“The Golden Moment”: Enclosure, Fugitivity, and Broken Immanence

How are we inclined to read the drive of endless striving and perseverance that marks Samuel Beckett’s postwar shift to an aesthetics of failure? His first-person narrators “go on” to the extent that they keep trying to escape from a world and humanity in ruins; from the sociopolitical structures, institutions, and legal codes that brutalize and confine them; from the systemic mechanisms of control that have reduced their existence to the poverty of managed and appropriated life. In this chapter, I consider the ethical and political implications of those impossible fugitive movements that traverse a sequence of Beckett’s writings, concentrating on “the golden moment” in Molloy (1951), ecstatic release in “The End” (1946), and the verbal overflow of Not I (1972). The bodies, voices, or narrators of those stories aspire to break free, though always in vain, from the material forces that have captured them and continue to subject them to the threat of death. However, in failing to escape, they end up becoming immersed in the common life of things; which is to say they end up evoking an immanence opened to the outside. Drawing on Beckett’s affinities with Georges Bataille, as well as his newly unearthed translations on the Marquis de Sade, I aim to elucidate the lines of flight and elusive departures outward, from within biopolitical conditions of enclosure, of these fugitive life forms. Beckett, I argue, stages or elicits a certain linguistic experience of broken immanence, whose openness to the outside we share in common calls into question sovereign configurations of power and violence constitutive of modernity, all the while affirming other ways of getting free.