This chapter concerns Coetzee’s encounter with philosophers and philosophy. After a brief description of Coetzee’s formation and institutional affiliations, it turns its focus to the ways in which Coetzee has probed both the capacity of literary works to confront philosophical questions and the innate capacities and limitations of philosophy’s own embedded disciplinary procedures and approved forms of discourse. It argues that Coetzee has done this by developing provocations: elaborating propositions – about the nature of human language, consciousness, and being; about the nature of truth, knowledge, and existence – that entice and frustrate philosophical readers, asking that they at least consider what their discipline takes for granted or leaves out of account in its framing of these issues.

Brian Massumi and others, such as William Connolly, draw together a number of approaches into what becomes a syncretic whole in developing a version affect theory that depends upon a sharp distinction between affect and emotions, and which posits affect as autonomous from cognition. The key elements of this mix are Deleuze and Guattari, Spinoza, and theories of affect drawn from psychology and neuroscience. In recent times, there has been significant criticism of some of the foundational approaches taken by this model of affect theory. The most telling relate to how this model of affect theory reads science, as set out by Ruth Leys and Moira Gatens. Both of their critiques are addressed to the work of Brian Massumi and particularly the systems he sets out in the first chapter of Parables of the Virtual (2002). In this chapter I will attempt to do a number of things. Firstly, I will situate the critiques Ruth Leys and Moira Gatens make of Massumi. Secondly, I will work through a reading of Deleuze’s, as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s, use of the concepts of affect and intensity and how these relate to Massumi’s understanding of these terms. Finally, I will briefly discuss the work of cognitive scientist Antonio Damasio and how steps might be taken to the ‘new paradigm of affect theory’ that Leys considers is now essential.

This chapter will examine the interconnected ideas of proportion and relation in Spinoza by reading Spinoza alongside two novels that have been drawn into proximity with his works. The first is a ‘Spinozistic novel’ avant la lettre, written by the twelfth-century Islamic philosopher Ibn Tufayl, which was translated by a friend of Spinoza's because of its resonance with his philosophy. This novel, I will argue, sheds light on the importance of relation and the absence of relation to Spinoza's three kinds of knowledge. By contrast, the second novel, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, seeks to criticise Spinozism, and at times Spinoza (see Gardiner 2000), in part by considering the idea of proportion and its connection to reason. To begin, however, I will sketch a background to some of the claims concerning Spinoza's effect on English literature in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The Radical Enlightenment and English Literature

In Radical Enlightenment and Enlightenment Contested, Jonathan Israel offers a major rethinking of the importance of Spinoza's ideas and the effect of his works on the European Enlightenment from 1650 to 1752. Israel recovers the central role of Spinoza in the processes that produced the Enlightenment, a role that he argues had been obscured because it had to take place underground. During the period of study, it was more or less forbidden to mention Spinoza's works, or ideas that were seen to align with them (called ‘Deism’ in England, or, following Israel, Spinozism), directly, unless one was repudiating them out of hand. The ideas that characterised Spinozism included the denial of a providential God, the identification of God with nature, and the insistence on seeking truth through reason rather than through reference to authorities such as the Church or the Bible. Even those who sought a more nuanced critical engagement with Spinozism had to be very careful. In effect, the only possibility was to engage with it indirectly. Israel states:

Ethics is that aspect of philosophy concerned with how to live. The Greek understanding of the word “ethikos,” involves “the state of being,” that which is manifest in the soul or mind. “Ethics” is etymologically linked to “ethology” through the Greek word root, “ethos.” The original meaning of “ethos” is “accustomed place,” or “habitat,” and by analogy it was quickly associated with “custom, habit.” It evolved however to be understood as the “character,” “disposition,” or core values of individuals or groups. Ethology, then, links ethos and “logos” (which might mean reason or expression); that is, it links disposition and understanding, in naming the scientific study of the behavior of animals within their natural habitats. A secondary meaning is the study of the formation of human ethos. Linking ethics and ethology, then, underlines how forming an understanding of one's disposition within one's habitat enables the proper living of one's life. The word “art,” is often associated with human relations to nature (often through ideas of the “representation” or “imitation” of nature, but also, importantly, with regard to “creation” understood to correspond analogically with natural creation). As such it is an understanding both of nature, and of dispositions within nature. Deleuze shows us not only how life is linked with nature, as ethics involves ethology, but how life and nature express dispositions as understandings, and how such processes of expression involve art, and its necessity. To put this another way: Deleuze shows us how art is necessarily concerned with the same fundamental question which concerns ethics and ethology: living.

