Lucky in Savannah: Beckett avec Žižek

Abstract

In the spirit of praxis, I connect Lacanian theory with the practice of making a video. Lucky in Savannah, which is an experimental adaptation of “Lucky’s speech” from Samuel Beckett’s (1954/1984) masterpiece, Waiting for Godot—"[t]he prototype of a modernist text” according to Slavoj Žižek (1991). For Žižek (2017), Beckett—rather than Shakespeare—is “a kenotic writer, a writer of utter self-emptying of subjectivity, of its reduction to a minimal difference” (p. 300). Will Greenshields (2017) argues that Žižek goes further than Lacan, and even performs an anti-Žižekian move when choosing Beckett over Joyce: “While for Joyce the beginning and end were so close as to be indistinguishable…for Beckett there is such a thing as a beginning, a bare minimum, and if the truly revolutionary act is to be achieved, one must return to it” (p. 13). For these reasons, it is certainly worthwhile to consider Beckett avec Žižek and others (cf. Greenshields, 2017; Moder, 2015). In my video, I employ a Beckettian aesthetic informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis, which leads me to the following question: Is Lucky's speech an example of “full speech” par excellence (Lacan, 1953), or is it a Real manifestation of the sinthome as "the meaningless letter that immediately procures jouis-sense, ‘enjoyment-in-meaning,' 'enjoy-meant'" (Žižek, 1991)?