Beckett, Ethics, Critchley, Adorno and much more

I was asked to write a chapter (of which this represents a large section) for an edited volume of essays. I don't think they liked my contribution since I still await the editor's response to my submission. It dates from 2001. I am oddly attached to it perhaps because it was always addressed to myself.

Perhaps one of the most surprising paradoxes of recent Beckettian criticism is the vigour with which his work has been re-enlisted to a metaphysical and totalizing project the spirit of which, for many, Beckett’s work represents the antithesis. Part of this vigour conceivably stems from an ethical turn in philosophy and in literary theory. Each of these contentious claims demands immediate qualification. First, it should be made clear that the term metaphysical is employed here in a specific sense which will be explicated below. Second, there have been several distinct ethical turns in recent philosophy and criticism and these need to be disentangled.

In the wake of the theoretical turn in Beckett studies, there has recently been an emergent demand that Beckett’s work be somehow rescued from the clutches of deconstructionists and schizoanalysts, that somehow the referent needs to be restored. In short there has been a return in Beckett scholarship to an implicitly metaphysical paradigm, one whereby Beckett’s work be reclaimed from those who would subject it to a complete loss of co-ordinates, sacrificing the critic in the process and abandoning the work to the vagaries either of the signifier or the schizoid.

Metaphysics being the philosophy of Being, it need not always be the case, however, that metaphysical enquiry have a foundational aspect or underpinning. Metaphysics as the study of first causes and of origins can also name that type of inquiry which ends up by proving the lack of validity of that very conception of metaphysics. This is why the term ontology may perhaps be more appropriate.[1] [ontology for Heidegger is the study of the Being of beings].[2] Ontology relates to a modality of coming into Being, of being-in-the-world, or (for Vincent Descombes) is to be thought of as an ontology of the present, of being now.

The question which I wish to address in this paper is has there been a return to metaphysical thinking about Beckett’s work? And, moreover has this return been felt moreso in philosophy than in literary criticism. Or, rather, is it more notable in the area of philosophical reflections on Beckett? An allied question will also be posed: what are the current set of relations obtaining between the two disciplines? Along the way it will also be possible to consider the notion - proposed by Gilles Deleuze - that Beckett himself is a half-philosopher. The set of questions posed here pertain to the inquiry that has underpinned much of this book, namely that which must be undertaken afresh each time the machinic phylum is forced to confront or undertake a negotiation and a relation with the machinic assemblage; the ruses and slippages, often into reification, but sometimes into molecularity, which occur when the Beckett corpus meets the critical hermeneut.

Beckett and the philosophers? Not only is this the title of Peter Murphy’s important article but it is also an enduring concern more generally amongst Beckett scholars, both those who may delve into the various Beckett archives in search of clues as to Beckett’s reading of the philosophers and those who may eschew such empirical researches in favour of speculative forays into retrospective intertextual explorations of resonances between Beckett’s work and any number of philosophical approaches from Aristotle, through the stoics, through Plotinus in the third century, to contemporary encounters staged between the work of Beckett and philosophers which he definitely did not read such as Baudrillard and Lyotard.

It is in part the very elusiveness of Beckett’s work, its untrammelled vital energy which defiantly remains unabated in the wake of such encounters that spurs critics and commentators to further efforts. It is always the case of encore un effort pour etre philosophe (avec Beckett). One of the most interesting manifestations of the philosophers’ response to Beckett, rather than Beckett’s response to the philosophers, is the extent to which contemporary philosophers have attempted to detect and to delineate the salient features of a Beckettian system.

There is nothing particularly strange about this common feature. Indeed it could be said to the critical act par excellence, one whose basic structure is discernible behind even the most enigmatic and epigrammatic of deconstructions. Of course this quality of critical response is the fundamental aporia of literary studies.

As Simon Critchley points out in the introductory remarks to the Beckett section of Almost Nothing, “there seems to be some sort of inverse or perverse relation between the resistance of Beckett’s work to interpretation and the philosophical abstraction and assuredness of the interpretation offered in its name.” (142). With comic panache Critchley caustically proposes a possible Kantian reading of the Beckettian œuvre (“What a broadening of the mind!” 144) before going on to point out that such a hypothetical project (which in Critchley’s view would amount to the philosophical reading of Beckett), like all of the valiant attempts that have gone before (one thinks for instance of Robbe-Grillet on Beckett as Heidegger, innumerable others on Beckett as cartesian etc.) have the end- product of the spectacle of “the philosophical hermeneut becom[ing] a rather flat-footed puppet dancing to the author’s tune” (144).

