Abstract

This chapter explores Beckett’s poetics of bilingualism and his practices of self-translation as spectropoetics. It brings together two philosophers, often at odds with one another, in order to theorize the figures and forms of Beckett’s bilingual œuvre and to posit a figural language that disrupts sensory experiences. Leaning on Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the figural on the one hand, and the “distribution of the sensible” modeled by Jacques Rancière on the other, I examine Beckett’s bilingualism as a defigurative project that interrogates the relationships between the seen and the said, the audible and the visible, the inner and the outer, and, ultimately, between the living and the dead. In what follows, I show the various ways in which Beckett’s bilingual writing engages with modalities of spectrality that trigger alternative modes of sense perception and induce hauntological forms of subjectivity. I thus suggest that in doing so Beckett’s bilingual œuvre inaugurates a new “regime of identification of art” (Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Trans. Steve Corcoran. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009, 28).