Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature by Christopher Langlois (review)

To begin with "terror"—the centerpiece of Christopher Langlois's book—Sibaji Bandyopadhyay situates it as "that affective state during which the subject expects a known danger threatening from within and/or without to fall suddenly from some unexpected quarter."¹ This definition considers the danger vis-à-vis terror to be known, but its particular iteration and source to be sudden and unknown for the subject. Terror thus has a complex equation with both knowledge and non-knowledge. In fact, it is at the cusp of the two. Let me use this epistemological problematic to initiate a discussion of Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature. The book sets itself the task of reading terror, both philosophically and historically, in terms of a poetics, one in which Samuel Beckett and Maurice Blanchot come together as two significant postwar European writers. The book starts from the Blanchotian premise that literature is terror, and works its way through philosophical readings of Beckett, most notably, Alain Badiou's, to complicate this poetics of terror (Langlois, Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature, 3). Countering Badiou's claim that Beckett's literature moves away from the Cartesian terror of solipsistic self-reflexivity as an impossible auto-identification of thinking with thought, the author argues for a Beckettian literature that constructs a non-ethical ontology of terror. The book takes a strong stance at the outset by declaring its departure from a dominant trend in the field: to derive ethical implications from Beckett. Langlois sees terror as "an imperative without content or concept" and explores literature's synonymy with terror without making it into an ethical question (15). He critiques this desire for ethics and wants to take "literature's sovereign imperative outside ethics" (15). Langlois's strength lies in his historicizing of "terror," without taking away from its philosophical nuances. In the Introduction, not only does he set up the theoretical coordinates but he also takes us through the postwar Parisian milieu in which De Gaulle's government engaged in a Robespierre-like "Purge." The return of terror is a lived historical reality for both Beckett and Blanchot.

The first chapter approaches the relation between thinking and suffering in Beckett's The Unnamable (1953), not to mention the failure to narrate suffering. Langlois considers the epistemological and ontological terror of a radical suffering without temporality or subjectivity. He uses Blanchot's reading of the camp survivor, Robert Antelme, to mark a historical instance where real-life suffering demands expression through narrative (47). The paradox that the indestructibility of the human subject grounds its limitless destruction anchors this critical movement in which radical suffering ultimately unravels the irreducibly minimal needs of the human: to think and to speak as a signature of the Other. This suffering not only finds an equivalence in thinking but also encounters the unthinkable and the unspeakable in an experience of terror. Langlois resists reading an ethic of salvation into this suffering and traces the differences between the unnamable's failed identifications with Mahood and Worm as figures of impossible alterity. The terror of thinking—where to think is to suffer at the hands of the unthinkable—creates a trajectory that goes against the arc of comprehension. This radical suffering cannot situate itself in historical and phenomenological terms. It exposes thought to that which is impossible to think in the speech of the literary neuter as an iteration of the inalienable third person.

Chapter two reads Texts for Nothing as literature of terror, framed between Badiou's diagnosis of the twentieth century's passion for the Lacanian Real as a figure of the impossible and Blanchot's reading of epochal terror in the French tradition of revolutionary romanticism. Langlois examines the breakages of voice, narrative, and language that haunt the disfigured subjectivity in a series of halted beginnings and premature endings. The disjunction between the ontological and the hermeneutic, as his reading implies, generates the terror of the literary. Notable in this...