Derrida (named after Jackie Coogan, the child actor in Chaplin’s 1921 The Kid) experienced the complicated upbringing of a Francophone Jewish Algerian ‘Maghrébin’, a French citizen of the colony of Algeria, growing up during World War II. Even before he was born, his origin had a complex linguistic and cultural dimension since the Derrida family had emigrated from Spain to France before 1870, when Algerian Jews received French nationality through the Crémieux Decree. Years later, Derrida would talk about the trauma of having lost his French nationality (even before he had visited France) as an Algerian Jew for two years during the occupation: ‘I lost it for years without having another. You see, not the least one’ (Derrida, Reference Derrida1998, 15). Having not learnt Hebrew, nor Berber or Arabic, let alone Spanish, but only the language of the coloniser, French, together with French mainland culture, Derrida described his complicated ownership of this given language with the statement: ‘I only have one language; it is not mine’ (Derrida, Reference Derrida1998, 1). While he characterised his relation to French in this way during a conference in April Reference Derrida and Attridge1992 at Louisiana State University (in a text that would become Le monolinguisme de l’autre; 1996), he had already described such a pseudo-ownership of his own language, in 1989, precisely in the context of a question regarding Samuel Beckett.

When asked on this occasion by his interviewer, Derek Attridge, if he was planning to write on Beckett one day (since he had already mentioned Beckett in another interview; Kearny, Reference Kearney1995), Derrida answered by saying that, due to an extreme proximity with Beckett that he not only felt, but also wanted to feel (‘to whom I would like to feel myself very close; but also too close’), it had been too difficult for him to write on Beckett’s works (Derrida, Reference Derrida and Attridge1992, 60). Then he added:

By confessing this proximity and this shared complicated relation and pseudo-ownership of the French language, Derrida was referencing Beckett’s own linguistic and cultural journey as an Irish-born, French-speaking writer, a descendant of a Huguenot family, who didn’t speak the ‘national language’ of his country of birth,Footnote ³ yet could speak Italian and German, and chose French apparently not out of an attempt to master a foreign culture (or to restore a lost familial language), but instead as a paradoxical effort to reduce, if not to lose, mastery over his own writerly activity. Years before he adopted French as his main writerly language after the war, in his 1929 contribution to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (the transition adjacent collective volume in support of Joyce’s Work in Progress, soon to be titled Finnegans Wake), Beckett had already expressed a dissatisfaction with the English language and its abstractions: ‘Mr Joyce has desophisticated language. And it is worth remarking that no language is so sophisticated as English. It is abstracted to death’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Cohn1984a, 28). The question, at this point, for Beckett, seemed to be how to continue Joyce’s labour of ‘desophistication’ but without being engulfed by it – a fear expressed at the beginning of the same essay: ‘And now here I am, with my handful of abstractions […] and the prospect of self-extension in the world of Mr Joyce’s Work in Progress’ (19).Footnote ⁴ In a similar way as Derrida would express it decades later in the only book of his that inhabited Beckett’s personal library, Ulysse gramophone (1987), Beckett knew that Joyce’s experiment – as valid and necessary as it had been – had gone as far as possible not in spite of but rather because of its mastery and voraciousness, namely its bemächtigen. As he expressed it to James Knowlson, two years after Ulysse gramophone had come out:

This notion of Joyce’s project as a literary enterprise of ‘addition’ resonates thus with Derrida’s description of Joyce’s oeuvre, in Ulysse gramophone, as a ‘literature of burden [somme] as one speaks of a “beast of burden”, literature of summons [sommation], moment of the debt’ (Derrida, Reference Derrida, Mitchell and Slote2013, 69; Derrida, Reference Derrida1987b, 119). As a consequence, the opposite experiment, a literary exercise like Beckett’s, based on impoverishment, lack of knowledge, and taking away, could be called – as Derrida agreed, answering to Attridge – essentially ‘deconstructive’, if not ‘deconstruction’ itself. What is more, Beckett’s chosen adoption of French could also be seen as a way to, through distancing, deconstruct by defamiliarisation his own language and cultural identity (see Dennis, Reference Dennis and Mével2019). As a matter of fact, both Beckett and Derrida saw their writerly projects – and, with them, the future of literature and/or philosophy – not in addition, incorporation, comprehensiveness, and totalities. Instead, they saw them in subtraction, reduction, or deconstruction of the encyclopaedic edifices and the ‘metaphysical assumptions behind Western thought’ (Coetzee, Reference Coetzee and Beckett2006, xiii), literature, and philosophy. The reasons why they both saw this need of subtraction and de-structuration lie not only in their personal experiences, but also in the cultural context they shared: World War II and its aftermaths in Europe and beyond. In other words, their aesthetic, literary, and philosophical enterprises were not only determined by and directed against a purely literary-philosophical tradition. They were also marked by their historical and cultural circumstances as ‘immigrant’ authors who adopted French as their language (one after a colonial imposition, the other as a literary and experiential choice), while they were immersed in the philosophical but also experiential questions and aporias of the French, European, and Western traditions that reached a crisis, and finally their nadir, with the Holocaust (see Salisbury, Reference Salisbury2015, 9).

Seen in this context, Beckett’s statements in the famous German letter to Axel Kaun of 1937 regarding, first English, and then language in general, reveal a preoccupation not only with his own developing aesthetic but also with an outdated tradition in need of revision, if not destruction. Or, as Beckett expressed it: ‘it does not suffice if the game loses some of its sacred solemnity. It should stop’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett, Dow Fehsenfeld and Overbeck2009, 520). Accordingly, what at first seems an artistic necessity, or even the personal impossibility to do something in an official, formal, or normal way, quickly reveals itself as an ethical imperative for any contemporary writer, a command to misuse language, until what sustains or lies below it – that is to say, its foundations or reason – comes through:

By linking grammar and style with a Biedermeier swimsuit and with the imperturbability of a gentleman, Beckett is remarking here not only the conditions of officialness and propriety demanded by the cultural and literary traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is also underlining the sphere of ‘authenticity’ as that which is ‘naturally’ dictated by cultural and, more significantly, biological origins (for example, it is natural for a writer to write in his own mother tongue, English). While this comment on contemporary culture could be seen as a Beckettian instantiation of the critique of the inauthenticity of being that Heidegger called das Man (‘the “they”’) (see Heidegger, Reference Heidegger2008), Beckett’s questioning of the modern subject will go further, since it will seek to erode not only authentic normality and officialness, but also the notion of authenticity or the proper itself in all spheres (see Katz, Reference Katz1999, no. 6, 198).

As we know, such an examination of the authentic, the proper, and the natural, together with the concomitant dangers of their intertwining in the desire for full, sovereign presence and meaning, characterises Derrida’s work from the start. Heidegger’s Destruktion of metaphysics was a model (in conjunction with other problematics, like the nature of the sign in Husserlian phenomenology, or the notion of origin in Rousseau) for Derrida’s initial conception of deconstruction, as well as a constant reference in all of his subsequent work. Thus, given Derrida’s continuous engagement with Heidegger’s oeuvre, and Beckett’s relation with the main champion of Heidegger in France during the war years, Jean Beaufret, and his mingling with the intellectual circles of Les Temps modernes where Heidegger’s work was discussed, I agree with Rodney Sharkey’s perception of Heidegger’s work as a main connector between Beckett’s and Derrida’s oeuvres – especially when conceived as deconstructive struggles against fascism and the worst of Western culture (Sharkey, Reference Sharkey2010, 411).

Derrida’s philosophical and writerly investigation of this essential complicity between the desire for presence and for the authentic went through different stages and questions throughout his life. As we will see, these different stages have thematic and formal correspondences with Beckett’s own developments, remarking thus different facets of their ‘sympathetic vibration’. If their biggest coincidence is that, as Szafraniec puts it, they ‘both deconstruct the self-present human subject’ and ‘institute the delay of self-presence as the source of the authorial “I”’ (Szafraniec, Reference Szafraniec2007, 118), such an achievement is not a simple action, performed conceptually only once. In other words, this shared deconstruction and affirmation of deferral and difference involves a multiplicity of movements of decentring, deflection, and analysis, affecting not only the subject and its purported sovereignty, but also our languages, conceptions of origin, and the bodies through and in which we are born, live, speak, and die. Further, the ‘sympathetic vibration’ of their deconstruction affects not only the private, subjective experience of the writer and reader. By questioning some of the basic tenets of Western philosophy and thought (the teleology of discourse and life, the limits of the sovereign subject, the world, history, and of any delimited totality), their projects also examine and question – in different yet resonating performative manners – our collective ways of being, as well as the assumed naturally given conditions of thought, art, and expression. It is this multifaceted complexity of their critiques of Western cultures that drives the different angles of this Element, centred nevertheless on the encounter in the two oeuvres between the overpowering sovereign and the khôratic space where it/he rises and dies.

