Samuel Beckett and Modernist Vitalism

This chapter seeks to unravel the complex relation between Samuel Beckett’s aesthetics of the ‘unword’ and his concomitant radical questioning of the human. I situate my discussion of Beckett in what might be termed the current ‘vitalist turn’ in the humanities. I claim that Beckett’s sustained critique of Enlightenment rationality – which he terms an ‘anthropomorphic insolence’ in the wartime novel Watt – cannot be assimilated to a vitalist programme that privileges life as a bulwark against the instrumental forces of modernity. By contrasting Beckett’s notion of the ‘inhuman’, in his writings on art in the 1930s, with the contemporary paradigm of the posthuman, I follow the task Beckett sets his readers: to remain with the negative, to not forsake failure as a backwards conduit to success. As such, I claim that Beckett’s works offer no possibility of redemption through immanence. Beckett’s countless figures of failure cannot be redeemed through a collapsing of the difference between various modes of being. Rather, Beckett’s non-representational modernist aesthetic can only be seen as successful in its rendering of the otherness of being insofar as it fails to capture or represent this otherness. The difference between the human and non-human is thus not overcome but displaced indefinitely. Finally, I trace the negativity of life in Beckett back to the origins of both modernism and vitalism in romanticism, exploring the legacy of Beckett’s particular reception of nineteenth century ideas in his writings on art and in the late work, How It Is.