Dalarna University Centre for Irish Studies
Biopolitical Beckett: Self-desubjectification as Resistance
Author(s): Jacob Lund
Source: Nordic Irish Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1, Samuel Beckett (2009), pp. 67-77
Published by: Dalarna University Centre for Irish Studies
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Biopolitical Beckett: Self-desubjectification as Resistance1
Jacob Lund
In an article published in theNew Left Review in 2006, the year of
Samuel Beckett's centenary, Terry Eagleton put a question mark after
his title 'Political Beckett?', therebyhinting at some political dimension
in Beckett, whom he characterises as 'one of the twentieth century's
most apparently non-political artists'.1 Following Theodor Adorno,
Eagleton claims thatBeckett's work is post-Auschwitz art, and that it
'maintains a compact with failure in the teeth of Nazi triumphalism,
undoing its lethal absolutism with the weapons of ambiguity and
indeterminacy. His favourite word, he commented, was
'perhaps'.
Against fascism's megalomaniac totalities, he pits the fragmentary and
unfinished'.2
In what follows I will pursue this compact with failure, this
ambiguity and indeterminacy, and will try even to completely remove
the question mark regarding the political impact of Beckett's work, by
proposing that it in its complex investigations of the relation between
and
language
subjectivity
might possess a so-called 6/opolitical
In
other
I
words,
potential.
suggest that the answer, or one of the
answers, to the question 'Political Beckett?' might be '5/opolitical
Beckett'.
According toMichel Foucault, modern society is characterised by
the integration of 'life' and 'the living being' into themechanisms of
power, that is, by a consideration of the very processes of life and the
possibility of controlling and modifying them; hence the term
'biopower'. In order to function and control its subjects, biopower is
dependant on representable and recognizable identities; itdepends on its
subjects' affirmation of their subject positions and of the predicates
attributed to them. In continuation of thework of Foucault, the Italian
'This
paper was originallypresented at theGlobal Beckett conference inOdense, Denmark, 26
November 2006.1 would like to thankall theparticipants of thatconference, especially Steven Connor
for his critique and Daniel Katz for his encouragement.
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Nordic IrishStudies
thinkers Giorgio Agamben and Maurizio Lazzarato conceive of a
reversal of biopower into biopolitics, understood as the production of
new forms of life. Tf power seizes life as the object of its exercise then
Foucault is interested in determiningwhat there is in life that resists, and
that, in resisting this power, creates forms of subjectification and forms
of life thatescape its control.'3
Focusing on the subject-constituting personal pronoun as accounted
for by French linguist Emile Benveniste in his theory of enunciation,
one might read the development from Beckett's The Unnamable, in
which the subject is questioned and destabilised through the firstperson,
via Company, inwhich only the second and the thirdperson is used, to
Worstward Ho, inwhich there is a total lack of person, as a movement
In pointing out
of self-desubjectification.
this act of self
I
in
these
deal with a
will,
however,
pages
primarily
desubjectification
few lines from The Unnamable and practically leave out Company and
Worstward Ho.4 Thus Iwill argue that this abstention from affirming an
identityand a fixed subject-position, this indeterminacy and sustainment
of a subjective potentiality, has political implications, in that the
condition of possibility for biopower lies precisely in its ability to
administer identifiable and representable subjects.
The Unnamable opens by explicitly pointing towards the enunciational
situation: 'Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I.
Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that.Keep going, going
on, call that going, call that on.'5 The opening mocks the narrative
convention that requires the narrator, at the beginning of his story, to
orientate the reader regarding time, place and person by means of the
indexical forms of language, that is, the 'shifters' or 'indicators of
enunciation' that connect person, time and place to the perspective of
- the kind of orientation we
the speaker
see, for instance, at the
room.
am
in
T
It's I who live there
of
mother's
my
Molloy:
beginning
now.'6 These deictic markers, these shiftersor indicators of enunciation
comprising verb tenses, personal pronouns, temporary forms and
spatial
terms
such
as
Molloy's
'am',
T,
'now',
'there'
and
'here'
are
destined to let the individual speaker appropriate language and take over
its entire resources in order to use it for his own behalf, and they can
only be fullyunderstood if the reader or listener reconstructs the position
of the speaker. As Benveniste observes, these words differ from other
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BiopoliticalBeckett: Self-desubjectificationas Resistance
linguistic signs in that they are signifiers whose reference, but not
signified, shifts according to when, where and by whom they are
brought intouse.
