Beyond the Suffering of Being: Desire in Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett E-Book

Cauchi-Santoro, Roberta

• Herausgeber: Firenze University Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

This book challenges critical approaches that argue for Giacomo Leopardi's and Samuel Beckett's pessimism and nihilism. Such approaches stem from the quotation of Leopardi in Beckett's monograph Proust, as part of a discussion about the removal of desire. Nonetheless, in contrast to ataraxia as a form of ablation of desire, the desire of and for the Other is here presented as central in the two authors' oeuvres. Desire in Leopardi and Beckett is read as lying at the cusp between the theories of Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas, a desire that splits as much as it moulds the subject when called to address the Other (inspiring what Levinas terms ‘infinity' as opposed to ‘totality,' an infinity pitted against the nothingness crucial to pessimist and nihilist readings).Roberta Cauchi-Santoro is a lecturer at the University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada) and the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada). Since September 2013, she has been teaching European Studies and Italian Studies at the School of Languages and Literatures at the University of Guelph. In January 2015 she also started teaching at the Department of Italian and French Studies at St. Jerome's University (University of Waterloo). She has published several articles on various aspects of Anglo-Italian literary relations.

Leseprobe

STUDI E SAGGI

– 157 –

Studi di italianistica moderna e contemporanea nel mondo anglofono

Studies in Modern and Contemporary Italianistica in the Anglophone World

Comitato scientifico / Editorial Board

Joseph Francese, Direttore / Editor-in-chief (Michigan State University)

Zygmunt G. Barański (University of Cambridge)

Laura Benedetti (Georgetown University)

Joseph A. Buttigieg (University of Notre Dame)

Michael Caesar (University of Birmingham)

Fabio Camilletti (University of Warwick)

Derek Duncan (University of Bristol)

Stephen Gundle (University of Warwick)

Charles Klopp (The Ohio State University)

Marcia Landy (University of Pittsburgh)

Silvestra Mariniello (Université de Montréal)

Annamaria Pagliaro (Monash University)

Lucia Re (University of California at Los Angeles)

Silvia Ross (University College Cork)

Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (Brown University)

Titoli pubblicati / Published Titles

Francese J., Leonardo Sciascia e la funzione sociale degli intellettuali

Rosengarten F., Through Partisan Eyes. My Friendships, Literary Education, and Political Encounters in Italy (1956-2013). With Sidelights on My Experiences in the United States, France, and the Soviet Union

Ferrara M.E.,Il realismo teatrale nella narrativa del Novecento: Vittorini, Pasolini, Calvino

Francese J., Vincenzo Consolo: gli anni de «l’Unità» (1992-2012), ovvero la poetica della colpa-espiazione

Bilenchi R., The Conservatory of Santa Teresa

Ross S. and Honess C. (edited by), Identity and Conflict in Tuscany

Colucci D., L’Eleganza è frigida e L’Empire des signes. Un sogno fatto in Giappone

Cauchi-Santoro R., Beyond the Suffering of Being: Desire in Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett

Roberta Cauchi-Santoro

Beyond the Suffering of Being: Desire in Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett

Firenze University Press

2016

Beyond the Suffering of Being: Desire in Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett / Roberta Cauchi-Santoro. – Firenze : Firenze University Press, 2016.

(Studi e saggi; 157)

http://digital.casalini.it/9788864534060

ISBN 978-88-6453-405-3 (print)

ISBN 978-88-6453-406-0 (online PDF)

ISBN 978-88-6453-407-7 (online EPUB)

Graphic design Alberto Pizarro Fernández, Pagina Maestra snc

***

Peer Review Process

All publications are submitted to an external refereeing process under the responsibility of the FUP Editorial Board and the Scientific Committees of the individual series. The works published in the FUP catalogue are evaluated and approved by the Editorial Board of the publishing house. For a more detailed description of the refereeing process we refer to the official documents published on the website and in the online catalogue of the FUP (www.fupress.com).

