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  • Beckett and the Laws of Habit
  • Ulrika Maude (bio)

Habit presents a challenge to our received understanding of what it is to be human, because it seems to entail an absence of reflection, thought, and rational intentionality, and appears instead to be closer to a form of automatism. Habit is therefore antithetical to what we value in ourselves: critical reflection, intentional actions, and an Aristotelian capacity for wonder. For this reason, habit figures prominently in the work of a number of philosophers, many of whom view it with suspicion. However, there is an alternative line of thinking that can be traced back at least to the work of the nineteenth-century French philosopher Félix Ravaisson, whose essay Of Habit, from 1838, influenced writers and thinkers such as Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, and Gilles Deleuze, all of whom are of course anti-rationalist thinkers. In this paper I will argue that Beckett's work, too, gives habit some very serious consideration. In fact, it might even be argued that an appreciation of its functions and mechanism is crucial to our understanding of Beckett's oeuvre.

The word "habit" can be understood in two different ways:

  1. 1. In the straightforwardly mechanical sense, as an objective fact and consisting in the regular repetition of an event: for instance, Krapp in Krapp's Last Tape (1958) eats too many bananas, drinks too much, and records a new tape each year on his birthday.

  2. 2. As a subjective disposition or "the construction of a project of life."1 This is not merely a question of mechanical repetition, but rather involves the will and originates in an intentional act. [End Page 813]

I shall argue that although they are seemingly very different, these two senses of habit can be seen to "proceed from the same principle."2

Ravaisson's (1813-1900) extended essay advances one of the most sophisticated and detailed analyses of habit available, and, crucially steers a path between materialism and idealism. In all forms of existence, Ravaisson argues, "the following are found together: permanence; change; and, in change itself, a tendency towards permanence" (OH, 27). The higher we move up in the "hierarchy of beings," the more multiple become the conditions of permanence and change, partly because higher beings exercise will rather than instinct and therefore simply have more freedom of choice. "Permanence and change," Ravaisson argues, are hence "the first conditions of habit" (OH, 33). "Habit is at first an effect, a way of being that results from change, but it gradually becomes a cause of change itself," initiating and maintaining repetition.3 As Catherine Malabou rather elegantly puts it, "change generates habit, but in return habit is actualised as a habit of changing."4 Deleuze calls this "repetition productive of difference"—the very paradox of repetition. Beckett, in his essay on Proust, published in 1931, perhaps says the same thing thus: "There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place."5

In his analysis of motivation, Ravaisson makes a distinction between action and passion, which for him are "inversely related to each other": while action is triggered by the intentional will, passions are initially prompted by receptivity or, what for him amounts to the same thing, passivity. The two are also diametrically opposed because "The continuity or the repetition of passion weakens it; [while] the continuity or repetition of action exalts and strengthens it." For Ravaisson, "Prolonged or repeated movement becomes gradually easier, quicker and more assured. Perception, which is linked to movement, similarly becomes clearer, swifter, and more certain" (OH, 49). Action leads to habit, and habit to grace, ease and elegance.

Prolonged or repeated sensation, on the other hand, diminishes gradually and through the reversibility of energies prompts action and a desire for a strengthened stimulus in the subject (this would for instance be the case in addictions). What began as passivity is therefore transformed into action. Effort, fatigue, and pain initially insert themselves between the will and the action, but they recede along with effort, and as the pain disappears, pleasure develops and increases. Continuity...

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