Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Beckett, Heidegger, the World
- 1 Homelessness: The Expelled, The Calmative, The End
- 2 The Poverty of World: Texts for Nothing
- 3 Spaces of Ruin: All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine, The Lost Ones, Ping, Lessness
- 4 Space and Trauma: Fizzles
- 5 Fables of Posthuman Space: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho
- Conclusion: ‘Neither’
- References
- Index
4 - Space and Trauma: Fizzles
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Beckett, Heidegger, the World
- 1 Homelessness: The Expelled, The Calmative, The End
- 2 The Poverty of World: Texts for Nothing
- 3 Spaces of Ruin: All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine, The Lost Ones, Ping, Lessness
- 4 Space and Trauma: Fizzles
- 5 Fables of Posthuman Space: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho
- Conclusion: ‘Neither’
- References
- Index
Summary
And dream of a way in space with neither here nor there where all the footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away.
(Beckett, Fizzles 8)It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death.
(Freud, ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’)Loss is impossible.
(Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond)This chapter attempts to understand the constitution of the subject in Samuel Beckett's Fizzles. I am concerned to suggest that these eight short texts present a radical decomposition of philosophical notions of the subject, as such. The subject(s) of these texts, for instance, speaks of itself as being ‘destitute of history’ (F 12), of having existed in a time ‘so long ago as to amount to never’ (F 13), of having given up ‘before birth’ (F 25). Thus, in specific relation to temporality, we are presented with a subject without history, without memory, without, that is, those categories that constitute the subject as subject. And yet, even in this state to which ‘none of his memories answer’ (F 7), some affect of the subject persists, despite itself. It is my concern here to understand how we may conceive of this persistence of affect. Perhaps one way is to read Fizzles as a kind of allegory of Blanchot's notion of the post-traumatic subject. In The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot, responding to Levinas’ conception of subjectivity (as constituted in the world via relations between self and other), offers a reading of what I am characterising as the post-traumatic subject: ‘one ought’, he writes, ‘perhaps to speak of a subjectivity without any subject: the wounded space, the hurt of the dying, the already dead body which no one could ever own, or ever say of it, I, my body’ (30). It is Blanchot's phrase ‘wounded space’ that should detain us here, for surely Fizzles is at one level ‘about’ the subject ‘in’ space, both exterior (texts 1–3) and deeply, and radically, interior (texts 5–8). ‘Trauma’, of course, means ‘wound’, and part of what I wish to explore here is how the remains of post-traumatised subjectivity in Fizzles is demarcated, or indeed effaced, within space. Space, spatiality, and movement through space are central, for instance, to a Heideggerian understanding of the subject.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett's Short Prose , pp. 129 - 154Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018