Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real 9781501341175, 9781501341168, 9781501341182

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Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real

Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real Arka Chattopadhyay

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Arka Chattopadhyay, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray Cover image © Caricature of Samuel Beckett, 1969, by Edmund S. Valtman, U.S. Library of Congress; Sketch of Jacques Lacan, 2007, by Edward Drantler All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Whilst every effort has been made to locate copyright holders the publishers would be grateful to hear from any person(s) not here acknowledged. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4116-8 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4118-2 eBook: 978-1-5013-4117-5 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To all members of my family present and absent … Writing is departure …

CONTENTS

List of Figures  viii Foreword  ix Acknowledgements  xi

1 Real Writing in Literature and Psychoanalysis  1 2 One … All … Alone: Borromean Logic of Solitude and Company in How It Is  33 3 Company and the Motility of Real Unconscious  77 4 Jouissance of Worsening in Lituraterre: Worstward Ho  113 5 Mathematized Body and Sexual Rapport  157

Conclusion  191

Works Cited  196 Index of Proper Names  206 Index of Subjects  208

LIST OF FIGURES

1.1 The discourses in rotation from Seminar XVII

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1.2 Positions in each discourse

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1.3 Analyst’s discourse

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1.4 Regular chain

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1.5 Borromean chain

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2.1 Borromean knot

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2.2 Two as junction between one and three from Seminar XXI

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2.3 The fourth ring of the sinthome from Seminar XXIII

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2.4 Positions in discourses

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2.5 Matheme of the analytic discourse

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3.1 One way of drawing the quadruple knot from Seminar XXIII

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3.2 Schema of alienation from Seminar XI

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4.1 False hole from Seminar XXIII

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4.2 True Borromean hole from Seminar XXIII

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5.1 The central hole of a torus produces the possibility of holes inside it

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FOREWORD

Other critics who are cited in this work, such as Ackerley, Brits, Culik and Stevens, have examined aspects of how Beckett’s works might be drawn into relation with mathematics. Still others such as Baker, Barfield, Barker, Brown, Locatelli, Moorjani, Rabaté and Watson have underlined illuminating parallels between the work of Lacan and Beckett. Yet Arka Chattopadhyay is the first to offer a sustained reading of the relations and non-relations between Lacan and Beckett via the bridge of the idea of the mathematical. Indeed, this is putting it too simply, as the relation is not simply between Beckett and Lacan using mathematics; rather, these three terms are interchangeably in relation. That is, the book offers, at the same time, new readings of Beckett made possible through Chattopadhyay’s careful attention to the potentials and limits of Lacan’s categories and an acute understanding of the idea of aporia only possible through mathematical theory, new readings of Lacan’s categories illuminated by Beckett’s writing practice, and new understandings of how mathematical theory might be understood other than as a foundation of rationalism. If Beckett is read via Lacan, so too Lacan is read via Beckett, and both readings deepen our understanding of how mathematics, rather than being seen as providing a precision somehow opposed to the openness and incompleteness that attends literary logic, might also offer another face, one that helps us come to terms with the kind of elusiveness that characterizes concepts such as infinity, the impossible, and via these the Real. Chattopadhyay underlines that the opposite face to the rationality of mathematics, the rationality that Adorno and Horkheimer have argued has imbued Enlightenment thinking, is not the irrational but what Chattopadhyay calls aporetic logic. This logic of endlessness, of infinities, of sets, of paradox and of incompleteness is essential to the capacities of mathematical thinking, and yet we commonly leave it to one side when we loosely imagine what we mean by mathematics. Just as we leave to one side what it might mean to exist, to be alive and human, and finite and indeterminate, when we loosely imagine our own lives. Yet Beckett, Lacan and Chattopadhyay attempt to imagine our being with rigour, and the kinds of rigour they apply are not merely figurative; rather, they are precise. Indeed, they offer a mathematical precision. Chattopadhyay is the first to fully engage with the specificity of

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FOREWORD

this rigour, along the way offering astonishing new readings of some of Beckett’s most difficult texts and underlining the ongoing importance of Lacan’s theoretical project. Anthony Uhlmann Director, Writing and Society Research Centre Western Sydney University

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements where they belong are often left unsaid. Therefore, ‘nohow on.’ Let me begin with my family: my father, Prof. Kuntal Chattopadhyay, from whom I received my first literary training; the loving memory of my mother, Soma Chattopadhyay, who was my first teacher of the English language; my paternal and maternal grandparents; and last but certainly not the least, my wife, Dr Anuparna Mukherjee, for all her academic and personal support during the writing and completion of this manuscript. Anuparna's parents deserve their place here for their silent but important presence all along. A special mention for my Lacanian comrade Samya Seth, who contributed to fine-tuning many of my ideas and helped with private translations and citation hunting. Shout out to dear friend and fellow researcher, Dr Sourit Bhattacharya, who was instrumental in triggering my Beckett intoxication in the haloed premises of the ancient Presidency College in Kolkata, India, fourteen long years back. I remember with respect all my teachers of English Literature during my BA, MA and M.Phil days, especially Dr Debashis Bandyopadhyay, who introduced me to Lacan in Presidency College during my undergraduate days there; Dr Santanu Biswas, who spearheaded an indepth textual reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis at Jadavpur University; and most certainly Anthony Uhlmann and Alex Ling, my two wonderful supervisors who helped and encouraged me without ever trying to impose their views. In all these years of living with Beckett and Lacan together and apart, there were many friends who wittingly and unwittingly inspired me and nicknamed me ‘Beckett babu’, but as it is impossible to accommodate all of them here, I would like to dedicate the following ellipsis to them:

*** To conclude, let me name the following scholars, friends and academics who contributed to my thinking on the subject through insightful conversations at various points during my research for this manuscript. This is only an incomplete list, as much as human memory serves: Prof. Carla Taban, Late Prof. Julie Campbell, Prof. Jean-Michel Rabaté, Prof. John Pilling, Prof. Mark Byron, Prof. Sigi Jottkandt, Prof. Stanley Gontarski, Prof. Angela Moorjani, Prof. Mark Nixon, Prof. Ronan

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

McDonald, Prof. Russell Smith, Prof. Dirk Van Hulle, Prof. Daniel Katz, Prof. Laura Salisbury, Dr Rhys Tranter, Prof. James Martell, Prof. Peter Fifield, Prof. Matthew Feldman, Prof. Anthony Cordingley, Prof. Bruno Clément, Dr Llewellyn Brown, Dr Melinda Jewell, Dr Ben Denham, Suzanne Gapps, Arthur James Rose, Arunava Banerjee, Dipanjan Maitra, and Samya Seth; members of the study group ‘Kolkata Lacanians’, Stuart Guerin, Prof. Russell Grigg, Dr Leonardo Rodriguez, Ofelia Brozky, Dr Esther Faye, and Dr Susan Schwartz; members of the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis, Robert Boncardo, Christian Gelder, Sajad Kabgani; and members of the UNSW Lacan reading group among others.

1 Real Writing in Literature and Psychoanalysis

Writing is everywhere in psychoanalysis and literature. The activity of writing is a frame shared by the two discourses. There is writing inside speech in the psychoanalytic clinic. On the couch, it is a speaking-body that per-forms (forms within speech do the writing, as we shall see) writing by talking while a second speaking-body from a nearby chair responds to it by writing back and countersigning one writing-in-speech through another. Literature as a phenomenon includes a complex interplay of speech and writing as well. Cutting across the diverse spectrum of human cultures, there are both oral and written literary traditions and traditions where orality turns into writing at a subsequent historical stage. At another level of this speech-writing complex, when we read a written text, the act of reading itself turns the written towards the spoken. When we see and hear in our minds the words that we are reading on an actual or virtual page, the written gets reconstructed through a mental speech which may or may not be verbalized. The sensory and cognitive experience of reading is inclusive of speech as a verbal as well as silent articulation of the written. So there is speech-in-writing in literature that flips the writing-in-speech which happens in psychoanalysis. To make a chiasmic formula of this, we can say that if literature speaks writing, psychoanalysis writes speech. Writing as a generalized activity produces content through its formal envelope. The form of writing as means permeates its end, i.e. the content and vice versa. It is at the level of formalism that we will soon place the question of mathematical form in writing. Writing as a generalized human practice is perhaps one of the most archaic, fundamental and beautiful human technologies. Be it the old-fashioned way of scribbling on paper or pressing keys to type on screen, writing is an embodied material

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act. Considering speech as another form of writing, we write with our material bodies, our voice and our mouth. At the desk, we write with material objects like pen and paper or with keyboards and computers, and what we produce is language as matter. We can consider a diary or a hardcopy book as a material object that concretizes writing. Softcopy versions of diaries and books are examples of virtual matter that take up machine memory with the weight of material data. Before the subjective process of signification and deciphering begins, language exists as a material phenomenon. An unknown language has a sonorous or scriptal materiality. We are enchanted by it even when we cannot make sense of it. This corporeal, material and concrete formalism (unlike the hermetically sealed notion of abstract formalism) of writing is integral to literature as a textual medium, as it is to clinical psychoanalysis which involves two speaking human bodies of the analyst and the ‘analysand’ (the one who seeks analysis). These speaking-bodies write through the material forms embedded in their speech acts as one cuts back into another. In both literature and psychoanalysis, writing as a material structure has an operative role. What it produces is a logic of concrete forms that complicates itself endlessly as it goes on.

Beckett and Lacan: A history of non-relation In this book, I wish to probe into the ‘material’ and ‘mathematical’ writing that happens through geometric logic, counting, physical movement and sexuality in Samuel Beckett’s late texts (from the early 1950s all the way up to the late 1980s) alongside Jacques Lacan’s final psychoanalytic teachings. In this late phase of Lacan’s work (from around 1970 till his death in 1981), his earlier figuration about the unconscious that is structured like a language (consolidated in the 1950s and 1960s) is sabotaged by the Real. The Lacanian notion of the Real brings back what reality excludes in its constitutive process. This involves how we understand reality through language that in turn works through images. We connect images with words that we hear or read or see (the word is image too). It is through word and image that we comprehend reality. This process of comprehension is also a cognitive process that constitutes what we call reality. What this process leaves out is the Real as a third category after the word and the image. The Real is what cannot be expressed through word and image. Language as a form of expression fails to depict the Real. Mathematical discourse, as we shall see, is a different kind of formalization that grapples with the question of reality, but arguably this discourse has more agency than natural language to touch on the Real as that which the constitution of

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reality excludes. We can think of the Real as an impasse of mathematical, logical and linguistic formalization. We will soon come back to elaborate on it further. To move on with the central thread of this book, there is ‘Real unconscious writing’ in both psychoanalysis and literature. This is a writing that is not aware of itself when it takes place in clinical speech acts and literary texts. This writing is thus ‘unconscious’ in a weak adjectival sense. It is an ‘unconscious writing’ in another strong sense as it presents a material inscription of the unconscious. In other words, it is a writing of the unconscious. This unconscious writing is a Real mode of inscription. It complicates traditional boundaries that separate the spoken from the written as it happens between semantics and syntax, in the gap between the word as signifier and the visual or aural image as its referent. In this book, I trace this Real ‘writing’ of the unconscious as a logical and mathematical impasse in the Beckettian text and take it through Lacanian psychoanalysis that offers a framework of logical writing to think through underdeveloped mathematical aspects of Beckett’s work. I treat both Beckett’s and Lacan’s engagements with mathematical and logical form as two isomorphic sequences in the history of literary and theoretical Modernism. The book aims to construct a ‘Lacanian Beckett’ and a ‘Beckettian Lacan’ by remaining faithful to what Shoshana Felman, in a trendsetting formulation on the psychoanalysis-literature interface, calls the mutual ‘implication’ of the two discourses (1977: 8–9). Historically speaking, Beckett (1906–1989) and Lacan (1901–1981) shared the postwar Parisian milieu as well as their birthdays (April 13), although they remained alone-together in overlapping cultural circles. This logic of being both alone and together is a nuance that will emerge from our Lacanian construction of Beckett. Reciprocally, the Beckettian construction of Lacan will radicalize the notion of the Real unconscious as endless ending. The contrapuntal reading will open up Beckett’s work on non-relation as a formal alternative to relationality. As we shall see, this Lacanian reading of Beckett and Beckettian reading of Lacan shows the inscription of a peculiar non-relation between psychoanalysis and literature. Literature has a non-relational relation with psychoanalysis, and it subverts the psychoanalytic unconscious by reducing it to the Real of bare matter with minimal sense. As it trashes the unconscious into a Real impasse of logic, it declares its non-relation with psychoanalysis. This is why only the radical post-psychoanalytic edge of Lacan’s later teaching in which he dissolves the psychoanalytic pivot of the unconscious can illuminate Beckett’s literary transgressions. Let us begin with a historical map of Beckett’s and Lacan’s ‘missed encounter.’ This is a schematic exercise in historical speculation. I use these speculative links as a point of departure for our discussion on Beckett and Lacan.

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Beckett’s missed encounter Beckett and Lacan’s shared interest in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is a potential encounter that never got actualized. Beckett was associated with the making of Wake which, for later Lacan, became the paradigmatic literary text, offering a direction of writing the Real through the symptom or the ‘sinthome’ (his Latin way of spelling the Greek origin of the French word symptôme in Seminar XXIII). Beckett had psychotherapy with Wilfred Bion at Tavistock Clinic in London from early 1934 to late 1935. During this period and afterwards, he made his own ‘Psychology Notes’ to record his reading of psychoanalytic literature. This was a time when Lacan was not a familiar name in psychoanalytic circles. Chronological time paved way for the logic of missed encounter here. As Mark Nixon notes, during his psychotherapy, Beckett had read a Minotaure issue in search of an essay by Edouard Claparède. The issue contained an early essay by Lacan: ‘Motifs du crime paranoiaque’ (Nixon 2011: 41–42). There is no evidence whether Beckett read or did not read Lacan’s essay. Daniel Albright notes, in 1930, Beckett had translated parts of Breton and Éluard’s The Immaculate Conception. Lacan was one of the reporters for this experiment of literary writing that mimicked psychic structures in the journal Annales médico-psychologiques (2003: 10). This indicates how Lacan’s work had a literary context from the very beginning. We will return to this context later. During a 2010 NEMLA panel, Stanley Gontarski shared a personal anecdote with me. According to this anecdote, in the early 1980s, when asked about Lacan, Beckett had replied: ‘His later work tends to become unreadable.’ This suggests affinity as Beckett immediately alludes to the most radical phase of Lacan’s teaching. The ‘unreadable’ is indeed a shared concern. Throughout this book, we will see how Beckett mathematically constructs this structural unreadability in his writing. Beckett was aware of Lacan, not only from the Parisian circles (Julia Kristeva’s husband Philippe Sollers was a common friend while Barbara Bray, Beckett’s companion in his late years, was the English translator of Elizabeth Roudinesco’s Lacan biography) but also from his reading of works that had more than a mention of Lacan. His library featured Maurice Blanchot’s L’Entretien infini (The Infinite Conversation) and Octave Mannoni’s critical biography, Freud (Nixon and Hulle 2013: 264; 278). Blanchot’s book is punctuated with significant references to Lacan such as the thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language (Blanchot 1993: 233), the subjects’ inability to speak about their Real being (235) and the analytic dialectic of knowledge and truth (236). Mannoni, who worked with Lacan, declares in his book on the inventor of psychoanalysis that his biographical construction of Freud ‘derives its inspiration from his [Lacan’s] general orientation’ (Mannoni 1971: 180). He also reflects on Lacan’s linguistic seizure of the

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Freudian unconscious. We know from Beckett’s letter to Barbara Bray on 7 August 1959 that he was reading Freud’s biography at the time of writing Comment c’est (Beckett had begun ‘Pim’, later to become Comment c’est on 17 December 1958). In this letter, he appreciated Freud’s ‘incredible suffering and fortitude of last fifteen years’ (2014: 237). There is more to this than chance, as we shall see in our next chapter on How It Is. Beckett had initially mentioned Freud in Company, but the passage was finally omitted as if to turn psychoanalysis into a sibilant textual haunting. These details indicate that there are both reason and evidence for conjecturing that Beckett was aware of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Lacan’s missed encounter Let us now turn to Lacan’s brief references to Beckett in his Écrits and the annual Seminars in Paris. In Écrits, Lacan alludes to Waiting for Godot while glossing Gide’s maxim, ‘the number two rejoices in being odd’: ‘the two numbers that have no equal are waiting for Godot’ (2006: 395). Lacan emphasizes the absent figure of Godot as ‘the third’ after Didi and Gogo’s ‘pseudocouple.’ The two cannot produce an even number because a three (Godot) as odd number pushes them from both inside and outside. We will return to this triad as a step towards the Real. In Seminar IX, Lacan passingly mentions Godot: ‘The God who is involved […] echoing Beckett who one day called him Godot’ (13.6.1962). This reference concerns the status of the Other (God as absolute Other). We will return to this problematic in Beckett. In Seminar XVI, Lacan refers to Beckett while talking about the dustbin of the unconscious: ‘We know a little bit about what is involved in dustbins in this period dominated by the genius of Samuel Beckett’ (13.11.1968). Although the specific reference is Beckett’s 1958 play Endgame, Lacan considers Beckett to have a wider engagement with the waste of the unconscious which at another level is a waste of language. We will see how this Real waste speaks to what Beckett calls the ‘inane’ materiality of the mathematical letter. In ‘Lituraterre’, Lacan evokes Beckett again in relation to the waste of the unconscious: ‘The admission (L’avouer) or, as pronounced of old, “l’avoir” (the having) of which Beckett makes a balance to the debt that makes refuse of our being, save the honour of literature, and relieves me of the privilege I believed owed to my place’ (12.5.1971; Jack W. Stone’s translation). What is this admission? What do Beckett’s texts ‘admit’? The Beckettian admission or avowal indicates an engagement with the Real signifier that expresses itself by trashing meaning into the letter’s mathematical materiality. Beckett’s writing of this Real ‘letter’ (mathematized structure of the signifier) will anchor our readings.

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Mathematical discourse, psychoanalysis and the Real in literary Modernism To clarify right at the outset, in this book, I am using the word ‘mathematics’ in a strictly delimited sense. It operates within the critical field of philosophy of science and refers to the discourse of mathematics. Writing is the key term here. Mathematics is a discourse that contains written letters which do not necessarily emanate from speech. It is a discourse in which writing can happen without speaking. Of course, we can verbalize the steps of a sum, but it is inscribing the steps that founds mathematics as writing. Invocation can come later. European literary Modernists are interested in mathematics for this supposed agency of supplementing speech. Modernist European literature of the twentieth century often speculates whether or not mathematical discourse can step in where the linguistic function of speech fails. For literary Modernism, invested in new aesthetic forms to grapple with the unspeakable, mathematical discourse offers a fresh way of formalizing (in) a text. Mathematics is also mobilized for its self-enclosed material purchase on the word in which a word refers only to itself and not to anything outside. This is how Baylee Brits sees the function of number in Modernist fiction as ‘presentation’ and not ‘representation’ (2018: 1). She mobilizes the ideogrammatic figure of infinity (which is writing incarnate), i.e. the lemniscate (∞) to ground what she calls a reciprocal relation between mathematics and literature. By way of an aside, we can consider the difference between this sign (∞) and the number that it strongly resembles but is not quite identical with (8). Lemniscate as a graphic sign hovers between a number and a knot (knotting of two zeroes). But most fundamentally, it shows mathematics as writing and alphabetical letter as de-formation as well as re-formation of number. In a brief prose text titled ‘The Way’ (1981), Samuel Beckett includes the lemniscate, first as number eight and then as the infinity figure, turning the number by a sideways geometric rotation (∞). The number and the graphic sign are used as indices for the two parts that make up this text. These two parts describe a journey across the two circles that constitute the figure of infinity. The ways are one way, and although one can cross over from one circle to another, there is no going back. Beckett highlights the knotty aspect of the lemniscate by approaching the sign in a trajectorial way. More importantly, however, the text marks a hesitation between arithmetic (number) and geometry (knot) by implying that the infinity sign is constitutive of two zeroes. Is zero a number or the non-numerical origin of the number series? Throughout this book, we will keep coming back to this question. In ‘The Way’, as the traveller journeys from one zero to another on the way to infinity, the ‘loose sand underfoot’ changes into ‘bedrock underfoot.’ While the sand does not preserve marks of footfalls, the bedrock does, and

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this changes the status of the zero as the absence of mark. In the first part of the text, it is the sand underfoot, and this makes the narrator state that zero footprint is not a sign that no one has traversed this path: ‘So no sign of remains no sign that none before’ (Beckett 2009a: 125). If we read the absence of footprints as zero, at this point, the zero means zero because it does not give us a sign, whether or not anyone has ever traversed this infinite pathway. In the second part of the text, when the second zero that constitutes infinity leads to bedrock underfoot, the anonymous narrator changes his or her observation: ‘So no sign of remains a sign that none before’ 125. The bedrock archives footprints, and hence the logic of the text establishes zero as one in this second modulation. In other words, the zero footprint now makes a one because it signals that no one has walked this way. The text thus moves from zero as zero to zero as one – from zero as zero knowledge to zero as one possible piece of knowledge. This movement suggests the bifidity of zero and one as the origin of the function of succession in number series. Without the movement from zero to one, there is no way of beginning a progression from one number to another that gives us a numerical series. Is the zero to be counted as one? Is it a number at all? We will return to such questions in various ways throughout this book, but it suffices to say here that number is a sibilant subsurface of Beckett’s late-Modernist prose. To return to Baylee Brits’s formulation on the figure of infinity: The lemniscate maintains the autonomy of the tropological and semiotic domain of literature on one of its loops, and the presentational domain of mathematics on another, but it allows the two domains meet at a certain point. (2018: 20) This dynamic of representation and presentation points to the perennial Platonic question around mathematics. Where is mathematics? Where does it exist? Does it exist on the page on which we work out sums, or is it everywhere in our human world? Does mathematics have a world of its own, or is it located in the everyday world of the human? Can it be an autonomous discourse that has nothing to do with the human world of reality? Contemporary philosophical thinking has made interesting approaches to this Platonic question about the existence of mathematics. For example, cognitive thinkers George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez have made a strong claim about what they call ‘embodied mathematics.’ ‘Embodied mathematics’ is placed in opposition to ‘transcendent mathematics’ which in their view is nothing but a ‘romance of mathematics’ (see Lakoff and Núñez: 337–363). A detailed analysis of their positions is beyond the scope of this book, but I want to mention their ideas as an important contemporary development on the Platonic question in mathematics. Lakoff and Núñez’s interest lies in embodied mathematical cognition as part of ‘mind’ (mind as extension

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of brain and body) and they are categorical on the point that mathematics does not exist outside us in any physical reality, but it is in the mind of the mathematicians. This is how they summarize their position in three points: 1 There are regularities in the universe independent of us. 2 We human beings have invented consistent, stable forms of mathematics (usually with unique right answers). 3 Sometimes human physicists are successful in fitting human mathematics as they conceptualize it to their human conceptualization of the regularities they observe in the physical world. But the human mathematical concepts are not out there in the physical world. (Lakoff and Núñez: 345–346) For Lakoff and Núñez, mathematics is a ‘product of embodied cognition – mind as it arises through interaction with the world’ (350). If we grant that embodied cognition itself is an interactive structure that thrives on its relation with the world, we cannot say that mathematics has no relation with the world outside. The cognitivist position would rather be that mathematics is produced by the interaction between mind and its embodiment in the physical reality. Far from giving absolute autonomy to mathematical discourse, the cognitivist position critiques the Platonism of absolutely autonomous mathematical forms. It humanizes mathematics by making it dependent on the working of the embodied mind. Lakoff and Núñez’s move towards ‘embodied mathematics’ is important as it clarifies the intensely human nature of mathematics: The subject matters of mathematics-arithmetic, geometry, probability, calculus, set theory, combinatorics, game theory, topology, and so on – arise from human concerns and activities: for example, counting and measuring, architecture, gambling, motion and other change, grouping, manipulating written symbols, playing games, stretching and bending objects. In other words, mathematics is fundamentally a human enterprise arising from basic human activities. (351) This position creates a critical space for studying mathematics from a humanities perspective – one of the aims of the present book. Steven Connor, a literary humanities scholar, in his book, Living by Numbers, has recently floated a somewhat homologous term, ‘vernacular mathematics’, in order to situate our cultural encounter with numbers in the human world (see Connor 2016: 7–19). In the field of European Modernist literature, Lacanian psychoanalysis will be my historical ally in approaching mathematical aspects of a literary text in a way that preserves the fundamental (fundamentally

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minimal as well) human dimension of the mathematical in the literary. There is, of course, a serious conflict between the cognitivist view of mathematics in Lakoff and Núñez or Connor’s cultural reading of mathematics on the one hand and contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou’s neoPlatonic claim that ‘mathematics is ontology’ (see Being and Event: 4) on the other. In a series of caustic remarks, Connor critiques Badiou for being an advocate of mathematical autonomy (Connor 2016: 13–14). Whether mathematics for Badiou is autonomous or not is an extremely complex question, and it is not the concern of this book. However, to give credit, where credit is due, Badiou’s claim that mathematics is ontology as a science of ‘being-qua-being’ (being as pure multiple, i.e. a multiple of multiples ad infinitum) does open mathematical discourse to other branches of human knowledge such as the humanities. Insofar as literature engages with the complex ontological category of ‘being’, both in the world it creates and in the people who populate that world, it must have some business at that basic level with mathematics. Without taking a categorical position on the Platonic debate in mathematics at this stage, I would probe into the question of mathematical autonomy in literature. Throughout this book, we will complicate this question as we study literary Modernism’s appeal to mathematics for a model of textual autonomy. To mention one important gesture towards mathematics within the historical sequence of European literary Modernism, in a brief 1913 essay, ‘The Mathematical Man’, the great Austrian Modernist writer Robert Musil argues in favour of the aesthetic aspects of mathematics by discussing its passionate pursuits of ‘pure reason’ (41). Although there is a clear echo of Enlightenment rationalism here, Musil also talks about the inextricability of intellect and feelings (43). On the question of autonomy, he makes a complex point about mathematical discourse by acknowledging its selfenclosure as well as the dependence of human reality on the mathematical. In a characteristically Modernist accent on inwardness, Musil muses that ‘somewhere inside, the individual mathematician is working, and his windows do not open to the outside, but to adjoining rooms’ (41). Mathematics is hailed here as part of the Modernist agenda of textual autonomy. In the same essay, Musil goes on to comment: Thanks to mathematics we bake our bread, build our houses, and drive our vehicles. […]. All the life that whirls about us, runs and stops is not only dependent on mathematics for its comprehensibility, but has effectively come into being through it and depends on it for its existence. (41) Musil’s critical move here flips the dependence relation between mathematics and human reality. In his vision, it is the human world that depends on mathematical discourse and not the other way round. This is

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a resounding statement of mathematical autonomy. But as we shall see through Beckett’s manoeuvres, the question of mathematical autonomy cannot be taken for granted and neither literature nor mathematics can eventually boast of a complete autonomy. Beckett is doubly careful not to turn mathematical discourse into a logocentric narrative of autonomous power. As we can see in Musil’s discussion, mathematical autonomy becomes a tool to counter notions of literary realism that the Modernist avant-garde is keen on subverting. In this equation, the text does not need to represent the world outside or be dependent on it. Mathematics as a discursive and textual entity brings the so-called external world into being through its inward operations. The experimental interiority of the mathematician’s project thus speaks to literary Modernism’s dwelling on psychic inwardness. The esoteric avatar of this Modernist literary tradition is emphatically experimental in its use of various scientific forms and ideas.1 The Modernist critique of realism, which champions the autonomy of the literary text, as opposed to realistic correspondence, is fundamentally inclined towards mathematics for this signifying autonomy and self-referentiality. Audrey Wasser has recently made a persuasive argument in favour of conceiving difference itself as a form in literary Modernism (2016: 161). This would tip the dynamic from realistic verisimilitude towards a textual autonomy of difference. Beckett himself advocates such formal autonomy by claiming that Joyce’s work is not ‘about something’ but ‘that something itself’ (1984: 27; emphasis original). But then again, can Beckett’s own work exorcise the realistic trappings of this signifier, ‘about’, altogether? The reading of Worstward Ho in Chapter 4 will gesture towards one possible response to this complicated question. Modernism’s self-reflexive focus on the textuality of the text echoes the linguistic materialism, embedded in the mathematical discourse where semantics is undermined by the material presence of words. The materiality of Beckettian textuality speaks to Lacan’s late insistence on the mathematical aspects of the signifier. This material textuality that delimits signification (‘matter’ does not have meaning but we ascribe meaning to it) can be connected with the Modernist notion of textual autonomy as a reaction against literary realism. The autonomy of the Modernist text is bolstered by this textual materiality that ultimately turns words into ‘things’ rather than offering a mimesis of things in the world. To return to mathematical discourse as writing without speech or writing that does not depend on speech for its inception, Jacques Derrida notes that mathematics produces a ‘nonphonetic inscription’ by alienating logos from phonē (2004: 29). This would contribute to the sceptical epistemology, which, as Brian McHale has famously argued, constitutes the backbone of the Modernist novel (1987: 8). Mathematical discourse becomes instrumental in Modernist novel’s engagement with deadlocks of

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knowledge. Nina Engelhardt mentions ‘the Modernist novel’s concern with the role of mathematics regarding the interplay of the rational and the nonrational’ (2012: 220) in her excellent doctoral thesis as she studies both Modernist and postmodernist fiction from the perspective of mathematics but without any reference to psychoanalysis. For my part, I would treat the mathematical turn within the turn to the Real in Lacanian psychoanalysis as an intellectual current of late Modernism of the 1950s and 1960s, with a specific literary-historical context. Before turning to Lacan, let us briefly see how mathematics became an important reference point for the post-war European ethos of late Modernism. While Beckett himself was a product of this ethos, the French literary group Oulipo, influenced by Beckett and others, practised ‘proceduralism’ by way of constrained writing. This group, formed in 1960 by Raymond Queneau, consisted of trained mathematicians like Jacques Roubaud who wrote poetry and novelists like Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. These writers experimented with manifold mathematical forms. They would often set pre-decided limits and write a text in strict accordance with those fiercely constraining limits. A famous example is Perec’s novel, A Void (1969), written without the vowel ‘e’. While Calvino used the settheoretical problematic of tarot cards in his novel, The Castle of CrossedDestinies (1973), Perec utilized a mathematical problem of chess (‘Knight’s tour’) in Life: A User’s Manual (1978). In a 1968 interview on science and literature, the late Modernist and proto-postmodernist writer Calvino described mathematics as a discourse that does not ‘base an argument on a truth beyond itself.’ He appreciated mathematics as a science ‘not guiltless of tinkering with its own formulative processes’ (1986: 29). Calvino is sharply attentive to the phenomenon of self-enclosure in mathematics. If mathematical truth is only mathematical in a hermetically sealed manner, so is literary truth, here for Calvino. The self-enclosure of mathematical form becomes a desire in the literary writer who wants to attain textual autonomy. Whether this absolute autonomy is attainable or not is a different question, but Oulipo was certainly not guiltless in tinkering with the formulative processes of the Modernist text. Although Beckett mostly refrained from doing constrained writing, he did use an explicitly combinatorial technique in his 1969 short prose text, ‘Sans/Lessness.’ As Ruby Cohn reports, Beckett wrote sixty sentences on sixty sheets of paper and drew them out twice in two random orders (1973: 265). This is how the text of 120 sentences was made with two sets of same sentences that opened outwards to potentially multiple textual versions and variants. J. M. Coetzee, another contemporary writer, trained in both Beckett and mathematics, went on to electronically generate these other possible versions.2 Apart from this, Beckett’s work also connects with Oulipo in terms of its deployment of combinatorial logic in moments like the biscuit episode in Murphy or the sucking-stone episode in Molloy. Late plays like

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Quad (1981) and What Where (1983) are entirely built on potentially exhaustive structures of permutation. ‘Combinatorics’ as a mathematical form is discussed at length by Oulipians like Roubaud and Calvino.3 As we shall see, Beckett’s textual rules are mostly different from Oulipian constraints. Rather than having pre-fixed rules, Beckett’s textual structures retroactively reveal rules during their critical dissemination. Oulipian rules are declared at the outset, whereas one has to construct Beckett’s rules, lying hidden in his texts, during the act of interpretation. We shall see how these structural rules often force the text onto a logical impasse, somewhat similar to Oulipo. Where does Lacanian psychoanalysis come into all this? It features in this milieu, both historically and ideationally. To begin with the historical, young Lacan was friends with the Surrealists, as we have seen above. Not only did he publish pieces in the Surrealist journal Minotaure but he was also friends with André Breton, Slavador Dalí and Jacques Prévert, not to mention Georges Bataille (a friend of Beckett as well). Lacan was the family physician of Pablo Picasso. As Lacan’s biographer Elizabeth Roudinesco reflects, the literary movement of Surrealism helped young Lacan to go beyond his psychiatric training and explore Freud’s discoveries (1997: 20). He also had an interesting relation with Oulipo. As Jacques Roubaud has said in his small laconic book on Lacan, the psychoanalyst was curious about the mathematical experiments of this literary group and even called Roubaud for a meeting that never took place in the end.4 Lacan referred to Raymond Queneau in his annual seminars in Paris, and Queneau attended some of Lacan’s seminars too. The two had a long association as co-followers of Alexandre Kojève’s instructive Hegel seminars in Paris from 1933 to 1939. Beckett seems to have been familiar with Queneau, if not as a fellow French writer, then at least through his friend George Pelorson who worked with the Oulipo founder (Knowlson 1996: 267). Queneau was famous for his interest in mathematics and numerology. In The Foundations of Literature (1976), he attempted to produce a numerical axiom of words and sentences, gesturing towards a mathematization of literary language. Lacan shared this numerological interest in his 1945 essay on the subject which opens with a reference to a mathematical problem, evoked by Queneau.5 As early as 1945, in the numerology essay, Lacan seems well aware of a logic that emerges from numerical problems, but logic at this stage is still aimed at solving problems and mastering the randomness of chance with rules. We see a similar inclination in the ‘Presentation of the Suite’ that follows the 1956 text of ‘The Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’ in Ecrits (1966). In the ‘Introduction’ to this ‘Presentation’ as well as the ‘Parenthesis within parenthesis’, added in 1966, there is a rigorous engagement with a logic that underwrites chance.6 The apparent randomness in the results of coin tossing is interrogated by way of mathematical notations (2006: 35). Discussing how Freudian ‘repetition automatism’ works in the ‘signifying

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chain’ of language, Lacan points towards the unconscious subject’s entrance in a logical sequence of numbers, even when tossed coins seem to produce random results. Although the text deals with the combinatorial possibilities of this retroactive logic that emerges from seeming randomness, we already note a shift away from problem solution. Here logic sets up a problem instead of solving it. In the middle of these mathematical niceties, let us not forget that both Lacanian texts on numerical logic are embedded in a literary context. The first opens with Queneau, while the second is advanced as a postface to the reading of Poe’s short story. The literary purchase on mathematical and logical structures is historically inalienable from Lacan’s use of mathematical logic in both these texts. As the connections explored above indicate, Lacan’s foundation as a psychoanalytic thinker has a strong historical accord with Modernist literature through Surrealism and Oulipo. Thomas Brockelman places Lacan within the complex historical sequence of avant-garde literary Modernism for his rejection of realistic representation (1996: 209). The logical and the mathematical terrain played a significant role in the development of Lacan’s mature thought where they became portals to what he called the ‘Real.’ For Lacan, reality, as we consciously understand it, is a melange of image and word or the Imaginary and the Symbolic orders, respectively. What this reality excludes is the Real, as an immanent beyond of language. The Real is the unspeakable, the unknowable, the unthinkable and the impossible vis-àvis language. While Lacan, from his first and second seminars (1953–55), had already had a notion of the Real, it exploded in his later teachings alongside the mathematical turn. This is the precise valence in which the present book makes use of the Lacanian Real, i.e. as a logical and mathematical writing or formalization that punctures itself by reaching its own impasse. The questions of writing and formalization bring us back to the literary context, especially in its Modernist predilection. It is important to note here that Lacan is not a system builder but a psychoanalytic experimentalist whose thinking operates through paradigmatic slices from one end of his clinical practice to another. There are tensions between the different slices of the same notion that he discusses in different contexts, in multiple seminars. In this book, I will restrict myself to particular iterations of some of these psychoanalytic notions that are deliberately not hypostatized into philosophical concepts. Lacan’s work is an exercise in infinite problematization rather than a managerial discourse of problem solutions. I see the explosion of the Real in Lacan’s later teachings as a culmination of his symptomatic propensity to problematize systemic thinking. The Real is precisely the phenomenon which punctures systemicity. Lacan clarifies in Seminar XXIII that the Real is the domain of ‘a-thinking’ (appensée) where the indefinite article, ‘a’, connotes thinking in the singular, shorn of connections that could structure thought into a system (2016: 124).7 In a different sense, the ‘a’ as an antonymous prefix to

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‘thinking’ (like ‘amoral’ or ‘alogical’) suggests the passage of thought into the unthinkable. The Real is thus an anti-systemic way of thinking through singularities that ultimately approaches the radical limits of what can be thought. Being faithful to this spirit of the Real, I will try and problematize the irreducible singularity as well as the impossibility of thinking that both Lacan and Beckett make us sensitive to. Instead of excavating ‘all’ the different evocations of Lacanian notions – the assumption of wholeness itself being a tendency towards systemicity – I will stick to singular iterations that ultimately do justice to the spirit of the Real as an impasse. As we shall see, Beckett’s works are full of impasses and the Lacanian Real will become an important tool, certainly not to explain away the impasse but to situate it as the collapsing point of a textual system of logical operations. I will concentrate on later Lacan who approaches the ‘impossible’ inscription of the Real through mathematical discourse as mathematics can perform a silent writing which is material, self-same and only minimally meaningful. The Real is a matter of writing, but this writing can never be complete. The Real can only be written mathematically and logically by way of antinomy, negation and aporia. It will be written by not being written. It can be written only when we acknowledge the fact that it can never be written. The impossible Real is a component, Lacan adds to Aristotelian modal logic. The Real is impossible because it is not related to anything else. Its logic is all about non-relation. The Real interrupts the Symbolic and Imaginary logic of relationality in which words and images associate with one another to produce sense. In different chapters of this book, I will explore different implications of this logico-mathematical Real in fields, ranging from corporeality and locomotion to love and sexuality. In this book, I will also use the Real as a minimalist mathematical constellation of the unconscious. This is in tune with later Lacan, for whom the unconscious is not linguistic or Symbolic but Real. The Real in this sense is a fragmentary logico-mathematical inscription of the unconscious itself. The Real will be important in my argument as the minimal structure of the unconscious subject when its Imaginary and Symbolic layers are stripped off. When the failure of language gets inscribed on the subject’s body, we stare at the minimal edifice of the broken subject as the Real. We will see how the body that is never at home with speech and language resonates with this Real. The Real concerns a shift from the semantics of the signifier to the bare material presence of the mathematical letter, i.e. number. Beckett does not simply engage with literal numbers, but we shall see how Beckett’s literature performs this mathematization of the literary text by eclipsing linguistic sense with the corporeal presence of words. This manoeuvre frames the Real as the stalemate of the mathematical logic that governs Beckett’s own textual system. Later Lacan attempted a partial writing of the Real; he had theorized from the beginning of his teachings as the unspeakable and the uninscribable through

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various mathematical forms. From Seminars IX and X onwards (1961–1963), Lacan evoked forms of surface geometry (Mobius strip and Klein Bottle) that suggested the homology of inside and outside in a flattening out of Freudian depth psychology. Seminar XII (1964–1965) introduced crucial numerical problems, and from Seminar XIX (1971–1972) up to Seminar XXVI (1978– 1979), Lacan became obsessed with the topological structure of Borromean chains and their geometric logic to formalize the aporias of the Real through mathematical form. We will see in the following chapters how these various mathematico-logical incarnations problematize the Real, but for now, let me show how this mathematical project of the Lacanian Real has its historical and cultural roots in Modernist literature and aesthetics. As we have seen above, Lacan’s early thoughts on mathematics and logic are permeated with literary references, contexts and commentaries, but even if we speak ideationally, Modernist literature in its epistemological concern has always been fascinated by the unknowable. What Brian McHale calls ‘metalingual skepticism’ (1987: 8) is intrinsic to literary Modernism’s mistrust of language as a tool to represent reality. Just as for Lacan, there is no ‘metalanguage’ to examine language with and from, which makes language faulty (2006: 688), similarly Modernist aesthetic is all about challenging the representational limits of language. The partial writing of the Real appeals to the Modernist idea of the fragmented and non-linear textual experiment. While Saussure’s theory of the arbitrary linguistic sign speaks to Modernist linguistic and epistemological doubt, a literary case in point would be Joyce and Beckett’s joint fondness for the Austro-Hungarian thinker, Fritz Mauthner who wrote Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Contributions to a Critique of Language) in 1901–1902. This is where the Lacanian Real reveals its Modernist literary impulse as a critique of realistic representation with an equally significant Modernist experimental interest in esoteric mathematical forms. Maud Ellmann in her masterful book, The Nets of Modernism (2010), takes a cue from Joyce’s Stephen who had considered ‘language’ as one of the nets that he needed to fly through in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Ellmann diversely develops the image of the ‘milk of language souring into poison’ (29), and one of her most telling remarks on this Modernist theme speaks to Saussurean linguistics: ‘a malady of language that petrifies the word and dissolves its connection to its referent’ (107). As we shall see in our readings, Lacan has a lot to say about Saussurean linguistics and insists that Freud be read along with Saussure’s nuances on the contextual instability and shiftiness of language as a system of communication. We will also see how Lacan mathematizes Saussure’s linguistic thesis and eventually goes beyond it in his pursuit of the impossible in the aporetic formalization of the Real. Throughout this section, I have argued for a historical and ideational interpenetration of Modernist literature and Lacanian psychoanalysis in terms of both the employment of mathematical discourse and the

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figuration of linguistic suspicion in the form of the Real. To end with yet another striation of Modernism and mathematics, let me recall how Jeremy Gray in Plato’s Ghost (2008) has advanced a historical argument about a ‘modernist transformation of mathematics’ that he prefers to call ‘mathematical modernism.’ Gray’s thesis not only brings out a Modernist sequence in the history of twentieth-century mathematics with its parallels in other fields like literature but it also makes a provocative connection between this ‘mathematical modernism’ and the Platonism of forms by suggesting that a mathematical Platonism arose from the triumphs of ‘mathematical modernism’ (2008: 443). This connection reflects back upon the Modernist project of mathematical formalization of which we see two striated sequences in Lacanian psychoanalysis and in Beckett’s late Modernist literary aesthetic. Moreover, as we shall see in our subsequent investigations, the thinkers and systems, Gray locates on the side of ‘mathematical modernism’; e.g. Frege’s theory of numbers and Cantor’s theory of sets are often integral to Lacan’s evocation of mathematical discourse. Lacan’s turn to Bourbakian set theory in Seminars XIX and XX (1971–1973) in his topological reflection on linguistic structure can be considered a psychoanalytic sequence of ‘mathematical modernism.’ It also speaks to the Oulipian interest in Bourbakian structures which forms the backbone of Jacques Roubaud’s 1977 essay ‘Mathematics in the method of Raymond Queneau.’ A historical intrication of mathematical discourse, aesthetic Modernism and psychoanalysis is at work here. For Gray, ‘mathematical modernism’ accomplishes the central task of bringing mathematics closer to physics (456), which would have a strong materialist resonance in endearing mathematical letter to physical matter. As seen above and will be elaborated in the following chapters, both Beckett and Lacan share a materialist propensity for the corporeal presence of letters in mathematical discourse. This would make them interesting case studies for ‘mathematical modernism’ if we were to shift the field, as Gray himself permits. He highlights the ‘unstable’ nature of ‘mathematical modernism’ and maintains that it eventually became ‘fractured beyond repair’ (458). Gray describes the openness of this historical sequence as follows: Part of the force of the weird and the wonderful in mathematics is that it might be true (in some sense). Mathematical modernism respects the connection even as it finds it hard to articulate. One way it does this is by offering a view of mathematics as rule governed but open to interpretation. (32) While mathematical Modernism’s openness to interpretation makes it a corollary to literary Modernism’s insistence on the polysemy of the text, the governance of rules reminds us of Oulipo as a historical bridge between Lacan and Beckett.

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Baylee Brits has connected the Beckettian notion of ‘unword’ that is all about creating holes into language with the question of mathematics in his work: Beckett’s generation of the ‘unword’ was often achieved most powerfully through recourse to the sign that undoes signification: the number. One of the most important means by which Beckett achieves this is through importing mathematical form into fiction, or quite literally mapping prose form onto mathematical sign. (2017: 124) While I am in obvious agreement with Brits on Beckett’s importing of mathematical forms into literature to subvert linguistic signification, my interest lies elsewhere, namely in psychoanalysis as a bridge of Real inscription between mathematics and literature. Psychoanalysis is entirely missing in Brits’s Cantorian work on the interface of mathematical and literary ‘transfinites’, and this absence might explain her silence on the relation between mathematical form and human subjective affect. It is the subjective layering of these forms where Lacanian psychoanalysis becomes a useful framework to bring mathematics and literature together.

How it is with Lacan and psychoanalysis in Beckett studies This book takes off from recent interventions into Beckett via Lacan and the general history of psychoanalytic criticism in Beckett Studies. The work of Lacanian philosophers like Badiou and Žižek is important. I will use Badiou’s Lacanian meditations on Beckett, but unlike him, I pursue psychoanalytic implications of the Real in Beckett’s mathematical forms. The Real writings in the margins of the Beckettian text happen, and their evental dimension produces a hole in meaning to evoke the Lacanian inscription as ‘act.’8 I will return to this dimension of speech act or the Lacanian saying (dire) and its encounter with the Real, but at the moment let me turn to Slavoj Žižek’s 2009 essay, ‘Beckett with Lacan.’ Dwelling on Beckett’s late stage play, Not I, Žižek draws attention to the dialectic of drives and their repetition with resonances of the Real and highlights the importance of the ‘cut’ in Beckettian subject. I will engage with this ‘signifying cut’ of language and show how it constitutes the Real in Beckett’s mathematical writing of the symptom. Suzanne Dow’s piece ‘Lacan with Beckett’ takes up the question from Žižek’s omission of Beckett as one of Lacan’s ‘silent partners’ in the eponymous book (2006) and analyses the symptomatic possibilities of this partnership, but without close readings. Rodney Sharkey addresses the issue from a psycho-biographic perspective in ‘Beckett after Joyce: Sinthome as

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Symptom’ and ‘“Local” Anaesthetic for a “Public Birth”: Beckett, Parturition and the Porter Period.’ This book distances itself from psycho-biographic readings of literature as well as psychodynamic interventions that illumine the creative process through psychoanalysis.9 Lacanian literary criticism shifts the emphasis from the Oedipal allegory of the text as a mimesis of the author’s life to the impersonal textual moorings where writing as an operation connects psychoanalysis with literature as a shared frontier. This littoral of writing both couples and uncouples psychoanalysis and literature in a non-relational relation. I am interested in what remains of the minimal knotting of the Real unconscious inscription in Beckett’s textual impasses. This shifts the emphasis from the authorial literary process to the post-authorial domain of the text as product. My claims about Beckett will maintain this distinction between the author-subject and the figuration of the unconscious subject(s) in the text. Instead of aiming at the author-subject as producer, I will explore the textual production of the divided subject(s) of language. At other times, we will see how the text itself is situated at the level of Real subjectivity. The textual unconscious we would aim here is a repository of Real complexities in knowledge and knowing. We would see how the text in some of our readings becomes reservoir of knowledge that no one knows. The Real unconscious in its textual incarnation decouples knowledge from subject. Thomas Cousineau’s essay, ‘Descartes, Lacan and Murphy’ (1984), is perhaps the first to map the Lacanian triad of the Real-Symbolic-Imaginary onto the famous ‘zones’ of Murphy’s mind. Cousineau highlights Beckett’s interest in the character’s ‘mind.’ I will interrogate the notion of the ‘mind’ with the Lacanian model of the Borromean knot as a subjective logic of Beckett’s textual unconscious that breaks down into the Real speaking-being or the Lacanian parlêtre (‘parle’ and ‘etre’ make up the speaking-being, but the Lacanian letter also suggests ‘para-being’ and a being, crystallized by the mathematical letter). Instead of bolstering ‘the mind’, I will show how Beckett’s silent partnership with Lacan is premised on an undercutting of this imaginary mind, as the Real inscription of the unconscious happens by subverting both the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Unlike a Cartesian mindbody dialogue, this investigation will point to a cut between the body and Beckettian ‘mindlessness.’ Real writing on the corpo-real surface of the body performs this furrowing. Llewellyn Brown in his essays on Happy Days and The Unnamable interprets the Beckettian voice as a Lacanian drive-object. His reading of cliché as Real in Happy Days evokes the Lacanian logic of ‘foreclosure’ of the Symbolic, pushing the argument towards schizophrenia. Brown notes that the fundamental ‘weakness’ of Beckett’s Lacanian readings has been ‘neglecting […] the dimension of the Real’ where signification is foreclosed in Beckett (2011: 173). I will return to this subject but without any diagnostic emphasis on psychosis as a clinical structure. Arthur Rose in

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his reading of The Unnamable mentions the famous case of Schreber and the Lacanian logic of psychotic foreclosure as he activates the Real qua diagnostic structure. Instead of going into the neurosis-psychosis divide, I will interpret the Real not as absolute foreclosure of meaning in Beckett but as semantic minimization effected through mathematization of the signifier into the letter. The veritably impossible ‘self-destruction of the subject’ (Rose 2014: 221) is important in Beckett’s unknotting of the Symbolic subject in the Real parlêtre where it is only a speck, a scrap, a letter and a litter. Brown’s recent book, Beckett, Lacan and the Voice (2016), is thus far the only sustained Lacanian reading of Beckett, which focuses on the voice. I share Brown’s accent on the Real. But while he studies the function of the Beckettian voice alongside the Lacanian invocatory object in Beckett’s theatre, the hinge of my argument is the Lacanian ‘matheme’ or the material self-sameness of the letter as the Real corporeality of the word in Beckett’s late prose. Brown does not touch later Lacan’s mathematized logic of the Borromean knot as a Real structure. I will inform the Beckettian operations of writing with Borromean logic and Lacan’s notion of the fragmented Real body with Beckett’s nuance that motility produces a schismatic corporeal writing in the field of love and sexuality. As Angela Moorjani remarks, Beckett Studies has had its share of resistance to psychoanalytic readings as ‘applied’ and ‘reductive’ (2004: 172). Most of the psychoanalytic readings have been interested in Beckett’s conscious use of psychoanalytic materials or attempted to draw an analogy between the clinical situation and Beckett’s theatrical situations. To give only one example, writing about the ‘psychoanalytic refuse’ in How It Is, Anthony Cordingley reflects: ‘Rather than reading for unconscious psychoanalytic processes in the novel, the present aim is to interpret the psychoanalytic material Beckett deliberately wove into Comment c’est/How It Is’ (2007: 114).10 Instead of tapping into intertextual, allegorizing and psycho-biographic propensities of psychoanalytic literary criticism, which operate on the level of conscious influence,11 I would use psychoanalysis to open up unconscious aspects of Beckett’s writing which otherwise remain enigmatic. I want to relocate the psychoanalytic question from cultural context and ambient intertextuality to textual interpretation. Uncoupling Lacan from ‘poststructuralist psychoanalysis’12 problematizes the misnomer ‘linguistic turn.’ If Lacanian psychoanalysis sticks to the function of speech in the field of language, it is in order to operate on the Real and go beyond the reduction of thought to language. Lacan formulates this Real as a strictly immanent topological point, internally excluded from language. In How It Is, Company, Worstward Ho etc., I hope to reconstruct Beckettian constructions, already there in his textual margins. The literary text is located in an irreducible interval between the positions of the analysand and the analyst. If it speaks from the couch as an analysand, it is also in the analyst’s position insofar as the end of Lacanian analysis

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consists of a ‘pass’ from the former to the latter. The text passes from being an analysand to becoming an analyst (see Felman 1977: 7). It performs this passage by avowing a fantasy that falls from the subject and a subject who falls from this anchoring fantasy into a Real ‘disbeing’ (désêtre) of unconscious parlêtre.13 The text crystallizes this symptomatic ‘construction’ as a modified final fantasy. In our readings, we will come across such fantasies at the limit point of the textual trajectory. Beckettian constructions are acts of writing that foreground the Real unconscious as an irreducible knot for the speaking-being who continues to have a discordant relation between the speech act and the body. According to Freud, the analyst often makes an intervention that is stronger than ‘interpretation.’ He calls it ‘construction.’ Constructions in Freudian psychoanalysis are fundamentally ‘incomplete’ as they go beyond particular ‘interpretations’ of analysand’s speech and aim at the analysand’s generic subjectivity. While they may or may not be ‘correct’, they orient the analysand on the path of reflexive constructions or counter-constructions (Freud 1964a: 263–266). For Lacan, who maintains that all analysis aims at training analysis or the production of an analyst in the analysand’s position, constructions happen between the analyst and the analysand and both engage in this act.14 Freud and Lacan would agree that when the repressed material cannot be ‘recollected’, it can still be constructed. As Jacques-Alain Miller reflects, Lacanian constructions happen at the level of the ‘matheme’ and these mathematical constructions mark the subject’s repressed Real (2010– 2011: 12). The construction of the signifier, mathematized into the letter, installs the Real that is otherwise screened over by Symbolic and Imaginary fantasies. As opposed to conscious fantasies, Lacan theorizes an overarching unconscious fantasm, which is traversed and modified through analysis. Only a construction can isolate the Real from this fantasm and reorganize the ‘fundamental fantasy’ on the basis of the Real. Lacan observes: ‘a certain order of construction can be required regarding what must be attained by way of what fundamentally screens the real in the unconscious fantasy’ (2006: 193). My readings will dwell on Beckett’s construction of the Real unconscious at the textual limit. These constructions realize the desire for to end yet again by articulating an endlessness of ending in the company of solitude. To invert an expression from Beckett’s letters, these endless endings and solitary companies are more oxy and less morons. The Beckettian construction of and on the Real, as we shall see, is his sinthomatic writing that says the primordially repressed without ever coming to signify it. These acts of writing stall linguistic sense with the strictly senseless materiality of the Real, mathematical letter. They punctuate fundamental textual fantasies of solitude or company and endless worsening by limiting the proliferation of ciphers with Real inscription. Through these Beckettian constructions, I will formulate a logic of writing which psychoanalysis and literature share. This

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is a literary logic not only because one of the discourses is literature. It is all the more literary as its psychoanalytic bearings lie in the literary within psychoanalysis. The Lacanian inroad into literature makes psychoanalytic literary criticism address, arguably for the first time, the logic of the literary text and its material status as a written entity. Lacan suggests in ‘Lituraterre’ that writing in its materiality is the common boundary, shared by psychoanalysis and literature. The psychoanalytic intervention engages with the textuality of the literary text where it produces a writing (écrit) that bores holes in the Symbolic order to glimpse into the inexpressible ‘ill seen ill said’ of the Real. If there is writing in literature, there is writing in the analysand’s speech as well. It operates between the signifier and the signified to inscribe the Real unconscious. This intervention, far from straitjacketing Beckett with Lacan, seeks to open up little-understood aspects of Beckett’s oeuvre like his use of mathematical forms, mathesis, the function of writing in speech, the inscription of the moving body and, finally, his aesthetic contribution to the field of the sexual in love. It should already be amply clear that the Lacan I am constructing is a literary Lacan who is Beckettian as much as Beckett is Lacanian. Beckettian text resists any psychoanalytic ‘application’ by responding to Lacanian interventions. This response is particularly observable in the Beckettian emphasis on corporeal movement as ciphering which underwrites this entire book. Strictly speaking, this insight is absent in Lacan. But when Lacan is constructed from this Beckettian standpoint, it has a serious impact on both writers. In this reciprocal intrication of Beckett and Lacan, the critical strategy is comparative and not applied.

Literature and psychoanalysis: Each other’s Real In a landmark introductory essay in the 1977 volume of Yale French Studies, Shoshana Felman dismantles the hierarchy of psychoanalysis over literature and vice versa by formulating a discursive interfolding in which the literary is seen as endemic to psychoanalytic practice. Revisiting her own argument after four decades in 2017, Felman picks up on Lacan’s stress on the unconscious as an affair of reading (2017: iv) which immediately connects psychoanalysis with literature as a practice of reading. For her, psychoanalysis needs ‘something like poetic intuition’, and Lacan’s ‘poetic pedagogy’ responds to this literary requirement within psychoanalysis (2017: xiii). To go back to her 1977 formulation, she sees psychoanalysis as the unconscious of literature and the literary as the unconscious of psychoanalysis – what remains ‘unthought’ in psychoanalysis (1977: 10). To

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reformulate this in Lacanian terms, literature is the Real of psychoanalysis as much as psychoanalysis is the Real of literature. The two are both related and not related through the orthographic function that etches their common limit. It has been repeatedly pointed out via Freud that psychoanalysis is inextricable from storytelling, which gives it a literary basis (see Brooks 1992; Vine 2005). In a Lacanian formulation, Justin Clemens argues that ‘psychoanalysis is in love with literature’ but ‘literature isn’t in love with psychoanalysis’ (2013: 10). I will build on this transferential notion of love insofar as it looks forwards to a Real logic of sexual non-relation. In Seminar XX, Lacan enigmatically remarks, ‘love is the sign that one is changing discourses’ (16). Lacan’s four fundamental discourses are the master’s discourse, the university discourse, the hysteric’s discourse and the analyst’s discourse. These discourses, mathematized on Lacan’s blackboard with ‘little letters’ (a, $, S1, S2), revolve around a lack. Each quarter turn changes one discourse into another. Interestingly, Lacan does not accord literature the status of a discourse, in spite of giving it such importance throughout his corpus to the point of claiming that his Écrits is ‘literature.’15 I will replace the word ‘love’ in Lacan’s remark with ‘literature’: literature is the sign that one is changing discourses. I would argue that for Lacan, literature is not a discourse in itself, but a discursive turn.

