From: "Lydia Perovich" <fauxprophete-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Badiou's Beckett III
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 23:20:57 -0400


...And since some Truths must exist, happiness should not be too far away.  
It suffice it to expose these Truths to an Other’s approval and see if at 
least some Truths might be shared.  "Le poème des nominations improbables 
rend possible d’imaginer une mathématique amoureuse."

Then Badiou goes on to examine what kind of relationships humans can get 
into; underlines that in Beckett to be defeated/undone is to give up on 
one's desire.  He come up with a few basic roles that human animals can play 
in all relationships. What makes a couple is a 'torturer' on one side, and a 
'victim' on the other (without ethical or pathetic connotations -- remember 
the methodological ascesis).  The torturers' mission is to extort 
narratives, memories, histories from the victims, whereas the victims are 
those who had been ambushed by a fable-less torturer to provide a constant 
supply of tales.  If those roles are ever sexuated we should keep in mind, 
writes Badiou, that for Beckett the sexes never precede a love relationship 
but are rather the result of it (pushed even further into contempor-ese: the 
sexes are not 'biological').  The torturer and the victim are also fully 
reversible roles and have nothing to do with an identity.  Also, Badiou 
explains, it is the victim that is ultimately the more active one of the two 
roles… 'she' can leave the torturer, and besides 'she' is the one who holds 
the "memory of beauty, the power of narration, and the archives of all the 
wanderings".  The torturer has only the imperative ‘Go on!’  We can call 
'masculine' (and Badiou writes it always between quotation marks) the 
combination of the imperative and immobility, and 'feminine' the one between 
errantry and narration.

(Jumping here over the important chapters 'Nostalgia' and 'The Theatre' to 
finish with the concluding chapter 'Beauty, again…)

It turns out is that something does turn out. (Il arrive que quelque chose 
arrive.) Something turns out to/for us. The mission of the arts is to 
salvage those rare moments of exception, to shed light on them, to make them 
part of the texture of our patience.  It is a difficult task but Beckett has 
accomplished it. Il a disposé le poème de l’increvable désire de penser.

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