Let the parade of philosophical imps of the perverse begin says Critchley. First to be tested for hermeneutical adequacy is Derrida, the philosopher who famously - and paradoxically helpfully for many Derrideans wishing to make a inroad into Beckett studies - has remained silent on his work. Critchley echoes the move of many others by commenting on Derrida’s own remarks about his inability to say anything about the work of Beckett an inability brought about by the ethical demand that one avoid “The platitude of a supposed academic metalanguage” (144).[3]

Critical Apparatus: Diving and Dredging
If the cartesian diver - also known as a bottle imp - is a likely figure of the philosophical hermeneut, alternately plumbing the depths and ascending toward the sky of transcendence (by means of rat’s asses and sky-cranes as one Deleuzean - Welchman? - would have it), then Critchley in offers a timely reminder of the Derridean figure of the dredging machine He reminds us that it is the remainder, the irreducible remainder which resists hermeneutical exegesis, that is perhaps what Derrida gestures towards most forcefully by not speaking or writing on Beckett’s text. “In this sense, we might say that the goal of Derrida’s reading practice is to let the remains remain,” Critchley convincingly concludes (146).

Endgame, Beckett’s play of ending and gaming, is reclaimed by Adorno - to whom Critchley turns at this point in his study, having reached an impasse associated with Derrida (and identified by Critchley as equivalent to the impasse of deconstruction). Rather than merely a play that offers a straightforward expression of the meaningless of existence, and rather than exemplifying mere Heideggerian “thrownness”, Beckett’s text, by means of what Adorno sees as the author’s materialism, succeeds on the one hand in moving beyond the inwardness which characterises Heidegger’s dasein and on the other ruling out the possibility of situation being translated into “meaning”. Critchley follows Adorno whose words and conclusion he (favourably?) quotes: “the dissociation of the unity of consciousness into disparate elements, into non-identity” (149).

These remarks on Adorno, and on Critchley’s approval for Adorno’s conclusion need to be placed in their proper context. Adorno’s vision of the decline of metaphysics does not rule out the possibility of introducing his own metaphysical concepts. Indeed nowhere perhaps is Adorno more metaphysical than when in Aesthetic Theory he writes:

“Because it is different from empirical life, the work of art posits its unity, as it were, programmatically. Traversing the realm of spirit, the art work determines its oneness in opposition to the contingency and chaos of what grows naturally” (266).

While Adorno is thus committed to a view of art which eschews any conception of the latter as the unproblematic mediator of an external reality - a commitment reiterated throughout his work - he is fundamentally committed to a conception of the work as integrated. This will not lead to a naive conception of the art work as a harmonious whole unvisited by disjunction or dissonance. Nor will it necessarily posit the work as synthetic resolution of a conflict, although Adorno does in places seem to argue the contrary (“this oneness is more than just formal; it enables works of art to rise above internecine disjunction” 266). In Adorno, who champions early Schoenberg and late Beckett, that which is dissonant need not be neutralized in Hegelian sublation. In a manner emblematic of Adorno’s negative dialectics, while

“art is unable to bring about the identity of the one and the many, ... [it] ... incorporates this inability as a moment of its unity”

It is a combination of its programmed unity which can include within itself elements which jar with that unity (one of these being its inability to facilitate or enable the identity of the one and the many) that leads Adorno to posit the monadic status of the work of art. This monadism has a further consequence. If the art work is autonomous and sealed within its own spatio-temporal co-ordinates, then analysis of the work in question must remain immanent rather than claim to be produced from a position transcendent to the analysed work (257-59).

Immanent critique, as performed by Adorno, is designed to avoid the simplistic alternative of judging a solipsism on the one hand, or an art which self-negates because it functions merely as a commentary on society on the other (352). For, while Adorno considered naturalistic theatre a dupe of the culture industry, he also regarded socialist realism as infantile. Beckett’s work avoids both pitfalls.

“Beckett’s dramas exemplify the proper relation between the two contradictory desiderata, i.e. successful figuration and adequate social context.” (353)

Adequate social context, it must be added however, amounts to a negation of content, which would lead one to conclude that adequate social context entails a merely formal property or series of properties standing in a relation of resistance vis-à-vis conformity and reactionary thought and practice.