FIGURE 1.1  The discourses in rotation (cf. Seminar XVII)

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The literary in its protean nature, nebulousness and indefinability is a sign of the Real that makes an inter-discursive turn possible. It can embody the hysteric, the university, the analyst and the master. Literature also turns towards love and illumines the amorous play around sexuality and its impasses, as we shall see in the final chapter. In Seminar XVIII, Lacan discusses literature turning towards ‘lituraterre’ (a neologistic letter rendered through Spoonerism) as the margin of psychoanalysis and literature. I will return to this turn in Chapter 4. There is a homologous turn in the text ‘l’étourdit’ (1972) where Lacan puns ‘etourdi’ (‘dazed’) with ‘le tour dit’ (‘the said turn’) as he talks about the Real dire (saying) which remains neglected in what is heard of the dit (said). Literature as a transformational threshold uses formalization to activate the Real of saying which otherwise remains repressed in the said. The literary turn formalizes this ‘half-saying’ which for Lacan is the way of speaking truth as truth can only be halfspoken. Psychoanalysis encounters the literary within itself around this notion of truth telling. As Lacan formulates, truth is structured like fiction, and this fictionality pushes it towards the literary through invention (2006: 625). The signifier, literally incarnated and littered into the letter, invents truth as a break in knowledge. As the schema of the analyst’s discourse suggests, S2 or knowledge is in the position of truth. In Seminar XXI, Lacan asserts that the unconscious ‘invents’, and it is only through the act of invention that a truth can be seized from the collapse of knowledge. In the dialectic of knowledge and truth, the literary act of invention is key for Lacan. Positing knowledge of truth is made impossible by the incursion of the unknowable Real, and discovery is not enough to posit this. Invention is necessary to show the Real hole in knowledge. As unconscious knowledge is knowledge without subject, to tell a truth about that knowledge or to reorganize that truth as knowledge, we must fictionalize or invent. During Seminar XXI, on 19 February 1974, Lacan declares that ‘there is nothing to discover in the Real since here there is a hole’ and there must

FIGURE 1.2  Positions in each discourse

FIGURE 1.3  Analyst’s discourse

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be ‘invention’ to ‘notice’ the hole as ‘the edge of the Real.’ This invention is creative as opposed to discovering something already there. Roberto Harari calls this the ‘creationist’ avatar of later Lacan, opposing the signifier with the letter (346). The signifier’s equivocity opens a literary polysemy within psychoanalysis, and the symptomatic letter, a written mathematical construction, marks an invention that radicalizes this opening. The letter’s inventiveness does not give free play to Imaginary meanings but fixes this equivocal play, not with one monolithic meaning but with a minimalist cut in meaning. What remains of meaning in the inventive literary letter is a material trace, closing in on its own materiality. In a 1974 interview, Lacan views psychoanalytic interpretation as literary invention: The subject is also provided with an interpretation, which at first sight seems to give meaning to what he himself says. In reality, the interpretation is rather subtler, tending to efface the meaning of the things from which the subject is suffering. The goal is to show him, by way of his own narrative, that the symptom […] has no relationship to anything, and lacks any kind of meaning. Even if it is apparently real, it does not exist. (2014: n.p.) Here Lacan defines interpretation as effacement. It consists in pointing to non-relations of meaning and not adding to surplus meaning. Insofar as psychoanalytic interpretation works on the Real symptom, it cuts away from its meaning and ‘constructs’ the sinthomatic letter in its mere materiality. The literary is knotted with psychoanalysis in this constructionist fixation of meaning, turning towards meaninglessness but never becoming totally meaningless. I will demonstrate this through Beckett’s turn towards the impossible ‘inanity’ of words. At the cusp of this aesthetic half-saying of truth as the true hole in Real knowledge, Lacanian literary shows its logical face as we formulate a literary logic in the letter. The business of truth telling that passes through the signifier’s equivoque to the letter’s mathematical materiality activates the poetic as the Real of psychoanalysis. In the preface to Seminar XI, written in 1976, Lacan announces that the unconscious is Real (1979: vii), and in the same preface, he designates the subject of this Real unconscious as an act of poetry: ‘I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject’ (viii). In Seminar XXIV, Lacan returns to the poetics of truth in psychoanalysis to give interpretation a literary and inventive status: ‘It is only poetry […] which permits interpretation’ (17.5.1977). He calls poetry a ‘hole-effect’ and identifies interpretation as ‘poetic writing.’ In Seminar XXV, on 20 December 1977, he distinguishes saying (dire) from speaking (parler) and names the analysand’s production, ‘poetry.’ Truth is produced as the

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analyst cuts into the analysand’s poem – a cut of saying into speech. This cut-interpretation is a writing that interrupts the Symbolic with Real saying. Psychoanalytic interpretation dialecticizes logic with poetry. In Seminar XXIV, on 19 April 1977, Lacan specifies analytic truth as ‘poetic’ and evokes his logical pursuit of truth. In the projective plane of the Real where parallel lines meet in infinity, we can glimpse a poetic logic of truth at work in psychoanalytic interpretation. This poetic logic privileges equivocation and fixes it with materiality through invention. This logic is on the side of the literary model of interpretation. It acknowledges its limit by preserving ambivalence and antinomy. Justin Clemens’s formula that psychoanalysis interrupts science with literature can be evoked here (6). Psychoanalytic practice offers an interpretive structure that counterposes the scientific with the literary and the logical with the poetic. As Lacan observes in ‘l’étourdit’, analytic interpretation is apophantic in targeting truth. Insofar as truth is a ‘half-saying’ in the Real, it is a literary turn. As the literary screw turns in the Real, psychoanalysis and literature invent a relation where there is non-relation. They turn towards, if not into, each other’s Real. Real is the irreducible third that makes this love letter between psychoanalysis and literature (im)possible. So far, we have seen how literature is the Real of psychoanalysis. To turn to the other side of my chiasmic axiom, let me point out how psychoanalysis is the Real of literature, not in terms of intertextuality but through an unconscious logic of encounter. Literature does not encounter psychoanalysis by conscious citations but through unconscious knotting around shared operations of writing and its limits, the function of the body, love and sexuality, and mathematical aspects of structure and counting. Psychoanalysis fixes literature as a transferential body of ‘subject-supposed to know.’ Psychoanalysis takes it for granted that literature knows more than what it thinks it knows. This supposed surplus knowledge is what psychoanalysis searches in literature, but paradoxically it finds the limiting letter in it. Instead of proliferating surplus signification, the mathematical integrity of the letter undercuts and stalls the signifier’s literary equivocation. Psychoanalysis thus isolates the Real from literature as an impasse of literary formalization. It seizes a writing that happens, at the level neither of the signifier nor the signified but between them. Psychoanalysis exposes the limits of literature as its own Real. The supposition of subjective knowledge with which it launches into literature breaks down as it encounters unconscious knowledge without subject in the literary text. In this encounter with the textual unconscious, psychoanalysis registers the points where transferential supposition of knowledge fails and the text comes up with knowledge that no one knows; sometimes even the text does not know. It only knows how to formalize this break in knowledge as a dead end of truth.

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Psychoanalysis and literature in the knot of writing Lacanian writing on the borderline of psychoanalysis and literature shows the ‘littoral’ condition of the letter as it punches holes into knowledge. This act inscribes the Real unconscious, and the Beckettian text with its logical impasses incarnates this inscription. This textual unconscious, engaging with the problematic writing of the Real, is liminal and terminal. Not all of the literary text is this writing; it occurs where the text subtracts from knowledge and makes its own logic impossible at its final frontier, combining the impossibility of writing with the necessity of writing. To evoke Beckett, it combines the ‘I can’t go on’ with the ‘I’ll go on.’ In the Lacanian Real, there is at once a stoppage and an endless continuation of writing. The textual limen combines this finite punctuation of writing with its infinite iterability. In this antinomy lies the impossibility of the Real. For Lacan, writing is not reducible to language but it is an effect of language: There can be no logic except on the basis of writing, insofar as writing is not language. […] if language can be investigated through writing, it’s precisely insofar as writing is not language, but rather that it is only constructed or fabricated on the basis of its reference to language. (Seminar XVIII: 65; emphasis mine) Insofar as modal logic passes into what Lacan calls the ‘science of the Real’ in Seminar XXI, mathematical formalization becomes the privileged domain and writing is seen as a mathematical ‘construction’ on language. When Lacan adds the ‘impossible’ to the Aristotelian triad of the ‘necessary’, the ‘possible’ and the ‘contingent’, it incorporates contradiction into logic and makes logic pass into the Real. I will return to this Real logic with Lacan’s geometric writing of the Borromean knot. Let us remember here that in the Lacanian definition the Real is not only that which resists linguistic symbolization but also ‘an impasse of formalization’ (1998: 93). When mathematical formalization reaches its aporia, ‘mathemes’ incarnate the Real unconscious in the letter. As Lacan says in Écrits and reiterates in Seminar XX, this writing happens at the level of the bar of repression between the signifier and the signified. This bar, incarnated in the algorithm ‘S/s’ (2006: 414), is present only in mathematized writing. Suspended between the signifier and the signified as a Real third, the bar of writing resists signification (415). Real writing is not restricted to linguistic inscription. There is writing in speech. In ‘Lituraterre’, the marks made by streams on the surface of the Siberian riverbeds produce a writing that inspires Lacan. In Seminar IX, he

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traces writing back to the story of the primitive hunter who makes marks on his bone to count the number of hunted animals though he does not know counting. This coalescing of writing with counting draws attention to the materiality of numbers and the domain of arithmetic. For Lacan, unconscious writing is fundamentally invested in counting without end. In Seminar XXV, he remarks, ‘the unconscious […] does not prevent counting […] (L’inconscient, […] ça n’empêche pas de compter)’ (10.01.1978). Writing turns towards the Real while language is Symbolic, and later Lacan moves away from the earlier linguistic model of the unconscious to a Real unconscious. This Real unconscious is incarnated, not in the signifier but in the letter; not in language but in writing; not in Imaginary meanings but in the Real that abbreviates meaning. In ‘Lituraterre’, Lacan defines writing as follows: It is from the same effect that writing is in the real the furrowing of the signified, which has more of the semblant insofar as it makes the signifier. Writing does not trace (décalque) the signifier, but its effects of language (langue), what is forged by whoever speaks it. It only climbs back in taking a name there, as happens in those effects among things that the signifying battery names (dénomme) to have them numbered (dénombrées). (6) Lacan calls writing ‘a furrowing of the signified’ in the Real. Here the ‘signified’ refers to Freudian das Ding or ‘the thing’ that gets murdered by the signifier as language comes into being. This passage also clarifies how writing traces the effects of language in speech and emphasizes the effects produced by functions of naming and numbering in the speaker’s signifying system. Naming introduces the creative and neologistic dimension in language insofar as the name is not so much a signifier, as it is an irreducible and untranslatable mark of the Real in the Symbolic. We will soon see how names function in How It Is. Numbering on the other hand activates the mathematical domain of mark-making and counting. Materiality of numbers as mathematical letters is drawn from the Real. Writing furrows into the Real and hollows it out. Lacan describes the hole that opens up through writing as ‘a bucket always ready to receive jouissance’ (8). This jouissance is an affective product of writing. Combining pain with pleasure, it inhabits the material body of language where its epistemic edifice is undone and the bare being of language as lalangue is exposed. Let us remember Lacan’s definition of language as ‘knowledge’s hare-brained lucubration’ (1998: 139) on lalangue. It implies that once this epistemic fabric is unmoored from language the leftover of lalangue presents itself as an affective hole of jouissance in sense. The Real unconscious as this minimal writing does not make sense but takes away from sense. In the shift from signifier to letter, the latter must be understood as that which carries the signifier in its body.

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Lacan draws on the mathematical letter as ‘the essentially localized structure of the signifier’ (2006: 418). The letter isolates the mathematical minimum from the signifier in writing and interrupts the sense of the signifier by its materialism or moterialism (mot or French for ‘word’, added to materialism). The letter makes the body of the signifier write against the sense. Beckett’s antinomic palindrome sequence from ‘On’ to ‘No’ is a Lacanian écrit with an operation on the letter. It produces a Real inscription that both stops (no) and does not stop (on).

Writing the mind: Is the Lacanian unconscious mental? For later Lacan, the unconscious is not mental but Real, and the Real inscription of the unconscious checks Imaginary excesses of the mental. In Seminar XXII, Lacan talks about the mental intractability of the Borromean knot as a Real writing. This intractability results from the difficulty of imagining the knot or having a mental image of it. The Borromean knot embodies the Real as a writing of Real-Symbolic-Imaginary orders. The regular link among three rings where the first links with the second and the second with the third is easy to imagine, but it is tortuous to picture a knot of three rings where not a single ring goes into the others and the knotting happens through a twist around the central hole. In the Borromean knot or Brunnian link, there is no one-to-one knotting. The three rings lie beside or on top of one another. What creates the link is the third ring which twists and knots up the other two, not by entering into the rings but into their shared hole. This knotting is impossible to imagine in the form of a flattenedout image. The moment one reduces the Borromean knot to the Imaginary, it dissolves. As Lacan found out in his seminars, the twist that enables the third ring to go into the hole, shared by the other two, is impossible to draw on the blackboard. The twist around the hole that founds the Borromean knot is impossible to visualize as a mental picture. Lacan thus states that the knot resists imaginary grafting which would have ‘mentalised’ it (14.1.1975). In Seminar XXII, he identifies the mental with the Imaginary: ‘the mental of man, namely, the Imaginary’ (11.3.1975) and again ‘the mental is Imaginary’ (18.3.1975). If mind is the order of the image, the unconscious only partakes of this mental without being reducible to it. The Real unconscious forces the mental with mathematical writing. As Lacan ironically says, ‘the most mental, the mental par excellence, the high point of the mental, namely, what can be counted: what can be counted is arithmetic’ (10.5.1977). Unconscious counting isolates the Real from the mental and inscribes the Real unconscious. Playing on homophony, in Seminar XXIV, Lacan

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FIGURE 1.4  Regular chain

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FIGURE 1.5  Borromean chain

translates Unbewusst, Freud’s German word for unconscious, as une-bévue in French. The pun produces a letter, tuned towards the Real as a result of forcing the Symbolic. Lacan states that the Freudian unconscious is mental only insofar as it is a lucubration on mental debilities like slips, bungled action and so on. For Lacan, the mental unconscious is nothing but a blunder because the mental, as the letter, une-bévue shows, is always already filtered through and configured by the Real unconscious as writing. According to Lacan, the weakness of the mental stems from the weakness of the Imaginary (10.5.1977) and the Freudian mental unconscious is weak. What invigorates this weak unconscious is not just the introduction of the Symbolic but the intrication of the Real. Lacan thus differentiates his notion of the unconscious from Freud’s by insisting that ‘the mental is woven of words’ which imbricates the Imaginary with the Symbolic. For him, the mental is ‘written with signs’ that embody ‘the agency of the letter’ in the ‘congruence of the sign to the Real’ (10.5.1977). Throughout this book, I am concerned with Real acts of writing at the textual margin that reveal psychoanalysis as the Real of literature, and literature breaks into this composition as the Real of psychoanalysis. In the next chapter, I would read How It Is where the text unfolds the subjective dialectic between the one and the multiple and finally fixes it with a Real antinomy. Lacan’s Borromean logic of the Real will be my mathematical support for Beckett’s writing of the subject as a discordant parlêtre who cuts into the non-knowledge of truth by being both alone and together. In How It Is, we will encounter Real writing through Borromean logic that produces knowledge without subject. This writing makes the signifier’s body write against its sense. In the problematic margin of the Beckettian text, this written construction of the sinthome produces a Real as endless ending or what Beckett in the brief prose text ‘Ceiling’ (1981) calls ‘endless ending breath’ (2009a: 130). In Chapter 3, I pose the writing of the Real unconscious from perspectives of embodiment and numbering in Company. This reading will approach

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the corpo-real from Beckett’s stress on the moving body as cipher where the literary informs psychoanalysis with what the latter cannot think. The chapter will problematize the textual unconscious as a minimal writing that subverts the signifier with the mathematical affect of jouissance in the letter. I will show how the Beckettian text continues to end endlessly through the orthographic construction of an inventive symptom as sinthome that makes solitude coexist with company. We will see how this marginal writing of the Real bores holes in knowledge and the text encounters its Real in a terminal antinomy. Beckettian writing inscribes its Real symptomatic fantasy at the level of textual structure in the diacritical marks of punctuation and the material composition of the text in the archive. The affective dialectic of embodied counting will situate the question of Real vis-à-vis number. In Chapter 4, I focus on Beckett’s worsening of language into lalangue as he uncouples knowledge from language. In a metaphor of worsening, shared with Lacan’s Seminar XIX: Or Worse …, the Beckettian text mathematizes language through neologisms and evacuates Symbolic sense into Real material marks. These marks speak to Lacan’s tracing of writing’s history to the primitive hunter’s mark-making that conflates words with numbers. Worstward Ho is literature, turning towards the impossible Real of ‘lituraterre.’ It formalizes the Real impasse in a sinthomatic construction that freezes the textual terminus as it falls into an endlessness of ending. Hugh Culik reflects that ‘invoking the notion of a limit as it is understood in mathematics, provides an instance of a larger structural pattern of reference in Beckett’s work: a hypericonic structure that bespeaks the limit of language as a complex and paradoxical opportunity’ (2008: 129). I agree with Culik on Beckettian mathematics as a performance of linguistic limit. Beckett engages with mathematics in an operational way, and his texts are axiomatic in their mathematical dimension. In this chapter, we broach the crucial question whether the Modernist literary text’s appeal to mathematical discourse for its own autonomy succeeds or not. This question is profoundly connected with the status of literary discourse vis-à-vis its semblance with reality and association with the Real. After moving chronologically from How It Is to Company and then to Worstward Ho, in Chapter 5, I complicate this Beckettian chronology by taking up a range of short texts from ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’, All Strange Away, ‘Enough’, turning to Malone Dies and finally returning to How It Is. Not only is the break in chronology logical, but it also underscores the historical consistency of Beckett’s mathematical and logical interest, this time, in the amorous domain. Here I tackle the question of sexual Real where sexual meaning encounters its Real limit in a logic of ‘sexual nonrelation.’ Instead of ‘applying’ this Lacanian insight on the Beckettian text, I create a dialogue between Beckett’s own logic of exclusion and non-relation in portrayal of sexuality in love in terms of the ‘pseudo-couple’ and what later Lacan considers the fundamental truth of psychoanalysis, i.e. Real

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sexuality as an absence of relation. The sexual Real of absent relationality is a ‘half-said’ truth, which resonates with Beckett’s dilemma of expressing without anything to express. In Lacanian terms, the sexual Real cannot be written, but its uninscribability must be inscribed via negativa. Beckett’s own antinomic emphasis in this amorous game opens up another order of ‘unthought’ for psychoanalysis by forcing it to think about the corpo-real nature of sexuality in love.

Notes 1

For example, see Christina Walter’s book Optical Impersonality: Science, Images and Literary Modernism (2014).

2

See Coetzee’s essay ‘“Lessness”: An Exercise in Decomposition.’

3

See Roubaud’s ‘Mathematics in the method of Raymond Queneau’ and Calvino’s ‘Prose and Anticombinatorics.’ Also see Claude Berge’s ‘For a Potential Analysis of Combinatory Literature.’

4

See Jacques Roubaud’s book Ma vie avec le docteur Lacan (2004).

5

See Lacan’s article ‘Le nombre treize et la forme logique de la suspicion’ in Autres écrits (2001).

6

This would remind us of the ‘anti-chance’ position of Oulipo. See section 21 of Jacques Roubaud’s article ‘Mathematics in the method of Raymond Queneau.’

7

Adrian Price translates ‘appensé’ as ‘appondering’ in the official English translation of Seminar XXIII but I would prefer ‘a-thinking’ as a translation.

8

See Lacan’s ‘Seminar XV: The Psychoanalytic Act.’

9

See Lois Oppenheim’s Psychoanalysis and the Artistic Endeavour (2015) and Imagination from Fantasy to Delusion (2013).

10 See J.D. O’Hara’s Samuel Beckett’s Hidden Drives (1997) and Phil Baker’s Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis (1997). O’Hara shows how Beckett ‘scaffolds’ his work by using Freudian and Jungian depth psychology as a reference, and Baker considers Beckett’s use of psychoanalysis as a referential ‘mythology.’ Also see Didier Anzieu’s Beckett et la psychanalyste (1992), which offers a psycho-biographic reading of his works as analytic analogues that function like self-therapy. Steve Barfield and Philip Tew draw a situational analogy between Three Dialogues and analytic sessions in ‘Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Parody: Exceedingly Beckett’ (1994). 11 For psycho-biographic readings of Beckett, see John Keller’s Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of Love (2002) and Rina Kim’s Women and Ireland as Beckett’s Lost Others (2010). 12 Scholarship on Beckett and post-structuralism (Richard Begam, Carla Locatelli, Daniel Katz etc.) takes Lacan into account insofar as he gives Freudian psychoanalysis a linguistic turn. Stephen Barker’s essay, ‘Recovering Néant: Language and the Unconscious in Beckett’ (1991) is a classic example.

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Catharina Wulf’s book, The Imperative of Narration: Beckett, Bernard, Schopenhauer, Lacan (1996), considers Lacanian desire (restricted to the early teachings) in terms of Beckett’s narratological concern. David Watson’s book, Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (1991), makes a similar use of Lacan in arguing for a Beckettian desire that paradoxically sustains the subject in language by mobilizing a desire for silence (44). Anna McMullan’s book, Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama (1993), approaches Lacan from the ego-self divide and theatrical mimesis. Also see Olga Cameron’s piece, ‘Madness or Mimesis: Narrative impasse in the novels of Samuel Beckett.’ 13 See Lacan’s ‘Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School’ for a fuller elaboration of the ‘pass’ and ‘subjective separation’ at the level of the Real from the fundamental fantasy that had anchored subjectivity up to that point. The end of analysis isolates the Real screened over by the fantasy, and the subject encounters his or her status as a ‘litter’ in this Real. This does not mean that the fantasy is destroyed. The separation indicates that it is modified through traversal. 14 In ‘Proposition of 9 October 1967’, Lacan says, ‘The end of a psychoanalysis, superfluously said to be training (didactique) is the effective passage from psychoanalysand to psychoanalyst’ (1995: 7). For Miller’s elaboration on the ‘pass’ as Lacan’s resolution of the potentially infinite ‘impasse’ of Freudian psychoanalysis, see ‘Another Lacan’ in The Symptom 10 (2009). 15 When asked about the importance of literature in his writings on 24 November 1975 at Yale University, Lacan said: ‘There is an inflection of literature. […] my Ecrits are a literature […] I do not imagine myself to do science when I do literature. Nevertheless it is literature since it is written and it sells; and it is literature because it has some effects, and some effects on literature’ (qtd in Rabaté 2001: 165).

2 One … All … Alone: Borromean Logic of Solitude and Company in How It Is

‘When one is alone one is all alone.’ — Beckett (‘Rough for Radio I’ (2003: 268))

Alone-together: Solitude and company Beckett’s texts are often engaged in an interrogation of human solitude which results in the declaration of company, but this company ultimately folds back into solitude. I would tackle this contradictory dialectic with Lacan’s Borromean logic of the Real that has a similar emphasis on both conjunction and disjunction. Contradiction, accommodated into logic, becomes a trope of the Real in which opposites can both be true and false at the same time. In this chapter, I would show how How It Is inscribes this Real contradiction of the one and the many as a coexistence of solitude and company in both geometric and arithmetic terms. We will evoke Lacan’s Borromean logic to illumine Beckett’s mathematical inscription of the Real unconscious. The Beckettian voice problematizes the opposition of solitude and company. When the solitary subject looks for an external position to anchor the voice, it cannot be found, and they are compelled to identify themselves with the voice. The paradox is that it is not his voice but there is no one with him and hence it must be his. The questioning of this voice of enunciation never stops. In the fourth text of Texts for Nothing (1950– 1952), we read: ‘What would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s me?’ (1995: 114). ‘Text 8’ uses the metaphor of ‘a mere ventriloquist’s dummy’ (133) for the speaking subject. The Beckettian subject’s struggle to own and disown this voice activates the unconscious field of the Other. In

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Seminar II, Lacan evokes this voice of the unconscious: ‘It is my unconscious, it is this voice which speaks in me, beyond me’ (1988b: 171). The voice oscillates between the two existential conditions of solitude and company, and this bivalence opens up a Real logic of contradiction: ‘There is no one and there is someone, nothing prevents anything’ (154), to quote from the final text of Texts for Nothing. The following passage from The Unnamable prefigures the oscillation of the one and the many, staged most elaborately and most mathematically in How It Is: Perhaps I’m not alone, perhaps a whole people is here, and the voice its voice, coming to me fitfully, we would have lived, been free a moment, now we talk about it, each one to himself, each one out loud for himself, and we listen, a whole people, talking and listening, all together, that would ex, no I’m alone, perhaps the first, or perhaps the last, talking alone, listening alone, alone alone, the others are gone, they have been stilled, their voices stilled, their listening stilled, one by one, at each newcoming, another will come, I won’t be the last. (2006: 402) This passage crystallizes the problematic of the voices, their ownership, the hesitation between the one and the multiple, and between beginning and ending. This would lay the foundation for How It Is – Beckett’s next extended prose work after The Trilogy. The hesitation between the one and the many in both How It Is and Company seems to return to the fact of solitude from the fiction of company, but as we would see, this apparent return to solitude is only apparent. In what follows, I will use Parmenides as a bridge between Beckett and Lacan as the pre-Socratic philosopher is a figure, they both evoke and work through. Plato’s text on Parmenidean philosophy will help us ground the numerical problematic in human ontology in terms of an oscillation between solitude of one and company of many. Beckett’s ‘Philosophy Notes’ and his Paris library are testimony to his interest in the Parmenidean questions of the One and the many. Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle write: Beckett’s library keeps showing traces of this interest in the Presocratics, up until the year before the author’s death (for instance Yves Batistini (ed.), Trois contemporains: Héraclite, Pérmenide, Empédocle [1961] and the Pléiade edition of Les Présocratiques [1988]). (2013: 128) Parmenides is a recurrent reference point in ‘Philosophy Notes.’ Beckett is acutely aware of the tension between ‘the number and variety of things’ in reality and the ‘only being’ in Parmenides. He notes the ‘little possibility of uniting these individual things with it’ (TCD MS 10967/9). Beckett’s extractions from Wilhelm Windleband’s book, History of Philosophy (1893), points to Plato’s Parmenides that ends by asserting

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unity in multiplicity: ‘If one is not, then nothing is’ (2014: 118). Notes under the section ‘Parmenides’ show Beckett’s awareness that the One cancels out ‘separateness of things’, ‘empty space’ and ‘motion’ by making them impossible. The One being is immovable and indivisible (TCD MS 10967/11), but we will see how Beckett brings ‘motion’ back in the Parmenidean world of How It Is. ‘Philosophy Notes’ offers an implicit critique of the Parmenidean One as an impasse and juxtaposes it with the multiplicity, prevalent in the pre-Socratic theory of atomism (see TCD MS 10967/12.1). Beckett notes that in Parmenides, the One exists without any explicable origin. One cannot say that this One ‘is.’ Like the ‘pastless now’ of Worstward Ho, it does not have a ‘how’ since no teleology of this being can ever be constructed (TCD MS 10967/12). The notes under the heading ‘Pluralists’ read: Escape from Parmenides only possible on two conditions: that the concept of the Real as One (held by all since Thales) should be abandoned, and that a cause of motion should be found. (TCD MS 10967/30) Is the Beckettian ‘Real’ one or many? In How It Is, we shall see that it is both one and many, and the Real is made of this contradiction. Beckett reintroduces discontinuity as the ‘real’ of plurality into the indivisible continuity of the Parmenidean One, and he does this in a mathematical way. In what follows, I will put this Beckettian Real in dialogue with Lacanian Real where both speak to the antinomy of solitary companies and populous solitudes. The English title How It Is hints at subversion by supplying a teleology for the Parmenidean One that is not supposed to have a telos. The French title Comment c’est has a counterbalancing effect. Punning on ‘recommencement’, it posits the Parmenidean One as an indivisible continuity where going on is tantamount to beginning again. The novel does not mention Parmenides but invokes Heraclitus – a characteristically Beckettian elision in which he says something by not saying it. The impasse of the One anchors the text and produces a writing of the Real unconscious, as we shall see. Beckett had experienced a writerly impasse when The Unnamable and Texts for Nothing failed to offer a way out (see Graver and Federman: 148). Does How It Is succeed in breaking this impasse? The answer is both yes and no. To be faithful to Beckett’s antinomic spirit, he radicalizes the impasse and at the same time generates a literary ‘construction’ on it in order to make it work. In How It Is, the Real One, combining solitude with company, is constructed like a written sinthome which formalizes the problem of the one and the many. It cannot resolve the problem but with the help of this Real symptom, the problem can be situated in a mathematical way. This Beckettian sinthome figures the unconscious as a minimal function of writing at the textual margin.

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How it is with readings Alain Badiou’s reading of Beckett puts a special emphasis on How It Is. He considers this novel transformative for Beckett’s writing career as it traces the crucial opening from the One of solipsism to a chance encounter with the Other. For Badiou, this is the key text that traverses a path from the solitary One to the encountered Other(s) and changes Beckett’s writing in a substantial way. Even though this encounter is ‘temporary’ in the novel, for Badiou, the ‘oscillation itself constitutes a principle of openness’ (Badiou 2003: 17). I share Badiou’s emphasis on the break with solipsism, but he does not engage with Beckett’s final return to solitude, and hence the complex intermeshing of the two conditions as a Real antinomy remains neglected. I will focus on the coexistence of these two existential possibilities in How It Is and examine how they fold upon each other at the end, at two different levels of Real writing. A great deal of attention has been paid to the second part of How It Is which stages the encounter. Garin Dowd highlights Beckett’s juridical metaphor and reads it as a trial in front of the ‘tribunal of Reason’ (2007: 153). I agree with Dowd regarding Beckett’s attack on reason, but it is also important to highlight the role of mathematical and logical resources here. In Beckett, as in psychoanalysis, it is aporetic logic and not irrationality that emerges as the Other of reason. Stated differently, it is a kind of selfcollapsing logic that counters logocentric rationality. In these writings, there is a drive towards logical precision: ‘not an iota to be changed in this description’ (Beckett 2009b: 33). More on this later but to return to the Other, the sado-masochism of this encounter is a major point for Anthony Cordingley, Paul Stewart and Graham Fraser. Shane Weller for his part considers Beckett’s final depiction of alterity in How It Is as ‘a disintegrative projection of the self’ (165) – a reading that goes against the break with solipsism. There is tension between the readings of Weller and Jonathan Boulter who interprets the desire for the Other as a demand for company in suffering where the alterity of the Other must be maintained for the sake of witnessing (198). Unlike Weller, who reflects that all the Others finally disintegrate into the self after having been projected from there, I would argue that both the self and the series of alterities are made to coexist in Beckett’s final view of ‘justice.’ Jonathan Boulter, Paul Stewart, Anthony Cordingley and Yoshiki Tajiri emphasize the problematic nature of the speaker’s final identification with the voice as a remainder of company, but they do not push this point further. Only Joanne Shaw pays some attention to the return of capitalization within this final declaration of solitude, which in Beckett’s ‘system’ stands for the continuation of the series as a corporeal writing. Shaw passingly mentions this possibility but does not follow up on its implications.

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In the third part of How It Is, Beckett painstakingly works out a ‘system’ (the systemicity of this system would be undermined by the Real antinomy at the end) of torments across a series of infinite crawlers. He sees a strange ‘justice’ in this system. I would argue that the pinnacle of this justice is the finale where there is no simple return to solitude but a complex writing of the multitude on both inside and outside of the self. Garin Dowd reads Beckettian justice in How It Is as a movement from transcendence to immanence: ‘Justice in the mud consists in resisting transcendence under all its guises’ (191). Dowd shows this within his Deleuzo-Guattarian framework but does not connect it to the problematic of ‘the one and the many.’ For me, the novel’s resolution exploits contradiction to posit an immanent coexistence of the one and the many in the Beckettian voice. Here I would complicate Brown’s stress on ‘absolute solitude’ (see Brown 2016: 96; 98) in his Lacanian reading of the Beckettian Other’s non-existence. It is not that there is no Other, but the Other who is there does not exist for the subject because they remain radically non-related.1 If there is an unstoppable series, where the book ends, Beckett forces it to stop. The serial multitude is critically altered at this stopping point so as to go on forever. The stoppage of one writing helps another writing to continue infinitely. This is where Real writing becomes important in How It Is. We will see how Beckett’s post-encounter solitude preserves the multiple as a trace of invocatory writing in speech.

The ‘system’ in the mud Let me first set up the terms in Beckett’s structural system to prepare the grounds for investigating its Real aspects that ultimately puncture the system. How It Is, divided into three parts (before Pim, with Pim and after Pim) is unpunctuated, spaced out in little fragments and presented in the ‘quotation’ of a voice, ‘on all sides then in me’: ‘I say it as I hear it’ (2009b: 3). The narrator hears it simultaneously with his breath as he pants, and when the panting stops, he murmurs to the mud what the voice has just said: ‘scraps of an ancient voice in me not mine’ (3). The framework of quotation ‘how it was I quote’ creates a distinction between saying and voice. The readers have no direct access to what the voice says. They only hear the narrator’s repetitions of what it has said to and in him. We get a visual image of speaking in the ‘brief movements of the lower face.’ He speaks both in and to the mud. The mud is the narrator’s constant listener. On occasions, the voice seems to come through the mud. In part one, the narrator crawls through the ‘primeval mud’ and ‘impenetrable dark’ towards Pim, his companion, in a flat and endless ‘under-earth.’ He is supplied with intermittent ‘images’ from his anterior

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life, above in the light. His most significant resource in this journey is a coal sack, made of jute, containing uncountable tins of food to keep him going. He keeps playing around with the sack, speaking to it, tying and retying it with the cord. It’s an ‘endless cortège of sacks burst in the interests of all’ (40). The narrator in part three posits an unknown figure as the distributor of these sacks. He contends that this caring figure is not part of their world but somewhere above in the light. This is the divine hypothesis in How It Is, and here he also attributes the voice to this transcendental entity. We will soon see how Beckett jettisons this transcendental One. The narrator crawls in a straight line till a point where he goes zigzag in ‘an arrow effect of hope.’ The ‘sudden swerve’ from the straight line to the zigzag echoes the pre-Socratic ‘clinamen’ by resulting in the encounter with Pim. Of the three seasons in this world, Beckett decides to begin with motion or the season of ‘journey’, passing on to the ‘abandon’ through the ‘coupling.’ The narrator crawls his way to Pim in part one. Part two shows their life together, and in part three, the narrator is fixed immobile in the mud. The decision to begin with motion is already an implicit critique of the One because motion creates a break in the immobile Parmenidean world. Although the narrator’s trajectory begins with motion and ends with stasis, there is no permanent stasis in this world, and while the narrator is motionless in part three, both his tormentor and his victim are mobile. As we shall see, motion is key to the narrator’s system of justice. The second part shows the encounter of ‘stoic love’ through lessons of ‘torment’ as the narrator writes with his nails on Pim’s back in Roman capitals, puts the tin opener into his arse, thumps on his skull and pestles on his kidney. This is called an act of naming and the narrator-tormentor is mute throughout the lessons. The ritual is supposed to make the victim sing and speak. The novel here offers the possibility that the voice, the narrator hears and quotes, may be ‘Pim’s extorted voice.’ Beckett capitalizes phrases and sentences to mark this writing on Pim’s body: soon unbearable thump on skull long silence vast stretch of time soon unbearable opener arse or capitals if he has lost the thread YOUR LIFE CUNT ABOVE CUNT HERE CUNT (65). The great capitals do not disclose the entire writing that happens on the corporeal surface but only a selection. Beckett implies that the ‘scraps of an enormous tale as heard’ by the narrator is the one he inscribes on Pim’s body. The description of this corporeal writing echoes the unpunctuated style and syntax of How It Is: ‘unbroken no paragraphs no commas not a second for reflection with the nail of the index until it falls and the worn back bleeding passim’ (61). The third part stages the oscillation between the one and the multiple as the narrator now imagines not only himself and Pim but also a series of

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crawlers, forming an infinite line in the mud. This is a meticulously regulated structure which founds justice. Everyone alternately plays tormentor and victim. One cannot play either tormentor or victim twice in a row. This reversibility is the first marker of justice. The justice is not entirely reciprocal because one can never torment one’s own tormentor though every victim gets a tormentor. Everyone always has the same tormentor and the same victim. So the narrator has Bom as his tormentor and Pim as his victim for life: ‘each awaits his Bom nameless goes towards his Pim’ (99). The names do not produce individuating marks in How It Is. They are generic and flexible. The narrator is Bom for Pim but to his Bom (his tormentor), he is Pim. Every crawler is Bom as tormentor and Pim as victim in succession. As the series moves slowly from west to east, the three seasons of the journey, the couple and the abandon are mathematically regulated at the same instant and identical distance. This spatio-temporal equity founds their ‘mathematical’ justice: at the instant I reach Pim another reaches Bem we are regulated thus our justice wills it thus fifty thousand couples again at the same instant the same everywhere with the same space between them it’s mathematical it’s our justice in this muck where all is identical our ways and way of faring right leg right arm push pull (97; my emphasis). This seems to be an immaculate system, governed by mathematical rules. The mathematical – Beckett’s own word – evokes an affective notion of justice here. The mathematical aims at systemic coherence which will soon be toppled by the Real. Both sacks and knowledge circulate by way of a precise logic in this meticulous structure. When one travels, one always gets a sack somewhere on his track, but he leaves the sack before he finds his Pim. When he finds his Pim, he snatches away Pim’s sack during the torment. After the torment, Pim leaves him without taking his sack back, and then the narrator’s Bom arrives and snatches away his sack. So each crawler gets his victim’s sack during the torment but also finds a sack in his travel. There are ‘more sacks here then than souls infinitely’ (97) by virtue of divine love. As we would soon see, this divine circulation of sacks awaits a Real moment of dissidence. Beckett’s final clarification on the logic of sacks anticipates this rupture by underlining how the dry logicality of this structure fails to address the question of human ‘need’: we leave our sacks to those who do not need them we take their sacks from those who soon will need them we leave without a sack we find one on our way we can continue on our way (97). To come to the logical circulation of knowledge, the crawlers know each other only as long as the torment lasts. The narrator considers the possibility

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of each crawler knowing all others ‘by repute’ and works it out through rigorous numerical operations: number 814327 may speak misnomer the tormentors being mute as we have seen part two may speak of number 814326 to number 814328 who may speak of him to number 814329 who may speak of him to number 814330 and so on to number 814345 who in this way may know number 814326 by repute […] rumour transmissible ad infinitum in either direction from left to right through the confidences of the tormentor to his victim who repeats them to his from right to left through the confidences of the victim to his tormentor who repeats them to his (104). Yoshiki Tajiri suggests that this transmission of knowledge may refer to the tale told by the voice: ‘the transmission of rumour from one to another parallels or mirrors the narrator’s own “quotation” of the other’s voiced speech’ (149). So each crawler composes his own ‘bits and scraps’ of this ‘enormous tale’ through the voice which repeats itself for every crawler. What plays spoilsport here is the crawlers’ sieve-like memories. They forget the torment as soon as it is over. In this mud world, knowledge lasts as long as the event lasts. Beckett calls it the ‘place without knowledge whence no doubt its peerlessness’ (Beckett 2009b: 107). Because of this forgetting, every torment and victimization seems to be the first. The crawlers do not know if they are going to or coming from someone, and this non-knowledge forms their justice: ‘all here unwitting our justice go never from never towards’ (99). The forgetting thus leads to a function of unknowing. More on this later. The mathematically oriented narrator describes physical movements through geometry, shifting to ‘dear figures’ of arithmetic in part three. As he tries to fix a specific number to the series, numerical specification fails, and the infinite dimension of the series is revealed. This is an ethical failure, integral to Beckettian justice. If the straight line of crawlers is imagined to be finite, the first will never get a tormentor and the last will never get a victim: nor ten million nor twenty million nor any finite number even or uneven however great because of our justice which wills that not one were we fifty million not a single one among us be wronged (107). Note how this re-emphasizes the infinite and linear structure of this under-earth. Had it been a closed circle, the first and the last wouldn’t have been deprived. Moreover, it’s not a finite round world where an infinite line would have to take a circular turn at some point: ‘We do not revolve’ (107). For Suzan Brienza, this is Beckett’s way of subverting Dante’s arrangement

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of infernal circularity by making his hell an infinite line (Brienza: 104). It is also stated that they move in circles above in the light because the space is finite there. In the infinite space of the under-earth, they do not need to do that: ‘that is above in the light where their space is measured here the straight line the straight line’ (Beckett 2009b: 107). When the narrator imagines alternative structures, he considers the Parmenidean possibility of one continuous gigantic body of crawlers in which all the Boms and Pims are glued together, but he does not choose this possibility. He also considers stopping the whole chain but whichever season it is stopped at, the stoppage will create injustice. Stopped at the season of couples, it will be unrelieved torment, and stopped at the season of journeys, it will be all solitude – both, forms of injustice. This not only highlights the importance of encounter but also emphasizes motion. It is because of motion that the tormentor can become the victim, and to stop this motion is to go against justice. Beckett thus retains motility as an ethical function within the hypothesis of physical ‘conglomeration’ into a corporeal One. As we have seen in his references to Parmenides in the ‘Philosophy Notes’, motility is a mark of discontinuity in continuity.

Retroactive voice and circularity of seasons In the third part, the narrator says that the voice is ‘peculiar to part three’ (101), but we have encountered it from the very first line. Here we understand the retroactive status of the voice, and the following passage from the first part makes sense: ‘But words like now words not mine before Pim no no that’s not said that’s the difference I hear it between then and now one of the differences among the similarities’ (16; my emphasis). The voice is heard neither in the past nor in the present, but somewhere between. We find it in part one even though it is peculiar to part three because part one is also part five. The three parts (seasons) revolve endlessly. The voice is a remainder from part three, slipping into part five which returns as the first part. How It Is thus reveals its circular form of repetition: alone hear these scraps and murmur them in the mud to the mud my two companions as we have seen being on their way he who is coming towards me and he who is going from me something wrong there that is to say each in his part one or in his part five or nine or thirteen so on correct whereas the voice as we have seen peculiar to part three or seven or eleven or fifteen so on just as the couple to part two or four or six or eight so on correct (101; my emphases).

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The logic of ‘or’ here implies that what the traveller considers to be his ‘part one’ is a result of his forgetting. What he holds as his part one can very well be ‘part five or nine or thirteen so on.’ The passage also indicates that what appears to be part two can be ‘four or six or eight so on’ and part three may well be part ‘seven or eleven or fifteen so on.’ The efficacy of forgetting in How It Is is connected with this circular repetition of the seasons. Since knowledge is limited to the duration of the encounter, the narrator will always think it is his first travel. This function of forgetting explains the narrator’s final denial of company. He thinks he is alone at the end because after the encounter with Pim in part two, he is on his way to forgetting. When the narrator is found as traveller in part one, we must understand that the ‘before Pim’ is also ‘after Pim’, i.e. the narrator has already lost his Pim in part three, has been tormented by his Bom in part four and is again travelling towards his Pim in part five. This explains the retroactive remark in part one: ‘I have journeyed found Pim lost Pim it is over I am in part three’ (14). Time is not chronological here, but that is not to say, there is no logic in this temporality. The tripartite structure of the book mocks the linearity of past, present and future. The so-called ‘natural order’ hides a strategy to ‘divide into three a single eternity for the sake of clarity’ (18). Time’s logical circularity is quietly at work under the chronological disguise. There is a tension between the circular form of the three parts and the image of an infinite line within the book. I will return to this point. The identity of the voice is shifty. If it is Pim’s extorted voice at one point, it becomes ‘the voice of us all’ (86) at another. What is constant in the voice is its link to alterity and the multiple. The voice is, to each crawler, a remainder and a reminder of the collective. Beckett’s narrator finally shifts the voice to a ‘strange care’, ‘not one of us an intelligence’ (120). This quasi-divine entity is imagined as a disembodied ear, lovingly listening to the voices from above. This One, from beyond the series, controls it. Here the narrator gets rid of the witnesses posited earlier and transfers the testimonial function to this transcendental One. Not only does this entity hear their voice but also ‘lends it into a story of his own’ and narrates it back to the crawlers intermittently so that they do not forget. His role becomes vital due to the forgetfulness of the crawlers. He is credited with three functions: ‘revictuallings narrations and auditions’ (122).

The finale: Elimination of the divine and the solitude in capitals In the finale, the narrator decides to eliminate the transcendental deviser, and this decision is called ‘a solution more simple by far and by far more radical’ (126). This radical elimination is political. The narrator suggests that this

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God-like figure manipulates the narratives and alienates the crawlers from their own stories. This master storyteller is given a hegemonic dimension whereby the crawlers start believing his story and not their own: when he lends his ear to our murmur does no more than lend it to a story of his own devising ill-inspired ill-told and so ancient so forgotten at each telling that ours may seem faithful that we murmur to the mud to him (121; my emphasis). The transcendental One reminds the crawlers of their forgotten stories, but because of infinite circularity, it is impossible to determine the temporal sequence. This Real indeterminacy makes it impossible to construct a chronology of saying and hearing from any given point inside this structure. One cannot know if he says before hearing or hears before saying: ‘the voice of him who before listening to us murmur what we are tells us what we are as best he can’ (122; my emphasis). If the transcendental One is saying how it is for the crawlers even before hearing them, how can this telling be faithful to their actual stories? He may as well be supplying his own manipulated versions. This makes the entity’s presence dictatorial. In an endless world where time is circular, it becomes impossible to determine causal sequence. This impossibility, needless to say, is a signature of the Real that resists the ‘system’ in which the series of crawlers is organized by a One from outside the structure. The narrator does not eliminate the voice but removes this transcendental entity. He owns up the voice which cancels the metaphysical promise of a higher life in the light and hurls everything down into the mud. The collapse of this vertical model of metaphysical worlds is in itself a Real topological operation in which the distinction between outside and inside is erased. Through this operation, the transcendental One outside the structure is eliminated and we have the emergence of an immanent One that is internal to the structure. The narrator returns to the possibility of solitude through this elimination as he falsifies the whole series, taking responsibility for the voice: ‘a formulation that would eliminate him completely and so admit him to that peace at least while rendering me in the same breath sole responsible for this unqualifiable murmur of which consequently here the last scraps at last very last’ (126). In the process of internalizing the voice, the narrator uses it to negate everything he has said so far in a mode of questions and answers. Except the mud and the dark, everything else is crossed out one by one: ‘all these calculations yes explanations yes the whole story from beginning to end yes completely false yes’ (126). This is the apparent return to his sole self: ‘only one voice here yes mine’ (127). H. Porter Abbott observes that the expression ‘all balls’ cancels the cancellation by ‘binding negation with the male organs of generation’ (103). Even without going into the genital metaphor, the incessant yeses and noes in this phase of narration highlight

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the logical nature of the interrogation. Joanne Shaw reflects that within this self-identified voice of cancellation, when the great capitals return, they suggest a continuation of the series (see Shaw: 167). This is one example of the return: never crawled no in an amble no right leg right arm push pull ten yards fifteen yards no never stirred no never made to suffer no never suffered no answer NEVER SUFFERED no never abandoned no never was abandoned no so that’s life here no answer THAT’S MY LIFE HERE screams good (Beckett 2009b: 128). This return to the One is foreshadowed in part one: ‘The question the answer barely audible if other inhabitants besides me here with me for good in the dark the mud long wrangle all lost and finally conclusion no me sole elect’ (9). This condition of being the ‘sole elect’ is not ethically sufficient because it preserves no trace of the multiple. The solitary One in part one can thus be distinguished from part three where singularity combines both the one and the multiple. Beckett’s adjective ‘solidary’ puns on ‘solitary’ and suggests a Real homophonous writing in the antinomy of solitude and company. At the end of How It Is, the subject is alone and not alone at the same time. The voice itself marks the first break with solitude because the narrator’s invocatory identification occurs within the apparatus of quotation. A complete fusion of the voice with the narrator fails, and the final line of the book still evokes ‘quotation’ as a mark of alterity: ‘good good end at last of part three and last that’s how it was end of quotation after Pim how it is’ (129). Although the self-identification with the voice is incomplete, the narrator has exorcised the transcendental figure. This reorients the series from transcendence to immanence. The series becomes strictly immanent when the crawler-narrator (and by extension all the crawlers) takes ownership of his voice. The voice is thus wrenched away from a transcendental unifier and relocated within the self as a problematic trace of the Other(s). The other important break with solitude is implied in the return of the capitals. The capitals point to two possibilities. The first is that the narrator’s Bom has actually arrived and started tormenting him by writing on his back with his nails, while the second possibility affirms that the narrator’s speech has incorporated capitalization as a trace of the Other. Joanne Shaw reads it the first way. Whichever way we read this problem, it indicates a continuation of the series as a retention of the multiple within the final solitude. When the great capitals return, unlike the capitals in part two, they are all in first person. The depth model of anterior life collapses into the mud surface as the ‘THERE’ becomes ‘HERE.’ ‘YOUR LIFE ABOVE IN THE LIGHT’ (62) shifts to ‘THAT’S MY LIFE HERE’ (128). After eliminating

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the quasi-divine figure, there are no more sacks and the narrator becomes apprehensive of death by starvation: ‘DIE’, ‘I MAY DIE’ and ‘I SHALL DIE.’ This contrasts his confident assertion in part one that he will never die of hunger. It is a difficult question to ask who shall die. Will the narrator die or is it his Bom? It depends on how we read the capitals. Are these Bom’s words carved on the narrator’s back? Or is it Bom’s writing that has left its mark in the narrator’s voice? This is a Real aporia in the text and we can never be sure. The problem of the capitals is a Real problem. It subtracts knowledge rather than solidifying it. It indicates a hesitation between literary form and content. The capitals in the last couple of pages of the book negate company at the level of content. Here the capitals inscribe: ‘WHAT’S MY NAME’ and ‘NEVER SUFFERED’ (128). Instead of the narrator who had inscribed the Other’s name ‘YOU PIM’ (61) in part two, the corresponding question in part three aims at self-naming: ‘WHAT’S MY NAME.’ This question never gets an answer. I will return to this void of self-naming. To proceed with the final capitals, ‘NEVER SUFFERED’ negates the torment we have seen in part two. The negation of the final capitals is only inscribed in their content. If their content declares that there is no suffering and no Bom writing ‘Pim’ on the narrator’s back, then the form of capitalization doesn’t stop inscribing the existence of the narrator’s Bom and, by extension, the whole series. The return of the capitals produces an irreducible textual opacity. This unreadability is vital for a Real inscription of the unconscious as impasse. The unreadable capitals write the form, or more precisely, they write the body of the signifier against its sense. The return of the repressed capitals marks the passage from the signifier to the letter. This passage hinges on an intrusion of the capitalization of writing into the vocalization of screaming. Lacan’s shift from the signifier to the letter is homologous with the shift from the Symbolic to the Real unconscious. The mathematical letter is vital for Lacan because mathematical discourse is fabricated on the basis of something which cannot be formalized without writing: ‘Mathematics makes reference to the written, to the written as such; and mathematical thought is the fact that one can represent for oneself a writing’ (Seminar XXV: 10.1.1978). More on this in the next section. The continuation of the series in Bom’s arrival and writing on the narrator’s back is transmitted only through capitalization which is an effect of writing on the speech act. Capitalization is a writing effect that Beckett performs on the body of his words, just as Bom would have written on the narrator’s body. It activates the function of the written in speech as Lacanian writing. Capitalization is a typographic phenomenon, strictly belonging to the written, as speech cannot be capitalized. When speech is capitalized in screaming (the narrator screams on a couple of occasions), it incorporates this writing function. Capitalization is an orthographic trace in speech through which the narrator folds the series back into himself as

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a kind of writing. Therefore, the final solitude is riven at two levels by the voice which is not one with the narrator and the writing function within that voice which still insists on the existence of the series. I would argue that this singularity which preserves both solitude and company is the final ‘justice’ for Beckett where one life coincides with all life (the ‘all’ is ironically a ‘not-all’ as the crawlers are innumerable). Part three declares: ‘One life all life not two lives our justice’ (117). This utterance makes sense only in terms of this final solitude which retains the ‘(not)-all’ in the One. The One is all alone in the sense that they are all and alone at the same time. We will see in the next chapter how the ‘all’ in Company generates the Real logic of Lacanian ‘not-all’ (the incompleteness of language as a system as well as the partial nature of every particular speech act which exposes it to the Real). This is hinted in How It Is in the repetition of the signifier ‘all’ in ‘all balls.’ The Imaginary totality of the ‘all’ is nothing but ‘balls’ for Beckett.

How it is with ex-sistence: Writing and the Real Susan Brienza writes about the style of How It Is: ‘Language becomes more mathematical as we read, almost in geometrical precision’ (102). The novel evinces a notion of infinity in two mathematical formalizations: circular and linear. Beckett’s extractions from Pascal’s meditations on geometry into his ‘Whoroscope Notebook’ were probably made from ‘Of the Geometrical Spirit’, a part of Pensées, which features in Beckett’s library. In this section, Pascal talks about two ways of arriving at the infinite through division and extension of numbers and then folds one into the other: For in numbers, inasmuch as they can be continually augmented, it absolutely follows that they can be continually diminished, and this clearly; for if a number can be multiplied to 100,000, for example, 100,000th part can also be taken from it, by dividing it by the same number by which it is multiplied; and thus every term of augmentation will become a term of division, by changing the whole into a fraction. So that infinite augmentation also includes necessarily infinite division. (n.p.; my emphasis) How It Is is riven by these two mathematical operators of extension into many and division into One, but as Pascal clarifies, the divisive trajectory which seems to end on the ‘One’ is no absolute solitude of solipsism. It is the divisive face of a two-pronged infinite multiplicity. Beckett treats this infinity as a numerical problem in the third part by introducing numbers. In ‘Of the Geometrical Spirit’, Pascal observes that ‘zero is not of the same

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kind as numbers, since, being multiplied, it cannot exceed them: so that it is the true indivisibility of number.’ We shall see how Beckett’s configuration of the One responds to this split between zero and numbers. Brienza observes how in the notebooks ‘Beckett himself revels in numbers as he calculates – on the verso page of his draft – distances, speeds and couplings’ (102). To elaborate on Beckett’s evocation of mathematical forms, he makes use of the two ancient and fundamental areas of mathematics: arithmetic that studies numbers and geometry that studies ‘objects and structures in space’ (Badiou 2016: 46). Badiou clarifies in In Praise of Mathematics (2016) that the connection between geometry and arithmetic lies in the operation of measurement whereby a measured line yields a specific number as its length (46). In other words, it is by measuring the geometrical line that we arrive at the arithmetical entity of number. This is how Beckett’s text uses these two mathematical paradigms. The human body is seen as a geometric object in space and the line that is constituted with these crawling geometric bodies is subjected to a complex measuring process which passes through the arithmetic of numbers but ultimately produces what cannot be counted anymore. Andrew Gibson is a rare Beckett critic to have mentioned Beckett’s mathematization of the human body. But I want to emphasize here that it is not the inert nature of a static body that makes it into a geometric object. It is rather the act of motility that underlines anatomy and consolidates the geometric status of the body in Beckett. Movement is anatomy in performance. It activates various geometric shapes inside and around the moving body as a structural phenomenon. Although Gibson does not carry out any extensive analysis of this problematic, he briefly notes how Beckett’s texts evoke complex mathematical and logical systems to make them inoperative in the final run. He rightly notices ‘its [Beckettian text’s] frequent concern with extraordinary paradoxes and what seem to be irreducible problems and impossibilities; and its formalization of material that is threatened with drastic inconsistency’ (2006: 32). In How It Is, the moving body in its various angles of displacement is treated as a geometric site: sudden swerve therefore left it’s preferable forty-five degrees and two yards straight line such is the force of habit then right right angle and straight ahead four yards dear figures then left right angle and beeline four yards then right right angle so on till Pim (39). The anatomy of the moving body borders on geometry: my arm bends therefore my right it’s preferable which reduces from very obtuse to very acute the angle between the humerus and the other the anatomy the geometry and my right hand seeks his lips let us try and

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see this pretty movement more clearly its conclusion at least (47; my emphasis). In a Yale University lecture on 25 November 1975, Lacan makes a similar connection between anatomy and geometry while talking about the power over the body in slavery: ‘A slave is defined by the fact that someone has power over his or her body. Geometry is the same thing, it has a lot to do with bodies’ (n.p.). Torture being a central theme in How It Is, the subject positions of the master and the slave are written into the torment and Beckett would agree with Lacan regarding the corporeal geometry of torture. What Badiou calls Beckett’s ‘subtractive writing’ concentrates on the fundamental functions of writing (Badiou 2003: 3). As Baylee Brits notes, this notion of writing carries an unexplained mathematical import (2018: 89). Pared down to the bare bones of language, this mathematized form of writing ascetically exhibits grammatical and logical operators that underlie language as a structure: ‘he is coming ten yards fifteen yards who for me for whom I what I for Pim Pim for me’ (Beckett 2009b: 52). Although Badiou insists that the effect of this Beckettian ‘ascesis’ is a fundamental simplification, it is not only that but also a terse obfuscation in places: Bom to the abandoned not me Bom you Bom we Bom but me Bom you Pim I to the abandoned not me Pim you Pim we Pim but me Bom you Pim something very wrong there (100; my emphasis). The grammato-logical operators explode and conspire with the lack of punctuation to take this mathematized expression to the brink of the Real. The refrain ‘something wrong there’ becomes ‘something very wrong there’, indexing Beckett’s investment in impasses of meaning and knowledge. If the ‘dear figures’ in part one offer relief, part two begins with the declaration: ‘No more reckoning save possibly algebraical’ (43) geometry but arithmetic returns in a big way in part three. The ‘dear figures’ (note the adjective ‘dear’) reveal an affective attachment with counting. There is no false opposition between affect and mathematical structure here; nor is there any binary opposition between mathematics and humanity. Coupled with affect, mathematical acts are helpful in maintaining the minimal humanity of these larval subjects. The operation of counting retains the humanity of the subject whose condition takes him to the margin of the species. The subject can count and therefore he is human: dear figures when all fails a few figures to wind up with part one before Pim the golden age the good moments the losses of species I was young I clung on on to the species we’re talking of the species the human saying to myself brief movements no sound two and two twice two and so on (39; my emphasis).