Firenze University Press Editorial Board

A. Dolfi (Editor-in-Chief), M. Boddi, A. Bucelli, R. Casalbuoni, M. Garzaniti, M.C. Grisolia, P. Guarnieri, R. Lanfredini, A. Lenzi, P. Lo Nostro, G. Mari, A. Mariani, P.M. Mariano, S. Marinai, R. Minuti, P. Nanni, G. Nigro, A. Perulli, M.C. Torricelli.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

***

© 2016 Firenze University Press

Università degli Studi di Firenze

Firenze University Press

via Cittadella, 7, 50144

www.fupress.com

Printed in Italy

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter One

On Desire

1.1 What Desire?

1.2 Desire as Lack

1.3 Freudian Desire

1.4 Lacanian Desire

1.5 Levinas and the Desire of the Other

Chapter Two

A Perennially Dull and Indistinct Pain: “Vain Longing that Vain Longing Go”

2.1 “Souffrance” and “Suffering of being”

2.2 “Souffrance” and “Suffering of being” in the pessimistic tradition

2.3 Leopardi and Beckett within the nihilist tradition

2.4 “Souffrance” and “Suffering of being” within the Heideggerian existential tradition and the Levinasian “Il y a”

Chapter Three

Making Suffering Sufferable: Desire for the Other in Leopardi and Beckett

3.1 Lacanian versus Levinasian Desire

3.2 Compassion as Pietas to overcome Ataraxia: Desire for the O/other in Leopardi

3.3 Lacanian and Levinasian Desire for the Other in Endgame

3.4 Lacanian and Levinasian Desire for the Other in Happy Days

Conclusion

References

Preface

In this monograph, I question critical approaches that argue for Giacomo Leopardi’s and Samuel Beckett’s pessimism and nihilism. Such approaches, whether the focus has been on one writer or the other or both, stem from Beckett’s quotation of Leopardi in his monograph Proust, during a discussion of the removal of desire. And yet the role of desire in both writers’ work, I argue, actually exposes the inappropriateness of the pessimist and nihilist labels. After tracing the notion of desire as it developed from Leopardi to key twentieth-century thinkers, I illustrate how, in contrast to the Greek concept of ataraxia as a form of ablation of desire, the desire of and for the Other is central in the two authors’ oeuvres. That is, while the two writers’ attempts to reach the respective existential cores of Beckettian “suffering of being” and Leopardian “souffrance” might seem to point towards the presumed nothingness of their existential quest, closer examination reveals that their shared aim to still desire is outdone by a persistent and combative desire that pervades their later work. Looking at Leopardi’s later poetry in the ciclo di Aspasia, including one of the last poems, “La ginestra, o il fiore del deserto,” and examining Beckett’s plays Endgame and Happy Days, I argue that desire in Leopardi and Beckett could be read as lying at the cusp between Jacques Lacan’s and Emmanuel Levinas’s theories, a desire that splits the subject (and is thus based on lack) as much as it moulds the subject when called to address the Other (inspiring what Levinas terms ‘infinity’ as opposed to ‘totality,’ an infinity pitted against the nothingness crucial to pessimist and nihilist readings).

This monograph began as a PhD dissertation. I am thus immensely grateful to my dissertation supervisors, Prof. Jonathan Stuart Boulter and Prof. Luca Pocci for their judicious guidance throughout. In addition, I would like to thank my wonderful family and friends. A heartfelt thank-you goes to my husband Domenico for his unflagging support, my parents, Frieda and Carmelo Cauchi, my sister Claudia and my brother Christopher. Above all, I would like to thank my daughter Federica, who teaches me the sheer joy of pursuing interests and discovering something new every day.

London (ON), Canada, 11th October 2016

Introduction

In noi di cari inganni | non che la speme, il desiderio è spento1

When Samuel Beckett meditated on desire in works such as Proust, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, and Molloy, he returned often to the lines quoted above from Giacomo Leopardi’s poem “A se stesso.” Just before quoting this poem in Proust, Beckett catalogues Leopardi as one of the sages who proposed the only (im)possible solution to living: the removal of desire. The question of the “ablation of desire” (Proust 18), upon which Beckett reflects, is the same one that puzzled Leopardi, and later Arthur Schopenhauer (whose philosophy bridges Leopardian and Beckettian thought), when they pondered humans’ insistence on allowing desire to consume their lives.

The centrality of the “ablation of desire” for Leopardi and Beckett, where the desired experience itself is imagined as the homeland of delusion, has spurred pessimist and nihilist readings. I argue that the pessimist and nihilist labels attributed to Leopardi and Beckett are inadequate because of the role desire plays in the two thinkers’ work, especially in relation to another central theme in both of their oeuvres: compassion. Although the sage who aspires to a desire-free life is central for both writers, the sage-ideal Beckett proposes through Leopardi – particularly in Proust, that monograph so inspired by Schopenhauer – is a failed sage.2 Leopardi’s and Beckett’s later work emphatically corrects the ideal of stoic ataraxic bliss they upheld in their early work. Hence, my contention is that, despite being brought together in their similar aspiration for a desire-free existence, it is specifically desire that remains central for Leopardi and Beckett, particularly as it intertwines with compassion. The centrality of a surprisingly similar notion of human compassion for both Leopardi and Beckett defies pessimist and nihilist readings of both authors.

