“cease to exist in order to be”: Worstward Ho between Badiou and Deleuze

In Handbook of Inaesthetics, Alain Badiou develops a disagreement with Gilles Deleuze over the ontology of artistic creation. By contextualizing this disagreement in Beckett’s Worstward Ho, however, we see that it is Deleuze who brings us closer to a position where the difficulties peculiar to artistic thought are better theorized.