Traumapocalyptic Experience of Language in Later Beckett

CHAPTER ONE Introduction

2

General Background Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. (D. H. Lawrence –Incipit of Lady

Chatterley’s Lover, Early Last Century)

Ours is essentially a traumatic age, an age of mass production of victims. The disastrous 20th century with its World Wars’ nightmares of Holocaust and Hiroshima and with its Cold War’s promise of an Apocalypse has only ended in the post-9/11 World Order of the 21st century. In both popular culture and critical theory, there is a widespread tendency to being victimized by a wound that, gaping wider and wider, is about to devour everything –in

3

everyday personal affairs, in politics, in history, and in media. Today, it seems that subject is already a subject of trauma, history is possible exclusively as a testimony to a trauma, and social organization may be founded upon the distribution of trauma through its representations in media. A sense of being victims is injected, on a daily basis, to global citizens. The word has been in such a common currency that, despite its complicated terminological psychiatric senses, it sometimes comes to denote, simply and yet as terminologically, a ‘crisis’, as Shoshana Felman did in her groundbreaking Testimony: Crises

of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, where there is a question of witnessing –or, experiencing- the thing without being able to speak it, that is, simply a confrontation with the unspeakable Real. The coincidence of ‘trauma studies’ and the ubiquitous ‘deconstruction’ in the 90’s led to a trauma hunt, in literary fields of critical theory, that idealized ‘trauma’ as an epic grappling with unspeakability. However, there are other critics, like Linda Belau, who warn against the “dangerous elevation of traumatic experience to the level of an ideal”:

That is, insofar as it remains beyond our understanding and comprehension, trauma can easily be seen as a sort of exceptional experience. And victims or survivors of trauma, consequently, may be seen as ambassadors of an exceptional realm, bearers of a higher (albeit more terrible) knowledge than is available to the rest of us. (1)

Trauma studies seem to be either trauma hunts in literary or non-literary texts or therapeutic treatises on recovery. Thanks to these studies, other brand new names of ‘trauma’ are constantly introduced to the already brimful hoard of hysterics, of the survivors of fatal accidents, of the subjects of near-death experiences, of the shell-shocked at the war, of the witnesses to forbidden scenes, genocides and terrorist attacks, of those wounded in love, of

4

the raped and of the returned from the camp. But studying trauma as such is missed in the field of such fervent research. An inquiry of ‘trauma’ must be warned against any appropriation of the term, since it has always been in danger of being abused by totalitarian powers. It is a vital warning because, in the natural path of the historical progress of any discourse, there must be also emergency brakes so that the discourse can find an opportunity to evaluate itself, to take a look back at itself, from without –without denying any of the efforts previously made to develop the discourse. It is not difficult to see the dangers of an extremely violent civilization which is, despite its insistence on ‘human rights’, busy producing victims and traumatized people in enormous scales. As early as 1986, the defense attorney of the longest and most expensive criminal trial of American history, Daniel G. Davis had warned against ‘mass production of trauma and hysteria’. McMartin preschool trial1 was only an early example of how there could be a possibility of being “traumatized artificially and dragged into a fruitless litigation” (Tuscaloosa

News- January 24, 1986) through a moral panic which was partly due to day care sex abuse hysteria and spreading rumors of Satanic Ritual Abuse in the 80’s and 90’s. Therefore, it is quite legitimate to view ‘trauma’ as an empty signifier, or a blank space, which has been occasionally filled in with the contents of the day’s moral panics and concerns that are subject to distortion by the interest-seeking institutions and irresponsible media. ***

1

In 1983, McMartin family, running a successful day care centre, was accused of several acts of sexual abuse, due to the bizarre complaints of a mother who was later diagnosed with acute schizophrenia and found dead because of chronic alcoholism in 1986, leaving the long trial on the way alone with her claims. The trial lasted seven years at a cost of $15 million. Now it is believed that the false accusations were made based on the highly suggestive methods of questioning about the traumatic experience imposed on the children. Such aggressive attempts to excavate a traumatic sexual abuse led to weird testimonies of seeing witches fly, travelling in balloons and in dark underground tunnels. Now it is believed that it was a product of moral panics of the American society in that time, aggrandized by Anti Cult rumors of satanic kidnapping and brainwashing children in an age of flourishing social work and child protection –i.e. day care centers to be looked at by families suspiciously.

5

The present thesis began around 2012 when the world was panicked by the rumor of another

apocalypse largely on media. Supposedly, we are the survivors of another ‘apocalypse’ in history, as the world has been frequently awaiting its ‘end’ from the very beginning of recorded history! So many times have been called ‘apocalyptic’ and a lot others will be. It seems that, dissatisfied with its present, each age considers itself as the most ‘evil’ of all ages, so corrupt that the ‘end’ is surely very near. But what is wonderful with regard to the ‘apocalypse’ as a signifier is the subjectivity that has historically filled it with two seemingly opposite senses, one etymological, the other practical. It is significant that ‘apocalypse’ which originally meant ‘unveiling’ is used in the sense of ‘the end of the world’. But in ‘unveiling’, as ‘apocalypse’ originally means, there has always been this scene of a curtain being drawn to reveal what is beyond and to let the light in. This scene is usually interpreted as the final victory of the good over the evil of darkness and it is not merely an ‘end’ but also indicative always of the beginning of a new era that does not belong to history and is not a ‘historical epoch’ as Agamben puts it. In ‘The Idea of Epoch’, he writes:

The most hypocritical aspect of the lie implicit in the concept of decadence is the pedantry with which –at the very moment complaints are being made about the mediocrity and decline, and predictions made about the coming end –each generation tallies its new talent and catalogues its new forms and epochal tendencies in art and thought. (Idea of Prose 87)

He truly diagnoses the inextinguishable desire of each age, “of no longer wanting to be

an historical epoch” (87) and insists on its repetitiousness: “If one feature of our sensibilities deserves to survive, it is just this sense of impatience and almost of nausea we feel when faced with the prospect of everything simply beginning all over again, even if for the best” (87). Therefore, if in our age the ‘apocalypse’ and the ‘apocalyptic’ have gained a fresh renown, if

