Introduction

To introduce this volume of essays, we reexamine Samuel Beckett’s poetics of failure in terms of perseverance, sketching how it evokes and answers the demand to “go on,” in times of crisis and impossibility, but always in vain. The drive of weak perseverance traversing Beckett’s life and work, often conveyed by the little word “on,” we argue, calls for staying with modes of unbecoming, unknowing, and unbeing. It incessantly fails to bring about the self-fruition of the subject, redeem the incompletion of meaning and life, and restore the fragmented artwork or literary work. Yet, in these ways, it defies recuperation back into the modern capitalist machine of progress as well as neoliberal programs of entrepreneurial risk-taking, striving, improvement, self-care, and hustle culture. What perseveres, to reiterate, is failure. And to fail, for Beckett, is to undergo an experience of shared dispossession, lessening, and invention. The essays included in this book undertake an array of methodologies to explore the intersections of Beckett’s life and work with philosophy and literary or critical theory while addressing aesthetic, ethical, and political concerns that bear on the question of perseverance. They grapple with the ways in which he reinitiates and defies the long itinerary of modernism, responds to events of upheaval and catastrophe, shows the senselessness of everyday and ordinary suffering beyond the limited scope of humanism, or fashions forms of brokenness, ruin, and diminishment. In doing so, the authors interrogate the rational foundations and configurations of the classical subject and broach other ways of continuing, of living or going on, from the standpoint of the impossible.