Being and Non-being: Badiou in Conversation with Beckett

24 Being and Non-being: Badiou in Conversation with Beckett Prayer Elmo Raj P. Beckett is an “elusive and anti-systematic writer” (“Think Pig!” xvii) but the ambulation of his writings is known for its “expressive imprecision” that ascertain the thoroughness of Cartesianism. Badiou, rather than terming Beckett as an absurdist, emphasizes on the evidence of illuminating being and sense. While tradition dispenses itself away from worldliness, Beckett journeyed through “nihilistic destitution” and murkiness of significations. The criticism anticipated on the polemics of being and significations are self-evident in Beckett’s corpus. Beckett’s writings are not a contingency of “existential deprivation.” Badiou asserts a “neo-classical Beckett” (Hill 81) who is conscious of a strategic and abstinent reassessment of the existential themes. The philosophical leanings of Beckett aim at the sequential principles that are at once temporal and hypothetical. Beckett’s ontological investigation into the meaning of life suggests that his work deliberates with the other. Therefore, life trickles “necessarily to one in the dark, comes as a supernumerary, incalculable, indiscernable, undecidable event—irreducible to all established protocols of being, nameable only as something ill seen ill said, of which all that can be said is what is missaid” (Hill 81). The probability of encounter does not position on the discontinuity