6

the ‘end’ of everything is fervently announced, it is not at all anything new. “Concepts such as post-modern, the new renaissance, humanity beyond metaphysics, all betray the seed of progressiveness hidden in every conception of decadence and even nihilism” (87), concludes Agamben with regard to this sense of approaching ‘end’ in our times. Therefore, it is not surprising that our time affirms a bond between ‘apocalypse’ and ‘trauma’. Trauma studies offer plenty of examples of modeling trauma and its recovery upon an ‘apocalyptic’ sense that involves both a death and a rebirth into a new life. For example, Parr talks about “the blossoming industry of memorialization” (1) while admitting of a relation between ‘trauma’ and ‘apocalypse’ by asking “how does culture answer to the memories that linger on in the wake of a trauma collectively experienced and the feeling that a community has been pushed to what seems like the end of the world” (1); or Felman dedicates a chapter in her Testimony on Paul De Man to ‘After the Apocalypse’, which may also shed a light on a certain relation between ‘apocalypse’ and ‘bearing witness’, since ‘apocalypse’ must always remain unattestable and without testimony for the one who has had the impossible experience of trauma without being able to symbolize it. In this way, any ‘apocalyptic’ text can be regarded as a symbolic, and for that very reason inadequate, left-over or residua of an experience of vision or revelation. Survival after the catastrophe can make the apocalyptic text possible, as well as the attempts to represent what cannot be grasped in representation. If the apocalyptic text is viewed as a ‘testimony’, it is the testimony both of a not-yet-occurred (in case of the end of time) and of an occurred (in case of visions). Not only does the apocalyptic text try to grasp a ‘beyond time’ –an attempt to historicize an ahistorical time- but also it proposes strange relations between representation and ‘the unrepresentable’. In other words, the end of time will be the end of representation too. However, a lot of questions remain as to the relation of the ‘apocalyptic’ to the ‘traumatic’. This relation forms

7

on borderlines that are easy to trace and to witness their being absolved in our age, as a theoretical result of the advent of deconstruction. But what is this border itself? Where is the meeting point of oppositions but in language, where the signifier ‘apocalypse’ can announce a union of repeated ‘end’s and ‘beginning’s? *** The study of literature in the light of ‘trauma’ has gained a major theoretical framework since the trauma fever of the 80’s and 90’s. Through ‘trauma studies’, however, a modern critical inquiry showed the hidden desire for endurance among all the ruins produced by the constant process of modernist renewal. The debates over the over-idealization of ‘the unspeakable’ in the literary work are especially influenced by post-structuralist thought on the limits of representation, confrontation with the unrepresentable Real, and the Void of thought. However, the preoccupation with ‘the Unrepresentable’ in any name, whether ‘trauma’ or ‘the Real’, may reflect the gnawing fear of losing the speech in our times. The hidden suffering of modern man has appeared in the disguise of what resists any representation, any entrance in thought or language. But the major problem with such an approach to texts is that the literary text still remains, in this theory, a representation. In other words, the literary text is still a representation of trauma –in the strangely broad sense of ‘suffering’ and ‘violence’-, even when it claims to the unrepresentability of pain. Thus, if the relation of the ‘traumatic’ to the ‘apocalyptic’ forms on a border which is necessarily also an ‘end’ –that is, the end of representation-, an originally traumatic reading of the literary text may take a route other than merely representing such and such a traumatic experience, which is admittedly doomed to fail thanks to its unspeakability. Nevertheless, the Unspeakable, as that which comes to mind but will not pass on tongue, is after all a pure surface in language, a mere form, or a pure name. In this sense, ‘trauma’ may be read as it occurs in the direct

8

formal experience of a text, whether in literature or in philosophy. Through ‘trauma’, the confrontation is basically with the materiality of the traumatic experience or the traumatic event as an empty signifier and a pure surface which resists any later attempts to be symbolized. Agamben, in whose works the borders of poetry and philosophy are easily absolved, inspires such approach when he writes, in ‘The Idea of Matter’,

the decisive experience, so difficult to talk about, it is claimed, for those who have had one, is not even an experience. It is nothing but the point at which we touch the limits of language. But what we reach obviously not a thing so new and awesome that we lack the words to describe it; it is rather, matter. (Idea of Prose 37)

The materiality of the signifier, the body of sign well before it is bound to positive or negative senses, when it communicates its surface, has remained to a large extent unspoken and the lack of a speech on the speechlessness of ‘trauma’ is still felt. It is necessary to conduct a research on literary and non-literary through a ‘traumatized’ reading where not only literature is read literature –as it is commonly done in academic literary theory- but also philosophy is read like literature –based on the forms and images that abstract ideas assume.

The Argument Literature is a testimony, but not merely in a sense that entails trailing the instances of recurring violence or traumatic scenes in a literary text. This study examines the moments of traumatization of language in a text. It argues that the tracing of the origins of ‘trauma’ in the late 19th century as well as its transformations down to its ultimate professionalization in the term PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) can reveal ‘the idea of trauma’, or trauma as

9

such, rather than its ever-growing various forms. From this point of view, what is significant to the present research is the status of ‘trauma’ acquires as a signifier in language. From the very beginning, the metaphor of ‘trauma’, from Greek ‘τραῦμα’ which originally indicated a ‘wound’ or ‘hurt’ in a physical sense (Online Etymology Dictionary), came to denote a psychic disorder in French psychiatry. It can be seen that the word ‘trauma’ was originally a name for a threshold state of suspension between psyche and soma, between the psychical and the physical. In other words, in the term ‘trauma’, the dialectic relation of inside/outside is held in abeyance. The same holds interestingly true for the metaphorical image of a ‘wound’ that reveals the inside on the outside, or, brings the content to the surface of skin. Not only in etymology but also in function, ‘trauma’ is bound to an aporetic liminality, since trauma, as a scene that haunts the subject, is only present in memory through its repulsion. In better words, the traumatic is not just any memory, but one that is present in memory through a desire to efface it as long as it comes in spite of the subject. Through a close examination of Freud’s investigation on ‘trauma’, two significant elements of the traumatic experience may be isolated: that is, the relation of the traumatic to ‘repetition’ and ‘death’. Again, a fissure could be discerned at the heart of the concept of ‘trauma’ since it simultaneously contains two completely reverse movements. On the one hand, there is a compulsion to repeat the traumatic scene, and on the other hand, the desire to put an ‘end’ to its pain. To put it briefly, the traumatic is repeated over and over just to extinguish itself. The two opposite and simultaneous movements toward ‘repetition’ and ‘end’, as the inherent structure of all trauma, lead the argument to the other important relation proposed in this thesis –the relation of ‘apocalypse’. Trauma as a “decisive experience”, in Agamben's terms, always suggests a radical break and a fundamental rupture. It is a revolution that

