A IS FOR ANNA, OR ‘THERE IS SOME ONE’: SAMUEL BECKETT
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Let me begin with a claim that must sound astonishing to many
ears, John Robert Keller’s assertion of the ‘primacy of love’ in
Beckett’s work.1
Clearly intended as a provocation to contempo-
rary Beckett studies, Keller’s book, Samuel Beckett and the Primacy
of Love, counters a long-running strain in Beckett criticism that
has painted Beckett as an unrelentingly pessimistic fi gure, whose
bleak vision of humanity is mitigated only by the blackest of black
humor. While Keller doesn’t deny what he calls the ‘primal ca-
tastrophe’ that many readers have detected shaping the contours
of the Beckettian narrator’s world, he fi nds Beckett’s fi ction to
be powerfully infl ected by a courageous attempt at love, at whose
center ‘is an attempt to connect to the mother’.2 With this, Keller
swiftly and economically confi rms what Freud has reportedly
taught us all along, such that it has become a truism of psycho-
analytic criticism, namely, that the mother is the child’s ‘fi rst love’.
Keller’s thesis, worked out through sustained readings of Murphy,
Watt, Waiting for Godot and several texts from the short fi ction
(although, surprisingly, not the short novella First Love), is that
by writing, by telling stories, Beckett’s narrator attempts to mend the gap that has separated him from the ‘loving otherness’ that is
the maternal being. Writing, Keller asserts, is a desperate ‘plea for
connection, by a self that is unifying, then fragmenting under the
weight of non-recognition’.3
Although Keller’s is probably not a Beckett many of us would
recognize at fi rst sight, his assessment of the writer as a think-
er of utmost perseverance and fortitude would likely gain an ap-
preciative nod from Alain Badiou. Badiou’s lifelong engagement
with Beckett is recorded in a series of essays, recently translated
in Alberto Toscano’s and Nina Power’s useful volume, On Beckett.
4
In this collection, Badiou speaks of the urgent need to put distance
between ourselves and the Sartrean or ‘existentialist’ Beckett that
has dominated Beckett studies for much of the past half century
(although, as Andrew Gibson points out in his thoughtful after-
word to the volume, Badiou seems largely unaware of the chal-
lenge to this characterization posed by more recent studies in the
deconstructive vein). Badiou invites us to rediscover a writer whose
fundamental ‘lesson’ is one of ‘measure, exactitude and courage’.5
Badiou thus shares Keller’s conviction that the Beckettian subject
is nothing if not powerfully engaged with one of the philosophical
‘conditions’ Badiou identifi es as love. But the philosopher, I sus-
pect, would likely retreat from Keller’s more expansive claim re-
garding love’s primacy or ‘fi rstness’ for Beckett. Love is, after all,
only one of the four conditions that Badiou identifi es under which
truths can emerge, and the Beckett that Badiou encounters is just
as deeply engaged with politics (his work in the French resistance),
with science (the Cartesian ‘Method’) and of course with art (writ-
ing), as he is with love.
With respect to these last, an important strand of critique has
surfaced in tandem with the appearance of the English transla-
tion of Badiou’s magnum opus Being and Event. Badiou, this cri-
tique alleges, is not as responsive as he might be to the precondi-
tions under which an event and its truth procedure might occur. An event is always a rare, aleatory occurrence, but the challenge
posed by this critique is whether we can think a situation’s own
implication in an event—that is, whether any of its local aspects or
historical features can colour or play a more or less defi ning role in
the way, or even if, the event occurs. Recent cases in point include
Sam Gillespie’s persuasive call for the need to identify the aff ect
that ‘grips’ the subject in the truth operation that makes it suscep-
tible to and capable of recognizing an event, and Peter Hallward’s
.
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