Beckett, Lacan, and the Voice (Samuel Beckett in Company)

The voice traverses Beckett's work in its entirety, defining its space and its structure. Emanating from an indeterminate source situated outside the narrators and characters, while permeating the very words they utter, it proves to be incessant. It can alternatively be violently intrusive, or embody a calming presence. Literary creation will be charged with transforming the mortification it inflicts into a vivifying relationship to language. In the exploration undertaken here, Lacanian psychoanalysis offers the means to approach the voice's multiple and fundamentally paradoxical facets with regards to language that founds the subject's vital relation to existence. Far from seeking to impose a rigid and purely abstract framework, this study aims to highlight the singularity and complexity of Beckett's work, and to outline a potentially vast field of investigation. Samuel Beckett in Company: Beckett and Relation: A Preface to the Series 8 Bibliography 15 Table of contents 18 Abbreviations and editions used for works by Beckett 20 Acknowledgements 23 Lacan with Beckett: Departures 25 The Voices of Samuel Beckett: Introduction and First Approaches 38 Listening 39 A Complex Field 44 Lacan and the Voice: A Preliminary Overview 51 Lacan and Beckett: Affinities? 52 The Limits of Certain Uses of Lacan 58 ‘Jouissance’: a Factor of ‘Empêchement’ 65 Further Developments Referring to Lacan: A Change of Orientation 72 Psychoanalysis, Beckett and the Voice: An Outline of Concepts 77 Structure of Our Study 86 I — The Voice and Its Structure 94 Initial Concepts 94 Voice and Retroaction of the Signifier 98 The ‘Buffering’ Effect of the Paternal Metaphor 101 ‘Foreclosure’ of the Paternal Metaphor 102 The Model of the ‘Pastout’ or the ‘Unlimited’ 104 An ‘Unborn’ Subject 112 An Impassive Mother 128 A Nonexistent Other 133 The Voice: Real and ‘Lalangue’ 136 The Hallucinated Voice 147 II — Disjunction of Pronouns 154 Metaphorical Formation of the ‘I’ 154 ‘I’ and the Drive: ‘Not I’ 157 Staging the ‘He’: ‘A Piece of Monologue’ 186 III. — Continuous, Interrupted, Responses 194 1. The Continuous 196 2. Interruption 223 3. Inscription 250 4. Image and Reading 262 IV — Exteriority and Artifice 278 1. The Voice of the Machine 279 2. Discursive Apparatus 357 Singularity of the Voice: A Conclusion 420 Bibliography 432 Index 458