Sponsored by Borghesi-Mellon Workshop, Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+, and Department of Philosophy.
The role of reflection, consciousness, self-consciousness and recognition in Beckett’s fiction has long been a topic of intense interest and debate. From Blanchot to Badiou, many of the canonical philosophical interpretations of Beckett focus on the status of self-reflection in the trilogy, which has often been read as a record of Beckett’s struggle to emancipate himself from the Cartesian philosophy of mind. Recent scholarship on Beckett has emphasized a naturalistic dimension of his post-Cartesian model of consciousness. This new focus on Beckett’s naturalism has led to important new accounts of the role of self-reflection in The Unnamable in particular. Yet as I will argue, the new naturalism in Beckett studies is premised on an unviable anti-subjectivism, which continues to exert an influence on humanistic research more broadly.
This essay will contest both the Cartesian understanding of self-reflection still dominant in scholarship on the trilogy and the reductive understanding of naturalism underpinning current critical paradigms. On my account, the recently recovered Hegelian idea of embodied cognition is uniquely well-suited to rendering intelligible the dynamic of reflection, contradiction, and revision in The Unnamable. Following the naturalistic reading undertaken by Dirk Van Hulle, this article will show that the preposition “on” ubiquitous in the final novel of the trilogy, The Unnamable, singularly manifests the Beckettian understanding of self, consciousness, and thought. But by turning to a tradition that is largely ignored in Beckett studies, I show that Beckett’s powerful depiction of the inability of the “I think” to “not go on” is a historically inflected representation of a rational model of agency. Owing to the peculiarly “reflective” relation of the trilogy to its own narrative form, Beckett’s conception of thinking should also be read as a\ narrative articulation of a theory of novel-writing—with broad implications for the study of modernism. Drawing on contemporary post-Kantian thought, I argue that Beckett’s middle-period trilogy is a staggering philosophical achievement in a distinctively novelistic mode.
For more information contact jjhackett2@wisc.edu