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This is the critical question of mathematical forms and acts in relation to subjectivism and objectivism. If we agree with the Galilean view that the natural world around us exists as a mathematical and physical writing, we still need subjects to situate these forms that are pre-inscribed in nature. How It Is affirms the humanity of these subjective mathematical acts, but it is careful to avoid the logocentric trap of depicting this counting as a rationalistic certitude. The counting will pass into the uncountable and knowing will stop at the unknowable. It is this final frontier of the uncountable and the unknowable that writes the impossibility of the Real. The narrator says, ‘my notions of mathematics astronomy and even physics they have marked me that’s the main thing’ (33). He gradually attempts to unmark these epistemic marks through writing. Mathematical minimalism thus opens a space where knowledge is unmarked into Real non-knowledge. How It Is performs an evacuation of the disciplinary formations of knowledge by invoking ‘scraps’ of humanities, geography, anatomy, history and mathematics. If mathematics is humanizing, it is also integral to the disciplining function of knowledge, resisted by the novel. Yet it is preferred over other forms of episteme for its self-sameness. I will come back to this. The novel bores holes in established knowledge systems as the narrator engages in auto-erasure: ‘the humanities I had’, ‘I’ve lost my latin’, ‘the geography I had’ and ‘the history I knew.’ These iterations dramatize a weakening mental landscape of ‘lessness’: ‘all gone from mind’ (1995: 197). By invoking proper names like Heraclitus and Haeckel, the text also suggests that there cannot be a totally blank mind. Instead, this writing pulls us towards the edge of knowl-edge. To make a move towards Lacanian Real writing now, the unconscious is not only structured like a language where there are signifying chains but these chains are also formed by writing. In Seminar XX, Lacan claims that the unconscious is ‘written’ or enciphered (chiffré) and it has to be deciphered in a mathematical manner. By ‘topologizing language’s status’ in what he calls his ‘linguistricks’, Lacan pushes the efficacy of this writing towards the logical and the mathematical (1998: 17–18). For him, writing connects the ‘function’ of speech with the ‘field’ of language within psychoanalytic discourse (27). He gives writing the status of a function in the mathematical sense and the letters forming this writing operate like written formulas. The letter as ‘the essentially localized structure of the signifier’ (2006: 418) designates a locus for writing and introduces into the signifier, a ‘function of the written.’ Lacanian writing is an ‘effect of language’ (1998: 46). The trace of the written in speech can approach the Real through an impasse of mathematical formalization. Beckett’s typographic writing of the capitals in speech triggers the bar between the signifier and the signified which is ‘precisely the point at which in every use of language, writing (l’ecrit) may be produced’ (Lacan 1998: 34). Lacan mathematically formalizes Ferdinand de Saussure’s thesis about

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the arbitrary relation between the signifier and the signified by writing it in the form of an algorithm: S/s (2006: 414).2 Something is repressed in the interstices of speech between the signifier and the signified. The bar as a ‘locus’ brings out the function of the written but resists signification in itself (415). This bar must be written through mathematical formalization. Stated differently, it can only be spoken as a trace of the written in speech. The written thus separates the signifier from the signified like a failed copula. Lacan offers a radical critique of Saussure’s thesis about arbitrary relation by replacing it with non-relation. For Lacan, the signifier ‘bears no relation to its meaning-effect’ (1998: 30). The bar between the signifier and the signified logically writes this non-relation.3 Beckett’s capitalization opens up this somewhat spectral writing function hidden in our speech. This psychoanalytic writing is performed on the surface of words. The letter extracts the skeletal mathematical surface as the Real of the signifier. The Lacanian letter as ‘an effect of discourse’ (1998: 36) produces a Real irreducible to a mythical teleology of language. In the classical period of Lacan’s teaching, for example, in ‘The Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’ (1956), he poses the Real as an a-teleological theoretical presupposition for the birth of language. Early Lacan associates the Real with a presignifying das Ding, anterior to the signifier (2006: 719). Language can only arrive by murdering the world of things, preexisting it, and hence it is perpetually haunted by the murdered things that come back to it as lacks and holes. This thesis is not crossed out in his later teachings, but the Real ultimately becomes not only a source but also an effect of speech as Lacan jettisons temporal chronology. More on this later. Beckett sees writing as a way of exposing holes in his famous German letter to Axel Kaun on 9 July 1937, much before Lacan’s interventions. In this letter, Beckett insists that the task of the writer is ‘to drill one hole after another into it (language) until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through’ (2009c: 518). In his 1956 interview with Israel Shenker, Beckett announces his literary project as an exploration of the zones of ‘impotence’ and ‘ignorance’, describing himself as a ‘non-knower’ and a ‘non-can-er.’ Beckettian and Lacanian functions of writing share this epistemic impasse as they drill holes into the said and the known by inscribing the ‘not-all’, the ‘not known’ and the ‘not said.’ These expressions keep coming back in How It Is. Not only How It Is but most of Beckett’s works are organized around holes in knowledge. As Watt says, it is all about ‘effing the ineffable.’ In ‘The Three Dialogues’, Beckett dwells on ‘the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’ (1984: 139). Whether it is Godot (1953) or the inaudible murmurs in Come and Go (1965) or the object of torture in What Where (1983), Beckett’s work constitutes these lacks through various textual operations. Although Godot

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never arrives, Vladimir and Estragon speak him into existence through the function of the proper name. The women in Come and Go mark the lack in what is unheard with their shocking response in the onomatopoeic ‘Oh!’ sounds. The words ‘what’ and ‘where’ in What Where turn the interrogative into the assertive by indexing the lack in their own referentiality. The ‘danger zone’ for the walkers in Quad (1981) is at the heart and not outside the walking square. These instances show a desire to formalize the inexpressible through writing. Be it the final chain of the three women in Come and Go or the geometric motility of the walkers around the foreclosed centre in Quad, Real writing is mobilized by a mathematized moving body. This will be examined in different ways in the next two chapters on Company and Worstward Ho and the final chapter on sexual non-relation. In Seminar VII, Lacan mentions the aesthetics of pottery to describe the process of constituting a hole by bracing it from all sides. When a potter makes a pot, he constitutes the void at the heart of what he has made (1992: 121). Lacanian writing is an encounter with a hole which cannot be written as a positive term, and yet it must be written as an omission. This expressive paradox resonates with Beckett’s dilemma regarding the ‘nothingness’ and the ‘compulsion’ of expression. Although the four walkers in Quad are prohibited from stepping on the centre, they do not stop walking. They approach the prohibited centre from the four corners. On the verge of colliding, they swerve away. They endlessly constitute the Real void by bracing it from all sides, like the potter in Lacan. The void is both outside and inside and gets written as a negative term by the moving bodies. This strikes a chord with the Lacanian shift from Real as external origin to internal hole. Like the three rings of the Borromean knot, walkers in Quad do not touch one another and yet remain alone-together in their asymptotic movements. In Seminar XX, Lacan calls the Real, ‘a result of the symbolic’ (1998: 95). The Real is the unsaid in the said, and even if this unsaid comes before the said, we can only approach it retroactively as the effect of saying. In How It Is, there is an originary and yet a-teleological (due to circular time) Real of the unsaid – ‘part one before Pim how I got here no question not known not said’ (2009b: 4) – but there is also another unsaid which drives the movement of both speech and body: ‘I go not because of the shit and vomit something else not known not said’ (7). At another point, the narrator identifies this ‘not said’ with the source of the voice: ‘who is speaking that’s not said’ (15). Joanne Shaw remarks that the impulsion to move in How It Is fuses with the impulsion to speak, and the harmony between ‘ten words fifteen words’ and ‘ten yards fifteen yards’ plays on the homophony between ‘words’ and ‘yards.’ The series of crawlers is as much human as it is a series of writing in which signifiers move left to right, as in most Western languages. This is analogous to the Lacanian signifying chain of the unconscious that is extended into the mathematical writing of the Borromean chain in his

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later teachings. Beckett uses ‘chain’ among other words like ‘procession’ and ‘caravan’ to refer to the series. They are also identified with a number sequence (‘a million strong’) till the ethic demands that they be declared innumerable. This identification of words with corporeal movement is reinforced in the narrator’s use of the word ‘translation’ to refer to motility. It highlights the Real word-body in the materiality of the letter. Lacan emphasizes that writing can only capture a fragment of the Real in the impasses of mathematical logic. Mathematical formalization is privileged for its ability to subvert meaning: The real can only be inscribed on the basis of an impasse of formalization. That is why I thought I could provide a model of it using mathematical formalization, inasmuch as it is the most advanced elaboration we have by which to produce signifierness. The mathematical formalization of signifierness runs counter to meaning. (Lacan 1998: 93) What Lacan calls ‘signifierness’ (signifiance) emphasizes the structure of the signifier as the letter. Mathematization of writing can support the Real because it evacuates as much meaning as possible and leads to what Lacan calls the ‘integral transmission’ of the ‘matheme.’ He declares that ‘mathematical formalization is our goal, our ideal’ (1998: 119). By emptying out meaning, we can approach the Real, and ‘the formalization of mathematical logic which is based only on writing’ becomes the Lacanian model of semantic evacuation. Borromean knot is one such writing which acts as mathematical support for the Real. Badiou reflects that for Lacan, ‘mathematics is a kind of formalization’ which expresses ‘the power of the letter.’ The Lacanian understanding of mathematics, as Badiou comments, is divided by the expressive paradox that ‘mathematization is at once the ready ideal of integral transmission, and that real qua impasse of formalization’ (Badiou 2008b: 243; emphasis in the original). Beckett and Lacan as two exponents of the Modernist historical sequence share an interest in mathematical formalization at the level of philosophy of science. How It Is has an explicitly mathematical form. In Beckett’s statements on form in art and literature, there is an unmistakable investment in mathematical formalization. In ‘Les Deux Besoins’ (1938), he uses the geometric diagram of two superimposed inverted triangles to describe two needs at work in literature.4 In this essay and in Murphy (1938), Beckett shows great interest in the Real of mathematics with a focus on √2 as the irrational number or the surd which problematizes Pythagorean theorem.5 In ‘Les Deux Besoins’, Hippasos is credited with the discovery of the irrational number which had jeopardized Pythagoreans and named the first martyr of art (Beckett 1984: 56). In conversation with Charles Juliet, Beckett states that ‘giving form to formlessness’ is the only way to find ‘some underlying affirmation’ (1995: 24). He famously tells Tom Driver in 1961: ‘To find a form

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that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now’ (Graver and Federman: 243). In the interview with Israel Shenker, while differentiating between Kafka’s form and his own, Beckett remarks that in Kafka’s work, ‘the consternation is in the form’, while in his own, ‘there is consternation behind the form, not in the form’ (162). In these comments from different periods, Beckett remains faithful to the agency of literary form. These remarks underline the function of formalization in tempering what Beckett variously calls ‘mess’, ‘chaos’, ‘formlessness’ and ‘consternation.’ Beckettian aesthetic structure must incorporate these impasses, but the question is whether it can master them. There may be impasses that mark subjective ‘ignorance’ and ‘impotence’ in the impossibility of mastering. In Beckett’s reiterations, the structure that marks its own impasse and does not disavow it is functional. As we have seen, the capitals expose such a formal/structural writing that avows the unmasterable Real. In Seminar XXI, Lacan formulates logic as the ‘science of the Real.’ The letter writes itself by boring holes in the Real. By this writing function of mathematical logic, one can reach what Lacan in Seminar XXI calls the ‘edge of the Real’ (19.2.1974). Letters are components of this writing. The insistence on the letter is an investment in the formal envelope of the signifier. This letter can only be defined in its agency of furrowing in the Real to punch holes into knowledge. The structure of the signifier as letter is ‘only sustained by the function of […] the hole in the Real’ (Lacan 2016: 22). Lacan is interested in literature for this kenotic function of the letter qua the Real. He believes that a literary demonstration should be literal. It should throw us into the ‘edge of the hole in knowledge’ that is traced by the letter as it is written: Is the letter not properly speaking littoral? The edge of the hole in knowledge that psychoanalysis designates precisely, when it tackles it, from the letter, is it not what it designates? (Seminar XVIII: 12.5.1971) In Seminar XXII, Lacan glosses this Real ‘hole’ as a shift away from Symbolic ‘lack’: The unconscious is the Real, in so far as in the speaking being, it is afflicted by the only thing that makes a hole, which assures us of the hole. This is what I called the Symbolic, by incarnating it in the signifier, of which when all is said and done there is no other definition than that, the hole. The signifier makes a hole. (5.4.1975; my emphasis) At this stage of Lacan’s teaching, the signifier, ‘incarnated’ in the ‘affliction’ of the parlêtre (speaking-body/speaking-being), is the letter that touches the Real in writing. The Real is what ex-sists when the letter bores holes in it. As the third in relation to the Symbolic and the Imaginary, it

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ex-sists by pushing the structure from inside out: ‘If something ex-sists with respect to something, it is very precisely because of not being coupled to it, of being thirded (troisé), if you will allow me this neologism’ (Seminar XXI: 19.3.1974). Lacan writes existence as ex-sistence, but this orthographic modification happens in the seminars where he speaks. The modification thus carries a mark of the written in speech. For Lacan, there is no existence without the ‘signifying cut’ or the hole brought forth by the writing of the letter. In the third session of Seminar XXII, he installs the Borromean knot, as a mathematical ‘support’ for thinking existence as ex-sistence. I would now show how existence in How It Is passes into ex-sistence in the field of writing.

Lacan’s knot: The Borromean of One and many For Lacan, Borromean knot is a material tool for demonstrating the Real. It accomplishes a topological writing by arranging the three orders of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. The entire knot as One is a Real writing: ‘The Real is writing. The writing of nothing other than this knot as it is written […] according to the law of flattened out writing’ (Seminar XXI: 14.5.1974). Lacan is referring here to the knot when it is flattened out

FIGURE 2.1  Borromean knot

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and drawn on the board. One cannot make a Borromean chain with two rings. Its simplest minimal formation is a knot of three rings. The specialty of this knotting is that in this knot of three, there is no relation between any two rings. Borromean structure thus presents a Real logic of non-relation. The three rings are alone and yet they are knotted together. Cutting any one releases all three rings and dissolves the knot. As we shall see, this knot is a useful mathematical formalization to support the Beckettian coexistence of solitude and company in the final predicament of How It Is. Jacques-Alain Miller says, ‘The Borromean form of the Knot surmounts the antinomy of juncture and disjuncture. This requires the introduction of a third, also not joined to the two others’ (2002: n.p.). The knot maintains this antinomic coexistence of the One and the many by holding up relation and nonrelation at two different levels of writing which are not related: ‘They are each there for themselves in a radical non-rapport, and they are nevertheless involved in a rapport’ (Miller 2002: n.p.). Like Beckett, Lacan works through Parmenidean One while arriving at the Borromean One. He thinks through Plato’s dialogue in Seminar XIX and comes up with his formula: ‘There’s something of the One’ or ‘There is such a thing as One’ (Y a d’ l’Un). In Seminar XX, he insists that this formula ‘is to be understood in the sense that there’s One all alone’ (1998: 67). In the triadic Borromean knot, there are three Ones. The knot constituting these Ones is another One though the constituents remain all alone. Lacan locates instances of the subject as parlêtre within this Borromean chain. The subject is produced as a representation between two signifiers in the chain. In How It Is, the narrator’s subjectivity is formalized in his enigmatic relation with his tormentor and victim, and Beckett ensures that we are looking at both a human procession and a procession of words and numbers. Lacan localizes the One in the signifying chain where a series of Ones is formed, and this ‘swarm’ of solitary letters speaks to Beckett’s series. Peter Fifield, in his Levinasian reading of How It Is, mentions the ‘knot of interruption’ (129) as a textual strategy where knots suggest impasses within the text. Fifield observes that the knots foreground Beckett’s aesthetic of renewal through repetition. Knot is not only a textual strategy in the novel. There is a speculation of making actual knots. A sack and a cord are mentioned in How It Is. More than once in part one, the narrator considers making knots with the cords – ‘tear a shred from the sack make knots’ (33) – but he does not trust the strength of the cord. So the knot features as a hypothetical figure in the novel. Lacan’s Borromean knot of R-S-I builds on Freud’s second topology of Id-Ego-Superego, and from Seminar XIX to XXIII, he uses the metaphor of the sack and the cord to point to both the Borromean knot and the Freudian topology (see Lacan 2016: 123–134). It is intriguing that Beckett and Lacan share the same figures of the sack and the cord.

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In Seminar XXI, Lacan reflects on the coexistence of solitude and company in the Borromean One: ‘This is all the existence of the One is based on: it is that there is something of the signifier, and that each is not unique, but all alone’ (12.2.1974; my emphasis). As there are three Ones in the Borromean knot and no one-to-one relation, they are all alone, but they also make up a three together which is the knot as One. This triadic logic, founded on an oscillation of one and three, insists on the Real. The third ring knots the first and the second and shows how a two can be constructed only from the position of the third: The Borromean knot is the mode which delivers to us the One of the ring of string as such; the fact on the other hand is that there are three of these Ones, and that it is only by being knotted, that we get the two. (Seminar XXI: 12.3.1974) The writing of the Borromean knot thus demonstrates that ‘the two is only produced from the junction of the one to the three’ (Lacan: 12.3.1974). Let me now return to How It Is to show how the couple is produced solely from the vantage point of the third.

Two between one and three: Knotting the couple in How It Is I will now show how Real writing works as triadic knotting in How It Is. There are many ways of demonstrating how the Real third knots the two in the

FIGURE 2.2  Two as junction between one and three (cf. Seminar XXI)

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novel. To begin with naming, the narrator can assume his victim’s name only from the position of the third: his Bom. He can share the name of his victim when his Bom names him Pim. To move on to coupling, narrator’s Bom is the third we never see. His ex-sistence is marked as a hole by the orthographic trace of capitalization at the end. He incarnates the Real, knotting the narrator with his Pim. This third figure is the Real ‘not said’ as both cause and effect of the said. The narrator’s Bom is pitched both before part one and after part three. It is because his Bom has tormented the narrator before the beginning that he can crawl towards his Pim in part one. Similarly, it is only because his Pim has left the narrator immobile in the mud in part three that in a fourth part, the narrator’s Bom can come and torment him. So the coupling of the two happens only because there is a third here. This unshown figure is thus both the cause and the effect of the three parts that are shown. The matter becomes all the more important because of Beckett’s initial speculation that it may not be the same figure. When the narrator starts wondering about the other crawlers, he initially posits two different tormentors, Bem and Bom, but finally abandons this quartet and reconfigures it into a triad. The triplicity establishes a structural logic in the rule that every crawler always has the same figure for tormentor and victim again and again in all the couplings. Had it been a quartet, this rule could not have been maintained. To move now to the third way of showing triadic coupling, How It Is chooses a tripartite structure to show a couple. In this system, there are two types of coupling for the narrator: first when he is tormented by his Bom and second when he as Bom torments his Pim. Both these couples are impossible without the third. If the narrator’s Bom had not tormented him, he would not have been able to travel towards his Pim. This structure is driven by another rule that only victims can travel – ‘a most remarkable thing’ (125). If the final capitals imply Bom’s arrival, Bom will torment the narrator and it will cause him to travel towards his Pim again in what would be part five – identical to part one. So, without his Bom, the narrator cannot couple with Pim, and without the narrator’s torment, Pim cannot travel and couple with his victim. This is the triadic knotting of the couple in How It Is where the two is only maintained from the position of the third. Beckett accentuates this triad by logically justifying the chosen sequence of journey, couple and abandon: and so ordered that it loath for the episode couple even in its twofold aspect to figure twice in the same communication as would be the case if instead of having me begin as traveller present formulation or as abandoned possible formulation it had me begin as tormentor or as victim […] the three quarters of which the first the journey present formulation and the three quarters of which the first the abandon formulation equally defendable (114).

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The narrator mentions two ‘defendable formulations’: the chosen ‘present formulation’ (journey-couple-abandon) and the ‘equally defendable’ formulation (abandon-couple-journey). In both, the coupling is placed between two different types of solitude – mobile and immobile. The season of two is always produced as an interim between the first and the third in a Borromean way. Beckett rejects the only order which does not place the two as junction between one and three. Both accepted formulations mark the difference between the two solitary modes. The two solitudes are fundamentally different unlike the two couplings that offer the same spectacle with reversal. Beckettian text thus works out its own logic, consolidating how the second solitude is different from the first: the two solitudes that of the journey and that of the abandon differ appreciably and consequently merit separate treatment whereas the two couples that in which I figure in the north as tormentor and that in which I figure in the south as victim compose the same spectacle exactly (114). In How It Is, to show the third figure is to enter the fourth part. The narrator says: ‘of the four three quarters of our total life only three lend themselves to communication’ (114). This ‘only three’ suggests that the fourth be the unsaid Real because it is the effect of the three: ‘it is sufficient for this episode to be announced Bom comes right leg right arm push pull ten yards fifteen yards’ (114). Beckett not only announces but also writes this episode as ex-sistence through capitals. This potential fourth episode would produce the third – the Lacanian number for the Real. The aforementioned Lacanian formula about two as odd number implies that two is also three. To count two is to count the originary zero (2 as 0, 1 and 2). There is a three in every two because of the repetition of 0 as 1 – the Lacanian signifier of inexistence or ex-sistence. The Real One is ‘the signifier of inexistence’ (see Seminar XIX: 19.1.1972). It has this ghostly iterability in the structure of counting which produces 0 as ‘+1’ between two numbers when passing from the first to the second.6 This numerical logic speaks to Beckett’s tripartite structure, based on the kenotic writing of the ‘+1.’ It also returns us to Pascal’s zero. The repetition of the originary 0 as 1 in How It Is is Beckett’s response to Pascal’s aforementioned thesis that zero is not a number but ‘the true indivisibility of number.’ How It Is treats 0 as 1 and incorporates it into the numerical series by generating a structure where two needs three and three needs four. In the Borromean knot, every ring is inside the second and outside the third – every One is inside One and outside another One. Beckett’s parlêtre finds himself in a similar position where inside him is the voice, not fully identified with the self, and outside him is his Bom who ex-sists and makes the whole series ex-sist alongside him. Lacan shows how existence is framed by inexistence or ex-sistence in the ‘+1’:

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There is no existence except on a foundation of inexistence and reciprocally, ex-sistere, to only have your support from something outside which is not. And this indeed is what is involved in the One. (Seminar XIX: 15.3.1972) Bom is the ‘+1’, ghosting in ex-sistence, and holds the promise of a larger chain. The Beckettian One at the end is singularly divergent. The series implied by Bom’s arrival literally ex-sists as corporeal writing that pushes the narrator from outside when Bom comes to write on his body. This third is made to in-exist in the content of the capitals, but the corporeal envelope of the signifier retains its ex-sistence. Bom’s numerical ex-sistence opens the solitude of the subject to the infinite series of crawlers outside him. This is the point from which we can have an infinite chain of Borromean knots in Beckettian crawlers. As Lacan demonstrates in Seminar XXI, from the minimal triad, infinite number of Borromean knots can be constructed (see 12.3.1974). Beckett’s mathematized literary form promises yet another formulation of the Borromean knot. If the form of the book is circular, the image of form within the book is an infinite line and Beckett rigorously maintains its infinite dimension. Lacan articulates in Seminar XXIII that the ‘equivalence’ of the circle to the infinite line is the ‘principle of the Borromean knot’ (2016: 125). The infinite line thematized in How It Is is enveloped by the circular and tripartite literary form of the book. As the infinite line in the content is enformed by circularity, it passes through the circle to frame the minimal Borromean shape. It produces a Borromean aesthetic knotting between two subtly different incarnations of literary form: the form of the text (infinitesimal circular repetition of three parts) and the form of a figure thematized within the text (infinite line).

Knotting the chain as justice How It Is maintains the openness of the Real One towards the ‘not-One’ from inside (voice) and outside (series). Here Beckettian justice enters into a dialogue with Lacanian ‘equivalence’ of Borromean logic. Each One is now ‘all alone’, and anyone in this series can incarnate the One. In the infinite chain, the Borromean principle of equivalence remains the same: cutting any One dissolves the chain. Each One equally generates the One of knotting. Lacan never dwells on the ethical aspect of the Borromean structure. This radical democratic dimension of ‘justice’ in Borromean logic is something that Beckettian text brings out. This strictly equivalent structure endows anyone with the agency of ‘+1’, i.e. any One is capable of unknotting the entire structural system. The spatio-temporal equivalence among Beckett’s

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crawlers means that if anyone is frozen or taken out, the entire structure collapses. The narrator vouches for this radical egalitarian structure by abandoning numerical specificity. Their justice wills that not even a single crawler be wronged. This innumerability thus grounds the notion of justice. For Lacan, ‘the three rings partake of the imaginary as consistence, of the symbolic as a hole, and of the Real as ex-sisting relative to them’ (2016: 44). The crucial point is that not one but all three rings partake of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. One must colour the rings to distinguish them. Each constituent round has the same relation to the other two. This indicates that the Real is not just one of the constituent rings; rather the Borromean principle of knotting the One is a Real writing. In Seminar XXII, Lacan underlines this split between ‘imaginary consistence’ and ‘real ex-sistence’ of the knot. At the level of consistence, the knot is Imaginary as there is no one-to-one knotting. We imagine a consistency because when we squeeze, the three rounds knot up to make a triple point shared by the three orders. This triple point is the Real ‘inviolable hole.’ Without squeezing the chain into a knot, we can see the three holes at the heart of each round. At this level of ex-sistence, the knot is Real as the three rounds mutually ex-sist by pushing each other from outside. So, where the knot consists, it is Imaginary, and where it ex-sists, it is Real: ‘The real cannot be just one of those rings of string. It’s the way of presenting them in their linked-up knot that, in and of itself, forms the real of the knot’ (Lacan 2016: 89). The final status of the One in How It Is participates in this équivoque between the link and the knot or the ‘link-knot’ (Lacan 2016: 93). When the rounds are squeezed together, it slides towards the knot; otherwise, it presents itself like a link or chain. Both conditions inscribe a coexistence of solitude and company but with a delicate difference. In the link/chain, the One of knotting is constructible while in the knot it is already constructed. In the knot, three ghost within One and in the chain One ghosts within three. Borromean logic is equivocal in intermeshing both these possibilities. The finale of How It Is plays on this equivocal relation between the One and the three. The final position shows the slide from the chain to the knot which explains the insistence on being One or alone, but the diacritical markers of quotation and capitalization write the presence of three in One. Instead of a movement from multiplicity to solitude, this move can be read as a tightening of the Borromean chain into the knot where there is an apparent return to the One, but the three of multiple still ghost in it. The three is not inside the One – two as voice and three as Bom are written on both inside and outside of the One. They are written in a way that the inside-outside dichotomy is dissolved by this topological operation. The chain in its slide towards the knot composes justice by retaining both the one and the many. Lacanian knot may offer a subjective instantiation of Beckettian justice in How It Is. But it is Beckett and not Lacan who gives an ethico-political

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dimension to this collective logic by insisting on the power of anyone to dissolve the community. The ‘I’, like ‘the unnamable’, becomes a partition between two possibilities of One and not-One. The voice inside marks the division of the One, and Bom and the series outside mark an exponential break with it. Beckettian parlêtre is marked by both these possibilities. The ethical coexistence of solitude and company reinforces the claim that ‘we have our being in justice’ (Beckett 2009b: 108).

Modal logic and the writing of the impossible How It Is installs the impossible as a signature of the Real in its finale by combining two kinds of writing. The writing of the multitude stops in written speech and continues in the ex-sistence of writing in speech. This grounds a contradiction, i.e. the narrator is both One and not-One (both p and ~p). This is how Lacanian logic becomes the ‘science of the Real.’ In Seminar XIV, he critiques a logic that reduces truth-function to meaning at the cost of ‘the signifying articulation’ (21.6.1967). By unsettling the semantic foundation of classical logic, Lacan points to the impossibility of ‘fixing any meaning that is univocal’ and shifts truth-function to the act of signifying articulation. This aporetic logic passes into the Real by excluding meaning. It also highlights the signifying act that tilts the signifier towards the letter. In Seminar XXI, Lacan observes that the Freudian logic of the unconscious does not know the principle of contradiction (Freud 2010: 341). For Lacan, the unconscious knows something of the impossible and overrides the ‘either/or’ with a ‘both/and’ logic in forming the Real (see Seminar XXI: 19.2.1974). Beckettian One introduces the function of the impossible by rejecting the principle of non-contradiction: it is both One and not-One (many). If we go by Lacan’s thesis that what is rejected by the Symbolic reappears in the Real, the return of the repressed capitals brings back the rejected Real as a logical impossibility. The narrator’s signifying articulation that he is alone does not work solely on the basis of meaning, but the capitalized letter produces an antinomy at the level of the speech act. Non-relation heightens this antinomic Real. It is formalized that the narrator is both alone and not alone, but we cannot determine the truth value of either statement. There is strictly speaking no relation between these two statements, inscribed at two non-related levels of writing. This non-rapport produces a Real unconscious writing through a logic of the cut. It is impossible to know whether the subject knows this non-relation. In Seminar XXI, this epistemic and semantic aporia is posited as the Real event of logic, registered in an impasse: ‘What constitutes the Real is that through logic, something happens, which

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demonstrates not that both p and non-p are false, but that neither one nor the other can in any way be logically verified’ (19.2.1974). Aristotelian modal logic rejects the impossible by maintaining the law of non-contradiction, but Lacan reintroduces it in his logical square (developed from Seminars XIX to XXI) of the necessary, the contingent, the possible and the impossible.7 He translates these modals with reference to writing. At this stage, I am only interested in the implications of this logic for literary writing and not concerned with its sexual connotations. As Russell Grigg has argued, this logic is primarily ‘conceptual’ and does not have an intrinsic link with sexuality which is precisely why it can reveal something about the sexual (2008: 82). I will come back to its sexuated aspect in the final chapter. To return to Lacan’s square, two modals point to stoppage of writing while the other two indicate endless inscription: 1 The possible: ‘what stops being written’ 2 The contingent: ‘what stops not being written’ 3 The necessary: ‘what doesn’t stop being written’ 4 The impossible: ‘what doesn’t stop not being written’ The double negation in the formula of impossibility cannot be neutralized into affirmation in Lacanian logic because there is no law of the excluded middle. The Lacanian impossible is thus an infinite inscription of negation which ‘doesn’t stop.’ But what it doesn’t stop writing is a negation of writing (a ‘not being written’). This Real writing incorporates stoppage as well as unstoppability. One writing stops, and at that point, another writing becomes unstoppable. The ‘no’ of stoppage becomes the ‘on’ of continuity. Molloy says, ‘at the same time it is over and it goes on’ (2006: 31). The narrator of ‘Enough’ reflects: ‘When the pen stops, I go on. Sometimes it refuses. When it refuses I go on’ (1995: 186). The Unnamable famously ends with ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (2006: 407). When one cannot go on at the level of the signifier, perhaps they can still continue on the plane of the letter. This meeting of Symbolic and Real writings will be re-examined in the context of sexual non-relation in Chapter 5. The Real writing of antinomy ensures that the multitude is both what stops being written and what doesn’t stop being written. Insofar as the novel actually comes to an end with the ‘end of quotation’, the stoppage of writing becomes possible, but it radicalizes the impossible as infinity. While both are endless writings, the critical difference between the necessary and the impossible is that, unlike the former, the latter is a writing of negation. How It Is continues to write the infinite series on the surface of the capitalized letter. The emergence of capital letters itself is conditioned by negation. Capitals come into being by negating small letters. Not only are they defined by this negation (not-small letters) but they also perform this negation by

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arriving in the middle of a series of small letters. There is no full stop in How It Is which means capital letters come only in places where proper names occur. This accentuates the capital letter’s status as negation. A (k)not is written through the capitals, and the infinite progression of the series points to the unstoppability of this negative writing. The subject knots the One of solitude with the One of non-relational solidarity by making this apparent contradiction integral to logic. Beckettian series as writing that stops and goes on at the same time speaks to the Lacanian schema of the Impossible Real that ‘doesn’t stop not being written.’

A potentially infinite unconscious: Is there a Beckettian sinthome? Is there a fourth and a fifth? Does the Real logic of ‘plus-one’ open an infinity of unfinished and unfinishable How It Is-s? Does Bom’s final arrival not signal a part four where the narrator’s torment begins? If this system loops ad infinitum, why does the text choose a tripartite arrangement? Does this question speak to Lacan’s quadruple Borromean knot in Seminar XXIII which adds the fourth order of sinthome? Colette Soler argues that the fourth order introduces a solution-symptom. For her, this is a fundamental sinthome constructed between the Real and the Symbolic as a new S1 of auto-nomination. Theorizing a Lacanian double unconscious, Soler foregrounds Real unconscious through the letter of sinthome that the subject constructs as their irreducible proper name at the end of analysis. As seen above, the attempts at self-naming in part three cannot produce an answer. What is constructed in the place of name is failure of nomination – a negative writing. Evoking Texts for Nothing, Badiou notes Beckett’s preference for triadic arrangement or ‘triplicity’ (2003: 53). There are triadic arrangements in The Trilogy, Come and Go and Play. What Where uses three positions (apart from Bam’s giant head) to show the quadrat of Bam, Bom, Bem and Bim while the potential fifth figure (Bum) remains unnamed. Since Bam’s position is doubled (split between the big head and one of the four small heads), we are back to the ‘+1’ in a four-in-three and a five-in-four structure. Quad presents the ‘+1’ of three in its four walkers. The second part gestures towards an enfolding of the multiple into the One by removing the colours, which makes it impossible to distinguish between the four fully robed figures. The dimming final image returns to solitude as only one walker tiredly charts the square. There is no knowing whether the second, third and fourth figures will return, and this act will go on forever.8 Quad offers no exit from the Real square of the unconscious where moving bodies produce geometrical writing. There is no solution to the problem but an infinitesimal

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movement that hypothesizes the infinite as an immanent limit. The end of the text signals this endlessness. The infinite here is both a negation and an extension of the finite. If we evoke Badiou’s critique of Lacanian infinity and Russell Grigg’s critique of Badiou’s critique, we would notice that the debate operates between two conceptions of the infinite – the assumption of a Real potential infinity in Lacan and the Cantorian actualization of infinity in Badiou’s set-theoretical position. This debate is beyond the scope of this book, but let me qualify that the figuration of infinity in How It Is is not actual but hypothetical. Not only is this infinite multiplicity simultaneously posited and not posited but it is also situated as negation of numeration. The infinity of human chain is marked by the narrator’s desire to retain justice for all the crawlers. It is an effect of innumerability, i.e. a figure of the ‘not-all.’ What Badiou calls a negative definition of infinity as ‘operational inaccessibility’ is retained in Beckett’s text, and this could well be ‘Pre-Cantorian’ (Badiou 2008b: 219). But things are more complex. The figuration of infinity in How It Is is not purely negative. If it draws a limit to endless counting at the final remove, it also throws open the possibility of endless counting. It is in this double bind of opening and closure that Real writing approaches infinity. To radicalize the point, let me say that Real as infinity deconstructs the Aristotelian binary of the potential and the actual. Real infinity is both potential and actual. The divide between potentiality and actualization does not exist in the Real. Everything in the Real is both potential and actual which makes the Real an inexorable contradiction. The infinity in How It Is is not actualized but maintained as an open hypothesis. It is figured as a negation of numbering, but it is also a speculative extension from the minimal triad. Having said that, Beckett is Cantorian in removing the transcendental infinite and repositioning infinity as pure immanence. One fundamental impact of the German mathematician Georg Cantor’s (1845–1918) notion of ‘actual infinity’ is that it relocates infinity from a transcendental world of the divine to our immanent world of human actualities (see Brits 2018: 3). If actual infinity is actual in the sense that it is immanent and not transcendental, then Beckettian infinity in How It Is is actual indeed.9 As we have seen, Lacan indicates this extension as a hypothetical infinity of Borromean knots from the plaiting of the fundamental three. This triad in Beckett’s text is narrator, his Pim and his Bom. The third part of How It Is dabbles with the possibility of a minimal four, and this fourth figure is named Bem (98). At this point, the narrator is not sure of the arrangement and considers the possibility of having two different tormentors in Bem and Bom. He soon retracts and collapses the two figures into one: ‘Illumination here Bem is therefore Bom’ (98). This contraction suggests that if there is a four in How It Is, it is not in the minimal subjective condition but in the artistic construction on that triplicity. The final writing of the One as a cut that brings together the one and the three

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is itself a fourth term insofar as Bom’s arrival signals part four. In the Real numerical logic of the ‘+1’, there is a four in three (Bem in Bom). Naming is the vital operation of coupling in Beckett’s text. It pushes the Symbolic with the Real by insisting on corporeality and mathematization of signifier into letter. Like numbers, names have something to do with the Real. The act of naming in language goes beyond the Symbolic in an immanent way. There is a creative and inventive aspect to naming and hence the plethora of neologistic names. Names in How It Is are generic. Every tormentor is a Bom and every victim is a Pim. Beckett thus reduces proper names to common nouns, and this reduction opens up Roberto Harari’s reading of nomination in Seminar XXIII as opposed to Soler’s radicalization of a Real proper name. Soler is uncompromising on the irreducibility of this sinthomatic proper name at the end of analysis. For her, this name as the final One cannot come from the Other; it is the only self-named name of the subject (Soler 2014: 111). Her strategic radicalization screens a countermove in Seminar XXIII where Lacan is talking about the reduction of this proper name to common noun, as Harari notes. Lacan signals a re-entry of proper name into the field of common noun (see Lacan 2016: 73). This is Harari’s gloss: ‘What we should be able to achieve with analysands consists not only in making a proper-name for oneself, but in being able to reduce it again subsequently to the status of a common noun [nom]’ (302). I will counterbalance Soler’s reading with Harari’s on two accounts. First, this profanation of proper name into common noun is crucial as it avoids psychologism or ego psychoanalysis, which Lacan’s corpus categorically opposes. Secondly, it is important to retain the impossibility of the Real as a letter which is both a singular proper name and a universal common noun. Soler misses this Real antinomy by radicalizing the singularity of proper name at the cost of common noun’s profane universality. The irreducibility of proper name can easily lapse into an illusory phallic hook for the subject’s self-assumed singularity as egotistical sublime. Hence, the significance of the countermove in profaning the proper name. I also emphasize this profanation in fidelity to Beckett’s antinomic text, which trashes proper names of Bom and Pim into generic names or common nouns. The text variously underlines this profanation by stating that the choice of ‘Bom’ over ‘Bem’ is just a matter of preference (99) or commenting that only the final ‘m’ counts: ‘m at the end and one syllable the rest indifferent’ (52). The profanation climaxes when the voice’s question ‘WHAT’S MY NAME’ – an attempt at auto-nomination – yields no response. Beckett’s singularity lies in locating this unnameable point of the Real which marks the text’s endless ending. Is there a Beckettian sinthome that constructs a writing on the Real and creates a stopping point for the unconscious? The question not only appeals to Lacanian psychoanalysis where a radical identification with a fundamental symptom is proposed as the end of analysis, but it also

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FIGURE 2.3  The fourth ring of the sinthome (cf. Seminar XXIII)

activates literary writing produced by the ‘invention’ of the letter.10 Suzanna Dow approaches ‘Beckettian sinthome’ by counterpointing it with Joycean sinthome. She locates it in his ‘syntax of weakness’ as opposed to Joyce’s epistemic mastery (Dow: 17). For me, Beckett’s writing does not propose any exit from unconscious inscription through the sinthome as fixion but constructs a sinthomatic partition to mark the non-relation between terminable and interminable analysis. I argue that Beckett is on the side of a Real unconscious, which is potentially infinite, and his work does not unhook itself from that Real but foregrounds the no-exit structure of the unconscious. Žižek implies this in the ‘Beckettian formula of drive’s persistence’ (‘Beckett with Lacan’: n.p.). Beckettian ‘ignorance’ has nothing to do with the analysands’ resistance in their ‘passion for ignorance’, as theorized by Lacan (1998: 121). It is not that Beckettian writing does not want to know. On the contrary, it wants to interrogate the aporetic point where knowledge reaches an impasse. There is a desire to know the Real which can only stop at limits of knowledge. This limit opens up a potentially infinite Real unconscious not only within the text but also outside it at the point of closure. The Beckettian text does not wish to exit this unconscious through the sinthomatic solution of Joycean writing, but on the contrary the construction of the Beckettian sinthome exposes the unstoppability of nonrelation in the Real unconscious. In his 1975 talk, ‘Joyce the Symptom I’, preceding Seminar XXIII, Lacan’s thesis is that Joyce ‘unsubscribes’ (désabonné) himself from the unconscious through the lalangue (an invented language of neologisms in this case) that he creates and enjoys in Finnegans Wake (1987: 26). For Lacan, this

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is an exit from the unconscious and what remains in Joyce’s final work is a jouissance of the letter that is not hooked to an unconscious (27). This radical thesis pushes Lacan towards the identification with the sinthome as an end of analysis in Joyce. I do not think there is any such unsubscription from the unconscious in Beckett but rather a constant radicalization of Real unconscious as writing that ‘doesn’t stop not being written.’ Beckettian sinthome is the Real One, constructed at the end of How It Is. It inscribes the inescapability of Real unconscious as a minimal function of writing. The Real is radicalized as an extensive limit of potential infinity where Beckett pushes the sinthomatic name with the unnameable sinthome. This makes an immanent ending possible by positing interminable infinity. Beckett’s work intervenes into the Lacanian structure to make a significant transformation by opening the teeming one-multiple of solitude and company through Real unconscious. There is no master signifier or S1 that emerges at the end of Beckettian text, except a suggestion of endlessness punctuated by the act of ending. What we have is not a One of solitude but a solitary One of company. This reduces the unconscious to a possibly infinite impasse. Beckettian sinthome is a writing that separates the end of terminable analysis from the infinity of interminable analysis by way of nonrelation. Borromean logic ensures that the finite and the infinite are knotted by the One which becomes an asymptotic four by conjoining and disjoining one with three. This singular Beckettian sinthome is neither the swarming Lacanian One of substitution nor the Lacanian One of a new master signifier that fixes the unconscious. This singularity splices the two Ones into a unity that is also riven by the triplicity of the Real. The fourth order of sinthome in How It Is is the construction of this convergently divergent One. It leads us to an irresolvable unconscious, endlessly ending in the Real. It is Miller and Soler, more than Lacan, who aim at a theoretical consolidation of Lacanian clinic. In their post-Lacanian developments, they occasionally veer towards closure which may not do justice to the radically open nature of problems in Lacan’s work. Beckett radicalizes Lacan as a greater problematizer of textual mathematics. He goes one notch further than Lacan by posing not just a Real unconscious of impasses but a more specifically irresolvable Real unconscious that endlessly ends and ends on and on.

‘Swarm’ of writing and the Real One Soler and Justin Clemens emphasize Lacan’s letter-like formula, ‘Y a d’ l’Un’ (‘There’s such a thing as One’), from contesting perspectives. For Soler, this One is a ‘signifying swarm’ (Lacan 1998: 143) that opens up the Real unconscious, incarnated in the letters of lalangue (Soler 2014: 22–23). For Clemens, the S1, homophonic with the French ‘l’essaim’ (‘swarm’), opens

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a unary differential repetition as the work of ‘one-multiple’ or ‘+1’ (Clemens: 161). Although Soler and Clemens fundamentally disagree on the identification of the One with the ‘unary trait’ (more on this trait to follow), they both see the One of ‘signifying swarm’ as a Real One. This Real One is a figure of subjective singularity, but as we have seen, the singular in Lacan’s Borromean logic does not exclude the multiple. Irrespective of whether the S1 of the swarm is the one-multiple of the unary trait that marks and remarks itself, Soler and Clemens agree that there is a series of Ones in this Y a d’ l’Un. A series of Ones formalizes Y a d’ l’Un as a composite Real One built on a non-relation of its constituent Ones. I have shown that Beckett’s coexistence of solitude and company is the effect of Borromean knotting where there are three Ones (R-S-I), all alone in a knot which is both three and One. Borromean logic posits a One all alone but, as Lacan reflects in Seminar XX, it is not one One but any number of Ones that appear in this swarm: S1 (S1 (S1 (S1 →S2))) (Lacan 1998: 143) Lacan is clear on the point that it is the swarm or the master signifier that ‘assures the unity of the subject’s copulation with knowledge’, and the only place where this swarm can be ‘discerned’ is lalangue and not language (1998: 143). As Soler demonstrates, this unconscious, made of lalangue, is Real. What interests me in this is the mathematical question of number. There is a potentially infinite series of Ones all alone in this lalangue. I would argue that numbers in Beckett’s text figure as coordinates for subjective counting. These numbers are corporeal incarnations, mathematizing the signifier into the letter. Lacan defines the Real One as ‘the signifying order insofar as it is instituted on the basis of the envelopment by which the whole chain subsists’ (143). Soler rightly observes that at this moment of Lacan’s teaching, ‘we have a Symbolic which is no longer language but langue, to be written lalangue’ (3). This lalangue of the Real letter or what Lacan calls ‘the One, incarnated in llanguage (lalangue)’ (Lacan 1998: 143) opens the gateway to the Real unconscious as writing. Lacan’s schema above clarifies that, like each Borromean ring, all the S1s are alone – separated by parentheses. Subject’s copulation with knowledge happens only when the series reaches its terminus, i.e. when the final S1 of the series represents the subject for the S2 of knowledge. What happens if this epistemic copulation fails? As Soler shows, the Real in later Lacan is split between subjective knowledge and knowledge without subject in the Real unconscious (14; 21). This is a question running through Seminars XX and XXI: Is there knowledge in the Real? (1998: 96; Seminar XXI: 23.4.1974). Lacan’s answer is complex. In Seminar XXI, he clarifies that

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unconscious knowledge is knowledge in the Real ‘even if there is no subject who knows it’ and he qualifies this unsubjectivated Real knowledge as a ‘depot’ (12.2.1974). This problematizes subject’s copulation with knowledge as Real unconscious knowledge appears in the form of ‘discordance’ (11.6.1974). The subject at the end of How It Is shows no signs of knowing that his master Bom has arrived and started writing on his body. The return of the repressed capitals only makes this knowledge available to the text. The text becomes a Real depot of unsubjectivated knowledge, transmissible only to the reader through the textual unconscious. As capitalized writing becomes a mark of the immanent voice through screaming, there is no way of knowing if the subject is aware of this writing on his body and his signifiers’ bodies. This is an aporetic point where the Real unconscious punches a hole in knowledge by forming an ‘impossible heap’ of knowledge without subject. For Lacan, ‘effect of truth is a collapse of knowledge’ (2007: 186) and truth’s half-saying has to do with its other Real half, outside the Symbolic. ‘The true aims at the real’ (Lacan 1998: 91) and the analyst’s discourse attempt to situate knowledge (S2) in the locus of truth, but the Real functions as the impossible, making sure that this knowledge in the Real is constituted but not supplied as a content of knowledge. Just as the potter makes the pot by constituting the void rather than filling it up, which would destroy his craft, psychoanalytic discourse fixes knowledge as a half-said truth. Real unconscious knowledge is not a piece of knowledge held by the subject but a ‘knowing how to do things (savoir-faire) with llanguage (lalangue)’ (1998: 139). This savoir-faire of saying (dire) effects and affects lalangue which is what language is made of (139). Lacan mobilizes affect in tandem with letters of lalangue in Seminar XX. As we shall see, in our reading of Worstward Ho, this affect of lalangue is homologous with Real jouissance. Lacan’s move from knowledge to knowhow anticipates a negation of knowledge into the form of non-knowledge, fixed in the half-saying of truth. Beckett’s pun (‘nohow’) makes this latent negation manifest. This is not phallogocentric knowledge but a Real hole in knowledge that offers

FIGURE 2.4  Positions in discourses

FIGURE 2.5  Matheme of the analytic discourse

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the subject the possibility of having a savoir-faire with lalangue. This is an avatar of knowledge as savoir-faire with non-knowledge where knowledge is deposited at the margins of the textual unconscious. Although there is neither a knowing subject nor a transferential ‘subject-supposed-to-know’, the textual unconscious still makes a depot of knowledge. This Real inscribes an unsubjectivated but textually situated non-knowledge. Soler clarifies that this non-knowledge is on the side of the One. As she says, this savoir-faire is ‘precisely the correlate of the non-knowledge of the One incarnated in the unconscious as lalangue’ (113). The Real can only appeal to an ‘act of knowledge but as a form of non-knowing within knowing’ (Moncayo and Romanowicz: 25). Lacan’s formula ‘there is no such thing as a sexual rapport (iln’y a pas de rapport sexuel)’ suggests that in the half-said truth of the subject, S1 and S2 cannot copulate into subjective knowledge due to the impossibility of the Real. Soler glosses this Real non-relation as ‘the impossible copulation of the representative or representatives of the subject with knowledge’ (21). For Lacan, this non-relation, coterminous with the absence of sexual relation, is the truth of Y a d’ l’Un: ‘The function of the One, the One insofar as it is only there to […] represent solitude – the fact that the One doesn’t truly knot itself with anything that resembles the sexual Other’ (1998: 128). So ‘the Borromean knot is the best metaphor of the fact that we proceed only on the basis of the One’ (1998). Just as the ‘Other cannot be added to the One’ because the Other is ‘the One-missing (l’un-en-moins)’ (129), in an infinite Borromean chain, there is no way of grounding the knotting of constituent Ones in the constituted One. Soler radicalizes the thesis of an irreducible Real name that would fix the unconscious but as we have seen, the original Lacanian figuration retains both the One and the series except the clinical pragmatism of a solution-symptom in the Joyce case. Beckettian unconscious is terminally interminable in which the Real doesn’t stop not being written. The function of sinthome here is neither to stop nor to continue the unconscious writing. Beckettian sinthome partitions the former from the latter even as it knots them up in a Borromean way. This unconscious underlines the Real of non-relation between the One and the Other which makes it simultaneously terminable and interminable as it continues to travel towards the Other. It is not only the forgetting function in Beckett’s text that indexes this non-relation. The final writing of the One and the series on the differential blade of the signifier and the letter is the Real index of non-relation. There is no relation between the signifier which communicates the sense that the subject is One in solitude and the letter of capitalization that writes the subject as a One in a lalangue of serial S1s. Had there been a relation, it could have opened the possibility of quilting through a phallic master signifier (S1). Jacques-Alain Miller remains true to the Lacanian possibilities of a psychoanalysis that posits ‘endless series’ without phallic anchorage:

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‘Lacan’s words […] frankly refute the notion of an end of analysis’ (Miller 2002: n.p.). He highlights rejection of meaning in later Lacan as the Real explodes. He presents Lacan’s final provocations of disjoining subjective meaning and knowledge from the Real through a ‘regime of outsidemeaning’ in ‘pure psychoanalysis’ (Miller 2002; 2003: n.p.). I will return to how this rejection of meaning in the Real responds to the unconscious in Beckett’s efforts at subverting meaning. Minimization of meaning will produce a minimal etching of Real inscription. The human chain in How It is a swarming inscription of solitary Ones and Lacan’s pun generates a letter that bridges the One of the S1 with the many of the swarm. Lacan contends the ‘buzzing’ ‘signifying swarm’ of signifier Ones as subjective singularity written in the Borromean One (1998: 144). Justin Clemens’s reading of the swarm corroborates the Beckettian nuance that solitary is solidary. Clemens observes that in Lacan, ‘the subject’s division can be distributed across 1+ bodies’ or again ‘a subject tends towards an indeterminate proliferation of bodies without any concomitant obliteration, proliferation or dispersion of the subject’ (153). This is another approach to the ‘endless series.’ Borromean knot as Real writing supports the signifier One which Lacan calls a ‘unary’ signifier insofar as Borromean knot as writing supports ‘unary trait’ (Lacan 2016: 125). He reflects that what ‘makes the One’ also ‘initiates substitution’ (126). ‘Unary trait’ is Lacan’s way of translating Freud’s ‘single trait (einziger Zug)’ from Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In this text, Freud refers to a particular identification in which the subject unconsciously imbibes any single trait from the Other. His example is young Dora’s imitation of her father’s cough (Freud 1949: 64). Lacan’s translation of ‘single’ as ‘unary’ is explicitly mathematical as it touches on number. For him, this ‘unary trait’ is not single. It is a ‘one-multiple.’ It can be a serial inscription of knotted but non-related singularities. In ‘Geneva lecture on the Symptom’, Lacan clarifies: ‘It is this unary trait that the whole question of the written revolves around. […] It is always a question of a configuration of the trait’ (23). For Lacan, unary trait is written mathematically in the S1 which takes its support from Borromean One. Clemens underlines the ambiguity in the relation between unary trait and signifier One. Lacan is cryptic here and Clemens resolves the opacity with the swarm: ‘the “one” of the “unary trait” is essentially the “one” of repetition, that is […] what […] becomes the onemultiple of the essaim’ (161). He describes this relation between unary trait and unary signifier as an incessant process of marking and re-marking: So the unary trait must be re-marked (or re-marks itself); it is only ‘unary’, one, by being so re-marked; as it is re-marked, it becomes a swarm, the S1, the precondition of language in the subject, what emerges between imaginary and symbolic as the trace of the real (jouissance). (Clemens: 163)

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This repetition turns unary One into a swarming one-multiple (+1) of signifier Ones. It indicates how One and (not-)all jointly produce a swarming solitude in How It Is. The repetitive torment of jouissance as a writing of painful enjoyment gives company to each crawler. As soon as the jouissance of torment is over, they become oblivious of company and declare themselves alone – whether it’s incarnated One(s) of lalangue or unary trait of the S1. To return to How It Is here, it stages a writing that continues on the bodies of the crawlers in an endless chain of repetitions. The novel has a strictly unary arrangement: every tormentor has the same victim and every victim, the same tormentor. The forgetting function ensures that each encounter with the Other is registered as the first. This gives a unary dimension to Beckett’s textual logic. Each time the encounter happens, it is inscribed on the Other’s body as One and each encounter reiterates this One in a series but without addition. There is no passage from one number to another here but only a serial re-marking of Ones. This failed counting reflects negation of numeration in the ‘innumerable’ series. This corporeal re-marking of Ones-without-addition inaugurates an infinite Real unconscious. For Soler, the S1 incarnated in lalangue is not the one-multiple of unary signifier and it cannot come from the Other (23). According to her, the sinthomatic One is an irreducible Real name of the subject (111). For Clemens, the swarm of S1s as the ‘+1’ of ‘unary trait’ comes from the Other, which is consistent with Freud’s ‘single trait.’ It creates the possibility of a divided subject of one-multiple bodies. While I am drawing on Soler and Clemens’s shared accent on the Real One of writing, whether this One comes from the Other or not is also an important question in How It Is. It is a Real question that makes subjective knowledge impossible and opens a savoir-faire with the Real through non-knowledge. At one level, the writing of the One obviously comes from the Other through the victim’s encounter with his tormentor when he writes on his victim’s back. But at another level, the final composition of the One problematizes the existence of the Other by pushing it towards Real ex-sistence. The final inscription of the One that combines solitude with company is thus difficult to attribute to the Other. The trace of the Other preserved in the capitalized letter is at odds with what the content of the signifier transmits, i.e. the Other doesn’t exist. This contradiction installs the impossible logic of the Real, homologous with non-relation. The writing of the One thus both comes and does not come from the Other, and the Other both exists and does not exist. This sinthomatic One is made of non-relational coexistence of solitude and company. Instead of making the possible unconscious writing stop, Beckettian sinthome discloses the impossible infinity of Real unconscious.

