Literature in the Archive of Terror: Badiou, Blanchot, Beckett

283 Pages·2017·1.62 MB·English

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Christopher Langlois, The University of Western Ontario
Supervisor: Dr. Jonathan Boulter, The University of Western Ontario
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree
in Theory and Criticism
© Christopher Langlois 2014
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i

LITERATURE IN THE ARCHIVE OF TERROR: BADIOU, BLANCHOT, BECKETT

Thesis format: Monograph

by

Christopher Langlois

Graduate Program in Theory and Criticism

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies
The University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada

© Christopher Langlois, 2014
ii

Abstract and Keywords

Abstract:

This dissertation conjoins the two most dominant trends in the criticism of Samuel Beckett
today: the philosophical and historicist approaches to his work. It explores how the Reign of
Terror that erupted during the French Revolution acts as a traumatic catalyst for key
developments in modernist literature and continental philosophy of which the philosophical
writing of Alain Badiou, the literary-critical writing of Maurice Blanchot, and the literary-
narrative writing of Beckett are perhaps the most exemplary expressions. The overarching thesis
that this dissertation defends is that Beckett’s post-war prose work in The Unnamable and Texts
for Nothing is overshadowed by the language and logos of terror that, according to Blanchot, is
constitutive of the experience of political and aesthetic modernity. The first main chapter of this
dissertation examines how the archive of terror is positioned within the philosophical project of
Badiou, particularly where he is interested in articulating the conceptual distinction between
what he terms destructive (failed) and subtractive (successful) protocols of evental interruptions.
Badiou does this by trying to exorcise the presence of terror from both the philosophical
discourse of political modernity and also from within the narrative architecture of the Beckettian
oeuvre. Whereas Badiou struggles unsuccessfully (in the eyes of this dissertation) to distance
both his own philosophical project and also Beckett’s post-war work in prose from the toxic and
paralyzing influence of terror, Blanchot determines that terror is, on the contrary, indispensable
for tracing the genealogy of the political and literary history of modernity back to its
revolutionary origins. The second chapter of this dissertation reads Blanchot’s multiple
engagements with terror through the distinctly phenomenological and literary-historical registers
that his work establishes. For Blanchot, the romantic theory of literature originally formulated
through the fragmentary collections of writings of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, as well as the
scandalous and virtually unreadable publications attached to the name of the Marquis de Sade,
places the historical phenomenon of terror at the heart of an aesthetic project through which the
avant-garde modernism of twentieth-century historical modernity continued to work. Through
Blanchot’s reading of German Romanticism and the Marquis de Sade, this dissertation develops
the concept of the fragmentary imperative of terror as a philosophical stepping-stone for moving
on in chapters three and four to a hermeneutical encounter with the terror that weighs so heavily
on the narrative voices and that penetrates so incessantly and so ubiquitously the narrative spaces
of The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing. These chapters show that Beckett’s admission that The
Unnamable and Texts for Nothing “finished me or expressed my finishedness” is the direct
consequence of the writing of these works being immersed so vigilantly and unpredictably in a
literary and historical archive of terror (Letters: Vol. II 497). The argument here is that the
ineluctable presence of terror in Beckett’s writing is obliquely symptomatic of the demands that
the traumatic events of twentieth-century modernity imposed on the otherwise aesthetically
sovereign discourse of modernist literature and narrative.

Keywords: Samuel Beckett; Maurice Blanchot; Alain Badiou; Reign of Terror; modernism and
modernity; aesthetics and politics; continental philosophy; hermeneutics; phenomenology;
poststructuralism; literary theory; literary criticism; historicism; fragmentary imperative;
literature and trauma; literature and terror.
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Acknowledgments
There are many people deserving of my sincere gratitude for the contributions that they have
made to my work and to my life during the long course of this study. I would like to begin by
thanking Jonathan Boulter for his encouragement, enthusiasm, intelligence, and wit throughout
the highs and lows of this project’s development. I consider Jonathan to be one of the smartest
readers of Beckett out there today, and this project benefited immensely from his sound advice
and criticism. I am also indebted to my second reader, Allan Pero, who taught me early on in his
seminars and in our meetings the enjoyment there is to be had in labouring playfully through
difficult literary and philosophical texts. I would also like to thank Călin-Andrei Mihailescu,
through whom I learned and unlearned more than I can articulate here. I need to thank
Christopher Keep as well, who worked silently behind the scenes and facilitated my first adjunct
teaching appointment at King’s University College.

