Ideas in Beckett and Deleuze

I will try to show how Beckett's works shed light on ideas developed in Deleuze and test and extend those ideas. In particular, here, I will focus on two points of impasse and possibility that Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari, identify: first, the limitations placed on philosophy by the image of thought that connects representation to Platonic Ideas which he discusses in 'Plato and the Simulacrum' (Deleuze, 1990, pp. 253-266); second, the limitations placed on thought by collective assemblages of enunciation that, with Félix Guattari, he discusses in 'November 20, 1923, Postulates of Linguistics' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1993, pp. 75-111). Structures emerge from these forms that are based on an invariance that fixes and limits our capacity to respond to experience and does no justice to the experience of life. I will argue that, in his 1983 play What Where (adapted for TV in 1986 and recently reproduced) Beckett engages with and 'exhausts' forms of thinking that closely relate to the Idea, and collective assemblages of enunciation, and in doing so challenges and renders these received modes of stability unstable.