In this paper I attempt to show how Žižek’s theories can serve as a useful tool in interpreting in a new way Samuel Beckett’s works, and in particular his novels. In order to do that, I will focus my attention on his novel The Unnamable and on the way its main character is constructed. This has been typically understood as representing a fragmented or decentered self, and thus as a form of critique of the Cartesian subject, ‘the spectre that is haunting western academia.’ I will try to demonstrate how this character is rather simply reduiced to its minimal condition of possibility. As such it is the expression of a radical experience of the subject, which shares a deep affinity with Žižek’s theories, especially as presented in The Ticklish Subject.
The comprehension of the subject that is revealed through the structure of the character implies a certain comprehension of the humanity of the human subject. Through an allegorical reading of Beckett’s later short text All Strange Away, I will show how his characters function as a radical critique of the conception of the human as a ‘gifted animal,’ proposing instead a conceptualization of the human subject as the place of an original lack.
In this sense Beckett’s novels can be said to be, beyond an artistic achievement, a effective place of potential ideological resistance.