Beckett in the Posthuman Technocene

Beckett in the Posthuman Technocene Laurent Milesi and Arleen Ionescu Beckett in the Posthuman Technocene: Jonathan Boulter, Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett's Short Prose Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. viii + 222 pp.); Galina Kiryushina, Einat Adar, and Mark Nixon, eds. Beckett and Technology ( Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. xvi + 269 pp.) Allow us to begin by recalling a private conversation one of the reviewers had with Hélène Cixous while he was translating her monograph Le Voisin de zéro: Sam Beckett. In the course of the discussion, the well-known feminist writer and critic, author of a major doctoral thesis published in English as The Exile of James Joyce, acknowledged that ultimately she valued Joyce over Samuel Beckett because there was still some humanity in the former, a depleted absence or "exhaustion" of which, for her and for many other readers, puts Beckett "in the vicinity of zero" (Cixous 2010: 7, 8, 9).1 It has almost become a critical commonplace to say that, writing after Joyce, whose later works (Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) represent the acme of masterly prose and of the plenitude of style despite modernism's sense of a human(ist) crisis, Beckett's genius lay precisely in realizing that he could not out-Joyce his predecessor and mentor, and that in order to make his mark as a writer, he had to travel in the opposite direction, stripping his writing of any remaining shred of a recognizably humanist sense of mastery.2 Long seen, alongside the likes of Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges, as a bridge between (late) modernism and postmodernism, and by now fully assimilated into the latter, Beckett is unsurprisingly attracting increasing critical attention for those themes, tersely expressed in barebones literary forms, that so resonate with our contemporary posthumanist Zeitgeist. End Page 387 Jonathan Boulter's study engages with such a dimension by focusing on Beckett's short prose. The author is known to scholars in Beckett Studies and posthumanism, having published Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed (2008), which already explored the limits of the human and the decentering of the human subject reduced to its bare essentials in Beckett's posthuman world (12–15 and passim), and Parables of the Posthuman (2015), with its passing mention of Beckett's sense of this worldly "lessness" (106). The privative in the latter title can be selected as the signature key to the set of motifs which provide the chapter headings in Boulter's volume: homelessness, the "poverty of world" of Texts for Nothing — recalling Heidegger's characterization of the animal as weltarm, versus weltbildend (world-building: the human) and weltlos (worldless: the stone), an opposition central throughout the study — (material or imagined) spaces of ruin and trauma, with a coda on "neither" asking "how does one record the disappearance of the subject? How does one register the space of that disappearance without reinscribing the subject?" (198). The overall approach in Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett's Short Prose develops the earlier Guide's suggestion that Beckett's work "critiques the idea of the human and the posthuman equally" by uncovering "the persistence of the human even in its most denuded form" (17), as spectral affect and remainder (198). Acknowledging the unsummarizable diversity of posthumanism as an umbrella taxonomic label, Boulter wishes more specifically to "place Beckett's conception of the posthuman in dialogue with Hayles, Haraway, Blanchot, and Derrida" (4) in order to extract "a spatially oriented emergent entity" (4), thus opening "canonical" constructions of posthumanism to thinkers uncannily relevant to Beckett.3 From Katherine Hayles, Boulter retains the notion of "distributed cognition" (5) and subjectivity, which he sees at work in the dis-location of body and consciousness displayed by several Beckettian characters. The resulting idealization of space is also consonant with Donna Haraway's construction of the hybrid (half-real, half-imaginary) cyborg as "a futural fantasy of non-humanist being" (8), a spectral fantasy which for Boulter ties in with Jacques Derrida's messianic envisioning of the specter.4 Thus, "Beckett's posthuman, like Haraway's cyborg, operates as a fantasy of moving beyond limitations and boundaries"; like Haraway's utopian spaces, Beckett's spaces...