Tragic-Dialectical-Perfectionism: On the Ethics of Beckett’s Endgame

Abstract

This essay explores the ethical dimensions of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame , in spite of—indeed, because of—the play’s apparent negation of all positive talk of human value and community. In the first part of the paper, I examine Stanley Cavell’s suggestion, put forward in his Carus Lectures of 1988, that Beckett’s play can be read as a work that embodies and develops the idea of Emersonian moral perfectionism. In part two, I turn the tables somewhat. After demarcating some of the social limits of Cavell’s ethical outlook, I then ask what it might mean to rediscover perfectionism in a more politicized form, something that I attempt to do via an exploration of the tragic dimensions of Beckett’s play. While retaining some important features of Cavell’s “thematics of perfectionism,” this approach aims at the same time to move beyond it in order to grasp how Endgame might, in Beckett’s own words, provide “an inkling of the terms in which our [human] condition is to be thought again.”