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

贝克特在1937年给玛丽曼宁的一封信中说，他正在创作“一种神秘的写作，这样空虚就可以像疝气一样突出”。实质性的空白突出于陈腐的语言表面;被“放进来”并被赋予形式。这篇论文的中心思想是，这种突出的空虚，即贝克特作品的核心在所有的表征和主题被剥离之后的“有或无”，类似于消极神学的神秘空虚。此外，我想指出，贝克特的抽象现代主义不仅预示着后现代主义，而且也预示着当代情感理论，因为他的作品实现了对身体生命的表达，超越了逻各斯中心主义的表现，进入了情感的强度。这一神秘的虚无与现代性危机、存在主义宇宙中心的上帝形空洞以及所指的空缺等诸多方面都有着密切的联系，它既是贝克特美学的根源，也是其美学的终结。贝克特试图表达一种先验的和内在的情感层面，这些次代表性的强度，布朗肖在他对《不可命名的》的评论中称之为“所有书籍都源自的运动”。它是一种“混沌”，就像古希腊原始而无序的虚空，从中产生了创造，我认为，它最终构成了思想和生活本身的先决条件。

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.