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‘End of quotation’: Literature, psychoanalysis and writing Peter Brooks constructs a literature-psychoanalysis interface by deploying narrative as desire. His Freudian reading not only gestures towards a textual unconscious but also leads us to see literature as condition for psychoanalysis – an idea explored in Chapter 1. Brooks writes: ‘It is rather the superimposition of the model of the functioning of the psychic apparatus on the functioning of the text that offers the possibility of a psychoanalytic criticism’ (1992: 112). I would like to depart from Brooks’s idea of textual unconscious by stressing liminality and impasse. Like the end of Beckettian analysis that holds up Real unconscious as an interminable impasse, the end of the literary text by way of the letter inscribes a senseless, material writing where the text stops at one level but goes on forever at another. For Brooks, end of a narrative retroactively gives it meaning like the period that completes the sense of a sentence: ‘If the motor of narrative is desire, totalizing, building ever-larger units of meaning, the ultimate determinants of meaning lie at the end, and narrative desire is ultimately, inexplicably, desire for the end’ (1992: 52). As opposed to the thesis that narrative end is signifying, I argue that narrative end in Beckett is materially non-signifying as it opens a Real infinity. Beckettian ending is immanent ‘collapsion’ where narrative jettisons itself into a material trace of non-signifying endlessness. Beckett’s texts often follow a mathematical and logical form to its extreme point where it stops working and the texts end precisely on such points of unworkability. They keep marking and re-marking Real impasses in mathematical formalizations in Beckett’s textual mechanics.11 In Beckett, literature becomes a logicized writing of this Real unconscious as impasse. This unique inscription of Real unconscious demands a Lacanian reading because Lacan’s final teachings are post-psychoanalytic in dissolving the Freudian unconscious.12 Far from solemnizing the Freudian unconscious, Beckett trashes it into a minimally meaningful letter. I approach Beckett’s trashing of the unconscious into an endlessly ending Real with later Lacan where the Freudian unconscious is under critique as ‘elucubration of knowledge on mental debility’ (Miller 2003; see Lacan: 11.1.1977). Opposing Freud’s psychoanalytic construction of knowledge on formations of the unconscious (slip, dream, bungled actions and so on), Lacan suggests that the Real unconscious is not a matter of knowledge. Miller for once expresses this anti-systemic accent in Lacan as a ‘not-know-what-to-dowith.’ If there is no knowledge to fix the unconscious, it speaks to its Real infinity in Beckett. Miller rightly proposes that this Lacanian unconscious is ultimately about the speaking-being’s discordance with Real, Symbolic and Imaginary. The Imaginary unconscious of the so-called mind fails to put the subject into any kind of relation with the Real.

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Beckett’s texts eventually incarnate themselves at these impasses of logical writing. They not only show that there is writing in the unconscious but also indicate that this writing messes with the unconscious as a blunder or de l’une-bévue (Seminar XXIV: 16.11.1976). Beckett’s writing localizes this blunder where textual logic collapses (‘something wrong there’), and the text can only end by indicating endless ‘collapsions.’ This is the final frontier where the text installs its own impasse as a Real writing of the unconscious. Literature does not have an unconscious but makes an unconscious as blunder at the textual margin. Freud observes: ‘The author […] directs his attention to the unconscious in his own mind, he listens to its possible developments and lends them artistic expression’ (1997: 82). As we can see here, Freudian literary exploration cannot unmoor the unconscious from the author. I would make a case for Real unconscious as textual product and not authorial process. As Jean-Michel Rabaté suggests, this ‘textual unconscious’ is ‘at work’ in the text, instead of causing it to come to life (2014a: 208), as Freud would have it. This Real unconscious is literary insofar as it is a ‘supposed deduction’ at the margin of Beckettian text. This literary practice of the letter, as we have seen in the previous chapter, is a condition for the inventive act of psychoanalytic interpretation. Beckett takes the literary to a critical post-psychoanalytic thesis of the unconscious as an irresolvable problematic of endless ending. The final teaching of Lacan resonates with this critique by reducing the mental Freudian unconscious to nothing more than an invented literary ‘supposition’ for psychoanalysis to have effects on analysands. These effects of interpretation, as we have seen, are also literary in an equivocally creative way and hence Lacan’s turn to poetry in Seminar XXV. If the unconscious can only be depicted as a hypothesis for psychoanalysis to happen (see Lacan: 10.5.1977), Beckettian Real unconscious is an endless ending which minimizes it to a perpetual transit of stoppage and unstoppability. There is no exit from Beckettian unconscious because it does not exist in the Symbolic but ex-sists as a Real break in Symbolic meaning. Miller’s figuration of Lacanian unconscious as a cut between ‘speaking’ and ‘being’ in the parlêtre (speaking-being) speaks to Beckett’s writing of the unconscious as a Real blunder that collapses knowledge and meaning. Later Lacan moves from the Symbolic to the Real unconscious to distinguish Freudian unconscious from his own definition of unconscious ‘in the Real outside meaning’ (Miller 2003: n.p.). The unconscious for Beckett is this insurmountable textual limit of signification. Worstward Ho ends with the terminal imperative of not going any further. In the short prose text, ‘Ceiling’, the operative sentence inscribing this limit is: ‘Further one cannot.’ Not only does it describe the textual margin but also performs its impasse by returning at the end of each major paragraph in shortening forms: ‘Further one cannot’, ‘Further one –’, ‘Further –’ (2009a: 129–130). The impasse here is marked by the antinomy of this gradually shortening imperative not to go

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further and the mobility, implied by the ‘on’ that immediately follows the sentence on every occasion. Let me now conclude this painstakingly long discussion of how geometry and arithmetic become mathematical portals to inscribe fragments of Real writing in Beckettian text. Beckettian One is a radical break. In the finale of How It Is, Beckett uses the discontinuity of motion to break the One. The final One breaks the One of solitude with the serial One of endless unconscious. Beckettian subject is One all alone in the intersubjective chain of signifiers, and this writing function divides the subject to offer a glimpse of ‘the structure of the subject as a discontinuity in the real’ (Lacan 2006: 678). How It Is draws out ‘being’ from where the letter writes a hyphenated break in ‘speaking-being.’ The non-relation between the one and the many in Real One is the instantiation of this break. Lacan’s remark in Seminar XX responds to Beckett, as it were: ‘That solitude, as a break in knowledge, not only can be written but it is that which is written par excellence, for it is that which leaves a trace of a break in being’ (120). From Real writing’s production of this break in knowledge, we infer a being in the unsaid that is formalized in the said. This is a corporeal, materialist and deeply lacking ontology that emerges from later Lacan. There is no formalization of the unconscious except this Real writing of impasse for later Lacan, and Beckett is indeed his comrade here. What remains of the unconscious in Beckett’s peerless mud without knowledge is an immanent ex-sistence that pushes the subject from outside through persistent quotations and corporeal writings. This mathematical writing of geometric movement, numerical logic and diacritical marks reduce the unconscious to a Real aporia of the infinite. This infinity is deduced from a finite triplicity and supposed as a negative extension of the finite.

Notes 1

See my review essay on Brown’s book ‘Reading Beckett, Lacan and the Voice: Ventriloquism of the Literary Object’ in S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, December 2016.

2

See de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, ‘Part One: General Principles’, chapter one: ‘Nature of the Linguistic Sign’ (1995: 67).

3

This non-relation is related to sexuality as a non-relation, which will be explored in the final chapter. As Bruce Fink comments, the written bar attests that ‘the relationship between the signifier and the signified cannot serve us as a model for sexual relationships’ (2004: 85).

4

See Disjecta for ‘Les Deux Besoins’, 55–57.

5

For the surd reference, see the sixth chapter of Murphy (1963: 79). In the fourth chapter, Neary refers to Hippasos and notes how he was ‘drowned in a puddle’ for divulging ‘the incommensurability of side and diagonal’ (36).

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6

See the sixth session of Seminar XII for Lacan’s articulations on the zero as the condition for the generation of a series of Ones (69). See chapter two of The Real Jouissance of Uncountable Numbers by Moncayo and Romanowicz for a detailed reading of Lacan’s use of Frege’s logic.

7

For more on Lacan’s subversion of modal logic, see Lorenzo Chiesa’s The NotTwo: Logic and God in Lacan.

8

See Brett Stevens’s article ‘A Purgatorial Calculus: Beckett’s Mathematics in “Quad”’ for another approach to Beckett’s interest in aporetic mathematical structures.

9

See Baylee Brits’s book Literary Infinities for a strong reading of Cantorian actual infinity in Modernist literature, including Beckett. For a Lacanian approach to infinity, see the third part of Douane Rousselle’s book Lacanian Realism.

10 See Lacan’s Seminar XXIII for more on the sinthome. Also see Colette Soler’s essay, ‘Literature as Symptom.’ 11 A mathematization of language can be traced back to Murphy and Watt. The figural description of chess game between Murphy and Mr. Endon, the ex-centric geometry of the circle and the point in Erskine’s room, and the exhaustively inexhaustible lists of things in Mr. Knott’s room are instances. In Watt, there is a mathematical play with combinatorial logic in the sections on the Lynch family, the permutations regarding Mr. Knott’s dinner, the examining committee scene and so on. In the conversations between Watt and the narrator, where word orders in a sentence and letter orders in a word are inverted one by one, the signifier is trashed into seemingly meaningless matter, i.e. the letter (Beckett 2006: 171). The Lost Ones continues to mathematize language and engages with the mathematical form of space. 12 See Miller’s essay, ‘Lacan’s Later Teaching.’

3 Company and the Motility of Real Unconscious

‘Not count! One of the few satisfactions in life!’ — Beckett (‘All That Fall’ (2003: 190)) ‘Extraordinary how mathematics help you to know yourself.’ — Beckett (Molloy (2006: 26)) To continue from where we had left off, this chapter will study Real unconscious subject in Beckett’s Company. The text presents this Real subject through corporeal thinking, counting and mathematical formalization – topics we have broached while looking at How It Is. We will build on our cursory remarks on motility as Real writing here. Corporeality of a mathematically formalized human body is integral to Beckett’s writing of Real unconscious. Corporeal thinking in Company oscillates between two fundamental mathematical operations of addition and subtraction. I will show how this thinking ‘act’ responds to intersubjective need, demand and desire and formalizes the unconscious speaking-being. Counting drives this corporeal thinking that involves a movement from the fact of solitude towards a fiction of company where the subject is open to the multiple of alterity. The notion of company is intrinsic to thinking which approximates Lacan’s critique of Cartesian cogito. For Lacan, in Descartes’s ‘I think therefore I am’, ‘therefore’ is a break. Like the bar of repression between the signifier and the signified, it suggests a split between the thinking ‘I’ and the ‘I’ of being. Thinking is homologous to motility, and it opens up company in this schismatic and poly-subjective movement. In another Lacanian reflection on the Cartesian formula, ‘therefore I am’ becomes the grammatical object

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of the verb; ‘think’ which suggests that ‘therefore I am’ is a thought of the I who thinks (Seminar XIX: 8.3.1972). The ‘I’ of being here becomes the product of the thinking I. The I that comes into being becomes a fictional construction of someone else’s thought. This opening towards company underscores thinking’s ability to conjure a fictional self into existence.

The subject of unconscious In Company, the opening proposition ‘A voice comes to one in the dark’ separates the voice from the speaker, making room for company. To the one on his back in the dark, a voice narrates someone’s past memories in second person. In one of these stories, Beckett had initially referred to Freudian repression but later omitted it. This makes a strong case for psychoanalysis as a textual ghost here. Let us look at the omitted passage: ‘You banished the whole episode from your thoughts. All this beneath the threshold of course. This much later when steeping in the works of Freud and his followers was the nearest you ever came to an explanation’ (Krance: 82). The silent listener is unsure whether the voice addresses him. The thirdperson narrator describes the listener’s confusion regarding the ‘you’ in the voice. The narrator is coterminous with the ‘devised deviser’ who creates this triad. The listener wonders if he is ‘overhearing a communication not intended for him’, but there is nothing to prove the existence of a companion. The problem of reference is at the heart of this situation: Use of the second person marks the voice. That of the third that cankerous other. Could he speak to and of whom the voice speaks there would be a first. But he cannot. He shall not. You cannot. You shall not. (2009a: 3–4) This passage uses a logical style to acknowledge the impossibility of speaking in first person. The narrator cannot directly address the listener, which refutes the possibility of first-person singular. It hints that voice, listener and deviser are breakages within the same subject – cracks opened up for company. The narrator-deviser cannot communicate with the listener without the mediation of the voice. The emphasis on ‘He shall not’ and ‘You shall not’ in the passage above implies an absolute need for this mediation. This affective ‘need for company’ formalizes textual logic here. As we have seen in the previous chapter, there is no battle between logic and affect in Beckett and Lacan. Structural logic in a textual system is often misunderstood as being dry while in these two thinkers, it is affect that triggers structures. Affect is what moves the structure. It is that which makes the structure moving. In other words, it is an affective motility. We will come back to this aspect.

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Lacan locates the unconscious in the split between ‘subject of enunciation’ and ‘subject of reference.’ He considers ‘I’ as a ‘shifter’, divided between the speaking subject and the subject who is spoken (Lacan 2006: 430). Carla Locatelli marks a similar split in Company: ‘When the self speaks to himself, it cannot coincide with the self who is speaking’ (174). The logic of this triadic subjective division is significant. Subject divides into a hearer and a third-person narrator who is the devised deviser of this division. He is included in his devising: ‘Himself he devises too for company’ (2009a: 16). However, this two is not sufficient. A third figure, i.e. the second-person voice, is required for mediation. The employment of this third to connect first with second indicates the requirement of a second person to extract the first person as evidence of identification from the hearer. It is only the third of voice that makes the narrator’s coupling with the hearer possible. This triadic textual logic in which the third is an indispensable unifier for the couple speaks to the aforementioned Borromean logic of coupling. It activates the numerical logic of ‘+1’ insofar as we fall back on three to reach two (0, 1, 2). We will return to the question of number soon. Lacanian thesis of sexual non-relation is founded on the bedrock of linguistic castration where the phallic signifier is the third that knots a two. In ‘La Troisième’ (‘The Third’), this ‘thirded’ function of phallus ensures the impossibility of a direct, unmediated, dyadic rapport: ‘The phallus stops us from having a rapport with something which would be our sexual respondent. It is our para-sexuated respondent, and each one knows that the “para” consists in what each one keeps aside, what each one retains beside the other’ (Lacan 1975b: 39). Two sexes are joined by the third and constitute a rapport only insofar as they are beside each other like Borromean rings in a mediated triadic relation. This third can also be the Symbolic mediation of speech as an inalienable mediator between two speaking-beings. Lacan’s critique of the Imaginary intersubjective relation in a couple comes across in the way he introduces the Symbolic order to rupture a ‘two-body psychology.’ For him, speech replaces the Imaginary dyad with a Symbolic mediation between the subject and the Other (see Seminar I). Voice as Beckettian mediator in Company has its constitutive origins in speech. Beckett’s positing of the independent third of voice as the only possible connector between the hearer and the narrator resonates with the triadic function of Lacanian speech. Thus, the unity of first person breaks into the triplicity of three grammatical persons. First person is produced only as a junction between second and third. This ‘I’ remains an ‘unnamable’ ‘last person’ – a never-to-be enunciated Real as the voice fails to elicit the desired self-identification from the hearer. Beckett’s triadic breakage beckons a question: when we refer to ourselves in the first, second and third persons, are we referring to the same subject? The invocation to thinking in speech and the resultant splitting of the subject activate the Lacanian unconscious. For Lacan, ‘the unconscious,

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being situated in the locus of the Other, can be found in every discourse, in its enunciation’ (2006: 707). But the act of enunciation excludes the Real subject from what is enunciated. Speech as the Other’s locus is the first break in the speaker’s solitude, and Company is obsessed with this question of enunciation: ‘Who is speaking.’ The text constructs a divisive speech act without letting us know if the subject is aware of his own speaking. This unknowing opens up Real textual unconscious. To return to the textual dwelling on enunciation: ‘And whose voice asking this? Who asks, Whose voice asking this? […] Who asks in the end, Who asks? (15)’ and again: ‘Who exclaims thus? Who asks who exclaims’ (39–40). Immediately after asking ‘who asks’, the narrator repeats it, this time about the identity of the speaker in the question: ‘who asks, who asks.’ This double questioning risks infinite regress into multiplicity: ‘Who asks, who asks, who asks’ ad infinitum. The text is aware of this logical problem: ‘Yet another still? Devising it all for company. What a further addition to company that would be! […] Quick leave him’ (40). The interrogation of third-person narrator necessitates the presence of a deviser for the narrator-deviser. Is he self-devised? The refrain, ‘Quick leave him’, has a logical function of ending potential proliferation. It stops a process of potentially infinite addition throughout Company. When the hearer-creature is called M and the creator, named W (two letters, inverse to one another), the narrator acknowledges: ‘But W too is creature. Figment’ (30). This opens the process to a potentially unstoppable series of creators who are creatures as well. ‘Quick leave him’ must come back as a logical stopper: ‘Yet another then. Of whom nothing. Devising figments to temper his nothingness. Quick leave him. Pause and again in panic to himself, Quick leave him’ (30). This ‘panic’ bespeaks the danger of unstoppable addition. It is efficacious to make a cut here in order to counterbalance the potentially infinite unconscious. Many imaginative details, considered ‘additions to company’, are never added by the text; be it a fly, the hearer may brush aside, or a dead rat, he may encounter. The narrator exclaims about them, ‘What an addition to company that would be’ but ultimately refrains from devising them: ‘But no. He would not brush away a fly’ (18). Addition is supplemented by subtraction here. Additions in Company are often hypothetically enunciated and withdrawn later. Subtraction underwrites addition in negations of hypotheses. A first-person singular voice, ‘murmuring now and then, Yes I remember’ is one such speculative addition but it remains an unrealizable prospect. Beckett writes: Deviser of the voice and of its hearer and of himself. Deviser of himself for company. Leave it at that. He speaks of himself as of another. He says speaking of himself, He speaks of himself as of another. Himself he devises too for company. Leave it at that. Confusion too is company up to a point. (16; my emphases)

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This passage attempts to resolve infinite regress by declaring the devised deviser, self-devised. His voice is marked by third person. It is clarified that the deviser ‘speaks of himself as of another’ which indicates ‘prosopopeia’ – a rhetorical device in which the speaker or writer communicates with the audience by speaking as another person or object. Beckett not only formulates but also performs this prosopopeia. The repetition of ‘He speaks of himself as of another’ enacts how the narrator refers to himself in third person.1 If the first locus of infinite addition is the prospectively endless series of devised devisers, the other is the possibility of unending hearers. The voice never says that the hearer is alone, and the narrator considers this a strategy of kindling ‘faint uncertainty and embarrassment’ (4). The hearer logically deduces that there is no one with him as he does not hear any other sound. Proximity of the voice is another clue, but he cannot be sure if its faintness is caused by actual distance: ‘For with what right affirm of a faint sound that it is a less faint made fainter by farness and not a true faint near at hand? Or of a faint fading to fainter that it recedes and not in situ decreases’ (21). The work through logic only produces uncertainty here. Such questions underline the aporetic logic of what the text self-reflexively calls a ‘reason-ridden’ textual imagination. Although the narrator sticks to his self-concluded solitude, he also maintains the ‘vague distress at the vague thought of his perhaps overhearing a confidence’ (29). As the passage cited above suggests, textual logic maintains safe distance from logocentric reason by kindling a Real affect of ‘confusion’ – one of the definitions of company. Another site of proliferation lies in the possibility that the voice does not refer to the one it addresses. This justifies Beckett’s unusual second-person point of view. The text painstakingly elaborates on this choice in a logical mode: If the voice is not speaking to him it must be speaking to another. So with what reason remains he reasons. To another of that other. Or of him. Or of another still. To another of that other or of him or of another still. […] So with what reason remains he reasons and reasons ill. For were the voice speaking not to him but to another then it must be of that other it is speaking and not of him or of another still. Since it speaks in the second person. Were it not of him to whom it is speaking speaking but of another it would not speak in the second person but in the third. For example, He first saw the light on such and such a day and now he is on his back in the dark. It is clear therefore that if it is not to him the voice is speaking but to another it is not of him either but of that other and none other to that other. So with what reason remains, he reasons ill. (6; my emphases) This ‘ill-reasoning’ as failure of logic in the Real stalls endless addition. If the voice does not address the hearer, it may speak of the Other it addresses

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or of another who is not addressed. If this unaddressed Other is absent, an outside to this ‘contourless dark’ must be imagined. But this outside remains impossible in the immanently self-enclosed world of the text. If he is part of the same dark, it results in an ambivalence that the voice may not refer to one particular other but anyone other than the person addressed. This uncovers the Symbolic as an order of endless Others (present and absent). Beckett’s use of second person comes to rescue by blocking the infinite slide as it ensures that the addressee is also the subject of reference. As the above passage works out, whoever the voice speaks to, it speaks ‘of that other and none other to that other.’ Second person thus erases the division between the one spoken to and the one spoken of, but it cannot unify the unconscious division between the one speaking and the one spoken of. The question of locus is important in Company. Are there two darks or one undivided dark, housing the creator and the creature? The answer offered after repeated interrogations and hesitations like ‘Another in another dark or in the same crawling on all fours devising it all for company’ (17) is in favour of one locus: ‘Another devising it all for company. In the same dark as his creature or in another. Quick imagine. The same’ (21). In the manuscripts, Beckett uses letters like ‘mathemes’ to designate company as C, ‘Hearer-Creature’ as A, voice as V and devised deviser as B while the decision to have one locus is termed a choice: ‘Dark chosen: same as A’s’ (Krance: 118). The devised deviser thus includes himself in this play of figments as a figment. This inclusive logic radicalizes the fissure. It focalizes a subject, divided into a conjurer and a conjured, by the act of conjuring. If the creator had been in another dark, he could not have been one of the figments. But in Beckett’s vision, he is self-created as a creature. If the creator was to have his own world extrinsic to his creature’s, there would be two different subjects but not two segments of one divided subject of the unconscious. If the signifying chain divides the unconscious subject, it does not necessarily mean that there is more than one person. It indicates that there are more than one subject position in a signifying chain. Lacan translates Freud’s ‘Wo Es war, soll Ich werden’ as ‘Where it was, I must come into being’ (2006: 435). This fundamental thesis about unconscious subject highlights originary displacement. It follows that (non)-relationality (substitution does not necessitate relationality) is constitutive of unconscious subject. The ‘it’ or ‘id’ that the I supplements in order to come into being is radically nonrelated to that which it has supplemented. In this opening towards company, whether this Other is internal or external is a problem that remains indeterminable. In Real unconscious topology, there is no distinction between inside and outside, and Company maintains this undecidability by suggesting that the openings to alterity are foldable within the subject. This hesitation underlines the neologistic ‘extimacy’ (the word unifying inside and outside is a coinage of Lacan’s) of Real unconscious as a written letter (Lacan 1992: 139).2

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‘Extimacy’ suggests that the unconscious is outside the subject by virtue of being inside it. Lacanian subject is a threshold between inside and outside like Beckett’s articulation in The Unnamable that ‘I’ is not the self but the ‘partition’ or the ‘tympanum’ between the self and the world (2006: 376). In Company manuscripts, Beckett notes, ‘Final other self-imagined’ (Krance: 118) in order to stop the bad infinity of endless others. Beckett’s ‘none other to that other’ resonates with Lacan’s ‘there is no Other of the Other’ (2006: 688; 693). Both these positions avoid infinite alterity. Positing an Other of the Other would have led to an Other of the Other of the Other and so on. There are Symbolic and Imaginary Others in the Borromean triad, but Lacan remains cryptic on the question of there being a Real Other. In a rare moment, he clarifies that this Real dimension of the Other is formalized in that there is no Other of the Other in Borromean knot (Seminar XXII: 18.3.1975). As we have seen, Real third constructs a Borromean couple of subject and Other but remains individually non-related to either one or the other. A crack is registered in the Symbolic Other because the Other of the Other has no solid ontological existence and remains Real: ‘In the place of the Other of the Other, there is no order of existence’ (Lacan 2016: 115). Although in the locus of the Real Other, there is no order of existence in the ontological sense, we still have ex-sistence there as a Real outline of absence. This Real absence of the Other reinforces the One, not as autistic Oneness but as a serial constellation of singularity. Unlike How It Is, which engages with interminable seriality, in Company, Beckett is quick to leave the infinite series. Mathematical function of the Real letter breaks interminability into a perpetually ending endlessness.

Company within the last solitude Company is finally enclosed by the voice as it envelopes the dialectical play of the one and the many: ‘Huddled thus you find yourself imagining you are not alone while knowing full well that nothing has occurred to make this possible’ (Beckett: 40–41). Here the second-person addressee is depicted as a creator and not just a creature. He resumes his fable from where it had been interrupted. As Daniel Katz observes, this enveloping moment turns the identities of the creator and the creature upside down: ‘It is the first time the hearer rather than the deviser, is referred to as engaged in fabling, and in this way, the tables are effectively turned; the hearer is no longer the mythic creation of a lonely deviser, but rather the creating deviser is the fable of a lonely hearer’ (173). This is not a backtracking from the three of company to the one of solitude but an ‘extimate’ zone of unconscious thinking, situated between the intersubjective and the intra-subjective. The hearer is conscious of the voice but unconscious of the narrator-deviser’s company. They are in

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the same dark but marked by an absence of relational encounter. The deviser knows the hearer, but the hearer never comes to know about the deviser’s presence. This makes for an unconscious company. If the final envelopment suggests that voice, hearer and deviser are all one, it also maintains the triad in Real writing in such a way that the difference between internal and external alterity becomes untenable. The text seems to end within the second-person voice, and if the voice is still there, how can the hearer be alone? Beckett’s indentation of the final word ‘alone’ opens a hint in the opposite direction. The ‘uninscribed typescript’ at Boston College (‘c2’ in Krance) registers only one significant change on the last page where Beckett adds an extra space and indents ‘Alone.’ This turns ‘Alone’ into a one-word paragraph. The effect of this apparently small change is profound. The final word, as a new paragraph, implies a position of exteriority for the voice: Till finally you hear how words are coming to an end. With every inane word a little nearer to the last. And how the fable too. The fable of one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling of one with you in the dark. And how better in the end labour lost and silence. And you as you always were. Alone. (42) The modified punctuation seems to unite semantics and syntax as the word ‘alone’ is left ‘alone.’ But in a text in which paragraphs are alternated between the voice’s second-person narration and the deviser’s third-person narration, this isolation generates the possibility that the word is located outside the voice. At that level, it divides the semantic which suggests that ‘alone’ is the last word of the previous sentence (‘as you always were’) by the syntactic which claims that ‘alone’ is a one-word-sentence paragraph. Real writing happens in this interruption of the semantic with the syntactic. ‘Alone’ is a Real ‘extimacy’, both inside and outside the voice. If it is outside the voice, the word ‘alone’ must be spoken by the thirdperson narrator. The moment ‘alone’ is written, the textual logic would ask, ‘who says, Alone’ and ‘who says, Who says, Alone.’ We can only situate this word within the discourse of the third-person deviser because the discursive act is pervasive. This word echoes the subject’s final solitude in the solitude of the signifier. This evokes the Lacanian point that there is no subject that can be supposed, independent of the signifier: ‘The signifier represents the subject for another signifier’ (Lacan 2006: 694). The problem of ‘alone’ provides another instance of a marginal, material inscription of Real unconscious as impasse. Like Roman capitals in How It Is, ‘alone’ jettisons Company into endless ending. It produces an antinomic unconscious writing at the cusp between the signifier and the signified by juxtaposing the sense of the signifier with its body. If the signifier suggests solitude at the level of sense, in its diacritical corporeal marking, it gestures

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towards company. This coexistence of solitude and company is a Real, written into the heart of How It Is, and Company continues to give company to it. The archival story of ‘alone’ does not end here. There is more to its body than what meets the eye. The draft marked ‘b’ reads: ‘Allone. Allnone. Alone./Alnone>All none>. All one. Allnone’ and the draft marked ‘c1’ reads: ‘Alone. All one. All none’ (Krance: 111). The archive here unveils the folding of the ‘all one’ and the ‘all none’ into ‘alone.’ The body of the signifier shows this tripartite division as it breaks into the letter. If Joyce had broken it as ‘a lone’, putting the break after the first vowel sound (Finnegans Wake: 628), Beckett plays on the Middle English root ‘al one’ and puts his break after the phoneme ‘al.’ This foregrounds the function of Real writing. There is no difference between ‘al’ and ‘all’ in speech, but in writing, the spelling differs. Beckett’s break suggests that he reads ‘all’ into ‘al.’ In other words, he reads the signifier in writing. The ‘all one’ literally rings within ‘alone’ by incorporating the function of writing into speech. This is a Real writing between the spoken and the written. What breaks ‘alone’ into ‘all’, ‘one’ and ‘none’ is an enjoyment (jouissance) of its morphological body. The text enjoys the body of the word over its sense. This enjoyment turns the signifier into a Real letter and drifts language towards the Real. The word ‘alone’ is not alone, thanks to the corporeal company of the minimal triad. This triadic split of the signifier into the letter is consistent with the tripartite division of the subject into hearer, voice and deviser in Company. Two propositions emerge from the division of the word ‘alone’: ‘all is one’ (‘Allone’) and ‘all is not one’ (‘Allnone’). Let us try and connect these two logical propositions with the subject’s division into hearer, voice and deviser. To explore this connection is to install a Real antinomy. This antinomic identification of the ‘all’ with both ‘one’ and ‘not one’ divides the ‘all’ into a Real ‘not-all.’ The final solitude reveals this logical impasse where the subject is neither One nor not-One. He is alone because in him, the all becomes both One and not-One, opening up the impossible Real. This One is neither autistic nor unitary, and yet it shows both inclinations. The letter ‘alone’ writes the Real unconscious subject by isolating a multiplistic singularity through antinomic logic. This impossible antinomy reiterates subjective division by exposing ‘the structure of the subject as a discontinuity in the real’ (Lacan 2006: 678). As we have seen in Chapter 1, this discontinuity is the ex-sistence of Real unconscious as a minimally inscribable function. The hearer as the supposed subject between the voice and the narrator never says ‘I.’ The first person remains unnamable as the voice uses ‘you’ and the narrator, third person. ‘The last person’ singular, which remains unsaid, is the impossible Real of the unconscious parlêtre. This shows how speech registers a break in the speaking-being: ‘The hole, the gap of being as such is hollowed out in the real. Speech introduces the hollow of being into the texture of the real’ (Lacan 1988a: 229). Speech kills a part of being by making it ex-sist but does not stop insisting on this Real

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hole. The unnamable ‘I’ in Company remains Real as the hearer never comes to own the invocatory memories. He never murmurs the ‘yes, I remember’ that is demanded of him. The narrator registers this impossibility: ‘Nowhere to be found. Nowhere to be sought. The unthinkable last of all. Unnamable. Last person. I’ (2009a: 15). And yet, as we have seen, the letter (‘lettre’ as ‘lêtre’ or letter as a fragment of being) ‘alone’ mathematically writes this unspeakable, Real subject.

Need, demand and inscription of desire Company demands ‘slight’ ‘activity of mind’ as a ‘necessary complement’ (4). The text insists on this minimal mental action: ‘The voice alone is company but not enough. Its effect on the hearer is a necessary complement’ (5). The narrator theorizes a partially inverse proportional relation between company and mental activity: In order to be company he must display a certain mental activity. But it need not be of a high order. Indeed it might be argued the lower the better. Up to a point. The lower the order of mental activity the better the company. Up to a point. (6–7) According to this subtractive imperative, one must minimize mental activity to radicalize the unconscious as company. As we have seen, minimizing the so-called mind, which is a product of the Imaginary order, opens a gateway to Real unconscious. It restricts Symbolic and Imaginary meaningmaking processes so as to express itself as a cut. Company expresses this minimality with a specific accent on the corporeal as it describes the ‘unstillable’ and ‘unformulable gropings of the mind’ (14). The voice is marked by ‘repetitiousness’ (9) that stresses automatism and compulsivity. If the subject thinks without knowing that he thinks, thinking is marked by ‘repetition automatism’ in the ‘insistence of the signifying chain’ (Lacan 2006: 6). The minimization of Imaginary mind accelerates Real unconscious in the Beckettian text. The narrator remarks that this ‘unstillability’ of the mental comes from the hearer’s itinerant ‘need for company.’ Whenever the voice pauses, the hearer hopes, it will not resume till it resumes in all repetitiousness. Unconscious company conjures voices of significant Others from the past. The little vignettes produce an entire gallery of these primordial Others. Father and mother punctuate these invocatory narratives, not to mention marginal voices like the old beggar woman’s and the moving encounter with the hedgehog. The beloved features in amorous summerhouse encounters from ‘the bloom of adulthood.’ These memories dramatize an intersubjective

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social fabric where the subject is structured by a complex weaving of multiple demands, needs and desires – all coming from the field of the Other. These persisting memory images enact a weak mental of Imaginary intermittency. The narrator’s desire is born in the gap between the hearer’s need for company and the voice’s demand for self-identification. His desire wrenches itself from the hearer’s need and the voice’s demand where they do not meet. The hearer never fulfils its demand, and yet he needs the voice’s intermittent presence. Beckettian company resonates with Lacan’s basic point that ‘man’s desire is the desire of the Other’, which is activated by a desire for recognition (2006: 222). For Lacan, the Symbolic is the locus of these significant Others who anchor the subject’s desires. Beckett’s text locates these Others in absentia within the spectrality of invocatory speech. Beckettian Others are conjured by speech and housed in fleeting mental images. They engage with both the Symbolic and the Imaginary. But is there a Real Other here? In one episode, the father demands the boy to jump into the sea. He says, ‘Be a brave boy.’ This sentence is described as a ‘call’ from the father. Both the Symbolic call and the father’s upturned image reflected in the water are mentioned. The boy gazes at the reflected image of his father’s ‘red round face’, ‘the thick moustache’ and ‘the greying hair.’ Beckett accentuates the intersubjective dimension by introducing other Others into this visual scene: ‘The far call again, Be a brave boy. Many eyes upon you. From the water and from the bathing place’ (11). The episode ends here by suggesting a constitutive alienation of the subject’s desire in the desire of the Other. The boy is pressurized by the demand to perform in front of Other(s), but we are left in suspense whether or not he is able to live up to these expectations. The sudden end of this micro-story indicates how his desire is lost in the overwhelming desires of his significant Others. In another episode, after putting the hedgehog in a box to protect it, the boy experiences the ‘glow’ of ‘some good deed on your part or by some little triumph over your rivals or by a word of praise from your parents or mentors’ (18). He anticipates appreciation for his humane act from his significant Others. If this affective ‘glow’ shows a demand for the Other’s recognition, the following affect is one of regret: ‘That rather than do what you did you had perhaps better let good alone and the hedgehog pursue its way.’ This regret is permeated with an anticipated accusation from the Other. When the hedgehog is ultimately found dead in the box, a third affect of ‘guilt’ turns the image into an indelible mnemonic trace: ‘You are on your back in the dark and have never forgotten what you found then. The mush. The stench’ (19). The subject experiences a setback here as he fears angering the Other, and the result is a traumatic trace of visual memory. Note how the text avoids actual description of the dead hedgehog by appealing to our senses through metonymic substitution: ‘The mush. The Stench.’ The traumatic image that concerns the Real body of the animal is written by not being written.

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Similarly, unforgettable is mother’s ‘cutting retort’ when the boy repeatedly asks him about the distance of the sky from the ground. First, he asks: ‘If it is not in reality much more distant than it appears. The sky that is. The blue sky’ (5). When mother ignores the question, the boy pauses and reformulates it. This shows his desire in the process of being regulated by the Other’s non-response (an alternative form of response nevertheless): Receiving no answer you mentally reframe your question and some hundred paces later look up at her face again and ask if it does not appear much less distant than in reality it is. (5–6; my emphasis) This time, mother gets angry and responds with an unforgettable retort. The voice here refrains from reproducing mother’s abusive sentence.3 The traumatic Real thus remains unarticulated. This memory survives as it shows the vulnerability of the boy’s desire in a condition of being constituted by the desire of the m-Other. In another vignette, the boy goes into a mountain gorse to see the cloudless light of the sky, but he can only see the clouds and not the sky. This vignette interacts with the previous one. The sky, as he had asked his mother, indeed turns out to be more distant than what it seems. He gets ‘derided’ by friends for his failure to see the ‘sunless cloudless brightness’ (15). At night, preparing for sleep, he can finally see the ‘ill seen’ gloaming of the enigmatic sky: Back home at nightfall supperless to bed. You lie in the dark and are back in that light. Straining out from your nest in the gorse with your eyes across the water till they ache. You close them while you count a hundred. Then open and strain again. Again and again. Till in the end it is there. Palest blue against the pale sky. You lie in that dark and are back in that light. (15–16) The boy goes without supper, perhaps because he is derided by friends for being unable to see the strange light. Mother might also have rebuked him for the naughty escape into the mountains. This is where the subject arrives at his own question about the sky’s real distance but not without the Other’s ridicule and derision as affects that constitute his subjectivity. There are many more examples, such as the mother saying to her friend Mrs Coote, ‘he has been a very naughty boy’ and so on, but we need to stop here for the sake of brevity. To have a final word on this point, in Company, the Others, visualized through Imaginary conjuring of the mind, are controlling, encouraging, ridiculing, derisive and judgemental. Each of these dispositions frames the subject’s desire in contradistinction. These Others push the boy away from his own desire through the sheer weight of their polymorphous desires.

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These constitutive and alienating Others remain inside the voice’s remembrance. They do not step out into the ‘measureless dark’ of the Real. Symbolic and Imaginary incarnations of the Other interact when operative sentences, spoken by significant Others, anchor mental images, but the Real Other remains excluded from this Symbolic-Imaginary rapport. Symbolic unconscious is ‘the discourse of the Other’ but is there an Other in the minimal inscription of Real unconscious? At this point, Beckettian text poses this vital question to Lacan in a spirit of intervention. The narrator says: ‘Only a small part of what is said [by the voice] can be verified’ (3). What is verifiable is the hearer’s present condition while the vignettes make up the larger part of the voice that remains unverifiable. According to the narrator, the voice says the verifiable only to make the hearer believe in the unverifiable: ‘A device perhaps from the incontrovertibility of the one to win credence for the other’ (3). In spite of the voice’s efforts to make the vignettes believable, it cannot place the Other in the Real. As we have seen before, in this chapter, Real Other is an enigmatic question that remains at the margin of Lacan’s work. Beckettian text must be given credit here for putting this question on centre stage. The only way to write the Real Other which has no existence is to write it through ex-sistence. A writing which states that there is no Other of the Other is an inscription of the Real Other through negation. If the Real Other is a writing of the fact that there is no Other of the Other, it means, this Other is a fragmented entity, staring at absence. I will now show how this Real Other in Beckett is registered as a mathematically written absence. Company charts a trajectory from the subject’s constitutive alienation in the Other to a point of immanent ending where the subject makes the Other ex-sist in the final letter. Lacan makes a suggestive move towards the Real Other and its complex formalization in Seminar XXIII: ‘The real Other of the Other, that is, the impossible, is the idea that we form of artifice, inasmuch as it is a form of making which eludes our grasp’ (2016: 50). The question of ‘artifice’ as artistic form must be seen in the Joyce-context that frames this entire seminar. Lacan argues that Joyce makes his ‘sinthome’ as an artifice through his writings and this keeps his Borromean link of R-S-I together. The passage above indicates that the Real Other of the Other in all its impossibility can still be inscribed through a complex formal writing. I would argue that the Borromean link is this mathematical form that can situate the hollowed out ex-sistence of the Real Other. For Lacan, the Symbolic-Imaginary Other is barred or lacking because there is no Real Other of the Other and yet Borromean logic can formalize this absence through the figure of the non-related third (see Seminar XXIII: 33–44). In Borromean formalization, there is a Real third (ring) that makes a couple. But can we call this third a Real Other? I would read the third ring that knots the other two and then becomes indistinguishable (after the rings are linked, one never knows which one is the third) as a formal inscription of the fact that

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there is no Other of the Other. The fourth order of the sinthome as ‘artifice’, as we shall soon see, is only an extension of this Real third. It has the same function of knotting a One with the Other through mediation. Be it the third ring in a triple Borromean knot or the third and fourth rings together in a quadruple Borromean knot, these are two different ways of inscribing this Real absence of an Other of the Other. Lacan’s Borromean logic interacts here with his set-theoretical evocations which in turn criss-cross into his numerical logic. Let us see these mathematical interpenetrations. In the set-theoretical framework, by rule, every set, even the so-called empty set, contains the null set as a subset [{Ø}]. Because of this invariant rule of set theory, the empty set is counted as One, because it has the null set as an element (see Seminar XVI: 18.6.1969 and XXIII: 10). This makes a One out of zero. I would argue that this null set offers a Real mathematical formalization to the barred locus of the Other in Lacan. If we continue to count, what drives this mathematical process is a logic of ‘one-multiple’ (‘+1’). In this logic, 0 generates 1 and 1 generates 2 in the form of ‘one multiples.’ If we write 1 in set theory, it would produce a 2, by virtue of the Real null set as an enigmatic trace of the Other: [1, {Ø}]. Writing 2 will lead to 3: [1, 2, {Ø}] and so on. Real Other is thus only a mark of the void. It is an emptiness with a shadowy circumference. What is Real about this Other is its absence which has a material outline that can be etched through mathematical writing. In my argument, this set-theoretical notion of counting produces a mathematical tracing of the Real Other, even though it remains unspeakable and non-related. Company responds to this impregnable Lacanian problem with the partial trace of a Real Other as it inscribes the Real subject in the final letter of the text, i.e. One-all-alone. This antinomic solitude registers the Real absence of the Other by making the three ex-sist in the body of the signifier, ‘alone.’ If there is a Real Other in this letter, ‘alone’, it is nothing but the three absent marks of ‘one’, ‘all’ and ‘none’ that have constituted this word and then disappeared in it. This way, the Real Other is mathematically written into this One (‘alone’) as a symptomatic construction. It is Beckett who reads Lacan here by giving one possible answer to what is perhaps one of the most complex questions thrown open by the Lacanian corpus. To continue with the complicated question of textual ending in Company, when the voice finally discloses that the ‘you’ mentioned in the micro-stories is also a narrator-deviser, the creature becomes the creator. It is a moment of complex identification when the second-person boy-man within the vignettes is identified as a narrator: ‘Supine now you resume your fable where the act of lying cut it short’ (41). Let us understand the complexity of this final identification. This counter-identification reverses expectation by coming from the voice’s end and not the hearer’s. This is not the identification that was desired by the voice. The hearer does not identify with the boy-man inside the voice as it would have liked. The voice does not identify itself

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with the narrator either. What it does instead is to envelop the narrator by identifying the boy-man as a narrator. It is not a simple identification of the ‘you’ ‘with’ the narrator but a more enigmatic identification of the second person ‘as’ a narrator. There is no way of knowing weather this a narrator is the narrator of Company. This indeterminacy forms another inscription of Real unconscious. This is yet another hole in knowledge where the nonrelation between a narrator and the narrator is written. The text here makes a depot of unsubjectivated knowledge that is open neither to the reader nor to the textual personage. To return to the textual operation of enunciation, let us ask: ‘Who says the final word, alone?’ As we have said, Beckett’s indentation indicates that ‘alone’ is outside the voice’s periphery and may well be spoken by the narrator-deviser. To consider another and perhaps the most radical interpretive possibility is to read the voice as enfolding the narrator within itself. The text never returns to the level from which it is devised. This could imply that the narrator is now incarcerated within the voice. If there is no narrator outside the voice at this final point, it explains why the text ends inside the fable. It must end its telling inside the tale because there is no one outside to pick up the act of telling. If this is indeed the case, then it is the hearer who must utter the final word. Even if it is the hearer who says ‘alone’, we still lack the self-identification that could have produced the first-person ‘I.’ This final word ‘alone’ is devoid of both subject-pronoun (I/you/he) and verb (am/are/is). Therefore, it is impossible to derive self-identification from this minimal syntax that preserves equivocation. Even if the hearer speaks the last word, it does not prove that he is the second-person boy-man inside the stories. What is written instead is a hole in knowledge as the Real ‘I’ remains indeterminable. ‘Alone’ is the subject’s Real symptom or sinthome. It is written in the form of a construction on the triad of ‘one’, ‘all’ and ‘alone.’ As we have seen, in the Lacanian logic of ‘one-multiples’, it takes four to count three: 3 – (0, 1, 2, 3). The quadruple Borromean knot is a construction of this minimal three (there can be no Borromean chain of two rings). In this four-fold knot, the symptom joins the Real in knotting the two. As we can see in the following image from Seminar XXIII, the third and the fourth rings (red and green) jointly knot the other two (black and blue) into a couple. So the fourth order of the sinthome (to be understood in this context as the Real of symptom) places a double buckle, instead of what was a single buckle, in the position of the Real third. In other words, the third and the fourth together play the role of the third and knot a couple into existence. The sinthome emerges from the Real and holds the four up but only on the basis of the fundamental three (see Seminar XXIII: 33–44). This geometric form in Lacan has its corroboration in his numerical logic. In this Real logic of ‘one-multiples’, Borromean four is nothing but a numerical writing of the three: 4= (0, 1, 2, 3). We get a four, simply by counting up to three. So the

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FIGURE 3.1  One way of drawing the quadruple knot (from Seminar XXIII: 42)

four is a way of collecting the three. In Company, the word ‘alone’ is this fourth entity, which writes the three (all-one-none or hearer-voice-deviser) by constructing itself on the three in absentia. This Real sinthomatic letter punctuates the anxiety of infinite regress registered in the text. Although infinity remains a potential here, it is fixed by a minimal count of the three, the construction of which produces the fourth order of the sinthome.

Counting movements in Company There are not too many studies of locomotion in Beckett that connect the topic to the concomitant act of embodied counting. What is this relationship between motility and measurement? Mary Bryden, in a Deleuzean reading of self-locomotion in Beckett, passingly mentions Beckett’s statement to Charles Juliet that while walking, he often had the desire to count his footsteps (122). She notes that ‘for Beckett, the physical weight of foot on earth, of tread on ground, often accompanied by computations of distance, held a special significance’ (122). Bryden’s reading goes in a different direction, and we are left wondering what this special significance might be. We will try to shed some light on this enigmatic significance here. Beckett’s interest in counting goes as far back as the Dream Notebook (the notebook he maintained while writing his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women), at the beginning of the 1930s. In it, we find the following entry: ‘Divide, multiply, contract, enlarge, order, disarrange, or in any other way image in the mind by thinking’ (20). John Pilling, the editor of the notebook,

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connects this passage with St Augustine’s Confessions (Book 7, Chapter 17) – a major source for Beckett’s ‘notesnatching’ act. Although we do not find anything close to numbers and counting in Book 7, Chapter 17, turning to Augustine’s book in general, we do notice fascinating references to counting that emphasize the notion of embodiment and, in an even more fascinating turn of events, go against what Beckett notes down. Let us zoom in on this passage from Book 10, Chapter 13: I have perceived with all the senses of my body the numbers we use in counting; but the numbers by which we count are far different from these. They are not the images of these; they simply are. (213; my emphasis) While Beckett sees counting in his notebook entry as an image of thinking in the mind, Augustine has a completely different view on the matter. Throughout Confessions, he maintains that it is images of things and not things themselves that are stored in the mental space of memory. As an example, let us consider this observation from Book 10, Chapter 15: ‘Things themselves are not present to my senses, but their images are present in my memory’ (215). However, Augustine makes an exception when it comes to numbers in the act of counting. He insists that these are not images of matter but matter itself. For him, in the business of counting, numbers are material. They enter not as images but as bodies into the space of memory. Numbers are perceived by the subject-body that performs the act of counting. In other words, they are materially inscribed on the subjectbody that does the counting. There is another passage in Confessions that insists on the material and corporeal nature of numbers. Augustine reflects: ‘I can name the numbers we use in counting, and it is not their images but themselves that are in my memory’ (Book 10, Chapter 15: 215). There is an opposition between image and materiality here. Numbers are not images when we count them. They are ‘materials’ that come into the mind during counting. I would argue that it is their materiality that makes a body of the so-called mind. The drift towards the material body of number creates an analogous drift towards the human body. This so-called mental count is thus embodied through motility. Augustine is insistent on the actual materiality of these numbers in the embodiment of the mental. Even though Beckett seems to think otherwise in his notebook entry, as we shall see, he eventually stands on the side of numerical materiality in counting by the time we travel from the Dream Notebook to Company and other late works. Beckettian counting does not entirely exorcize the mental but the materiality of numbers as objects that occur in the mind pressurizes an Imaginary notion of the mind with Real mathemes. As should be amply clear by now, ours is not an argument about historical influence of Lacan on Beckett or Beckett on Lacan. It is likely that this

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aspect of embodied counting in Beckett historically comes from his reading of Augustine, but that does not take away from Beckett’s ‘encounter’ with Lacan and Lacan’s ‘encounter’ with Beckett around the question of subjective counting. The logic of such encounters is located at the level of ideational traffic far away from the factual veracity of historical influence. Ideas can cross over from one text to another by the sheer work of chance that does not have anything to do with whether or not one writer has actually read the other. As long as something new can be brought out from these texts through this ideational encounter in my mind, the reading stands justified. In our opening chapter, we have already established the room for speculation that is left open by the historical ‘missed encounter’ between Beckett and Lacan. This window looking out into a speculative realm opens new possibilities of reading as well. In the present context, reading Beckettian motility and counting from a Lacanian perspective of corporeal writing is finding another illustration of Real inscription between psychoanalysis and literature. In our comparatist and contrapuntal framework of reading one with the other, we will see how Beckett makes writing with numbers, a deeply affecting exercise. This affective value is Beckett’s significant addition to Lacanian paradigms of counting. Baylee Brits has recently made a significant case for counting in Beckett by showing how he transforms words into mere numerical signs that are generic placeholders more than anything else. She constructs a notion of ‘generic literature’ from Beckett and others (Coetzee and Borges) taking the cue, as it were, from Badiou’s work on Beckett as an exemplar of generic writing. In Brits’s argument, number becomes a way of grounding the question of textual form as it enables a shift from ‘content’ of phenomena to ‘conditions’ of phenomena (2018: 120). As her reading of Watt suggests, the question of counting is endemic to the narrative act of description and Beckett’s overt ‘combinatorial’ method in the sucking stone episode of Molloy and throughout Watt becomes an apt though somewhat predictable example (see Brits 2018: 94–119). While Brits grounds counting in literary narration, I am interested in actual acts of counting with material numbers within that narration. Moreover, I want to focus on the relationship between counting and motility here. Although Brits makes an interesting connection between number and body by considering body parts as mathematical points with zero dimension (2018: 127), her concern is not with the body in movement; nor is it with a psychoanalytic figuration of the drive-body as it relates to embodied counting. As we shall see, in Company, corporeal inscription and embodied counting come together to create a co-belonging between the former’s bodily geometry of shapes that approximate mathematical letters and the latter’s actual work with number where numbers are not just counted but felt within the groove of counting. Numbers happen on the body of the subject in the form of a deep affective event. They register their material presence on the material surface of the human body in movement,

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and this registration evokes a complex spectrum of affects, ranging from satisfaction to exhaustion, not to mention anxiety. In Company, Beckett’s emphasis on embodiment works in tandem with a material dimension of counting numbers. Motility, coupled with mental counting, produces a writing in which body and mind increasingly become indistinguishable. The use of the intensely corporeal word ‘gropings’ to describe mental activity connotes how the so-called mental is sabotaged by Real body as a mathematized fragment in motion. Counting on the other hand opens the numerical field as another subversion of the Imaginary mental realm. As we have seen, Real unconscious doesn’t stop counting, and these numbers produce a material writing, backed up by the corporeality of the moving body as a material cipher. This material writing approaches the Real through a complex affect of jouissance, combining joy and pain. Daniel Katz analyses the textual structure of Company as a series of four walks: the father’s, the old son’s, the tramp across Ballyogan Road and the final walk on the snow. He draws attention to Beckett’s use of letters in the expressions, ‘A to Z. Or Ballyogan Road’ and ‘Somewhere on the Ballyogan Road on the way from A to Z’ (2009a: 14). Walking is compared here with alphabetical scansion. This gives a numerical status to letters. In the first tramp, when the old son walks along a narrow country road, he adds the number of footfalls and starts converting them into yards on the basis of two steps per yard till he gets into gigantic numbers: ‘So many since dawn to add to yesterday’s. To yesteryear’s. To yesteryears.’ Days other than today and so akin. The giant tot in miles. In leagues’ (8). This counting tends towards exponentiation as mathematical company of numbers. The materiality of these numbers is important for the emotive aspects of human company. Beckettian counting has an affective intensity, and the material presence of numbers offers satisfaction to the solitary human subject. The bigger the sums are, the better the company. This subjective counting is integral to the additive notion of company. In one of the so-called mental images in the narrative, the boy takes it upon himself to measure the little summerhouse in which he waits for his beloved. From this ‘rustic hexahedron’ (note the geometric terminology), he shifts to counting a lifetime of his own heartbeats: You close your eyes and try to calculate the volume. Simple sums you find a help in times of trouble. A haven. You arrive in the end at seven cubic yards approximately. Even still in the timeless dark you find figures a comfort. You assume a certain heart rate and reckon how many thumps a day. A week. A month. A year. And assuming a certain lifetime a lifetime. Till the last thump. But for the moment with hardly more than seventy American billion behind you you sit in the little summerhouse working out the volume. Seven cubic yards approximately. (25–26; my emphases)

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The boy explains his enjoyment and satisfaction in playing with numbers here. He identifies the figures in a spatial way. These numbers constitute an anchoring subjective locus for him during moments of trouble. If this numerical ‘haven’ echoes the hexahedronic space of the summerhouse, it once again shows the meeting point of arithmetic and geometry. Numbers construct a geometric space which is subjected to arithmetic again when it is measured. The place of numbers gives the boy mathematical company. This point is similar to Ill Seen Ill Said: ‘How many? A figure come what may. Twelve’ (47). Counting is not a dry mechanical process but an affective support for the subject. It presents a numerical opening of the Real as infinity. How does the subject suture this count is the critical question.4 In another aforementioned vignette, Beckettian ‘ill-seeing’, aiming at the margins of visibility, is facilitated by this mental arithmetic. To see the ‘palest blue against the pale sky’ merging into a ‘sunless cloudless light’, the boy counts hundred. This shows how the Imaginary field of the seen is minimized into the Real of the ‘ill seen’ through numerical formalization. If the stress was previously on addition, this marks a shift to subtraction. When the creator crawls, he counts in order to measure the locus: ‘And furthermore to count as he went adding half foot to half foot and retain in his memory the ever-changing sum of those gone before’ (35). During the tramp on snow, the wanderer stops counting his steps because observation has shown that his trajectory is exactly the same every day. This desire for numerical company reveals a corollary desire for numerical novelty. The wayfarer is not interested in counting because he knows that the result will not change. The new and differential numerical score that he wants to see but does not get anchors his counting as a lack. When the wayfarer reaches destination, he anxiously discovers that the usual ‘beeline’ of his footsteps has become an arc, which hints at knotting. Beckett uses the word ‘withershins’ to describe this anticlockwise curve while in the drafts, the more explicitly geometric term, ‘parabola’ was used. The parabola makes his heart heavy for not counting. The desire for a new result, which drives the count, reaches an ironic point here. The new figure is actually produced in corporeal marking but not counted by the subject. Geometric conversion of the straight line into a parabola not only suggests a knotting of the line but also indicates that the number of footsteps in the parabola is different from the number in the beeline. So the new numerical result is there, but it remains unknown. This non-knowledge creates anxiety. In his discussion of how contemporary everyday life is infested with numbers and how we handle numbers, Steven Connor refers to the lack of depth in numbers. The flatness of numbers gives them an ‘unreadable’ dimension that can potentially lead to what he calls a horror of numbers (2016: 53). Even though Connor does not mention Lacan anywhere in Living by Numbers, it is interesting that the argument he makes about the horror of number and its relation to death is expressly Lacanian. According to him, the

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act of counting things one by one opens up a horrific ‘vision of indifference’ where all ones in that process are interchangeable as numbers: ‘No one differs in any respect from any other one’ (59). Connor’s mobilization of the undifferentiated 1 in numerical succession would remind us of Lacan’s discussion of the ‘unary trait’ as ‘one-multiple’ and the primitive hunter for whom every mark is a one and, as a result, there is no progression but an infinite repetition of ones. In other words, what is produced as notches on the infinite line is a unary number series (1 1 1 1 1) and not actual succession of natural whole numbers (1 2 3 4 5). This problem of the 1 that cannot be added to itself exposes counting to uncountability (Connor 2016: 67). This speaks to Lacan’s fundamental point in grounding the Real as the impossible (as well as the impassable), i.e. the uncountable in relation to number. As we have seen in the previous chapter and will soon see in what follows, Lacan’s Real One, which is a return of the repressed 0 as 1 in the form of ‘the signifier of inexistence’, has a close accord with the Real affect of anxiety generated by numbers. This 1, as Connor observes, is the individual who dies. It is death that makes the individual’s singularity accede to the multiple as each one dies alone and at the same time all ones die. Death as the source of horror is this singular universal in logical terms that removes differences as all of us become any one in the counting-towards-death (see Connor 2016: 58). In the death event, we are face-to-face with a Real limit of language and expression that is not transcendental, unless we bring in the fable of afterlife. It is this immanent beyond of the Symbolic in death as an experience of the Real that triggers horror of numbers. To quote Connor: The fact that numbers can never properly add up to anything, that number can never fully come to an end, is what makes number so deathly and yet allies it with a kind of craving agitation that can come close to rapture. This is the delirious horror of number. (70–71) This nervous energy (‘delirious horror’), introduced by counting, belongs to the order of jouissance as a tormenting enjoyment in between pleasure and displeasure. Counting creates an affect of exhilaration where endlessness and limit play out the complex dialectic of death-in-life and life-in-death. Beckettian characters are energized by numbers as material company in counting as subjective enactment, but they start cringing when numbers subject them to endless exponentiation. For Freud, fear has a specific object-cause but anxiety does not, while Lacan, with his characteristic discursive torsion, formulates that anxiety is ‘not without an object’ (2015: 89). What Lacan’s double negation (‘not without’) suggests is that anxiety does have an object though it is not the object of anxiety as such. What is placed in the position of the fading object of anxiety is none other than the enigmatic object a that is the object-cause

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of desire. The double negation also places anxiety on the logical plane of the Real (the double negation of the Real as that which ‘doesn’t stop not being written’). For Lacan, anxiety is a Real affect set in motion by the object a of desire, but the subject does not know what object is involved in it (2015: 89). To make matters easy, we can say that the subject is made anxious by their object of desire without them having any knowledge about it. Stated differently, they find it difficult to understand how their object of desire can also cause them anxiety. The affect of anxiety is Real as its object is the ‘ultimate object’ of ‘the Thing’ or das Ding (Lacan 2015: 311) that lies behind language. This is why Lacan says that ‘anxiety is that which doesn’t deceive’ (Lacan 2015: 311). If the signifier kills this Thing to come into existence, the numerical letter takes the signifier as close as possible to this Thing. This is one way of grounding the relationship between anxiety and counting. Number is located somewhere in between the signifier and the Thing and hence the evocation of anxiety in counting. There is a Real non-knowledge at work in anxiety in the sense that we can never fully know what the presignifying das Ding is. If we connect this anxiety with the question of counting, we would see that Beckettian subject is happy to count numbers to avoid the void, but as and when counting seems to become unstoppable, it causes anxiety. The affect of counting is a complex jouissance that goes beyond the binary of pleasure and displeasure. It remains true to anxiety – the only affect that does not lie as it comes from the Real.5 For Lacan, counting exposes both what passes and what does not pass from one number to another. In Seminar XVI, he works his way through the Fibonacci sequence (1 1 2 3 5 … ) to highlight its unary impasse. The impasse is produced when 0 and 1 do not add up to form a 2 in spite of the Fibonacci law that the two preceding numbers would yield the next (26.2.1969). In Seminar XIX, Lacan returns to the addition of zero with one, which opens the number series. It does not produce a two but remains One (0 + 1 = 1) while every subsequent addition of one (+1) accedes to the next number (2 + 1 = 3, 3 + 1 = 4 etc.) (10.5.1972). This originary crack is reproduced in every numerical passage as the Real of the impassable. It becomes a swarming Real One between any two whole numbers in a count and yet remains uncounted in itself. This One is the Real of number that does not pass or add up but simply accumulates in the number series. It is a primordial accumulation in numerical succession that itself remains outside the count even though it is placed in between any two numbers in the successive counting process. The Real One is thus ‘extimate’ – both inside and outside. This One gets as close as the signifier-turned-Real letter can ever get to the Thing which remains the undeceiving generator of anxiety. When 0 as 1 spectrally ex-sists in the interstices of numbers, counting provokes anxiety. This Real One resists addition by ensuring that every count hits ‘the-impossible-to-count’ in this unary iterability.

