A Cartesian triad in the work of Samuel Beckett

Abstract

Influenced by the thought of Descartes, Geulincx and Berkeley, Samuel Beckett sought to compose a poetics of uprooting and impossibility, in which he gave new meanings to the fragments he adopted from those philosophers, altered them due to the absence of a philosophical system per se, and then reformulated them through a collation with other texts in the constitution of their writings. The void (or gap) between the inner world of the subject and the outside world is a central theme throughout Beckett’s works, and this gave rise to the notion of the “unword”, which refers to the author’s intention to conceive a literature that tends towards the minimum. This is where the gap between mind and body, already announced by those thinkers, comes to occupy a privileged place in which silence is one of the central features of the impossibility and presence of the inner world.