From Residua to Offal: Beckett’s Counter-Anthropocene(s)

This article reflects on a series of short texts by Samuel Beckett, proposing that they centre our focus on the ‘residues’ of capitalist systems. Exemplars of the subject as victim, Beckett's human characters tend to fall prisoner to mutations in their environments; all that is left to them is the possibility of remaining, persisting amidst ruination. In this regard, Beckett’s work might be read as an act of resistance against an anthropocentric narrative of Earth’s history and against the temporalities of the Great Acceleration. This article thus identifies ‘counter-Anthropocenes’ in a selection of Beckett’s prose texts, where the transformation of the world no longer produces gain or profit, but always waste or leakage – a residue that is also ‘what remains’ or subsists, a ruin that is part of the development whereby the Capitalocene becomes a Necrocene. After an introduction to this terminology and a discussion of its resonances within a range of Beckettian ecosystems, the article then explores characters’ material modes of subsistence that resist the imperatives of the Capitalocene; they manage to ‘go on’ in a world without future. The article argues that the abundance of remains and their circulation in Beckett’s fictional worlds provide alternative narratives of human history, in which globalising and totalising perceptions can never be achieved. Rather, human beings themselves are turned into refuse caught in, and subjected to, the entropy of the Necrocene. Reading Beckett’s texts through this lens augments a conundrum at the heart of Beckett’s oeuvre and at the core of the ecological challenge of our times: the limited agency of individuals in the eco-socio-political systems that shape the everyday. Beckett’s Necrocenic poetics of loss offers us a vision of stillness and persistence against the fast-paced, production-oriented temporalities of the Anthropocene—or Capitalocene.