Introduction: Deleuze, Beckett, Même Combat

Abstract

Imagine a playwright who can no longer bear to write. Imagine a poet whose feelings for language have become so exquisite as to preclude their formulation in words. Imagine Hamlet so radically curtailed in its garrulousness that it is reduced to the dumb show. Imagine a state where language is exhausted in the two senses of the term, in that all the potentialities for expression have been realised and frozen into words, with the result that all potential speakers are too tired to speak.