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The narrator-deviser decides that the hearer should be in the ‘supine’ position as it is the most companionable. For himself, he chooses the ‘prone’ position. Before becoming motionless in the dark in this prone position, the narrator describes his crawl mathematically. He speculates about the mathematical unit of crawl, matching it with the ‘footstep of erect locomotion’ (32). Motility makes a mathematical attempt to mark the locus by number: He rises to all fours and makes ready to set out. Hands and knees angles of an oblong two foot long width irrelevant. Finally say left knee moves forward six inches thus half halving distance between it and homologous hand. Which then in due course in its turn moves forward by as much. Oblong now rhomboid. But for no longer than it takes right knee and hand to follow suit. Oblong restored. (32; my emphases) This mathematized presentation of the human body oscillates between two geometrical shapes: the oblong and the rhomboid. This locomotion is thus open to the structural company of the two. The crawler’s subjectivity is constituted between two geometric signifiers. This mathematical company fractures his moving body between oblong and rhomboid shapes. Motility, as opposed to additive figures, emphasizes division, and the geometric description splits one body into two. The mental count becomes more intricate due to crawling: So as he crawls the mute count. Grain by grain in the mind. One two three four one. Knee hand knee hand two. One foot. Till say after five he falls. Then sooner or later on from naught anew. One two three four one. Knee hand knee hand two. Six. So on. (32; my emphases) These numbers are Real letters written in the unconscious from the place of the count. They subvert the Imaginary mental landscape with their granular materiality. The activity of counting alongside physical movement is almost an automatic act. It does not have a great deal of conscious sense. To quote Moncayo and Romanowicz, ‘the more formal and “senseless” aspect of the signifier refers to numbers and to the Real’ (43). The signifier’s sense is evacuated in the self-same materiality of numbers that approach the Real in their formal and bodily qualities. When the boy finally encounters the girl in the summerhouse, he engages in a mental measurement of her height: Knowing from experience that the height or length you have in common is the sum of equal segments. For when bolt upright or lying at full stretch you cleave face to face then your knees meet and pubes and the hairs of your heads mingle. Does it follow from this that the

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loss of height for the body that sits is the same as for it that kneels? […] you close your eyes the better with mental measure to measure and compare the first and second segments namely from sole to kneepad and thence to pelvic girdle. […] You separate the segments and lay them side by side. It is as you half surmised. The upper is the longer and the sitter’s loss the greater when seat at knee level. You leave the pieces lying there and open your eyes to find her sitting before you. (26–27; my emphases) There is a thickening tension here between the mental as an order of the image and corporeal mathematics that produces numerable fragments. The boy leaves these numerable material ‘pieces’ of the body suspended in the mental image. These fragmented, mathematized body-traces subvert the imaginariness of the mental. Although the passage above has a context of intersubjective corporeality of the lover and the beloved, the mathematical splitting of the same body produces two fragments that give each other company. This corporeal splitting breaks the Imaginary totality of the body by introducing a Real body of fragments. In the final instance, the ‘mathemes’ shift from measuring the immeasurable space of the Real to measuring time when the gaze is fixed on a watch. This company goes well beyond two. The bright sunlight is the third element, and the two shadows of the two hands are the fourth and the fifth. Beckett does not go into the potentially infinite combinations but restricts himself to the second hand and its shadow. Instead of reading time, the boy-man follows the procession of the second hand and its shadow as he attempts to measure the exact durations wherein the hand first precedes and then follows its shadow. The oscillation of solitude and company is mathematically grafted on the spatial dial of time: At 60 seconds and 30 seconds shadow hidden by hand. From 60 to 30 shadow precedes hand at a distance increasing from zero at 60 to maximum at 15 and thence decreasing to new zero at 30. From 30 to 60 shadow follows hand at a distance increasing from zero at 30 to maximum at 45 and thence decreasing to new zero at 60. Slant light now to dial by moving either to either side and hand hides shadow at two quite different points as for example 50 and 20. Indeed at any two quite different points whatever depending on degree of slant. But however great or small the slant and more or less remote from initial 60 and 30 the new points of zero shadow the space between the two remains one of 30 seconds. The shadow emerges from under hand at any point whatever of its circuit to follow or precede it for the space of 30 seconds. Then disappears infinitely briefly before emerging again to precede or follow it for the space of 30 seconds again. And so on and on.

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Let us note how the zero changes its value here, and beyond a point, Beckett abbreviates the potentially recursive structure that has been opened through this observation. We go on: This would seem to be the one constant. For the very distance itself between hand and shadow varies as the degree of slant. But however great or small this distance it invariably waxes and wanes from nothing to a maximum 15 seconds later and to nothing again 15 seconds later again respectively. And so on and on. This would seem to be a second constant. More might have been observed on the subject of this second hand and its shadow in their seemingly endless parallel rotation round and round the dial and other variables and constants brought to light and errors if any corrected in what had seemed so far. But unable to continue you bow your head back to where it was and with closed eyes return to the woes of your kind. (38–39) This long passage expresses a mathematical logic that interfolds solitude and company. When the shadow disappears behind the second hand, it looks as if the hand is alone, but the shadow soon reappears and company resumes. Time determines the duration of solitude and company and their alternation via the degree of slant in the light. The mathematical surface of the dial constitutes a metaphorical frame. It is a numerical stage for the drama of disappearance and reappearance to take place. The constants and the variables are numerous in this combinatorial game, and all the constants are subject to variations, if not errors. The sole certitude is that the company of the second hand and its shadow continues to arrive at new zeroes. These zeroes have different numerical values because they are placed at different number points on the dial. These polyvalent zeroes return us to the Lacanian zero as a Real One. They insist on the ex-sistence of this One in the count. The boy-man is exhausted by endless variations in this count. His tired jettisoning becomes the only way of stopping the count. This exhaustion is a new affective reaction to the mathematical company of counting. The exponentiation of numbers is gratifying only as long as there is a limit, but limitlessness produces vexation as an affective excess of the Real. Let us talk about two more moments of counting from the manuscripts: ‘Twice one is two twice two is. Yes or no. No. […] Twice one is two twice two is. Yes or no. No’ (Krance: 100). Like the mute granular numbers, falling in the mind, this omitted passage places a material emphasis on numbers. There is a punctuating move here, and the decision not to count up to four manifests the anxiety of unstoppable numerical proliferation. Although the subject enjoys counting big numbers, when counting becomes potentially infinite, he starts to panic. Here he says no to the addition of ‘twice two’ and never utters four in spite of performing the addition. This shows a desire not to go beyond three. As with How It Is, the sinthomatic four remains

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a construction of and on the three. The four is the ex-sistence of the Real One as zero in the minimal three. To look at another excluded passage: ‘No one. No thing. No where. No when. No sound. What will he do now? Five times two. Five times one. Two fivefold. One fivefold’ (Krance: 100). Counting helps to ward off the void here. When all subjective supports fail and the subject is up against the void, it is counting to the rescue. This counting paradoxically activates the five negations (‘No one. No thing. No where. No when. No sound’) that make up the void. But it activates these negations only to negate the void. The multiplication first counts each unit as two (five times two) because each negative marker has a noun alongside it (no one, no thing). Subsequently each is counted as one (five times one) by conjoining the negative prefix with the noun (none, nothing). So the central hesitation once again concerns the two key numbers of unity/solitude (1) and coupling/company (2). The Real void is not actualized but maintained as a potential here. Counting elements that constitute the void creates a material presence of numbers. It prevents the void from actualizing itself on the subject. There is an antinomy here between the negative elements of the void that are evoked only to be negated. This negation against negation frames the contradictory logic of the Real. Counting touches the Real when it juxtaposes negation as process with the void as product. It forestalls the void by formalizing the antinomic Real. In the TV play … but the clouds … (1977), we find another striking dialectic of numbers and nothingness. Counting is used to arrive at nothingness here, and the affect it produces in the subject varies from a rewarding sense of satisfaction in having something to do to a sense of exhaustion with the increasing complexity of counting. We have seen a somewhat similar affective matrix in Company. Let us look at the passage from … but the clouds … : There was of course a fourth case, or case nought, as I pleased to call it, by far the commonest, in the proportion say of nine hundred and ninetynine to one, or nine hundred and ninety-eight to two, when I begged in vain, deep down into the dead of night, until I wearied, and ceased, and busied myself with something else, more … rewarding, such as … such as … cube roots, for example, or with nothing, busied myself with nothing, that MINE. (421) Numbers as a way of avoiding the void apparently fail as counting produces a fatigued return to nought as the core of the subject. The affective identification with this subjective zero is pronounced in the expression ‘that MINE.’ The anonymous man in the play is absolutely possessive about this zero-nothing as something that is entirely his. It is clear from this passage how counting returns to zero. But this zero, inscribed as a number, also succeeds in stalling nothingness. It is the zero as ‘one-multiple’ that localizes

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the subject who is a Real One of the zero. Zero is a material mark on the void. It can stop absolute nothingness by presenting the edge of nothing as a minimal something. … but the clouds … has a top-lit circular playing area on which moving bodies and their shadows etch intercutting lines. These are lines of motility fleshed out on a zero. The play thus ends up inscribing the zero-core of Real subject in an intensely material and performative way on the televisual screen. In Seminar XII, Lacan clarifies that numbers play out the ‘tension’ between the One and the Other where the Other is ‘One-more (un-enplus)’ (12.5.1965), but as we have seen, there is no simple addition of this One with the Other insofar as every count repeats the One. At stake, here is an infinite line of numerical repetition. According to Miller, the subject gets sutured with their discursive chain through the lacking zero that repeats itself at every interval of the count as we pass from one number to another: ‘Suture, by extension – the general relation of lack to the structure – of which it is an element, inasmuch as it implies the position of a taking-the-place-of’ (2007: n.p.). If the extimate zero haunts the numerical series, ending this unending signifying chain becomes pivotal. Counting could go on forever as the chain in How It Is and Company suggests. The drive to end changes from an immanent impulsion to an immanent compulsion. The slide is endless and yet it must end. This immanent ending happens by acknowledging endlessness through envelopment. Beckettian contraction aims at a compulsive ending of what is compulsively endless. Ill Seen Ill Said articulates: ‘Minimally less. No more. Well on the way to inexistence. As to zero the infinite’ (74). The movement from zero to infinity is an exercise in cultivating inexistence. In Beckett, returning to the minimal zero as One – the Lacanian letter of inexistence or ex-sistence – is a gesture towards immanent ending as it opens up an infinity of endings. To continue with the question about where to end subjective counting, Joan Copjec proposes a Real termination by drawing an ‘interior limit of the series of numbers’: ‘That which is unthinkable within the logical functioning of numbers has to be conceived as unthinkable for the set of numbers to be closed’ (Copjec: 173). She qualifies that ‘what is thought is not the unthinkable but the impossibility of thinking it’ (Copjec: 173). In the dial scene in Company, there is no articulation of the unthinkable as such, but we have the exhaustion of reaching an internal limit of the numerical series. Real unconscious is thus articulated by proposing a limit to articulation. The final envelopments in How It Is and Company enable such incorporation. Instead of maintaining the inside-outside distinction, these envelopments produce a topological effect by internalizing the exterior and vice versa. The desire to measure that drives counting is halted by the ‘measureless’ and ‘bourneless’ nature of the Beckettian locus. A Real impasse of mathematical formalization is reached in this failure of figurality.

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Lacanian matheme and the drive of corporeal jouissance Mathematical corporeality in Company triggers the psychoanalytic notion of bodily drives. Lacan’s definition of body as ‘enjoying substance’ (1998: 23) opens it up to a Real jouissance where the body enjoys the speakingbeing. This is not to be confused with our conscious enjoyment of our own bodies when we speak. This is the body’s way of enjoying us as we speak with it. We remain unconscious about this enjoying function of the body. Lacan revises the Cartesian formula ‘I think therefore I am’ as ‘I think thus it enjoys itself’ (1975b: 2). This enjoyment belongs to the body’s being. Jouissance is located in the Freudian ‘beyond’ of the ‘pleasure principle’ in death drive. It combines pain with pleasure. The imperative to enjoy at any cost in the Sadean framework is also a jouissance. Jouissance cannot be square-bracketed within the sense-effect of the Symbolic. Body’s enjoyment of the speaking-being’s words supplements sense through a manoeuvre which enjoys the being of language over its meaning. What is enjoyed is the materialism of the word-surface and not what the word means. Lacan gives a neologistic name to this in ‘moterialism’ that combines materialism with the body of the ‘word’ (‘mot’ in French). This is how Real unconscious takes hold of lalangue as the being (not meaning) of language. Real jouissance enjoys lalangue as the bare being of language. The writing that happens through this Real corporeal jouissance punctures linguistic meaning and opens up holes that inscribe the Real unconscious. Let us build on the proximity of jouissance and death drive. The unpleasant component of jouissance in which joy turns towards torment is associated with the loss of the Real das Ding: The signifier as such, whose first purpose is to bar the subject, has brought into him the meaning of death. (The letter kills, but we learn this from the letter itself.) This is why every drive is virtually a death drive. (2006: 719) Lacanian letter brings the first understanding of death into the unconscious subject. Lacan considers all drives as death drives since they are partial and relate to cuts in anatomy as correlatives of the signifying cut of language. This is implied in the ‘vel/or’ between ‘being’ and ‘meaning.’ The letter can only create meaning by killing a part of being (das Ding). In Lacan’s logical formalization of two intersecting Euler circles, there is a part of the circle of being which ex-sists in relation to that of meaning (1979: 211). The materiality of word thus never stops insisting on death. Insofar as the subject enjoys this materiality and is enjoyed by it, it brings them into distressing proximity with the thing. This inclusive exclusion turns

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FIGURE 3.2  Schema of alienation (from Seminar XI: 211)

jouissance towards death drive. The corporeal edge of the word leans on das Ding and the jouissance that comes out of it is full of Real anxiety. In Lacan, ‘erogenous zones’ are consistent with this cut in the signifier, opening towards das Ding. Drives are operationalized by anatomic cuts of eye, ear, mouth and anus. These orifices have a ‘rim like structure.’ They glimpse the body’s Real by sketching its threshold: The very delimitation of the ‘erogenous zone’ that the drive isolates from the function’s metabolism […] is the result of a cut that takes advantage of the anatomical characteristic of the margin or border: the lips, ‘the enclosure of teeth’, the rim of the anus, the penile groove, the vagina, and the slit formed by the eyelids, not to mention the hollow of the ear. (2006: 692) These anatomic cuts puncture body’s Imaginary totality. Lacanian ‘mirror stage’ generates the Imaginary fiction of a whole body when the ego is grounded in specular identification. In opposition to the Imaginary capture of body in the mirror as a whole, this anatomical conception of corporeal rims crystallizes Real body as a hole. Lacan reflects: Man is captivated by the image of his body. This point explains many things, the first of which is the privileged position that this body holds for him. His world […] his Umwelt, what there is around him, he corporeifies it, he makes it a thing in the image of his body. He does not have the slightest idea, of course, of what happens inside this body. (1989: 9) In the schism between the corporeal exterior viewed in the mirror image and its unknown interior mechanism, what gives lalangue its disturbing jouissance is the location of the tongue (la langue as ‘the tongue’ in French)

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at the partition between the body’s interior and exterior: ‘Everything that creates meaning in lalangue proves to be linked to the ex-sistence of this tongue, namely that it is outside the business of the life of the body’ (Seminar XXI: 11.6.1974). The tongue as the organ that generates lalangue is fittingly placed at the cusp of the inside-outside border of the body. It is inside the mouth and yet just outside the space of body’s internal mechanism. This ‘extimacy’ of something both inside and outside marks Real body as a cut between the within and the without. Jouissance of lalangue is allied with this drive-body as a Real body of fragments. When the subject enjoys lalangue in the signifying cut, the homologous anatomic cuts formalize drives and extract a disturbing Jouissance from them. When the subject speaks, words have an effect on their body. Lacan defines drive as ‘the echo in the body of a fact of saying’ (2016: 9). While speaking, the subject enjoys the speech act from different parts of the body, and the body enjoys it too. Lacan maintains that ‘there is jouissance of being’ (1998: 70), which relates to ‘being of signifierness’ (71). Signifier’s ‘signifierness’ (signifiance) in the form of the letter connects parlêtre (speaking-being) to corporeal jouissance: ‘I identify the reason for the being of signifierness in jouissance, jouissance of the body’ (71). The corporeal field of enjoyment is grounded in the function of the drive as an echo of speech on the body. The division of the subject into a hearing function (hearer), a speech function (voice) and a writing function (narrator-deviser) in Company speaks to Lacan’s point that ‘hearing is part of speech’ and the ‘resonance of speech is something constitutional’ (1989: 19). Listening to the voice is the primary textual act in Company. The only trace of movement in the hearer is ‘the eyelids stirring on and off since technically they must’ just ‘to let in and shut out the dark’ (Beckett 2009a: 17). The voice has another visual component: ‘Dark lightens while it sounds. Deepens when it ebbs’ (11). If the ears are open to hear the voice, the eyes which oscillate between being ‘hooded’ and ‘bared’, from ‘hooded again’ to ‘bared again’, ‘filling the whole field’, are functional in absorbing the visual component of the voice. The anatomic cuts of the ear and the eye thus establish their function in Beckett’s text. The boy-man’s tramps compensate for the stasis of the hearer. The decision to have the narrator-deviser move ‘on all fours’ is also in reflex to the hearer’s stasis: ‘Is not one immovable enough?’ (30). In Seminar XX, Lacan maintains that the unconscious is made of lalangue. Symbolic unconscious is knotted with lalangue because language is built upon lalangue through knowledge. Lacan defines language here as ‘knowledge’s hare-brained lucubration’ (1998: 139) on lalangue. Real unconscious from this perspective becomes a way of ‘knowing how to do things with lalangue.’ In ‘The Third’, Lacan insists that ‘there is no letter without lalangue’ and lalangue ‘plunges’ into the letter through the writing effect of language (1975b: 27). Drive’s ‘echo’ of speech on the body gives integrity to the letters of lalangue. These affective letters are held up in the jouissance of speaking:

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It is because there is the unconscious – namely, llanguage [lalangue], insofar as it is on the basis of the cohabitation with llanguage [lalangue] that a being known as speaking being is identified. (1998: 142) In Lacan’s later teaching, lalangue foregrounds the register of enjoyment in the body of language and its impingement on the human body through the letter gives a being of jouissance to the body. Counting in Beckett dramatizes this corporeal process where the body of the signifier, purified into numerical letters, impinges on the moving human body to produce drive-like echoes. The connection between counting numbers and physical movement in Beckett connects the impulsion to speak with the impulsion to move. Numbers are drawn from the Real, and their mathematical attribute ensures that they can be transmitted á la lettre. In Seminar XX, Lacan proposes ‘mathematization’ for this ‘integral’ transmissibility of the mathematical letter (1998: 119). When the Beckettian subject counts, numerical letters are extracted from the Real of language or lalangue. The subject enjoys these operations as they subvert the sprawling insistence of linguistic sense with the materiality of the word anchored in number. There is also pain in this jouissance when the count exposes the infinity of the uncountable: ‘This proliferation which multiplies it without limit, which manifests itself as presentifying, in a serial fashion, a certain manifestation of infinity’ (Seminar XII: 3.3.1965). If this infinity of the Real opens an endless process of interminable analysis, we need another Real to punctuate the limitless with a limit. The Real antinomy of this situation is that we need a limit to inscribe that which is limitless. Hence, Beckett’s numerical operations make an effort to mark the limitless by installing a limit. The narrator’s attempt to count the uncountable heartbeats of a lifetime is a performance of this impossibility. Though Badiou in Number and Numbers (2008) announces his distance from the Lacanian elaboration on numbers, the distance is less than what he makes it to be. Badiou erases Lacanian being from Lacanian subject. He argues that the Lacanian thesis on numbers is radically different from his thesis because he holds that ‘number is a form of being, and that, far from being subtended by the function of the subject, it is on the contrary on the basis of number, and especially of that first number – being that is the void (or zero), that the function of the subject receives its small share of being’ (2008a: 25). I do not think there is any disagreement between Badiou and Lacan on this point. For both, zero as the first numerical mark forms ontology. Lacan, however, considers ontological being to be nothing more than a break in speech and body. In the passage above, Badiou ignores the Lacanian discontinuity of being, written into the cut which is central to the initiation of number series. To be fair to Lacan, the question of numerical letter is nothing but an ontological question (Lacanian ontology as the immanent being of body with jouissance and the cut of the Real

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unconscious between speech and body). This is why the term ‘subject’ takes a back seat in later Lacan as the broken being of the Real parlêtre takes over. The subject is unknotted in the unary non-relation of the R-S-I and reknotted as a speaking-being with a Real cut between the speech of lalangue and the body’s being of jouissance. In Seminar XX, when the Symbolic foregrounds the Real by turning from linguistic sense to its sonic being in lalangue, it marks a homologous shift from the subject to the parlêtre. There is limited access to being due to the loss of das Ding in the inception of the Symbolic as well as the sexed process of reproduction.6 Unlike Badiou’s claim that the function of Lacanian subject overwrites being, I think that Lacanian subject is finally a Real exsistence of the being that is lost in both biological and linguistic birth. What remains of this ontology is an inscribed Real unconscious as a cut in being that is produced by numbers as Real letters. Badiou is more Lacanian than ever when he concludes: We might also say that between Number, which inscribes its section in the unrepresentable inconsistency of natural multiples, and number, which we manipulate according to structural links, passes the difference between Being and beings. Number is the place of the being qua being, for the manipulable numericality of numbers. Number ek-sists in number as the latency of its being. (211) Badiou makes a capital distinction here between ‘Number’ in uppercase singular and ‘numbers’ in lower-case plurals. Number is the place of numbers which does not pass while numbers keep moving in a series. Beckettian subject uses the word ‘haven’ to describe his love affair with counting. When the boy-man is waiting for his beloved, he is housed in the ‘rustic hexahedron’ of a matheme. This immovable haven is the place of Real Number (the swarm of Real Ones, accumulated in the impassability of numbers), and the progression of numbers happens in this place. Although Beckettian subject enjoys the material presence of infinitesimal numbers, it also produces pain when he cannot terminate the series. Beckettian parlêtre must limit the count by accommodating its limitlessness in the final count of three-as-one in ‘Alone’ which constructs the ‘+1’ of four as the swarming Real One. Lacan points out that mathematical formalization is ‘not transmissible without the use of language itself’ (1998: 119). This indicates the impossibility of complete mathematization or complete eschewal of linguistic sense. Beckett’s boy-man cannot think entirely in numbers. Numbers inaugurate corporeal thinking, but they are also resorbed into the linguistic function. There is no such thing as a complete mathematization of speech. However, in the counting of the three-in-one as four, the signifier ‘alone’ passes into the Real matheme of the letter by limiting the illimitable as Beckett quick leaves him.

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To return to corporeal cuts, Beckett refers to the body anatomically, foregrounding parts over whole. Corporeal drives make their presence felt here. The narrator describes the hearer’s body as an extension from the ‘calcaneum’ to the ‘bump of philoprogenitiveness’ (2009a: 33). These anatomic terms isolate the body as a part from the familiar Imaginary framework of the complete body. The calcaneus, an anatomical term for the heel bone, highlights the moving function of the body. It metonymically inscribes the whole body through one part. This part is the terminal border of the body where it touches the ground: ‘the thrust of the ground against his bones’ (33). In nineteenth-century phrenology, the philoprogenitive bump was believed to be a part of the brain, causing the parent’s instinctual love for children. In Company, it indexes the effect of drive on the body. The hearer is a ‘figment’ of the creator and the creator’s ‘philoprogenitiveness’ instigates him to conjure the hearer. The creator’s crawl ‘on all fours’ reemphasizes the fragmented body. During the crawl, the unbroken linearity of the erect body breaks into five parts. Motility fragments the body and produces company in between the different parts of the same body. Movement generates its share of jouissance. When the narrator’s crawl comes to a halt in the prone position, it counterpoints with the supine: ‘The supine though most tempting he must finally disallow as being already supplied by the hearer’ (37). The creator-narrator lies prone while his hearer-creature remains supine. Although this position restores corporeal linearity, it is not the same as erect linearity. Both positions flatten the body from its vertical axis of walking, in the boy-man’s tramps, into the horizontal axis of lying down. The final positions make the body inaccessible to the possibility of mirror image as the foundation of ego. The prone and the supine subjects cannot see their whole body or even a part of it. This is how the narrator-deviser’s physical efforts to see himself in the prone position are described: ‘But how prone? Prone how? How disposed the legs? The arms? The head? Prone in the dark he strains to see how best he may lie prone. How most companionably’ (37). The demonstration of this ‘straining to see how prone’ describes the body in parts: legs, arms and head. This corporeal division attempts to import the body as an image into thinking, but the effort to erect an Imaginary whole from the different parts of the body is severely limited by the fixity of the prone position. Although the deviser can see his creature, the creature can never be his mirror since he cannot see his creator and the text is uncompromising on this point. The creator cannot see himself as a whole body in his creature’s eyes because his creature does not see him for a moment. After this failed effort to see his whole body, the narrator-deviser fixes his gaze on his creature’s naked body, glistening in the ghostly glimmer of the voice: After long straining eyes closed prone in the dark the following. But first naked or covered? If only with a sheet. Naked. Ghostly in the

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voice’s glimmer that bonewhite flesh for company. Head resting mainly on occipital bump aforesaid. Legs joined at attention. Feet splayed ninety degrees. Hands invisibly manacled crossed on pubis. (37–38; my emphases) The narrator sees his creature with closed eyes. The decision to have him naked reinforces his status as a body. The description foregrounds a holebody. The anatomic isolations of head, occipital bump, legs, hands and pubis underline a fragmented body. The effort to defragment this partial body does not succeed. The position is depicted in geometric terms (‘Feet splayed ninety degrees’), and the counterpointing of ‘joined’ and ‘splayed’ suggests how a whole body can only be constructed by suturing its ruinous parts. This partial body is the result of the letter’s cut in the Real unconscious as a break between speaking and being. The final moment shows the transition from the erect walking body to the supine body as thanato-morphosis when the unchangeable supine position fuses with that of the corpse. The eternal stasis of the corpse registers a translation of all drives into death drive. Corporeal jouissance, after all bodily movements, finds its final home in death. Inanimate body is the Real site where all the partial drives turn into death drive. The body goes from walking to halting, from halting to a ‘huddled’ position to a ‘lying’ down. It goes back and forth between the ‘huddled’ and the ‘supine’ till, in the end, the perpetual supineness of the corpse becomes a ‘rule.’ This is the poignant moment of final animation: Simultaneously the various parts set out. The arms unclasp the knees. The head lifts. The legs start to straighten. The trunk tilts backward. And together these and countless others continue on their respective ways till they can go no further and together come to rest. Supine now you resume your fable where the act of lying cut it short. And persist till the converse operation cuts it short again. So in the dark now huddled and now supine you toil in vain. And just as from the former position to the latter the shift grows easier in time and more alacrious so from the latter to the former the reverse is true. Till from the occasional relief it was supineness becomes habitual and finally the rule. You now on your back in the dark shall not rise again to clasp your legs in your arms and bow down your head till it can bow down no more. But with face upturned for good labour in vain at your fable. (41–42; my emphases) There is no displacement in this final move but only a postural alternation punctuated by final stasis. The last traces of animation tend towards the inanimate ‘rule’ of the corpse. The terminal movement is replete with corporeal fragmentation in ‘setting out of various parts’ like head, legs, arms, trunk and ‘countless others’, thus turning the

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body into a Lacanian ‘waste scrap’ (Seminar XXI: 11.6.1974). As in the summerhouse episode where the fragmented upper and lower limbs give each other company, the segmented body in ruin provides company to itself insofar as one not only is a body but also has a body. If the body has a being, it is only the mutual having (possession) of the different parts that constitutes this being. The word ‘alacrious’ here accentuates that this final transformation is a matter of both pain and pleasure, i.e. the affective complex of jouissance in death drive. The transition from the huddled to the supine position produces alacrity, but for the transition from the supine, back to the huddled, ‘the reverse is true.’ This alacrity grounds death drive when it makes the ‘habit’ of supineness into a ‘rule.’ Habit acts as a ‘great deadener’ by putting the cadaverous stamp on the ‘bonewhite flesh.’ The stasis of the supine position coincides with a slow cessation of the voice as death takes over. This ending suggests that corporeal inscription of the Real can only end when the life of the body ends. As the semantic stability of the signifier ‘alone’ meets the fluidity of the letter in lalangue, the jouissance of death drive permeates the deathly stagnation of the moving body. Our interpretive route through corporeal drives reconfirms the erotics, latent in the notion of company. Not only does Beckett excise the Freud reference from the published text but he also removes a mention of masturbation: ‘Masturbate now and then to while away the time’ (Krance: 93). Perhaps the explicit reference to masturbation would have made sexuality too apparent in the text. The sexual is a spectral presence in Company. It ex-sists in the textual ruses. In the summerhouse section, when the boy-man measures the upper and lower parts of the beloved’s body by imagining them suspended side by side, both the measuring act and the fragmented body have an underlying erotic function. In the same vignette, when the boy-man makes a jump cut from his beloved’s abdomen to his father’s potbelly, the sexualization of the corporeal becomes patent: Your gaze descends to the breasts. You do not remember them so big. To the abdomen. Same impression. Dissolve to your father’s straining against the unbuttoned waistband. Can it be she is with child without your having asked for as much as her hand? (27; my emphasis) The image of the father, reading Punch with ‘the waist of his trousers unbuttoned’ drifts into his own image, as he waits for his beloved in the summerhouse. Later on, the beloved’s swollen abdomen reminds the boyman of his father’s protruded waist in unbuttoned trousers. Two identical body parts in an intersubjective circuit represent sexuality in a divisive mode here. The technique of representation is partial as in the Lacanian ‘montage’ of drives:

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If there is anything resembling a drive it is a montage. […] The montage of the drive is a montage which, first, is presented as having neither head nor tail – in the sense in which one speaks of montage in a surrealist collage. (1979: 169) Lacan’s reference to Surrealism makes room for the literary here. As we have seen in Chapter 1, Surrealism frames Lacan’s literary entry into psychoanalytic practice. For him, all drives turn to death drives as they can only represent sexuality in a partial way in the unconscious. The technique of this representation is akin to cinematic montage as juxtaposition of images. The juxtaposition of the beloved’s abdomen with the father’s potbelly offers a montage in the passage above. What solidifies this trope is Beckett’s cinematic use of the word ‘dissolve.’ This montage signals the fragmented body’s partial sexual drives. Sexuality is elliptically written into this image as something that links one body with another but only by way of division. Company is thus in sync with the undecidable company of Real unconscious located in a mathematical cusp between addition and subtraction. We have approached this subjective company from the position of the speaker’s enunciation in speech and the resultant schism in his identity. This identity is formed through a process of regulation by the Other’s demand. The Symbolic subject of the unconscious dissolves when the solitary and the solidary are knotted up as a Real jouissance of discord between speech and the speaking-body’s divided being. Through counting and motility, Company subverts the mental Imaginary and writes the Real unconscious as a trace of broken alterity, both inside and outside the self.

Notes 1

For more on Beckett and Prosopopeia, see Bruno Clément’s essay ‘‘‘but what is this voice?’’’

2

See Jacques-Alain Miller’s essay ‘Extimity’ in Symptom 9.

3

Beckett has recorded this memory in two other places. In Malone Dies, the mother’s cutting response is quoted: ‘It is precisely as far away as it appears to be’ (2006: 261). In ‘The End’, the boy’s question is about the sound of rain on earth to which the mother replies: ‘Fuck off’ (1995: 81).

4

See Miller’s ‘Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier’ in Symptom 8.

5

See Chapter XII of Seminar X: Anxiety.

6

In ‘Position of the Unconscious’, Lacan advances the myth of ‘lamella’ as the unborn part of being that haunts as a missing libidinal organ (2006: 718).

4 Jouissance of Worsening in Lituraterre: Worstward Ho

‘The fact that one says remains forgotten behind what is said in what is heard.’ — Lacan (1998: 15) So far, we have charted geometric and numerical modes of Real unconscious writing in How It Is and Company. I have observed the Beckettian text’s utilization of geometric and arithmetical forms to inscribe what cannot be inscribed otherwise. As we have seen, Beckett maintains a vestigial human dimension of the numerical problematic of one and many in the oscillation between solitude and company as two fundamental existential conditions. Through diacritical markers (Roman capitals in How It Is) and hidden morphemes in the word-body (‘alone’ in Company), I have highlighted how the signifier’s corporeality is made to write against its semantic code. Beckett’s texts have complemented this stress on the corporeality of signifiers with an emphasis on human corporeality as an inscription in its own right. The writing, performed by the moving human body, has in many ways constituted and formalized the unspeakable Real. While we continue to probe these questions with Worstward Ho in the present chapter, our focus will be on the exact way in which this Beckett text decouples knowledge from language and makes language phonologically and morphologically fluid. This linguistic fluidity, as we shall see, marks an affective articulation of lalangue in the Beckettian text. When the semantic solidity of language is shaken, we are left with its bare being in sonic supports of lalangue that affect us with their minimal affective meanings. This movement of language towards lalangue will be our focus in this chapter. I will show how this move is dramatized by Worstward Ho which aims at linguistic inanity as

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yet another way of writing the Real unconscious through non-knowledge. In this chapter, we would return to Lacan’s theorization of the literaturepsychoanalysis interface, evoked previously in Chapter 1, as we demonstrate how the text of Worstward Ho becomes a littoral between the two discourses of psychoanalysis and literature. As Llewellyn Brown indicates, the material dimension of lalangue in psychoanalysis connects with literary polysemy: ‘Lacan is working with language in its material dimension, where it cannot be limited to, or enfolded within a single meaning’ (2016: 105). Having said this, we would also attend to the fact that the mathematical aspects of this material language not only make room for multiple meanings but also restrict this semantic multiplicity with an a-signifying body of the letter.

Beckett, Lacan and the worsening letter I will read Worstward Ho (1983) as an enactment of what Lacan calls ‘lituraterre’ as we continue to trace the logico-mathematical writing of Real unconscious in the literary text. ‘Lituraterre’ – Lacan’s singlemost significant theorizing on the interface of psychoanalysis and literature – is a written essay as well as a spoken text that appears in the form of a session in Seminar XVIII (1970–1971). This doubleness of status as both writing and speech is shared by Worstward Ho that thematizes how writing becomes a performance of speech. Beckett’s text interpenetrates the oral and the written in its passage from ‘Say on’ to ‘Said nohow on’ (2009a: 81). The text also shares the titular metaphor of Seminar XIX ‘ … Or Worse’ through which Lacan indicates how psychoanalytic truth can only be ‘half-said’ while the other half remains unsayable in the Real. Beckett’s text is obsessed with worsening without end. The ellipsis and the continuation, implied in the alternative, ‘or worse’ expose a similar interminable worsening. Worsening both aims at and withdraws from the absolute stopping point of the ‘worst.’ The worst is an impossible Real. As it remains unreachable, Beckett and Lacan settle for a compromised formation of the ‘best worse.’ In this worsening of speech, Beckett’s and Lacan’s affinity lies in a linguistic operation that tips language over from sense to sound, from knowledge to affect (jouissance) and from literature to ‘lituraterre.’ This operation cuts into the bare being of language as lalangue. In our comparatist dialogue of literature and psychoanalysis, Beckettian ‘ill-saying’ will speak to Lacan’s ‘half-saying’ as homologous incarnations of literary and psychoanalytic truth telling. Llewellyn Brown has rightly pointed out that in psychoanalysis as well as in literature, ‘it is impossible to say the truth about truth’ (2016: 44). Both literature and psychoanalysis deal with the aesthetics of half-saying truths. Worstward Ho figures writing as an effect of speech act – what Lacan calls Real ‘saying’ (dire), ex-sisting in ‘the said’ (dit). For Lacan, the signifier

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introduces an evental order of the act (1992: 265). In other words, saying is an event. It happens, and that it happens often remains repressed in what is said. While we concentrate on the content of what is said, the form of speech remains somewhat neglected, to say the least. As the Lacan of the essay ‘l’étourdit’ formulates, if we can foreground this saying, it can inscribe the Real topological structure of language that remains buried in the said. An emphasis on the structure of saying reveals lalangue as the ex-sistence of Real in language. In other words, saying goes hand in hand with lalangue while the said is enclosed within the Symbolic. As we shall see, this Real structure of speech or the being of speech that makes up the speaking-being (parlêtre) has to do with the mathematical minimalism of self-same letters. Beckett’s text shifts grammatical voice to mark the split between saying and said: ‘Say on. Be said on’ (81). While the active voice (‘say’) foregrounds saying, the passive construction of the same verb (‘be said’) draws our attention to what is said in the saying. In an alternative reading of this equivocal shift, we can argue that saying says the speaker in a certain kind of way. That is what it might mean to ‘be said on’ by saying itself. Read this way, the shift of voice gives radical agency to Real saying over the Symbolic and epistemic solidity of the said. This also acknowledges the problem of ‘missaying’ as a closing of the gap between the act of saying and what is said in it: ‘Say for be said. Missaid’ (81). Beckett’s use of the signifier ‘say’ is curiously mathematical. He uses the signifier’s equivocation to suggest that ‘say’ is a hypothetical act of supposition. This evokes the mathematical injunction: ‘Say it’s an x.’ This insight into speech as logical supposition gives a mathematical colour to language. In Worstward Ho, saying is mathematized into a non-representational space where verisimilitude of truth in the said is eclipsed by the saying event: ‘Say bones. No bones but say bones. Say ground. No ground but say ground’ (82). As we can see in the lines quoted here, language itself withdraws its correspondence with any extralinguistic reference and insists on its hypothetical and mathematical character. Even though there are no bones and grounds, we continue to hypothesize about their ex-sistence in the mathematical act of saying. This connects back to the point, which we have made in Chapter 1, about the discursive autonomy of mathematics as a framework for writing. At this level, there is no hard distinction between writing and saying. In fact, Real saying writes itself in speech against that which is said in it. Mathematical discourse does not need to depend heavily on any reference to external reality to install its model of writing, and this makes it all the more appealing to Modernist writers like Beckett who want to give the literary text a certain degree of autonomy. Worstward Ho foregrounds literary writing’s originary orality. For Lacan, in ‘Lituraterre’, this orality, transferred to writing at a later stage in human history, is constitutive of the literary medium: ‘If literature be the using up of leftovers (accommodation des restes), [it] is an affair of a collocation in

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the written of what first would be song, spoken myth, dramatic procession’ (Lacan 1971: 1). The phrase ‘using up of leftovers’ echoes the letter in the litter. In accommodating various oral materials, literature uses residues from different Symbolic domains. This foreshadows its turn towards lituraterre. From the voice that inaugurates writing in How It Is and Company, we arrive at an impoverished ‘saying’ without voice in Worstward Ho. In ‘Comment dire’ (‘what is the word’) – Beckett’s last text written in 1988 – saying still haunts the speaking-being from a Real void: ‘Afaint afar away over there what – ’ (134). The Real is written by not being written here in the empty form of the dash that stands for a blank space as well as an enigmatic directionality of speech where it meets what it lacks. Beckett translates ‘dire’ as ‘word’ but the French (‘dire’ and not ‘mot’) strengthens the Lacanian echo of Real saying. ‘Comment dire’, as the final punctuation of Beckett’s oeuvre, names the lacking place of saying by marking it diacritically with a dash. The dash, like the Roman capitals in How It Is, is a material textual marker. It is a typographic mark of writing in speech. It points to the Real that can only be written into speech. This last poem remains opaque on the speaking subject. The subject is dissolved by the ‘dire’ which produces a typographic cut between the speaking-being’s speech and body as a minimal inscription of Real unconscious. The question regarding enunciation that we saw in Company is intact, but in Worstward Ho, the source of speech becomes inanimate: ‘No words for it whose words. Better worse so’ (2009a: 88). Beckettian ‘it’ echoes Freudian and Lacanian ‘it speaks’ of the unconscious. By depicting an inanimate source of speech, Beckett avows the effect the unconscious has on speech. If speech and language act like prerequisites for the unconscious, literature is a precondition for psychoanalysis. In Lacan, the ‘it’ or ‘id’ that acts as the unconscious source of speech in Freud’s second topology (id, ego, superego after preconscious, conscious and unconscious) resonates with the Real. He treats the ego as Imaginary while the superego is connected with the Symbolic order of language (see the Yale University Lecture: 24.11.1975a). Alan Sheridan defines the Real as ‘that which is lacking in the symbolic order, the ineliminable residue of all articulation’ (Lacan 1979: 280). Beckett’s narrator is frustrated with this unspeakable, and hence the answer to the question ‘who speaks’ can only be an undefined and indefinable ‘it.’ In ‘Lituraterre’, Lacan mentions Beckett as a litterateur or ‘liturateur.’ He is credited with a literary avowal of the unconscious that creates a parallel with its psychoanalytic revelation: It must be said no doubt that I was tired of the wastebasket to which I have channelled my fate. You know that I am not the only one, to be generous, to admit it (I’avouer). The admission (L’avouer) or, as pronounced of old, ‘l’avoir’ (the having) of which Beckett makes a balance to the debt that

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makes refuse of our being, saves the honor of literature, and relieves me of the privilege I believed owed to my place. (1971: 1) In this characteristically witty remark, Lacan imagines a fulcrum between literature and psychoanalysis that is balanced by Beckett and himself as two avowers of unconscious truth in the wastebasket. What is this truth? The first truth about the unconscious is that it speaks from behind the veil of conscious speech. It speaks insofar as it ex-sists in the said as a Real saying. To avow this ex-sistence of Real unconscious in speech is to be able to half-speak (mi-dire). The homology between psychoanalysis and literature is founded on the fact that in both discourses, truth can only be half-said and the art of half-saying constitutes the literary within psychoanalysis. In this dialogue, avowing the unconscious is to expose the letter to the litter as the first signal of turning from ‘literature’ to ‘lituraterre.’ I will return to the latter half of Lacan’s reference to Beckett. What does Beckett make with his ‘art of saying (l’art-dire)’ (Lacan 2016: 99)? What is the Beckettian sinthome in Worstward Ho and how is it constructed on the Real by worsening the Symbolic? The triad of R-S-I is not enough and the fourth order of the symptom arrives in Worstward Ho with greater incisiveness than it did in How It Is and Company. In Seminar XXIII, while discussing Joyce, Lacan defines artistic singularity as ‘know-how (savoir-faire)’ (2016: 47–61). We know from Seminar XX that at stake here is the Real unconscious as a ‘knowing how to do things’ with lalangue. Real unconscious is written by creating ripples in lalangue that uncouple knowledge from language. As we have seen, this savoirfaire is a way of dealing with non-knowledge or ‘true holes’ in knowledge. Truth, in other words, is a hole in knowledge. It has a tremendous negative energy vis-à-vis knowledge. A hole marks the schismatic relation between knowledge and truth. Real unspeakable truth punches a hole in knowledge which is an affair of the Symbolic with the Imaginary. In later Lacan, there is a geometrically formalized distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ holes. A true hole is made of three entities when an infinite straight line goes through the hole, shared by two rings, and creates a knot. In other words, the true hole is a Borromean hole. A false hole on the other hand is strictly dyadic as it is constituted by two rings. There is no infinite straight line to make a knot from this hole. Truth as hole thus involves a triadic logic of coupling while the false hole is dyadic.1 We will see how the holes drilled into knowledge by the Beckettian text are true Borromean holes that are driven by a triadic logic. The Beckettian neologistic letter (‘nohow’) pushes the Joycean ‘know-how’ towards Real non-knowledge. The imperative of ‘saying nohow on’ is the driving force of Worstward Ho. When words do not come to service, blanks dominate and all saying is reduced to ‘mis-saying’; the text takes up the task of worsening ad absurdum

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FIGURE 4.1  False hole (Seminar XXIII: 98)

FIGURE 4.2  True Borromean hole (Seminar XXIII: 99)

to get to a minimally true half-saying. A sadomasochistic operation of worsening the void and its three shades is the function of the narrative as writing becomes coterminous with the affective jouissance of worsening. The ‘worst’ governs writing from inside out, like Lacan’s ‘internally excluded’ Real. This worst is identified with annulment in the text: ‘Naught best worse’ (95), but worsening reveals the impossibility of annulment and settles for a minimal remainder of ‘unnullable least’ (95). In Worstward Ho, subtraction fails to become negation. This makes the textual process interminable, and yet there is an ending. When the text splices the terminable with the interminable, it draws an immanent limit to the impossible and produces a Real writing in the symptomatic letter. This antinomic problem of endless ending is something we would continue to explore, taking the cue from previous chapters. Contradiction, as I have repeatedly marked, is the prevalent logical modality of the Real. Beckett’s textual act of endless ending taps into this Real logical trope.

Between the clouds: Reading ‘Lituraterre’ The word ‘lituraterre’ is a ‘lapsus’ or ‘slip.’ In this respect, it is like an unconscious formation. The signifier ‘literature’ turns to ‘lituraterre’ through a spoonerism where there is a transposition of vowel sounds (e and a) between the two morphemes that constitute the signifier (‘litera’ and ‘ture’). This homophonous word play evokes a complex associative web of ‘lino’ (I erase), ‘litura’ (deletion), ‘liturarius’ (that which shows deletions),

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‘litoris’ (shore) and ‘terre’ (earth). This homophonic mode makes Real writing possible in speech as one word creates a chain of associations with other words that may or may not be actually spoken. Homophony is instrumental in making the Symbolic turn towards the Real as linguistic sense is overtaken by the affective subsurface of language. When language enjoys itself in such a way that its sense is overpowered by jouissance as an affective complex of pain and pleasure, we observe the flow of lalangue that underwrites language. This affective being of lalangue has a friend in what Lacan calls the ‘matheme.’ It is the mathematical extraction of the signifier in the form of the letter that grounds lalangue. In other words, there are mathematical letters in language that anchor its affect and minimize the workings of meaning. To return to ‘Lituraterre’, Jean-Michel Rabaté observes: ‘Lituraterre’, then, generates a double pun: it suggests both letters and their erasure (a pun that is more obvious in French since one can always hear rature – erasure or crossing out – in the very signifier) and the limit or border of a territory, be it the sea, a hole or even another territory. (2001: 33–34) Lituraterre means writing erasure on the ground where the letter bridges the litter and the littoral as it writes its own erasure. Flying over the almost barren Siberian Plain, Lacan had seen the rivers, which from great heights looked like tiny inscriptions on the surface of the earth. He called these distant solitary traces, ‘streaming (ruissellement).’ These streamings were traces of an embankment which performed lituraterre by producing as well as effacing a writing. Santanu Biswas comments on this double function: If the first stroke is a furrow on the ground, an empty riverbed, an erasure written on earth, then the streaming effaces it partially by filling it up with water, which however, does not efface the edges of the erasure. Rather the water establishes the edge as the two banks of the river which continue to distinguish the erasure. (Biswas 2012: 183) The streams sketch the edge of this writing, and though the rest is erased, it retains the littoral as a remnant. From this aesthetic and literary experience, Lacan reaffirms the kenotic function of the letter. In literature’s turn towards lituraterre, literary writing bores holes in knowledge through the letter. Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ identifies the function of the letter as carrying the signifier in its envelope. Poe’s story shows how literature can bore holes in knowledge ‘in forming such a message on the letter.’ Lacan credits him with an ethical avowal of the unconscious that is intrinsic to the phenomenon of lituraterre: ‘It is clear that in not saying so, it is all the more rigorously he admits it’ (1971: 2). Lacan’s prescription

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for psychoanalytic literary criticism thus consists of examining this littoral condition of the letter. When the letter furrows into the Real and activates the edge of knowl-edge, the littoral not only separates the two territories of psychoanalysis and literature but also shows that ‘they have a common measure’ (3) in this function of Real writing. Lituraterre sketches this nonrelational relation of the two discourses: The letter is it not […] littoral more properly, that is, figuring as a domain entirely made for the other frontier, in that they are strangers, to the extent of not being reciprocal. The edge of the hole in knowledge, is that not what it sketches? And how could psychoanalysis, if precisely what the letter says ‘literally’ (‘à la lettre’) with its mouth, it did not have to be misrecognized, how could it deny that it is, this hole – since to fill it, it returns to invoking jouissance? It remains to be known how the unconscious which I say to be an effect of language, in that it supposes its structure as necessary and sufficient, commands this function of the letter. (3) The letter’s kenotic function is based on the Symbolic unconscious, but its ‘structure’ extracts a Real from this Symbolic. The literal surface of the letter activates its littoral condition, and the hole it opens up is filled by jouissance. Lituraterre operates through lituration and incarnates the limit where ‘language calls the littoral in the literal’ (3). The littoral condition of the letter is demonstrated by its literal presentation which is also a literary presentation. Lacan’s suggestion is clear. If there is a psychoanalytic reading of literature, it must attend to the textuality of the literary text in all its literal resonances which open up the littoral of meaning. It is important to underline that Lacan’s demonstration in this essay, ‘Lituraterre’, is literary. It emerges from his own subjective experience as an aerial observer between the clouds. What he theorizes from this poetic personal experience is a literal presentation because it traces the river’s writing of its own erasure: The streaming is the bouquet of a first stroke (trait) and of what effaces it. I have said it: it is from their conjunction that the subject is made […] It is necessary then that the erasure be distinguished there. Erasure of no trace that might be in advance, this is what makes the shore (terre) of the littoral. Pure Litura, this is the literal. (1971: 5) Lacanian subject is defined here as a combination of the mathematical writing of unary trait and its effacement. As we have seen in Chapter 1, Lacanian writing begins from the numerical writing of ‘unary trait’ and the streaming both writes and erases it. The subject is thus an effect of writing and erasure – the two functions constituting lituraterre. There is no

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writing before the erasure which means that the letter can only be posited retroactively from its erasure. Lacan reflects that ‘between center and absence, between knowledge (savior) and jouissance, there is a littoral which turns to the literal’ (5–6). The littoral constitutes the letter with jouissance which has the affective agency to eclipse the semantic doublet of knowledge and meaning. The more the letter dwells on its word-surface, the more literal it becomes, and this literality pushes it towards the litter. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in which one signifier literally slips to and from another signifier in a network of inter-linguistic puns is Lacan’s favourite example for this movement. As he says, ‘the signifier stuffing (vient truffer) the signified’ (1998: 37) produces a Joycean ‘joui-sense’ or enjoyment of proliferating meaning. Beckett’s text on the other hand, as we shall see, inverts Joycean enjoyment of excessive meaning with an enjoyment that minimizes meaning to the mathematical letter.

Lituraterre and the discourse which might not be a semblance The central question of Seminar XVIII (of which ‘Lituraterre’ is a part) is whether there can be a discourse without semblance. Lacan’s definition of discourse is not only linguistic. It also involves a ‘social bond (lien social).’ ‘Semblance’ to this social or what belongs to the world outside is intrinsic to it. In every discourse, there are four positions: agent/truth and other/ production. Semblance or what Miller translates as ‘make-believe’ works as the agent, standing over truth. Semblance ‘is the signifier in itself’ (Seminar XVIII: 13.1.1971) which means it is at the heart of the Symbolic and ‘what is real, is what makes a hole in this semblance’ (13.1.1971). A discourse without semblance must be a discourse of the Real in the Real, but there is no discourse that can completely let go of semblance (which would mean letting go of natural language altogether). Since no discourse can be entirely non-linguistic, ‘there is no discourse except a semblance’ (9.6.1971). Although Lacan posits no discourse without semblance, he talks about Real ‘writing’ as a way of making holes in semblance. For Lacan, the Real can be supported only by mathematical inscription ‘because it is not with words that we write the real. It is with little letters’ (24.11.1975). It is important to note here that Lacan does not give even mathematical discourse the complete autonomy of being a discourse without semblance. Mathematical discourse might promise autonomy, but it cannot deliver entirely on that account. In other words, the limits of what can be mathematized in language can touch on the Real, but that does not mean

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that mathematics is a discourse of the Real in the Real. This is the irony of European literary Modernism’s appeal to mathematical autonomy as a model for textual autonomy. Neither literary Modernism nor mathematical discourse can attain a complete autonomy that does not need to go beyond self-reference. This is why words cannot become entirely ‘inane’ in Worstward Ho. There is a vestige of reference to the world outside discourse that survives in this dynamic as a minima of affective meaning. Although mathematical discourse would like to believe in its absolute Symbolic autonomy vis-à-vis the referential world outside itself, it can never fully achieve this independence and exclusivity. Sundar Sarukkai, a scholar on mathematical thinking in the domain of philosophy of science, has made the provocative argument that mathematics as writing can never totally erase its relation with natural language. For Sarukkai, mathematical writing is fundamentally about an act of ‘tracing’ that reduces ‘word-mark’ into ‘alphabet-mark’ (2001: 669). He likens this process of writing to translation as a linguistic process and argues that ‘the language of mathematics is itself a translation of NL [Natural Language]’ (2001: 669). As we have seen in Chapters 1 and 2, Lacan’s emphasis on mathematics comes from the fact that mathematics is writing and it offers him a way of thinking about Real writing that takes place in the unconscious. While Lacan privileges mathematics as a writing that makes ‘integral transmission’ possible through the self-sameness of ‘little letters’, mathematical formalization for him is also full of impasses that inscribe the Real via negativa. Like Sarukkai, who shows the dependence of mathematical language on natural language, Lacan too acknowledges that ‘mathemes’ ‘are not transmitted without the help of language and that’s what makes the whole thing shaky’ (1998: 110). He is categorical on this scepticism throughout Seminar XX, and it is interesting that this is the same seminar in which he declares mathematization of language as the goal of psychoanalytic practice. Let us look at another iteration of this scepticism from the seminar: Mathematical formalization consists of what is written, but it only subsists, if I employ, in presenting it, the language (langue) I make use of. Therein lies the objection: no formalization of language is transmissible without the use of language itself. (119) So mathematics is no metalanguage for Lacan. It can curb the Imaginary and Symbolic seductions of meaning and knowledge. But it cannot erase them as it needs natural language for its subsistence. We can find cognitivist support for establishing mathematical discourse’s dependence on human language in Lakoff and Núñez’s work (mentioned in Chapter 1) as they foreground the metaphorical operation of mathematical ideas in the embodied mind (see Lakoff and Núñez: 39–50). This dependence registers the failure of both mathematical autonomy and Modernist

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literature’s appeal to it for its own textual autonomy. Modernist literary text can definitely extract from mathematical language a certain degree of autonomy from the world of realistic verisimilitude. But it cannot claim complete independence from meaning and knowledge of and in this reality outside discourse. A discourse that does not have an iota of semblance is a completely autonomous discourse with no connection with reality. It exists entirely in the Real because the Real is precisely what reality leaves out. But there is no such discourse. Real can be registered in a discourse in the form of an aporia, but it cannot become the exclusive thriving point of a discourse. Neither mathematics nor literature can be a discourse without semblance altogether but as Lacanian psychoanalysis demonstrates, both can approach the Real in partial moments of rupture when mathematical and literary forms lead to operational deadlocks. Although there cannot be a discourse without semblance, writing, which furrows into the Real through the letter, can break the semblance at certain discursive points. Where the Real interrupts, a discourse can forego semblance. Lacan mentions lituraterre as a process or a turn and not a product. It is only within this turn that a discourse without semblance can be glimpsed. This turn is central to Lacan’s arrangement of the four discourses in Seminar XVII. By making a ‘quarter turn’, one discourse changes into another (2007: 14). I would argue that literature’s turn to lituraterre is a discursive turn between literature and psychoanalysis where a writing happens neither in literature nor in psychoanalysis but on their shared littoral. It installs Real unconscious as an impasse, but the impasse also produces a passage as it constructs something on the Symbolic that comes from the Real. This is the sinthome that the Beckettian text makes in order to produce an immanent ending of endless endings. The Real symptom is helpful in punctuating a process which cannot be terminated otherwise. Lacan never clarifies literature’s precise position in his quadrangular discursive machinery. I read this silence as a suggestion that the literary is endemic to any discourse. Literature can perhaps be defined by its polymorphous fluidity as a discourse. Literature is a transitional discourse that is never settled and always engaged in a turn. While both psychoanalysis and literature-turning-towards-lituraterre are discourses coming from semblance, they both engage with a logico-mathematical writing that breaks this semblance with the littoral and produces an eruption of the Real. In ‘Lituraterre’, Lacan claims that Modernist avant-garde literature (this is the ambit under which he mentions Beckett) is composed of the littoral: Is it possible from the littoral to constitute a discourse such as characterizes itself as not being emitted from the semblant? There is the question only proposed by the literature called avant-garde, which is itself made of the littoral: and thus does not sustain itself by the semblant. (7)

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Although avant-garde literature interrupts semblance with the littoral, Lacan maintains that this interruption is something that ‘only a discourse can produce’ (7). The breakage cannot create a substantive autonomy from semblance as it remains an effect of discourse, and hence in some sort of relation with the world outside. It is impossible to have a discourse without semblance that consists of no reference to the real world and simply lives by the Real that is excluded from reality. It is only as the impossible that the Real can be grasped here. The Real is thus an impossible effect of discourse, and lituraterre is a discursive turn that attempts to embody this impossibility. Although it fails to induce a complete break with semblance, lituraterre, for once, succeeds in breaking the semblant with the littoral. This breakage exposes a jouissance of tormenting enjoyment. This affective dimension of mathematical language can momentarily undercut the semblance-driven paradigms of knowledge and sense.

