Abstract
It is essential to note at the outset that a condensed version of this paper was presented at the Second World Phenomenology Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico on September 12–18, 1995. This declaration is unsuspectingly critical. Although you, the reader of this text, will become familiar with the chiasmic method and the specific interests of this inquiry as you reflect on this excursion into Beckett’s drama, I would have you consider that this meditation does not have a definitive point of closure. On the contrary, if this study has been successful as a chiasm, it will reveal that a continuous, yet evocative line of questioning extends from the performative dimensions of the conference through to the more conceptual interpretation imparted via a hermeneutic reading of this text. This extension is most acute when we note the curious affinity between a theatre performance and this conference. Delivering a conference paper is akin to performing on a stage, though for this conference our interests are in the main more philosophic than dramatic. Still, this similarity is instructive for it underscores the participation which is essential for both philosophic inquiry and dramatic theatre. The active involvement of participants should be stressed for, as you shall discover in Part I, it is this interplay which characterizes the essence of a chiasm. As you follow this text, then, I am hopeful that you will engage in the chiasm set up in the original meditation.
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Notes
Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Poetry, Language,Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 86. Also see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind” in The Primacy of Perception, trans. Carleton Dallery, ed. J. M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), “Cézanne’s Doubt” in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Herbert L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 35; Martin Heidegger, “The Turning” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, pp. 41–43. For Heidegger’s discussion on the essence of truth as Aletheia, see variously, Being and Time,trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), Section 44; “On the Essence of Truth” in Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell, trans. J. Sallis (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); “The Origin of the Work of Art”; and “Aletheia (Heraclitus, Fragment B 16)” in Early Greek Thinking, trans. David F. Krell and F. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).
Samuel Mallin, Here to Zero (Toronto: S.L. Simpson, 1983), pp. 723–2429.
Samuel Beckett, Waiting For Godot, trans. from the French text by the author (New York: Grove Press, 1954).
Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. J. M. Anderson and E. H. Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 58.
Ibid., p. 68.
Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 49–52.
See Heidegger’s discourse on the possible “saving-power” which is harboured within our epoch. See his essays “The Question Concerning Technology” and “The Turning,” as well as his discussion in “Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being” in Nietzsche IV. Nihilism, ed. David F. Krell, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1982).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. C. Lefort and trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 266.
Ibid., p. 265.
Ibid., pp. 143–147, 248.
Samuel Mallin, “The Line of Performance: Pina Bausch’s Dance-Theatre” in Harbour (Vol. 1, No. 1, 1990), p. 29.
Mallin, “The Line of Performance: Pina Bausch’s Dance-Theatre,” p. 31.
This term is a key description of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of chiasm. See The Visible and the Invisible,pp. 142, 263–266.
Ibid., p. 266.
Ibid. p. 266.
Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” p. 166.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible,p. 215.
Samuel Mallin, “Chiasm, Line and Art” in Merleau-Ponty: Critical Essays, ed. Henry Pietersma (University Press of America, 1989), p. 223.
Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” p. 179.
Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” p. 19.
Mallin, “Chiasm, Line, and Art,” pp. 225, 233–235.
On the etymology of “theatre” which links to the Greek theoria, as “spectacle” or “contemplate,” see for example: Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 31–33; Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 102–104; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Seabury, 1975), pp. 124–128.
Heidegger, Parmenides, p. 103.
Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking,pp. 58–62. (My emphasis in italics.)
Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 120.
Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, pp. 63–64.
Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. 7.
Ibid., p. 12.
Ibid., pp. 27–30.
Ibid., pp. 48–49.
Ibid., p. 9.
See Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, pp. 127, 129.
Bert O. States, Great Reckoning in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 74. Also see, L. Kane, The Language of Silence (London & Toronto: Associated University Press, 1984).
Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. 31.
Ibid., p. 49.
Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” in Basic Writings, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in collaboration with J. Glenn Grey and D.F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 196.
Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p. 62.
Beckett, Waiting for Godot, p. 60. See also p. 44.
Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p. 62.
Ibid., p. 80.
Ibid., p. 68.
Ibid., p. 68.
Ibid., p. 61.
Ibid., p. 61.
Ibid., pp. 63–64.
Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” p. 196.
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McNeely, G. (1998). A Hermeneutic Inquiry into Heidegger’s Gelassenheit. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Reincarnating Mind, or the Ontopoietic Outburst in Creative Virtualities. Analecta Husserliana, vol 53. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4900-6_16
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