'I switch off' : towards a Beckettian minority of theatrical event

This essay will analyse Samuel Beckett's subversive handling of theatre's fundamentally evental dimension as a medium where things happen on stage against the backdrop of the Deleuze-Badiou philosophical debate (for example, Badiou's commentary on the Deleuzian theory of the event inThe Logic of Sense, in his own Logics of Worlds) over the event's relation to language. Does the event belong to language? Does it pre-exist language? Can the event be represented by language or does it bore a hole in linguistic representation? As I would argue, these are important questions for Beckett's theatre when we explore the way in which theatrical speech relates to the missing event it attempts to describe. Whether the event is enclosed within the speech act itself or whether it is doubled by the attempt of speech to describe it is, as we shall see, a vital question for Beckett. Although both Deleuze and Badiou take a stand against representation, the former makes a complex argument about a constitutive relation between the event and language while the latter argues in favour of a schism between the two. Placing these philosophical questions in the arena of theatrical performance, I would argue that instead of inverting the standard theatrical primacy of event over speech by having the text lord over performance, Beckett in his plays reconfigures the theatrical event and gives it a Deleuzian 'minor' agency. Beckett's consistent emphasis on the offstage as a 'minor' evental locus in his plays opens up the spatial complexity in the speech-event relation, which, as we shall see, is not without its temporal dimension either, and I propose the Deleuzian 'counter-actualization' of event as a useful conceptual framework for the study of this minor agency in Beckett.