10

triggers thought that, as Levinas notices in Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe

Nemo, “probably begins through traumatisms or gropings to which one does not even know how to give a verbal form: a separation, a violent scene, a sudden consciousness of the monotony of time” (21). In the sense of a radical break, the ‘end of time’, as the vital concern in apocalyptic texts -either religious or literary ones-, can be related to the idea of trauma. And exactly as a break, as a wound, the ‘apocalypse’ expresses the very features of a decisive traumatic experience. While ‘apocalypse’ is an ‘end’, it is so only because it involves a rebirth into the annihilation of time and space. Like the ‘traumatic’, any ‘apocalyptic’ involves a simultaneous relation to the opposite movements of ‘repetition’ and ‘death’. What is at stake here is not only to see trauma as apocalypse, but also to see the reverse view of apocalypse as a negative trauma –negative in the sense that it is the trauma of the not-yet-occurred. But it must be noted that ‘apocalypse’ is only important to the present research as long as it is put to the test of language and its relation to discourse is figured out. This may include etymological examinations of the cleavage –such a woundly sign- on the body of the signifier ‘apocalypse’ that, from the Greek ‘ἀποκάλυψις’ , transliterated as apocálypsis , originally meant ‘to uncover’, a revelation or disclosure and later came to denote ‘end of time’ (Online

Etymology Dictionary). This research examines the relation of ‘apocalypse’ to discourse traumatically and through its aporetic unspeakability. Like trauma, which is beyond discourse and hence ineffable, “the end of time” remains totally outside, in spite of any attempt to represent it. “To speak of the ‘end of history’,” Maurice Blanchot says,

is simply to pose the question of the place of such words, henceforth without content since, as soon as history comes to a close, speech loses the direction and the meaning

11

that are only given to it by the possibility of historical accomplishment. (Blanchot, The

Blanchot Reader 279)

Then the end, while being necessary to discourse, falls out of it. It is necessary because, in Blanchot's own words, “the end determines the coherence of the discourse” (279). In addition, by the suspension of the dialectic relation of inside/outside, as it occurs in the liminality of both ‘trauma’ and ‘apocalypse’, logos (language, discourse) approaches its ‘unsaying’ which is quite different from silence –its dialectic twin. The language that approaches its unsaying is called, in the next step of the present research, ‘traumapocalyptic’ and is examined in literature. It has been already noted, especially by Blanchot, that literary experience is a confrontation with a language that is not primarily involved, as in everyday language, with the communication of ideas, but that which rather involves the word in terms of its ‘form’ and attends to its ‘outside’. The

traumapocalyptic is not accomplished by representing this or that idea –that is after all a ‘communication’ again. It is, rather, an unsaying. It is language but only as long as it approaches its ‘end’ –a language not to be ‘meant’ but to be ‘experienced’. It is modeled upon a ‘wound’ as it per-forms its content and never keeps the form and content in the dialectic relation of inside/outside. That is, it does not keep form and content separate in the relation of saying (there is a form that ‘says’ the content): here form ‘does’, ‘performs’, content -not expression but performance. It is an apocalypse of expressive literature into a performative one. Literature thinks about its performativity in our age since the growing of interactive entertainments is seriously threatening its attraction.

12

In the wake of Blanchot’s thoughts on literature, Foucault attends to the surface language of ‘I Speak’, in which language reaches an extreme where form not only says but also does the content. In other words, for the statement ‘I speak’, form and content are the same, simultaneous, and on a border of indifference. In his Thought from Outside, Foucault examines the consequences of such thought on language when it comes to the surface and on the significance of a language that passes on the pure exteriority. “From the moment discourse ceases to follow the self-interiorizing thought and, addressing the very being of language,” Foucault writes,

returns thought to the outside; from that moment, in a single stroke, it becomes a meticulous narration of experiences, encounters, improbable signs –language about the outside of all language, speech about the invisible side of words. And it becomes attentiveness to what in language already exists, has already been said, imprinted, manifested –a listening less to what is articulated in language than to the void circulating between its words, to the murmur that is forever taking it apart; a discourse on the nondiscourse of all language; the fiction of the invisible space in which it appears. (25)

By exposing both thought and language –representation in general- to their void, ‘thought from outside’ effaces the border of fiction and reflection, of poetry and philosophy, as in Blanchot’s work, since it is a thought that never yields to self-interiorizing. It is in this regard that the form of ideas gains a greater importance than the ideas themselves. A close examination, for instance, of Foucault’s style in his monograph, reveals not only an outline of the main concerns of ‘thought from outside’, but also a performance of this thought in language: a language which in describing anything whatsoever only describes itself, a language

13

in whose synchronous saying and doing, comes up to its surface. This is not a surface that is formed on an inside (since, in this case, there would be another opposition between form and content), rather, it is a pure exteriority. In traumapocalyptic writing, language is not merely experienced as a waiting for the realization of the meaning behind or beyond the signifier, and it cannot be reduced to a carrier of big ideas. Agamben’s Experimentum

