Introduction: Negotiating the Archival Turn in Beckett Studies

Abstract

The work of Samuel Beckett and Gilles Deleuze overlaps in surprising ways. Both writers express a resistance to narrative, subjectivity, language, representation, exegesis, dogma, hierarchy, teleology and closure. For example, they explore the idea of mutable subjectivity, with Beckett creating fragmented and disappearing characters and Deleuze expressing the notion of becoming: becoming-animal, becomingwoman, becoming-imperceptible and so on. Likewise, both Beckett and Deleuze distrust signification and prefer ambivalence and nuance to clarity of meaning. Although they shared the same publisher (Jerome Lindon at Les Editions de Minuit), Beckett and Deleuze evidently never met each other. Beckett apparently never read Deleuze, but he seemed to manifest Deleuzian ideas in his work. Deleuze wrote two specific essays on Beckett in Essays Critical and Clinical, and he frequently cited Beckett’s techniques to demonstrate his own theories in works with or without Guattari. In some instances, Deleuze even seemed to use Beckett’s writing to develop and exemplify some of his own ideas and concepts. Commenting on the 1992 publication of an essay by Deleuze in a volume with Beckett’s late work (Quad, suivi de L’Epuise, par Gilles Deleuze), Jean-Jacques Lecercle (2010: 154) speculates provocatively, ‘Perhaps the close proximity, in the French edition, of Deleuze’s essay, “The Exhausted”, to Beckett’s own text, is indeed more than a fortunate coincidence: perhaps it is a symptom.’ Deleuze’s essay outlines Beckett’s preoccupation with ‘exhausting the possible’ (152) that is exemplified in such work as Quad (‘exhausting space’) as well as in the famous stonesucking sequence in Molloy and the various biscuits in Murphy. Timothy Murphy (2000: 229) proposes that ‘Beckett’s prose stages Deleuze’s