MEANING IN SALVATION, MEANING WITHOUT SALVATION: ADORNO’S REFLECTION ON BECKETT’S PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

Beckett’s philosophy is a victim of those interpretations that are themselves victims in the interpretation of his work because they could not understand him beyond the limitation that aesthetic convention allows. Beckett’s thought participates in the landscape of immanence, but stands out from it through discursive deviations given in the words executed that remained without meaning on the main route of semantics. Adorno’s strong affinity with temporality leads to Beckett’s intermittence with the power of reflection and sees it in the scenes of the world realised in the deadness of mere duration after the nuclear catastrophe. The world in its progressive disappearance evokes the thought that this has all been going on for a long time, which is why death, which will probably not fail to happen, is invoked as an organ of salvation. The world living in the medium of rationality calls this a heresy, especially since the life of present history lies in the linear causality of the instrumental mind, in which the promise of happiness coincides in the final reason with the fulfilled goals of history. There are, as we know, states of life that are redeemed by the messianic character of death, but in Beckett there is the fear that the end will come too late, with the thought that the end has come but that it may have already passed and abandoned those waiting for it. In the announced death of nature, which systematically disappears in the aspirations of the subject, the life of existence is negated by the shame of the act far more than by the ontological hopelessness it creates. Beckett nowhere mentions it explicitly, but Adorno decodes it through reflection, denouncing all that simplistic dialogue has erased in conversation. With a semantic shift and a great leap, Adorno managed to isolate Beckett’s thought from all meaning, to save it from assimilation with standard forms of communication, so that common sense, from which it shuddered in its own indifference, could judge undisturbed its cavernous hermeticism. Beckett’s linguistic reduction is far closer to nonsense from the perspective of official sense, knowing that he has completely compromised himself in his concept by human aims. Adorno notes that Beckett’s fullness of meaning survives through apparent contradictions that elude meaning and appear only through a transcendental semantics that far surpasses the rationalist opus of manifestation, and for this very reason appears in the distilled form of linguistic minimalism as a testament that in the future no one will read. This thought is not without meaning, for meaning can only appear where it is ruthlessly denied.