Given the complex intertwining of the questions of subject, language, and origin in their work, it is unsurprising that both Beckett and Derrida placed the mothers and the question of maternity and birth at the centre of their projects. As proof of this centrality, there is not only Beckett’s famous affirmation to MacGreevy in 1937 – same year as the letter to Axel Kaun – saying: ‘I am what her savage loving has made me’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett, Dow Fehsenfeld and Overbeck2009, 552), or even Geoffrey Thompson’s statement that the ‘key to understanding Beckett […] was to be found in his relationship with his mother’ (qtd in Knowlson, Reference Knowlson1996, 172). More importantly, figures of May Beckett, as well as of other semi-anonymous mothers, constantly haunt Beckett’s corpus, confirming his statement, from 1948 to Georges Duthuit, that, for his life and for his work, he might need no other eyes but his mother’s:

In the case of Derrida, as he expressed it in the most literary and personal text of his oeuvre, ‘Circumfession’, not only the figure of his mother, but also the temporal coincidence between her dying and his writing of this confessional text, becomes central. Linking himself to Saint Augustine, who also wrote through the mourning of his own mother (and a copy of whose Confessions remained in Beckett’s library until the end), Derrida also considers the possibility, like Beckett, that his eyes – also weeping – could amalgamate with his mother’s, and thus allow for a substitution of him for her, similar to Molloy’s:Footnote ⁵

Thus, with their writerly and deconstructive projects essentially linked to their own mothers, births, and notions of maternity, it is neither a coincidence nor just anecdotal evidence that Beckett’s most important writerly ‘revelation’ – what will determine his own path and literary idiom of subtraction against Joyce’s masterwork of addition – happened at his dying mother’s room: ‘Krapp’s vision was on the pier at Dún Laoghaire; mine was in my mother’s room. Make that clear once and for all’ (qtd in Knowlson, Reference Knowlson1996, 319).

If, as Jean-Michel Rabaté writes in Beckett and Sade, the biggest dream for an artist is to give birth to themselves, becoming their own creator (Rabaté, Reference Rabaté2020, 40), or, as Angela Moorjani exclaims – following Ehrenzweig – ‘the birthing process is the central myth of artistic creation’ (Moorjani, Reference Moorjani1982, 138), this dream, as Derrida pointed out in ‘La veilleuse’ (Derrida, Reference Derrida, Mitchell and Slote2013, 100), does not arise without the realisation of its annihilating consequence: the effacing not only of the artist’s first birth, but with it, also of their mother, and potentially, of maternity itself. This violent consequence points out to a complication already present in the modern notion of the sovereign subject, namely if the subject must be conceived as sovereign (absolutely independent, self-sufficient, and so on), how much of his sovereignty (since we have not yet finished deconstructing the links between the universal and the masculine) is realised, or comes to be, at the expense of that against which he affirms itself, or of that against which he defines his ‘purity’ or ‘totality’?Footnote ⁶ What is more, how much of this sovereignty is constantly threatened by the realisation of its delusive character, given that, ultimately, in modernity, no absolute divide, limit, or separation – as Trezise shows – is possible between subjects, objects, their environments, and all the interstices, thresholds, and abysses in between; or, to utilise a cherished figure and simile in Beckett’s work, since, ultimately, there is no absolute divide between Dives and Lazarus, or ‘from the unseen to the seen’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006a, 167)?Footnote ⁷

As we can expect, such questions of sovereignty and dreams of purity bring us back to the shared political and historical context of Beckett and Derrida. As the growing recent scholarship on the political and historical dimensions of Beckett’s works,Footnote ⁸ together with the increasing interest on what Beckett’s oeuvre can tell us about gender and ecocriticism questionsFootnote ⁹ show, far from being an abstract modernist instantiation of ‘l’art pour l’art’, Beckett’s literature is deeply engaged with modernity, modern history and society, and, particularly, with their aporias. Similarly, even if Derrida’s early works were originally seen as ‘metaphysical’, his purportedly ‘ethical turn’ in the 1980s and 1990s did not mark a new opening to ethics and moral questions. When read carefully, we can see since the beginning a Derridean preoccupation with philosophical questions of real ethical consequences: questions of purity, of secondariness, of otherness, of sexual difference, and so on. Thus, the ‘sympathetic vibration’ or shared deconstructive perspectives of Beckett’s and Derrida’s writings lie precisely in a series of similar stylistic and thematic strategies whereby thinking realises the limits and frames of the Western tradition that reached a critical point in the middle of the twentieth century. Consequently, if the personal, contextual, and historical coincidences between the two authors can reveal us something, it is precisely how the question of the person or subject – as it was understood through our modern tradition and its male Cartesian avatars – cannot be thoroughly thought without an extreme experiential questioning of the philosophical and literary frames of said tradition. Ultimately, it is precisely such an experiential and performative critical strategy that accounts for the difficulty of both Beckett’s and Derrida’s works, and for their necessity.

1 General Writing

2 Khôra: The Space of Genesis

Nowadays, in the era of the Anthropocene, the study of space in Beckett is understandably exploding. With two volumes in this Element series, Anna McMullan (Reference McMullan2021) and Mark Byron (Reference Byron2020), and recent studies like Boulter (Reference Boulter2020), Dennis (Reference Dennis2021), James Little (Reference Little2020), and Anthony Cordingley (Reference Cordingley2018), where space as a traditional philosophical category is prominent, Beckett’s work appears to be a literary instantiation of how Derrida described différance in the homonymous conference of 1968, ‘spacing, the becoming-space of time, or the becoming-time of space’ (Derrida, Reference Derrida1982, 13; 14), or as ‘Text for Nothing VIII’ describes it: ‘time has turned into space and there will be no more time’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006d, 320). However, as the different angles to the study of space in Beckett show, spaces here are not uniform, albeit they are all radical, or, at least, radically originary, showing ‘the multiple surface manifestations of an abysmal deep structure whose laws, whose relation to meaning are unfathomable’ (Moorjani, Reference Moorjani1982, 64).

To return to our earlier analogy between Beckett’s multiple beginnings in texts like How It Is, Waiting for Godot, Not I, Play, and so on, and those analysed by Derrida in Hegel’s philosophical project, we can briefly examine a certain proto-space in the pre-beginning of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, its preface or Vorrede, and compare it with some Beckettian genetic spaces. When, in this preface, Hegel is explaining the power of the Understanding as analysis, he describes it in contrast with an unbroken circle, and, after identifying such power with death, he spatialises the latter by making it into a passage or space through which Spirit must go in order to, accomplishing the turn, find itself. Here is the passage:

This spatialisation of death is reinforced through the choice of the German term Verwüstung for devastation, a word that, like the Latin term devastatio – which entails the term vastus – includes the term for desert, Wüste.

As we can see, it is the contradictory trait of a broken-yet-reunited-circle before the beginning that links Hegel’s devastation or desertification (Verwüstung) to Beckett’s own inaugural post-apocalyptic deserts and desertic spaces. What is more, the discursive space itself of this devastation in Hegel, as prologue or before-discourse (Vor-rede), underscores space as a seminal and genetic dimension. In other words, such a devastation or radical emptying, being the original space of beginning, has no previous space to take place. Thus, as a space for space, it can only be what Plato called the third genre of beings (the first being the Idea and the second the sensible world), khôra: ‘Khôra everlasting, admitting no destruction, but affording place for all things that come into being’ (Plato, Reference Plato and Burnet1903, 52a–b). As it appears in the Timaeus, khôra is a kind of cosmogonic surface or originary receptacle taking place – as a sort of place – at the utmost origin of the cosmos, between form and matter, or between what is modelled (matter) and the model (Idea). Like Schelling’s Grund – which he developed, probably influenced by his early engagement with the Timaeus – hovering between an original ground or Urgrund, an effacing of the ground or Ungrund, and an abyss or Abgrund, khôra is the kind of surface or pre-surface before any inscription, which, aporetically, cannot be imagined without the future perfect (‘it will have been marked’) of its later inscriptions.Footnote ¹⁹ As the discursive structure of the Timaeus shows, given its aporetic status, it is very difficult to write on the subject of khôra, and whoever does it, as Plato does (through multiple voices in the dialogue), needs to – according to Derrida – resemble it in some way, if they want to raise this surface enough for us to perceive it:

In his own conception of an impossible original, originary, or first trace, Derrida links khôra, as this third genre of being as the originary or pre-originary place, surface, or receptacle, to Artaud’s notion of the subjectile, an aesthetic pre-surface before any trait (plastic or discursive) can take place. Through this connection, he underlines not only the desire of the artist to remake or give birth to themselves, but also their divine or demiurgic trait as manipulators of khôras or proto-surfaces of inscription and impression. At the same time, he also emphasises Plato’s own description of the supposition of khôra as a ‘bastard reasoning’ (νόθος) (52b), underscoring the necessary fictional character of such a presupposition (of the ‘pre’ of all positions), and giving us, in this way – through this recognition of the agnosic and structural necessity of khôra or the subjectile as proto-spaces – an inkling as to why Beckett’s own idioms are inseparable from a proto-topology.Footnote ²¹

