Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency (review)

This is a study of rather remarkable scope that nevertheless centres on a very precise point: the interstice between the wor[l]ds of Beckett and Badiou. Badiou, the philosopher of intermittent events, and Beckett, the writer of an attentiveness to and une attente de (a "waiting on" or "waiting for") those intermittencies, unite in Beckett and Badiou at a utopian mid-point that is literally – or, more to the point, literarily – a eu-topos [good place] and an outopos [non- or negative place]. The "utopian trace" (4) uncovered in this convergence is the thread that stitches the interstice together, the path of a pathein mathein ("the pathos of intermittency" [23]), which leads, as Prufrock would have said, to an overwhelming question: that of the place (eutopos, outopos) of passion (pathos) in the works of Beckett and Badiou.

The importance of pathos is not immediately evident in the work of Badiou, a philosopher of such "unrelenting positivity" that he is a veritable "prisoner of [this] Marxist insistence" and blind, as such, to the negative capability or thought-without-concept – thought-via-affect, affective intelligence – at work in Beckett's oeuvre (Gibson 4, 164, 252). The consistent mathematical rigour one finds in Beckett, from the earliest works (Gibson gives Murphy pride of place, with an excellent justification provided on pages 143–44) to the latest (Quad being exemplary; see 233-35, 238–39) is rarely taken into account as a generative principle of Beckett's work. But when Beckett and Badiou are studied in tandem, their respective visions, the wheels of their thought, form a kind of bicycle (Beckett's favourite mode of transport) with a single shared crankset (where the pedal meets the metal, where the metallan or "searching for" meets the pedalis or what's "a foot").

What's afoot can be traced back to an early footnote in Gibson's introduction, where the name of Françoise Proust first appears, and to the mid-point of the study (176), where reference is made to Beckett's Proust. Indeed, a second subtitle for The Pathos of Intermittency could well have been From Proust to Proust, since Beckett and Badiou traces a trajectory from Beckett's monograph on Marcel Proust to Badiou's engagements with his colleague Françoise Proust (the subtitle From Kant to Cantor would also have applied, stressing, in this case, the set theory, both theatrical and mathematical, examined in this study). "The Proustian equation" we find on the first page of Beckett's monograph – in which "the unknown" that is also "the unknowable" falls under the "two signatures" of "damnation and salvation" (Beckett, Proust 1) – is in fact the Gibsonian equation in Beckett and Badiou. The two present, in tandem, "that double-headed monster" of post-revolutionary "time" (Proust 1) that we find recorded in Kant's and Wordsworth's reflections on the French Revolution and its aftermath: reflections on the inauguration of "a time we call modern" (Françoise Proust; qtd. in Gibson 258). This is the time of revolutions, of the perpetual possibility – and awaiting – of revolution, and "Proust makes it quite clear that the two aspects of modern time are interinvolved"; the one is the "underside" or the "dark heart" of the other (266). Hence the joy of chance events and the angst or anguish of the inert or uneventful are the "Janus-face" (5, 135) of Beckett and Badiou, bespeaking a point that Gibson admits can only be made by reaching or heading out (beyond Badiou and Beckett) to Proust. What Françoise Proust offers to Gibson's book and Marcel Proust offers to Beckett's earlier one is the theory of what Wordsworth in The Prelude called the "feeling intellect": that is, of thinking in the absence of a concept (this is in fact the "force" of mathematical "forcing" in the terminology of set theory [65–67, 136]). This strange power is a "going on" even when one "can't go on."

Gibson's point is that...