Beckett and Deleuze, Tragic Thinkers

In Deleuze and Beckett, ed. Stephen Wilmer and Audrone Zukauskaite (London: Palgrave, 2015), pp. 193-206. Abstract: Deleuze refers to Beckett numerous times throughout his career, most notably in the extended analyses of “The Exhausted” and “The Greatest Irish Film,” but also in passing, in Anti-Oedipus and in the book on Kafka. Common to many of these passing references is a tendency to situate Beckett in a tradition of writers whom Deleuze associates with a peculiar operation of the comic and the joyful in literature—a tradition that includes Kafka and Nietzsche. To understand Deleuze’s fascination with Beckett is to recognize the quintessentially comedic character of these writers. It is to see laughter not as an incidental effect, but as a defining aspect of their work. This paper explores the idea that the laughter Deleuze admires in Beckett takes root in tragic action. My approach, in presenting this argument, will be to focus on Deleuze’s reading of Hamlet, and then to test a Deleuzian theory of tragedy against images from Beckett’s work (especially from Endgame and “First Love”). Deleuze’s notion of tragic thought is aligned with a well-known Beckettian motif—the experience of time as interminable hesitation, as a purgatorial suspension of judgement. But not all hesitation is tragic (in the same way that not all laughter takes root in tragedy). Beckett’s case is emblematic because it stages a disjuncture between a dramatic action and the temporal horizon within which it unfolds. I will argue that Beckettian laughter breaks out precisely at the moment in which such a disjuncture occurs.