Lituraterre and the jouissance of lalangue: From knowhow to nohow In ‘Lituraterre’ Lacan reflects: ‘What is evoked of jouissance insofar as a semblant is broken, this is what in the real presents itself as a furrowing’ (6). This suggests how Real writing evokes affect (jouissance) when it breaks semblance in a discourse. Lacan elaborates that ‘writing is in the real the furrowing of the signified’ (6). This definition of Real writing shows that it traces the edge of Freudian das Ding in the Real through its furrowing. When the letter touches the edge of the Real, it emits a jouissance that comes as close as language can ever come to inhabit the Real. The eclipsing of knowledge by jouissance exposes a layer underneath the semantics of language, i.e. lalangue. In Worstward Ho, Beckettian worsening exposes this layer in which the affect of jouissance overrides linguistic sense. Beckett’s subtractive operation on knowledge lays bare the lalangue of language, where Real unconscious is incarnated in affective letters of jouissance. At the end of analysis, the Real unconscious of lalangue is incarnated in such sinthomatic letters. We will see how Worstward Ho stalls the infinity of endless worsening with the ‘unnullable least’ of three pins and one pinhole as the primordial four of sinthomatic construction. In the ‘Geneva Lecture on the Symptom’, Lacan traces lalangue back to the Greco-Roman Stoics who anticipate a bodily dimension of language. He defines lalangue as ‘this language that has absolutely no theoretical existence’ and that which ‘always intervenes in the form of what I call – using a word that I have wanted to make as close as possible to the word “lallation”, “babbling” – “lalangue”, “llanguage”’ (1989: 14). Lacan defines language as ‘knowledge’s hare-brained lucubration’ (1998: 139) on

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lalangue. Knowledge constructs language on top of the fundamental sonic structure of lalangue and language is ‘what we try to know concerning the function of llanguage [lalangue]’ (138). If knowledge’s work on lalangue establishes language, then undoing it would uncover lalangue as the ‘being of language’ (2006: 736). I argue that this subtraction of knowledge from language is the turn of writing from literature to lituraterre. The withdrawal of knowledge from language uncovers lalangue and writes the unconscious as Real. Lalangue as ‘the word prior to its grammatical and lexico-graphic systematization’ (Miller 2000: 38) is homologous to the mathematical extraction of the letter from the signifier. As Jean-Claude Milner argues, ‘Language is what sustains lalangue insofar as it is not-all’ (1990: 66). Each parole or speech act has an incomplete and impossible-to-complete relation with langue as the system of language. Lalangue as a neologistic letter is made of two morphemes: ‘la’ and ‘langue.’ So the word ‘lalangue’ as a Real word-body contains a reference to ‘langue’ as linguistic system. At this level, lalangue indicates the impossibility of exhausting the general system of langue through individual speech acts of parole. Through particular speech acts, we can never totalize language as a system. What is said makes a gesture towards what is not said through the ‘not-all’ of Real saying. This identification of lalangue with ‘not-all’ clarifies that lalangue is driven by Real logic. It also connects lalangue with ‘halfsaying’ as ‘not-all’ truth can ever be said. Language is an epistemological construction on lalangue, and once it is unmade, lalangue as remainder reveals itself. When the epistemic edifice of language is withdrawn from it, language ceases to exist and the Real reigns supreme in the material supports of lalangue. This residual status of lalangue is clarified in Lacan’s reference to Joyce’s novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He dwells on Joyce’s literary use of the word ‘suck’ to designate ‘the noise that the lavatory makes when you pull the chain, when it sinks down the hole’ (1989: 8), and the young protagonist Stephen marvels at this gurgling sound. Lacan explains the efficacy of lalangue with the help of this literary example: The fact that a child says, perhaps, not yet, before he is able to construct a sentence properly, proves that there is something in him through which everything is sieved, whereby the water of language happens to leave something behind as it passes, some detritus which he will play with, indeed, which he will be forced to cope with. (1989: 16; my emphasis) This ‘detritus’, called ‘debris’, elsewhere in the Geneva lecture is lalangue. Once the ‘water of language’ is evacuated, lalangue as pure sound appears. While this is as close as literature-turning-towards-lituraterre can get to the Real via the enjoyment of sounds over sense in lalangue, it can never fully settle in lalangue. As soon as this pure sound is mimetically reproduced in the signifier ‘suck’, despite its onomatopoeic quality, it opens up a can

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of semblants. The word brings in a semblance of Symbolic and Imaginary sense as it invokes the child’s breastfeeding activity, among other things. Even though ‘suck’ refers to a purely meaningless sound of water passing through the hole in the novel, the resonances of the word reinforce meaning through associations. Language reappropriates lalangue as soon as the break from knowledge is induced. This goes back to our previous problematic that avant-garde Modernist literature cannot become a discourse without semblance after all. This double movement shows how literature breaks the semblant by creating a littoral, but it cannot last long in this littoral. Worstward Ho as an exercise in language unmakes the epistemological construction on top of lalangue to disclose the detritus of language through an unworsenable remainder. It stages the process of littering the letter. The ‘unnullable least’ emerging as the minimal remainder of worsening is the Beckettian ‘lessness’ of lalangue. The language of the text performs this lituraterre by informing the letter with the literal and the littoral to arrive at the litter of linguistic ‘inanity.’ In ‘nohow’, ‘no’ ironically invokes ‘know’ through homophony which operates on the literal surface of language. It traces a Real writing in speech as only writing can distinguish ‘nohow’ from ‘knowhow.’ In Beckett’s text, Real unconscious writing takes place as savoir-faire with non-knowledge. As Jean-Michel Rabaté observes, ‘If we work psychoanalytically with literature […] we will learn to work with unknowing’ (2014a: 214). Beckett’s neologistic style and morphological torsions subject language to a Real logic of Jouissance. The textual operation of worsening literally installs the littoral at the ‘bounds of boundless void.’ This subversive work on language exploits the literal by joining the signifier ‘listening’ with the ‘least’ of ‘leastening’ in the letter. Tropes of fluidity indicate a liquefaction of language into lalangue through the affective fabric of jouissance. Words oozing from the ‘soft of mind’ ‘secrete’ their ‘secrets’ as they make language semantically fluid. The neologistic play on degree-words like ‘unmoreable’, ‘unworsenable’ and ‘unnullable’ underwrites an inclination to overflow sense with a tortuous jouissance that tears apart the veil of ‘word surface.’ The resistant trace of ‘unnullable least’ stands for a final iota of sense which cannot be eliminated. In spite of undermining the semantic value of words by underlining their investment in jouissance, Worstward Ho must stop at the least of semblance. It demonstrates this ethical failure as a Real limit: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ (2009a: 81). As we have seen, this acknowledgement of futility registers the failure of both mathematical discourse and Modernist literary text to create absolute autonomy from the world. It is an important failure nevertheless. Worstward Ho moves lalangue-ward by worsening the illusory ‘all’ of language with the ‘not-all’ of half-saying. The jouissance of mathematical letter irrupts when the littoral interjects between knowledge and jouissance. As knowledge is sabotaged, the letter through the littoral reveals a Real

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jouissance. Jouissance is an affect combining pain with pleasure. Although it is anchored in the letter, it can transgress the Symbolic and undercut linguistic sense. For Lacan, in human speech, there is always this unconscious dimension of enjoyment. I will approach jouissance here in tandem with the little pieces of the Real glimpsed through breakages in the Symbolic. Miller calls this ‘the impossible jouissance’ attributed to the Real. As we have seen, ‘here jouissance is on the side of the Thing’ (Miller 2000: 22). The Lacanian paradox is that jouissance is both the cause and the halting point for the signifier. We are concerned with the second part of this paradox where there is a disjunction between jouissance and signifier. This paradoxical relation implies that jouissance can always overwhelm the signifying system of language and override the operation of meaning. In Seminar VII, Lacan discusses the transgressive agency of jouissance vis-à-vis Symbolic law which is dominated by the linguistic operation of sense. The capacity to subvert sense makes jouissance an affective ally of lalangue. Talking about lalangue in Seminar XX, Lacan repeatedly marks its effects as ‘enigmatic’ affects that go beyond ‘enunciated knowledge’ (1998: 139). The effects of lalangue are affective in an enigmatic way because these affects go beyond language and into the Real. I would place the Real affect of lalangue at the level of jouissance because ‘lalangue is the apparatus by which jouissance is conducted’ (Soler 2016: 58). As a tormenting variety (and verity) of enjoyment, jouissance is located in the beyond of the Freudian pleasure principle on the horizon of death drive. When Real jouissance fills up the holes drilled by the letter in writing, it approximates the non-Symbolic das Ding. Das Ding has a relation to death insofar as the thing must die for the signifier to come into being. Lacan comments: ‘The path toward death […] is nothing other than what is called jouissance’ (2007: 18). He strengthens this link between jouissance and death drive by highlighting their shared function of repetition. Repetition automatism as the mechanism of death drive is ‘necessitated’ by jouissance (45). If the project of worsening in Worstward Ho is driven by an affective logic of jouissance, it also opens up the trajectory of jouissance in its fundamental relation to death drive.

Listening to leastening: The fort-da in Worstward Ho Most interpreters of Worstward Ho focus on the way negation and subtraction reveal the textual remainder. For Shane Weller, it stages ‘the impossibility of nihilism’ (2005: 193) by insisting on what remains after the act of annihilation. Subversion of meaning is another oft-explored point in Beckett Studies from the days of its absurdist christening by Martin Esslin

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to more recent post-structuralist readings. Lois Oppenheim’s point about Worstward Ho that ‘the repetition of utterance’ by ‘continually missing its ontical mark, makes of the text a reaffirmation of absent meaning’ (2000: 48) is symptomatic of deconstructive approaches. I do not think the linguistic focus in Worstward Ho reduces thought to language as the misnomer of ‘linguistic turn’ will have it. In fact, the text militates against this reduction by marking an immanent unsayable through the act of (mis)saying. There is something in thought that simply stumps language. Although worsening has to work through language, the trace that cannot be worsened remains testimony to the irreducibility of thinking to language. Let us see how Worstward Ho critiques the so-called linguistic turn which often includes Lacan in a rather unfortunate labelling. As we have previously seen, in ‘l’étourdit’ (punning ‘etourdi’ or ‘dazed’ with ‘le tour dit’ or ‘the said turn’), Lacan formulates: ‘That one might be saying remains forgotten behind what is said in what is heard’ (2009: 32). Saying formalizes the unsaid Real of the said as it remains forgotten behind what is said (34). We can thus understand Beckett’s emphasis on the verb ‘say’ as a reminder of the repressed Real in the fact of saying. Worstward Ho encircles the facticity of this saying. It gives ground to ‘saying on’ which doesn’t refer to ‘on’ being said but marks the endless continuation of saying. The enfolding nature of speech act is a reminder of how saying, ghosting behind the said, frames the discourse of inscribing the ‘not-all’ Real. The Real is bolstered by the letter ‘say’ as it equivocates between speech and the mathematical supposition of ‘say it is x.’ This limits the said to a logic of supposition. It signals a mathematical materialism of language in the savoir-faire of lalangue. Lacan’s and Beckett’s unhooking of language from knowledge clarifies their distance from any linguistic reduction of thinking. Writing in neither Lacan nor Beckett is marked by any omnipotent view of language. As we have seen, the moving body produces a writing through its positions and corporeal geometry in Company and the body also becomes the surface where writing takes place in How It Is. This corporeal writing clearly supplements the supremacy of language in speech. I will now filter and refine this focus on language with the affective element of jouissance. As we shall see, when words are put to the task of worsening, their materiality in the letter creates an infinitely malleable texture of lalangue in Worstward Ho. This is not a language that carries knowledge. This is a lalangue that creates ruptures in knowledge through vital moments of unknowing. Having acknowledged that language cannot be transformed into pure lalangue, Beckett’s worsening toys with words like things and treats language at its material level of plasticity. This object-like malleability of the letter makes it resonate with the writing of lalangue in the Real. When the signifier is treated as an object, the body of the signifier or the letter becomes operative. This writing does not reduce thinking to language. It only corporealizes language into lalangue. Worstward Ho turns language

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into a body with pain and joy, bones and words, acting like things. This constitution as well as fragmentation of language as a body, falling off, in its cracking bones and tattered syntax distance it from any notion of linguistic omnipotence. Worstward Ho acknowledges the foreignness of body and language by underlining the irreducibility of the parlêtre (the Real speakingbeing) to both these apparatuses. We will return to this point later. Worstward Ho begins at the beginning and ends at the end of its narrative universe. The minimal units of body and place give a starting push to saying which carefully constructs and deconstructs its thematic universe. The text begins when the first body or the first shade, designated as the kneeling shade of a woman, stands up in the dim void. The place is an inescapable unary zone: ‘No place but the one’ (2009a: 83). It is considered ‘beyondless’: a ‘thenceless thitherless there’ (83). The shades inscribe a multiple in this One. The teleological question regarding which came first, the body or the place, is resolved through an a-teleological logic of equivalence: ‘First both’ (81). Although it begins with the assertion, ‘Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none’ (81), the inanimate speech still acknowledges a ‘remains of mind’ (82). The unary setting has a complex temporality. While futurity is cancelled – ‘No future in this. Alas yes’ (83) – the place is marked with a present without any past. It is called a ‘pastless now’ with ‘no once’ (98). This disavowal soon turns into a retroactive declaration of the past as a past begins to take shape through the unfolding of the present, moment by moment. The text thus begins from the fundamental units of mind, body, space and time – all marked with a minimal and vestigial status of the detritus. This minimal thematic structure is complemented by a childlike language, i.e. Beckett’s ‘syntax of weakness.’ Brienza notes about the language of Worstward Ho that the ‘syntax in general is lessened towards the speech of an infantile creature’ (254). This infantile syntax produces an effect of lalangue in Worstward Ho. To zoom in on the child-like littering of words into objects, the motif of waste is injected into the early reference to ‘throwing up’ that was ‘puke’ in the drafts: So on. Somehow on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go. Where neither. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again. Where none. The place again. Where none. (2009a: 81) ‘Throwing up’ here is a way of exiting the place so as to return later. Although the place is immanent (‘beyondless’), it allows its bodies, subsequently named ‘shades’, to ‘come and go.’ There is constant oscillation in these shades. They appear, disappear and reappear in sudden movements. On return, they sometimes change and sometimes remain unchanged. The possibility of change is left enigmatic as if saying ‘yes’ to change will make it happen:

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Unchanged? Sudden back unchanged? Yes. Say yes. Each time unchanged. Somehow unchanged. Till no. Till say no. Sudden back changed. Somehow changed. Each time somehow changed. (2009a: 85) This oscillation reminds us of Freud’s ‘fort-da’ game – the child’s throwing back and forth of the spool in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Freudian game is a stage for the pleasure principle, beyond which lurks death drive. If ‘throw up’ is a way of effecting this oscillation, the replacement of ‘puke’ with ‘throw up’ produces the verb ‘throw’ which literally echoes throwing of the spool. Beckett uses ‘gone’ – the equivalent of the German ‘fort.’ To be gone is declared the supreme good of all: ‘Gnawing to be gone. Less no good. Worse no good. Only one good. Gone. Gone for good. Till then gnaw on. All gnaw on. To be gone’ (100). Just as Freud discovered death drive by observing the child’s masochistic elation when the spool representing his mother was gone, the worsening project in Worstward Ho is inspired by this ‘going for good’ which, by way of another literalizing word play, becomes the ‘only one good.’ We will keep halting on these literalizing plays on word-surfaces. They mark the movement from language to lalangue. To worsen the corporeal shades on this ‘shade-ridden void’ (91) is to make them go for good. If this oscillation is the field of the pleasure principle, the ‘longing’ for an irreversible departure is another name for death drive: Longing the so-said mind long lost to longing. The so-missaid. So far so-missaid. Dint of long longing lost to longing. Long vain longing. And longing still. Faintly longing still. Faintly vainly longing still. For fainter still. For faintest. Faintly vainly longing for the least of longing. Unlessenable least of longing. Unstillable vain last of longing still. (97) The alliteration of ‘l’ develops the sonority of this passage. ‘Longing’ is subtly literalized in the pun with ‘long’ in the collocation: ‘long longing.’ Worsening aims at annihilation in the text. It is the affective function of jouissance in its path towards death drive that is named ‘longing for faintest’ here. While worsening works towards minimizing this longing to absolute nothing, it fails to realize a state of no-longing. It has to make do with the least. This ‘least of longing’ is also a longing for the least. This litter of longing points to the enjoyment that rests within death drive. The ‘longing that vain longing go’ shows how the subjects enjoy their death drive as jouissance remains ‘unstillable.’ The passage subverts the Imaginary notion of mind as jouissance of longing pressurizes it with a Real affect. It clarifies that the mental remains are nothing but ‘so-said’ and ‘so-missaid.’ The mental is undercut by the effect as well as the affect of a Real saying. There is no mind without words, but even the words ‘missay’ the mind. This acknowledges the insufficiency of both the Imaginary and the Symbolic. It makes room for

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the Real as ‘missaying’ sensitizes us to the limits of both language and its image-making process of signification. This ‘missaying’ turns language into a lalangue-like state as words breathe more sound than sense. As is apparent in the passage quoted above, this is a quasi-invented language where words are pushed towards the inventiveness of neologisms.

Logic of worsening: Subtractions and negations The world of Worstward Ho is an enclosed textual system with its very own governing logic, but as we have seen above, the rules and regulations that drive Beckettian systems also reach an unplumbable point. This aporetic point is where its systemic autonomy suffers. Let us see this process step by step. While the unrelenting void is identified with skullscape, the bodies of the kneeling woman, the old man and the child and the skull are weakened into shades. These shades (barring the skull) keep coming and going. They fade in and out but do not go for good. Their gnawingly resilient presence necessitates worsening. As the inanimate speech says, though they are in a bad shape, they are not sufficiently wrong: ‘Far far from wrong’ (88). Worsening aims at making them more and more wrong, as wrong as they can be(come). Worsening has another name in the text: ‘failing better.’ It works through subtraction. The very possibility of addition is laughed away: First one. First try fail better one. Something there badly not wrong. Not that as it is it is not bad. The no face bad. The no hands bad. The no –. Enough. A pox on bad. Mere bad. Way for worse. Pending worse still. […] Add a –. Add? Never. Bow it down. Be it bowed down. Deep down. Head in hat gone. More back gone. (89) The ‘pox on bad’ evokes an image of the litter. The ‘shades’ in the final text were called ‘scraps’ in drafts, literally promising the litter in the letter. The trajectory of worsening is decided on a strict subtractive line where the longing to be gone dominates and so does the signifier ‘gone.’ The two dashes (–) acting like ellipsis in the above passage return again and again in Worstward Ho as a material formalization of ‘blanks for when words gone’ (99). These blanks anticipate a more prolific and violently disjunctive use of the dash in ‘What is the Word.’ In this poem’s drafts, Beckett renames the dash as ‘traits de disunion’, playing on the hyphen that is called ‘trait d’union’ (Hulle 2011: 104). This neologism is a double letter constructed on a diacritical marker in writing. The blanks, indexed by the disjunctive dash, break open the surface of language to glimpse the lacking Real. These suspensions in semblance are brought forth by a

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language that tips on the side of jouissance and lalangue. The subtractive work of worsening omits the boots from the old man and the child and makes them barefoot. It makes ‘dim black holes’ of what were ‘eyes’ in the third shade of the skull. Worstward Ho is often seen as the representation of an urge to what Locatelli names ‘unwording.’ Mooney calls this a desire to ‘cancel by reiteration’ (2011: 215). Repetition – a mark of the death drive – shows a limited availability of words and works towards linguistic precision in the text. If repetition helps in self-cancellation, its relation to the jouissance of death drive (another kind of self-cancellation) is a corollary. If there is repetition in the coming and going of shades on the void, there is another order of repetition in the drive for worsening. As the worst is inaccessible, worsening has to go on ad infinitum, and this is structurally reflected in the extreme use of verbal repetition in Worstward Ho. Beyond a point, Beckett hardly introduces new words into the text. He simply combines and recombines old words, repeating them relentlessly. This limited diction acknowledges Symbolic castration through a syntactical weakness. As the basic units are few – dim, void, shades, worsening etc. – every passage is replete with manic obsessive repetition: ‘Longing that all go. Dim go. Void go. Longing go. Vain longing that vain longing go’ (2009a: 97). This follows the long passage on longing that was cited above. As a result, almost all terms in this section are repetitions from that longer passage. Even if we consider this as an independent passage, it works through a circuit of repetition where ‘go’ features in every sentence and words like ‘longing’ keep coming back. Another kind of repetition is integral to worsening. When a shade is worsened, it consists of step-by-step micro-worsening acts. To worsen the kneeling woman, her head, back and greatcoat are worsened one by one. This is a composite repetitive structure, relating to repetition automatism as a means for the jouissance of death drive.

Impasses in worsening: The dim and the void There is a textual logic of worsening, guided by rules of appearing, disappearing and reappearing of the shades. As the text unequivocally describes, shades one and two can come and go, but the third shade of the skull as well as the dim and the void can only go when they ‘go for good.’ The crucial rule is this: the void can go for good only when the dim goes for good, and when the dim goes for good, everything else disappears forever. The most important object to worsen is the dim and hence the longing: ‘Oh dim go. Go for good. All for good. Good and all’ (88). The longing also makes a pun between the two senses of the signifier ‘good.’

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Let us explore the source of the dim. The text declares ‘dim light source unknown’ alongside the declaration of ‘no knowledge’ which becomes a mantra: ‘Know minimum. Know nothing no. Too much to hope. At most mere minimum. Meremost minimum’ (82). This alliterative passage frames the litter of knowledge as ‘meremost minimum.’ This unknowing is an effect of the Real. It is the ‘nohow’ of Real which aims at non-knowledge but can only get at its ‘meremost minimum.’ It unmakes the linguistic fabric and extracts lalangue. To return to the dim, minimal knowledge corresponds with ‘such dim light as never’ (86). The light is also minimal. The ‘dimmest light’ of knowledge is the most unrelenting element called ‘selfsame’ (90). The dim is qualified as unknown, and the text shows a desire to preserve this Real: ‘At all costs unknown’ (90). Whatever appears in this void – a grot, a gulf or a tube – as soon as its appearance is supposed, it fills up with the self-same dim. The self-sameness of the dim echoes the self-sameness of a Real letter, and it is important to note how Beckett shifts the signifier ‘dim’, which is usually used as an adjective, into a noun. This estranges the signifier into the letter. The dim can temporarily be undimmed, but it remains unworsenable. One can only minimize it. It turns out to be the impossible Real of ‘unworsenable worst’: So leastward on. So long as dim still. Dim undimmed. Or dimmed to dimmer still. To dimmost dim. Leastmost in dimmost dim. Utmost dim. Leastmost in utmost dim. Unworsenable worst. (95) The dim gives visibility to the invisible, and as a result, it is impossible to worsen: Old dim. When ever what else? Where all always to be seen. Of the nothing to be seen. Dimly seen. Nothing ever unseen. Of the nothing to be seen. Dimly seen. Worsen that? (90–91) In this strange half-light, the ‘nothing to be seen’ is ‘dimly seen’, and under its spell, the invisible nothing turns into ‘all always to be seen.’ The dim also turns the nothing into something. This ‘ill seen’ at the littoral of visibility is nothing as something, namely the edge of the littoral. As the dim marks the edge of the visible, it cannot be worsened. Beyond it ex-sists the Real nothing which cannot be converted into something. The ironic question ‘Worsen that?’ indicates the impossibility of worsening this Real limit. The dim is thus the first aporetic point for the textual and systemic operation of worsening. The problematic of the dim subtly connects us with language. Beckett qualifies that the shades are also words, ‘oozing’ from some ‘soft of mind’ into the skullscape. When the kneeling shade is designated as feminine, it becomes clear that the shades are words:

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Oozed from softening soft the word woman’s. The words old woman’s. The words nothing to show bowed back alone a woman’s and yet a woman’s. So better worse from now that shade a woman’s. An old woman’s. (96) If the shades are words, worsening them is tantamount to worsening words or language. The text acknowledges that the ‘worsening words’ offer ‘a room for worse’ (88). Beckett, from his letter to Axel Kaun in the 1930s, knows well the inherent paradox of worsening words with words. If words are subjected to worsening, the problem of the dim is also connected back to language. Words are seen as agents of dimming which goes to show that they cannot usher in knowledge. Instead, they are material vehicles of Real unknowing. When they stop oozing, these intervals carry the impression that words will never be back until they return. Beckett names these intervals ‘blanks’ and indexes them performatively with dashes. Words, like shades, keep coming and going. In the blanks when they disappear, the void is ‘undimmed’: Blanks for when words gone. When nohow on. Then all seen as only then. Undimmed. All undimmed that words dim. (99) So words lead to dimming of knowledge while their absence creates greater visibility of knowing. Words are the cause of dimming as well as objects of worsening. If words can be worsened into the worst or made to disappear forever, it would make the dim go for good. That, according to the aforementioned textual rule, would facilitate everything else to go for good. Beckett thus concentrates the problem of the dim and that of worsening at the level of language. The other unworsenable phenomenon is the void. It becomes difficult to worsen because it is not a positive entity. Badiou glosses this impossibility as follows: But if the void is subtracted from its own exposition it can no longer be the correlate of the process of worsening, because the process of worsening only works on shades and on their void intervals. So that the void ‘in itself’ cannot be worked upon according to the laws of worsening. You can vary the intervals, but the void as void remains radically unworsenable. (2003: 99) Although Badiou’s logic is correct, he misses the point that the unworsenability of the void is an extension of the dim’s unworsenability. The void is a negative term which comes alive when the dim light is shed on it. It is a lacking place like the Real, and the furrowing of the letter activates it. Therefore, to worsen the void, the dim needs to be worsened

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which is veritably impossible. The text nevertheless attempts this impossible by plunging into the Real through logico-mathematical writing: Say child gone. As good as gone. From the void. From the stare. Void then not that much more? Say old man gone. Old woman gone. As good as gone. Void then not that much more again? No. Void most when almost. Worst when almost. Less then? All shades as good as gone. If then not that much more then that much less then? Less worse then? Enough. A pox on void. Unmoreable unlessable unworseable evermost almost void. (2009a: 100–101) Beckett introduces another impasse here. As the void is not a positive term, one can only worsen its shades. The void is ‘most’ when ‘almost’, and the presence of the shades makes it ‘almost.’ The void is worst with the shades because only then is it ‘almost.’ The logic is articulated as ‘worst when almost.’ When the shades disappear, the void reduces, and as a result, it cannot remain ‘almost.’ So when shades are worsened, the void becomes ‘less worse.’ Although lessening is coterminous with worsening in the text, this is one exceptional case where less becomes equivalent with ‘less worse.’ Worsening of shades and the void’s own worsening are placed at crosspurposes. To worsen the shades, one has to unworsen the void, and worsening the void will be tantamount to bringing the shades back and unworsening them. For the void, this is the littoral of worsening. It is the second Real point where the textual logic encounters a stumbling block. These limits of infinite worsening install Real unconscious as textual impasse.

Worsening and its remainder: ‘With every inane word a little nearer’ These impasses in worsening the void and the dim make the worst unavailable. To arrive at the worst is to arrive at the absolute ‘inanity’ of words. The act of lituraterre in Worstward Ho aims at this absolute verbal inanity of draining out all sense and littering the letter. But like the impossible discourse of the Real and in the Real, it is impossible to evacuate all sense from the signifier.2 There remains a seemingly true ring in words which makes them meaningful and, therefore, un-inane: ‘How almost true they sometimes almost ring! How wanting in inanity!’ (2009a: 88). This lack of inanity is a residue of sense in worsening words. It leads to the ‘sweet one word’ of Ill Seen Ill Said: ‘less’ (73). The worsening project is thus admittedly reorganized as a ‘leastening’ or ‘leastward’ journey. This is not a discourse without semblance, but it is nevertheless a discourse that ‘leastens’ semblance as much as possible. In the manuscripts, Beckett explicitly associates the labour of worsening with the

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signifier ‘impossible’: ‘Till the impossible achieved’ (Weel and Hisgen 1998: 101). This is the climax of the worsening process: Least never to be naught. Never to naught be brought. Never by naught be nulled. Unnullable least. Say that best worse. With leastening words say least best worse. For want of worser worst. Unlessenable least best worse. (2009a: 95) Badiou passingly notes that joy in Worstward Ho relates to ‘poverty of words’ (2003: 107). Stated differently, it is the jouissance of Symbolic castration. I would argue that this link between the ‘leastening’ words and joy implies the jouissance of worsening: Remains of mind then still. Enough still. Somewhose somewhere somehow enough still. No mind and words? Even such words. So enough still. Just enough still to joy. Joy! Just enough still to joy that only they. Only! (Beckett 2009a: 93) The Imaginary mental remnant here is not only imbricated by the Symbolic edifice of words but it is also forced by Real saying that reduces language to the ‘not-all’ of lalangue. Jouissance of words coming to an end marks this Real affect of lalangue. This joy is not reducible to pleasure as it combines the pain felt at cessation of words in a deathward movement. This minimal joy (note ‘only’ and ‘enough’ in the passage above) is a Real jouissance that repeats itself without any complete attainment. Reiteration in the text has a mathematical economy. It targets greater precision. The text declares that to ‘gain time to lose’ (88), it would refer to the three shades simply as one, two and three. This act of numbering demonstrates the drive for mathematical precision. It is consistent with Beckett’s obsession with counting numbers in Company and other works. We could remember famous episodes like Murphy’s counting with the biscuits or Molloy’s counting of his farts. In Beckett, when numbers are used as communicative signs, they often lead to a breakdown of communication. For instance, when Molloy attempts to communicate with his mother by knocking on her skull, numbers codify meaning. One knock stands for ‘yes’, two for ‘no’, three for ‘I don’t know’, four for ‘money’ and five for ‘goodbye’, but his mother confuses the counts as she cannot remember more than two. By the time Molloy delivers the third or the fourth knock, she has already forgotten the first two. This forgetting function highlights the difficulty of passing from numbers as semantic code to numbers as material entities. It shows the passage between the signifier and the letter where knowledge is interrupted by jouissance of counting. To return to Worstward Ho, the numerical scenario is complicated by the fact that shade two is a ‘twain.’ The old man and the child qualify as one

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shade. So there are three entities in two shades and four-in-three when we add the ‘skull within the skull.’ The bigger skull houses the three shades and the inner skull. It is this ‘+1’ as setting that turns the total number of entities into five. This ‘+1’ as the repressed Real of structure reintroduces the problematic status of zero or the void-interval in counting. As we have seen above, the void cannot be worsened because it is a negative entity. In the present context, the void can be seen as a negation of number in the form of zero. Even if we do not count this zero, it seems to return like the repressed Real in the form of the ‘+1’ or the one-multiple. It is this one-multiple that makes three entities into four and four into five. With textual progression, numbering becomes a method of worsening. Signifiers are replaced with numerical letters. As worsening continues, the void between the old man and the child becomes a ‘vast’ ‘rift.’ The increasing gap provokes the question whether the void as zero should be counted as a three-in-two. Lacanian ‘matheme’ of number here facilitates the jouissance of worsening as the desirable precision can only be achieved through subtraction. Throughout Worstward Ho, verbal condensation is on the rise. Condensation mathematizes language through an ascesis that is not limited to numbers. For example, the text declares that since all said is missaid, it will only use ‘said’: ‘From now said alone. Said for missaid. For be missaid’ (97). And again: ‘From now back alone. Back for back on. Back for somehow on’ (98). This condensation, searching for verbal inanity through formulas and equations, gives a self-same and unchangeable mathematical quality to words. This is where the signifier wishes for a mathematical crystallization into the material letter of selfsameness: the ‘x’ which is nothing but ‘x.’ The passage that follows the one on joy demonstrates how the letter bores holes in knowledge: Enough still not to know. Not to know what they say. Not to know what it is the words it says say. Says? Secretes. Say better worse secretes. What it is the words it secretes say. What the so-said void. The so-said dim. The so-said shades. The so-said seat and germ of all. Enough to know no knowing. No knowing what it is the words it secretes say. No saying. No saying what it all is they somehow say. (93–94) The question of knowledge here is complicated by the distinction between what the speaker says and what the ‘words say.’ This points to the Real cut in the parlêtre. What the inanimate source of speech says can be known, but what these words say cannot be known. This marks a Real edge of knowledge. What words say in themselves is that there is a fact of saying. For Lacan, as we have seen, this Real saying remains repressed in ‘the said.’ The speaker says the said (dit), but the words say themselves from the Real place of saying (dire). I will return to the word ‘secretes’ which puns on ‘secrets’, but let me note here that the consistent textual metaphors of liquefaction

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in ‘soft of mind’, ‘ooze’ and ‘secretes’ not only develop the image of a festering wound but also imply an untameable flow of jouissance. There are blanks, but the ‘ooze’ of letters resumes. This fluidity shows how language is liquefied into lalangue. Ellie Ragland commenting on ‘literature as the material of jouissance’ suggests that ‘jouissance coalesces around the object a in language’ (141). In Lacan’s final mathematical writing, this unknown object-cause of desire is inscribed in the central hole of the triple-Borromean knot. It thus partakes of all three orders. The object a that emerges from jouissance as it pushes language lalangue-ward is a Real object. This Real object can also be thought as a sinthome that holds the three orders together. As we shall see, the object in Beckett that finally fixes endless worsening is a symptomatic Real One. It is incarnated in the affective letters of lalangue.

The final move: Failing better at the littoral and the construction of the symptom Isabelle Ost locates desire in the textual movement of Beckettian writing (97). She argues that late Beckettian writing condenses sexual desire within the ‘textual mechanics’ and depicts a ‘vanishing subjectivity’ in the ‘delocalization of desire’ (98). She also connects the Beckettian textual residue to the Lacanian object a (101). Anthony Uhlmann observes in a piece on Worstward Ho: ‘The endeavor to end is in Beckett […] an impulse that structures the whole’ (2011: 87). As neither the dim nor the void can fully be worsened, the prospect of termination becomes grave. With How It Is and Company, we have seen the importance of ending in Beckett. If the ‘unnullable least’ is declared as the stopping point, how does the text reach this point? One hypothesis is the disappearance of the shades into the ‘black hole’ of the skull which has the topological function of ‘inletting all’ and ‘outletting all.’ The skull turns inside into outside. The doubling of the skull into an inner and an outer one highlights this Real ‘extimacy.’ The hole in the skull is a condensation of two holes of the eye. They produce gaze as the object of scopic drive. This ‘seat and germ of all’ houses the ‘remains of mind.’ The worsening of the eyes into anatomic cuts indicates a corpo-Real that sabotages the Imaginary. The hypothesis of getting rid of the skull to effect an ending is soon abandoned. Since the words can never attain the worst, the skull as the generator of words cannot go. So how does the text create a space for ending? The manoeuvre which ultimately punctuates worsening and gives the text a stopping point is mathematically characterized by Badiou as a ‘sidereal metamorphosis’ (2003: 110). This is the enigmatic final move that creates a textual terminus:

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Enough. Sudden enough. Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. All least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther. Best worse no farther. Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on. Said nohow on. (2009a: 103) The signifier ‘enough’ here works as a ‘matheme’ of termination. It suggests the suddenness of this move. To have the three shades, the dim and the void ‘all least’ is the desired ‘best worse.’ It substitutes the worst and brings about an ending. But how does this final ‘leastening’ happen? Contrary to the repeated and somewhat successful efforts of subtracting shades, now the speaker subtracts itself from the visual field as an excluded Real aspect of the subject. The speaking-subject cuts away from the textual field through this exteriorizing move that has an explicit topological character to it. There is no worsening the shades anymore by subtracting their particulars like boots and greatcoat. The worsening agent now decides to stand at a distance from them so that they appear least. This countermove inverts the Symbolic operation of worsening words and inscribes the Real subject as a cut in the perceptual field of the Imaginary. Uhlmann underscores the Parmenidean contradiction in the ending of Worstward Ho by addressing this limit as a point where ‘Being and nonbeing are at last identified, in stasis’ (2011: 92). If this is a contradiction permeating the final state of things, the means to arrive at this contradiction is also contradictory. We reach this limit through the impossibility of ‘no move and sudden all far.’ Neither the shade-infested void nor the eye moves, and yet a distance is created. The contradictory distanciation is an antinomic sign of the impossible Real. This final position in space echoes the immovable Real in ‘The Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’: ‘For the real, whatever upheaval we subject it to, is always and in every case in its place; it carries its place stuck to the sole of its shoe, there being nothing that can exile it from it’ (2006: 17). For Lacan, the signifier moves from one place to another, representing the subject while the Real remains static as an immovable locus. This is consistent with Worstward Ho where all ‘upheaval’ is restricted to worsening word-shades. The void on the other hand, like the Real, remains immovable and unworsenable. Symbolic upheavals carry us to this final stasis of the Real where worsening is stalled at its limit. This limit inscribes a Real unconscious at the end of analysis. We have seen such endless endings in both How It Is and Company, and Worstward Ho is no exception. As the Real is both inside and outside in its extimacy, there is no way of moving out of it, hence, the ‘no move and sudden all far.’ The eyes are at a distance but not completely out of the field because there is no way of exiting the place. It is the One and only place: ‘No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still’ (2009a: 81). This move without move enables the final inscription of the littoral. The Real antinomy of static distanciation inscribes ‘bounds of boundless void.’ The seemingly boundless

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void becomes bounded as its limit is discovered. The final move is poised at this littoral where one cannot go any farther, and this ‘no farther’ is the ‘best worse.’ Worstward Ho as a text is concerned with discovering Real impasses that ultimately jeopardize its rigorous systemicity. The discovery of an impasse in the apparent limitlessness of the void accomplishes lituraterre by writing Real unconscious as ex-sistence. The spaced-out new paragraph ends the text with an implicit affect of satisfaction in ‘said nohow on.’ The verb in past tense without the passive voice (‘said’ and not ‘be said’) has a satisfied sense of closure to it. The inaugural passivity of ‘be said on’ now finds a calmative in being able to say ‘anyhow on’, and Worstward Ho ‘fails better.’ The skull and the shades turn into three pins and one pinhole from the sudden distance. They mark the apparent absence of oneness at the end by remaining discrete. In the manuscripts, Beckett had initially used figures of threads and dot, then needles and pinhead, and finally the word ‘eyelet’, before settling on pins and pinhole (Weel and Hisgen: 286–287). Threads and needles would have made the logic of knotting obvious. But the published text decides not to use this metaphor. The knot in the final text is made to hide itself. It ex-sists as a Real One of symptom. The choice of ‘pinhole’ as a word is interesting. It usually does not refer to the bodkin’s eye unlike its abandoned alternatives (‘pinhead and eyelet’) that do. The use of ‘pinhole’ maintains the equivoque of lalangue as pun. It refers literally to the hole in the pin but, as Brienza notes, it also evokes the pinhole camera – an inverted visual substitute for the eye (256). The literal turns the camera into the bodkin’s eye, and the punning letter maintains an equivocal balance between the Imaginary and the Real. If we read the signifier ‘pinhole’ as a reference to the pinhole camera, it would emphasize the mental realm by presenting three pins as images. But if we take the word in its literal presence, ‘pinhole’ presents the Real hole where three pins can enter. How is the Real One of sinthome made in Worstward Ho? The answer lies in the question: Can there be a pinhole without a pin? This brings back the Lacanian rim in the potter’s void. Without a rim, there is no true hole, and there is no pinhole without a pin. But even if it is a hole, constituted by pins, how does it suggest a One? The textual logic gestures towards an answer. The three pins are the unnullable traces of the three shades: the kneeling woman, the old man and the child, and the skull within the skull. The pinhole is the compromised ‘best worse’ of the meta-head or the skull within which we have the void, the dim and the three shades. This One locus of the skullscape suggests envelopment where the three pins are One in the One pinhole. So the final worsened versions of the three shades are enveloped by the outer skull as one true hole. The text explicitly states a Real logic of non-relation here: the three pins and one pinhole are ‘vasts apart.’ The voidinterval is a figure of rapport as non-rapport. It insists on division within the One. This singular One is a divided and divisible separator (and operator).

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It creates unicity but only as divergent singularity. This sinthomatic One is replete with a Borromean logic that formalizes non-relation even though it makes a One. The three pins do not go into the pinhole. But the pinhole is still able to circumscribe them as a space that houses them with vasts of void apart. They are alone and yet together in this hole. Without going into the pinhole and remaining side by side, like the ‘para-being’ of the parlêtre, the three pins still find themselves inside the hole. The hole thus erases the distinction between inside and outside as a Real ‘extimate’ space. This is a ‘true hole’ in the Lacanian sense because it is ratified by the presence of the three pins. It is countersigned by their triadic Borromean logic. This final One is internally excluded from the three. It symptomatically produces a ‘+1’ on the three. Within this three, there is yet another plusone of the fourth (shade 2 as twain). This complex counting suggests an apparent four in which a five ex-sists. If we consider the void between the old man and the child as well as the three intermediate voids among the four entities, it raises the count to six, seven, eight and nine (counting four voids). This potential infinity of ‘boundless void’ is bounded by the logical and symptomatic modification of a fundamental fantasy of absolute annihilation. As we have seen, the fantasy that drives the logic of textual worsening is a desire for absolute nothingness, but this never happens and the text has to revise this fundamental fantasy by making modifications in it. The penultimate paragraph shows the final traversal and transformation of this fundamental fantasy of irreversible disappearance: What were skull to go? As good as go. Into what then black hole? From out what then? What why of all? Better worse so? No. Skull better worse. What left of skull. Of soft. Worst why of all of all. So skull not go. What left of skull not go. Into it still the hole. Into what left of soft. From out what little left. (103) This modification in the fundamental fantasy of the worst is fractured by the minimal inscription of Real unconscious as a limit. The subject is worsened to its absolute limit, but subjective destitution still maintains a minimal cut of speech in relation to body. The softening ooze of words in lalangue still happens from the corporeal meta-head that is reduced to a pinhole. This is one more disjunctive synthesis of the terminable and the interminable as an endlessly ending Real fixed by the sinthome. In Seminar XXII, Lacan defines Real symptom as a mathematical function of serial Ones in letters of lalangue: What is it to say the symptom? It is the function of the symptom […] to be understood as the mathematical formulation f (x) […] What is this x? This is what can be expressed of the unconscious by a letter, insofar as only in the letter is the identity of self to self isolated from every quality.

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From the unconscious every One, insofar as it sustains the signifier in which the unconscious consists, every One is capable of being written by a letter. (21.1.1975; translation modified) This is a functional inscription of Real unconscious through mathematical letters in lalangue. We have been tracing the arc of this Real writing in Beckett. The three pins and one pinhole at the end of Worstward Ho mark the parlêtre’s singularity at the end of analysis. They inscribe the one-multiple (+1) of Real symptom. Beckettian text makes the symptom functional by using it as a limit to stop the endless metonymic slide of the signifying chain. The symptom enables Beckett to make an immanent ending. The nonrelation between the pins and the pinhole marks the serial nature of Ones in the symptom. These are signifiers made into material objects with no meaning. These traces have become symptomatic letters. This is what Lacan calls ‘the articulation in the symptom of signifiers (without any meaning at all) that have gotten caught up in it’ (Lacan 2006: 714). The pins and the pinhole are not metaphors with overflowing meaning. They are material marks in the Real that exclude meaning. This conflates the Lacanian slope of analytic interpretation with the Beckettian trajectory of literary text. As they literally stand for the least of sense (‘inanity’), the pins and the pinhole are notches or objects. Had they been reducible to metaphor, there would have been no end to the metonymic chain of signification. They can stop the slide only as material incarnations of numerical letter, serialized in lalangue. They construct a series of inscribed marks unfolding a primordial writing similar to Lacan’s example for origins of writing in Seminar IX. Before examining the written marks in Worstward Ho, let us briefly go back to our previous discussion of mathematical autonomy and the problem of vestigial semblance. In Seminar IX, Lacan evokes the primitive hunter and his scratch marks on an antelope’s rib to count hunted animals (13.11.1961). For Lacan, it is these horizontal marks (ǀ ǀ ǀ ǀ), spaced out on the bone, and not the ancient human ability to create pictograms that represent origins of writing. This origin of writing that Lacan traces is unmistakably mathematical. This fundamental notion of writing as notching or mark-making can be understood as a mathematical description of the world, provided we come out of the Platonic belief that mathematics is not dependent on the real world of objects and creates its own entirely autonomous world. Sundar Sarukkai, whom we have mentioned above, describes the inclination for Platonic autonomy in mathematics in the following way: Platonists believe that mathematical entities have an existence independent of human minds. These entities inhabit a special world, the Platonic world. Platonism thus believes not only in the independent existence of mathematical objects and relations but also believes that the ‘reality’ of that world explains the universal nature of mathematical truth. (2005: 416)

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As against this Platonic promise of mathematical autonomy, Sarukkai mobilizes the question of mathematical language as a complex correlate of the real world outside this apparently self-enclosed system. His emphasis on mathematics as writing, as we have seen, is crucial. It creates a dialogue with Lacanian references to mathematics as the order of the written. Sarukkai connects mathematical formalization as writing to description of matter in physics: ‘Mathematical form is not about doing mathematics alone; it is also about writing mathematics in some specific ways, the underlying belief being that physical terms are expressed by unique mathematical forms’ (2005: 422). This connection harps on a semblance that mathematics in its Platonic avatar tries to but cannot erase. Lacan would share this position insofar as he maintains that there is actually no discourse – not even mathematical discourse – that is entirely independent of semblance. Both Sarukkai and Lacan would agree that mathematical formalization as writing cannot entirely separate itself from natural language as a descriptive mechanism. Having said that, Lacan, unlike Sarukkai, insists that mathematical writing gives us a chance to break this semblance of reality by touching on the Real at the limits of its formalized writing. This is why in Seminar XVIII, Lacan makes a hypothetical case for a discourse that ‘might not be’ dependent on semblance. This conditional mode of speculation (‘might not be’) draws attention to the impossible Real that can only be written as a point of suspension in mathematics. To return to mathematical writing as mark-making, I argue that the three pins and one pinhole are of the same archaic order of writing where the mathematical structure of the signifier in the letter writes itself as a mark of absolute difference.3 When these marks (Beckett’s pins) are repeated, this repetition of ‘unary trait’ or the one-multiple grounds the difference of each mark from the other. Hence the importance of the empty space between any two marks (‘vasts apart’). This void-interval makes them different through repetition. The pinhole, operating like a full stop, punctuates the Real impasse in the unworsenability of the dim and the void. For Lacan, this is the birth of writing as counting or mark-making. It offers a mathematical ‘entry into the real’: With the repetition of the apparently identical that there is created, separated out, what I call, not the symbol, but the entry into the real as inscribed signifier – and this is what the term of primacy means – of writing. The entry into the real, is the form of this trait repeated by the primitive hunter of absolute difference in so far as it is there. (28.2.1962; my emphases) This rigorous writing of Real unconscious as archaic signifying marks of counting only allows the least of Imaginary mind. The skull is reduced to its minimal presence of ‘little left.’ Imaginary excess of the mental is

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checked by the Real of inscribed unconscious. This is where Lacanian Real unconscious resists the Freudian unconscious (Unbewusst) as an expression of defectiveness (une-bévue) in the mental. The text of Worstward Ho must be punctuated before letting go of all meaning. There remains a vestige of semblance. This remainder is given a theoretical reflection in Beckett’s text by acknowledging the impossibility of the absolute worst. But it also has a performative index. A remnant of semblance comes across at the textual terminus in the residual image of the graveyard that erupts just before the final move. This is a key point where the seemingly autonomous textual setting of dim void is countered by the graveyard as a marker of extra-textual reality. The One locus now unfolds itself in grave associations of death. The moment comes when the old woman’s shade is revealed to be a stooping gravestone: Stooped as loving memory some old gravestones stoop. In that old graveyard. Names gone and when to when. Stoop mute over the graves of none. (2009a: 102) The realistic setting of the graveyard, as opposed to the indefinable void, is a semblant that anchors minimal textual meaning. It reinscribes the fact that there is no discourse without semblance. Even acute mathematization of a discourse cannot entirely divorce it from the world of reality outside. Worstward Ho must finally fall back on the reality of the graveyard. Having said that, the reality of the graveyard has a significant association with the impossible experience of the Real that is scripted in the affair of death. Death is Real because it is an experience of unknowing. It is a limit to human knowledge insofar as we can never experience our own death. By invoking death, the graveyard reinforces the jouissance of death drive. This avowal of death is similar to the ending of How It Is where the voice says ‘I SHALL DIE.’ It also connects with the terminal stasis of the corpse in Company. Death is a correlate of the end of analysis which can open infinity but only through finitude: ‘When the subject achieves his solitude […] in the full assumption of his being-toward-death’ (Lacan 2006: 264). In Stirrings Still, Beckettian subject wanders indoors and outdoors with a weak Imaginary mental function ‘so on unknowing and no end in sight’ (2009a: 113) until the end comes as a final punctuation of subjective time: ‘No matter how no matter where. Time and grief and self so-called. Oh all to end’ (115). Immanent textual ending can only coincide with death as the liminal point of finitude. In other words, we can only have immanent ending by making an appeal to the figure of death as textual terminator. The endlessness of textual ending can only be fixed by death as it is both certain and sudden as a terminator. The ending in the above lines from Stirrings Still overlaps with the condition of subjective destitution as a figurative death of the so-called Symbolic self. The jouissance of death drive thus articulates a

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final avowal of finitude in Beckett. Acknowledgement of mortality becomes the only warranty for an immanent possibility of ending. This ending in and through death as the only possibility for textual ending throws open the question of the immortal as an extension of the mortal. Beckett’s texts continue to interrogate this spectral position. The trope of gravestone enters Worstward Ho from Ill Seen Ill Said, and it is replete with death drive in its emphasis on the inanimate.4 Even though the graveyard functions as a vestigial trace of semblance for the textual discourse in Worstward Ho, we must note how Beckett mathematically minimizes this semblant. Marked by Beckettian ‘leastening’, the graveyard is semblance, minimized and mathematized. The gravestone offers a minimal trace of meaning by presenting a numerical surface from which names have disappeared. It only has the year of birth and death, clinically separated by a dash. This is a mathematical surface like the dial in Company. It only has ‘little letters’ etched on it. The two dates, (dis)-joined by a dash, are a mathematically minimalist encapsulation of life. This writing continues to pressurize semblance by furrowing into the Real with numbers. We must note how affect goes hand in hand with this mathematical inscription of numbers on gravestone. The text likens the stoop of the gravestone to the stoop of ‘loving memory.’ It also evokes a sad mute presence that respects the gravestone which has been anonymized by time. The mute stoop conveys an elegiac affect, concentrated on corporeal posture. This affect is written into the dates that barely survive as number on the dwindling gravestone in death’s Real abode. As Lacan said in answer to a question at Yale University, not everything can ever be mathematized, but analysts must ‘begin to isolate in it (psychoanalysis) a mathematizable minimum’ (24.11.1975a). The numerical surface of the half-erased gravestone extracts such a mathematizable minimum from life. As the graveyard stands witness, mathematics cannot offer absolute autonomy to Modernist literary text. But it can make semblance with reality as faint as possible by re-mathematizing that iota of semblance. There is more than an element of tension here between the culmination of my argument which traces a return of the representational in the presentational and Baylee Brits’s reading that holds on to the discreteness of the gap between mathematical (numerical) presentation and literary representation. What she calls literary ‘transfinite allegory’ is self-enclosed in its attention to ‘its own mechanisms of numeration’ (2018: 193). Brits is uncompromising on the purely presentational aspect of ‘transfinite allegory’: ‘“Transfinite allegory” will also provide the model by which literature can approach mathematical infinities without subsuming mathematics to a representational economy’ (Brits 2018: 21). But as we have seen with both Sarukkai and Lacan in two different contexts, mathematical discourse does not have an absolute presentational autonomy. In fact, it hides within itself a representational economy. Brits’s allegory that allegorizes its own textual

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process is clearly on the side of Modernist textual autonomy which she would posit as a ‘mathematical absolute’, and this is where we differ (Brits 2018: 43). I do not think mathematics is located at the level of the absolute in the literary discourse of Modernism. For me, the psychoanalytic approach to philosophy of mathematics in literary Modernism finds its efficacy in the crucial failure of this autonomy. Neither is mathematical autonomy an absolute nor is literary autonomy of the Modernist text an absolute. The vestigial verisimilitude that finally stages the failure of absolute mathematical autonomy of presentation in the Beckettian text pressurizes presentation with representational semblance. What Brits calls ‘generic literature’ as a product of the mathematics-literature interface is more on the side of Platonic autonomy than what the readings in this book will be comfortable with. She announces in the concluding chapter of Literary Infinities: Numbers never function the way a standard sign in natural language does, as a signifier with a relation to that which is signified. Rather, a number presents nothing other than itself. In other words, a number does not possess a referent or signified, but rather is itself the signified. This is the tautologous havoc that presentation wrecks upon representation. (182; emphasis original) This is a neo-Platonic thesis of presentation triumphing over representation or, in other words, mathematics taking over literature with a certain degree of power, whereas I have been arguing for a coeval failure of both mathematics and literature to achieve systemic and textual autonomy vis-à-vis reality. As noted above, mathematical discourse cannot excise traces of natural language on which it remains minimally dependent at the least. As we have seen with the graveyard of Worstward Ho, the return of representational semblance can be synonymous with the lacing of human affect, in this case, the melancholia of mortality.

The language of the literal So far, we have seen how Worstward Ho approaches the Real edge of knowledge in repetitive manoeuvres of worsening that install the unworsenable littoral in both the dim and the void. The text is driven by an affective logic of jouissance that ultimately inscribes a Real impasse for its own textual system. This Real insurmountable liminality is consolidated in the antinomy of static distancing that anchors the final textual move. The littoral breaks the semblant here and invokes an impossible jouissance of the Real to ooze in the hole opened up by the breakage. By subjecting language to the impossible jouissance in the repetition of death drive, the

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text undoes epistemological linguistic construction and unveils lalangue. The littoral marks the limit of this lituraterre. It takes us to the least trace of unavoidable semblance in the imagistic emanation of the graveyard. This minimal semblance is axiomatized when the graveyard image transforms into numerical and diacritical letters. Having probed these aspects, the textual praxis of Worstward Ho still demands analysis of its symptomatic language. Let us now come back to this peculiarly innovative language to further ground the question of lalangue as a bare being of language in the text. The language of Worstward Ho is Beckett’s self-acknowledged ‘syntax of weakness.’ It is minimalist, ascetic and sonorous. It gives priority to materiality of words over their sense. To address sonic and bodily aspects of words that are key to understanding lalangue, let us hark back to the fundamental linguistic categories of phoneme and morpheme. In phonology which studies operation and organization of sounds in language, phoneme is considered the fundamental linguistic unit. Phoneme is a perceptually discrete unit of sound that helps us differentiate one word from another. For example, it is from the difference between the phoneme ‘s’ in ‘sin’ and the phoneme ‘f’ in ‘fin’ that we distinguish the two words from one another. Morphology on the other hand studies the bodily structure of words in relation to sense. Morpheme is the fundamental linguistic unit here. It refers to the independently meaningful part of a word that cannot be further divided. Phoneme is a sonic unit and morpheme is a formal unit. They both play a role in the semantic process of differentiation, but morpheme has more to do with sense while phoneme is more about sound. Phoneme helps in differentiating between words at the level of sounds, and morpheme helps us differentiate one part of a word from another part of the same word at the level of sense. The relationship between phoneme and morpheme is more complex than this. The two can overlap, but phoneme can also be part of a bigger morpheme. As the linguist Roman Jakobson notes, in post-war linguistics, there was a serious debate on the primacy of phoneme and morpheme: It was even suggested that the meaningful (significative) units of the linguistic code, such as morphemes or rather words, are the minimal entities with which we actually deal in a speech event, whereas the merely distinctive units, such as phonemes, are an artificial construct to facilitate the scientific description and analysis of a language. (108) We will see how Beckett’s language in Worstward Ho constantly perambulates between the phoneme and the morpheme in layering corporeal and sonic questions of difference within language. The lexical playfulness that opens up lalangue in Worstward Ho has to do with phonological and morphological fluidity. As we have noted, phoneme and morpheme share

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an emphasis on differential aspects of language. It is this differentiality that Beckett radicalizes to activate lalangue. The special language of this text explodes phonological and morphological word-bodies and problematizes the rapport of sound and sense. Sentences in Worstward Ho are brief. They often consist of one or two words. This language transgresses the grammatical law of the Symbolic. The broken syntax proceeds through a plethora of passive constructions and repetitions. It often lacks the connecting verbs and generates an effect of stuttering. There is a profusion of full stops which often makes the sentences ungrammatical. One coherent sentence is split into three ungrammatical sentences by three full stops, giving the prose a staccato rhythm: ‘The staring eyes. Dimly seen. By the staring eyes’ instead of ‘The staring eyes dimly seen by the staring eyes’ (2009a: 91). Punctuation which generally facilitates linguistic sense is thus made to create halting points in the semantic flow. Dashes as ellipsis mark gaps that are opened up by linguistic stuttering. These gaps and pauses highlight the minimalism of this language: ‘The no –’, ‘Bad the no –’, ‘Still dim and yet –’, ‘Worse in –’ and so on. We encounter entirely ungrammatical sentences, comprising two prepositions: ‘On in’ (81). Beckett’s morphological torsions introduce a neologistic style with letters like ‘unmoreable’, ‘unlessable’, ‘evermost’, ‘pastless’, ‘beyondless’, ‘meremost’, ‘thenceless’, ‘thitherless’, ‘worser’, ‘unutter’, ‘uninane’, ‘dimmost’, ‘misseen’, ‘missaid’, ‘ununsaid’, ‘unnullable’, ‘leastmost’ etc. Neologism is a principal modality of lalangue when we consider the babbling speech of the child in whom a kind of language appears before its ‘grammatical and lexico-graphic systematization.’ What the child constructs prioritizes sound over sense and often delves into non-sense. Beckett’s neologisms cut into linguistic sense by subjecting it to a torsion of enjoyment (jouissance). It is not the speakingbeing who enjoys. It is language that enjoys itself by dismantling sense with sound as it goes towards lalangue. These instances of lalangue hold on to the letter’s creative streak in the construction of the sinthome. Unlike the more expansive and inter-linguistic Joycean neologisms in Finnegans Wake, Beckettian letters in Worstward Ho are contractive, intra-linguistic and less interested in adding to linguistic sense. Most neologisms in Worstward Ho are made of negative prefixes or suffixes and result from a subtractive play on degree words. Some neologisms evoke contradictions by uniting opposite words: ‘leastmost.’ Others neutralize the semantic import of a word through double negation: ‘ununsaid.’ How do we understand the meaning of a word like ‘ununsaid’ where the negative prefix is repeated? Does this doubling of ‘un’ create new meaning? Do the two negative prefixes neutralize one another? In that case, is there a semantic difference between ‘said’ and ‘ununsaid’? Lalangue is reluctant to answer questions of knowledge and meaning. These neologisms add ungrammatical prefixes and/or suffixes with words (‘unmoreable’) to dissolve the lexical surface. The word-surface is broken into

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its constituent syllables. An ungrammatical word like ‘unmoreable’ provokes us to split its syllabic units and think about ‘un’, ‘more’ and ‘able’ separately. Neologisms like these make us dwell on the morphemes that semantically constitute a signifier. These neologisms foreground the differential register of language by pointing to complex, if not impossible distinctions. For example, how do we distinguish between ‘unworsenable’ and ‘unworseable’? As we have seen above, there is tension between phoneme and morpheme as fundamental linguistic units of differentiation. What is the primary unit of distinction in language? Is it the more sonic phoneme or the more semantic morpheme? As we can see, Beckettian language in Worstward Ho touches on this problematic by making us divide a neologistic word at the level of morphemes that cannot be divided further. It also makes a gesture towards phoneme in distinctions between ‘unworsenable’ and ‘unworseable’ where the only difference lies in the ‘n’ sound. Both morphemes and phonemes underline linguistic difference in the body of words and sometimes make this difference inexplicable, as in the case of ‘unworsenable’ and ‘unworseable.’ These neologisms consistently emphasize corporeal constitution of a word by dismembering its phonological and morphological body into letters of lalangue. This language shows a slant towards formal logic in its emphasis on quantification of difference. Beckett’s neologisms highlight notions of impossibility and subtraction through ‘un’-prefixes and ‘less’-suffixes, respectively. These are morphemes that explode in a language of quantification. It is fascinating how the question of difference that usually founds meaning in language (the semantic difference between one signifier and another) is given a quantitative spin where it no longer generates new meanings but restricts the semantic operation to a bare minimum. As we have seen, the signifier is consistently broken into minimal units of phoneme and morpheme as differential markers. The inclination of this language is to abbreviate sense to such minimal units and even topple the morpheme with phoneme so that sound dominates sense. Difference is suspended into an impossible quantification. There is no denying that this gives a mathematical texture to language. The neologisms work at the level of quantitative differentiation, the two poles of which are ‘unmoreable’ and ‘unlessable.’ So we can neither add to nor subtract from the minimally quantified difference that exists in this strange linguistic fabric. ‘Unmoreable’ and ‘unlessable’ create walls of impossibility. What cannot be added to and subtracted from is the mathematical evacuation of the signifier’s sense in the Real letter. This is the matheme’s gift of minimal self-same transmission. Sinthomatic neologism is the Beckettian means for this evacuation as the Symbolic law opposes it. Neologism, alienated from the Symbolic structure of semblance, can only refer to itself like a mathematical letter. The neologisms in Worstward Ho are such material traces of the jouissance of worsening words. They keep pushing language to a point where sound and rhythm communicate over sense: ‘Unmoreable unlessable unworseable evermost almost void’ (101).

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Another sinthomatic aspect of this language that moves lalangue-ward is an inclination for the literal. To recall, in ‘Lituraterre’, the literal calls forth the littoral by concentrating on homophony. In the famous letter to Axel Kaun in 1937, Beckett talks about ‘dissolving’ ‘the terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface’ to drill holes into language (2009c: 518). I would consider homophony as a device to dissolve the word-surface by breaking the phonological and morphological body of the word. Homophony foregrounds this word-body in the Lacanian letter. Punning makes us hear one word in another through spelling. This indicates how pun exploits both speech and writing. Because of both spelling (writing) and pronunciation (speech), we hear the word ‘secrets’ in ‘secretes.’ The reader is working here on the literal surface of the word, and the vowel ‘e’ is omitted from ‘secretes’ to make it ‘secrets.’ It is the sonic order of the phoneme (‘e’) that Beckett mobilizes in order to make one word resonate with another. Homophony joins hands with the phonematic level of language in a play of similarity and difference. It dissolves the surface of the word by working on the literal. The text bristles with such puns like ‘worst’ with ‘words’, ‘ward’ with ‘word’, ‘nohow’ with ‘knowhow’, ‘leastening’ with ‘listening’, ‘secretes’ with ‘secrets’, ‘preying’ with ‘praying’ and so on. The word ‘Bootless’ that describes the worsened state of the old man and the child is a literalization (without boots) of the signifier which otherwise means ineffectual. So is ‘pinhole’, which literally becomes the hole in the pin. Beckett uses the obsolete Middle English preposition ‘atween’ to describe the interval between the old man and the child, described as the ‘twain.’ ‘Atween’ puns with ‘a twin’ as well as ‘twain.’ At a subtler level, replacement of ‘between’ with ‘atween’ makes us aware of the phoneme ‘b’ in the prefix ‘be’ by replacing it with an ‘a’. This complex double punning vacillates between the spoken and the written and ruptures the word-surface by provoking the readers or hearers to break it into constituent syllables. The ambivalent interval between the spoken and the written is the space where Real unconscious écrits happen at the threshold of psychoanalysis and literature. Be it the neologistic prefixes and suffixes or the play of homophony, Worstward Ho ‘fails better’ in unmaking the word-surface in various ways. In the process, it treats words in their composite and dissolvable materiality. The genesis of the text from Beckett’s ‘Sottisier Notebook’ gives us more reasons to believe that words are constantly cut open, fiddled with and replaced as if the composition process itself was nothing short of a worsening. The word ‘sick’ in ‘sick with the one’ was first ‘stuck’ and then became ‘sick’ only through the mediating third word ‘stick.’ The transition from ‘stick’ to ‘sick’ depends on removing the consonant (‘t’) – another phonematic operation. There are other instances where the morphological body of a word calls forth another, e.g. the collocation ‘vertex vertical’ in the final text where the common syllable ‘ver’ extracts one word from inside the body of another word. One more phonematic example is ‘hold the old

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holding hand’ where the consonant ‘h’ disappears from ‘hold’ to make room for the signifier, ‘old.’ In the omitted expression ‘Too many two together’, there is a similar literalist play of ‘too’ and ‘two’ which form the ‘to-gether’ or ‘two-gether’ (Weel and Hisgen: 127). When Beckett replaces ‘shadow’ with ‘shades’ in the notebook, he crosses out the ‘ow’ and replaces the two letters with ‘es.’ This makes the word ‘shades’ physically emerge from the word ‘shadow’, just like the diminutive it is. The notebook abounds in phonological extensions from one word to another: ‘black’ and ‘back’; ‘dim’, ‘rim’ and ‘brim’; ‘mem’ and ‘min’; ‘rid’, ‘lid’ and ‘unlid’; ‘loss’ and ‘less’; ‘drip’ and ‘rip’ etc. Phonological extension between two consecutive words emphasizes the word-body in a state of perennial flux. It shows how one word melts into another and keeps worsening. This also explains Beckett’s metaphor of liquefaction in the soft oozing and secretion of words. Phonemes and morphemes are put to task as differential markers of sound and sense, but it is the phoneme that delicately displaces the morpheme as sound takes over sense in lalangue. Sense is liquefied into sound, and differential linguistic meaning is fixed by a suspended quantification of difference. Words are liquefied when the solidity of their constitution is radically questioned. Cracks are revealed everywhere, and the worsening words are made as malleable as objects.

The dialectic of ‘being’ and ‘having’ and the body of language Let me now return to Lacan’s comment on Beckett in ‘Lituraterre.’ He plays on the homophony between ‘L’avouer’ and ‘l’avoir’ (‘admitting’ and ‘having’) to suggest that Beckett balances the having in a way that produces a ‘debt’, and this ‘makes a refuse of our being.’ The only being that we can posit in Worstward Ho is the divided being of speech in the speaking-body that makes a parlêtre. Beckettian worsening litters this being through worsening words till they reach the limits of worsening. The split between being and having relates to castration and its Symbolic resonances in Lacan. Lacanian castration is not biological but linguistic. It points to the incompleteness of language vis-à-vis the subject that eventually makes a move towards the Real. Just as castration for Lacan is not biological, phallus for him is not a sexual organ but, first and foremost, a signifier. Lacanian phallus is a (master) signifier, controlling the meaning-effects of language, and Symbolic castration (the constitution of language as ‘not-all’ that goes against language to reveal lalangue) produces linguistic poverty by subverting the signifier which governs sense. This is consistent with the Beckettian text as it works with verbal frugality and evacuates sense from language.

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The discussion of human body in Seminar XXIII allows us to read this dialectic in another way: ‘To have a relationship with one’s own body as though it were foreign is certainly a possibility, one that is expressed by the use of the verb to have. One has one’s body. To no extent is it something that one is’ (2016: 129). Lacan formulates that the body is what we have insofar as we are not it. It is a foreign entity. He argues here and in the ‘Mirror Stage’ essay that when we assume a corporeal being by identifying with the image in the mirror, we only ‘misrecognize’ ourselves in and as this Imaginary body as a foundation of the ego (2006: 80). This being of the body not only produces a false identification with the body but also misunderstands it as a complete structure. As opposed to this Imaginary totality of corporeal being, the having of the body reveals the corpo-Real as a fragmented body and acknowledges the body as a part (‘not-all’) of the subject. We have seen this Real body in Beckett’s emphasis on the fragmented moving body in Company. In Worstward Ho, the Real of the linguistic body is approached through an act of worsening words. The word-body can be worsened by the agent because they are not the body. They only have it. The alterity of the body thus premises the operation of worsening. Here Worstward Ho reveals a dialectical tension between being and having in the body of language. Language in Worstward Ho unfolds like a body. This materialist approach to language suggests its intimacy with the jouissance of lalangue. In ‘Lituraterre’, Lacan observes that Beckett creates a lack in being by balancing it from the side of having. I will use this statement to qualify the depiction of the body of language in Worstward Ho. Worstward Ho begins when the first body stands up in the dim void, coming into being at that very moment. This body stands only inasmuch as we can say it: ‘Say it stands’ (2009a: 82). Straightaway, the body is made to identify itself with saying. It becomes contingent upon the speech act. This body, compelled to stand despite great physical pain in the bones, is soon identified as the first shade (the kneeling woman), and the other shades are gradually introduced as other ‘bodies’: ‘That shade. Once lying. Now standing. That a body? Yes. Say that a body. Somehow standing. In the dim void’ (83; my emphasis). If the shades are identified as bodies, we have previously seen that they are also identified as words. They are words oozing from the soft of the skull: ‘Oozed from the softening soft the word woman’s’ (96). Like the dimming words which come and go, creating blanks, the shades too keep coming and going. They are bodies and ‘yet’ they are words. This double status is marked by the manic repetition of an apparently redundant ‘yet’: Nothing to show a child and yet a child. A man and yet a man. Old and yet old. Nothing but ooze how nothing and yet. One bowed back yet an old man’s. The other yet a child’s. A small child’s. (102; my emphases)

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These ‘yet’s suggest the double status of shades as both things and nothings. The shades exist only as they are made to ex-sist by words. They are made of no(-)thing, and yet they have corporeal existence because as words, they have their bodies. If, as words, they are made from the death of das Ding, they also have their bodies which tip them on the Real side of the thing. Instead of simply marking the loss of das Ding, words in Worstward Ho stand up as brittle corporeal objects in an insistent foregrounding of their fluid surface texture. Insofar as these word-bodies sicken, worsen and fall to pieces, we encounter the body more as a having than a being. The body is more of an attachment to the subject than the subject itself. Words dim everything on the void. They also dim the shades in an act of self-blurring until the ooze returns and words start dripping from the soft of mind once again. The double identification of shades with both bodies and words deductively indicates the equivalence of bodies and words. Words are conceived corporeally as things, and the painful standing, kneeling and moving of the primordial shade family mimic the stuttering movement of Beckett’s prose. Beckett underlines the fractures in this body of language by worsening it through phonological extensions, neologisms, homophony, punctuations and dashes. All these exercises are located on the side of having because, as opposed to being which assumes union, having implies a separation between the one which is and that which it has. Because the subject has language and is not language, they can worsen it. If language is one with the inanimate speakingbody, it creates a neat identification with language insofar as the body is language. Having is the Beckettian register of worsening that divides being. Having forces being. It avows the Real subject who is not simply language. Language is only an Other that is used by the subject. It is this alterity from language that gives the parlêtre a chance to worsen it. In acknowledging the Symbolic’s alterity in the parlêtre, Worstward Ho balances the being of the linguistic body with its having. It avows Real unconscious as a cut between body and speech as saying worsens the body of speech and maintains the otherness of speech to the speaking-body. The final signature of this separation is the non-relation of the three pins and the pinhole which demonstrates the ‘best worse’ inanity of the signifier in the mark of the letter’s body. They inscribe the Borromean sinthome as their non-relation is knotted up in the Real One. The frail corporeality of language on its way to lalangue and the acknowledgement of linguistic foreignness vitalize a critique of linguistic turn in Worstward Ho. The admission about the otherness of language resists thought’s reduction to language in the text. This balancing act between being and having of language turns being into litter where ‘language calls the littoral in the literal.’ It is because we have language and we are not language that we can turn it towards lalangue.

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To conclude, Worstward Ho deconstructs the epistemological edifice of language by sabotaging linguistic sense. It orients itself towards a Real unconscious that consists of the jouissance of lalangue, hovering on the threshold of death drive. It only stops its worsening at the littoral which houses the minimal semantic remainder of semblance. This vestigial semblance shows how the Modernist text’s gesture towards mathematical discourse to make a case for its own autonomy cannot be entirely realized. Neither literature nor mathematics can fully become a discourse without semblance, but avant-garde literature such as Beckett’s can break the semblance with the Real at certain aporetic points through logical and mathematical writing. Beckettian text uses three levels of Lacanian equivocation – homophony, grammar and speech – to equivocate the turn from literature to lituraterre as it knots psychoanalysis and literature in a minimal mathematical writing of the Real.

Notes 1

Lacan distinguishes the ‘false hole’ of the two in the symbol and the symptom from the ‘true hole’ of the Borromean triad where the Real as an infinite line passes through the false hole to knot the three together. This transforms the false hole into a true hole (2016: 67).

2

See the fourth chapter of Michael Lewis’s book, Derrida and Lacan: Another Writing. Lewis argues that the Lacanian ‘mathemes’ are diagrammatic and they invoke their own Imaginary or visual nature. This reinforces our previous point that even mathematical formalization cannot entirely let go of the Imaginary signifying process of natural language.

3

For a reading of Lacan’s influence on Badiou’s notion of the count-as-one, see Lorenzo Chiesa’s ‘Count-as-one, Forming-into-one, Unary Trait, S1’ in The Praxis of Alain Badiou. Moncayo and Romanowicz develop a numerical reading of Lacan’s notches which shows how the unary strokes on the bone make the infinite line ex-sist (112–113). They place the zero in both the unary system and the system of natural numbers to mark the difference. In the unary strokes, the zero ex-sists as ‘the act of the trace that remains unmarked and that brings the infinite line to existence as a function of the notch’, while in the natural system of progressing from one number to another with the +1 at every step, the zero ‘represents the first mark or notch on the infinite line’ (113). In both systems, the zero as the act of the trace (the gap between notches) and as the first mark holds on to the Real which keeps insisting in counting.

4

A particular stone draws the mysterious old woman in Ill Seen Ill Said. Beckett repeats the inanimate pronoun: ‘It it is draws her’ (48) which suggests something in the very ex-sistence of the inanimate as inanimate that draws her. This is nothing short of a repetition compulsion: ‘When it draws she must to it.’ The narrator asks whether ‘she too as if of stone’ envies the

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stone (48). The text calls this the ‘universal stone’ (73). Freud in the famous fifth chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle discusses the aim of all human life as death which returns life to the prehuman existence of inanimate things (1955: 38). Phil Baker has mentioned this in relation to drive function in Beckett (139). The gravestones in Worstward Ho can thus be connected to Company’s final corporeal position of entombment and the figure of the stone in Ill Seen Ill Said.

5 Mathematized Body and Sexual Rapport

‘The real: as soon as this term is introduced, one asks oneself what one is saying. The real is not the outside world; it is also anatomy, it has to do with the body.’ — Jacques Lacan (‘Yale University Lecture’: 25.11.1975a) After dwelling on three Beckett works in a chronological order in the three previous chapters, it is time now to break chronology with logic by going back and forth into the Beckett canon. These navigations will eventually bring us back to How It Is with which we had begun. This is how it is in our recursive knot of writing. This final chapter would further the exploration of Real mathematical and logical writing between psychoanalysis and literature, but this time, in a new critical context, that of sexuality. Sexuality, which has been both boon and curse for psychoanalysis, in its popular avatar, is not to be left alone after all. Coupled with the question of love as event, sexuality provides a vital context for us to think through Real writing in the body. We will discuss Lacan’s late work on sexuality as non-relation and pit it against Beckett’s own independent emphasis on aesthetic nonrelation as a form. But as we shall see, this aesthetic form is not without its sexual undertaste. Ciphering of sexualized bodies in the domain of love will reflect back on the affective rubric of mathematical materialism that we have been following throughout this book. Sexuality is a tale of broken bodies, suffused with the affect of love. Corporeal enjoyment (jouissance) in the sexual field is enformed into Real unconscious writing. Love extends these enigmatic exchanges that mathematically formalize the impossible in the letter.

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Love and sexual rapport in corporeal materialism For Lacan, subjective destiny (‘man’s relation to the function called desire’) relates to ‘anatomy’ as the etymology of the word (from Greek ‘temnein’ and ‘tomia’) emphasizes cutting. The problematic relation between the subject and desire ‘assumes its full vitality’ in ‘the fragmentation of one’s own body’ (Lacan 2015: 237). Real is integral to this problematic relation that finds expression in corporeal fragmentation. As we have observed, anatomic emphasis in How It Is, Company and Worstward Ho not only mathematizes human body in its movemental geometry but also presents the body as a ‘true hole’ in the Real. The topology of cutting isolates anatomic fragments as Real corporeal holes. In this chapter, I examine Beckett’s mathematical presentation of sexuated body in relation to sexual difference as a writing of the Real. Beckett and Lacan have a shared mathematical and corporeal concern with sexual relationality. This is a corporeal and mathematical materialism or ‘moterealism’ where the word (mot in French) tends towards the integral transmissibility of mathematical letter. The function of motility (it is not for nothing that the word itself has ‘mot’ in it) is faithful to this moterealism. It introduces the order of corporeal inscription. Llewellyn Brown reads this inscription as a subjective response to the Real tortuous voice in Beckett. He defines this writing in terms of ‘language in the material effects it produces on the body’ and underlines that ‘writing here comes as a substitute for the symbolic inscription usually afforded by a structuring invocation’ (2016: 213; emphasis original). I would not concern myself with voice which Brown analyses at great length in his work. My interest lies in the dialogue between this corporeal inscription and the amorous ground of the sexual. Corporeal inscription in Beckett asks questions about love and sexual coupling. These questions bring us close to the Lacanian formula: ‘There is no such thing as a sexual rapport. (il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel).’ To quote Badiou, this formulation signifies ‘that the sexed distribution of human animals “is not inscribed in a rapport”’ (2012: n.p.). Lacan is interested in the question whether sexuality can be written as a logico-mathematical relation, and his answer is in the negative. As we shall see, Beckett’s portrayal of the moving body in pursuit of amorous company shows how the literary text tackles this question of writing sexual relation. For Lacan, sexuality as the absence of relation can only be inscribed through a double negation (does not stop not being written) where the two negations do not neutralize one another. In other words, something gets written by not being written. This is homologous with the ‘impossible’ Real in his logical square. So the impossibility of writing sexuality as a mathematical relation points to a Real writing. As we shall see, Beckett uses ‘little letters’ of anatomic ‘mathemes’

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to approach this impossible task of inscribing sexual relation. In a letter to Barbara Bray on 4 February 1959, Beckett dwells on the impossible in a curiously logicized idiom: ‘I only try to say as little more than I find possible […] and as little less’ (2014: 196). In this antinomic equivalence of ‘as little more’ and ‘as little less’ lies the impossibility of the Real. Let us begin with love as a way of writing or, shall we say, an attempt at writing sexual relationality. Beckett scholarship is aware of the importance of love. John Keller offers a psychoanalytic reading of Oedipal love in Beckett as a ‘need for contact with a primary, loving other’ (1). Sigi Jottkandt problematizes Keller’s simplistic reading in her interpretation of First Love and contends that the subject’s primary love is not reducible to Oedipal love for the mother. Whereas Keller’s conception of love and attachment as ‘states of confusion between self and other’ (2) is governed by a homogenizing uniformity and fusion of two into one, Jottkandt emphasizes what Badiou calls the divisive ‘twoness of love.’ She also references the Lacanian formula ‘there is something of the One (Y de l’un)’. As we have seen with How It Is, this Real One opens a chain where all Ones are both alone and together. As Beckett says in ‘Ohio Impromptu’: ‘Alone together, so much shared’ (2003: 446). This combination of solitude and company awaits a dialogue with the Lacanian ‘para-being’ (parallel and thus non-relational presence) of the sexes. Badiou’s book On Beckett (2003) highlights the contingent amorous encounter and its persistent presence in Beckett as a trace of divisiveness. Given Lacan’s influence on Badiou’s notion of love, the latter’s reading of Beckettian love demands a Lacanian reading in turn. In what follows, I will not attempt a reading of love as such but treat it as a means to the end of inscribing sexual rapport. Badiou agrees with Lacan that love supplements the absent sexual relation. If Lacan insists on asymmetry of the two sexual positions, for Badiou, this irreducibility of sexual difference is the truth of love and Beckett, its foremost literary correspondent. As Badiou observes regarding Beckett: ‘Sexual difference is unthinkable except from the point of view of the encounter, as it unfolds within the process of love’ (2003: 27). For both Lacan and Badiou, love writes sexuality as a break between the One and the Other. Beckett’s anatomic emphasis is a critical gateway to love and sexual relation as it underlines the Real body engaged in a corporeal inscription of sexual (non)-relation. In All Strange Away, ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’, How It Is, ‘Enough’ and throughout Nohow On, Beckett is at his mathematical best in presenting the geometry of the body. How It Is mentions ‘geometry’ and ‘algebra’ as fundamental categories of corporeal being. For Beckett, the body in action highlights its fragmented nature. These fragments move in time and space to produce an aesthetic calligraphy of love. The geometry of physical movement is backed up by what Saposcat in Malone Dies calls the ‘mental arithmetic’ (2006: 181) of counting numbers. Corporeal geometry

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is a topological translation of this mental counting. But this is not to evoke mind-body dualism. As we have seen in Company, the body does counting as much as the mind creates geometric shapes. Topology ensures that body and mind are not two distinct entities but borders of one another. The mind is simply an imaginary of the body.

Pseudo-couple: Relation, non-relation and sexuality Beckett’s works are testimony to an aesthetic of non-relation that ruptures any conventional notion of relationality. Anthony Uhlmann remarks: The same principle of exhaustion or negation might be seen in Beckett’s aesthetic writings where he develops the concept of ‘non-relation’ in art, which he opposes to an artistic tradition that, he states, has always emphasised relation and the power of relation. (2013: 2) Jean-Michel Rabaté talks about ‘Beckett’s recurrent argument, a strong theory of art accounting for his desire to usher in a new poetics or a new ethics of nonrelation in which distance, dehiscence, and incommensurability are key terms’ (2016: 40). Rabaté reads this non-relation ethically as it creates an unbridgeable gap between the subject and the Other (2014b: 142). In a letter to his friend, the English playwright Harold Pinter, dated 17 September 1970, Beckett uses a neologistic signifier to characterize the relational principle (including the sexual relation), depicted in James Joyce’s only play, Exiles. The signifier in question is ‘apartness’, and Beckett expresses the non-relational aspect of this word like this: ‘All exiled in one another from one another’(Beckett 2016: 240). It underlines a notion of irremediable distance as the signature of sexual relation. For the Lacan of Seminar XXIII, Exiles is indeed representative of sexual non-relation in the case of Joyce and Nora. Beckett’s coinage ‘apartness’ thus speaks to the Real, not only by virtue of inventing a signifier but by marking the ‘partial’ or fragmentory aspect of sexual relationality in the morpheme, ‘apart’, which constitutes the neologism. In the ‘Three Dialogues’, Beckett remarks that the artist shows a fidelity to the failure of relation. For him, Bram van Velde is the first artist to expose ‘the incoercible absence of relation’ (1987: 125). In the letter of 9 March 1949 to Georges Duthuit, he refers to Bram as ‘the first to repudiate relation in all its forms’ (2011: 140). One reason for non-relation that Beckett speculates in this letter is indivisibility: ‘And can there be relations within the indivisible?’ (140). If things are indivisible (a Parmenidean possibility) or, in other words, if everything is one, how

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can there be relations? The idea of relation is premised on something being divided into parts and the parts having relations with one another. This Beckettian logic is partially shared by Lacan. One of the many reasons behind the impossibility of sexual relation is love’s desire to be indivisible – to be one and not two. Love desires for unity, but sexuality as non-relation does not help as the one is divided into two and two into three and so on in the field of the sexual. In this chapter, we will see how this Beckettian aesthetic of non-relation informs his inscription of sexuality as a Real. Lacan’s critique of sexuality as a relation is a critique of any dualistic and binary construction of sexuality. In How It Is, Company and Worstward Ho, there is a third that ex-sists in relation to the couple, and a triadic logic grounds the construction of the two. The Lacanian knot and the Beckettian crawlers are testimony to this triad that undercuts a dyadic relation. When Beckett uses the term ‘pseudo-couple’ for the first time in Mercier and Camier and returns to it in The Unnamable, it marks a similar critique of dyadic function in coupling. There is something rotten in the state of coupledom, and we can see the Beckettian pseudo-couple as an expression of sexual nonrelation. The unnameable, for example, is torn between Basil and Mahood, his two masters, who expose a triadic arrangement. The pseudo-couples in Godot, Endgame, ‘Footfalls’ and ‘Ohio Impromptu’ and so on represent love’s desire to be One in uncanny alter-ego-like constructions, and yet their coupledom remains ‘pseudo.’ Godot is a missing third between Didi and Gogo while Hamm and Clov highlight asymmetry. Beckettian pseudocouples foreground a non-relational principle of sexual difference, cutting across sexual orientations.1 Beckett’s Molloy wonders whether his partner (Ruth or Edith) is biologically female or a man in female disguise. Irrespective of whether the coupling is homosexual or heterosexual, Lacanian sexuality is not inscribed in a relation: Lacan’s discussions about relations between men and women can apply equally well to what are more conventionally referred to as ‘homosexual’ relations […] In female homosexuality, both partners could come under feminine structure, masculine structure, or one of each; the same goes for male homosexuality. (Fink 2002: 41) This is one implication of the formula: ‘When one loves, it has nothing to do with sex’ (Lacan 1998: 25). In other words, love cuts across sexual orientations. Beckett’s short story ‘Enough’ is opaque about the narrator’s biological sex, and this opacity makes it impossible to take a call on the homosexual or heterosexual status of his or her relation with the male Other. We will come back to this story. For Lacan, the event of ‘sexuation’ is irreducible to biological sexuality. For the subject, it is the event of sexual identification that matters and not their anatomy at birth which is a

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deterministic category. There is an irreducible difference between biological sexuality and sexuality at the level of the subject. The first may or may not be static, but the second is always mobile and shifty. As Beckett’s Clov says about the toy dog’s missing organ, ‘the sex goes on at the end’ (2003: 111). This joke drives home the point that sexual determination is not simultaneous with the biological mark of birth. Sexuation goes on at the end, well after engenderment through different kinds of evental marks where biological sex becomes secondary: ‘As if the sex mattered’ (117). Biological sexuality takes a back seat with the auditor in Not I whose sex is ‘undeterminable’ (376) or the walkers in Quad about whom Beckett writes ‘sex indifferent’ (453). This indeterminate biological sexuality opens up subjective sexuality and intensifies the structural question of sexual coupling. Lacan hinges his thesis of Real sexuality as the absence of an inscribable relation on the function of the topological rim: ‘Sexuality is distributed on one side or the other of our rim as a threshold of the unconscious’: There is no access to the opposite sex as Other except via the so-called partial drives wherein the subject seeks an object to take the place of the loss of life he has sustained due to the fact that he is sexed. (2006: 720) There is no unmediated access to the Other in the so-called sexual relation. The first complicating factor is that it is not a relation between two subjects but a subject and an Other. The second problematic aspect is that the Other in this (non)-relation is reduced to the body of the Other. The third problem lies in the fact that the subject’s approach to this corporeal Other cannot capture the whole of the Other. In this fragmentary approach, the Other is mediated by an enigmatic object. Lacan calls this ‘small object a (objet petit a)’. This partial object, inextricably related to the partial drive-object, is the object-cause of the subject’s desire. When the subject attempts to write the sexual relation with the Other in corporeal terms, they only succeed in writing a relation between themselves and this unknown a object. This generates a relation between the subject and the object but not between the subject and the Other. After all, the subject can access the Other only through their own object of desire. Sexual (non)-relation thus becomes ‘thirded’: There’s no such thing as a sexual relationship because one’s jouissance of the Other taken as a body is always inadequate – perverse, on the one hand, insofar as the Other is reduced to object a, and crazy and enigmatic, on the other. (Lacan 1998: 144) For Lacan, in biological reproduction, the subject loses a part of ‘life’ and they try to find this lost object in their partner. When one is biologically ascribed a fixed sexual mark at birth, it takes away from the spectrum of life that goes beyond one sex. This opens a gaping hole at the heart of biological

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sexuality, and amorous sexuation becomes a way of addressing this hole subjectively. It is addressed by the a object as a Real remainder that ‘resists any assimilation to the function of a signifier’ (2015: 174). The a is a Real object and not a signifier. This a object falls from the Other in the sense that One projects this object in the Other even though the Other may or may not have it. The Other may also ascribe attributes to the One that the One does not have. Love is thus a dialogue of two lacks. When we love someone, we do not exactly know why we love them. Having said that there is something enigmatic in the Other that generates love. More often than not, this enigmatic object turns out to be an extension of the subject’s own fantasy and not something that actually exists in the partner. Love is an exchange of two unconsciouses, but it is essentially narcissistic because amorous fantasy tends to reduce the Other to the self on both sides. Insofar as the a object falls from the narcissistic image of the subject or the Other, the fall activates the anatomic rim (204). As we have previously seen, drive-objects are corporeal. When the subject inscribes the object as falling from the Other’s body, it is given a corporeal and topological shape. The a object as a topological rim can only ‘half-fill’ the ‘hollow of originative castration’ (205) – hence, love and sexuality’s constitutive relation with anxiety as an affective signal of the Real.2 This objectification can happen from both ends in love. It fixes the partner to what he or she does not have – hence, Lacan’s famous definition of love as giving what you do not have to someone who does not even want it. In Seminar XX, he argues for a tension between love’s desire to be One and the non-relation between the two sexes. Eros shows an unconscious desire for unity, but sexuality insists on the cut of the Real. Lacan maintains that love makes up for the lack of sexual relation (1998: 45; 47; 69), but though it supplements the lack, it cannot hide it: Love is impotent, though mutual, because it is not aware that it is but the desire to be One, which leads us to the impossibility of establishing the relationship between ‘them-two’ (la relation d’eux). The relationship between them-two what? – them-two sexes. (1998: 6) According to Lacan, love aims at ‘the being of the subject’, approaching it through the evental ‘encounter’ with the Other (1998: 50; 145). But it fails to unify sexual duality as amorous encounter misses the being of the Other. When we attempt to mathematically write this sexual relation between ‘them-two’ as ‘xRy’, the R, instead of unifying them into One, creates a Real interval (1998: 6–7; 35). ‘R’ becomes an independent third term between x and y in this mathematical inscription, and this impedes the possibility of establishing rapport between x and y. ‘R’ thus ends up being a separator between x and y. Lacan observes that the two of love can only be knotted together by a Borromean third (‘R’) which insists on separation. For him, sexual difference remains irreducible as the ‘jouissance, qua sexual,

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is phallic – in other words, it is not related to the Other as such’ (1998: 9). What etches the interval between two sexes is phallic signifier, and sexual jouissance cannot produce sexual relation because it is related to the phallus and not to the Other. There is no relation between the sexes that is not mediated by the phallus as a third entity. Like the f (x) of symptom,   Lacan approaches sexual relation as a mathematical function of xRy. This ‘R’ of relation between x and y is problematic because it is based on ‘the signifier function (la function de signifiant)’ where ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are ‘mere signifiers’ in the flow of linguistic usage (Lacan 1998: 35). In Seminar XXI, he problematizes this ‘R’ as an independent third which uncouples the two: ‘If you write xRy in this order, is the result that x is related to y? Can we support what is expressed in the active or passive voice of the verb by the relation?’ (11.6.1974). Lacan suggests here that the ‘R’ does not necessitate that x relates to (in active voice of the verb ‘relate’) y or x is related to (in passive voice) y. To continue the grammatical language, ‘R’ becomes an independent noun here. The dyad becomes a triad in this way. This is the Borromean logic where three knots two and yet maintains a unary non-relation with two. There is no immediate relation with the Other which is exclusively generated by sexuality. For Lacan, the object-cause of desire is yet another third between the One and the Other. As we shall see, a objects that oscillate between a man and a woman are mutually misrecognized. Without any mutual overlap, they fail to establish sexual relation. The relation ceases to be sexual at the moment of objectal mediation: ‘To desire the Other […] is only ever to desire a’ (Lacan 2015: 179). There is definitely a relation here between the two fantasies of the subject and the Other. But what is established between two fantasies of two sexes remains a non-sexual relation. In other words, the relation is fantasmatic but not sexual. Joan Copjec notes that Lacan’s thesis of sexual non-relation emphasizes sexuality as an eschewal of meaning: ‘Sex is the stumbling block of sense’ or again, ‘sex is produced by the internal limit, the failure of signification’ (Copjec: 204). This antagonism between sexuality and Symbolic meaning opens up the strictly senseless Real in sexual non-relation. Beckett’s writing of Real unconscious involves the sexual as a Real non-relation that punches true holes in language and its meaning-making mechanism.

Sexual jouissance and corporeal fragmentation Let us connect the question of corporeal fragmentation in love with sexual jouissance and the impossibility of sexual relation as a Real that underwrites love. Lacan equates jouissance with the ‘not-all’ of the body. To enjoy a body is to fragment it:

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To enjoy, is to enjoy a body (jouir, c’est jouir d’un corps). To enjoy, is to kiss it, to embrace it, to cut it into pieces […] to enjoy something […] is to be able to treat something as a body, namely, to demolish (le démolir) it […] this is the most regular form of enjoyment […]. (Seminar XIX: 15.12.71) The body that engages in sexual jouissance is a fragmented body in a state of ‘demolition.’ Lacan defines enjoyment in the sexual context as something that is corporeal and fragmentary. The sexual act, including foreplay, is seen here as a gradual fragmentation of bodies in jouissance. The act approaches erogenous zones as parts of the body. These parts never make a whole in sexuality because sexual enjoyment comes from fragments of the body rather than any corporeal whole. This is anything but the Imaginary body as totality. In later Lacan, body is defined as ‘enjoying substance (la substance jouissante)’ (1998: 23). This definition is slanted towards the Real in its stress on bodily affects and corporeal fragments that localize this affective enjoyment. Let us look at another Lacanian commentary on sexual jouissance as fragmentation, this time from Seminar XX: It [the body] enjoys itself only by ‘corporizing’ (corporiser) the body in a signifying way. That implies something other than the partes extra partes of extended substance. […] one can only enjoy a part of the Other’s body, for the simple reason that one has never seen a body completely wrap itself around the Other’s body, to the point of surrounding and phagocytizing it. (Lacan 1998: 23) If we follow Lacan’s reasoning here, approaching the sexual Other as body is a signifying operation. But the notion of body this operation generates is not that of ‘extended substance.’ Its various parts do not extend metonymically into a whole. This is a Real body of fragments that remains fragmentary in the act of sexuality and does not constitute a whole body. The passage also clarifies our previous point that Real sexual jouissance goes against love’s desire for unity. Sexual act cannot literally and permanently unify two bodies. As Lacan says, one body never ‘completely wraps itself around the Other’s body.’ Sexual coupling is a temporary dialogue between partial bodies that can only approach each other from incomplete and marginal points where they are ‘not-whole.’3 These erogenous parts open up the corporeal rim. If the specular unity of the body in the mirror is Imaginary, this anatomic body, figured in its cuts and limits, opens up the corpo-Real. We have already theorized these mathematized corporeal fragments, but here we consolidate them anew in the context of sexuality. Throughout Seminar XXIV, Lacan mobilizes the topological figure of torus as a geometric support for his thoughts on body as Real structure. Corporeal materialism takes him from a spherical to a toric space. Torus

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comes into being by boring a Real hole at the heart of a sphere. It fragments a sphere by introducing this hole in it. If we treat these geometric figures as diagrammatic writing, inscription shifts from two-dimensional (sphere) to three-dimensional space (torus) at this point. The central hole in the torus also creates possibilities for holes inside this three-dimensional object. Materiality is a privileged term in Lacan’s mobilization of topology as corporeal support for the subject: ‘Material presents itself to us as corpssistance [body as consistence] (Le matériel se présente à nous comme corpssistance)’ (14.12.1976). In this context of corporeal materialism, Lacan articulates ‘a body of the Real (un corps du réel)’ (16.11.1976). The geometry of topology with its twists, turns and folds approaches this mathematized material of Real body. Torus grounds Lacan’s mapping of Real body by drilling holes into the assumed totality of spherical structure. The anatomic body of fragments is also a corporeal field of drives. As we have previously seen, Lacanian drives have to do with different cuts in the body: mouth, anus, eyes and ears. The link between anatomical body and drives consolidates the status of this partial body as Real because ‘it is the real that the drives mythify’ (Lacan 2006: 724). Let us see how this Real drive-body works in our sexual context. These ‘erogenous zones’ define the liminality of the body precisely where it opens to the Other. As we have seen, Lacan describes ‘erogenous zones’ as topological borders (2006: 692). It is through these erogenous zones that the Real body opens itself to the sexual Other. Stated differently, the Other is approached through a corporeal

FIGURE 5.1  The central hole of a torus produces the possibility of holes inside it (cf. Seminar XXIII)

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topology of the cut. One subject-body sexually interacts with another through these corporeal cuts. Eyes interact with images of the Other. Ears resonate with the Other’s voice. Mouth opens to float words in the air that cross over to the Other. Lips as corporeal rims of the cut wrap themselves up against the Other in the act of kissing. Anus makes room for a sexual dialogue with the Other. Counterpointing body as Imaginary totality, these rim-like structures reveal points where a single body ends. Where one body ends, the end itself opens to the corporeal field of the sexual Other. Lacanian emphasis on the rim of corporeal orifices will remind the Beckettian reader of Molloy’s comic ode to the arse, his repeated references to farts and his claim that he was born through his mother’s anus. Beckett’s narrator in How It Is draws attention to various ‘pores’ of the body: By the tongue when it sticks out the mouth when the lips part the nostrils the eyes when the lids part the anus no it’s high and dry the ears no the urethra perhaps after piss the last drop the bladder sucking in a second after all the pumping out certain pores too the urethra perhaps a certain number of pores. (56; my emphases) This partial body is made of an excremental traffic of orifices. ‘Pores’ underscore Real corporeal fragments in this drive-body. Topology of the rim is faithful to the void of the Real. Like the potter of Seminar VII who constitutes the rim around the void, corporeal writing engages with the Real through this topological rim. In Beckettian couples, the moving corporeal fragment engages in a similar writing with and in the empty space around them. Their movement is an attempt in writing to constitute the void of the Real that they find themselves surrounded by. As Estragon says: ‘There’s no lack of void’ (2003: 61). More on this Real space when we read ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ and All Strange Away. Real unconscious is at the cusp between the subject and the sexual Other. It is neither inside nor outside the One or the Other. As Lacan says, it is ‘their cut in action’ (2006: 712). He uses topological figures of Möbius strip and Klein Bottle to show how the inside and the outside are folded into one another. Beckett in a letter to Duthuit on 9 March 1949 intuitively knows this interfolding before Lacan. In this letter, Beckett talks about nonrelation; he also observes that the relations ‘called outside and inside are one and the same’ (2011: 140). For Lacan, critique of depth psychology leads to the topological surface of Real unconscious where the inside is outside and vice versa. The neologism ‘extimacy’ inscribes this Real in a letter. What is important to highlight here is the spatial aspect of the Real. Real is an extimate space characterized by the antinomy that it is both inside and outside. I would locate this Real spatial cut between the One and the Other, not only at the Symbolic level of speech but also at the interval between two bodies as they open the Real void of intersubjectivity. Real space teems

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with hollows and yet ‘doesn’t lack anything’ (Lacan 2015: 185). The cuts of the body and in the body expose a limit where one body couples with another, only by maintaining an irreducible spatial interval. Sexual coupling constitutes this Real interval between two bodies by attempting to splice the border of two anatomies. Does the splice work or is it the cut that dominates? Moving bodies of the wandering couple in ‘Enough’ gesture towards an answer.

‘Odd hands are ill fitted for intimacy’: Mediations of love in ‘Enough’ The amorous relationship in ‘Enough’ is premised on a submission to the Other: ‘All I know comes from him’ (1995: 187): I did all he desired. I desired it too. For him. Whenever he desired something so did I. […] I only had the desires he manifested. […] When he told me to lick his penis I hastened to do so. I drew satisfaction from it. We must have had the same satisfactions. The same needs and the same satisfactions. (186) The narrator receives all her knowledge and desires (including the sexual) from her partner to the point that their relation acquires a master-slave dynamic. In this absolute submission, there seems to be an amorous fusion of two identities into one. Attribution of all desire to the Other apparently makes subject-to-subject relation impossible and turns this into a relationship between a subject and an Other. While this is an obvious echo of the Lacanian point that man’s desire is the desire of the Other, things are more complicated than this. Although the narrator attributes all agency to the amorous Other, the very fact that she tells this analeptic story gives her agency. She tells this story long after their separation and the relationship is memorialized through the narration. This narratorial agency interrupts the fusionist dominance of the One. As a storyteller, she acquires the power to frame the Other who does not have a single word in direct speech throughout the text. As the opening clarifies, the entire story is held in the field of inscription where the pen continues to write even when it stops. This writing of the pen on paper is juxtaposed with a geometrical writing of bodies in movement. The narrator, whose sex is kept under the wraps and finally revealed in a suggestive manner,4 is remembering her outing with the quasi-parental male companion. As discussed above, whether the narrator is male or female is irrelevant, and cutting across biological sex, the story deals with sexuation in an amorous relationship, which is realized through enormous walks. The

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ambulation of the couple involves walking with mathematical precision, and Beckett’s anatomical emphasis makes way for corporeal inscription. The gigantic male walks bowed beside his companion who is much shorter. His trunk runs parallel with the ground, dividing his body into two parts and giving it the shape of an inverted L. Beckett adds that ‘to counterbalance this anomaly he held his legs apart and sagged at the knees’ (188). The sagging knees add to the layered fragmentation of the body, turning the vertical line of the inverted L into a zigzag formation: His human frame broke down into two equal segments. This thanks to the shortening of the lower by the sagging knees. On a gradient of one in one his head swept the ground. To what this taste was due I cannot say. To love of the earth and the flowers’ thousand scents and hues. Or to cruder imperatives of an anatomical order. (190; my emphasis) The mathematically presented partial body at this point starts to resemble an inverted U, and the text suggests that this physical bending could be caused by an anatomical imperative. The other speculative reason for the stoop is pinned on affect in all its chthonic powers (‘To love of the earth and the flowers’ thousand scents and hues’). Affect and anatomic ‘mathemes’ are thus evoked in parallel. It is important to note that these corporeal letters are not reduced to actual alphabets. They remain inverted L and inverted U. This is how they maintain their Real distance from the Symbolic-Imaginary meaning-making process, i.e. L for ‘Love’ and ‘U’ for the quintessential second person of amorous encounter. We have two anatomical references to the ‘sacrum’ in the spine which is qualified as ‘sacral ruins’ due to tortuous body-bending walks. The anatomical imperative interacts with a tormenting joy of jouissance. In this world of corporeal fragmentation, the male character’s clarification that ‘anatomy is a whole’ assumes an ironic ring as the sonic resonance of ‘whole’ takes us towards ‘hole.’ Anatomy is a hole indeed. Their corporeally asymmetrical communication is captured in segmented movements and positional shifts: ‘He halted and waited for me to get into position. As soon as out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed my head alongside his the murmurs came’ (188). For this murmurous communication, the narrator must bend and divide her own body. Combinatorial possibilities of their verbal communication give a figural structure to language. It mathematizes the body of language to produce lalangue: Immediate continuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture. Delayed continuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture. Immediate discontinuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture. Delayed discontinuous communication with immediate redeparture. Same thing with delayed redeparture. (189)

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This moterealism turns signifiers into mathematical letters. Lacan as a ‘materialist’ in his view of language highlights this malleability: ‘The signifier is matter transcending itself in language’ (Lacan 1990: 112). Beckett’s figural language brings the signifier as close as possible to the ‘matter’ of das Ding in the letter. This mathematized language parallels the mathematical inscription of two amorous anatomies. Their communication is not restricted to words. It takes on a different bodily shape at night when they rest together: Attitude at rest. Wedged together bent in three. Second right angle at the knees. I on the inside. We turn over as one man when he manifests the desire. I can feel him at night pressed against me with all his twisted length. […] With his upper hand he held and touched me where he wished. Up to a certain point. The other was twined in my hair. (1995: 191–192; my emphasis) This moment of sexual intimacy is presented as corporeal inscription when the two bodies fold and break against one another. Their positional geometry is marked with anatomic precision. The two bodies engaged in sexual jouissance are not only depicted as partial, but their dyadic division is now transformed into a triad as well. Their corpo-Real segments now resemble a tripartite angular Z and not the regular alphabet – a letter more than a signifier. They look as if they are one body when they turn. This illusory oneness is integral to love that supplements the absence of sexual relation and threatens to collapse the two of love into a One by devouring the Other’s body. If the narrator’s position on the inside suggests what Lacan called phagocytizing, this unifying illusion of a two-becomingOne is interrupted by the partial points in the body where the tactile sexual encounter happens. The narrator insists on mediation and fragmentation in their physical relation. They wear one pair of gloves – one glove each, for the odd hands that they clasp while walking together. The free outer hands remain bare. This single pair of gloves uniting the two lovers introduces a mediating third object. Lacan uses the Kantian metaphor of the ‘inside out glove’ for sexual non-rapport (see Seminar XXIII: 68),5 and we know that Beckett was highly aware of Kant’s philosophical works (Nixon and Hulle: 139; 140). The narrator is not fond of the gloves but obeys her lover as he does not ‘like to feel against his skin the skin of another’ (1995: 187). She adds: ‘Mucous membrane is a different matter’ (187). This anatomical reference to ‘mucous membrane’ suggests sexual encounter. In the light of this embedded sexual reference, their intermittent clasping and unclasping of hands becomes an erotic metonymy. The hand movement works as an innuendo for the temporary and fragmentary process of the sexual act. As these hands stand for sexual organs by way of corporeal metonymy, Beckett says the spectral

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phallus by not saying it. The Real non-relation of sexuality is thus marked as a negative term. It does not stop not being written. Substitution of the whole body for a body part is highlighted in sexual jouissance: Yet he sometimes took off his glove. Then I had to take off mine. We would cover in this way a hundred yards or so linked by our bare extremities. Seldom more. That was enough for him. If the question were put to me I would say that odd hands are ill-fitted for intimacy. Mine never felt at home in his. Sometimes they let each other go. The clasp loosened and they fell apart. Whole minutes often passed before they clasped again. Before his clasped mine again. (187) The hands that continue to unite and disunite produce a corporeal writing in the air. When they unite, the two approximate the letter H. The left and right hands in their alternate movements of clasping and unclasping create a chain between two bodies, but it is an incomplete union because the two outer hands are free. If this is the first note of disunion, the second note is struck with intermittent unclasping. Clasping of odd hands implies asymmetry in this relation between subject and Other. The oddity of odd hands strikes a dissident chord in amorous intimacy. To read the signifier ‘oddity’ in a mathematical way, the evenness of an amorous two is undercut by the possibility of a third which is an odd number. This third is not only the single pair of gloves but also the sexual organs presented under the veil of hands. The mucous membrane acts like an anatomical bridge shared by male and female organs. The signifier ‘hands’ is finally dropped as the body parts are designated by possessive pronouns (‘mine’ and ‘his’), thus reinforcing the erotic subtext. This underlines the reduction of the Other to not only the body but also to a part of the body: ‘Phallic jouissance is the obstacle owing to which man does not come (n’arrive pas), I would say, to enjoy woman’s body, precisely because what he enjoys is the jouissance of the organ’ (Lacan 1998: 7). Beckett’s couple is sensitive to this partial dialogue of bodies which characterizes an intermittent sexual act but cannot constitute sexuality as a unified relation. Lacan plays on the ambiguity in the expression ‘the enjoyment of the Other’ (1998: 23–24). Whose enjoyment does this signify? In One’s enjoyment of the Other, does the Other enjoy? This linguistic ambiguity leads Lacan to positing two, if not three, varieties of sexual jouissance – phallic jouissance, Other’s jouissance and an Other jouissance qua phallic jouissance. Lacan calls the feminine jouissance ‘supplementary’ in relation to phallic jouissance. Its supplementary nature is another reason for the absence of sexual relation. Had the two jouissances been complementary to one another, they could have established sexuality as a relation. Lacan underlines that a woman is defined as being ‘excluded’ from phallic jouissance (1998: 73–74). Feminine Lacanian logic is thus defined by the fragmentary

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quality of ‘not-all (pas-tout)’. In other words, not all of a woman can ever be pinned down by phallic jouissance. If we map this on Beckett’s story, the female speaker’s complete attribution of her desire and knowledge to the Other becomes all the more important because this self-proclaimed passivity does not allow us to be conclusive about her enjoyment. She agrees with all the needs, demands and desires of the Other, and this apparent submission to phallic jouissance excludes her from the landscape of her own desire. If we juxtapose this with her desire to tell the story, we arrive at her narrative jouissance that is unrelated to the Other as such. The narration frames the jouissance of the Other, but there is no way of knowing if this jouissance actually belongs to the Other. As the male Other is not given voice, we cannot place this jouissance as his. Narration itself becomes an obstacle to knowledge, and from either ends, the relation is compromised into a mutual supplementation with no unmediated crossover from one jouissance to another. Having looked at multiple ways in which the sexual relation fails to write itself in ‘Enough’, let us now come to counting in relation to the affect of love. The amorous couple wanders through undulating landscapes that resemble their bowing and straightening bodies. Although they hardly talk about ‘geodesy’, they perform geodesy with their flights in arithmetic. Their play with numbers is located in an ambiguous gap between addition and subtraction. This is the second component of our materialism, i.e. numerical operations: His talk was seldom of geodesy. But we must have covered several times the equivalent of the terrestrial equator. At an average speed of roughly three miles per day and night. We took flight in arithmetic. What mental calculations bent double hand in hand! Whole ternary numbers we raised in this way to the third power sometimes in downpours of rain. Graving themselves in his memory as best they could the ensuing cubes accumulated. In view of the converse operation at a later stage. When time would have done its work. (1995: 188) There is a whole affective spectrum here in amorous counting that ranges from the exclamation of delight to the sombreness of separation in time. We have previously seen the anxiety of counting in Chapter 3. This on the other hand gives us a sense of what Steven Connor would call the pleasure of measure: ‘Far from being the adversary of number, pleasure is, in some ways, its apotheosis’ (Connor 2016: 155). Having said that, pleasure here is not uncontaminated by its ‘converse operation’ of sadness which tilts the proceedings towards jouissance. The joy of this affective counting coincides with physical movement as arithmetical flight meets corporeal journey. Accumulation of numbers harmonizes with accumulation of rainwater. If the numbers proliferate and write themselves on the map of memory, they

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are also counterbalanced by a ‘converse operation’ of subtraction. The last sentence marks the complexity of affect at stake in this jouissance of counting by pushing the joy of proliferating numbers towards the pain of subtractive separation. This counting introduces the numerical field as a third entity between the two lovers. As they share the operation, their relation is also mediated through it. Their counting marks a primordial third, threatening the coupling of two whole numbers (1 and 2). This is the originary zero that returns as a Real One. To count or not to count the zero, that is the question. The protagonist of Beckett’s short story, ‘The Expelled’, suffers from the dilemma both at the beginning and at the end of a numerical sequence as he is left unsure where to count his first and last footsteps on a staircase: There were not many steps. […] I have never known whether you should say one with your foot on the sidewalk, two with the following foot on the first step, and so on, or whether the sidewalk shouldn’t count. […] At the top of the steps I fell foul of the same dilemma. (Beckett 1995: 46) As we can see here, dilemma as an affect seizes the subject when it comes to generating or closing a count. The sidewalk in this passage offers a spectral example of the zero that haunts the number series as it insists on being counted as one. As we have seen in our reading of How It Is, the desire not to close the count has its ethico-political and fundamentally human implications in Beckett. Beckett’s lovers in ‘Enough’ are more decisive than the lonely character in ‘The Expelled.’ They count the zero by resorting to the ternary number system which takes 0, 1 and 2 as nonnegative integers. ‘Whole ternary numbers’, i.e. 0, 1 and 2, give us a ‘+1’ that ex-sists in the two. Counting under the standard ternary number system includes the zero. To go back to Lacan’s aforementioned formula, two as an even number ‘rejoices in being odd’ because of the zero as the third that crops up in counting the two. The lovers raise the numbers to the third power, and the accumulating cubes give us a triadic structure. It breaks the dyadic fusion of two-as-one. Lacan uses the signifier ‘ternary’ to underscore the impossibility of unmediated sexual relation: There are three of them, but in reality, there are two plus a. This two plus a, from the standpoint of a, can be reduced, not to the two others, but to a one plus a. […] This identification, which is produced in a ternary articulation, is grounded in the fact that in no case can two as such serve as a basis. Between two, whatever they may be, there is always the One and the Other, the One and the a, and the Other cannot in any way be taken as a One. (1998: 49)

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‘Enough’ uses numerical operation as a letter-like materialism of mediation between the amorous couple. A little Real is written in the number, ‘provided by lalangue itself, with what it conveys by way of the real’ (Lacan 2011: 19). For each of the two lovers, the Other is ‘a one plus a’, and this object a is the cause of their respective desires. Each partakes of this a and sees the Other as ‘a one plus a’, but what this a is for the One is not what it is for the Other. From this differential point, love becomes a sharing of what is unshareable. Love is giving what you do not have to someone who does not even want it because he or she wants something else from you – something you do not have and cannot give. To return to geodesy as ‘matheme’ in ‘Enough’, another instance of counting raises subtractive operation to an imperative: We did not keep tally of the days. If I arrive at ten years it is thanks to our pedometer. Total milage divided by average daily milage. So many days. Divide. […] Daily average always up to date. Subtract. Divide. (1995: 191) The pedometer, as a calculating object, adds another layer to the already existing numerical mediation between the couple. The flowers as food of love mark the final third as the two lovers incorporate them. The flowers as a object inscribe the inside-out cut between the subject and the sexual Other: We lived on flowers. So much for sustenance. He halted and without having to stoop caught up a handful of petals. Then moved munching on. They had on the whole a calming action. We were on the whole calm. More and more. All was. This notion of calm comes from him. Without him I would not have had it. Now I’ll wipe out everything but the flowers. No more rain. No more mounds. Nothing but the two of us dragging through the flowers. Enough my old breasts feel his old hand. (192) The flower acts as calmative here. They devour it as an external object, and it bridges them by moving from outside to inside. This incorporated object establishes a commonality by traversing the Real interior of two amorous bodies. The flowers topologically exteriorize this corpo-real interior. When the narrator decides to erase the incidentals, she retains the two and the flowerbed outside as well as the flowers that go inside their body. The flowers thus form the Real ‘extimate’ space for their amorous dialogue. When writing tends towards erasure, it retains a minimal three, and this fundamental triad is constitutive of love. The story had declared at the outset: ‘When the pen stops I go on. Sometimes it refuses. When it refuses I go on’ (186). The ending brings us to that point where the pen stops, but another writing continues because the two bodies keep

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moving, dragging themselves through the flowers. This potentially infinite writing is marked by the haptic encounter of two corporeal fragments as the breast and the hand struggle through Real ‘feelings’ – another affective signature. If sexual relation is the Real that ‘doesn’t stop not being written’, love continues to shift the negation from contingency to necessity, i.e. from ‘stops not being written’ to ‘doesn’t stop being written.’ It creates a desire for endlessness: ‘Doesn’t stop, won’t stop’ (Lacan 1998: 145). Love may begin from a chance-encounter with an Other, but its energy is invested in making this contingent event necessary. The difference between love’s unstoppability and the sexual relation’s unstoppability in Lacan’s schema of modal inscriptions lies at the level of number. While love shifts the negation, it still fantasizes One negation (does not stop), but sexual relation is about two negations (does not stop not) that cannot be neutralized into one affirmation. If Beckett indicates Imaginary Oneness of love as a fantasmatic relation, he also cleaves the One with the not-One of the triad (the two lovers and the Real locus of flowers inside out). He insists on corporeal fragmentation as the only mode of sexual jouissance (breasts feeling hand, both being body parts). Love and sexual relation are seen as a dialectic where the possibility of synthesis is disrupted by Real antinomy. Beckettian text is punctuated by a liminal inscription of Real unconscious where writing stops and does not stop at the same time. The textual unconscious lies in the ex-sistence of the floral three-in-two, and in ‘Enough’, from the very beginning, this Real is placed in an orthographic space of inscription and erasure. Where writing on paper stops, corporeal writing becomes unstoppable.

