Bearing Witness in How It Is
Russell Smith
It is widely acknowledged that Samuel Beckett’s work reaches an impasse with The Unnamable and the Texts for Nothing, where the problem of the subject in language, the question of “who speaks?” appears to have been pursued to its limit. In an influential reading of Beckett’s oeuvre, Alain Badiou sees Beckett’s resolution of this impasse, particularly through the prose text How It Is, as involving a transformation in the orientation of his thought, which henceforth “attempts to ground itself in … the category of ‘what-comes-to-pass’ … and, above all, the category of alterity, of the encounter and the figure of the Other” (On Beckett 16).

In this paper I wish to pursue Badiou’s insight in a slightly different direction, by reading How It Is in the light of Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of shame, responsibility and the ethical act of bearing witness. For Agamben, the absence of relation between the living being and the speaking being, the gap between the subject and its enunciation, rather than producing an infinite deferral of signification, paradoxically allows for the possibility of testimony. The act of bearing witness, of saying “how it is”, should be understood, not as an act of speech on behalf of an other who cannot speak, but rather, as an act of speech in which it is this other who, unable to speak, paradoxically authorises and completes the speech of the witness who is unable to speak in his own name. This concept of testimony involves a radical reconception of the relation between subjectivity and language that, I will argue, is central to Beckett’s reorientation of his work in How It Is as, in Andrew Gibson’s words, “a project of thought … whose implications are ultimately ethical”.
Lecturer in English, Australian National University
Borderless Beckett:
International Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo 2006
September 29 – October 1