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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 June 2025
This time around, for some reason, what strikes me about Augustine's description is how isolated the child appears, training its own mouth to form signs (something you might expect of a figure in a Beckett play) […] Stanley Cavell
– ‘The Argument of the Ordinary’.Abstract
The name ‘Italian Theory’ has come to refer to a transformative theoretical-critical turn, after poststructuralism, away from the sovereignty of language and towards the larger semantic horizon of life. The shift has determined a return to/of the conflict between language and the body. This article proposes that Samuel Beckett's play, Not I (1972), feeds such a renewed interest in the body's interference with the governing works of language. The discussion begins by approaching Beckett's text through Émile Benveniste's notions of subjectivity and enunciation, both ambiguously connected and traversed by a dynamic (and visionary) spatial-bodily dimension. Beckett's attunement to Benveniste, in turn, helps relocate the writer in the contemporary debate on the conflict between language and the body. Not I stands out because it is about a physical struggle against speech that suggests Beckett's own search for his own kind of living thought, a thought of ‘movement and vitality’, as he had phrased it in his early essay on predecessors, ‘Dante … Bruno. Vico.. Joyce.’
Keywords: Samuel Beckett; Not I; Émile Benveniste; body; language; Italian Theory
The Scene of Instruction
Not I might be the exemplary Beckett play that Stanley Cavell has in mind in his reflection on the scene of language instruction in Augustine's Confessions. Written in 1972, it holds a special place in the Beckett canon: it is a linguistic play, about the possibility of speech. A spotlit mouth eight feet above the darkened stage speaks across from a compassionate auditor in a hooded djellaba, the traditional garment from North Africa. The ‘breathless, urgent, feverish, rhythmic’ stream of words amplifies the momentous passage from silence to speech. Mouth crosses to her new condition on an April morning, when she initially finds herself ‘in the dark’, able to hear only a ‘buzzing’ resembling a ‘dull roar’ within the skull and see a flickering beam without. Speech comes, trailing along a continuum of sound and light.
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