The Unnamable Read Online Free Page A

are not dealing with a book at all, but with something more than a book:
     perhaps we are approaching the movement from which all books derive, that point of
     origin where, doubtless, the work is lost, the point which always ruins the work,
     the point of perpetual unworkableness with which the work must maintain an increasingly
initial
relation or risk becoming nothing at all. (Blanchot 2000, p. 97)
    But in seeming to disallow the fixing down or location in a specific source of
The Unnamable,
Blanchot nevertheless assimilates the text to his own philosophy, of the ‘neutral’, or the ‘indifferent’, anticipating
     the moves made by philosophical critics of the 1980s and beyond.
    For critics who tend towards the philosophical readings I have just been describing,
     and who tend to see Beckett’s major achievement as concentrated in his prose,
The Unnamable
has a special status as a kind of abstract or encyclopedia of Beckettian themes and
     feelings, the fullest and most unflinching enactment of the ‘issueless predicament’
     that his work in general explores. Such critics tend to treat
The Unnamable
as the matrix, oromphalos, around which all the rest of Beckett’s work, both before and after, inevitably
     swirls, as though Joe, Winnie and all the rest of Beckett’s post-
Unnamable
creatures were destined to join Molloy and Malone in their concentric orbits around
     this novel’s dubiously spectatorial speaker.
    But there have been other readers who have seen the very extremity of
The Unnamable,
its maximum of minimality, as providing the decisive impetus for the thirty years
     of new and improbably various ways of ‘going on’ that succeeded it. For such critics,
     ‘going on’ has meant ‘going beyond’, or even getting out from under,
The Unnamable
. Perhaps the most influential of these critics in recent years has been the philosopher Alain Badiou. Badiou agrees
     with other critics in seeing
The Unnamable
as a climax in Beckett’s work. However, Badiou attempts to alter the centre of gravity
     of Beckett studies, by directing attention to the kind of work that followed upon
The Unnamable.
For Badiou, this is work that is no longer skewered on the unresolvable excruciations
     of what the subject is and how it is to be spoken, but deals instead with what he
     calls the ‘occurrences’ of the subject, most notably in its encounters with otherness.
     ‘Instead of the useless and unending fictive reflection of the self’, writes Badiou,
     ‘the subject will be pinpointed according to the variety of its dispositions vis-à-vis
     its encounters – in the face of “what-comes-to-pass”, in the face of everything that supplements Being with the instantaneous surprise of an Other’ (Badiou 2003,
     p. 16).
    Badiou describes himself as encountering Beckett through
The Unnamable
during the 1950s, and being captivated by the vision he found there of nothingness
     and dereliction, a vision that ‘rather suited the young cretin I was at the time’
     (Badiou 2003, p. 39). Forty years later, Badiou dismisses this view as ‘a caricature’.
     In urging that we follow Beckett in moving beyond
The Unnamable,
Badiou is also urging a move beyond the kind of language-centred post-structuralist
     criticism that finds in
The Unnamable
its most complete statement of principle, caught as it is in the same infatuation,
     the same ‘Cartesian terrorism’(Badiou 2003, p. 55). In writing that ‘[i]t was important that the subject open itself
     up to an alterity and cease being folded upon itself in an interminable and torturous
     speech’ (Badiou 2003, p. 55), and insisting that Beckett had in fact done so, Badiou
     is also reproving a generation of critics who have found in
The Unnamable
what he sees as a sterile model for self-replicating and ultimately self-satisfied
     scepticism.
    Perhaps Beckett never again made such intense demands on himself or his readers as
     he does in
The Unnamable.
When he turned back to