Linguae is an important continuity to Foucault’s Thought of Outside and is an ample performance in the form of discursive writing. Finally, it is argued that Beckett’s later work can be regarded as traumapocalyptic. In this step, a language that will not communicate such and such an idea, one that will not communicate but its own communicability –its ‘I speak’- and is there only to reveal the exteriority, this language that, as it was seen, approaches its unsaying, is compared to the emergent ‘eye’ in Beckett’s later work which originates in the mid-60’s in his critical, dramatic and prose works. This comparison is possible because firstly, for the ‘eye/camera’, saying and

seeing are the same and synchronous. The synchronous ‘seeing’ and ‘saying’ grants sort of ‘performativity’ to the ‘eye’-writings of Beckett, which will be called matiagraphic2 texts; and second, it is also possible to trace the history of a weakening ‘eye’ in later Beckett’s work which, most of all, is an ‘eye’ that approaches its ‘end’, that is its unseeing. The performance of a spectacle which is nothing but the very act of ‘seeing’ is experienced in Beckett’s stripping of stages and of language in his later works. In other words, the matiagraphic experience involves seeing the ‘eye’ itself as from outside, as it sees anything else, in the way an ‘I’ always ‘says’ also itself in anything it says about anything else.

2

The word is coined from the Greek word, mati (μάτι), meaning ‘eye’.

14

In summary, the argument of the present thesis consists of three parts: (1) Developing an experience of traumapocalyptic out of the examination of the terms ‘trauma’ and ‘apocalypse’; (2) Examining the ways in which such traumapocalyptic experience takes form in representation (in the language of literature as well as that of philosophical reflection); and (3) Analyzing the traumapocalyptic movement of Beckett’s later writing. However, through the argument of the present study, it can be shown that representation in general consists of limit moments, of thresholds –‘origin’ and ‘end’- that work as ungraspable moments of representation (its voids). However, the duality of thresholds or impossible moments basically constitutes the foundation of thought and of representation. Since the rule of causality governing thought and language is marked by the priority and anteriority of the cause and the effect, and since priority and anteriority are but structures of temporality, ‘time’ appears as the intrinsic structure of signification. In better words, signification is only possible in a mode of representation that presupposes this linear temporal mode. Therefore, the apocalypse, the ‘end’, of causality/temporality/representation is naturally the concern of any representation as its vital question: a question impossible to understand because causality perceives chance not as pure but as ‘chance’ still interiorized by causality, as ‘chance’ in language and opposed to regularity and system. In summary, the present research answers the following questions:  How can the idea of ‘trauma’ in relation to that of ‘apocalypse’, as two prevalent paradigms of the thought of our age, develop a new view of literary text?  What are the characteristics of a traumapocalyptic writing?

15

 In what ways is traumapocalyptic writing to be observed in non-literary, theoretical texts? Rather, how is it possible to read theory as literature as much as literature is read upon theory?  Is it possible to trace a discontinuous history of the negative thought of

outside?  How does representation approach its apocalypse of un-representing without being lost in silence, in Beckett’s later work?  In what ways is Beckett’s later writing involved in ‘unwording’ the text? How does his work found a synchronous seeing and saying, which brings the text to its exteriority? How is this seeing and saying related to the traumatic idea of testimony?  Why is the idea of language approaching its unsaying a theoretical step beyond the deconstruction of the conceptual pair of logos and silence? Or, how does the ‘eye’ see its ‘unseeing’?

Literature Review The concept of ‘trauma’ has been theorized in relation to literary texts since the 1990’s. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,

Psychoanalysis, and History (1992) is usually taken as a groundbreaking work in trauma literary studies. Through an examination of the relation of literature to testimony, it develops a theory of reading that turns the reader into a witness. The foreword specifies that “through an alternation of a literary and a clinical perspective, the present study strives to grasp and to

16

articulate the obscure relation between witnessing, events and evidence, as what defines at once the common ground between literature and ethics” (xiii). The book uses an extensive hoard of sources ranging from the fin de siècle writers such as Freud, Dostoevsky and Mallarmé, to more recent works by Camus, De Man, Celan, videotapes of Holocaust testimonies and Lanzmann’s film, Shoah. What is significant in Felman and Laub’s work is their consideration of the act of testifying as central in the analyses of literature and trauma. In the present study, however, any concern for trauma testimonies always points toward establishing a relation between ‘seeing’ and ‘saying’, since for the traumatized, it is not only a question of witnessing the event, but also, and more importantly, the attempt to put the experience into words, which usually fails. The selection of works to be studied, in Felman and Laub’s work, is also restricted mainly to the disastrous aftermaths of the WWII, which may be unfortunately mistaken with a reduction of the name of ‘trauma’ to Holocaust in our age. Also Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) is a key work in the field as it explores ‘trauma’ in a consistent theoretical framework in which the term ‘trauma theory’ is used for the first time. Freud’s notion of ‘traumatic neuroses’, as developed in different stages of his work, helps Caruth to consolidate a notion of trauma, formed around ‘belatedness’ which is investigated in literary works of Duras, Resnais and Kleist, as well as De Man and Kant’s theories: “The event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it” (4). In Caruth’s view, trauma is treated culturally, and its incomprehensibility is discerned as a main irresolvable symptom. An irresolvable paradox in understanding, trauma insists and repeats this very ir- resolvability. In her investigation of trauma through literary texts, Caruth

17

puts the relation to what insists on remaining unknown at the center of the traumatic experience. Dominick LaCapra’s Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994) as well as his Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001) deal with, among other things, how trauma surpasses mere referentiality to enact some shattering of the experience. Literature is proper to trauma because of its inherent escape from referential language. He works on the nature of trauma writing as an attempt to represent a beyond-representation. He also warns against those theoretical relations of trauma to the un-representable, as in literature, that may dangerously turn trauma into a sublime and ideal. The discovery of ‘middle voice’s as prevalent vehicles in trauma writing, in Writing History, Writing Trauma, may also be considered as a good theoretical achievement in analyzing the stylistic sides of trauma writing. Ruth Leys’ Trauma: A Genealogy (2000) is a major critique of the contemporary tendency of reducing ‘trauma’ to the psychiatric model of PTSD. Reading the history of the concept of ‘trauma’ instead of adding a new theory in the light of other unseen forms of the traumatic experience, Leys discerns an oscillation between mimesis and anti-mimesis in different trauma theories. The grounds for such an evaluation of the concept of trauma had been already made by Paul Antze and Michael Lambek’s compilation of different authors’ works on memory, Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (1996). This collection of essays extended the discussions of trauma to such diverse fields of investigation as anthropology, psychiatry, history and philosophy of science. Roger Luckhurst’s The Trauma Question provides a summary of the history of the term ‘trauma’. It traces trauma not only in narrative fiction and memoirs but also in

