Erotics of Nonrelation: Sexuality, Reason, and the Inhuman in Samuel Beckett’s Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho

Abstract

This thesis examines the tensions and connections between sexuality and reason in Samuel Beckett’s Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho. It situates these late works through philosophy, theorists of sexual difference, and Beckett’s archives. It combines empirical research with speculative philosophy and proposes the idea of an erotics of nonrelation to accommodate desire that exceeds the human, the gender dyad and organic life.

Through a cross-examination of transformations across Beckett’s career and his composition process, it considers the ways Beckett complicates the ideality of woman and man through the particularity and sense of bodies and place in his last decade of prose. Thus, this thesis is in conversation with Beckett studies; it expands the scope of current readings of the maternal and womb in relation to these late works. Registering impersonal and pre-personal forces and tendencies, the tragicomic, atavism, geologic time, space and void, provoke new understandings of sexuality, ‘life,’ time and sense. This expansion also unfolds an ecocritical perspective.

Discursive fragments of religion, philosophy, science, history are recomposed from rhetoric to rhetorical question in Beckett’s experimentations. Thinking with such questions, the thesis enacts a hermeneutics of the gaze, logos, oikos, genre, the material imagination. This hermeneutics on the one hand offers insights into intertexts from Beckett’s reading and extant library that have yet to be discussed in detail by Beckett studies. On the other, such insights allow this project to grapple with the condition of global change and human induced climate change.