From The Sublime to the Ordinary: Stanley Cavell's Beckett

‘Beckett shrugs his shoulders at the possibility of philosophy today.’ So claims Theodor Adorno in his rather abortive ‘Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen.’1 And yet, perhaps because of this very act of shoulder shrugging, the works of Samuel Beckett seem to have fired the imaginations of a great many philosophers. Discussions of Beckett feature prominently in the writings of such thinkers as Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Blanchot, Alain Badiou, and, of course, Theodor Adorno, and current work in Beckett studies has been dominated by contemplating, clarifying, and extrapolating these philosophical readings.2 A recent book by Richard Lane, entitled Beckett and Philosophy, is divided into a section mapping out Beckett’s significance for an array of French philosophers, and another section mapping out the same territory in German philosophy.