La coïncidence des contraires dans l'œuvre de Samuel Beckett

Abstract

Whatever the genre Beckett chooses to express himself, his writings feed on an impressive literary, aesthetic, philosophical and theological substrate. These influences are closely connected to the general approach that determined his conceptions of writing and the stage, namely, a negative theology. The totality of his work bears the trace of a theatricality that manifests itself in its relation to speech, space and time, and the notion of character. The problematic of dispossession runs through all of Beckett's texts and this dispossession affects the subject, reality as well as language itself. It is illustrated among other things by a theme that had been dear to Heraclitus, Nicolas de Cusa and Giordano Bruno: the coincidence of opposites.

Keywords

• drama
• philosophy
• contraries
• negative theology
• language
• stage