The Protruding Void: Mystical Affect in Samuel Beckett's Prose

贝克特在1937年写给玛丽·曼宁（Mary Manning）的信中说，他正在创作“一种神秘的写作，这样空虚就会像疝气一样突出来”，以此为动力，这个项目试图理解贝克特对剥离语言、戳洞或撕开其武断面纱的狂热渴望，作为一种渴望，让这种矛盾的肉质、实质性的空虚从破旧的语言表面突出来；被“放进去”并给一张表格。这篇论文的核心观点是，在所有的表现和主题都被剥离之后，贝克特作品的核心是“有或无”，这种突出的空白类似于消极神学的神秘空白。此外，我想指出，贝克特的冷漠的现代主义不仅是后现代主义的先驱者，也是当代情感理论的先驱者，因为他的作品实现了对身体生活的表达，超越了以意义为中心的表达，进入了情感强度。也就是说，这种与现代性危机、存在主义宇宙中心的神形空洞、所指的空缺有着各种关联的神秘虚空，既是贝克特美学的根源，也是他美学的终点。贝克特试图表达一种前个人和内在的情感层面，那些次代表性的强度，布朗肖在他对《不可名状》的评论中称之为“所有书籍都源于的运动”。它是一种混沌，就像古希腊的原始和无序的空虚，创造由此产生，我认为，它最终构成了思想和生活的先决条件。

Taking as its impetus the droll remark made by Beckett in a 1937 letter to Mary Manning that he was in the process of creating "a mystical writing, so that the void may protrude like a hernia", this project seeks to understand Beckett's apophatic desire to strip away language, to poke holes or tear apart its arbitrary veil, as a desire to let this paradoxically fleshy, substantive void protrude through the threadbare linguistic surface; to be "let in" and given a form. Central to this thesis is the idea that this protruding void, that "something or nothing" at the core of Beckett's work after all representation and thematics have been stripped away, is akin to the mystical void of negative theology. Moreover, I wish to argue that Beckett's apophatic modernism not only anticipates postmodernism but also contemporary affect theory, in that his work achieves an expression of bodily life beyond logocentric representation into affective intensity. That is to say, this enigmatic void, which has been variously related to the crisis of modernity, the God-shaped hole at the centre of the existentialist universe, and the vacancy of the signified, is the both the root and the end of Beckett's aesthetics. Beckett seeks to give expression to a prepersonal and intrapersonal plane of affect, those sub-representational intensities which Blanchot called, in his review of L'Innommable, "that movement from which all books derive". It is a kind of khaos, like the ancient Greek primordial and disorderly void out of which springs creation, and which ultimately constitutes, I will argue, the precondition for both thought and life as such.