Agamben claims that '[t]here is politics because man is the living
being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare
life and, at the same time,maintains himself in relation to thatbare life
in an inclusive exclusion'.7 In lightof this statement, the sentence T, say
I. Unbelieving' could be said to sum up the problem of subjectivity
central to the whole oeuvre of Samuel Beckett: namely, the human
relation to language and the impossibility of directly expressing the
speaking subject. It is impossible in narrative to create a statement in
which the subject of the enunciation is completely co-extensive and
congruent with the subject of the utterance, and vice versa. The
enunciating subject can neither be enunciated nor uttered as enunciating.
In actualizing language, the subject of enunciation is expropriated by
what becomes the subject of the utterance. The linguistic personal
takes the place of the living, existential non
pronoun, the word T,
of
the
enunciation, which iswhy the narrating voice,
linguistic subject
towards the end, has to say T say I, knowing it's not I'. (U, 408)
The sentence T, say I. Unbelieving'
inscribes a traditional first
- that
as
one who speaks - but this
text
the
the
of
the
is,
person-I
subject
I-subject cannot appropriate the sentence and is immediately
transformed into an I-object whereby the second person, the one spoken
to, is inscribed as 'say I'. The sentence is then reformulated as 'It, say it,
not knowing what', inwhich the 'subjective' T
is simply replaced by
the 'objective' 'it'. The unity of the first person has disintegrated and
no source of the
there is no longer any deictic location of an T,
speaking voice, no subject of the enunciation. The narrative situation is
characterized by a fundamental uncertainty as regards who is speaking.
It is not the subject of enunciation who seemingly tries to express him
or herself through an actualization of language, 'Unbelieving', but some
unspecific other. The subject of enunciation is, in its inscription in
and perhaps
language, denied its self, its personal being, and cannot
will not occupy the place of subject of the utterance. A hundred pages
of the beginning is thus replaced by an impersonal
later, the T
'someone': 'Someone says I, unbelieving.' (U, 406) The conditions of
in language remain, as Judith Butler
possibility for becoming an T
remarks with reference to Benveniste, indifferent to the T
that one
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becomes: 'The more one seeks oneself in language, themore one loses
oneself precisely therewhere one is sought.'8
Thus, The Unnamable
sabotages the formal apparatus of the
discursive enunciation by not allowing anyone to identify themselves
with, and undertake responsibility for its time,place and person; by only
asking, not answering the questions: Where now? Who now? When
now? This suspended identification thereby implies a renunciation of the
possibility, described by Benveniste, for appropriating language through
the shifters and using it on one's own behalf, as a means of expressing
oneself. It also implies a renunciation of the concomitant idea that the
word T designates the one who speaks, and at the same time implies an
utterance about thatT:
that one, in saying T, cannot not be speaking
about oneself:9 T seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me.'
is a paradox. The linguisticT, towhich I referby the
(U, 293) The T
concept of the subject of utterance, is at the same time a non-I, in that
the narrator not only uses the personal pronoun to refer to him or herself
but also tomark the distance to his or her self.
