Beckett lu par Adorno : La Catastrophe du langage comme réponse à la catastrophe historique

Abstract

In this article, the notion of catastrophe is first treated as a metaphor for what happens to literary production when it is disrupted by twentieth-century art innovations. I address this issue by looking at the exemplary case of Adorno’s reading of Samuel Beckett, whose writing renders traditional æsthetic processes obsolete, thus breaking the continuity between language and the meaning that it is supposed to convey. According to Adorno, the catastrophe operating in Beckett in terms of language is a response to the historical catastrophe of the Second World War and the way in which it broke the continuity between human suffering and the possibility to articulate it with language. By presenting the opposition between Adorno’s and Sartre’s approaches to literature, I will show that, while Sartre responds to the catastrophe of the Second World War with committed literature, Adorno, from his reading of Beckett, responds with what will be called the catastrophe of language.

Keywords:

• Catastrophe
• Adorno
• Beckett
• modern art
• commitment
• form

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Louis-Thomas Leguerrier

Louis-Thomas Leguerrier completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the Université de Montréal. In 2019, he published Ulysse au XX^e siècle: Entre Athènes et Jérusalem (Éditions Hashtag), an essay based on his thesis on twentieth-century re-readings of the figure of Odysseus, notably by Joyce and Benjamin Fondane. As of May 2020, he is doing a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University under the supervision of Annabel Kim.