18

techniques of photography and cinema. It may be referred to as a valuable source of various experiments in representing trauma. Since the present study approaches ‘apocalypse’ from a limited point of view, more precisely, the modern views of the Messianic and the ‘End of Time’, the sources consulted are not at all historical or biblical accounts of apocalypse. In other words, the works are consulted in which ‘apocalypse’ is treated in terms of its theoretical structure, notwithstanding its religious implications or historical contextualization that fall out of the scope of the present research . In a delicate harmony between Marxist analysis and Biblical undertones and Expressionist techniques of writing, Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia (English translation 2000), for example, reflects on the nature of an ‘end’ which is also a ‘rebirth’: the Apocalypse reflected in various artworks and regimes of representation. Or, Derrida’s Of an Apocalyptic

Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy is a deconstructive examination of the word ‘apocalypse’ originating in a mysterious meaning of ‘unveiling’. Derrida’s lengthy essay shows that the West has always been involved in and dominated by the apocalyptic programs of discourses of the end. In this regard, it is also important to refer to Agamben’s theorization of the Messianic as a linguistic matter, in various essays collected under the title Potentialities, such as ‘Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption’, ‘Language and History: Linguistic and Historical Categories in Benjamin’s Thought’ and ‘The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin’. In his examinations of the Messianic, Agamben notices a mode of communication without communication and a Law which is outside itself. What is inspiring in Agamben’s view is the way he examines the Messianic in terms of the forms it imposes upon language and the linguistic structures implied in it. In Benjamin and Agamben’s readings, the Messianic becomes a status in

19

language, a very poetic solution to escape entrapment in the imposed regimes of representation based on the exchange of meaning. In Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920, the ‘compulsion to repeat’ is examined in relation to the ‘death drive’ to make up an understanding of the wound as that which suspends the opposition of inside and outside, or psyche and soma. It is also significant that Freud discerned, in the movement of Eros toward pleasure, a countermovement of Thanatos toward Death. Also Moses and Monotheism (1937) shows a change in Freud’s view of trauma toward a rather collective and social form that puts a wound, like castration, as a trace on the body of men. An important feature of a traumatic experience, that is, its belatedness, is studied by Freud with an emphasis on the in-betweenness of the psychic wound. Walter Benjamin’s Theologico-Political Fragment (1937) may be read for its genius tracking of the trauma at the heart of the Messianic. He notices the impossibility of drawing a distinguishing line between the Messianic and the profane, which could be summarized in its famous excerpt,

if one arrow points to the goal toward which the profane dynamic acts, and another marks the direction of Messianic intensity, then certainly the quest of free humanity for happiness runs counter to the Messianic direction; but just as a force can, through acting, increase another that is acting in the opposite direction, so the order of profane assists, through being profane, the coming of the Messianic Kingdom. The profane, although not itself a category of this Kingdom, is a decisive category of its quietest approach (Reflections 312)

20

The in-between-ness of the ‘apocalyptic’ is an important point of Benjamin’s essay. The movement and counter-movement of the profane and the Messianic, in Benjamin’s work, may be interestingly seen in formal harmony with Eros and Thanatos in Freud. Maurice Blanchot’s L'Espace Littéraire (1955) enquires into the relation of literature to ‘death’ and is informed by his insights into poetic language that attends to the materiality of the medium. It is there that the apocalyptic power of words is noticed when, he writes, for instance,

words, we know, have the power to make things disappear...But words, having the power to make things ‘arise’ at the heart of their absence - words which are masters of this absence - also have the power to disappear in themselves, to absent themselves marvelously in the midst of the totality which they realize, which they proclaim as they annihilate themselves therein, which they accomplish eternally by destroying themselves there endlessly. (43)

The space of literature is realized in a language which is freed from the exchange of ideas and values. This interruption in the act of communication, as what characterizes the language of literature for Blanchot, may also be seen in its Messianic implications of the ‘end of time’ as the ‘pause’ to any exchange of values. Blanchot’s Pas au- delà (1973) is a fragmentary inquiry into the “eternal return of the same”, which is examined in relation to the insistence of the traumatic in the present study. Also, his L’ écriture du désastre (1980), is another fragmentary reflection on non-concepts which are produced out of the discontinuity of the disaster:

21

The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. It does not touch anyone in particular; “I” am not threatened by it, but spared, left aside. It is in this way that I am threatened; it is in this way that the disaster threatens in me that which is exterior to me—an other than I who passively become other. There is no reaching the disaster. Out of reach is he whom is threatens, whether from afar or close up. (1)

Writing of the Disaster may also be read as an experiment of turning ‘trauma’ into a both constituting and disrupting principle of the text. Through a seemingly paradoxical structure, another possibility, for both writing and thinking, emerges in this work where philosophy and poetry merge in a delicate border of inseparability. In this sense, Blanchot’s

The Instant of My Death and Derrida’s seminar on it, Demeure, are found useful in that Blanchot’s text is an attempt to grasp an ultimate moment of death which always escapes the representations of the subject. This is accomplished in a fiction that cannot be told from a philosophical text that inquires the fundamental question of how to write (non)-experiences. Foucault’s La Pensée du dehors (1966) constitutes the major theoretical framework of the argument of the present study. In this book, Foucault speaks of the experience of an ‘outside’ –in the sense of a beyond-representation- that is not easily the outside in opposition to an inside. This is an outside that is not comfortably the product of an exclusion. This notion of ‘outside’ is in concordance with the notion of the wound examined in our study as that which forms in the surface, as a rupture on the symbolic that has made the invisible visible: it is the visibility of what is not seen, that is vision itself. The thought never begins except in the assumption of an ‘outside’ for itself, a void, like a wound. He also proposes a possibility of the disappearance of the subject in the language:

22

If the only site for language is indeed the solitary sovereignty of “I speak” then in principle nothing can limit it –not the one to whom it is addressed, not the truth of what it says, not the values or systems of representation it utilizes. In short, it is no longer discourse and the communication of meaning, but a spreading forth of language in its raw state, an unfolding of pure exteriority. And the subject that speaks is less the responsible agent of a discourse (what holds it, what uses it to assert and judge, what sometimes represents itself in it by means of a grammatical form designed to have that effect) than a non-existence in whose emptiness the unending outpouring of language uninterruptedly continues” (Thought from Outside 11).