The sage-ideal Beckett refered to in Proust by citing Leopardi is also ultimately not upheld in relation to the aesthetically productive desire-free moment. Schopenhauer proposes that to be snatched away from desire can transport the individual into a state of pure cognition, where aesthetic appreciation is possible. The individual in a desire-less moment becomes “the one eye of the world that gazes out from all cognizing creatures” (World as Will and Representation 1: 221). Leopardi’s ultra-sensitive individual at the mercy of “souffrance,” who aspires to atarassia [ataraxia], and whose quiet suffering enables artistic production, foreshadows Schopenhauer’s aspiration for stoic ataraxy. The stoic’s ataraxic aspiration also clearly prefigures and intersects productively with the Beckettian “suffering of being” (Proust 19). This ataraxic aspiration attempts to interrupt longing, and is both a source of pain or suffering and an apt condition for aesthetic appreciation. However, the human being can never perfectly inhabit a realm free of desire and will. As Schopenhauer asks, “who has enough strength to survive there [in a state of will-lessness] for long?” (1: 222). Aestheticism requires the elevation of consciousness to the will-less, timeless subject of cognition, but when such a difficult state of pure contemplation is impossible to achieve, what remains is “the emptiness of the idle will, the misery of boredom” (1: 228).3

In contrast to the dissolution of desire in ataraxia, the desire for the other is central in Leopardi’s and Beckett’s oeuvres. That is, while the two writers’ attempts to reach their respective existential cores (Beckettian “suffering of being” [Proust 19] and Leopardian “souffrance”) might seem to point towards the celebrated nothingness of their existential quest, closer examination reveals that the attempt to still desire common to both authors is frustrated and outdone by a combative desire that pervades their (relatively) later work. Hence, while the desire to cease desiring is the philosophical kernel of both authors’ oeuvres, it also draws attention to and exacerbates the inextinguishable quality of desire.

Looking at Leopardi’s post-1828 poetry, particularly the poems in the ciclo di Aspasia (which include the quoted “A se stesso”), as well as one of his last poems “La ginestra o il fiore del deserto,” and examining Beckett’s plays Endgame and Happy Days, I argue that desire in Leopardi and Beckett should be read as lying at the cusp between Jacques Lacan’s and Emmanuel Levinas’s theories of desire. Leopardi’s and Beckett’s desire encompasses the struggle between the forces of thanatos and eros; their desire is one of self-preservation as well as a desire that acquires meaning in social interaction. These forces are also central to the death – as opposed to sexual – drive at the core of Freud’s pleasure and reality principles and Lacan’s breached subject in “moi” and “je.” To counter desire as a tension between thanatos and eros, which splits the subject (and is thus based on lack), I propose that Leopardi and Beckett are inspired by a Levinasian kind of desire that moulds the subject when called to address the other – inspiring Levinas’s particular concept of “infinity,” which is opposed to “totality” and can be pitted against the nothingness crucial to pessimist and nihilist readings.

Leopardi’s and Beckett’s art, then, is not simply concerned with the Schopenhauerian attempt to rip the flimsy film of desiring and willing in order to reach pure aesthetic contemplation. Nor can existential pain simply be eased through the cessation of one’s strivings. In the chapters that follow, I show how for both authors there is a paradoxical human desire that, differently from the “subjective spirit of base desire” that Schopenhauer debunks as the stimulating in art (1: 233), compels the individual to endure his existence. My contention is that the easing of existential anguish lies in the final acceptance that the human being cannot become void of desire. This inextinguishable desire – positive in effect, albeit challenging to experience – can bring about compassion.

