Biopolitics, Conflict and Not I

Abstract Beckett’s Not I can be studied in the light of biopolitics. In this article its dramatic action is read as a power relationship where Auditor acts as an ‘apparatus’ in Agamben’s sense of the term, and Mouth as a person, understood in the sense of Esposito’s critique of personhood. In this conflict Mouth does not capitulate by means of a double praxis : ‘destituent’ and ‘instituting’: her refusal to use the pronoun ‘I’ is at the same time an action of self-desubjectification which destitutes language and thus attempts to evade biopolitical control, and an act of subjectification which transforms language and attempts to institute a new and different subject.