Page 105 [105]
LLEWELLYN BROWN
This insistence on incessant movement shows that the presence of a body
in space circumscribes a structural hole that allows for no rest.!? As Connor
has pointed out: “It is only Watt’s clownish imbalance that keeps him on the
move.”!® The physical dimension at stake in a precarious manner of walking is
also one of Nauman’s preoccupations:
An awareness of yourself comes from a certain amount of activity and you can’t get
it from just thinking about yourself. [...] So the films and some of the pieces that
I did after that for videotapes were specifically about doing exercises in balance.
I thought of them as dance problems without being a dancer, being interested in
the kinds of tension that arise when you try to balance and can’t.
Nauman is concerned with what is to be discovered about oneself as an
irreducible exception from conceptual knowledge.
Watts manner of orienting himself in space can be seen in the light of Jacques
Lacan’s imaginary register, illustrated by the apologue of the “mirror stage,”
which does not only suppose the recognition by the infant of his image in the
mirror. Indeed, to be complete, this construction also requires the “assent of
the Other,” whereby the mother exchanges gazes with her child. ”° This enables
an identification whereby the latter can henceforth see his body as a constituted
whole, after having adopted his mother’s point of view as his own.
If, however, the mother does not communicate her desire for her infant,
the latter can find himself bereft of such corporeal consistency. His place is
indeed marked by the signifier, but he can experience difficulty fixing a point
of identification in what fundamentally constitutes an endless chain. Instead
of being able to orient himself in relation to an origin, he is left hoping that
somewhere, somehow, he may perchance hit on “the right aggregate.””!
The fact that Watt is obliged to repeat the same actions in the absence of
any stated goal suggests a process of “exhaustion,” in the spirit developed
by Gilles Deleuze.?”? On the one hand, the only limit to the extension of his
movements is the point of physical possibility. On the other, he executes the
We develop this point further, around the notion of the “cut,” in relation to Endgame.
Llewellyn Brown: The Monad and the Cut in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Sanglap Vol. 4,
No. 2 (January-February 2018), 55-79; online http://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/
article/view/39 (accessed 21 April 2020).
Connor: Shifting Ground.
Nauman in Kraynak: Please pay attention please, 142.
Jacques Lacan: Le Séminaire, Livre VIII, Le Transfert, Paris, Seuil, Champ freudien, 1991,
414.
?! Samuel Beckett: Text 8, Texts for Nothing, in The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989, New
York, Grove, 1995, 133.
Gilles Deleuze: LEpuisé, in Quad [...] suivide L’Epuise par Gilles Deleuze, Paris, Minuit, 1992.
+ 104 +