As we know, khôra is not only translated as ‘place’ or ‘receptacle’, but also as ‘mother’ and ‘wet nurse’ or nourrice. As Paul Stewart and Mary Bryden, among others, have shown us, if Beckett’s wandering characters are looking for and constantly finding something, these are receptacles (ditches, urns, jars, pots, and so on), and mother figures or wet nurses (Ruth-Rose, Lousse, Mag, Marguerite-Madeleine, Lulu/Anna, Molloy’s mother, Mag, and so on). In other words, in Beckett’s work there is a complicated, albeit essential, obsession with the mother as the place or receptacle of pre-origin.Footnote ²² This is why, as we suggested earlier, The Unnamable’s most important and invariably first question is neither for the subject of the text, ‘Who now?,’ nor for its time, ‘When now?’ (both questions switching places between the two versions), but rather for its place: ‘Where now?’Footnote ²³ Or, as the unnamable underlines it, close to the end of the novel, after the voice promises ‘No more stories from this day forth’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006b, 378): ‘seeking indefatigably, in the world of nature, the world of man, where is nature, where is man, where are you, what are you seeking, who is seeking, seeking who you are, supreme aberration, where you are’ (379; my emphasis). In the original French version, this topological question becomes even more philosophical, even Kantian. Here, nature has lost its ‘world’, ‘the world of man’ is transformed into the faculty of ‘the Understanding’ (l’entendement), and the ancient Greek resounding term for ‘being’, ‘on’ (ὤν), has brought up its universal place, effacing the particularity of ‘you’: ‘cherchant toujours, dans la nature, dans l’entendement, sans savoir quoi, sans savoir où, où est la nature, où est l’entendement, qu’est-ce qu’on cherche, qui est-ce qui cherche, cherchant qui on est, dernier égarement, où on est’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett1992, 164–5; my emphasis).

It is precisely this search for the originary place that, in the amalgamation of the mother and the pre-originary place of production or receptacle as khôra, makes the unnamable proffer, in ‘the town of [its] youth’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006b, 385), his matricidal desire: ‘I’m looking for my mother to kill her, I should have thought of that a bit earlier, before being born’ (385). At the same time, this amalgamation of the space of origin and the birthing or mothering body is what conditions all the aporetic configurations of the death/birth identification in the oeuvre, such as the ‘not-having-been-born’, the ‘birth as death’, ‘astride of a grave’, ‘the wombtomb’, and so on. As a remark again of the logic of the broken circle in search for its centre, this murdering/suicidal search for the originary place becomes the search for the ending place where I, as the narrative voice, am myself impossible – that is, the place of my own death. In other words, through the mother/son and the origin/end identification, the matricide is a suicide – and vice versa. As Derrida explains: ‘Matricide forms a pair, so to speak, with infanticide. And since it is a child who tries to kill his mother, the matricide-infanticide leads on to suicide’ (Derrida, Reference Derrida, Mitchell and Slote2013, 93).

Going back to the particularity of Beckett’s idiom as a textual system that puts into play a khôra or khôratic spaces, we can ask: how exactly does this resemblance between the text (and narrative voice) and khôra as original surface complicate any discourse on or story about it? In other words, how does such a structural and thematic amalgamation between text and genetic surface affect the determination of the text’s or discourse’s genre, since a discourse on khôra, or a chorology, is necessarily a genetic discourse on the origin of the origin itself and, consequently, on the original lack of distinction between genres, genders, characters, and determinations in this primordial ground? By giving figure to this primordial ground with the mud in How It Is, Beckett remarks not only the putatively first biological environment or life’s genetic space, but also, in the indetermination of the words’ origin (given that the novel presents itself as a long citation with an undetermined source), life’s indistinction from discourse as Logos, the indistinction of nature from technè, as well as that between all speaking beings from each other.

Given this ur-indistinction or originary confusion, Beckettian stories or discourses on the original ground, like How It Is, are, as Mark Byron asserts of Worstward Ho, a ‘literary cosmogony, a creation of a universe in language, but one subject to processes of geological erosion and agricultural accretion’ (Byron, Reference Byron2020, 54). The aporia of such a written cosmogony or chorology is that, by founding its own surface of inscription (or grounding its own ground like Company does, as Abbott suggests, as a ‘Möbius strip’; 11), it does not give priority (grounding force) to any particular ground or original surface: neither to the earth as geological world or as ground of agri-culture, nor to the page as surface of inscription of its own – and any possible – discourse, nor to pure empty astronomical space as the original place of the cosmos. As the voice of The Unnamable expresses it – remarking again the necessary multiplicity at the origin, or what Derrida called its supplement – these, ‘our beginnings collide […] this place was made for me, and I for it, at the same instant’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006b, 290). In other words, in their apparently simultaneous origins, neither of these grounds is the ground or place necessary for the others to take their place and begin.

An analogous kind of undecidability among original surfaces of inscription and textuality is present in Beckett’s history of reading and note taking through the 1920s and 1930s. If, as Matthew Feldman notes, first ‘Beckett was looking at developments and structures of thought within the Western philosophical tradition, especially its origins in Ancient Greece’ (Feldman, Reference Feldman2006, 14), then turned to science and psychology, to psychoanalysis, and, finally to art theories like Franz Marc’s and linguistic theories like Mauthner’s, it is because these discourses also explore genetic surfaces. Philosophy focuses on the originary ground of thought and culture, psychology on the one of epistemology and the psyche, and art and linguistics examine the original grounds of personal and collective expression. If Beckett took notes on all these disciplines both consecutively and alternatively, it is because, in their explaining of the origins of things (both human and non-human), philosophy, psychology, science, linguistics, and art act consecutively and alternatively too as Ur-, Un-, and Abgrund of each other. That is to say, in their agonic efforts to explain humanity’s origins and its original forces, especially with the development of different social sciences at the end of the nineteenth century – and with the waning of theology as a central study of civilisation – these discourses function as the original ground (Urgrund), the effacing of ground (Ungrund), and the abyss (Abgrund) of each other. In this way, they work as a system of inscriptions and effacements non dissimilar to those within and among texts like Wortsward Ho, The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing, How It Is, Ill Seen Ill Said, and so on, where scientific, mathematical, historical, and psychological discourses are sometimes parodied, sometimes mimicked, yet constantly questioned.

What the engagement with these different genetic discourses and disciplines means, in terms of the construction of the Beckettian oeuvre, is that, since Beckett built his works continuously with reference to the notes he took on these discourses and disciplines, his work is always reflecting on the aporias of these diverse origins and grounds of inscription. In other words, in most if not all of his work, Beckett continuously examines the developments and structures of thought, the world, and the self, not exactly at their beginnings, but rather as they are always constantly beginning and simultaneously failing to do so, like the self-deconstructing surfaces of the Weltstoff that interested him so much in the Presocratics, or like the third zone of Murphy’s mind, where there are ‘nothing but forms becoming and crumbling into the fragments of a new becoming, without love or hate or any intelligible principle of change’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006a, 70). This is perhaps why, when considering the inextricable mesh of the origins of the psyche, the world, and thought on his notes on Windelband’s explanation of Schopenhauer, he substituted the terms ‘that dark, only on itself directed drive’ (‘Jener dunkle, […] Drang’) for the Schellingian ‘the Urgrund und Urzufall’ in the sentence: ‘With him the Urgrund and Urzufall became the will-to-live and T I I [Thing-In-Itself]’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett, Matthews and Feldman2020, 447; qtd in Feldman, Reference Feldman2006, 49–50). Through such a small substitution between the two philosophers’ themes (Schopenhauer’s dark drive ‘dunkle … Drang’, and Schelling’s original ground and accident ‘Urgrund and Urzufall’), he linked the Kantian Thing-In-Itself or noumena and the will-to-live with the originary ground and the originary accident that marks and turns the former into an inscribable surface. By doing this, the Beckettian idiom revealed that its secret or inaccessible core – its unnamable – was, as Derrida surmised, inseparable from its structure, its topology, and its inscribable khôratic or genetic surface.

