Abstract I propose an analysis of Beckett’s theatre in the context of Argentina’s intermittent democracy, that is, frequent interruptions of democratically-elected governments as well as authoritarian practices within democracy and civic compliance. This research is based on archival searches and interviews with theatre practitioners. Along with information about some of Beckett’s productions through history, I briefly describe Argentina’s troubled politics since the mid-1950s, when Beckett’s work first arrived. At a time when social memory is being undermined, this contribution is an effort to identify key moments in the history of Beckett’s theatre in Argentina and reassess its potential to generate political reflection.
Abstract Taking as its cue the similarities between Beckett’s and Derrida’s oeuvres as projects that philosophically and performatively deconstruct the modern subject in order to open the possibility of a more just subject, this article examines what such a (more) just Beckettian subject or even a Beckettian justice might be. Finding that such a subject or justice is necessarily intertwined with the question of gender in the evolution of Beckett’s work, the article then examines recent readings of Not I , while listening to the echoes that the scream in this play has in other artistic works like David Lynch’s Twin Peaks , and the music of the Greco-American singer Diamanda Galás.
Abstract This essay sets forth a comparative reading of Beckett’s How It Is and Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”. “In the Penal Colony” (1919) describes a complex mechanical contraption used by a colonial authority to punish the condemned by tattooing their crime on their body. Beckett’s final novel, published as Comment c’est in 1961 and in English translation in 1964, repeats this inscription, presenting it alongside a multitude of violations inflicted on the condemned. The novel’s genetic edition and recent scholarship, including Emilie Morin’s Beckett’s Political Imagination (2017), have demonstrated that these violations consciously refer to crimes committed by French authorities during the Algerian War of Independence, under the guise of questioning or justice. This essay proposes that it is the protest against an absurd and violent justice that brings Beckett and Kafka in extreme proximity. Both authors denounce this by creating strikingly similar “penal colonies” that undermine Western conceptions of justice, which remain blissfully unaware of colonial oppression.
Abstract Modernist formal reduction and realist concern for immiserating conditions have largely been seen as opposite aesthetic impulses. On the one hand, a dominant theory of modernist art defined modernism as a process of formal reduction that would eliminate all references to ‘extraneous’ subject matter. On the other hand, a tradition of realism has focused on the ways that socio-economically reduced conditions deplete means of self-representation. Despite critical schematizations to the contrary, a special variety of twentieth-century art has integrally tied modernist reductionism and regard for conditions of reduction together. These works of ‘reductionist realism’ tend toward a more philosophical (but no less anguished) regard for existences marked by reduction.
