Deferral, Discipline, and the Esthetics of Failure: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

摘要

The most profound irony of postmodernity is the paradox inherent in thehistorical movement beyond the new. But the experiential realization of suchparadoxes is precisely what we have called the esthetic. The postmoderntranscendence of modern panestheticism is the estheticization of our veryexperience of time.Eric Gans (1993, 206).I would like to consider Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot, in light of the 2014GASC’s themes of deferral, discipline, and knowledge. I think it will be interesting toexplore waiting as a mode of deferral which involves particular forms of discipline. As aguiding framework for this discussion, I am going to revisit Eric Gans’ paper, “Beckett andthe Problem of Modern Culture.” There, Gans considers (among many other things)Beckett’s “esthetics of failure.” He makes it clear in the paper that Beckett’s esthetics wasnot only pertinent to the post-war epoch, but also continued to be so in 1981. In revisitingGans’s analysis, I would like to re-examine the play and its esthetics (considered as a formof knowledge) in order to begin to re-situate the discussion within a contemporary cultural,historical, and of course theoretical context.