Deleuze and Beckett: The Image as Exhaustion of the Word

Abstract

Since Difference and Repetition, Deleuze aims to free the spirit from its relationship with representation. Nevertheless, this program contained a paradoxical formulation. Deleuze proposed a new image of thought, one that is none other than the image of thought without an image. The entire struggle against the "philosophy of representation" compelled one to conceive of a thought without representing anything, to seek an image of thought which, as a thought without an image, was not an image in itself. This blindness permeated all of Deleuze's work in the 1970s where there is no theory of the image nor any attempt to construct any image whatsoever of a thought without an image. One could say that what fascinated Deleuze, in the experience of cinema, at the beginning of the 1980s, was precisely the possibility of producing images of thought, and images of a thought without an image. It is only with The Exhausted that the activity of the spirit is presented as the creation of images. Instead of an image of a thought without images. While in the books about cinema, the spirit is on the screen, i.e., it is the movement and time of images, in the analysis of Beckett's television plays, the spirit is something that takes place within the minds of the exhausted characters.

Catarina Pombo Nabais holds a PhD in Philosophy by the University of Paris 8 (2007). Researcher at the Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Departamento de História e Filosofia das Ciências. Integrated member of the Centro de Filosofia das Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Campo Grande 1749-016 Lisboa, Portugal. Email: ccnabais@fc.ul.pt. This work is financed by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., within the scope of the Norma Transitória - DL57/2016/CP1479/CT0063.