A IS FOR ANNA, OR ‘THERE IS SOME ONE’: SAMUEL BECKETT

Let me begin with a claim that must sound astonishing to many ears, John Robert Keller’s assertion of the ‘primacy of love’ in Beckett’s work.1 Clearly intended as a provocation to contempo- rary Beckett studies, Keller’s book, Samuel Beckett and the Primacy of Love, counters a long-running strain in Beckett criticism that has painted Beckett as an unrelentingly pessimistic fi gure, whose bleak vision of humanity is mitigated only by the blackest of black humor. While Keller doesn’t deny what he calls the ‘primal ca- tastrophe’ that many readers have detected shaping the contours of the Beckettian narrator’s world, he fi nds Beckett’s fi ction to be powerfully infl ected by a courageous attempt at love, at whose center ‘is an attempt to connect to the mother’.2 With this, Keller swiftly and economically confi rms what Freud has reportedly taught us all along, such that it has become a truism of psycho- analytic criticism, namely, that the mother is the child’s ‘fi rst love’. Keller’s thesis, worked out through sustained readings of Murphy, Watt, Waiting for Godot and several texts from the short fi ction (although, surprisingly, not the short novella First Love), is that by writing, by telling stories, Beckett’s narrator attempts to mend the gap that has separated him from the ‘loving otherness’ that is the maternal being. Writing, Keller asserts, is a desperate ‘plea for connection, by a self that is unifying, then fragmenting under the weight of non-recognition’.3 Although Keller’s is probably not a Beckett many of us would recognize at fi rst sight, his assessment of the writer as a think- er of utmost perseverance and fortitude would likely gain an ap- preciative nod from Alain Badiou. Badiou’s lifelong engagement with Beckett is recorded in a series of essays, recently translated in Alberto Toscano’s and Nina Power’s useful volume, On Beckett. 4 In this collection, Badiou speaks of the urgent need to put distance between ourselves and the Sartrean or ‘existentialist’ Beckett that has dominated Beckett studies for much of the past half century (although, as Andrew Gibson points out in his thoughtful after- word to the volume, Badiou seems largely unaware of the chal- lenge to this characterization posed by more recent studies in the deconstructive vein). Badiou invites us to rediscover a writer whose fundamental ‘lesson’ is one of ‘measure, exactitude and courage’.5 Badiou thus shares Keller’s conviction that the Beckettian subject is nothing if not powerfully engaged with one of the philosophical ‘conditions’ Badiou identifi es as love. But the philosopher, I sus- pect, would likely retreat from Keller’s more expansive claim re- garding love’s primacy or ‘fi rstness’ for Beckett. Love is, after all, only one of the four conditions that Badiou identifi es under which truths can emerge, and the Beckett that Badiou encounters is just as deeply engaged with politics (his work in the French resistance), with science (the Cartesian ‘Method’) and of course with art (writ- ing), as he is with love. With respect to these last, an important strand of critique has surfaced in tandem with the appearance of the English transla- tion of Badiou’s magnum opus Being and Event. Badiou, this cri- tique alleges, is not as responsive as he might be to the precondi- tions under which an event and its truth procedure might occur. An event is always a rare, aleatory occurrence, but the challenge posed by this critique is whether we can think a situation’s own implication in an event—that is, whether any of its local aspects or historical features can colour or play a more or less defi ning role in the way, or even if, the event occurs. Recent cases in point include Sam Gillespie’s persuasive call for the need to identify the aff ect that ‘grips’ the subject in the truth operation that makes it suscep- tible to and capable of recognizing an event, and Peter Hallward’s .