Around 1938, a year before he died, Freud wrote: ‘Spatiality might be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. Probably no other derivation. Instead of Kant’s a priori conditions our psychical apparatus. Psyche is extended, knows nothing about it’ (Freud, Reference Freud1946, 152; my translation and emphasis). Around the same time, in 1936, when considering angst and pain in relation to his own experiences, Beckett wrote (also in German):

‘[I]n the depths’, as any stratigraphic view can teach us, lie the original surfaces. If stratigraphy includes both lithostratigraphy and biostratigraphy, it is because at this place of absolute origin, the Urgrund, khôra, or the original extension as Beckett and Freud saw it, the psyche, the world, genders, genres, humans and nature cannot yet be separated, let alone individuated. In other words, ‘in the depths of the past’, the original surface or khôra is always the already marked Anthropocenic or post-apocalyptic one. Or as Hamm exclaims: ‘The end is in the beginning (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006c, 141). Thus, as the unnamable realises it, this desire for the ultimate depths or fonds (a French term that can be translated as ground, bottom, background) has no end, since it is a perpetual form of haunting: ‘Are there other pits [fonds], deeper down? To which one accedes by mine? Stupid obsession with depth [profondeur]’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006b, 287; Beckett Reference Beckett1992, 10).Footnote ²⁴

Hence, if our era, the Anthropocene, defines the epoch where the surface of the Earth is indelibly written and constituted by human marks, and consequently, by the necessary effacing of the Earth as pre-original surface, the Anthropocene has always been there, here, since the beginning. Yet, if this always already-marked surface as Beckett raised it is the khôra or Urgrund, it means it is also, and simultaneously, the Ungrund and the Abgrund, the Un-grounding (or Un-reasoning) and the Abyss, the deathly centre of Quad I and II, but also of all structures, as Derrida explained them in his critique of structuralism. As such, what defines this original, abysmal ground (Grund) is not its grounding force, but the fact that all grounding and definition separating psyche and nature, epistemology and art, subjective and objective ground gets immediately effaced, blotted with each mark, in – as ‘Text for Nothing VI’ states it, paraphrasing the Gospel of John and Genesis – the ‘slime where the Eternal breathed and his son wrote’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006d, 314). As Derrida saw, it is precisely this aporia of the trace, where at the rising of the surface the inscriptions both reappear and disappear, that produces the desire for sense and story, namely, our own obsessions or the hauntologies that makes us who we are.

This is the desire of writing as both the drive to write at the beginning and what writing desires to achieve at and as the end. Beckett shows this arche-teleological aporia not only in the broken-circles of his texts and plays, in their semi-circular structures, but also in the insistent and repeated finality of his incipits, such as: ‘I gave up before birth’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006d, 411), ‘For to end yet again […]’ (418), ‘Birth was the death of him’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006c, 453), ‘till in the end / the day came’ (462), ‘Little is left to tell’ (473), or in Malone’s ‘I am being given […] birth to into death [Je nais dans la mort]’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006b, 276; Beckett, Reference Beckett2004b, 177), and Waiting for Godot’s famous ‘birth astride of a grave’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006c, 82). This is also – as Derrida showed – the aporia of the fulfilment of the journey of Self-Consciousness as Spirit in Hegel’s system, as the latter developed it in The Phenomenology of Spirit and the Logic.Footnote ²⁵ For this process of Self-Consciousness to take place, Hegel must presuppose, chronologically, this desire for completion, this urge that compels it toward its end as telos. However, this means that such an end has to already be posited, spatially, at the other extreme of the book. At the same time, for Self-Consciousness and the reader to reach the end, chronologically, the desire that drives them there must already be inscribed, spatially, at the beginning of the book. It is this inversion in the spatialisation of time and the temporalisation of space – the play that Derrida called différance – that continuously reinscribes the end at the beginning, and vice versa. This is the rising of khôra, as the genetic surface on which any god or writer has written or marked anything, and whereupon they have also wished to finish (with) writing, and thus to erase what has been written. Given the meaning of khôra also as mother, this is the surface too of what Derrida called the logic of obsequence, according to which the mother will not only always precede the child, but also survive it. Finally, if, in Hegel, such an aporia between the beginning and the end describes the impossibility of the fulfilment of Self-Consciousness’ knowledge, for Beckett, it describes the impossibility to end the, or even any story, and thus, the essential spectrality or hauntology of his work, at least – if Murphy is the last Beckettian character to effectively die in a narrative – from Watt on.Footnote ²⁶

3 Hauntologies

Considering the development of Beckett’s oeuvre, from his first narratives, to his last dramatic works on and for TV, the question of the rationale for his changes in media arises. If the move to the theatre can be explained by a visual and dramatic necessity, as well as an escape from the mental and linguistic isolation of fiction (as the writing of Waiting for Godot was from that of the trilogy), the move to television betrays another necessity. As Anna McMullan explains, ‘the teleplays exploit the technologically mediated gaze of the television to intensify the uncanny effects of [the] ghosts of the Romantic tradition’ (McMullan, Reference McMullan2021, 38). What Where provides an excellent example of this transformation, since the play’s inherent structural and thematic spectrality benefited from the medium. Just as with the prose works and the dramatic pieces, where the medium of expression is at stake, structurally and thematically, Beckett’s television plays question and utilise the televised medium in its singularity, exploiting especially what Derrida termed its ‘hauntology’.

While a certain preoccupation with the ghost or spectrality began appearing in Derrida’s works since Truth in Painting (Reference Derrida1978), it is in Specters of Marx (Reference Derrida and Bennington1993) where he defines hauntology precisely in terms of telemedia and of a conjuration, as promise, between the public and the private. Such conjuration is:

Given Derrida’s cultural context as what the French call a ‘soixante-huitard’ – an intellectual who developed his work through the crises and upheavals of French political and educational institutions that had their peak in 1968 – and his relative silence until the early 1990s on Marxism and Marxist theory, Specters of Marx constituted not only an event in Derridean theory, but also somewhat of a response to an unspoken Marxist spectre in his oeuvre. Nevertheless, the notion of hauntology, together with the questions of the ghost and the spectre in the book, refer not only to the public/private televisual medium, to the spectres of Marxism at the end of the Cold War, when Fukuyama had declared ‘the end of history’, and to the infamous ‘ghost of Communism’ that circulates in Europe at the beginning of The Communist Manifesto, together with the spirits of Max Stirner, criticised by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology. Besides all these spectres, the main ghost in the book, framing it, is Hamlet’s father’s ghost.

As Beckett’s scholars know, at least since Adorno’s ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, Beckett’s work suffers from a deep Shakespearian hauntology in general, and, particularly, from Hamlet’s multifarious spectrality. As Claudia Olk has recently shown, Hamlet and its ghosts haunt Beckett’s corpus since the beginning, particularly in the short story – unpublished during Beckett’s lifetime – ‘Echo’s Bones’, where the main character,

Furthermore, the spectrality and hauntologies particular to this, Shakespeare’s most famous, if not his best play, extend all the way through Beckett’s corpus, including in a work with a female protagonist, like Happy Days. As Olk explains:

Now, if Hamlet frames Specters of Marx, it is not only because of Marx’ predilection for Shakespeare – as underlined by Derrida – but also because the infamous ghost of Marxism and Communism, haunting Derrida himself, as a soixante-huitard at the end of the Cold War, is, like Hamlet’s and Beckett’s own, a ghost of inheritance. In other words, as Beckett’s early short story, ‘Echo’s Bones’, shows, with its subplot of Lord Gall’s inability to have a male heir, and Belacqua’s subsequent intervention, by becoming Lady Gall’s lover himself, but ‘wrongly’ fathering a girl instead of a boy, spectrality or hauntology is always engaged with questions of inheritance. In other words, what haunts certain rulers, like Hamm or King Hamlet – as well as the sovereign leading Marxists and non-Marxist theorists and philosophers of the early 1990s – is who would inherit them or their kingdom. This haunting question of inheritance means that such a hauntology – like other dimensions shared by both Derrida and Beckett – is also connected with the questions of sexual difference and reproduction. This is clearly visible in ‘Echo’s Bones’:

As we have seen, such a suspension of heritage happens not only through the lack of a son, but also and precisely through the birthing of a daughter instead of a male heir. Hence, if the question of sexual difference within the tradition of writing that includes both Derrida and Beckett – as both inheritors and ascendants – is another part of what made Derrida identify with Beckett, it is because both knew that the possibility of a different philosophical and literary inheritance involved a radical transformation of the tradition and its styles.

