Tragic-dialectical-perfectionism

on Beckett's Endgame

pp. 67-90

in: Ben Ware, Modernism, ethics and the political imagination, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

This chapter examines Stanley Cavell's suggestion – put forward in his Carus Lectures of 1988 – that Samuel Beckett's Endgame can be read as a work which embodies and develops the idea of Emersonian moral perfectionism. While this suggestion is never fully substantiated by Cavell himself, it is, as I hope to demonstrate here, possible to provide an account of what a perfectionist Endgame might look like by drawing on a range of Cavell's texts, from his early essay on Endgame through to his recent study Cities of Words. In the second part of the chapter, I turn the tables somewhat. After demarcating some of the social limits of Cavell's ethical outlook, I ask what it might mean to rediscover perfectionism in a more politicized form – something which I attempt to do via an exploration of the tragic dimensions of Beckett's play.