Ruben Borg

Ethics of the Event: The Apocalyptic Turn in Modernism*

In their contributions to the forum on “The Ethics of Temporality” (Partial Answers 8.1, 2009) Elana Gomel and Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan suggest that there can be no genuine ethical position without the rejection of deterministic models of thought. Such a rejection, they claim, is predicated upon a correct understanding of time as a real force for difference and heterogeneity — a force that remains irreducible to any totalizing discourse or meta-historical perspective. Taking its cue from that discussion, “Ethics of the Event” explores the paradoxes (ethical as well as epistemological) engendered by the modernist insight that time is real. In particular, the essay analyzes the strain that such an insight places upon the modern ideal of subjective self-determination. It then draws upon the work of Samuel Beckett to flesh out a literary model that is able to find some species of ethical freedom outside the framework of a fully self-determined subjectivity.

Between Fact and Fiction: The Nature of Events in Joyce and Beckett

It is a commonplace of Beckett scholarship that his narratives dramatize a retreat from the possibility of narration. Expression fizzles out into voicelessness as the narrated world evaporates thinner with every new text. My aim in this paper is to present this feature of Beckettian poetics as the final phase in the development of an experimental narrative tradition inaugurated by Joyce. Like Beckett, Joyce views the task of writing fiction as a means of reflecting on the ontological structure of events, and thus of re-evaluating the purchase of truth across fictional and factual narrative information. As we shall see, both writers explore the idea that the geometry of relations between fact, fiction, and truth needs to be radically rethought. But whereas Becketts work tends towards the realization of a purely fictional state, a state ideally withdrawn from the empirical world, Joyces method is to level the ontological distinction between fact and fiction to a point where they become indissociable. By staging a dialogue between Beckett and the later Joyce, I wish to read their increasingly radical narrative innovations as examples of a peculiarly modernist engagement with the nature of factual and fictional truth. It seems that a discussion of the nature of truth in Modernism must always fall between two stools. One is too easily seduced by the encyclopedic sweep characteristic of many twentieth-century masterpieces. The promise of total cultural recall, that is to say, of a complete re-appropriation of the past, constitutes an unavoidable epistemic paradigm. Yet this very taste for accumulation and historical

Beckett and Deleuze: Tragic Thinkers

This essay reappropriates a question Deleuze asked of Kant, in order to ask it again of Beckett: ‘The Northern Prince says “time is out of joint”.1 Can it be that the Northern philosopher says the same thing: that he should be Hamletian because he is Oedipal?’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 88); by the same token, can it be that Beckett’s writing is Deleuzian because it is mock-Oedipal?