Breakdown or breakthrough?

deleuzoguattarian schizophrenia and Beckett's gallery of moribunds

Benjamin Keatinge

pp. 81-96

in: S. E. Wilmer, Audrone Žukauskaite (eds), Deleuze and Beckett, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

Abstract

Now that we have had a look at this stroll of a schizo, let us compare what happens when Samuel Beckett’s characters decide to venture outdoors. Their various gaits and methods of self-locomotion constitute, in and of themselves, a finely tuned machine. And then there is the function of the bicycle in Beckett’s works: what relationship does the bicycle-horn machine have with the mother-anus machine? […] It is often thought that Oedipus is an easy subject to deal with, something perfectly obvious, a ‘given’ that is there from the very beginning. But that is not so at all: Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring-machines. And why are they repressed? To what end? Is it really necessary or desirable to submit to such repression? And what means are to be used to accomplish this? […] At the end of Malone Dies, Lady Pedal takes the schizophrenics out for a ride in a van and a rowboat, and on a picnic in the midst of nature: an infernal machine is being assembled. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984, pp. 2–3)

Cited authors

Deleuze Gilles

Beckett Samuel