Book | Chapter

For all of their virtuosity in expressive sabotage it is not the case that either Beckett or Levinas has as their aim a well-wrought inscription of indeterminacy, an eloquent neither-this-nor-that. Although expression is found by both to be out of reach, much is put into words in their oeuvres. While the insufficiency of language is a shared principle, significantly, neither author renounces their preferred field of operations. Levinas's maintenance of the other as a notion whose foreignness is substantiated in its escape from language's "ontological" clutches does not lead him to discuss, say, gardening or baking. On the contrary, substitution, hospitality, and deference are the stuff of his philosophy because they are the activities that the philosophical text cannot, properly speaking, touch. The situation for Beckett is similar. His observations in the Three Dialogues that the painter's art is untenable as a project of expression leads him not to mechanical engineering or his father's profession as a quantity surveyor, but to the traditionally analogous disciplines of drama and literary prose. Moreover, Beckett's is an eloquent and cultured oeuvre; one of the most consistently used points of orientation is the Western canon of fine art that would seem to be the very target of his vitriol in the dialogues.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137319241_7

Full citation: