Nothing has changed

Abstract

This chapter addresses the argument: following Samuel Beckett's way would actually come much closer to the bone of Jacques Lacan's teaching. The least - unnullable least? - one could say is: nothing has changed. The double meaning of this sentence invokes on the one hand the claustrophobic and static setting of Beckett's writing, a site where nothing could ever change. Beckett's art, as opposed to James Joyce's, is the art of (n-1). The words have to be deprived of their magic, hollowed, their meaning has to be subtracted from them so that they become scarce and empty. Language itself is a veil, that was Beckett's insight already in the late 1930s, not the locus of expression, a veil to be pierced, not expanded, not a canvas to paint upon to conjure a new infinite universe. Rather, the veil is there only to get behind it, to what seemingly lies beyond.