This project has also benefited from my graduate colleagues in the Centre for Theory and
Criticism and the Department of English. Debates and conversations around drinks and more
drinks, coffee and more coffee with Kate Lawless, Will Samson, Kamran Ahmed, Marzena
Musielak, and Jonathan Fardy provided me with much needed stimulating company and
friendship throughout my studies. I count Jonathan Fardy in particular as one of my closest
friends, and the development of many of the ideas contained in this study proceeded by being
bounced off his razor-sharp mind. I also need to thank my cousin, Josh Cashaback, who never
misses the opportunity for directing a deprecating remark my way, but who I can say without
hesitation is one of the best and caring friends I have.

Finally, my warmest and deepest thanks go out to my mother, Mary Ann Langlois-Smith, for her
sacrifices, her selflessness, and her strength, and to Valeria Puntorieri, my partner and my love.
Her hard work and devotion are a daily inspiration for me, and I am simply better for having her
in my life. This work is dedicated to them both.
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Table of Contents

Title Page……………………………………………………………………………………i
Abstract and Keywords……..……………………………………………………………....ii
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………...iii
Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………..iv
1. Introduction: Terror in the Literature and Literary Criticism of Samuel Beckett.......1-38
2. Alain Badiou and the Philosophical Impasse of Terror……………………………39-88
3. Maurice Blanchot and the Fragmentary Imperative of Terror……………………89-140
4. Suffering the Terror of Thinking in Beckett’s The Unnamable……………..…..141-206
5. Repetitions of Terror in Beckett’s Texts for Nothing……………………...…….207-262
6. Conclusion: Deleuze, Beckett, and the Figural Subtraction of Terror…..……....263-266
Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………267-275
Curriculum Vitae…………………………………………………………………….276-278
1

Introduction

Terror in the Literature and Literary Criticism of Beckett

I mean Negative Capability, that is,
when a man is capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts,
without any irritable reaching after
fact and reason.
(John Keats)

I lived through the revolutionary Irish
movement, Sinn Fein, and the wars,
Hiroshima, Hitler, the death camps,
and daily violence that I’ve
experienced all my life. And after all
that they want me to paint bunches of
pink flowers.
(Francis Bacon)

The Methodological Borderposts of Beckett Studies Today

It is a commonplace in Beckett studies today that the philosophical modes of
interpretation that had dominated critical analyses of the Beckettian oeuvre since at least the
1980s have been eclipsed in recent years by the rising popularity of so-called “archival” and
“genetic” methods of criticism and scholarship. Papers presented at the “Beckett: Out of the
Archive” conference that took place at the University of York in June 2011 were re-printed in a
special issue of Modernism/Modernity in November of that year, thereby consolidating the
academic influence of these modes of research on Beckett’s life and writing. In his editor’s
introduction to this special issue, Peter Fifield, a philosophically-minded reader of Beckett in his
own right, acknowledges that “Beckett is an archivist’s author. Storing his proofs, drafts, diaries,
and notebooks for up to sixty years, the author has left textual remains that document his
development as a writer in great detail. These are held in numerous libraries – public, academic,
and private – but are also steadily becoming available to a wider audience via publications in
print and online” (673). Archival research into the Beckettian oeuvre has been invigorated in no
small part by the publication through Cambridge University Press of two volumes (with two
2