This question of the inheritance of deconstruction as a radical transformation of philosophical writing was indirectly asked to Derrida in the 2002 documentary Derrida, when, one of the directors, Kirby Dick, asked him, ‘If you had a choice, what philosopher would you like to have been your mother?’ (Dick and Kofman, Reference Dick and Kofman2005, 97). Here is his answer:

The end of this answer, with its reversibility, that is, having the male writer giving birth to his mother, describes well not only Beckett’s own birthing of May Beckett through her incarnations in his oeuvre, but also the undecidable reversibility of birth (who gives birth to whom) within texts like Footfalls, or even Ill Seen Ill Said. What such reversibility exposes is not only the possible confusion expressed in V’s question in Footfalls: ‘Will you never have done … revolving it all?’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006c, 428) – a revolving similar to that of the turn described by Derrida in Rogues, trying to totalise and close the self while opening it to its other – but also the necessity to think of another kind of philosophical-literary inheritance, and consequently, of another tradition. For Derrida, this is the paradoxical maternal inheritance embodied in the logics of the obsequence and pregnancy. The first logic, as we saw earlier, prescribes that the mother will not only always precede the son/daughter, but that she will also always follow them, surviving them beyond their own death. The second one, playing with the notion of containment and receptacle, and thus, with khôra, implies that, given that one was contained in the womb, anything that one brings forth in life would already have been included in the mother.Footnote ²⁷ Combined, these two logics speak of a survival and a comprehension of the maternal beyond all filial and paternal inheritances. In this way, these logics describe hauntology as a logic that – as Derrida explains – precedes any ontology, theology, and/or onto-theology, given that, being related to the mother, it bespeaks birth before being or even Being. In other words, such a hauntology is connected with khôra as the maternal pre-space of all origination or birth. Furthermore, if such a khôratic-hauntology takes the figure of the waking mother, as in Beckett’s Footfalls, it is because even if in the matricidal dream of remaking oneself the author can kill the mother, according to Derrida, it would never be able to kill maternity itself. Because, following the logic of obsequence,

If such a female and/or maternal hauntology and chorology appears better on a television screen, it is because, as Beckett shows, the space there is neither present nor absent, neither public nor private, neither masculine nor female.Footnote ²⁸ Yet it is a place where visuality and sound, just like Narcissus and Echo, have their space of indecision. Such indecision remarks the essential trait that Derrida sees in the ghost and hauntology at large. This is an indecision embodied in the double referentiality of the genitive preposition ‘de’ in the French syntax ‘le fantôme de X’ (‘the ghost of X’), according to which it is unclear who possesses or haunts whom: is the ghost of Hamlet its own image, its ghost appearing after Prince Hamlet is dead, or is it the ghost of somebody else’s [his father] who haunts Hamlet because Hamlet has it? In Derrida’s words:

In Beckett’s performative exploration of spectrality in his TV plays, such a suspension or indistinction takes, sometimes, an analogous form to the Narcissus/Echo myth. Ghost Trio, with its FEMALE VOICE and MALE FIGURE, is a perfect example. With its Echoesque, recorded female voice (distinguished, in its mechanicity or machine-like quality, by its refusal to change its tone or modulation), it begins the action by commanding the viewer to ‘Look. [Long pause]. The familiar chamber’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006c, 436), where the male figure will embody Narcissus in a double encounter with its own image. The first narcissistic reflection takes place in section II Action, from a broad point of view (A) that does not allow us to see his reflection, yet the voice partakes in the surprise:

1. 21. F turns to wall at head of pallet, goes to wall, looks at his face in mirror hanging on wall, invisible from A.

2. 22. V: [Surprised.] Ah!

3. 23. After 5 seconds F bows his head, stands before mirror with bowed head. 2 seconds. (438)

The second narcissistic reflection takes place in the last section, III Re-Action, when the viewers get to partake too in the reflection, thus identifying them with him:

1. 27. Cut to close-up of F’s face in mirror. 5 seconds. Eyes close. 5 seconds. Eyes open. 5 seconds. Head bows. Top of head in mirror. 5 seconds. (441)

While this is the second reflection in the mirror, it is only the first one on the screen, since it is the first time that we, as viewers, get to see him, the male figure – and ourselves in him as a screen or mirror. What is more, near to the end, Beckett underscores this audience-character reflection by doubling it in a final one: ‘38. Silence. F raises head. Face seen clearly for second time. 10 seconds’ (442). Thus the narcissistic reflection is complete, not only between the character and his image, but also between him, his image, and our own as viewers.

Such a performative reflection on narcissism is close to Derrida’s own understanding of it, not as a self-centred tendency, but rather as a necessary reflection through another who, like Echo and the female voice in Ghost Trio, precedes Narcissus’s own grief:Footnote ²⁹

Moreover, as it happens in other works by Beckett (Company, Waiting for Godot, and so on), the narcissistic reflection is doubled again into a possible younger version of the male figure, a ‘small boy’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006c, 441) who, after knocking, appears framed by the door, precisely between the first full narcissistic reflection in the mirror (between Male Figure – His Mirror Image – Us, the Spectators), and the last one (between the Male Figure and the viewer), when the face is ‘seen clearly for the second time’ (442).Footnote ³⁰ Besides constituting an anachronic reflection of self, this boy reinforces the stage of primary Narcissism as the khôratic or originary space whereupon identity will be built, and which, as a psychological neoteny, constitutes an infantile or youthful essence always threatening with partial or even total regression, and thus, with ultimate dissolution in a full return to the khôratic wombtomb.

The spectral suspension of the divide public/private is also exposed well in a play like Eh Joe, where the camera’s approaching movement, together with the voice, act as an undecidable private/public accusation of guilt. The text voices some of the harshest accusations of an Oedipal drama, with Joe having ‘throttled’ his father, and to his mother, ‘laid her too’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006c, 393); the general accusation being, then, an utmost attempt to ‘still’ each one of an undefined ‘us’ – to which the voice belongs – until there’s ‘Not another one to still’ (393). Furthermore, the final and hardest accusation of the play implies guilt on the suicide of a woman, described only as ‘The green one … . The narrow one … . Always pale … .’ (395). What is most striking about the form of Beckettian hauntology here is that, even if the guilt is suggested as a ‘common’ failed lover’s guilt – the guilt of an impervious Don Juan – the most poignant charge lies on the utterance and effects of words and idiomatic expressions. Throughout the play, the voice quotes Joe with ironic compliments that nevertheless underline his guilt: ‘The best’s to come, you said’ (392), ‘Mental thuggee you called it’ (393), ‘That old paradise you were always harping on’ (393), ‘Voice like flint glass … . To borrow your expression’ (394), and so on. At the end, however, the guilt of these more or less innocuous literary expressions becomes a murder accusation, as the voice connects one of Joe’s idiomatic expressions, ‘Spirit made light’, with the aforementioned former lover’s suicide: ‘Spirit made light … . To borrow your expression … . The way [the eyes] opened after … . Unique’ (395). The second time that the expression appears, the accusation reverts to the form of a question, as if to elicit a confession: ‘Spirit made light … . Wasn’t that your description, Joe?’ (396). Finally, after the voice narrates the series of suicide attempts – until the successful one –, it turns into commands, and transforms Joe’s expression into a pure idiom, a neologism: ‘Imagine the hands … . The solitaire … . Against a stone … . Imagine the eyes … . Spiritlight … .’ (396; emphasis in original; my bold). Preceded by the direction ‘Voice drops to whisper, almost inaudible except words in italics’ (396), the idiom almost exists like the ‘a’ of Derrida’s ‘La différance’, ‘a mute mark […] a tacit monument, I would even say a pyramid’ (Derrida, Reference Derrida1982, 4). It is ‘purely graphic: it is read, or it is written, but it cannot be heard’ (3). Or it can be heard barely – depending on the director and actor’s choice – like a graphic, murderous idiom, surviving only on the script and the surface of Joe’s face.

4 Living On

As Gontarski notes in his introduction to the Grove Press edition of Nohow On, there is a Derridean topological paradox in Worstward Ho: ‘Can [the skull] then perceive itself if there is, to adapt Jacques Derrida, no outside the skull. From what perspective, from what grounding could it then be perceived?’ (Gontarski, Reference Gontarski and Beckett1996, xxi). As the infamous quote from Derrida proclaims, ‘there is nothing outside the text’ (as Spivak translated it). In an analogous way, in Worstward Ho – if not in the whole Nohow On trifecta, and perhaps for all of Beckett’s late works – there is no outside the skull. Less an immaterial Cartesian res cogitans and more a figuration of a Lacanian cross cap or torus, the skull in Worstward Ho is a singular – if somewhat folded or ‘sunk’ – surface of inscription and apparition without any outside, framed or tied, at its beginning and end, by its singular ritornello, ‘on’.Footnote ³¹

‘On’, this first and last word of Worstward Ho, underscores the aporia of its apparently infinite or boundless topology. There is no other place for this infinite place, this ‘infinite here’ (as ‘Text for Nothing VI’ describes it), or this ‘Thenceless thitherless there’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006d, 473) on which we appear, imagine, and write. In other words, there is no other surface (besides, perhaps, the surface of the reader’s eye) from and on which we perceive, talk, or imagine the infinite surface of this ‘on’.Footnote ³² This topological paradox foregrounds the topos or space as the essential dimension and question of these texts. As we have seen, this is what we can call Beckett’s ‘spacing of time’ (as Derrida described différance in the homonymous conference), which, before the recent volumes on Beckett and space mentioned earlier (McMullan, Byron, Dennis, and so on), had been noticed already by Bruno Clément, for whom, Beckett ‘turns the question of place into the question of writing’ (Clément, Reference Clément2009, 367), by Trezise in the context of Derrida’s reading of Husserl (Trezise, Reference Trezise1990, 16–20), and by Gontarski, who sees in the Nohow On texts ‘a reduction of narrative time to points of space’ (Gontarski, Reference Gontarski and Beckett1996, xxvi).

