Deleuze and Beckett Towards Becoming-Imperceptible

Abstract

In this essay I will explore Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of becoming-imperceptible and demonstrate how this notion works in Beckett’s texts.1 Deleuze often refers to Beckett’s characters, rethinking them in terms of desiring-production, schizophrenia, the body without organs, becoming and becoming-imperceptible. The Beckettian characters, wandering in the schizophrenic promenades and obsessed with the combinatorial exercises of exhaustion in Deleuze’s writings, function not as a simple example, but as an argument strengthening the contours of a new immanent ontology. This new immanent ontology raises the question of life in terms of non-personal and even non-organic power, which, by passing through different intensities and becomings, moves towards becoming-imperceptible. But what is becoming-imperceptible? How can we rid ourselves of ourselves and how can we evade perception and self-perception? To answer these questions we have to define the new immanent ontology and to discuss, in Rosi Braidotti’s terms, ‘the ethics of becoming-imperceptible’ (Braidotti, 2006). The new understanding of life as a nonpersonal and nonorganic power requires the theory of immanent ethics which could redirect our thinking from the question of the individual or person towards the philosophy of the impersonal (Esposito, 2012).