Chapter 2 Suffering Immanence in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable
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Abstract: This essay examines Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable through Maurice Blanchot’s concept of radical suffering. Radical suffering is an affective condition that negates the existence of the subject and highlights the unstable quality of subjectivity. Blanchot explains this affective encounter as “suffering such that I could not suffer it,” and Langlois deploys this limit-experience in order to name the paradoxical situation expressed by Beckett’s narrator. This essay articulates a fundamental difference between suffering that is phenomenologically accessible to literary and philosophical critique, and a limit-experience of suffering that inheres in the non-phenomenological space of immanence. Insofar as radical suffering has a narrative presence in The Unnamable, it is a presence that is symptomatic of the ontological configuration of immanence, and one that is constitutive of both literature and narrative form.