more forthcoming) of Beckett’s letters1. With this veritable deluge of archival material becoming
more and more accessible (and therefore attractive) to readers and enthusiasts of Beckett’s work,
it should come as no surprise that philosophical and hermeneutical methods of disseminating
Beckett’s writing have started to lose their appeal and persuasiveness in the contemporary
climate of Beckett criticism, which now more than ever is intent on reading Beckett for virtually
all of the historical, political, and biographical resonances that his work provokes. Insofar as one
of the consequences of the rise of archival Beckett studies has been a de facto eclipse of the
philosophical and hermeneutical methods of criticism that had hitherto complemented Beckett’s
literature so adeptly, it is necessary at this stage in Beckett studies to reconsider if these types of
readings – largely poststructuralist and posthumanist in their theoretical persuasion – cannot still
further our understanding of the Beckettian oeuvre without simultaneously abstracting Beckett’s
work from out of the particular historical and biographical contexts of its composition and
reception, contexts that archival modes of scholarship have started diligently and expertly to
unearth.
The jury is still undecided on how the endgame of the “archival turn” will play itself out.
That the tendency in this “archival turn” of subjecting Beckett studies to what Andrew Gibson
labels a “new positivism” has “sometimes been invigorating” would be counter-productive and
flat-out mistaken to deny, but it is imperative to stress, as Gibson does rather concisely, that
“positivism does not logically end in an anti-philosophical account of Beckett. It rather explains
why philosophical thought, or an activity akin to it, was essential to him. Philosophical and
theoretically-based readings of Beckett in general repeatedly accomplish one side of his project,
or confirm it in place. For they reiterate and extend his insistence on the privilege of the
speculative intellect relative to historical disaster” (Samuel Beckett 166; my emphasis). Gibson’s
words of caution for what this “new positivism” risks engendering, namely an anti-theoretical
anti-intellectualism that fits all too comfortably in the neo-liberal context of contemporary
academia, articulates a potentially divisive fault line in Beckett studies. Closing this
methodological divide demands a conceptual and ideological dexterity that is not always present
in studies of Beckett which tend to approach his life and writing from one methodological

1 The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume 1: 1929-1940 and The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume 2: 1941-1956. Both
volumes are edited by Lois More Overbeck, Dan Gunn, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, and George Craig.
3

perspective at the expense of the other. Implicit in Gibson’s recent biographical engagement with
Beckett is the disarmingly commonsensical proposal that nurturing the interpretive and
theoretical capacity for zeroing in on what makes Beckettian literature symptomatic of a
particular historical context is a necessary (though not yet sufficient) condition for reconciling
philosophical and “new positivist” readings of his work.
The historical disaster to which Gibson refers is not only the catastrophe of modernity
that culminated in the physical and psychological devastation meted out by the Nazi Terror and
the heavy hand the Nazism played in the traumatization of the European cultural consciousness,
particularly in the (post-) Collaborationist France where Beckett continued to make his home
after the war, but also the ideological and military victories of capitalism in late modernity and
its dehumanizing expertise in reducing people, and relations between people, to things and
relations between things (identity thinking writ large and wide in the late twentieth-century
context of globalization). Understanding the complexity and particularity of the historical
conditions contemporaneous with Beckett’s texts is the minimal requirement necessary for
considering, on the one hand, the non-aesthetic and non-literary imperatives (we will get to the
aesthetic and literary imperatives soon enough) behind why Beckett’s writing articulates itself
with the particular formal architectures and narrative commitments that it did, and on the other
hand for situating Beckett’s neo-avant-garde experimentation with the poetics of narrative as a
timely intervention against the pressures exerted on literature from outside the formalist territory
of its aesthetic sovereignty2. Beckett’s writing must therefore be interpreted in the first analysis
according to an historical symptomology that begins from the insights made available from the
“new positivism” of Beckett studies and then continues to pursue more substantive questions
relating to how historical disaster weighed so heavily on demarcating the aesthetic sovereignty of

2 In The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, Christophe Menke suggests that one of the
implications of Derridean deconstruction is that it extends the localized experience of aesthetic negativity (localized
within the space of artworks alone) into nonaesthetic discourses as well. As such, the aesthetic experience of
negativity fostered by our encounter with advanced artworks, as Adorno calls them, becomes the ground for
transforming the logic and the experience of nonaesthetic discourses: “the sovereign enactment of aesthetic
negativity is characterized by the fact that it develops the foundations of art as a threat to our meaning-producing
discourses. The sovereign enactment of aesthetic experience breaks open the boundaries of its validity and asserts its
validity for nonaesthetic discourses as well” (164). One of the ways that this dissertation envisions the aesthetic and
literary relevance of terror is that it acts as an affective no less than conceptual catalyst for “breaking open” these
boundaries.
4