Under the heading ‘The Crisis of Meaning’, Adorno states that Beckett’s work seems to presuppose the experience of meaninglessness - but it doesn’t negate meaning - it negates traditional categories of art by carrying “the empirical process of the disappearance of meaning” into the midst of those categories. The revolution is one of form.

This process of “metaphysical negation” is one which attenuates the need for and the appeal of any metaphysical affirmation: “at the end of this tunnel of metaphysical meaninglessness ... there is no light (220).

Returning to Critchley, he concludes that the specificity of Beckett’s work for Adorno lies in the former’s interrogation of meaning, of what it is to produce meaning, and yet at the same time his work does not end up with that interrogation as its meaning, that is the meaning is the work’s resistance (via a reflexive consideration of its meaninglessness) to meaning. Again the characteristic Critchley phrase appears here: “a necessary and impossible task” (151).

Critchley follows this up by explicitly reminding the reader of his purpose, which is to show that Beckett’s work’s meaningless is an “achievement” rather than a task, and that that meaninglessness will refuse attempts on the one had to recuperate a meaning (even meaninglessness as meaning) and on the other what he refers to as the (nihilistic) comfort of meaninglessness.

Whichever way one puts it it is clear that Critchley is enlisting Adorno to support his own contention regarding the impossibility of Beckett’s text, the remainder which has silenced even Derrida. Derrida’s silence for Critchley indeed is the mute but eloquent signifier of the fact that for many others who do try to speak on Beckett “The dredging machine continues its work even as the water and silt escape it and because of this fact” (152).

What then of Adorno’s dredging machine? How will it manage to theorise meaninglesness in a manner which avoids existentialist and Heideggerian reification? Critchley points out that it is through a conception of form as social praxis that Adorno makes such a move. The utopian moment of “reconciliation” is tempered however by the acknowledgement that this moment is not reconciliation as it has been traditionally conceived (namely, one supposes within broadly Hegelian terms, as sublation). Critchley is compelling on how Adorno’s hectoring antitheses neutralise the prose under its scrutiny and testifies in Critchley’s view to the failure to evoke Beckett’s idiom (157). If issue is later taken with Critchley’s version of Deleuze no such qualms are felt in his judgement of the Adorno misprision of Beckett’s humour.

And yet Adorno’s reading of Beckett remains in Critchley’s words “the philosophically most powerful and hermeneutically most nuanced piece of writing on Beckett” (160). Would it disingenuous to respond to this by turning Critchley’s own comments (on Adorno) against their author by saying that perhaps this judgement tells us more about Critchley’s concerns than it does about either those of Adorno or indeed of Beckett.[4] Adorno, after all, leaves us in the space of a negative dialectic and in the utopian opening of a formal praxis. It is these two items which as a Levinasian Critchley wants to retain (even if his will be a messianism without the messianic, a secular Totality and Infinity). And, given the affinity between the two thinkers, this is why Critchley can find his quasi-Levinasian reading partner in Blanchot.

The reading of the trilogy which Critchley goes on to produce - out of his averred sense of the necessity, the demand - Levinasian one presumes - to go on - is largely predicated on the distinction made by Blanchot between narrative time and the time of dying. It is the latter which offers Critchley the forum for a Ricksian “syntax of weakness”, an idiom uttered in awareness of the impossibility of dying (Blanchot). Hence the interminability of the on, in Critchley’s view.

The enduring presence of Ricks in the development of the argument is surprising. Critchley makes of the former an obscure ally in a double-headed project: with Ricks a potshot (although not ‘ritualised’, as Critchley with some humour says of Ricks’ own reproaches to deconstruction) against “the complacent scepticism of certain philosophically challenged tendencies within contemporary debate”, and, pace Ricks, against a limited vision of the Derridean project (part of Critchley’s concerns in recent work has entailed a revision of his once highly critical view of Derrida in the light of the latter’s recent “ethical turn”). Finally Critchley parts company with Ricks by correctly indicating the fatuous assumptions surrounding what exactly art and life might be in the unreconstructed realist vision of his oddly chosen companion. Critchley offers us another clue as to where he is heading by attesting that while he is aware of the existence of something outside language (and it should be noted that he will take Deleuze to task for adopting a position on this issue reducible to or equivalent to a transcendent one), he is not sure what that outside is.

Keeping in mind his favourable comments on the question of form and its relation to social praxis, it comes as no surprise that Critchley envisages a utopian moment coterminous and coincident with Beckett’s syntax of weakness:

The undoubted felicities of Beckett’s bull do not return us to life as it is allegedly lived (for which mercy much thanks, GD), but rather engage in a massive and unrelenting critique and dismantling of the illusoriness of what passes for life, through which we can detect the faintest glimmer of a world transfigured by a messianic light” (171)

One senses the approach of Levinas.