On the other hand, when we describe what could be the key concept of Derridean deconstruction, we can agree with Martin Hägglund (Reference Hägglund2008) and decree ‘espacement’ or ‘spacing’ as the main figure of Derrida’s thought. What is more, given Derrida’s insistence on the mark, trace, or even scratch (graphos) of any writing, sign, or impression – the condition of what he calls iterability –, such a ‘spacing’ cannot, like in Beckett’s corpus, be conceived without a concrete, even if unstable, topology, as a logic of surfaces. In other words, there is no ‘spacing’, as well as no inscription, mark, or trace, without a surface or an ‘on’ as place of inscription, appearance, extension, movement, and, simultaneously, of effacement, disappearance, and stasis. In other words, there is no grammatology without a topography, and, most importantly, a chorology.

Hence, Derrida’s logic of grammatology and ‘archi-writing’ as generalised inscription describes the essential impossibility of being inscribed, of appearing, or of rising, and of – sometimes at the same time – being erased, disappearing, or of vanishing, without a surface. Such a logic of topological and topographic necessity is performatively examined, and tried, in Worstward Ho. Given this necessity of the surface, as the text explores it, there is an aporia between an inerasable immortality or an impossibility to simply disappear (‘Nothing ever unseen’; ‘Never to naught be brought. Never by naught be nulled’; Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006d, 477, 479), and an inevitable, constant effacing or sinking in on the void (‘Alone in the dim void’; 477). This logic of the persistence of the surfaceFootnote ³³ as the structure on which everything takes place – or where everything stops having its place – was described further by Derrida in ‘Living On: Border Lines’, a text examining Blanchot’s La folie du jour and L’arrêt de mort, a novella comprising two stories that narrate the death of two female characters, J. and Nathalie, the first one of whom goes through a resurrection. Reflecting, in this text – titled in French, Survivre – on the enduring that Blanchot sees in surviving, Derrida glosses on the ‘on’ (sur) of ‘living on’ (survivre), and on how it continuously recreates a topos in between living and dying, that is to say, a spatio-temporal suspension or epochè, analogous to the genetic and spectral topology we find in Worstward Ho:

These sentences as arrêts, simultaneous life and death sentences, appear in Worstward Ho – and in Company and other texts, like Imagination Dead Imagine – in the form of commands for the Reason, the Imagination, and the depths of this faculty, where Kant’s schemata are formed. These are impossible – or what Derrida calls ‘double bind’ – commands prescribing the simultaneous appearance and disappearance of figures and their space. The ‘on’ – common English translation of the French preposition ‘sur’, as well as phonetic transcription of the ancient Greek word for ‘being’ (ὤν) – gives figures to both, the sentence as command or imperative, and to a multifarious topology that includes the space of sight (stare), the surface of the word (say), and the khôratic pre-surface of being (be) and its modalities: ‘On. Stare on. Say on. Be on. Somehow on. Anyhow on’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006d, 477). In this way, the survival as ‘living on’ in the text appears as a simultaneous genesis of a space and a sentence, in an analogy and reinterpretation of the cosmogonies described in both Genesis (‘And God said, Let there be light: And there was light’; Gen. 1:3; my emphasis) and John (‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’; John 1:1). For his part, Derrida sees a similar simultaneity of word and act in Blanchot’s L’arrêt de mort, where ‘Thus the récit will be the cause – as well as causa, chose [thing, mere tool] – of what it seems to recount. The récit as the cause and not as the relating of the event: this is the strange truth that is announced. The récit’s the thing’ (Derrida, Reference Derrida, Bloom, de Man, Derrida, Hartman and Miller2004, 118).

This causality or simultaneity between the words and the acts is suggested to Derrida, in ‘Living On’, by the aforementioned resurrection of the character of J., who, even though she will ultimately die at the end of the first of two stories, comes back to life at the exact moment the narrator calls her, without a pause between the two events (‘there wasn’t a second’s interval’ (Blanchot, Reference Blanchot1978, 20). In a similar confusion of the origin of voices as in Company or How It is – and through a simultaneity that reminds us too of the echoed lines in Rockaby, spoken by both, the recorded voice and the woman in the chair (‘time she stopped’, ‘living soul’, ‘rock her off’) –, here one does not know, ultimately, who calls whom:

As a genetic, ‘conceptual’, or ‘birthing’ text, namely, as a text constituted and remarked as a pure act of creation or conception – or, as Amanda Dennis describes it, ‘a parable of the authorial process in the absence of an external creator’ (Dennis, Reference Dennis2021, 197) – Worstward Ho appears too as an absolute event instead of a representation. It is thus a thing (chose), or just a ‘name’ (the Beckettian idiom in the title, ‘worstward ho!’, underscoring this singularity), especially remarked by its untranslatability, even to its own bilingual author. It appears thus as one of Beckett’s final idioms, a finality stemming not only from the closeness in time to its author’s death, but also because of the closed perfection of its idiom, in other words, because of its impossibility – and desire – to be translated or said otherwise.Footnote ³⁴

Nevertheless, as the (unwarranted by the tenor of the whole of Beckett’s oeuvre)Footnote ³⁵ fame of the two short quotes, ‘Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006d, 471) and ‘you must go on, I can’t go on. I’ll go on’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006b, 407) shows, there is, in Worstward Ho – as in The Unnamable, and other texts – a persistence, an insistence, or continuation, not disconnected from a logic of survival. Going back to J.’s resurrection, Derrida connects it too – indistinguishable from the narrator’s call – with the end of the second story, and thus of the whole book or novella, where the narrator, taking advantage of the feminine gender of the word ‘thought’ in French (la pensée), talks about a certain thought, stronger than himself, in terms that make it seem that he is talking about a certain ‘her’, whom, at the exact end, he calls ‘eternally’ – as he has done before (or they, since it is impossible to decide if the two male narrators of the two stories are the same one) – and to which she responds ‘eternally’ as well:

This confusion, in Blanchot’s story, between an indeterminate her and a thought – or ‘thought’ in general –, that makes the author think, imagine, and write, also gives figure to the insistence of female voices and presences haunting male characters in Beckett’s late texts like Eh Joe, Ghost Trio, Ill Seen Ill Said, Nacht und Träume, and … but the clouds …, as well as to the feminine voices themselves trapped in loops or semi-loops of speech, like Mouth in Not I, May in Footfalls, and Winnie in Happy Days. However, it is in Worstward Ho, where the undisentangeable confusion between speech, word, writing, creation, imagination, and conception, and their simultaneous coming to be, takes place. In this way, the text, whose title – connected to the 1855 maritime novel Westward Ho! – wakes up images of an ocean, appears as a living cosmogonic surface, or a new avatar of the primeval or infernal mud of How It Is. In other words, as a genetic or cosmogenetic text, Worstward Ho works as a khôra. Or, given this Greek term’s connection with the mother-receptacle as both the simultaneously genetic surface sustaining and letting the world rise, and as the depths, or the ultimate lack of surface – the abyss engulfing it all – Worstward Ho appears also as ‘the deep’, upon whose waters or face God’s spirit moved at the beginning of Genesis.Footnote ³⁶ In the original Hebrew, this deep or abyss is called tehom (ההום), a word potentially related to the name of the Mesopotamian goddess, Tiamat, another victim of a kind of matricide (by her great grandson Anu), and whose body becomes the material (mater) for the creation of the cosmos (form). Thus, beyond the reminiscences of an oceanic surface it recalls (related to Beckett’s recurrent images of the water at the seawater baths in Dún Laoghaire, of the lake on which Krapp and his companion drifted, and of Molloy’s beach), the writerly surface or topography of Worstward Ho is also the deeps of the faculty of the Imagination for Kant, where the schemata are born, and out of which – and on which, as page or canvas – they are drawn. In other words, Worstward Ho’s depth, from which everything oozes, is where the unions between intuitions, perceptions, images, words, and concepts are conceived. Thus, on this cosmogonic surface, before any such union – allowing speech, writing, and images to be formed – arises, the only thing that is possible is itself as surface: on.

