Afterness and spectrality: excavating postself and posthuman in Samuel Beckett and Don DeLillo

Beckett constructs the spectral posthuman presence of bare essentials (the metaphysics of the human) through the gradual scission of language. Beckett’s undead/undying characters are stuck between the posthuman and the postcorporeal. This interdependent human-posthuman binarism (where subjectivity and embodiment both evaporate and extend themselves) transports the Beckettian ‘humans’ beyond hermeneutics. In DeLillo, corporeality and subjectivity are impaled by radiation, virtual data, information and mutations. DeLillo’s posthumanism of metamorphosing stem cells and ‘nanobots’ remove the boundaries between bodily existence and computer simulation. If in Beckett, there is dark compassion for the ill and the maimed and their gradual movement toward annihilation, in DeLillo, organs are severed and conserved for an indefinite, unseen, utopian future, beyond the mortal expanses of presentness. Beckett’s posthuman is a breathing form at the threshold that is barely recognizable, not-yet-entirely-dead and not-yet-entirely-re-alive. Ironically, for DeLillo, this extension of the self and body by posthuman technology looks at a disconnected entity at the other end of the spectrum. This article explores the posthuman reactions in Beckett’s Lessness and Ill Seen Ill Said where concrete physicality vanishes and DeLillo’s counter-preservation of bodies through cryonic freezing in Zero K.