Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Beckett, Heidegger, the World
- 1 Homelessness: The Expelled, The Calmative, The End
- 2 The Poverty of World: Texts for Nothing
- 3 Spaces of Ruin: All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine, The Lost Ones, Ping, Lessness
- 4 Space and Trauma: Fizzles
- 5 Fables of Posthuman Space: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho
- Conclusion: ‘Neither’
- References
- Index
5 - Fables of Posthuman Space: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Beckett, Heidegger, the World
- 1 Homelessness: The Expelled, The Calmative, The End
- 2 The Poverty of World: Texts for Nothing
- 3 Spaces of Ruin: All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine, The Lost Ones, Ping, Lessness
- 4 Space and Trauma: Fizzles
- 5 Fables of Posthuman Space: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho
- Conclusion: ‘Neither’
- References
- Index
Summary
A place. Where none. For the body. To be in.
(Worstward Ho)In some crucial ways the so-called second trilogy of Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho recapitulates the trajectory of the short prose from All Strange Away to Lessness. Company is a closed space text, par excellence; Ill Seen Ill Said moves the subject – now fully spectralised, perhaps even now beyond the category of the posthuman, as such – into a festishised external space, a gravesite; Worstward Ho, in some ways Beckett's most difficult text, moves the subject into space that is immediately placed under erasure: ‘Say ground. No ground but say ground’ (NO 90); here the body both is and is not ‘The body again. Where none’ (NO 90). In the second trilogy we move, in other words, from the space of memory, the space of a kind of autobiographical meditation on the possibility of being through remembrance (Company), to the space of spectralised mourning (Ill Seen Ill Said), to a space that places us beyond even the categories of being, ontology, space, and place. Worstward Ho's intractable difficulty resides in the fact that Beckett here has moved us into a space, the pure space of literature, as Blanchot would call it, where all categories – hermeneutical, ontological, philosophical – collapse. We are asked, as we move through these final texts, to negotiate a relationship to the idea of a fully remaindered subject inhabiting a fully remaindered space: this trilogy reaches the point where mind and world can only be figured as imagined, spectralised traces of themselves: ‘Remains of mind then still. Enough still. Somewhose somewhere somehow enough still. No mind and words? Even such words. So enough still’ (NO 104). My task here, in my reading of the trajectory offered to us in these three texts, is to begin thinking through the possibility of thinking beyond the posthuman. Because the posthuman subject, as I have argued elsewhere, is always haunted by the traces of the human: the term ‘post’ never fully effaces the nostalgic traces of the human that once was. Even in texts as radically spectralised as Lessness or Fizzles, there is in place the possibility that the subject is tied in some ways, ontologically or through the complex process of remembrance, to a more fully realised past.
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- Information
- Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett's Short Prose , pp. 155 - 196Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018