In 1975, Deleuze and Guattari published Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Although the preoccupation of the book mainly consisted in rejecting conventional interpretations of Kafka as an Oedipalized neurotic, it also invoked Samuel Beckett as a further example of what they termed ‘minor literature’ – the use made of a dominant language by an author writing from a ‘minoritarian position’ within that language whose effect is to corrupt, subvert or destabilize it. The book would inspire a fundamental reappraisal of the works of Beckett, challenging the prevailing view that situated Beckett within the series of well-known existential thinkers – Sartre, Camus, Ionesco – who dominated mid-twentieth-century French philosophy. Critics then started to explore Beckett's relation to post-structuralist writers, with works by – amongst others – Angela Moorjani (1982), Steven Connor (1988) and Thomas Trezise (1990).
Central to this new scholarly endeavour was Deleuze's engagement with Beckett – something that Wilmer and Žukauskaitė’s edited collection now develops and expands upon in a refreshing way. For those who believe that all that can be said about Beckett has been said already, I would respectfully say that it is time to think again. Correlatively – and because it is a book that is as much about Deleuze as it is about Beckett – the volume makes a timely contribution to debates within the fields of literature, performance and philosophy where appetite for Deleuze remains unabated. It is no idle boast on the part of Wilmer and Žukauskaitė when they say that these essays are penned by some of the world's leading Beckett and Deleuze scholars – Colin Gardner, Anthony Uhlmann, Isabelle Ost, and S. E. Gontarski – to name a few, although there are excellent contributions by emergent scholars too.
Divided into four parts – ‘Difference, Becoming, Multiplicity’, ‘Psychoanalysis and Sociality’, ‘Space, Time and Memory’, and ‘Theatre and Performance’ – the collection persuasively makes the case that Beckett was Deleuzian avant la lettre. As Wilmer and Žukauskaitė rightly observe, ‘Beckett and Deleuze overlap in surprising ways’ (p. 2). While there is no evidence that Deleuze was ever read by Beckett, Deleuze drew inspiration from Beckett's work and it is those engagements that provide the starting point for the essays here. Familiar Deleuzian themes, such as difference and repetition, becoming, multiplicity, any-spaces-whatever, immanence and life, are mobilized to show how Beckett's novels, theatre and television plays can be thought as examples of ‘minor literature’. As such, Beckett's work is revealed to be nothing less than the very ‘deterritorialisation of language’ that Deleuze once proclaimed it to be: a ‘revolutionary force’ for all literature. As Wilmer and Žukauskaitė assert, in inventing ‘new literary, theatrical and cinematic language’, Beckett – like Deleuze himself – undermines conventional notions of subjectivity and resists thereby ‘forms of domination and power’ (p. 3). It is the source of that ‘deep affinity’ between Deleuze and Beckett that they each ‘invent different strategies of evading both dominant significations and modes of subjection’ (p. 3).
There is a tension in the book, however – if not quite a performative contradiction. In its sectoral separations, disciplinary divisions inevitably begin to assert themselves. This is most evident in Part IV, where performance scholarship is consigned. Yet the arguments presented in this book invite ways of reading the contributions that break with this editorial exposition – in Deleuzian terms, that break with the compartmentalized logic of an ‘indexical assemblage’, in order to release nomadic readings and interpretations, to deterritorialize the order of scholarly convention that frames the book itself. For unlike many edited collections, in these essays we find clusters of intensities, lines of flight – and escape – that defy disciplinarity. In short, here we have that rare and admirable thing in an academic text: an open invitation to create new combinations of thought.
