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Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency (review)

Alain Badiou, unrepentant Platonist, ontologist, mathematician, sometime Maoist, and long-term political activist, might seem to belong to a world far removed from that of Samuel Beckett. True, Badiou’s own output as novelist and playwright might suggest the relationship between the two deserved a second look. Nevertheless, when in 1995 Badiou in Beckett: l’increvable désir spoke of the indelible imprint left on him by the encounter withL’Innommable and others in the 1950s, it came as something of a surprise. Andrew Gibson’s scrupulous, immensely well-read, but arguably inconclusive book is in large measure the result of that surprise. The task Gibson gives himself is double: it is to address the thought of Badiou (on being, event, truth, politics, ethics, aesthetics) as that of one of the pre-eminent philosophers of the present; and it is to argue that, after the plethora of existentialist-inspired readings, in the wake of the so-called post-structuralist turn of at least some recent Beckett criticism (which, from Gibson’s perspective, though others will disagree, is disappointingly in thrall to much the same pessimism as before), it is Badiou who today offers the best chance of bringing Beckett criticism out of the doldrums. To make good the claim Gibson points to Badiou’s rejection of ‘post-Hegelian romantic historicism’ (p. 51), a stance Gibson seems to share, though he writes too, as if he could not entirely take the claim seriously himself, that what Beckett and Badiou have in common, alongside Mallarmé, is their status as ‘vestigial or melancholic modernists’ (p. 40). Gibson is however nothing if not independent-minded, and he goes on to express justifiable impatience with Badiou’s stereotypical account of Beckett’s literary development. But reading Gibson’s endorsement of Badiou’s claim that Beckett’s aesthetic is one of subtraction, dedicated to the ‘suspension of all that is inessential’ (p. 122), others might go further, and ask whether distinguishing in Beckett between what is essential and what is not, as in the case of the emperor’s new clothes, is not simply to revert to a timeworn essentialism according to which writing has value only in so far as it may be deemed to embody (a) truth, and vice versa. Gibson is an indefatigable, inventive, and persuasive critic, but the principal interest of his book lies with its patient exposition of Badiou, and it is increasingly clear that, for Badiou, as so often in the past, Beckett is at best a source of suggestive phrasings and provocative examples, a hook on which to hang arguments whose provenance and purpose lie elsewhere. ‘The trouble with Badiou’s reading of [Beckett’s] plays’, Gibson engagingly concedes, ‘is that it is more consistent with his philosophy than with the plays themselves’ (p. 233). Badiou is not the first philosopher to become interested in Beckett, and is unlikely to be the last. This interest of philosophers in Beckett is remarkable; but it is also testimony to the fact that something in Beckett’s writing — a signature, an affect, a demand — is irreducible to truth, disregards value, and resists all capture.