Given that Beckett's apparent desire for control over the performances of his plays during his lifetime, and the subsequent ongoing insistence of the Beckett Estate that his stage directions be closely adhered to, are well known, I will, in this chapter, move away from what has become the standard debate – wherein the interests or intentions of the author are opposed to the creative freedom of producers, actors and directors – towards a different point of focus. This will involve an examination of the concepts of ‘expression’ and ‘affect’ which Deleuze develops through his reading of Spinoza and Leibniz on the one hand, and the work of the German Romantic dramatist Heinrich von Kleist on the other. I will then seek to compare these to Beckett's statements regarding his own strong interest in the work of Kleist in order to develop an understanding of the external nature both of expression itself and of the affect in his work, and the implications of this for performance practice.

In order to begin it is useful to again detail the control Beckett extended over productions of his work while he was alive. Both Kenneth Tynan – when he changed the script of Breath – and JoAnne Akalaitis – when she tampered with the stage directions to Endgame – were threatened with legal action (Bair 1990: 640–1, Brater 1989: 84, 107). In his letter to Akalaitis, who had changed the setting of Endgame to an abandoned New York subway car for her 1984 production, Beckett stated that ‘Any production which ignores my stage directions is completely unacceptable to me’ (Brater 1989: 107).

In Difference and Repetition, Proust and Signs and (with Félix Guattari) A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?, Deleuze develops the concept of ‘the image of thought’. This idea seeks to express how the notion of what it is to think is envisaged or pictured at a given time or place. Such ways of thinking form the basis of implicit presuppositions which underlie ideas and conceptual systems. An ‘image of thought’, then, is a kind of canvas of underlying assumptions upon which the works of a given period are sketched. Deleuze sums up the idea in Negotiations:

In Difference and Repetition Deleuze describes a ‘dogmatic’ image of thought which has been dominant throughout the history of philosophy, but in A Thousand Plateaus, What is Philosophy? and Negotiations he emphasises how the image is subject to change over time. He asks, ‘Do we, for instance, have the same image of thought that Plato, or even Descartes or Kant, had?’ In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari discuss such shifts in some detail in their descriptions of ‘the plane of immanence’.

Ever since people have written about Beckett it has been noticed that he is a writer who is, even more than usual, interested in images. A good deal of work has recently been done concerning Beckett's interest in, and use of, images from the visual arts. Most famously, Beckett told Ruby Cohn that he had remembered a Casper David Friedrich painting, Two Men Looking at the Moon, which he had seen during his trip to Germany prior to World War Two and had adapted this image, staging it in En Attendant Godot. Working from a diary Beckett made while travelling through Germany and visiting art galleries before World War Two, and directed by comments made by Beckett himself, James Knowlson has convincingly displayed how Beckett made use of images from paintings which had had a forceful impression on him and reconfigured them in developing his own striking images in later works. Might the same be claimed for Beckett's use of philosophy? That is, did he borrow images used by philosophers and reuse them in his texts? Furthermore, what, in effect, is an ‘image’; what can it do, and what does Beckett make it do?

‘MAKE SENSE WHO MAY’

An obituary of Beckett written by Alfred Simon was published in Le Monde on 27 December 1989. With Beckett's French contemporaries, and perhaps Sartre in particular, in mind, Simon wrote:

While I won't be discussing Catastrophe in this chapter, one might claim that, leaving aside its genesis as a work commissioned in support of the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel, who was then being held as a political prisoner, it has in common with What Where an interest in violence and violent relationships, as both involve torture, of the body and spirit.

In the previous chapter we saw how Beckett moves increasingly away from an aesthetic of relation, an aesthetic of allusion, towards an aesthetic of nonrelation, and how his use of the image develops throughout this process. In this chapter, we will begin to consider one of the perceived problems involved in this shift with regard to the question of how Beckett's literary works interact with philosophical texts. That is, if Beckett moves away from allusion, from a direct link to philosophical arguments, how might his works be considered to still be involved with philosphical ideas? My contention is that Beckett's works continue to interact in important ways with works of philosophy. Further, I argue that, once the relations made explicit through the use of allusion are disavowed or rendered problematic, the use of the image becomes one of the principal strategies Beckett's works develop in maintaining the vibrant exchange with philosophy.

In The Philosophical Imaginary Michèle Le Doeuff describes the importance of images to the affects produced by philosophy. While philosophy sets out to distance itself from ‘myth, fable, the poetic, the domain of the image’, it never succeeds in developing a language which is free from images. On the contrary, ‘Imagery and knowledge form, dialectically, a common system. Between these two terms there is a play of feedbacks.’ That is, images, and the particular qualities they bring with them, serve an invaluable function within philosophical thought.

IMAGES, PHILOSOPHY, LITERATURE

As touched upon in the discussion of Le Doeuff, the supposed conflict between the knowledge (considered dubious, unworthy) offered by the senses and that offered by the light of reason alone (which alone might lead us to the truth) has long drawn a distinction between images and ideas or concepts. We see this, of course, in the celebrated image of the cave in Plato's Republic: the truth, the Idea, is like the light of the sun, and is only open to us through reason, whereas we are habitually caught up with the play of images which are illusory and misleading, like the shadows on the wall of the cave. Perhaps still more famously Descartes opposed the light of reason (which delivers us clear and distinct ideas or concepts) to the confused impressions we are given by the images offered to us by the senses.

