Beckett, Biopolitics and the Problem of Life

The question and concept of ‘Life’ in Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre has had a long, complicated and submerged trajectory: from existentialist attributions of radical freedom, to post-structuralist engagements with an ethics of dying and weakness and further to contemporary strands of criticism derived from the neurological and biological sciences that direct our attention towards the material, somatic and posthuman in Beckett’s works. But what does Beckett have to say about Life itself, before the act of critical and conceptual sublation in the work of interpretation? The negative freedom presented by Beckett’s works challenges the hierarchies, exclusions, and binary thinking of biopower, as formulated by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. However, Beckett’s works do not afford a political position through which to directly rival any such discourse. Rather, they undermine the very ground of the oppositions between conceptuality and materiality, the mind and the body, the rational and the irrational, that structure conventional political and ethical modalities of thought, action and responsibility.