Beckett and Bare Life: Post-war Political Subjectivity in Molloy

Abstract

What can Beckett offer political theory concerned with subjecthood in the aftermath of the Nazi concentration camps? I suggest in this essay that Molloy provides a literary terrain through which to explore the collapse of the Enlightenment and the emergent vulnerability of the subject in relation to the state. Reading Foucault and Agamben’s differing analyses of biopolitics through Molloy, I argue, offers an opportunity to critique both theorists as well an opportunity to read a theory of the post-camp subject into Beckett. I argue as well for a reading of Molloy as an illustration of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of Enlightenment and the impossibility of political futurity under the logic of the camp.

Keywords

• beckett
• biopolitics
• sovereignty
• futurity
• camps.