However, because Beckett was not exactly Kant, the figures that come out of this cosmo- and epistemogonic space or khôratic surface as ‘schemata’, are not regular categories, but One – ‘the kneeling one’, Two – ‘the twain’, and Three – ‘the head’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006d, 475). Given that, at least, the first two are gendered (‘an old woman’s’, ‘an old man and child’; 480, 473), this space of conception includes and takes account of sexual difference. However, like in the earlier story ‘Enough’, where the sex/gender of a character is not suggested until the end, the revelation of One, ‘the kneeling one’ or ‘bowed back’ (476) as an old woman does not happen until after the first half of the text. What is more, as the first figure to appear in the text – simultaneously or, in other words, genetically indistinguishable with its place (‘First the body. No. First the place. No. First both’; 471) – it is, precisely, as bones that are ground that it surges, reminding the Beckettian reader of Echo, Narcissus’ sempiternal pendant: ‘Say bones. No bones but say bones. Say ground. No ground but say ground’ (471). On the other hand, when considering the goal or desired process of worsening the text – namely, of their preying one on the other (‘All always faintly preying’; 483) – of the three numbers it is Two, ‘the twain’, ‘the old man and child’, representing not only filiation and masculine inheritance or genealogy, but also the survival or living on of the infant dimension, that proves the most recalcitrant: ‘What of all seen and said not on them preying? True. True! And yet say worst perhaps worst of all the old man and child’ (479). However, at the end, this pseudo-Oedipal trinity (old woman, old man, and child) gets reduced to a singular, purportedly sexless one, through the genderless skull: ‘Two black holes in foreskull. Or one. Try better still worse one. One dim black hole mid-foreskull. Into the hell of all. Out from the hell of all’ (483–4).

Beckett’s logic of survival or ‘living on’ in Worstward Ho is thus a complete re-creation of language through new idioms (‘worstward ho’, ‘unstillable’, ‘unlessenable’, and so on, but also all the idiomatic syntax of the text), or a full reappropriation and recreation of English as of his mother tongue (alienated through the passage to French), in order to try and make it untranslatable and yet translatable. As Derrida remarks, such living on or sur-vivre of the text happens only in the simultaneity of the aporia of its translatability and its untranslatability: ‘A text lives only if it lives on {sur-vit}, and it lives on only if it is at once translatable and untranslatable (always “at once … and … ”: hama, at the “same” time)’ (Derrida, Reference Derrida, Bloom, de Man, Derrida, Hartman and Miller2004, 102). As with other Beckett’s texts – like the published separately fragment from How It Is, ‘The Image’ – such desired simultaneity appears in a synchronicity more appropriate to painting and the visual arts than to writing and the diachronic: ‘All at once in that stare’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006d, 476), ‘All at once as one’ (484). Nevertheless, for this synchronicity to take place, it needs, like the eternally answering she (elle) or thought of Blanchot’s L’arrêt de mort, a certain, if not eternity, at least ‘oncelessness’. In Worstward Ho, there is only one such element: ‘Onceless alone the void’ (481). In the constant creation and erasure of all the elements, in their changes and lack of change: ‘Void cannot go’ (475). This is why at the end of the text, when the three figures and everything else get reduced to the one hole, there is no going beyond the limits of the limitless void: ‘Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther’ (485). Yet, if the void has an essential characteristic, it is that, like khôra, it allows for something to stand: ‘It stands. See in the dim void how at last it stands’ (472).

In the void of its untranslatability, standing, constantly demanding to be translated, Beckett’s texts continue ‘living-on’, as Derrida remarked with Walter Benjamin, through a translation of ‘übersetzung’ that always potentially implies both: ‘überleben’ (living over or past the death of the author, his parents, children, and so on) and ‘fortleben, living on, continuing to live’ (Derrida, Reference Derrida2007, 26).

5 Deconstructing the Sovereign Subject

Conclusion: Apostrophes and Addresses

As Katz expresses it: ‘In Beckett, the “I” is not a representative of full subjectivity, but one marker within a subjective economy which necessarily comprises the second-person position, with its implicit demand’ (Reference Katz1999, 107). In other words, Beckett’s oeuvre, as well as Derrida’s, is essentially an act of address. In different ways, they both reflect on Althusser’s ‘interpellation’ as a ‘double specular relation’, exposing its aporias, particularly with regard to primary narcissism. Beckettian texts like Company, That Time, and even the early ‘Sedendo et Quiescendo’ with its opening line: ‘Down you get now and step around’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006d, 61), apostrophise us, the reader, directly, utilising the second person pronoun ‘you’. Other texts present us with an almost direct address, marked either with irony, as when Clov, in Endgame, picking up the telescope and turning it ‘on auditorium’, exclaims ‘I see … a multitude … in transports … of joy’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006c, 112), or with silent urgency and even effrontery, as when the Protagonist in Catastrophe ‘raises his head, fixes the audience’ (489). One of the most particular acts of address or apostrophe happens, without words, in Film, where, by beginning and ending the work with an extreme close-up of Buster Keaton’s eye, the film not only comments on its philosophical chase and anticipates the final deadly encounter between eye (E) and object (O), but also, and most importantly, identifies E/O with the spectators through this sight, making them both subject and object of this final vision. Such an identification through an optic direct address – which seems to visually state ‘I/eye am you, the I/eye’ – reflects as well other narcissistic identificatory encounters in Beckett’s work, like those between Listener and Reader in Ohio Impromptu, May and Mother/Amy and old Mrs. Winter in Footfalls, or Molloy and Moran in Molloy.

As the resulting affect of any command of which we are the object tells us, such acts of direct address or apostrophe are always, in varying degrees, violent. This violence is particular in Beckett, since sometimes it involves a command to do a certain violence to our mental faculties like the imagination and discursive reason (‘Imagination Dead Imagine’, Worstward Ho, How It Is).Footnote ⁴⁴ At other times, such direct addresses violently identify us with characters in emotional states like melancholy, nostalgia, and even guilt (Company, Eh Joe, That Time). At the same time, by performatively reflecting on this violence of the address and the identification, Beckett’s texts problematise it, questioning the innocuity of a gesture as apparently simple as a couple looking at each other’s eyes, as when Krapp narrates:

Or when, at the end of Happy Days, Willie and Winnie look at each other, the latter first smiling, but then losing the smile, freezing in the potentially ominous long pause that ends the play.

In a text accompanying Marie-Françoise Plissart’s photographic novel Droit de regards, where a series of couples have amorous encounters while they chase and run away from each other, Derrida examines the aporias of the direct visual address, by analysing the French pronominal verb ‘se regarder’ (to look at each other, or at oneself), and how it applies to different instantiations between two people. Following the photographic examples in the text, he describes three possibilities of the sentence ‘Elle se regardent’ (they look at each other). Furthermore, because he is also performatively reflecting on such a reflection by writing the text as a dialogue between two unnamed voices, he adds apostrophes to his description (for example, ‘comme je t’aime’ meaning potentially ‘how [much] I love you’).

1. 1. Elles se regardent: One looks at the other, one looking at the other who doesn’t necessarily look back at the moment she is seen. […]

2. 2. Elles se regardent: Each one looks at herself (se regarde) in a mirror, without seeing the other. […]

3. 3. Elles se regardent: Both look at each other, their gazes intersecting, as one says, being exchanged, watching the other watch her, right in her eyes, with infinite speculation [I see the other seeing me see her, I look at you at the instant you watch me watching you]. Here you do not have a single example of that – for, like ‘I love you’ [comme je t’aime], it cannot but escape the camera lens. Even if they cross their gazes in a face to face, like they seem to do once […] the photography does not give us any assurance of it, the perception of it is impossible. (Derrida and Plissart, Reference Derrida and Plissart1998, XXVII–XXVIII)

Transposing these three instances to Beckett’s work, we can say that number 1 is quite common, with characters like Clov exemplifying it the most with his apparent scopophilia. We have seen instances of number 2 in plays like Ghost Trio, and the speculative reflection is also at the base of Beckettian doppelgänger plays like Ohio Impromptu, Footfalls, and even in the lines of Rockaby, describing ‘all eyes / all sides / high and low /for another / another like herself’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006c, 462–3). Finally, number 3 describes Winnie and Willie at the end of Happy Days, as well as the lake anecdote told by Krapp. Nevertheless, its two most striking instantiations occur in Murphy and in Film. In the novel, it takes place close to the end, just a couple of pages before Murphy’s own death. After their now infamous game of chess, ‘Murphy […] took Mr. Endon’s head in his hands and brought the eyes to bear on his, or rather his on them, across a narrow gulf of air, the merest hand’s-breath of air’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006a, 149). Initially, Murphy sees the eyes as things, not as sight itself, with the novel itemising their ‘sockets’, ‘the whites’, ‘iris’, ‘the red frill of mucus’, and even ‘the filigree of veins like the Lord’s Prayer on a toenail’ (149). Finally, he sees ‘in the cornea, horribly reduced, obscured and distorted, his own image’ (149).Footnote ⁴⁵ Such a self-reflection (se regarder) provokes in Murphy a kind of synaesthesia, where the sight produces a voice and discourse, what the novel calls, playing with the different meanings of spirit as pneuma or gas (Geist), ‘afflatulence’ (150). Such spirit or gas describes not only the identification of Murphy’s self in and with Mr. Endon’s sight, but also its consequential disappearance, not as vanishment, but as a remarked erasure of sight, what Beckett calls ‘unseen’.