Yet, if one looks slightly closer, it becomes apparent that the image and the idea are also closely linked. Nietzsche, in the Birth of Tragedy, points out that Plato not only attacks art and artists, casting them out of his Republic, but also provides a life-raft for art with his Dialogues. So too Stephen Gaukroger has brought to light Descartes's interest in rhetoric – the vividness of images – as a way of expressing truths.

‘IT'S DONE I'VE DONE THE IMAGE’

In Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, Michael Hardt describes how Deleuze develops themes which have a long history in the Western philosophical tradition, but which have ‘remained suppressed and dormant’. Hardt places Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson within a minor tradition which Deleuze develops:

One might apply Hardt's idea to an understanding of the image that has emerged at various times within the Western philosophical tradition, and that has been both suggested by and answered by certain kinds of artistic practice within the Western aesthetic tradition. At times this idea has emerged with clarity and force, and at times the insights it claims to reveal have been surrounded, taunted, ridiculed.

This idea considers that the apprehension of the image (which emerges from the real and is impressed upon our senses like a ‘signet ring in wax’) is fundamental both to our understanding of what the world is and to how we know that world.

In ‘The Exhausted’, Gilles Deleuze considers the image to be of primary importance to Beckett's television plays. While this idea fits neatly within Deleuze's reading, which stresses how the concept of ‘exhaustion’ might be seen to develop in Beckett's works, it leaves some aspects of Beckett's use of the image to one side. I will argue in this chapter that, if we pay attention to the key idea of nonrelation in Beckett's works, we can add elements to Deleuze's description of Beckett's use of the image.

Beckett's interest in developing an art of nonrelation is well known from Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit and has been treated by a number of critics such as J. E. Dearlove. What has not been fully drawn out in these previous studies is how Beckett's aesthetic practice and his understanding of the importance and nature of relations, or connections, develops throughout his career. A close attention to the quality of these shifts sheds light on Beckett's understanding of the image.

FROM RELATION TO NONRELATION

In Beckett's abandoned first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, which was written in 1932, the central character Belacqua describes his theory of relations for the Polar Bear. He begins by referring to an image of a bridge over water, an image which reappears throughout Dream as it is drawn into relation with an idealised anti-hero called ‘Nemo’, who stands on a bridge and finally jumps from that bridge.

Beckett's understanding of the image, and its importance to literature, as it is expressed in his occasional aesthetic writings, is formed around premises which closely relate to understandings which pass through the idea of the presentation. Beckett's interest in the image begins quite early in his career, and attention to his aesthetic writings makes it apparent that he holds consistently to certain of the conceptions he develops early on. This is not to claim that there are no developments or shifts in his understanding or practice, or that he is always able to adequately apply these ideas to his works. Rather, as we will see in examining Beckett's aesthetic practice in the next chapter, there are important shifts as well as points of apparent contradiction between his works and the aesthetic ideas he describes. In short, it takes Beckett some time before he is able to develop a form which is able to do justice to ideas whose outlines at least he seems to have perceived from the outset.

We have seen, through the reading of Bergson, Peirce and Deleuze, how, rather than being understood as relating to the Thirdness of the sign, which already involves interpretation, the image should be understood as involving the immediacy of Secondness, which is presented to us and requires interpretation. A similar understanding of the cognitive functioning of the image (which is immediate and requires interpretation), as opposed to the symbol (which exists as a relation and so already carries an intended interpretation) can be found in Beckett's own aesthetic writings.

The idea of the image, its nature and its power, both with regard to perception per se and perception and apprehension through art, was of key importance to early twentieth-century modernism, and the aesthetic understandings developed by many major English-language writers. The importance of Bergson and his aesthetic theories, which include his theories of the image, is now, after a fairly long eclipse, again being recognised. In part, this study adds to the work of underlining the importance of this recognition.

Yet, through the new impetus and the altered direction given to Bergsonian ideas by the work of Gilles Deleuze, the idea of the image has begun to re-emerge as a key concept in contemporary theories of aesthetics. Deleuze has outlined certain problems which remain pressing in the field of aesthetics, and many of these relate to his understandings of the image, which, while passing through Bergson, are no longer Bergsonian, no longer ‘modernist’ understandings, but again contemporary. In part, then, this study also contributes to the process of seeking to understand the relevance of the image to contemporary theories of aesthetics.

So too, while his aesthetic understandings were clearly informed by modernism, and the Bergsonian ideas which strongly inflected English-language modernist writing, Beckett has developed the idea of the image more fully than any other writer. That is, he emerged from the modernist moment, bringing key aesthetic assumptions from modernism with him, but he also developed his own practice beyond that moment.