Critchley moves inexorably then to Blanchot - the better to get to Levinas? - by asking Who speaks? That this question has often been asked within Beckett studies is well-known. Hence it is somewhat perplexing to see Critchley rehearse the various ways of responding “Samuel Beckett” as if it were the abiding refrain amongst that body of scholars; moreover, and more problematically, to read Critchley on this issue, one would have to be tempted to ignore the work of a diverse body of scholars many of whom for a quite considerable length of time have been offering a very different and often a very nuanced - perhaps even philosophically nuanced ! - reply to precisely the question posed in Blanchot’s 1955 essay. Yet Critchley’s red herring (since in a conference paper he had already identified the philosophical and psychoanalytic herrings of Beckettian studies, perhaps it is time to turn our radar to his own essay), it has to be said, does not quite have the sort of following amongst Beckett scholars that he implies.

And yet, when Critchley enlists Blanchot and endorses the latter’s claim that it is not I but it which speaks in Beckett’s work, one finds oneself unable to dispute that conclusion. However, Critchley’s next move is to proclaim that what Beckett’s work is striving towards, in its exhaustion of the possibilities of a personal pronoun having a referent however transitory, is a condition of the il y a, in other words the il y a of Levinas. [What remains to be asked here is limited to whether one wishes to ask the question of this il y a and therefore of Levinas more generally. Since Critchley already provides his own answer, in the shape of the opening essay of his volume on precisely this topic, the reader will be forced to make a return with him to explore the issue more thoroughly.]

It is clear that Critchley has come to rest at the moment of ethics, here conceived as pertaining to a moment of attention to what he calls, following Beckett, the buzz, or what in Murphy is described as the great blooming, buzzing confusion. But before drawing to a conclusion he has time for one further hermeneut, more subtle than Ricks but not as much as Adorno.

It is the contention of this chapter that in so doing he has time also for a surprisingly recuperative appropriation of an old adage long derided amongst certain scholars of Beckett, but enjoying, in some quarters an allied - although distinct - revival: “the meaninglessness of existence”. Critchley picks up Cavell’s rejoinder to this chestnut - meaninglesness as goal - and runs with it. Critchley’s quarterback , it will transpire, to Deleuze’s juggernaut. However despite the recuperative moment we are, Critchley wants very vehemently to argue, in a situation purged of redemption (he, like Beckett, will not sink to such depths as to require a salvific moment of redemption).

The messianic moment without a messiah to which Critchley is leading us is precisely an ethical one; it can be summarised in his view in one word : “Imagine!” This demand, he concludes, sums up the Beckettian corpus. The work is totalized by being inscribed in the encompassing volume of Totality and Infinity.[5]
[1] In his book on Freedom Jean-Luc Nancy distinguishes two modalities of ontology. The first posits a continuum - what Pierre Klossowski has called the suppot - wherein a Being underpins all individual (or singular) instantiations of that Being. The other modality entails the inverse relation (indeed Nancy says that the first entails a non-relation or rules out all relation) whereby the singular does not have a ground in Being but rather entails - in a Heideggerian sense - a relation to the present (and, presumably to the event).
[2]Despite Heidegger’s comments on slippage - and how the asking of the question of metaphysics cuts the ground from under the questioner - embroiling him or her in the whole of metaphysics, inaugurating the moment of anxiety which is equivalent to the experience of the nothing - there is a very strong sense in which the slippage remains under the auspices of an “ossifying” force. There is an insistent molarity in the thought of Heidegger which would make of Malone’s stick and pencil “propriative” entities. However, despite the fact that his question remains metaphysical, Malone is not committed to such an encounter with his surroundings. If fort is the other pole of da-sein, then it is true of Beckett’s Malone and his possessions that he and they remain in the zone of the fort rather than the da, the thrown away as opposed to inhabiting/participating in the condition of “thrownness”.
[3] See also Royle, Begam, Docherty and Katz.
[4] See Butler’s review of Critchley in Modern Language Review October 1999, 94:4 1180-1
[5]Imagine - that is make an image. Here Beckett’s work takes the place of the unimaginable divine, a secular reworking of the Judaic prohibition on the visibility of the Divine..that then is the messianic light invoked by Critchley.