The Test is Company: A Deleuzian Speculation on Beckett’s Sociendum

Abstract

Samuel Beckett’s later works are generally understood to involve a paring down of intersubjective relations from the early focus on ‘pseudo-couples’ (Molloy and Moran, Watt and Knott, Mercier and Camier, but also Vladimir and Estragon, Hamm and Clov, Winnie and Willie) to the near-isolation and near-silence of the ‘closed space’ prose texts and many of the late plays. The reduction in intersubjective interaction parallels the reduction in linguistic means. While this view accounts for much of Beckett’s development, it fails to account for the rare appearance of larger human groups and the problem of sociality or sociability that emerges from those groups, a problem that Beckett confronts most systematically in The Lost Ones. In the speculative meditation and extrapolation that follows, I draw upon and extend Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, and particularly its notion of the paradoxical ‘limit-object’ that founds each faculty of thought, to examine Beckett’s investigation of the paradoxes of sociability that arise out of the mind’s encounter with the limit-object which I will call the sociendum, a collective relation that involves no individuals and that constitutes anarchy simultaneously with order. This sociendum takes two forms in Beckett’s prose, or rather its paradoxical nature requires it to be represented using two narrative logics: on the one hand, the multiplication and interference of purely pronominal subject-positions in texts like Company, and on the other the entropic decay of an unsustainable collective order that aims (futilely) at intersubjectivity in The Lost Ones.