De l’espèce à la marque : l’art beckettien de mal penser les choses

Abstract

Cultural historians or cultural materialists have often argued that things can be distinguished from objects in as much as they have been deprived of any use value, thus positing the thing as the before or the after of the object. While many poems written by contemporary Irish poets seem to support that contention, this essay wishes to argue that some of Beckett’s first novels, including Murphy or Molloy, evince an altogether different conceptual framework, one in which the thing and the object exist simultaneously instead of successively. In Beckett’s œuvre, the objects lose their functionality because they are never properly actualized in the minds of the characters, and retain an ideal use value in the discourse of the narrator only. The trademark thus crystallizes the difference in status between the object and the thing