‘As if the sex matters’: Beckett, Barthes and Endgame in Love

Abstract

This chapter reads Beckett's Endgame alongside another prominent work of the mid-century French literary context, Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. It proposes that queer readings of Beckett's play have emphasized queer sexual relations and sexual acts at the cost of attending to the experience of love as itself a potentially queered condition. Emphasizing the relationship of Clov and Hamm as an ongoing dialogue in the sense of that undertaken by Barthes's figure of the plagued Romantic lover, or l'amoureux, this reading finds in Barthes's work precisely the critical vocabulary to make the queer experience and relations of Beckett's play visible.