In the wake of Foucault’s monograph on Blanchot, Agamben’s Experimentum Linguae (1989) is worth studying. As a preface to his Infanzia e storia and in the disguise of a preface on the ‘preface’, Agamben elaborates on threshold moments and on the experience of voice (voce), that is a ‘perfectly empty dimension’. In experimentum linguae, the matter of language appears and the unsayable occurs exactly within language and not beyond it. Another work of Agamben, Idea della Prosa (1985), is an interesting example of confounding the borders of theory and poetry. Pure potentiality of representation is worked out through the titled fragments of the book. It can be read as a confrontation between theory and literature. Indeed, literature poses the problem of language to thought as it questions the limits of representation. Idea della Prosa should be read as a community of fragments in which philosophy approaches poetry, not to integrate, analyze, or appropriate it. These fragments write the Idea as it reaches its dead-end and makes recourse to poetry only to escape totality –a totality which is disrupted in the fragmentary form of the work.

23

Thesis Outline The present thesis consists of five chapters three of which serve as the main chapters. Each of the main chapters can be divided in 2 parts since the argument of each chapter is traumatically double and insists on such a ‘cut’ in each chapter. Generally, the movement of the main argument could be seen as (1) finding a relation between two prevalent mental contents of our era, ‘trauma’ and ‘apocalypse’, although it does not claim that such relation of wound to its recovery is unique to this age; (2) tracing this traumapocalyptic relation in representation, in language and thought –or, in the relation of language and thought-, especially finding good examples of such language in a mutual approach of poetry and philosophy, on a border, on a thought limit, where thought meets (un)thought of outside, when representation represents its surface, its materiality –where it is performance, rather than expression; (3) finding this type of writing instantiated in Beckett, one of the most explained yet the most un-explained figure of writing in our age. The critical attention to Beckett’s work after 1950’s puts him on a border where, while seemingly being the most included by diverse critical methodologies, he is usually excluded as being the inaccessible revolutionary ‘outsider’. As the organization of the ideas in the present thesis may be considered improper to the title of the thesis, Traumapocalyptic Experience of Language in Later Beckett, in that less than one third of the thesis is dedicated to later Beckett, it must be taken into account that the present thesis does not primarily take the ‘traumapocalyptic experience of language’ for granted. In other words, first, such an experience must be delimited before tracing it in Beckett’s work. In this research, a theoretical bond between ‘trauma’ and ‘apocalypse’ is worked out, which has not been theorized before. That is why putting the emphasis in the

24

title on ‘later Beckett’ will lead to a lost sight of the significance of a ‘traumapocalyptic’ writing which has not been delimited before. It is only after examining the theoretical characteristics of ‘traumapocalyptic’ writing that one is able to discern it in various literary and non-literary texts. The second chapter, ‘The Traumapocalyptic Relation’, can be cut discursively into two main parts: ‘Trauma’ and ‘Apocalypse’. First, after admitting the long journey the word ‘trauma’ has taken to our modern times and the acceleration of this movement since its first psychiatric appearance since the late 19th century, the state of ‘trauma’ as a pure signifier in language is examined. A genealogy of the word shows that, in the course of its modern terminologisation, it has suffered an undecidability between psyche and soma. In better words, the main characteristic of the term ‘trauma’ was that it could not be located exactly as a physical or a psychical disorder. In Freud’s later elaboration on ‘trauma’, it was conceptually related to two simultaneous while opposite functions of ‘repetition’ and ‘death’. This undecidability can be recognized in the state of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder where a painful memory repeats itself only to put an ‘end’ to itself. In other words, traumatic event is only present in memory only to be excluded fearfully. The second part of the Chapter 2, on the other hand, deals with another prevalent paradigm of thought in our time -that is, Apocalypse. It is shown that, in the wake of the disastrous Second World War, the thought of apocalypse was oriented in a direction in which the basic features of the traumatic, as discussed in the previous part, namely ‘repetition’ and ‘end’, can be easily isolated. Reading Benjamin’s elaboration on the Messianic reveals a movement and a counter-movement of profane ‘happiness’ and messianic ‘redemption’ that meet on a delicate border in which the movements are the same

25

and synchronous. The apocalyptic, then, takes form on the limits of representation where the ‘end’ announces a ‘beginning’, and the ‘death’ a repetition in ‘rebirth’. In Agamben’s work, the bonds between the concept of the ‘end of time’ and the discourse are even more strengthened. It can be argued that the messianic is related to language and law in the sense that representation essentially needs an original ‘trauma’ or an ultimate ‘apocalypse’ in order to function. In other words, both ‘trauma’ and ‘apocalypse’ are viewed as limitrepresentations in which the un-representability is touched. Consisting in its turn of two major arguments, the third chapter opens in a part that treats literature theoretically and ends in one that treats theory like literature. It means that, while the first part works out a philosophy of literature based on the previous findings on ‘trauma’ and ‘apocalypse’, the second part methodologically reverses the usual direction of sacrificing literature to theory and takes up a path in which theoretical texts are read, as in literature, based on their formal features and network of images. By this methodology, the third chapter becomes both theory and practice because of in-between-ness it ‘traumatically’ enjoys in middle of the present thesis. First, a traumapocalyptic poetics is formed through readings of Blanchot’s works on the idea of literature. For example, in Blanchot, literature stands at the limit of common language by attending to its own materiality, by insisting on its form to interrupt the closed regime of communicative give and take, by testifying to the surface and revealing the hollow inside. But this question still remains that, by disregarding the content and by wanting to refer to its own immediate materiality, what remains of representation? Literature shows the possibility that communication is stopped in language in order to open up to another language, and of course another thought. What is a language that does not communicate and demands to be experienced –to affect- as it is spoken? What is a