Writing of sexual relation: A non-neutralizable double negation Before proceeding with Beckett’s texts, let me build on the dialectic of contingency and necessity in love and show how the question of sexual relation complicates this dialectic. In Lacan’s logical square that reconfigures Aristotelian modals, sexual relation belongs to the fourth order of the impossible, coterminous with the Real. Seen in terms of this square, love hovers between contingency and necessity: The displacement of the negation from the ‘stops not being written’ to the ‘doesn’t stop being written’, in other words, from contingency to necessity – there lies the point of suspension to which all love is attached. All love, subsisting only on the basis of the ‘stops not being written’, tends to make the negation shift to the ‘doesn’t stop being written’, doesn’t stop, won’t stop. (Lacan 1998: 145)

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If love shifts the negation from the contingency of stopping to the necessity of not stopping, the impossible sexual relation doubles this negation. The impossible combines the necessary and the contingent insofar as it has two negations which cannot be dissolved into an affirmation. It indicates that the impossible sexual relation can only be written through a repeated negation of writing. In Seminar XIX, Lacan declares that ‘this non-relationship […] must be written. It must be written at all costs (il faut l’écrire, il faut l’écrire à tout prix)’ (15.12.1971). It is in this double bind that the sexual relation remains suspended. On the one hand, it cannot be written, and on the other, its absence must be written. For Lacan, both love and language supplement this absent relation. In other words, love and language are modes to write sexual non-relation as a negative term. Lacan suggests that there is a sexual Real that resists the inscription of this relation in writing: ‘Everything that is written stems from the fact that it will forever be impossible to write, as such, the sexual relationship’ (1998: 35): Since what is at stake for us is to take language as (comme) that which functions in order to make up for the absence of the sole part of the real that cannot manage to be formed from being (se former de l’etre) – namely, the sexual relationship. (1998: 48) If sexual relation is the impossible Real of writing, where writing undercuts the Symbolic and leans on the Real of the ‘matheme’, it can inscribe nonrelation as a hole in writing. As the above passage suggests, sexual nonrelation leaves a Real hole in ‘being.’ Language comes into this being, namely the parlêtre through a hole where sexual relation fails to write itself. It continues to circulate that Real of absent relationality as its rim. The speech that hollows out being produces Real unconscious as a written hyphen in the speaking-being. As cultures of amorous prattle would testify, love engenders a creative practice of naming through language. Lovers often invent a private language of intimacy and quite literally create affective names for each other. These are love’s Real sayings that operate as nominations. They activate lalangue and constitute sexual non-relation as the truth of love. We have seen how ‘Enough’ registers lalangue as a mathematical writing of corpo-real fragments. The Lacanian double bind (the sexual relation cannot be written but that it cannot be written must be written) has an interesting analogy with Beckett’s aforementioned expressive dilemma of the ‘obligation to express’ in spite of the nothingness of content and manner of expression. Given that for Lacan, the expressive act of language is conditioned by a fundamental inexpressibility of the sexual relation, Beckett’s expressive antinomy speaks to this. The antinomy of ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ meets the paradox of ‘there is only the sexual act’ and ‘there is no sexual act.’6 More on this later.

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‘Imagination Dead Imagine’: Spatial interval and unstoppable writing ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ (1965) begins on a mathematical note of subtraction: ‘Islands, waters, azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit. Till all white in the whiteness the rotunda’ (1995: 182). The white inscription of a geometric space interrupts whiteness on a virgin page. Corporeal geometry is mediated by the white rotunda – a Real space. The paradox of imagining the death of imagination takes the narrator to a corporeal inscription of two white bodies in a white rotunda. The mathematical imperative to measure is articulated straightaway: No way in, go in, measure. Diameter three feet, three feet from ground to summit of the vault. Two diameters at right angles AB CD divide the white ground into two semicircles ACB BDA. (182) Arithmetic and geometry are evoked as two mathematical operators in the question of measurement. The two semicircles ACB and BDA are occupied and constituted by two fragmented bodies: Still on the ground, bent in three, the head against the wall at B, the arse against the wall at A, the knees against the wall between B and C, the feet against the wall between C and A, that is to say inscribed in the semicircle ACB, merging in the white ground were it not for the long hair of strangely imperfect whiteness, the white body of a woman finally. Similarly inscribed in the other semicircle, against the wall his head at A, his arse at B, his knees between A and D, his feet between D and B, the partner. On their right sides therefore both and back to back head to arse. (184; my emphases) The passage directly uses the category of ‘inscription’ to geometrically depict human bodies in space. In this mathematically etched foetal position, two fragmented bodies remain with their backs to each other. They never turn to face one another, and their intermittent gazes do not meet. The light oscillates between glaring whiteness and pitch-black. Both conditions make it difficult for the onlooker to see the bodies. When pitchblack, the cipher on the white surface is clearest; the more it whitens, the more the writing fades. As in the world of The Lost Ones, when it is brightest in this rotunda, it is also the hottest and the reverse is true. There are unpredictable pauses of varying length between the fall and rise of temperature. The text clarifies that the man and the woman are neither dead nor sleeping and their bare white bodies are on the verge of the inanimate. The foetal position is reinforced in the way ‘with their left

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hands they hold their left legs a little below the knee, with their right hands their left arms a little above the elbow’ (184). The positional geometry of the body produces two tilted Zs in the two semicircles of the rotunda. The static position disables the possibility of an encounter. The predetermined space and the fixed positions ensure that there is no relation between the two sexed bodies. They have their respective zones, strictly delimited, as if to prohibit a sexual act. Baylee Brits has underlined the importance of space in this text where ‘body parts are assigned to points or generic placeholders’ (2018: 127). For her, there is a shift of emphasis from a geometry of measurement to a topological study of space here (127). Drawing on Kant’s thesis that mathematical propositions are ‘synthetic apriori’ which need both conceptual and experiential modes of knowing, Brits zooms in on the Kantian coordinate of space, not as ‘content’ but as a ‘condition’ of experience (132). To continue with this spatial probing, the Real space that I am interested in here is not so much the two semicircles occupied by the two bodies as it is the spatial edge between the bodies. The interval between two amorous bodies is a geometrically grounded locus that does not allow displacement. This is a static Real space unlike the signifier which changes places. Neither utters a squeak apart from the sound of their breathing. They have no Symbolic access, and all language belongs to the distant observer who sketches them in the immense whiteness of the rotunda. They open and close their eyes at different points except one rare occasion when ‘the beginning of one overlapped the end of the other, for about ten seconds’ (184). Even this overlap cannot establish any physical relationality as they face away. The third, ex-sisting in the two here, is the locus itself that inscribes them in fixed angles so that they cannot see or touch each other. Two semicircles compose a zero in their ternary arrangement. The zero does not make a whole. It only marks the Real structure. The one and two of the sexed bodies are united in perpetual disunion by this zero structure. It contains them in an asymptotic way by keeping them separate. Beckett ends the text on a note of erasure. The white rotunda is fixed on the ‘agitated light’, and it soon becomes indecipherable as ‘that white speck lost in whiteness’ (185). The text ends with chalk white as the writing slowly fades back into the whiteness of the page but not without leaving an invisible mark. Erasure cannot undo writing but folds it into a presence within absence. The rotunda does not disappear but only seems to disappear as its whiteness merges with the whiteness outside. The topological turn of Real writing collapses the partition between white interior and white exterior. The rotunda cannot be found, but the stoppage of writing promises invisible writing of white on white, ad infinitum. Real unconscious as an inscribed absence of sexual relation resides in this invisible white on white – a writing that stops at the limit and from this stopping point becomes invisibly unstoppable.

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All Strange Away: Being beside the other All Strange Away (1978) is a more elaborate variation on the subjective predicament in ‘Imagination Dead Imagine.’ It begins with an identical imperative of imagining the death of imagination or, shall we say, the process of removing Imaginary excesses from the Symbolic. The task in All Strange Away is to inscribe Real space with corporeal positions. As embodied presence traces the contours of this space, the text names this function ‘physique.’ Both the bodies and the space are much more provisional than what they were in ‘Imagination Dead Imagine.’ The setting appears to be a cube to begin with but turns out to be a rotunda as the rotating bodies inscribe it with their erotic ‘play of joints.’ The bare bodies rotate in the direction geometrically marked by the word ‘deasil’ (meaning clockwise): Call floor angles deasil a, b, c and d and in here Emma lying on her left side, arse to knees along diagonal db with arse towards d and knees towards b though neither at either because too short and waste space here too some reason yet to be imagined. (173) Far from being complete, construction of this space on the dying wings of imagination is a work in progress. The text begins with an assumption that this space is a cube but corporeal inscription establishes it as a rotunda. Emmo and Emma, the imagined male and female figures, chart the space with their moving bodies. As Brits argues, geometry is transformed into topology here as the mathematical study of space enlarges its focus from ‘actual space’ to all ‘possible spaces’: ‘Topology does not require an object, but rather, a spatial possibility; it is a mathematics capable of generation, without the requirement for representation’ (Brits 2018: 135). This experimental constructability of possible spaces makes room for a dynamic corporeal inscription: For nine and nine eighteen that is four feet and more across in which to kneel, arse on heels, hands on thighs, trunk best bowed and crown on ground. And even sit, knees drawn up, trunk best bowed, head between knees, arms round knees to hold all together. And even lie, arse to knees say diagonal ac, feet say at d, head on left cheek at b. […] Arse to knees, say bd, feet say at c, head on right cheek at a. Then arse to knees say again ac, but feet at b and head on left cheek at d. Then arse to knees say again bd, but feet at a and head on right cheek at c. So on other four possibilities when begin again. (172) and But a, b, c and d now where any pair of right-angled diameters meet circumference meaning tighter fit for Emma with loss if folded as before of nearly one foot from crown to arse and of more than one from arse

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to knees and of nearly one from knees to feet though she still might be mathematically speaking more than seven foot long and merely a question of refolding in such a way that if head on left cheek at new a and feet at new c then arse no longer at new d but somewhere between it and new c and knees no longer at new b but somewhere between it and new a with segments angled more acutely that is head almost touching knees and feet almost touching arse, all that most clear. (176; my emphasis) Beckett’s narrator is self-reflexive about the use of mathematical language here. This mathematically spoken body is all fragments. The narrator’s obsession to corporeally inscribe the locus turns them into endlessly adjustable blocks that encipher the space they inhabit. The first passage creates an explicit connection between corporeal geometry and combinatorial logic by evoking permutations of various body parts at different geometric points of this rotunda. There is a deployment of all possible combinations of physical joints. But beyond a point, these rotations seem impossible as the body will not allow these breaks and angularities. It is not clear whether Emma and Emmo are figments of the narrator’s geometric imagination.7 The narrator repeats sentences like ‘he’s not here’ and ‘she’s not here.’ If they are puppets in the imaginative construction of a place, they are made to do anything at the narrator’s command. This explains their incredible contortions, going beyond the capacity of the human body. It shows that the body cannot be built metonymically as a whole from the parts and remains a loose arrangement of fragments. The fragments can only make a not-whole and hence these impossible contortions, as if they were always already nothing but parts. Just before the section titled ‘Diagram’, this tortuous corporeal arrangement is revealed as an effort to keep one of the two semicircles empty: ‘There being no alternatives and in this way the body tripled or trebled up and wedged in the only possible way in one half of the available room leaving the other empty, aha’ (177). The ‘tripled or trebled up’ bodies undergo contortions that are replete with the torment of jouissance. Imagination stops short of visualizing their sexual organs. The male organ is described as ‘a speck of dirt’ while the female is left unseen. Although the narrator describes a moment of copulation, it is held within the hypothetical textual style and they are repeatedly described ‘lying side by side.’ Why does one semicircle have to be vacant? Each time the narrator mentions this emptiness, it registers a relish in the interjection ‘ah’ or ‘aha.’ This affect is evocative of lalangue. Emma and Emmo turn over from one semicircle to another. Textual logic imposes this arrangement on them as a rule: ‘And so all tripled up and wedged as before but on the other side to rest the other and within the other hemicycle leaving the other vacant, aha, all that most clear’ (180). I would argue that this imperative to preserve empty space is another way of marking a third in this embodied zone of two. One empty hemicycle in this zero-like structure of the rotunda

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incarnates Real space as an interval between the two of sexes. When two bodies are packed into one semicircle, they write the geometric space into existence by maintaining a Real void beside them. In ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’, each body had one fixed semicircle, but in All Strange Away, they can have any one. The governing rule is that they must leave one hemicycle empty. Is that for the narrator to frame them from there? The narrator would then be a mediating third. The Real void as a third entity ensures that the sexual relation of the two cannot be written in a mathematical sense.

The para-being of two: ‘Each in his worlds, the hands forgotten in each other’ Both ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ and All Strange Away depict parallel existence of sexed bodies in delimited zones. In the former, the two bodies are static and evenly distributed into two semicircles of a rotunda, whereas in the latter, they are dynamic as they continue to move together with great difficulty from one hemicycle to another. The spatial logic here is one of ‘either-or’ as they must keep one of the two semicircles vacant. In spite of differences, these two arrangements share a parallel corpo-Real arrangement of bodies ‘lying side by side.’ There is something enigmatic in the nature of this locus which stultifies sexual union, but as we have seen, the locus is written through the positioning of bodies. This parallelism is another way of coupling solitude with company as in ‘alone together’ or ‘all alone.’ It brings us back to Lacanian ‘para-being’ where the One and the Other are divided in two parallel zones. Although they remain side by side, there is no rapport: ‘It is in relation to the para-being that we must articulate what makes up for (supple au) the sexual relationship qua non-existent’ (Lacan 1998: 45). This para-being of the parlêtre grounds Real unconscious subject. Alenka Zupančič categorically says: ‘The Real is precisely not being, but its inherent impasse’ (2017: 22). She expands this para-ontology by suggesting that it is Real sexuality that turns Lacanian ontology into an impasse: ‘This is what the Lacanian concept of sexuality is primarily about. It conceptualizes the way in which a fundamental impasse of being is at work in its structuring (as being)’ (2017). This para-being that Zupančič calls being, ‘collateral to its own impossibility’, (134) comes close to Beckett’s tripled-up bodies wedged side by side. The analogy is consolidated in that Lacanian being is nothing but corpo-Real fragment as enjoying substance. When one writes this parasexuated being, the absence of sexual relation never stops being written. Writing the parlêtre in the sexual field is coterminous with a Real writing of sexual non-relation. This relational lack, evocative of castration, inscribes

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Real unconscious, written in the cut between speaking and corporeal being. It is the cut between speech and being that fails to form sexuality as a relation. In consequence, we have a Real parlêtre that inscribes the absence of sexual relation. Para-sexuated company maintains non-rapport in a triadic conjunction where the disjunctive interval between the two bodies becomes an ironic copula. Real space separates sexed bodies in love and creates an impediment to their relational possibilities. Para-sexuation ensures that the non-relation is not written as a positive term but only as a Real void that (dis)-joins the couple.

Symbolic mirage of sexual relation In Seminar XIV, when Lacan is still using the expression ‘sexual act’ as an anticipation of his thesis on ‘sexual relation’, the paradox he drives home is that ‘there is only the sexual act’ and yet ‘there is no sexual act.’ This is yet another Real antinomy, this time in the field of the sexual. Let us try and understand this contradiction. As we have seen, there are amorous, linguistic and fantasmatic relations, but none of them can properly be called sexual. Lacanian view of human sexuality is disjunctive. It states that there is no direct sexual dialogue without mediation of speech, objects or fantasies as various incarnations of the third vis-à-vis the so-called romantic couple. Beckett’s work is testimony to these manifold mediations. Let me now turn from love to language as the other mode of inscribing the negation of sexual non-relation. Lacan variously highlights Symbolic mediation in sexual rapport, maintaining that for human beings, ‘speaking function’ ‘supplies for’ the ‘function of the fact that there is no sexual rapport’ (18.1.1977). It is at this level that the aforementioned contradiction finds its place. Symbolic supplementation suggests that while there is no sexual relation, in speech there is nothing but sexual relation. As Lacan states, ‘the sexual relationship is speech itself (que le rapport sexuel, c’est la parole elle–même)’ (Seminar XVIII: 10.3.1971). Sexual relation does not stop not being written as speech supplies for the inexistent relation by allowing the parlêtre to have a sexual relation with itself. The speakingbeing’s relation to their own speech as well as the speech of the Other is sexual. So in speech there is nothing but sexual rapport, but other than that there is none. Human animal’s sexual rapport with their speech creates a mirage of sexual relation which does not exist and cannot be written. The infinitely reiterative failure of sexual relation in writing has to do with the way speech conjures a semblance of sexual rapport. Any literary text, composed in language, cannot portray sexual relation without linguistic mediation. Leaving this obvious impossibility aside, we may continue to speculate if literature can show or present a sexual relation where sexuality

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is approached without any linguistic filtering. In a non-chronological throwback, let me now turn to Malone Dies and How It Is to concentrate on Macmann’s affair with Moll in the former and narrator-tormentor’s rapport with his victim in the latter.

Heresy of the Christ-tooth: Love and lalangue The final stage of Malone’s deathbed storytelling in Malone Dies brings us to a brief but rollicking relationship between Macmann, Malone’s fictional protagonist, and his female attendant, Moll in the asylum. I will preface this discussion with Paul Stewart’s point that ‘Malone Dies is more concerned with sex as a preparation of the severance of all modes of connection in death’ (2014: 68). Death as the ultimate condition of non-relation and subjective solitude reopens the question of Real, but I will focus on sexuality as an absence of relation in the Macmann-Moll relationship. Beckett portrays this relationship with a grotesque eye for old age carnal love, and yet it has a Marquezian innocence as both the hero and the heroine experience love for the first time in their advanced old age. Ageing tinges love with a taste for mortality and activates death drives by triggering erotic drives. Mac and Moll’s difficult intercourse is described through the bawdy imagery of a pillow going into a pillow slip (2006: 253). At another place, Moll uses the expression ‘tetty-beshy’ (255) – an Anglicized translation of the French tête-bêche – to mark their sexual positions. In the eponymous French pair of stamps, two human figures are seen upside down in relation to one another. This would remind us of the precise positions of the para-sexuated couples in ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ and All Strange Away. The Symbolic interferes with the ana-tomy of sexual exchange through their love letters. Moll writes the first one, gleaning a minimal positive value from their belated amorous relation by comparing it to ‘pears that only ripen in December’ (254). Metaphors like this one expose Symbolic mediation of language in their relationship. In her love letter, Moll opines how ageing would only allow their love to transcend sexuality and avoid the disturbing phases of lovelessness, dwindling sexual interest and the pain of witnessing ageing. She finds them a perfect match in their beautifully complementing ugliness, and in spite of accepting impotence, she is far from giving up on sex. She advocates ‘courage’ in such manoeuvres, sends ‘oyster kisses’ and calls herself ‘Sucky Moll.’ These signifiers disclose a sexual relation between the speaking subject and her speech. ‘Tetty-beshy’ is a phonetic translation working at the level of neologism, and ‘Sucky Moll’ exemplifies nomination. These are lalangues in love where the signifier enjoys itself through the speaking-being, and this sexual bond with the signifier compensates for

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the lacking sexual relation. Lorenzo Chiesa has recently made a persuasive argument about ‘sexed liason’ as a supplementary writing of sexual nonrelation: ‘The phallic function allows for the emergence of sexed liaisons against the background of an enduring absence of the sexual relationship’ (2016: 29). Human subject’s sexualization of speech is one such sexsed liaison facilitated by the phallic function of the signifier. Although this ‘concrete sexed liaison’ of phallic function (Chiesa 2016: xi) is coloured by the impotency of aged lovers, Beckett’s comically inflated commentary on carnal love in old age spills over into the general amorous field. Moll’s emphasis on oneness in her letters is striking: ‘Let us think of the hours when, spent, we lie twined together in the dark, our hearts labouring as one’ (255). Love’s labouring heart fuses two into one and impedes the possibility of a dyadic relation. The Symbolic is replete with a desire for fusion which goes directly against the possibility of a relationship between the two. This unifying phallic proclivity is more apparent in Macmann’s delightful little poems: Hairy Mac and Sucky Molly In the ending days and nights Of unending melancholy Love it is at last unites. and To the lifelong promised land Of the nearest cemetery With his Sucky hand in hand Love it is at last leads Hairy. (255; emphasis in the original) These poems further underline the naming function in amorous lalangue as the two lovers rechristen each other, Hairy Mac and Sucky Molly. The accent on unity here makes an overlap between erotic and death drives in the journey to the cemetery. Narrator Malone consolidates this Imaginary illusion of Oneness by defining love as ‘a kind of lethal glue’ (255). If love succeeds in positing a One from two, there can be no relation within that unity. This is Beckett’s own logic of non-relation in his aforementioned letter to Duthuit. That said, this is the phallic relation with the Symbolic that is written per excellence. But what about the Real non-relation that cannot be written as a positive term? As the Mac-Moll affair enters into its final phase, the narrator dwells on three key objects. Two of them are Moll’s earrings, shaped like ‘long ivory crucifixes.’ One day, Macmann asks: ‘Why two Christs?’ (256). Moll answers that they are the two thieves while the Christ is inside her mouth.

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This response discloses another three-in-two arrangement. The corpo-real object, marked by the signifier ‘Christ’ is located in the inner-fold of the body. It is Moll’s solitary canine, crafted to resemble the cross: Then parting her jaws and pulling down her blobber-lip she discovered, breaking with its solitary fang the monotony of the gums, a long yellow canine bared to the roots and carved, with the drill probably, to represent the celebrated sacrifice. (257) The canine is subjected to the semblance of the signifier-Christ. It is crucially placed against the anatomic space of the usually unseen inner body. When the mouth opens, it topologically exteriorizes this corporeal interior as a Real. The signifier ‘Christ’ is written on the inner-fold of Moll’s body and this object, fused with the signifier, hangs loose in her mouth. This last tooth inflects Moll’s speech, and its fall foreshadows a time when it will be difficult to distinguish her toothless speech from a child’s blabbering lalangue. This object a, marked by the signifier Christ is banalized into a letter. It literally falls from the Other as a mark of lack. Beckett’s text accords this letterobject, a specific role in their so-called sexual relation. When they kiss, the tongue (la-langue) encounters the tooth. The narrator gives it the status of a third in the form of an oral object: And in the pleasure he was later to enjoy, when he put his tongue in her mouth and let it wander over her gums, this rotten crucifix had assuredly its part. But from these harmless aids what love is free? Sometimes it is an object, a garter I believe or a sweat-absorber for the armpit. And sometimes it is the simple image of a third party. (257; my emphasis) The narrator sees this solitary tooth as a mediating object for their jouissances. Their enjoyments pass through this borderline object, positioned at the intersection of the inner and the outer body like the extimate tongue of lalangue. The canine is another example of a corporeal fragment dressed up to resemble what it is not, i.e. a cross. The only rapport this can yield is a rapport with the Symbolic, i.e. the signifier ‘Christ.’ The Symbolic glimpses a corpo-Real in this a object. The narrator generalizes from this instance of a mediating third and reflects on the impossibility of unmediated sexual contact, giving other examples of ‘third parties’ in love. The Mac-Moll affair fails to write sexual relation and ends up positing a ‘concrete sexed liaison’ with the phallic signifier. But the Symbolic is imbricated with the Real when lalangue shifts from an Imaginary oneness to a Real object written on the body. What underlines the enabling function of this third for their relation is that soon after Moll loses the final tooth, Lemuel comes into Macmann’s room to give him the news of her death. Moll’s final canine companion falls conveniently so that she can collect

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it and put it away in a safe place. When she tells this to Macmann, his thoughts reinforce the value of the mediating object: Macmann said to himself, when she told him, There was a time she would have made me a present of it, or at least shown it to me. But a little later he said, firstly, To have told me, when she need not have, is a mark of confidence and affection, and secondly, But I would have known in any case, when she opened her mouth to speak or smile, and finally, But she does not speak or smile any more. (259) In Macmann’s love-laden thoughts, the signifier Christ, profaned into the sole surviving canine, has the status of a potential gift – a classic object a exchanged in love. The Christ-tooth is an atomic object of desire located at the cusp of Real body, torn between its Imaginary religious significations and its Symbolic presence as a signifier. The Christ-object of desire holds together the R-S-I (Lacan’s pun of R-S-I with ‘heresy’ becomes all the more relevant here) as it mediates their love relation. Once this Christ-tooth disappears, speech itself vanishes which had thus far sustained the relation. The next scene is Lemuel’s arrival and the intimation of Moll’s death, putting an actual end to their affair. The potential sexual relation between ‘Sucky Moll’ and ‘Hairy Mac’ thus remains enclosed within the Symbolic order that pushes towards Real lalangue. It can only witness a linguistic effect in the name of love that supplements the absent sexual relation. There is sexual rapport in speech but not in the Real. In fact, the Real is written at the limits of language only from the impossibility of writing a sexual relation. It is important that the mediating object is figured in the female from the male side and conditions masculine jouissance, leaving us in the dark about feminine jouissance. A detailed discussion of feminine jouissance is beyond the scope of this book. I am more interested in Beckett’s writing of the absent sexual relation as a Real inscription between psychoanalysis and literature. We cannot be sure if Moll’s jouissance passes through the same a object that Macmann’s does. This begs the question about feminine jouissance being the ‘not-all’ of phallic jouissance and goes back to Lacan’s point that a woman is more Real than a man because Symbolic castration cannot cut her as much as it cuts a man (2015: 191). Let us look at Lacan’s famous formulas of sexuation. The arrows in the formula show how a man relates to a woman through the a object which is not the same thing as a signifier,8 while a woman relates to the phallic signifier (Φ) in a man. In this quaternary sinthomatic structure, both a and Φ are mediators and impediments to sexual relation. The last nail in the coffin is the non-relation between the two mediators, a and Φ, indicated by the absence of an arrow. There is castration on both sides. The barred subject ($) and the barred Other (ø) cannot form a sexual relation not only because the signifier and the object create obstacles but

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also because the two are not necessarily related. Beckettian Christ-tooth equivocates between the signifier and a corpo-real a object by way of the letter. Lacan sees the a as that which ‘gets lost in signifierization’ (2015: 174). This accentuates its status as the pure materiality of a letter. The Real object a is not a signifier, but it may well be a letter. The Christ-tooth is an object and not an object. It is a signifier and not a signifier. It is an antinomic Real letter produced by lalangue in love. It is inside Moll, but it takes a Mac to identify and relate to it. What Moll relates to in Mac is not this objectal letter, and the text remains cryptic on what she might identify with in her man. This marks another point of opacity for their sexual relation.

Real sinthomatic support of non-relation: How It Is again Let us inform our previous discussion of tortuous coupling in How It Is with the present emphasis on sexuality. Sexual encounter between the tormentor and the victim in How It Is cannot be separated from the question of writing. Like the ‘Christ’ in Malone Dies, writing takes place on the body and it becomes impossible to distinguish between sexual act and writing. Through the writing of one corporeal fragment (nail) on another (back), the signifier impinges on the body as a site of sexual dialogue. This sadomasochistic sexual encounter is encapsulated by writing as the victim’s back becomes a notebook, smeared with blood. Corpo-real inscription is expressed in what is ironically named ‘stoic love.’ All tormentors during the torment have the generic name, ‘Bom’, and all victims are named ‘Pim’ by their tormentors. Every Bom carves the name ‘Pim’ on his victim’s back: ‘YOU PIM’ (61). The amorous act of writing thus begins with a lalangue-like nomination and aims at making the Other speak. Material writing on the corporeal surface fuses the sexual and the semiotic in an inextricable knot. This writing is operative at the material level of the body. Letters act like ‘furrows’ that turn the body inside-out by topologically externalizing the inner-fold when the nail rips the skin apart. This violently Real writing happens by exposing the other side of the skin which activates the corpo-real. Sexual enjoyment passes through a writing that demands to be read and yet defers reading through tricks of obfuscation: A special stroke indescribable a trick of the hand with the gratifying result one fine day vast stretch of time me Jim or Tim not Pim in any case not yet the back is not yet uniformly sensitive but it will be cheers none the less done it more or less rest (61).

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As narrator-tormentor struggles to make the victim’s back a uniformly sensitive and readable surface, the ‘special stroke’ increases the duration of training and maximizes his erotic enjoyment of the Other. It also opens up a playful series of nominations in amorous lalangue. As Soler reflects, ‘if love loosens one’s tongue, it is perhaps because it is precisely based on the meeting between two lalangues’ of the two lovers (2014: 167). The enigma about the Other’s jouissance and the Other (feminine) jouissance remains intact. The text does not register Pim’s nominative saying (dire) apart from his cry when Bom torments him by fragmenting his body in the sexual act. We do not hear what the Pims of this world have to say. Bom plays on the equivocal corporeal surface, which confuses the letter J and T with P. It defers Pim’s understanding of his name. Enciphering and deciphering therefore remain inalienable from sexual jouissance. The tormentor goes on to write ‘DO YOU LOVE ME’ (65) on Pim’s back. He delays the end of this eroto-semiotic dialogue by crossing out the letters E and N without finishing the script with the letter D that would have produced the signifier END. These are all writing strategies that complicate interpretation through equivocations. Narrator’s recurrent efforts to protract the encounter are poised at this twin point where the signifier reduces sexual relation to itself. As Badiou has rightly noted, the text does not sexually identify the couple as man and woman before the encounter and there is no sexual attribution afterwards. Every subject plays both sexual roles successively with two different partners. This implies sexual plasticity. It also supports our previous point that the question of sexual relation does not depend on homosexual or heterosexual coupling. Beckett’s text represents the way sexual enjoyment is imbricated with the signifier effect. The mechanical rituals of the sexual act are tabulated with numbers. These steps are called ‘lessons’, highlighting Symbolic mediation: First lesson theme song I dig my nails into his armpit right hand right pit he cries I withdraw then thump with fist on skull his face sinks in the mud he cries cease end of first lesson second lesson same theme nails in armpit cries thump on skull silence end of second lesson all that beyond my strength (54). These lessons are permeated with the Symbolic effect of signification, and the tormentor and the victim conduct their sexual dialogue through them. This is where the overlap between sexuality and the Symbolic becomes impossible to overcome. The lessons are distilled into numbers, and this pushes the Symbolic with the numerical field of the Real letter: Table of basic stimuli one sing nails in armpit two speak blade in arse three stop thump on skull four louder pestle on kidney five softer index in anus six bravo clap athwart arse seven lousy same as three eight encore same as one two as may be (59).

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Numbers in their circuitous progression and iterative sameness minimize the Symbolic into the Real, but in spite of furrowing on the body, the letters can only produce a sexual enjoyment mediated through this minimal signifying effect. The so-called sexual act produces nothing but speech in the Other as proof of his enjoyment. The sexual rapport this can institute is a phallic rapport with the Symbolic or what Chiesa calls a ‘sexed liaison.’ The inscription of phallic function in ‘concrete sexed liaisons’ writes the absent sexual relation as absence. Phallic function marks its uninscribability. The sexual rapport with the signifying effect of language does not stop being written and declares the absence of any such rapport in the Real. When the signifier borders on the Real letter, the inscription of this Real happens at the cost of the sexual relation’s writability. It is in this equivocation that the Real of sexual rapport doesn’t stop not being written. This is how we arrive at the antinomy that sexual rapport cannot be written, but its absence must be negatively written. What is written in this way is the Real of sexuality, and this writing of sexual non-rapport via negativa inscribes the sinthome as a construction on the Real. As the ‘+1’ or the ‘one-multiple’, sinthome alienates the possibility of an unmediated dyadic sexual relation by turning the triad into a quaternary structure. As Lacan says in Seminar XXIII: ‘The other sex is supported by the sinthome’ (2016: 84). Construction of the sinthome as a writing on the Real mathematically formalizes the missing sexual relation. We have seen in Chapter 2 how How It Is writes this sinthomatic construction of the Real One. Now we come a full circle by understanding this quadruple knotting on the sexual plane. Beckett ‘fails better’ in inscribing sexuality as relation which produces the sinthome as a minimal writing of the Real. As a bit of the Real is written in the field of the sexual, sense is minimized and juxtaposed with the moterealism of Real unconscious in the sinthomatic letter. This negative writing of sexual non-relation completes Beckett’s textual registration of Real unconscious as an impasse. In inexhaustible pulsations, the tremor of Beckett’s endlessly ending texts touches the Real.

Notes 1

See the final chapter of Copjec’s Read My Desire for anti-heterosexist implications of the Lacanian thesis of sexual difference.

2

See Seminar X for more on anxiety as an affective signal of the Real between jouissance and desire.

3

See Bruce Fink’s ‘An Introduction to Lacan’s Seminar XVIII’ in Against Understanding: Volume 2 for a gloss on the equivocation between ‘pas-toutes’ (not-all) and ‘pas-toute’ (not-whole) in the late seminars (88).

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4

The last sentence where the narrator refers to her ‘old breasts’ (1995: 192) is an implicit declaration of her biological femininity.

5

Lacan evokes the Kantian metaphor of clothing ‘our right hand into the lefthand glove by turning it inside out’ (2016: 68) and laconically observes that the problem with this inside-out glove is that its buttons are on the inside and hence it cannot be worn properly. This indicates an irreducible residue resisting the perfect fit which could have ushered into a sexual relation.

6

See Seminar XIV where the absence of sexual act prefigures the thesis on sexual non-rapport. As Lacan says, if there is no sexual act, what enables this saying (dire) is nothing but the sexual act (31.5.1967).

7

See Ackerley’s ‘Samuel Beckett: The Geometry of the Imagination’ in Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies: New Critical Essays.

8

See Book X: Anxiety chapter XIII for more on the distinction between a object and the signifier.

Conclusion

‘It’s the end, Clov, we’ve come to the end.’ In my end is the Other’s beginning. But as the Other is not only outside but inside me as well, let us approach this alterity by pinpointing tangents of this argument as well as possible extensions. Before that, a final look back at what we have done. Throughout this book, we have theorized the encounter of psychoanalysis and literature by tracing Real writing in a logico-mathematical sense that happens between the two discourses. Lacanian psychoanalysis has been our framework to do a bridge-building exercise between mathematical writing and literary writing. We have considered Beckett’s characteristically Modernist interest in literary form that speaks to mathematical and logical formalization. Be it geometric shapes or counting or better still, a mathematical presentation of the moving body as cipher, psychoanalysis serves as an important connecting third for mathematics and literature, thanks to the fundamental human dimension with which it approaches mathematical and logical questions. An interface of mathematics and literature without the mediation of psychoanalysis might have lacked this vestigial, unavoidable and valuable humanity that underwrites our mathematical questions. As we have found out, Modernist literary text’s gesture towards mathematical discourse in Beckett as a model for discursive autonomy works but only up to a point. Neither the literary text nor the mathematical text can ever become an absolutely autonomous discourse that has nothing to do with the human world. Where this discursive autonomy fails, we stare at the final punctuation of the text that mathematically inscribes a Real point of impossibility. To underscore the human aspect of these liminal points, where the text processes the question of its own ending, an affective residue is always at work. The entire geometric problematic of Borromean links retains the poignant human question about solitude and company. Mathematics without psychoanalysis could have neglected this human aspect, but we have not done that. In fact, we have highlighted the ethic of human community that insists in this numerical dialectic of one and many. We have seen how

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counting is a thoroughly affective human domain where numbers offer company to a solitary subject but unending numerical operations produce great anxiety. This numerical problem, as we have encountered, concerns the human dynamic of desire that is essentially framed by significant Others with whom the subject has complex bonds of feeling. As Jean-Michel Rabaté has recently argued, Beckett along with Georges Bataille took a strong position against post-war humanism in its anthropocentric avatar. They attempted to ‘limit’ the sublime hubris of human exceptionalism (Rabaté 2016: 18). The minimal affective humanity that we have observed in Beckett’s Real textual limits is a characteristically different notion. This is not a human triumphalism of power but a quiet humanity that faces the inordinate complexities of life. This is the bare minimum of the human or what Rabaté calls a return of the human in a ‘rigorous architectural perspective’, when he discusses how Beckett appreciated Antonello da Messina’s painting of Saint Sebastian (83). To echo How It Is, this is a mathematical humanity, barely within the species. We have demonstrated how Beckett’s texts end and do not end at the same time by endlessly ending in the Real. To make a brief aside at this point, let me say that this oxymoron of endless ending is a signature of Real infinity as antinomy. It finds an echo in Baylee Brits’s reading of the literary transfinite where she uncouples infinity from ‘the experience of endlessness’ (see Brits 2018: 186). The Real is not infinite because it is just endless. It is infinite because it is endless and it ends. It ends endlessly, and hence it is infinite. As Brits reflects, Cantorian actual infinity can be measured, but that does not make it determinable (Brits 2018: 3). Exploring the affective liquefaction of language into lalangue that goes hand in hand with mathematization of language in Worstward Ho, we have noticed how the textual end point that inscribes a minimal humanity of affect looks outward into the world. To qualify the failure of textual and mathematical autonomy one step further, where the text ends, a minimal semblance with the human world outside – in this case, the graveyard – hits back. The Real end of the text where it opens itself to interminability goes against any assumption of textual autonomy. The end places the Real not wholly within the text but at this cusp where it looks out into the world. The Real that is written at the textual margin as a marginal conception of the human is ultimately transtextual in the sense that the stoppage of one writing makes the other kind of writing unstoppable. The text touches its outside at this trans-textual point of closure. This cannot be an entirely autonomous text. Even if it does not come into being as a mimetic representation of the real human world, it does nevertheless end with a minimalist projection into the human reality outside. Beckett’s texts constitute this Real unconscious as an impasse. This writing as a symptomatic construction both radicalizes and minimizes the unconscious in a double movement of expansion into potential infinity and

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depletion into the mathematical self-sameness of the letter. We have traced mathematical inscriptions of this trans-textual unconscious in the endless ending of the text. Beckettian parlêtre (speaking-being) is inscribed in a hyphen that cuts speech from corporeal being as a mark of the Real. Later Lacan’s shift from the Symbolic to the Real illumines Beckett’s penchant for situating this immanent impossibility at his textual limits. As Beckett takes literature to its limit, he finds Lacan there who has taken psychoanalysis to its limit. The two meet in this liminal zone of the littoral where their relation is as important as their non-relation. They meet in a cusp where literary writing breaks down into psychoanalytic inscription and vice versa. In this malleable threshold, they inscribe parallel lines meeting in projective infinity. Whether it is motility as Real inscription or the question of the Real Other or the Borromean coexistence of solitude and company or better still the radical notion of Real unconscious as irresolvable problem, there are many significant points where Beckett reads Lacan by bending and inflecting his thoughts. He asks questions and even modifies Lacan’s theoretical edifice. On the other hand, not only have we underlined how literary the practice of psychoanalysis actually is, but we have also attempted to read the Lacanian text in a literary-imaginative mode of close reading. We have done a psychoanalytic reading of Beckett only through a literary reading of Lacan. This is the crux of the affair here. Our Lacan is as literary as our Beckett is psychoanalytic. Throughout this book, we have underscored the importance of logic in Beckettian texts. If there is an Other to logocentric rationality in Beckett, it is certainly not its binary opposite, irrationality. What battles the rational is aporetic logic. Beckettian text dialecticizes rationality with logic, not only to subvert logic but also to hold this subversion within logic itself. The work on mathematical forms and numbers in Beckett’s literary texts and Lacan’s psychoanalytic teaching, I believe, has allowed us to have a different purchase on the ‘matheme’ than what calculative rationality would ever permit. For me, the entire thrust of reading mathematics from a humanities perspective lies in situating the limits of mathematical formalization as a framework where it fails to elicit knowledge and touches the Real by encountering a systemic and structural dead end. Mathematical thinking as an ally of rationalism is precisely the trajectory that I have resisted throughout this book. For example, Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment maintain that a thorough mathematization of thinking is the carrier of Enlightenment reason. The mathematized logic we have studied in Beckett and Lacan runs opposite to Adorno and Horkheimer’s diagnosis of Platonic number as the ‘canon’ of Enlightenment rationality (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002: 4). The number that we have brought out is not a vehicle of Enlightenment rationalism that mathematizes all thought (see Adorno and Horkheimer 2002: 18–19). This is a completely different notion of number that bores holes in the epistemic edifice of rationality. It

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registers how all thought can never be mathematized and punctures rational meaning with the bare materiality of language. Logic, mathematics and the apparatus of number, all play their part here in formalizing the impossible as an aporia of form. As we have seen, Beckett’s texts not only transgress their own operational logic in a creative principle of variance but also continue to inscribe and reinscribe rules that keep limiting the logic of the textual field. Lacanian subversion of modal logic by including the impossible is crucial for Beckett’s insistence on antinomy. The antinomy of solitude and company is the fundamental Beckettian sinthome that emerges from this study. What gives support to this Real writing is Lacan’s Borromean structure where logic is mathematized through topological geometry. Beckett’s work consistently critiques the logic of excluded middle and holds onto double negations that cannot become affirmations. This way of seeing negation, neither as a binary opposite of affirmation nor as a nihilistic pointer of destruction (double negation produces an indestructible remainder), extends the possibility of studying Beckettian negation through various systems, from modal logic to frameworks, as diverse and complex as set theory, category theory and para-consistent logic. I leave this Other work to the future of alterity. Another potential opening lies in extending, consolidating and theorizing the horizon of the political. Apart from engaging with political implications of Beckett’s aporetic dialectic and linguistic materialism, mathematical logic also opens up the question of the political by insisting on community. Be it the ‘one-multiple’ of the swarm or the Borromean chain, Lacanian logic implies a collective subject. In How It Is, The Lost Ones, What Where and Quad, Beckett makes a gesture towards a political community that upholds a strangely counter-intuitive notion of justice in successive tortures. Coexistence of solitude and company in parallel constructions promises a new collective logic where the numerable and the innumerable taken together evince a radical democratic formation. This is not an intuitive addition of one into many. This collectivization is driven by a counterintuitive logic of disjunction. In other words, it is a radical non-relation between one and many that builds the human collective. This is a community that does not compromise the radical agency of each individual. It marries the anti-totalitarian structure of ‘not-all’ with the subtractive formation of ‘one-multiple.’ The ‘one-multiple’ is subtractive because it blocks passage from one number to its successor by regenerating the originary zero as One. This One that accumulates against addition has the agency to subvert the capitalist regime of numbers as mere addition. This Real One has the revolutionary audacity to demand the impossible from a collective. If this infinitesimal collective is not-all in its innumerability, it is also irreducible to a simple logic of addition. As we have seen through Lacan, Beckettian ‘plusone’ does not add the One to the Other but keeps reiterating the irreducible unary nature of the One-multiple. There is a Real non-relational logic in

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this radical balance of in-dividual and community. Beckettian community is founded on the non-relation of solitude and company. It gets constructed by way of negating the solitary. I hope we have re-signified some old but important questions in Beckett Studies, concerning knowledge, ignorance, meaning making and the figure of the Other. We have seen how Lacanian function of the letter as kenosis, punching a hole into knowledge, inflects Beckettian obsession with ignorance. We have marked how Beckettian text pushes knowledge to a point where the subject dissolves into the Real of unsubjectivated knowledge as a textual deposit. These registrations of non-knowledge sketch the Real as a negation of meaning in process. This way the present book nuances Beckett’s absurdist christening by supplementing meaninglessness with minimal meaning. Beckettian world of ignorance and impotence evacuates meaning from words through words by counter-posing semantics with sonic materiality. As the signifier is mathematically incarnated in the letter, a difficult jouissance interdicts Imaginary meaning. What emerges through this interdiction is the inane corpo-reality of language. This negation can never reach absolute meaninglessness, and the potentially infinite process produces the impossibility of the Real. We have noted how Beckettian text insists on non-relations within this minimal meaning as breaking points of a signifying chain. When it comes to the field of sexuality, a Lacanian exploration of feminine sexuality in Beckett would be interesting from the readings we have carried out in the final chapter. There are many such tangents and potential elaborations that invite us to continue this dialogue or, shall we say, a double-monologue between Beckett and Lacan. ‘You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’ I look forward to the Other in me. I await the Other not in me.

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INDEX OF PROPER NAMES

Adorno, Theodor W. 195 Augustine, St. 93, 94 Badiou, Alain. 9, 36, 47, 48, 52, 63, 64, 94, 107–8, 134, 136, 138, 154n, 158, 159, 188 Beckett Works All Strange Away 30, 159, 167, 179–81, 183 …but the clouds… 102–3 Company 5, 19, 29–30, 34, 46, 51, 77–112, 113, 116, 128, 136, 138, 139, 144, 145, 152, 155n, 160, 161 Disjecta 52 Dream Notebook 92, 93 Endgame 5, 162 ‘Enough’ 30, 62, 161, 168–75, 176 ‘The Expelled’ 173 How It Is 5, 19, 27, 29, 33–76, 83, 84, 85, 101–2, 103, 113, 116, 128, 138, 139, 144, 157, 159, 161, 167, 173, 183, 187–90 Ill Seen Ill Said 96, 103, 135, 145, 154n-155n ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ 30, 159, 167, 177–8, 179, 181, 183 The Letters 20, 50, 134, 150, 160, 167, 184 Malone Dies 30, 112n, 159, 183–7 Molloy 11, 62, 94, 136, 161, 167 Murphy 11, 18, 52, 75n, 76n, 136 ‘Philosophy Notes’ 34, 35, 41 Proust and the Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit 160

Quad 12, 51, 63, 162, 194 Stirrings Still 144 Texts for Nothing 33, 34, 35, 63 The Unnamable 34, 35, 62, 83, 161 Waiting for Godot 5, 50–1, 161 Watt 50, 76n, 94 ‘The Way’ 6–7 ‘What is the word’ 116, 131 What Where 12, 50, 51, 63, 194 Worstward Ho 10, 19, 30, 35, 51, 69, 74, 113–55, 158, 161, 192 Calvino, Italo 11 Coetzee, J.M 11 Copjec, Joan 103, 164, 190n De Saussure, Ferdinand 15, 49, 50, 75n Derrida, Jacques 10 Freud, Sigmund 4, 5, 12, 15, 20, 22, 29, 55, 61, 71, 72, 73, 74, 78, 82, 97, 104, 130, 155n Gray, Jeremy 16 Jakobson, Roman 147 Joyce, James 4, 10, 15, 66–7, 70, 85, 89, 117, 121, 125, 148, 160 Lacan Works Autres Ecrits 12, 31n Ecrits 5, 12, 15, 20, 22, 23, 26, 28, 49, 50, 75, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 104, 105, 112n, 125, 139, 142, 144, 152, 162, 166, 167

INDEX OF PROPER NAMES

‘l’étourdit’ 23, 25, 115, 128 ‘Geneva Lecture on the Symptom’ 71, 124, 125 ‘Joyce the Symptom I’ 66–7 ‘The lectures at the Law School Auditorium, Yale University on November 25, 1975’ 32n, 48, 116, 145, 157 ‘Lituraterre’ 5, 21, 23, 26, 27, 115–16, 117, 118–27, 150, 151, 152 ‘Overture to the First International Encounter of the Freudian Field, Carcas, 12 July 1980’ 174 ‘Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School’ 20, 32n Seminar I 79 Seminar II 34 Seminar VII 51, 82, 115, 127, 167 Seminar IX 5, 26–7, 142, 143 Seminar X 97–8, 158, 163, 164, 168, 186, 187 Seminar XI 24, 104, 105, 112, 116 Seminar XII 76n, 103, 107 Seminar XIV 61, 182, 190n Seminar XVI 5, 90, 98 Seminar XVII 22, 69, 123, 127 Seminar XVIII 23, 26, 121, 143, 182 Seminar XIX 30, 55, 58, 59, 78, 98, 114, 165, 176 Seminar XX 22, 26, 27, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 75, 104, 106, 107, 108, 113,

207

117, 121, 122, 124, 127, 161, 162, 163–4, 165, 171, 173, 175–6, 181 Seminar XXI 23, 26, 53, 54, 56, 59, 61–2, 68–9, 106, 110–11, 164 Seminar XXII 28, 53, 54, 60, 83, 121, 141–2 Seminar XXIII 4, 13, 31n, 53, 55, 59–60, 63, 65, 66, 71, 83, 89, 91, 92, 106, 117, 118, 152, 154n, 160, 166, 170, 189 Seminar XXIV 24–5, 28–9, 73, 74, 165–6, 182 Seminar XXV 24–5, 27, 45, 74 Television 170 ‘There can be no crisis of psychoanalysis: Jacques Lacan Interviewed in 1974’ 24 ‘The Third’ 79, 104, 106 Lakoff, George 7–8, 122 Miller, Jacques-Alain 20, 32n, 55, 67, 70–1, 73, 74, 103, 121, 125, 127 Milner, Jean-Claude 125 Musil, Robert 9–10 Pascal, Blaise 46, 58 Plato 7, 8, 9, 16, 34–5, 55, 142, 143, 146, 193 Soler, Colette 63, 65, 67–8, 70, 72, 127, 188 Žižek, Slavoj 17, 66 Zupančič, Alenka 181

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

affect 27, 30, 39, 48, 69, 78, 81, 87, 88, 94–5, 96, 97, 98, 101, 102, 111, 113, 114, 118, 119, 121, 122, 124, 126–7, 128, 130, 136, 138, 140, 145–6, 157, 163, 165, 169, 172–3, 175, 176, 180, 191–2 being 4, 5, 9, 18, 20, 27, 34–5, 61, 75, 77–8, 85–6, 104, 106, 107–8, 111, 112, 113, 125, 144, 151–4, 163, 176, 181–2. See also speaking-being body 14, 18, 19, 20, 27, 45, 47–8, 51, 77–112, 114, 116, 125, 128, 129, 151–4, 158–60, 164–8, 169–71, 180, 185, 187–8, 191 community 42, 60–1, 193, 196 counting 27, 28, 30, 48, 49, 58, 64, 68, 72, 92–112, 136, 137, 141, 143, 172–4, 193–4 death 96–7, 104–12, 127, 130, 132, 136, 144–5, 153, 183 discourse 6, 22, 23, 30, 50, 69, 79–80, 89, 114, 117, 121–4, 126, 135, 143, 144 drive 104–12, 127, 130, 132, 138, 144, 145, 162, 166, 167, 182, 183, 184 form and formalization 6–17, 21, 23, 25, 26, 30, 35, 45, 46, 47, 49, 52–3, 55, 59, 68, 69, 83, 89, 90, 91, 96, 102, 103, 106, 108, 113,

116, 117, 122, 128, 131, 141, 143, 157, 191, 194, 195 fragmentation 104–12, 129, 158, 164–90 Imaginary 14, 18, 24, 28–9, 46, 60, 79, 100, 105, 109, 116, 130, 152, 154n, 160, 175, 184 infinity 6, 7, 46, 62, 63–4, 67, 72, 73, 75, 76n, 83, 92, 96, 103, 107, 141, 144, 192, 193 Jouissance 27, 30, 67, 69, 71, 72, 95, 97, 98, 104–12, 119, 120, 124–7, 130, 136, 138, 146, 162, 163, 164–8, 171–3, 186, 188 Lalangue 27, 30, 66, 67, 68, 69–70, 104, 105–7, 108, 113, 114, 117, 124–7, 128, 136, 138, 142, 147, 148, 149, 152, 153, 174, 176, 183–7 letter 5, 6, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27–8, 29, 30, 50, 52, 53, 54, 62, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 74, 82, 83, 85, 86, 95, 104, 106–7, 110, 114–18, 119–21, 125, 126, 131, 133, 137, 139, 141–2, 143, 145, 153, 157, 170, 184–5, 187–9 logic 2, 3, 7, 12–13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20–1, 24–5, 26, 33, 36, 46–54, 56, 57–8, 61–3, 65, 68, 72, 73, 74, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 90, 91, 98, 101, 102, 104, 115, 117, 118, 126, 128, 131–5

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

love 14, 19, 22, 23, 25, 30–1, 157, 158–60, 161, 163, 164, 165, 168–76, 183–7, 188 mathematics 6, 7–17, 30, 45, 47, 48, 49, 52, 67, 100, 115, 119, 122–3, 142–3, 145, 146, 154, 179, 191, 194 matheme 19, 20, 26, 52, 82, 93, 100, 104–12, 119, 122, 137, 139, 149, 154n, 169, 174 modernism 6–17, 122, 146 motility 19, 41, 47, 77–112, 158, 193 non-relation 2–3, 14, 18, 21–5, 30, 50, 55, 61, 63, 66, 68, 70, 72, 75n, 108, 140–1, 153, 157–90 number 5–8, 13, 14, 16, 17, 27, 29–30, 40, 46–7, 52, 58, 64, 65, 68, 71, 72, 76n, 79, 93–9, 101–3, 107–8, 136–7, 145, 146, 154n, 171, 172–3, 175, 189, 192, 194 one 33–76, 83–6, 102–3, 137, 142, 143, 184, 187–8, 194 Real 1–32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 43, 45, 48, 49, 50–4, 56, 58, 60–1, 63–75, 77–112, 113–18, 119, 120, 121–31, 133–54, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163–73, 174–8, 181–2, 185–90, 191–5 set theory 8, 16, 90, 196 sexual relation 22, 51, 70, 157–90

209

sexuality 14, 19, 23, 25, 30, 31, 62, 75n, 111–12, 157, 160–4, 165–8 signifier 3, 5, 14, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 45, 49–50, 52, 53, 56, 62, 68, 70, 71, 72, 75n, 76n, 77, 79, 84–5, 98, 99, 104, 106, 114–15, 121, 127, 128, 135, 143, 149, 151, 163, 164, 170, 183–9, 195. See also letter sinthome 4, 29, 30, 35, 63–7, 70, 89, 91–2, 117, 123, 138, 140–1, 153, 189, 194 speaking-being 18, 20, 53, 73, 74, 75, 79, 85, 104, 106, 115, 116, 129, 141, 151–4, 176, 181–2, 183, 193 unconscious 2–3, 5, 14, 18, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26–31, 33–4, 45, 53, 61, 63–7, 68, 69–70, 72, 79–80, 82, 84, 95, 103, 106–7, 110, 112, 114, 116–17, 120, 139, 140, 141–2, 144, 153, 162, 163, 167, 175, 178, 189, 192 writing 1–32, 36, 45–54, 56, 60, 61–3, 66, 71, 72, 73–4, 75, 84, 85, 106, 114, 115, 118, 119, 120, 122, 124, 126, 142–3, 157, 158, 167, 171, 175–6, 178, 181, 186–9, 191, 193, 194, 196 zero 6–7, 46–7, 58, 76n, 90, 94, 98, 100–1, 102–3, 107, 137, 154n, 173, 178, 180, 194