摘要：In the latter period of his work, Samuel Beckett began to devote
much of his writing to exploring the nature of the voice and the
gaze. Even those works that directly concerned silence and
blindness implicitly thematized the voice and the gaze by
embodying their absence. With later works, Beckett began to call
into question the way in which these phenomena contributed to
the constitution of subjects, modes of self-identification, and their
relation to chosen objects of desire. In the 1950s and 1960s,
Beckett produced dozens of short pieces of prose and theatrical
works that wholly dispensed with traditional plot and character in
favor of a series of experimental reductions, for example, to breath
and light (Breath), to a disembodied voice (Company, Eh Joe, That
Time, Cascando), or to a mouth illuminated by a point of light
(Not I). Jacque Lacan, who would come to secure the place of the
voice and the gaze in the philosophical canon, wrote and lectured
on these concepts at the same time. If brought into dialogue, the
work of each thinker—each highly nuanced and complex in its
own right—can serve as a hermeneutic tool for better elucidating
the function of the voice and the gaze and the role that they play in
the formation of subjects. A great deal of critics have erroneously overlooked Lacan’s insistence that when he invokes these concepts
he is not speaking about the phenomenal voice or the gaze of
perception as such; similarly, Beckett’s work, though it directly
thematizes their phenomenal aspects, treats these concepts in a
thoroughly Lacanian manner.
