Waiting with Beckett in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This article asks what we might make of Samuel Beckett’s persistent aesthetic and ethical commitment to waiting during a moment shot through with calls to action in the face of extinction events and climate catastrophe. Concentrating on Beckett’s ‘grey time’ and interest in Freud’s death drive, I argue that Beckett’s work uses the temporal suspension of the ‘meanwhile’ to attend to how bodies and selves endure through time when there has been a withdrawal of care for the version of the human that has imagined itself able to produce and mark the end of multiple human and more-than-human others. Beckett’s scenes of endless ending, as forms of what Leo Bersani might call ‘willed lessness’, carefully return us to the ongoing relationship within and between human and more-than-human worlds, sustained according to different configurations of intensity. In the place of action, what persists in the ‘meanwhile’ is a drive that ‘de-dramatizes’ the human as a ‘subject of knowledge’, so that things might die in their own time and after their own fashion.