Beckett Ongoing Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics

“You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” These are some of the most quoted lines written by Samuel Beckett, which speak to the impulse of persevering in times of crisis and impossibility. Yet few readers of Beckett agree about what this paradoxical formula could mean, let alone what mode of engagement it would seem to indicate, be it committed, autonomous, or something else entirely. This volume of essays explores what that mode of engagement could be, all the while elucidating the ethical and political stakes of the “ongoing” in both Beckett’s life and work. Across multiple disciplines in the humanities, the authors delve into questions of political subjectivity and representation, the ethics of powerlessness and refusal, the aesthetics of syncopation and destitution, multimedia experiments between genre, as well as Beckett’s wider impact on transnational itineraries of modernism and philosophy up to the contemporary.

Michael Krimper teaches in the French and English departments at New York University, USA, where he received his PhD in Comparative Literature. His forthcoming book, Out of Work: The Refusal of Literature from Melville to Blanchot, examines the crystallization of an antiwork aesthetics and politics in late modernist writing and theory. He is also the editor of a recent special issue for the Journal of Beckett Studies that published Beckett’s lost translations on the Marquis de Sade. His articles, reviews, and translations have appeared in New Literary History, diacritics, SubStance, parallax, October, the Journal of Italian Philosophy, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other venues.

Gabriel Quigley is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University, USA. Combining comparative modernisms, continental philosophy, and postcolonial theory, his work focuses on retrieving concealed paradigms of possibility and freedom. His articles and translations have been published or are forthcoming in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, French Studies Bulletin, Derrida Today, Critical Inquiry, Journal of Modern Literature, and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.