In his article 'The nature of pronouns', Benveniste notes that in
contrast to common nouns, 'the instances of the use of / do not
constitute a class of reference since there is no 'object' definable as / to
which these instances can refer in an identical fashion'.10 The meaning
of the pronoun can be defined only through reference to the event of
discourse inwhich it is used. The reality towhich theword T refers is
thereforenot a real, but a discursive reality, and subjectivity comes to
depend on enunciation: V cannot be defined except in terms of
'locution', not in terms of objects as a nominal sign is. / signifies 'the
person who is uttering thepresent instance of discourse containing 7.'11
Elsewhere, in 'Subjectivity in Language', Benveniste shows that
subjectivity is the capacity of the speaker to posit himself as subject:
"Ego' is he who says 'ego'.'12 This implies that theT does not refer to
a pre-existing subjective substance, some wordless experience of the ego
or sense of being oneself, but rather to its own saying, whereby theT
itselfbecomes the referent it ismeant to signify.13 It is thus literally in
and through language that the individual is constituted as a subject. The
to
personal pronoun is an 'empty' signifier; a shifter thatdoes not refer
an exterior reality but which, being always available, is 'filled' by
whoever utters it. It is a marker of the subject only as long as that
subject iswithin an enunciation. Subjectivity can thus be defined only
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BiopoliticalBeckett: Self-desubjectificationas Resistance
through this linguisticT that transcends the totalityof lived experience,
and thatprovides thepermanence of the consciousness.14
In Agamben's
reading of Benveniste, the proper meaning of
- is
- as shiftersand indicators
pronouns
inseparable
of the enunciation
- the
from the reference to the event of discourse. The articulation
- that
shifting
they effect is not from the non-linguistic to the linguistic,
but from langue toparole; from the language system to itsuse; from the
code to themessage. Deixis, or indication, does not simply demonstrate
an unnamed object, the individual speaker, but first and foremost the
very instance of discourse, its taking place. The place indicated by the
demonstration and fromwhich only every other indication is possible, is
a place of language. Indication is thus the category within which
language refers to itsown takingplace.15
crucial question for Agamben concerns the consequences of
subjectiflcationfor the living individual}6 What happens in, and for, the
individual living being, the 'infant' - in the etymological sense of a
- in
the moment he tries to appropriate
being who cannot speak
to
T
and
language, says
begins
speak? As Agamben has shown on the
basis of Benveniste's analyses, the T,
the subjectivity to which the
infantgains access, is a discursive reality referringneither to a concept
nor to a real individual.17 The T, as a unity transcending any possible
experience and providing the permanence of consciousness, is nothing
but 'the appearance in Being of an exclusively linguistic property'.18
Hence Benveniste's conclusion: Tt is in the instance of discourse in
which I designates the speaker that the speaker proclaims himself as the
'subject.' And so it is literally true that the basis of subjectivity is in the
The
exercise
of
language.'19
In his book Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben describes how
enunciation - how this subject-constituting appropriation of language
that establishes the passage from the general, virtual language to
actual
discourse
the
concrete,
simultaneously
implies
desubjectification and the expropriation of the speaking subject:
[T]he psychosomatic individualmust fully abolish himself and
desubjectifyhimself as a real individual to become the subject of
enunciation and to identifyhimselfwith thepure shifter
T, which
is absolutelywithout any substantialityand content other than its
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mere reference to the event of discourse. But, once strippedof all
extra-linguistic meaning and constituted as a subject of
enunciation, the subject discovers thathe has gained access not so
much to a possibility of speaking as to an impossibilityof speaking
[...] Appropriating the formal instrumentsof enunciation [which
are the shifters,for example thepronounT], he is introducedinto
a language fromwhich, by definition,nothingwill allow him to
pass
into discourse.
And
yet,
in saying T,
'you',
'this',
'now
he is expropriated of all referential reality, lettinghimself be
defined solely throughthepure and empty relation to the event of
discourse.20
The shifterT does not refer or correspond to a living being in an
exterior reality; it effects a shifting not from the non-linguistic to the
linguistic, but from language to discourse, from the language system to
its use. The deictic shifter does not simply demonstrate an unnamed
object, the psychosomatic individual, but first of all the very event of
discourse, its taking place, and thereby in a certain sense excludes the
reality of the speaker. In our very subjectification, our appropriation of
and entrance into language, in which we transform language into
discourse by removing ourselves from infancy, our individual living
traces a
reality is expropriated and desubjectified. Thus Agamben
constitutive desubjectification in every subjectification.
In accordance with Agamben's descriptions of desubjectification,
Maurice Blanchot maintains that theT of The Unnamable cannot be
assigned to the author, Samuel Beckett, since thatwould be an attempt
to relate it to what he calls a 'real tragedy of a real existence' and
'something actually experienced'. Itwould, moreover, be an attempt 'to
reassure ourselves with a name, to situate the book's 'contents' on that
personal level where someone is responsible for all that happens in a
world where we are spared the ultimate disaster which is to have lost the
right to say I'.21 Certainly there is no one to undertake responsibility for
theT of The Unnamable; but this perhaps not only has to do with
losing the right to say T, but also with demonstrating what this 'saying
I' implies, along with an extremely deliberate way of 'saying I no more',
to borrow the titleof Daniel Katz' book. Following Agamben, we could
claim thatBeckett's work testifies to the fact that the subject is not only
an effect of language, but also the sitewhere language can or cannot be
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BiopoliticalBeckett: Self-desubjectificationas Resistance
actualised or realised indiscourse. 'The subject is [...] thepossibility that
or, better, that it takes
language does not exist, does not take place
not
of
its
being there, its contingency. The
place only through possibility
human being is the speaking being, the living being who has language,
because thehuman being is capable of not having language, because it is
capable of itsown infancy.'22
The unnameability of theUnnamable can be read as a refusal to comply
with the alienating demand to identifywith the 'empty' signifierT, a
refusal to affirman identityand a fixed subject-position:
I shall not say I again, ever again, it's too farcical. I shall put in it's
[sic!] place, whenever I hear it, the thirdperson, if I thinkof it.
Anything toplease them.Itwill make no difference.(U, 358)
In themeantime no sense in bickering about pronouns and other
parts of blather.
64)
... someone
name
for me,
The
subject
doesn't
matter,
there is none.
(U, 363
there is no
it's the fault of the pronouns,
says you,
from that,
no pronoun
for me, all the trouble comes
that, it's a kind of pronoun too, it isn't that either, I'm not that
either, letus leave all that.(U, 408)
What happens is a continuous un-saying or negation of thepronouns that
are meant to function as references to the speaking subject, and thus to
indicate the origin of the discourse. The narrating I in The Unnamable
does not appropriate language and does not identify itself with the
personal pronoun; it never enters and connects itselfwith what is told.
Thus Benveniste's definition of subjectivity as the speaker's capacity to
- cannot
posit him- or herself as subject "Ego' is he who says 'ego"23
The
be applied to the unnameable narrator-subject of
Unnamable, as it
to represent it.
meant
which
is
to
the
refuses
linguistic ego
identifywith
'Do theybelieve I believe it is Iwho am speaking? That's theirs too. To
make me believe I have an ego all my own, and can speak of it,as they
of theirs.Another trap to snap me up among the living.' (U, 348) In the
terminology of Benveniste, one could say that the semiotic linguistic
signified of thewords, theirsignifie, is present without being 'filled' by
an extra-linguistic semantic referent.
What the novel stages is "the active
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Nordic IrishStudies
non-being" of the subject. A subjectivity is expressed through its
resistance to allowing itself to be expressed. We are, in the very precise
Iser dealing with
formulation of Wolfgang
'Subjektivitat als
that
ihrer
Manifestationen',
is,
'subjectivity as the
Selbstaufhebung
autogenous cancellation of its own manifestations'; but this does not
mean, as Iser throughhis continual reference to 'the basic self seems to
claim, that there is an already constituted subject or self, which exists
before these negations or self-cancellations. The subject is only
constituted through the negations, in other words,
through the
of
actualization
and
de-subjectifying
simultaneously subjectifying
language.