Mediated by the Schopenhauerian notion of compassion, the compassionate trait in Leopardi and Beckett can be read in the two authors’ portrayal of desire for the other. This desire can be construed as both Lacanian and, very significantly, Levinasian. Schopenhauer claims that “all love (caritas) is compassion” (1: 401). Compassion, says Schopenhauer, “is apparent in our heartfelt participation in the friend’s well-being and woe and the selfless sacrifices made on account of the latter” (1: 403). This conception of compassion in Schopenhauer is rooted in Leopardi, where compassion entails being able to feel other individuals’ suffering. It is a notion, however, that differs from, for instance, Levinas’s, because while in Schopenhauer the compassionate human being is able to still desire, in Levinas compassion undergoes an inverse movement. I argue for a desire in Leopardi and Beckett that, in spite of any attempt to still its source, paradoxically brings about more of a Levinasian compassion. In “La ginestra,” Endgame, and Happy Days the self becomes a compassionate subject who is, as Levinas says, “unable to shirk: this is the ‘I’” (Totality and Infinity 245). The desiring subject thus plays a pivotal role in the desire for the O/other, a Lacanian desire characterized by a ‘coring out’ effect. Nonetheless, the desiring subject in Leopardi and Beckett can also be interpreted as characterized by a Levinasian desire in its being-for-the-other. The desire of the subject encompasses Freudian death and life drives, Lacanian demand versus desire, or what Gavriel Reisner terms “an opposition to desire within the ego […] anti-desire,” pitted against “a force of desire which supersedes the ego” (14).

This study unfolds in three chapters. In chapter one, I briefly trace the theme of desire in the specific designated framework. I delve at some length into the contributions of Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Freud, Lacan, and Levinas, all of whom shape Beckettian desire as the outcome of the human subject’s division. The trajectory of my discussion passes through Leopardi’s desire of amor proprio (building on eighteenth-century Enlightenment conceptions of amour propre) and develops into Schopenhauerian Will as opposed to its negation. It passes through Freud’s death as opposed to life drive and Lacan’s cleaved subject into “moi” and “je,” where the “moi” is specifically equated by Lacan to amour propre. The first chapter is thus a meditation on the nature of desire, in particular the desire both Leopardi and Beckett bring out. It sets up the theoretical scaffolding for the analysis of desire through Leopardi’s poetic voices and the utterances of Beckett’s dramatic characters. The voices’ and characters’ attempt and failure to come to terms with the elusive nature of their speech can be equated to the impossibility of reunifying Lacan’s split subject. Consequently the voices and characters displace desire onto the violence of a language that cuts up what it addresses and represents an act that is repeated in the speech spewed out by Hamm and Clov in Endgame and Winnie in Happy Days.4 I also examine this speech in “La ginestra,” Endgame, and Happy Days through the “Saying,” the being-for-the-Other, conceived according to the philosophical analysis of Levinas.

In chapter two, I briefly review the criticism that constructs Leopardi and Beckett as pessimists, nihilists, and existentialists. I explore the negation of desire, crucial to Leopardian atarassia tinged by “souffrance” and Beckettian “suffering of being,” arguing that both writers’ work stems (but also significantly differs) from pessimism, nihilism, and existentialism. Indeed, “souffrance” and “suffering of being,” and the desire to cease desiring which is at their very crux, have been repeatedly perceived through a philosophically pessimist lens. Bevir lists three types of pessimism within which Leopardi, Schopenhauer, and Beckett could all be placed: the existential, cultural, and metaphysical pessimist traditions. In the case of Leopardi and Beckett, their work ultimately concedes the imperishable quality of human desire.

In chapter three, I flesh out the discussion revolving around irreducible desire by arguing for a desire that is suspended between Lacanian and Levinasian notions of the concept. I suggest that desire as presented in Leopardi’s and Beckett’s oeuvres goes beyond anything that could possibly offer fulfilment. Desire is a surplus always exterior to Levinas’s “totality” because it affirms the otherness, integrity, and transcendence of the Other. This form of desire goes beyond the Beckettian “suffering of being” or Leopardian atarassia (tinged by “souffrance”) because it breaks free of the disintegrating effect of the desire-free epiphanic moment and instead engages and even serves the other. It compels one to first freely make a choice for the traumatizing face-to-face encounter: the choice to oppose nothingness through the (painful) evocation of infinity. The face of the other (who is Other) represents what Levinas refers to as “exteriority” (otherness, infinity, what disrupts and destabilizes sameness, the “Saying” over the “Said”). The Leopardian poetic voices and the Beckettian interlocutors, in their desolate and marginal existence, are torn and split subjects. Nonetheless, they take account of the strange world inhabited by the other person who, on being addressed, becomes Other.

Notwithstanding its elusive quality, language can thus serve as a vehicle through which desire is channelled. The desire expressed through language is insatiable, endlessly reproductive, asymmetrical, non-reciprocal, and non-dialogic, all the while yearning for that which transcends the ‘I.’ In Levinas’s view, the essence of language is the relation with the Other: “It is the ethical exigency of the face, which puts into question the consciousness that welcomes it. The consciousness of obligation is no longer a consciousness, since it tears consciousness up from its centre, submitting it to the Other” (TI 207). This submission is Levinasian desire, which interprets the production of being as goodness.

