Mastery and Genericity: Marx, Badiou, Beckett

Abstract: This article develops a reading of the generic in the work of Samuel Beckett, with reference to and in debate with Alain Badiou’s mobilization of this concept in his writings on Beckett. I firstly explore the implicit link Badiou makes between Beckett and Karl Marx, through the concept of “generic humanity.” I then consider Beckett’s Endgame as a work in which the generic serves to problematize all forms of mastery, in the breakdown of the “order” the play’s characters seek to bring to experience, including the experience of death. The article ultimately reads Beckett as an author whose commitment to the generic, as a deformation of the specific differences which underpin order and propriety, ceaselessly transgresses the categories within which it is contained—the generic is both human and inhuman, life and death. This transgression, I argue, is essential to the comedy of Beckett’s writing, which goes unrecognized by Badiou.