It is in the lightof the demonstration of this simultaneously subjectifying
and de-subjectifying experience of language thatBeckett's work might
be said to have a political, or rather a ft/opoliticaldimension. In his book
Homo Sacer, Agamben locates the foundation for the political in the
human being's linguistic nature, in the fact that we, in language,
separate and oppose ourselves to our own bare life and, at the same time,
maintain ourselves in relation to thatbare life. Immediately before this,
he claims that the fundamental, categorical binaries ofWestern politics
are naked
life/political existence, zoe/bios, exclusion/inclusion.
According toAgamben, the primary ambition of biopower is an attempt
to produce, in the human body, an absolute distinction between the
living being and the speaking being, between zoe (simple vegetative,
organic life) and bios (the conscious, politically qualified life of the free
human being) and between the non-human and the human. The most
extreme result of this ambition is the completely desubjectified and
wordless Muselmann of theNazi camps. Following Martin Heidegger,
Agamben does not see the human being as 'a living being who must
abolish or transcend himself in order to become human man is not a
duality of spirit and body, nature and politics, life and logos, but is
instead resolutely situated at the point of their indistinction'.24 Thus
Beckett's unnameable being, this 'wordless thing in an empty space' (U,
idea of infancy,
390) can be read as a manifestation of Agamben's
which forms the basis for an ethical and political attempt to resist and
counter-act the biopolitical ambition to completely separate naked life
from political existence, the living being from the linguistic being. It is a
matter of remaining within the double-movement of subjectification and
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BiopoliticalBeckett: Self-desubjectificationas Resistance
desubjectification, in this no-man's-land between identity and non
identity,since thisplace, which is so difficult to encircle and maintain, is
the site of resistance against biopower. It is the foundation upon which a
new minor biopolitics can be created.
is completely
In contrast to The Unnamable, the personal pronoun T
abandoned inWorstward Ho, written some thirtyyears later. 'On. Say
on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on.'25 It starts
where The Unnamable leftoff
'you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go
on' (U, 418) while at the same time echoing itsbeginning T. Say I'
by substituting an 'on' for theT. A few lines laterwe read 'All of old.
Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail
again. Fail better.' The text continues for fortypages in a comma-less,
elliptical and repetitivemanner, only to end as itbegins, with theword
on:
'Said
nohow
on.'26
The sentence 'Fail again. Fail better' emphasizes the perseverance
with which Beckett - as a 77 year old, 14 years after having received the
Nobel Prize - still maintained what Eagleton calls 'a compact with
failure'. This 'aesthetics of failure' was already foreshadowed in
Beckett's first publication, the poem Whoroscope, in which he stated
'Fallor, ergo sum!' (T fail, therefore I am'), and was formulated more
directly in 1949, in a famous passage in the dialogues with Georges
Duthuit: 'To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, thatfailure is his
world and the shrink from itdesertion, art and craft,good housekeeping,
living.'27The failure thatconstitutes Beckett's artistic goal is a failure to
represent
altogether,
creative
incompetence.
'I'm
working
with
impotence, ignorance', as he said in an interviewwith Israel Shenker.28
The question, however, is how impotent the Beckettian subject of
enunciation is in its attempts to fail; whether this better failing does
actually bear witness to the one who fails and, in continuation of that, to
a potency and a potentiality in relation to the language in which the
failing takes place.
'Desubjectification', as Agamben claims, 'does not only have a
dark side. It is not simply the destruction of all subjectivity. There is also
this other pole, more fecund and poetic, where the subject is only the
subject of its own desubjectification'.29 By going on, 'unbelieving' but
'with the obligation to express', the Beckettian expropriated subject of
enunciation can be said to appropriate itsown expropriation. Rather than
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impotence, Beckett's work bears witness to a potentiality, to a subject
that is capable of becoming the subject of its own desubjectification: a
subject that resists and evades biopolitical control.
