From World to Desert. A Beckettian Glacial Ecology for the Anthropocene

NOELIA BILLI

Dublin

Congreso; International Conference Samuel Beckett and the Anthropocene; 2020

Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies, University of Dublin

This presentationaims to explore the possibility of reading S. Beckett?s writings as the deployingof a glacial ecology according to which the connections between thingsand words depict a world ruled by the inorganic and the mineral element. Incontrast with an organic biocentered ecology, in which the idea of Lifefunctions as an universal that harmonizes everything there is, this glacialecology allows to understand beckettian linguistic matter as something thatresists to the recycling and reusing, and by doing so, intensifies a decomposingdrive that ends up transforming the world into a desert. We will focus on theconnections between death and speech in Beckett?s work, and we will analize theways in which the voices that seem to come from the empty interiority of thesubject (its cranial cavity) are a mode of representation of the Humanity which,in the Anthropocene, has become a climatological and geological force. Deprivedof the power to order, understand, or even experience the world, we will showhow Beckett?s characters are the vehicles as well as the victims of a languagethat reveals as something without a gravitational center, which moves, strikes andmakes contact without ever organizing itself or the outside. Within this frame,we will study Beckett?s sceneries of the Outside as spaces in which the effectsof physical decomposing and degradation radicalize the de-humanizing effectthat language has over the subject. Finally, we will focus on the use of "dust" and "mud" in some of the Irish writer works where, contrary to the Christian tradition,these elements are the residue of a ruined world where the human is inevitablyextinguishing. Resorting to some concepts Maurice Blanchot developed to think thesenotions (the Outside, the death that speech brings into the world), our purposeis to highlight the peculiar place the human has in the Anthropocene and howthis was foreseen in Samuel Beckett?s glacial ecology.