Following Levinas, I argue that the ethical relation with the Other has to be considered beyond the confines of the system of language which has invariably made it end in totality. In seeing a beyond not only to being, but also to language, in underscoring the “Saying” over the “Said,” Levinas shifts priority onto the interpersonal encounter. I locate the foundational power of the ‘ethical encounter’ in “La ginestra,” Endgame, and Happy Days in the forging of community with another person: “if communication and community is to be achieved, a real response, a responsible answer must be given. This means that I must be ready to put my world into words, and to offer it to the other […] by first freely making a choice for generosity and communication” (Totality and Infinity 14). Levinas’s Other saddles the ‘I’ with unfamiliarity and even alienation but also, relatedly, binds it with commitment. In Levinas the pre-Other self is thus an ‘I’ who answers the call which, unlike in Lacan, leads less to alienation than to inspiration.

In both Leopardi and Beckett, Lacanian torn subjects are counterintuitively confronted by the Levinasian good-of-the-other. The concern with the other in both authors makes the balance tip towards a Levinasian desire that can potentially enable unique compassion: “[i]n the irreplaceable subject, unique and chosen as a responsibility and a substitution – a mode of freedom, ontologically impossible, breaks the unreadable essence. Substitution frees the subject from ennui, that is, from the enchainment to itself where the ego suffocates in itself” (Levinas, Otherwise than Being 124). Desire in Leopardi and Beckett is thus equated with putting oneself in the place of another. Despite their similar aspiration for stoic ataraxic bliss, it changes the game to unravel how both Leopardi and Beckett go beyond the question of the “ablation of desire” and come to view and project desire as central to human compassion.

1 “Not only our hope | but our desire for dear illusions is gone” (Proust 18).

2 The invisible chord of sympathy between Beckett and Schopenhauer has long been recognized by criticism: “Beckett had a ‘sensed affinity’ with Schopenhauer; consequently [he] emphasized the latter’s pessimism, artistic views and the role of the will” (Feldman, “Samuel Beckett’s Early Development” 190).

3 Schopenhauer affirms that “what someone truly wills, the striving from his innermost essence and the goal he pursues accordingly . . . could never alter with external influences such as instruction: otherwise we could recreate him” (1: 321). Schopenhauer here admits the essential inner immutable core of desire, or, as the Latin Stoic Seneca puts it, “velle non discitur” (“willing cannot be taught” 81: 14). Motives can only alter the direction of their striving, but not the striving itself.

4 The direct consideration of desire in Lacan, as in amour courtois to which it inspires, reveals the very impossibility of its completion and wholeness while the discourses that sublimate desire in the same courtly love tradition are as direct as their detours.

Chapter One

On Desire

1.1 What Desire?

Leopardi’s treatment of desire in “A se stesso,” the poem that Beckett quotes in Proust and other works, affirms the fundamental common ground between Leopardi’s and Beckett’s respective existential enquiries. The removal of desire in Leopardi, explicitly announced in “A se stesso,” has its roots in the famous terrifying inscription above the garden of unhappiness which defines the Leopardian “souffrance”:

Entrate in un giardino di piante, d’erbe, di fiori. Sia pur quanto volete ridente. Sia nella più mite stagione dell’anno. Voi non potete volger lo sguardo in nessuna parte che voi non vi troviate del patimento. Tutta quella famiglia di vegetali è in stato di “souffrance,” qual individuo più, qual meno. (Zibaldone 4175-78; 19-22 April 1826) 1

Beckett also cites “A se stesso” in the opening line of Dream of Fair to Middling Women where he jeeringly places Leopardi in a list of mostly fictitious writers of “gloomy composition”:

[Belacqua] declined the darkest passages of Schopenhauer, Vigny, Leopardi, Espronceda, Inge, Hatiz, Saadi, Espronerda, Becquer and the other Epimethei. All day he told the beads of his spleen. Or posa per sempre, for example, he was liable to murmur, lifting and shifting the seat of the disturbance, stanco mio cor. Assai palpitasti […] and as much of that gloomy composition as he could remember. (61-2)

The ebbing of desire is instigated by suffering. This ebbing takes place when desire flees into the inner core of existential agony; here, as Beckett writes in , “the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being” (19). Schopenhauer corroborates this thought when he says, “our mental activity is a continuously delayed boredom,” because “life swings back and forth like a pendulum between pain and boredom” (1: 338). Suffering is the state in which the human being is most alive.