Notes and References
1
2006), 67-74,
TerryEagleton, 'PoliticalBeckett?', inNew LeftReview 40 (July/Aug
67.
2
Eagleton,
3
Maurizio
70.
Lazzarato,
'From Biopower
mPli 13(2002), 99-113, 100.
4
See my
'Enunciation,
Subjectivity,
to Biopolitics',
and Neutrality:
translated by Ivan A. Ramirez,
Artistic
Experience
in Samuel
Nordic Journal ofAesthetics29-30 (2004),
Beckett', inNordiskEstetiskTidskrift/The
that further develops
the line of thought
Ho
76-86, for a reading of Worstward
here.
propounded
inMolloy. Malone
Dies.
The Unnamable
Samuel Beckett: The Unnamable,
(London:
in
references will appear parenthetically
John Calder,
1994), 293-418, 293. Subsequent
the text as (U, 293).
6
inMolloy. Malone
Dies.
The Unnamable,
Samuel Beckett, Molloy,
5-176, 7. See also
J.
in Lance
St John Butler & Robin
'Beckett's Devious
Deictics',
Angela Moorjani,
Davis,
eds., Rethinking Beckett. A Collection
(London: Macmillan
of Critical Essays
Press, 1990), 20-30, 20.
7
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel
Heller-Roazen
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 8.
8
Judith Butler, Excitable
(New York & London:
Speech. A Politics of the Performative
30.
1997),
Routledge,
9
in General
translated by Mary Elizabeth
Problems
Emile Benveniste,
Linguistics,
Meek (CoralGables: UniversityofMiami Press, 1971), 197.
10
Benveniste,
11
Benveniste,
12
Benveniste,
13
See Daniel
218.
218.
224.
in the Prose of
Subjectivity and Consciousness
Illinois: Northwestern
Press, 1999), which has
University
been a major
inspiration for my reading of Beckett, and upon which I draw heavily in
in
this exposition
of Benveniste's
analysis of the personal pronoun and subjectivity
Samuel
Katz, Saying
Beckett (Evanston,
I No More:
language.
14
See Katz.
translated by Liz Heron
See also Giorgio Agamben,
Infancy and History,
The Witness and
1993), 45, and Remnants of Auschwitz:
(London & New York: Verso,
:Zone Books,
the Archive, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen
(New York
1999), 121.
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BiopoliticalBeckett: Self-desubjectificationas Resistance
15
See Giorgio Agamben,
and Death.
The Place
translated by
Language
of Negativity,
Karen E. Pinkus with Michael
Hardt (Minneapolis
& Oxford: University of Minnesota
Press, 1991), 25.
16
See Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz,
121.
17
See Benveniste,
226.
18
121.
Remnants of Auschwitz,
19Agamben,
226.
Benveniste,
20
116.
Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz,
21
Maurice
'Where now? Who
now?'
in The Siren's
Blanchot,
Song, ed. Gabriel
Josipovici (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), 194 [translation modified].
22
146.
Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz,
23
224.
Benveniste,
24
Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 153.
25
Samuel Beckett, WorstwardHo
(London: John Calder,
1983), 7.
26
47.
Beckett, WorstwardHo,
27
Samuel
'Three Dialogues'
in Disjecta.
Miscellaneous
Beckett,
Writings and a
Dramatic Fragment,
ed. Ruby Cohn (London: John Calder,
138-145, 145.
1983),
28
'An Interview with Beckett'
Israel Shenker,
in New
York Times, 5 May
1956,
Beckett:
The Critical Heritage,
eds. Lawrence
and
Graver
reprinted in Samuel
Raymond Federman
(London, Henley & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 146
149, 149.
29
"I am sure that you are more pessimistic
than I am . . .': An interview with Giorgio
trans. Jason Smith,
in Rethinking Marxism:
A Journal
Agamben',
of Economics,
Culture& Society 16:2 (2004), 115-124, 124.
77
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