Abstract
Approaching the political ramifications of ‘contradiction’ as a trope in Beckett’s textual logic, this chapter argues that this narratological device has an important homology with the radical political process of democratic change. An excursus through Mao Ze Dong’s “On Contradiction” and its contemporary re-inauguration in the form of an antinomic logic of the political event in Alain Badiou testifies to this. Considering contradiction as a Maoist tool for radical political change in which the famous Marxist dialectic is subjected to endless antithesis without synthesis, this chapter demonstrates how Beckett’s texts contemplate a politics of change by deploying contradiction as a logical modality of textual operation.
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Notes
- 1.
See Badiou’s book, On Beckett.
- 2.
See Nadia Louar’s essay in this volume for further discussion of Rancière.
- 3.
P is a standard notation in any elaboration of the law of contradiction.
- 4.
I dwell on the politics of this oscillation in my book, Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real.
- 5.
The text has been read as an allegory of the Platonic cave where emancipation lies in exiting (Todorov; Libera; and Murphy). David Houston Jones reads The Lost Ones as a text documenting human survival in the gas-chamber situation. No critic to my knowledge has questioned the search itself as a machination of the law.
- 6.
It is worth noting that climbers are generally referenced as “he” while there are women in the cylinder. This creates a gendered dimension for the human predicament in The Lost Ones but this dynamic remains beyond the scope of this chapter.
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Chattopadhyay, A. (2021). Beckett, Contradiction and a Textual Politics of Change. In: Davies, W., Bailey, H. (eds) Beckett and Politics. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47110-1_3
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