Overview

The term ‘posthumanism’ has only relatively recently come to be deployed in readings of Samuel Beckett's work. In retrospect this fact is curious given that Beckett's worlds – in his prose and drama – are replete with signs of the human subject having passed over to other planes of existence, or non-existence, being, or non-being. Critics and readers of Beckett have, of course, noticed the presence of the spectre and the ghost in the work, have had to grapple with finding a way to make sense of what Beckett is offering in these images of haunting. But it is only recently that critics and readers have begun to think about the spectre or the ghost in specific relation to the idea of the posthuman, a category that moves our understanding of Beckett's subject beyond what are assimilable, because still metaphysical, categories (the afterlife, limbo, hell). The category of the posthuman, for my purposes in this analysis, is one that allows me to think about Beckett's subject in relation to a plurality of philosophical ideas: being, ontology, community, ecology, space, and spatiality. That is to say, the posthuman is a concept that demands that we view the subject, first and foremost, as an emerging complexity, an event of being that challenges our conception of what, in fact, it means to be. Beckett's subject, I will argue, thematises the event of being, thematises the emergence of states of subjectivity not easily comprehensible but utterly crucial for our conception of the relation between being and space, between the human and his world. Moreover, to understand Beckett's posthuman subject is not to understand a theoretical subject position (the posthuman as future event) but to acknowledge that the posthuman is always already present in the human, as the human (or even, as we will discover, that the human persists in the posthuman, haunting it, if only as a trace). Beckett is not, thus, dismantling the subject, transforming or killing it, in his prose.