In the case of Film, as we have seen, Beckett exemplifies Derrida’s remark on the impossibility of the perception of such an act of mutual visual self-reflection through the loop of the extreme close-up of the singular eye at the beginning and end of the film. As we realise at the end, this loop embodies both eyes (Is), E’s and O’s, while at the same time, it ‘swallows’, in its gap or in between, the (I/eye of the) self-reflective spectator in it, making them identify with both seer I and seen (O). Thus, it is by the temptation to close this loop between the one-who-sees and the-one-who-is-seen (a loop that will infinitely invert these positions, identifying them [O=E, S=P, the being is what it perceives: Esse est percipi]), that the spectator will potentially embody, by responding with their total acquiescence (as we inevitably acquiesce to the identification with the ‘you’ of Company or That Time), a non-objectifying sight, that is, a potentially non-violent sight. In other words, in the purported total reciprocity of this looking at each other, both seer/seen and seen/seer would have the chance to avoid the violence of objectification, implicit in any relation between a subject and an object.

As we know, this is the kind of objectifying relation that Beckett diagnosed in the history of art in Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. If, ultimately, Beckett embraces the failure that he sees in Bram van Velde’s painting as an ideal, namely, the failure of the absence of relation, such an absence does not deny the necessity of the relation nor its presupposed ‘dualist view’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006d, 562). In fact, such a failure or renunciation can only take place through the relation itself. In other words, Beckett’s famous aesthetics of nonrelation imply an affirmation of the relation itself even if as impossible or always failed:

What is more, if the relation – even as absent or failed – is productive for Beckett, it is precisely through the particular kind of anxiety that it elicits.Footnote ⁴⁶ This is not an anxiety of a missing adequation, as with a realistic, mimetic theory of representation or adaequatio vision of truth, but rather the anxiety of all that is excluded not only through a singular relation, but also in order that that singular relation can exist. In other words, it is the anxiety of the exclusionary singularity of any relation:

It is precisely this violence of exclusion that can never be avoided. Since, even if we have a potential reciprocal sight of subject and object, artist and model, E and O, and so on, such a sight can never be represented. It can never be shared, opened to a third eye, and thus confirmed. In fact, as Derrida says, it cannot even be confirmed by yourself if you are part of this reciprocal sight, since you are, too, seeing, and thus blind to the other’s sight. Or, as Amanda Dennis expresses it in connection to Merleau-Ponty, ‘we cannot be both subject and object at the same time’ (Dennis, Reference Dennis2021, 181). To consider this aporia in terms of discursive address, we could say that, even if the fictional work addresses me directly with a ‘you’, I can never be sure that it is truly me. In a similar way, due to the underdetermined referent of the direct address, together with the repetition essential to language and discourse, when addressing ‘you’, I can also never be sure – like the characters in How It Is, Company, or the voice(s) of The Unnamable – that my words are truly mine, or that they are addressing the ‘you’ I intend.

Derrida examined such an aporia of the direct address in the context of his discussion with Lacan of Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ – and of the Lacanian idea that the letter (or truth) always arrives to its destination – in ‘Envois’. As he does in Memoirs of the Blind, Droit de regards, and other texts, Derrida utilises here the French informal pronoun tu, not only as an imitation of the epistolary novel and philosophical dialogues, but also to underscore the aporias of the direct address, and its effects for both, fictional and philosophical discourse. In this way, he reinforces one of the main points of his whole oeuvre, the idea that philosophy, like literature, because it is a writing practice, cannot do without a writing subject, and more importantly, without a written addressee. Thus, for example, when speaking of a hypothetical postcard of Socrates, he asks:

Thus if, in the question of this address of philosophy, there is an identification, or a confusion between the same and the other,Footnote ⁴⁷ it is precisely – as in Company – because of the impossibility to determine who addresses whom: me – another, another – me, me – the other in me, the other in me – yet another in me, and so on, just as the diverse centres and circles in their search for each other or yet another in the painting in Erskine’s room.

Therefore, like in Company, the question of such philosophical or written address for Derrida also spells the possibility of a solipsism, and of the kind of nihilism that, as we mentioned at the beginning, he saw both existing and not existing in Beckett’s oeuvre, and in metaphysics at large. If such a nihilism can be the consequence of a solipsism, it is because, as with the conclusion of Company, there is always the possibility that, at the end, there is no addressee, just one voice alone, in delirium: ‘or are we delirious, each alone, for ourselves? Are we waiting for an answer or something else? No, since at bottom [au fond] we are asking for nothing, no, we are asking no question. The prayer’ (Derrida, Reference Derrida1987a, 19; Derrida, Reference Derrida1980, 24). This is why, perhaps, for a certain Beckett ‘the prayer is the god. Yes, prayer rather than poem, in order to be quite clear, because poems are prayers, of Dives and Lazarus one flesh’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett, Dow Fehsenfeld and Overbeck2009, 274). In other words, the poem or, rather, the poetic, is the only possibility of trans-cendence, in the sense that it is the only way to potentially cross the gap, the gulf, the chiasmFootnote ⁴⁸ (χάσμα μέγα; Luke 16:26) of the relation – like Mr. Kelly and his kite at the end of Murphy;Footnote ⁴⁹ or like a hedgehog trying to cross the road.

As Szafraniec (Reference Szafraniec2007) and I (Martell, Reference Martell2020) have pointed out, there is a poetic coincidence in Beckett and Derrida, in the figure of a hedgehog ‘out in the cold’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006d, 436). For Derrida, the poetic takes this figure because it is an attempt at transmission or translation, in other words, a trans-movement trying to connect (at least) two elements of a relation. However, the poetic is not any kind of communicational connection. Following the confusion of the direct address, it is a transmission whereupon the writer or speaker cannot determine anymore not only whom are they addressing, but also if their words are ultimately their own. Such an underdetermination, for Derrida, means that the poetic not only can confuse the interior and the exterior sources of the words, as a dictation. What is more radical is that it can confuse them so essentially that, that which we deem our utmost interior, the ‘heart’, is precisely what the poetic teaches us, as if we did not have a heart before. As Derrida expresses it, ‘You did not yet know the heart, you learn it thus’ (Derrida, Reference Derrida and Kamuf1991, 231). In other words, if, as Beckett described it, the poem is the prayer and the god, it is because the poetic is that particular chance to find the most personal expression, one’s own idiom, but always from outside – or auswendig, as Derrida remarks, emphasising that that is how one says ‘by heart’ in German, literally ‘turning from the outside’.

Now, such a chance – like the hedgehog that the voice in Company tells ‘you take pity on’ and ‘put it in an old hatbox with some worms’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006d, 436) (or, in French ‘avec une provision de vers’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett2004a, 38), which might be translated as ‘with a provision of verses’) – can always turn awry, and the hedgehog, as one of the main figures of modernism, might die and rot, even if it always remains in your memory:Footnote ⁵⁰ ‘You have never forgotten what you found then […] The mush. The stench’ (437). For Derrida, it is the possibility of such a survival through repetition that ultimately might mean death, since learning ‘by heart’ also means learning ‘by rote’, namely mechanically, automatically, ‘soullessly’, ‘not-lively’, and perhaps, ‘not-livingly’, since, as the young Beckett who wrote Proust would say: ‘Memory and Habit are attributes of the Time cancer’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006d, 515).Footnote ⁵¹ Consequently, the chance for the poetic to live is to remain as an absolute secret, pronounced only one time, and then protected and covered by oblivion, even and especially in the confusion of the address(e)es and the words’ origins:

This is the double bind of the repetition necessary for poetry, literature, philosophy, and writing at large to exist. While it is such a repetition that kills its singular character, its idiomaticity, and the sovereignty of both addresser and addressee. This is the double bind of texts like How It Is, and their failed attempts at finishing in order to stop repeating. It is the same double bind of the Beckettian circles, unable to stop the repetition but also to fully complete it, expressed in the ‘and yet’ of Endgame’s ‘The end is in the beginning and yet you go on’ (Beckett, Reference Beckett and Auster2006c, 141). But most importantly, it is the double bind of the necessary repetition inherent to any address to the other. This is the necessary repetition of the reflective Narcissus, be it in the form of a bent-over-himself Belacqua, a Molloy reflected in a Moran, or a Samuel Beckett reflected in all the series of characters of his oeuvre, including the female and queer ones. This is the double bind of the writer trying to address somebody else besides themselves, either as readers, love objects, or both, but incapable of doing so without repeating and reflecting themselves in an inescapable and resurgent primary narcissism (see Freud, Reference Freud1957). If Derrida and Beckett shared the insight of this double bind, it is because they recognised its aporetic necessity, together with the need to rethink narcissism, in writing, until there is (no) more of it:

Finally, as we know, such a problematisation of primary narcissism is, in some way, the plot of The Unnamable, Texts for Nothing, and other fictions. In other words, it is the reason why these ‘characters’ are simultaneously always already dead and not yet born, undistinguishable from the surrounding and internal other that comprehends them, inside out, in this suspension of individualising birth, our sojourn in khôra.