At the End, Writing

Abstract This article reads Beckett’s poems “Mort de A.D. ” and “What is the Word” for how they voice and incorporate notions of formal and epistemic endings, or the lack of an ending. These two poems, written in different phases of Beckett’s career, are useful in mapping a shift in Beckett’s ‘problems’ with endings. Putting Beckett in conversation with the contemporary Italian philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Franco Berardi, specifically their analyses of “infancy” and “conjunctions” respectively, this article pays close attention to Beckett’s poetics of ending, or rather the impossibility of writing about the end.