the Beckettian space of literature and affected so dramatically its formalist protocols of
composition (i.e. protocols of thinking in literature).3
The wager of this dissertation is that terror is uniquely situated to perform the double
conceptual duty of reading Beckett’s work historically and philosophically due to the Janus-
faced role that terror is positioned to play as a site of mediation that stares out at the immanent
inescapability of the suffering and violence of twentieth-century modernity at the same time as it
looks forward to the “speculative” transcendence of trauma and affliction aimed at by the
political and aesthetic discourse of modernist and contemporary literature. This is a literature, as
Beckett puts it, which ceaselessly searches out a perspective (Adorno will call it the negative
dialectical perspective of reconciliation) that would place literature in the privileged position of
accommodating “the mess” of the anguished and dehumanizing world outside it (which alas,
Beckett concedes, “is not a mess you can make sense of”) (Samuel Beckett: The Critical
Heritage 218-19). Devising this perspective in the space of literature is a question that falls both
within the purview of philosophical thinking and of the aesthetic imagination, and is not solely a
perspective laced with the pathos and melancholic lamentation of a discourse (literary or
philosophical) that has forfeited the transcendental aspirations of thinking radically (and not just
passively) aesthetically and philosophically. Saying that Beckett’s is a literature of terror is
decidedly not, in other words, simply a repetition of the perceptions of darkness and despair that
continue to shroud the reception of Beckett’s writing and dramatic texts in the imagination of
contemporary popular (and sometimes even academic) culture. The conceptual specifications of
terror do not permit this one-sided interpretation of its value and its consequences for
understanding literature (and not only literature). Terror is an event of thinking and a singular
catalyst of the aesthetic imagination (Jena Romanticism and the Marquis de Sade vouchsafe this
assertion), even as it doubles simultaneously as the predicate of the historical experience of
panic, anxiety, and suffering which Beckett’s writing undeniably mimetically reproduces in the
extreme limit-situations of its narratives and narrative voices. Accordingly, this dissertation is
invested in the hypothesis that it is terror that most comprehensively confronts Beckett’s writing
with such contradictory imperatives and exigencies like maintaining fidelity to an event of

3 Anthony Uhlmann elaborates on the concept of “thinking in literature” in his latest work, Thinking in Literature:
Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov.
5

thinking (in literature) and reflecting mimetically the suffering and the horror of the world
around it, of giving voice to the echoes and archiving the remainders, as Beckett witnessed and
reported first-hand atop the devastation at Saint-Lȏ, “bombed out of existence in one night”, of
our “humanity in ruins” (“The Capital of the Ruins” 277).

What is Terror? How Does Terror Work? Or, Literature and the Aporetics of Terror

There is a phenomenological narrative to the experience of terror that is imperative for
understanding its conceptual migration from the political and historical spaces of revolutionary
possibility and violence and into the philosophical and aesthetic discourses of modernity and the
avant-garde modernism of the twentieth century. In one sense, terror is the experience of
undergoing physical and psychological torture coupled with being deprived of any and all
expectation of when the violence and the anxiety that terror metes out will stop, deprived, that is
to say, of any knowledge of whether or not what torture seeks to extract (almost always a right or
true form of speech4) will suffice for its cessation. Terror is thereby directed through its
impositions of violence and its exhortations for speech to dissolve as many of the
phenomenological coordinates that it can that consciousness requires in order to orient itself
epistemologically in the world. Terror works best through confusion and disorientation, and
when a subject or a state struggles to set confusion and disorientation aright, terror intervenes all
the more forcefully as the repetition of what led to terror in the first place. To be in terror is to be
exiled from the world of phenomenological experience and epistemological assurance, to have
lost contact with the temporal dissemination of being-in-the-world, and to be violently separated
from one’s own consciousness and memory of a life before this existence in terror commenced.

4 The drama of Blanchot’s 1973 récit, The Madness of the Day, centres on the extraction of a story from the text’s
narrator-protagonist, who, like the narrator-protagonist of Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, finds himself under the
watchful eye of medical professionals, the “keepers” who dutifully watch over him and demand that he tell a story
(Complete Short Prose 122). From The Madness of the Day: “I had been asked: Tell us ‘just exactly’ what
happened. A story? I began: I am not learned; I am not ignorant. I have known joys. That is saying too little. I told
them the whole story and they listened, it seems to me, with interest, at least in the beginning. But the end was a
surprise to all of us. ‘That was the beginning,’ they said. ‘Now get down to the facts.’ How so? The story was over!
[…] Then I noticed for the first time that there were two of them and that this distortion of the traditional method,
even though it was explained by the fact that one of them was an eye doctor, the other a specialist in mental illness,
constantly gave our conversation the character of an authoritarian interrogation, overseen by a strict set of rules”
(18).