26

language that does not ‘say’? These are the questions that are dealt with next in the chapter. A line of thought is traced in philosophy, introduced by Foucault as ‘thought of outside’ in an essay by Foucault in the same name in the late 60’s, written on the work of Blanchot. Foucault’s essay is read, and the argument of the thesis goes on by comparing the traumapocalyptic language to the state of ‘I speak’ Foucault recognized as the exteriority of any language which is not only said but also done. In this language, like in the sentence ‘I speak’, the form performs. A pure form, it is not a matter of ‘saying’ and, it is located on the border of representation. This is the most extreme site of the ‘beyond-language’ (the unsayable) that language can imagine for itself. Therefore, it is on the surface of form that the dialectic of inside/outside is really traumatized, wounded. In this regard, Agamben’s dense work, Experimentum Linguae, is read very closely in which Agamben, in the wake of Foucault, elaborates on the traumatic original experience of language, that is, the voice before it is turned into the language; that is, the body of word before it is bound by meaning to signification, to communication. Agamben’s work is also read in the light of its form, since the form of the ideas in performance is as important as the ideas themselves. This is surely another expression of Agamben’s ‘form-of-life’ which is a life “linked so closely to its form that it proves to be inseparable from it” (Agamben, The Highest Poverty xi). It is seen that the unrepresentable, or decisive experience in language, is only the body, the matter of word. By falling into the ‘unrepresentable’, the traumatized only reaches the matter of words, in this sense, the traumatic experience itself. That is why any testimony is improper to the traumatic experience itself, and any testimony is already a testimony to the failure of testimony. Finally, the fourth chapter is a reading of Beckett’s work since the mid-sixties as traumapocalyptic writing and in the light of what was developed theoretically on language

27

when it approaches its unsaying. The chapter develops a critical stance toward the

experimentum linguae in Beckett’s work. Instead of immersing his work in an accumulation of allusions and scholarly references, they are treated as performance, that is, of saying and

doing at the same time. It is argued that language approaching its unsaying (or ‘unwording’, in Beckett’s own terms) could be compared to an emerging ‘eye/I’, in Beckett’s later work. Similarly, the ‘eye’ in question in Beckett approaches its unseeing. In both cases, representation comes to its surface, to its exteriority, and what is represented is not such and such a thing but the very ‘end’ of representation. Beckett’s work is examined in all areas of his later less-read writing: in his critical work where he speaks of an art that turns way from expression in disgust; in his dramatic work that reaches a ‘degree zero of spectacle’ and thus questions the very existence of the ‘eye’, the ‘scene’, and ‘seeing’, in these dramatic experiences; and finally, in his later prose work, of which Ill Seen Ill Said is an explicit lingering on the border of ‘seeing’ and ‘saying’ which is a traumatic question of testimony. How to say what has been seen?, that is the question. It is shown that Beckett’s language tends to a performative mode which primarily demands the company of the reader that is synchronized to the text and this is what puts Beckett’s text on exteriority and blocks clear-cut interpretations. In simple words, his works are rather to be experienced than to be interpreted.

Approach and Methodology The present thesis is methodologically library-based with the use of electronic sources. The theoretical approach taken in the thesis is inspired by deconstruction of text through close

reading of its form. Deconstruction surveys the zone of indifference, the threshold moments

28

which pass in language, in the name of différance where the meaning is suspended. In Derrida’s deconstruction, it is impossible to reach an ultimate meaning. This suspension of meaning, then, is thought as beyond-language and the ‘unspeakable’. What Agamben’s elaborations on language may add to the deconstruction of a text is his observation that the limit of representation, as a border, partly belongs to the inside of language and is not totally outside. In fact, as it is developed through readings of Foucault’s Thought of Outside, this ‘outside’ which is –and not has- also an ‘inside’, this pure exteriority, happens but not in the realm of signification –which is still bound to the ‘depth’ and interiority of meaning, but in the ‘matter’ of language, in Agamben’s words. But how does language escape its signification, or, how does it enter the realm of ‘unsaying’ –which must not be simply mistaken with ‘silence’, since ‘silence’ is still the dialectic opposite of ‘discourse’? What is the pure potentiality of representation? Through his discourse on the ‘I Speak’ of language, Foucault highlights the performative side of language where saying and doing are the same and synchronous. The performances on the form of a text are the major concerns of this thesis. The methodology of the present study owes a great deal to Agamben’s modification of our view of oppositions. Through deconstruction, it is shown that ‘difference’ and ‘opposition’ is produced by language and will lose its power in certain threshold moments in a text. For Agamben, however, those oppositions may be viewed in terms of the relation of a ‘potentiality’ to its ‘actuality’. In this view, not only are ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘content and form’, opposite aesthetic terms, but also ‘form’ is considered as an actualization of ‘content’. Agamben looks for the ways in which the pure potentiality of representation is taken into account. These are the points in which language resists against its actualization into representation and reveals its ‘impotentiality’, or, the potentiality not to represent. In this

29

sense, content is not to be merely interpreted but also to be experienced in form –an experience of language. Agamben’s notion of experimentum linguae orients the reading strategy of the texts in the thesis. In this way, a text is read according the moments when it approaches its ‘unsaying’ and tends to perform the idea at stake. The way Agamben approaches the metaphysical dualities is reflected in the

experimentum linguae or infancy. Methodologically, for him, speechlessness cannot be approached as such, but always in language. By entering language, ‘voice’ becomes the name of the state before acquiring language, of the undifferentiated flow of forms that have not yet taken meaning. This move from voice to language, this fundamental scission of human proper being, is irreversible, and thus, the state of speechlessness, or pure voice, is never accessible by man after entering into language. The pure potentiality of representation, representation before its being actualized, exists or occurs in language only as a name that is

infancy. Thus, the materiality of the medium itself also acquires certain significance, where materiality means an immediacy of experience before getting contaminated by representation and deep interpretations that excavates different senses. In the common model of representation and communication, the materiality in question is suppressed and treated only as a means, a sign to exchange. The involvement with the ‘unrepresentable’ or the ‘unsayable’ in any discourse –either literature or philosophy- consists this very confrontation with the ‘matter’ of language that occurs only in language and not in any illusory beyond. Another important matter in the thesis is the approach it takes with regard to concepts of ‘trauma’ and ‘apocalypse’. In fact, at stake here are not their merely psychological or religious sides. Rather, they are also studied for the experience they entail in language. That is, if they are going to found a basis for a philosophy of literature, they are so because,

30

through them, states of being in language appear. Therefore, the findings of ‘trauma studies’ and ‘apocalypse studies’ are examined here in the light of the language experience they may bring about.

