Abstract
This article re-examines the legacy of modernist aesthetics, with special focus on Samuel Beckett and his radical critique of subjectivity, language and ontology. The problem of language as a fundamental agent of difference pervades both the content and form of literary modernism. Beyond conventional semantic and aesthetic function, language acts in Beckett's works to construct a subject that is at once multiple in expression and voided at its core. Drawing on performance and philosophy to explore an ethical dimension of Beckett's praxis already sensed by Theodor Adorno and Alain Badiou, this study recalls the political implications of what are sometimes dismissed as ‘mere’ aesthetic questions, by looking deeper into the modernist attitude toward language, subjectivity, and void. This research suggests that the full radicality of the Beckettian subject has yet to be fully absorbed in philosophy and culture, devastating as it is to the postmodern focus on identity and difference.
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