Introduction
pp. 1-19
in: , Late modernist style in Samuel Beckett and Emmanuel Levinas, Berlin, Springer, 2013Abstract
The distinctive potency of Beckett's and Levinas's texts is more clearly visible when they are read alongside one another. Both are persuasive, involving, and even moving because of a continual negotiation between recognizable people, events, and statements, and the systematic disruption of the subjects, setting, and sense of their discourses. Both root their writing in a world of small events that are as common as they are apparently inconsequential. The stuff of Beckett's texts is a ground-level buzz of figures remembering, moving, speaking, while Levinas's philosophy is equally mundane. His subjects experience insomnia, they meet strangers, and they give way to other people. These fundamental occurrences are one of the features that makes Beckett's work so attractive to phenomenology, as Maude and Feldman's Beckett and Phenomenology (2009) testifies. Combined with this fidelity to the familiar, however, both Beckett and Levinas subject this realm to persistent abstraction, which makes them newly and continually, strange. What appears a familiar human subject is fragmented and "unselfed" by their acts of speech or encounters, so that they sustain a significance altogether more unusual than first appears. This balance between familiarity and strangeness is central to this reading of Beckett and Levinas.