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Where Extremes Meet: Rereading Brecht and Beckett / Begnung der Extreme.
Brecht und 
Beckett: Eine Re-interpretation 
where "fate is no longer a single coherent power," but dispersed
into 
"fields of force" radiating in all directions, actions must be
shown as 
"pure phenomena" (BT 29-30), as they are with a motiveless specificity
in Baal and in In the Jungle of Cities, more devastatingly so there than
in the more rationalized epic of Galileo or in Mother Courage. 
        Yet, Courage pulling her wagon, after the death of Dumb 
Kattrin, aimlessly at the end-"infinite emptiness" all around her,
as 
Hamm says apocalyptically in his warning to Clov, and imagination 
dead imagine the resurrected dead of all the ages combining with those 
of the ceaseless war-is an even bleaker image of a pure phenomenon 
than the dying Shlink asking for a cloth over his face, like Hamm, 
because "he doesn't want anyone to look at him" (Jungle, CP 1:
161), 
or Garga in the office of the late Shlink, saying in the final lines, "It's
a 
good thing to be alone. The chaos is used up" (163). Or even the 
dying Baal, that pale lump of fat, with no teeth left, crawling on all 
fours like an animal to the door, for one last look at the stars. With the
used-up chaos as the datum of thought, or the fields of force more 
entropic, this is all the more so in Beckett as he encapsulates the 
gratuitous and baseless necessity of the utterly negated subject, with, its
excruciating consciousness, or disjunctures of it, from the hollow in the
wall of Endgame or the seeds which will never sprout to the 
diminishing returns or spastic brevity of the aphasic later plays. 
        Moreover, what we appear to encounter in Beckett--even in 
the plays with a more explicit political content, such as Catastrophe, 
and the clownish cycle of torture ("give him the works until he 
confesses") that followed in What Where (SP 315)--is not merely "the
nausea of satiation" or "the tedium of spirit with itself,"
which Adorno 
invoked in his essay on Endgame (11), out of his own aversion to the 
politics of Lukatcs. Never mind the abstract, subjectivist ontology that
Lukaics charged Beckett with and Adorno rejected. Lukacs may even 
be right, and there may be something like that there, though 
abstractions live in Beckett, like the pauses and silences extruded from
Chekovian realism, in the lymph nodes and bloodstream of thought, 
where alienation is a reflex with illimitable affect that elides in the pure
phenomena certain figures and gestures resembling the A-effect, as if 
the Brechtian arrest were in the Beckettian moment(um) the subject of 
thought itself. As for the subjectivist ontology, what may be most 
compelling or unnerving in Beckett is his response to a certain 
harrowing stillness in the barest rumor of being which is, all told, and
told again, till the telling is intolerable, thus further dispersed in 
thought, as with the ceaseless stirrings of the equivocal word still (is
it 
motion? or time? as endurance? or all of it under duress?), the 
ontological ground, if ground there be, of the subtlest, most seductive,
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