Beckett, Lacan, and the Voice (Samuel Beckett in Company) by Llewellyn Brown & Jean-Michel Rabaté

Author:Llewellyn Brown & Jean-Michel Rabaté [Brown, Llewellyn]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Literary Criticism, English, European
ISBN: 9783838268194
Publisher: ibidem Press
Published: 2016-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

3. Inscription

The study of the voice in its topological quality—as continuous and unbreachable, on the one hand, and marked by uncontrollable interruptions, on the other—shows it as a force that largely escapes the subject. We shall now examine privileged ways in which the subject succeeds in responding to the voice by means of producing an inscription, then by creating an image or adopting a ‘reading voice’.

Inscription: A Definition

The process of inscription concerns language in the material effects it produces on the body. If, in the context of limited wholes governed by the Name-of-the-Father, the subject benefits from a definitive inscription in the register of linguistic semblances, in his confrontation with the unlimited, he is obliged to renew and diversify the forms of his inscription, with an aim to create an indispensible border. It is therefore a matter of an action involving the body, as the encounter with a jouissance that is radically ‘unstillable’.[147] In this perspective, writing proves to be of a material order, as Henri Michaux remarkably demonstrates in his paintings.[148] While a signifier names, it also points to the place where it breaks down and encounters, not another signifier capable of reviving meaning, by founding a dialectic, but a void that, then, becomes a ‘jar ever ready to receive jouissance, or at least to invoke it with its artifice’ (Lacan, 2001, 19). Writing here comes as a substitute for the symbolic inscription usually afforded by a structuring invocation.

As such, it is qualified as a ‘littoral’, ‘figuring an entire domain made for the other frontier, in that they are foreign, to the point of not being reciprocal’ (Lacan, 2001, 14). A frontier, as such, supposes a symbolic operation of exclusion as a result of which the two protagonists—be they enemies—are situated together within a set, and are governed by the same law. The littoral, however, supposes a total absence of any relationship: neither of the two entities can function as a border for the other; neither can confer existence on the other as a limited whole. In sum, the abyss remains impossible to absorb, to bypass or to completely hem in. This conception of the littoral thus points to the subject as reduced to his founding trait or cut: to the original incidence of the signifier that produced the ‘speaking being’ (parlêtre), in the absence of any symbolic Other capable of inscribing the subject within a dialogical construction. This is where the subject encounters the force of the drive—as observed earlier when studying Mouth in Not I—in relation to Lacan’s demonstration of how Japanese calligraphy provides the conditions for an absolutely singular response to the crushing force of the universal.[149]

The material quality of writing is particularly palpable in Texts for Nothing (completed in 1951), where the subject shows himself to be unable to create a distance from the unstoppable voice. Indeed, at this stage of his creation, Beckett had not yet attained the structuring hiatus or blank capable of extricating him from the incessant flow of the voice. As

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