Abstract
This chapter approaches the body in Beckett’s theatre through the concept of the secret which Deleuze and Guattari develop in A Thousand Plateaus, through the text of Beckett’s neither and through the idea of a presence of absence in Beckett’s work. Examining Come and Go, What Where and Footfalls, it invents a new concept—belacquobatic secrets—and sees this concept undergo variations as it tries to diagnose how relations of non-relation are established in performances of Beckett’s work. Further, it examines how the body resists representational categories and how Beckett establishes relations of non-relation between bodies and language, events and signification.
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- 1.
In his discussion of the Greek Stoics, Uhlmann similarly proposes that the relation between body and event can be considered one of non-relation (Uhlmann 2009: 135 ). He does not, however, expand this observation in the directions we will take it.
- 2.
First published in 1929, the subject of Dante… Bruno. Vico. Joyce was suggested by Joyce himself. The peculiar use of ellipses is Beckett’s own, with the dots indicating the number of centuries which separate each writer.
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Koczy, D. (2018). Belacquobatic Secrets: Deleuze and the Purgatorial Rebellion of the Beckettian Body. In: Beckett, Deleuze and Performance. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95618-3_5
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