Beckett After Language

The name “Italian Theory” has come to refer to a transformative theoretical-critical turn, after poststructuralism, away from the sovereignty of language and toward the larger semantic horizon of life. The shift has determined a return to/of the conflict between language and the body. This article proposes that Samuel Beckett’s play, Not I (1972), feeds such a renewed interest in the body’s interference with the governing works of language. Discussion begins by approaching Beckett’s text through Émile Benveniste’s notions of subjectivity and enunciation, both ambiguously connected and traversed by a dynamic (and visionary) spatial-bodily dimension. Beckett’s attunement to Benveniste, in turn, helps relocate the writer in the contemporary debate on the conflict between language and the body. Not I stands out because it is about the physical struggle against speech and the physical struggle suggests Beckett’s own version of living thought, a thought of “movement and vitality,” as he had phrased it in his early essay on predecessors, “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce.”