Definition of Terms Trauma A history of the meanings attributed to the word ‘trauma’ is sketched in the second chapter. But a brief and accessible definition of the term could be J. Laplanche and J. Pontalis’s in

The Language of Psycho-Analysis:

An event in the subject’s life defined by its intensity, by the subject’s incapacity to respond adequately to it, and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organizations. In economic terms, trauma is characterized by an influx of excitations that is excessive by the standard of subject’s tolerance and capacity to master such excitations and work them out psychically. (465)

The term ‘trauma’ is extensively used in this thesis to imply a state of undecidability between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, between psyche and soma. However, it has been applied, in various contexts, to denote a ‘break’, a ‘rupture’, or a ‘shock’. It might be taken as an experience that leads language and representation to its unsaying and unrepresentable extreme.

31

Apocalypse The word ‘apocalypse’ is not primarily intended here in its religious senses. Like ‘trauma’, it is taken into account as a term that denotes an ‘end’ –or ‘death- which is also indicative of a ‘rebirth’ and beginning. In its terminological sense, it includes two seemingly opposite senses of ‘revelation’ and ‘end’. According to Martha Himmelfarb in The Apocalypse: A Brief

History,

For most people the term “apocalypse” summons up images of the cataclysmic end of the world, images that derive in large part from Revelation. But in Greek the term

apokalypsis has nothing to do with the end of the world. Its basic meaning is “uncovering,” thus, more figuratively, “revelation.” The association with eschatology derives not from the meaning of the term but from the content of the book of Revelation and other related works. (1)

The apocalyptic, in the present thesis, takes form on the limits of representation where the ‘end’ announces a ‘beginning’, and the ‘death’ a repetition in ‘rebirth’.

La Pensée du Dehors/ Thought of Outside ‘Thought of Outside’ is used by Foucault in 1966 to designate Maurice Blanchot’s work. It could be summarized as the thought of the elimination of the subject. Foucault examines this thought completely other than the interiorizing representational thought and writes “when language is revealed to be the shared transparency of the origin and death, every single existence receives, through the simple assertion ‘I speak,’ the threatening promise of its own

32

disappearance, its future appearance” (58). By ‘thought from outside’, Foucault attends to the surface language of ‘I Speak’, in which language reaches an extreme where form not only says but also does the content. In other words, for the statement ‘I speak’, form and content are the same, simultaneous, and on a border of indifference. In his Thought from Outside, Foucault examines the consequences of such thought on language when it comes to the surface and on the significance of a language that passes on the pure exteriority.

Experimentum Linguae

Experimentum Linguae, according to Paolo Bartoloni, in Agamben Dictionary, is

an investigation into the development of language from sound to speech via the acquisition of voice. Within this framework, sound is the elemental state, comparable to Aristotle’s dynamis, while speech is the transformation of language into discourse, and as such close to the opposite of dynamis: energeia. (105)

In other words, experimentum linguae is an experience in language where it is not intended for saying such and such a thing. Also called infancy by Agmaben, it refers to both immemorial childhood and speechlessness (in+fans) of the infant (and exactly immemorial because speechless). But it is merely the name given to that speechlessness; it is the speech of speechlessness. Experimentum linguae, then, is language as it approaches its limit of

expression. In the present thesis, this has been examined as the unsaying of language which tends, especially in our age, to performance and doing rather than saying.

33

Traumapocalyptic Writing The term is a coinage in this thesis by the conceptual affinity of trauma and apocalypse in bringing crises to representation. The idea of the limit of representation, when made a question in representation –any writing- makes up traumapocalyptic writing. A traumapocalyptic writing, as it is developed throughout the study, is governed by the relations of ‘form’ and ‘content’ only as far as writing reveals its content through the performances on form.

Matiagraphy

Matiagraphy is another coinage of the present thesis where writing an ‘eye’ (matia) is intended. The relation between seeing and saying in this thesis is regarded in terms of the question of ‘unsayable’. It is always the question of an ‘eye/I’ that has seen something without being able to say it. Related to both traumatic unspeakability and the attempts to reveal the revelations in writing as in apocalyptic, matiagraphy puts serious questions to representation according to its principle that ‘eye’, in everything it sees, also reveals itself. A mataigraphic examination, for example, does not look at a painting of such and such an object for the ‘verismilitude’ of the object represented but for the ‘eye’ that has seen it.

*** The next chapter tries to theoretically establish a relation between ‘trauma’ and ‘apocalypse’ and seeks this relation in the limits of representation and language. In better words, ‘traumapocalyptic’ is seen as a problem or failure of language which is usually interpreted as

34

its struggle with the ‘unsayable’. The main characteristic of this relation is proven to be a fusion of ‘beginning’s and ‘end’s –two essential extreme points- which leads to repetition – repetitive images in the traumatized head being an example. Merging of extremes in this chapter paves the way for an insight, in the third chapter, into the relation of philosophy to literature which, instead of exhausting literary texts in favor of philosophical truths and critical meanings, pays attention to language –in both philosophical and literary texts- as a performance or experience. Beckett’s later work is investigated, in the fourth chapter, in terms of such a traumapocalyptic relation in which the limits of language and representation are really at stake.