‘Teachings of the death of thought’: Bataille, Beckett, and ‘anhumanism’

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay considers the relation between Samuel Beckett and the French writer and thinker Georges Bataille. At the core of Bataille's writing is a blurring between violent oppositions – atheism and faith, terror and apathy, the sacred and the profane – which he describes through language whose most consistent metaphor is that of a laughter indistinguishable from silence. This essay reads such ‘silence’ in Bataille's reading of Beckett and in Beckett's reading of Bataille. It contends that to take this laughter seriously we must transgress the categories on which the dominant modes of literary valuation in the postwar period rely: the ethical, the political, and the human. In doing so we might begin to approach what Bataille discovered in himself and in his reading of Beckett: what he termed a laughter ‘beyond our measure’.