Beckett Ongoing and the Novel.

This article reconsiders the ethico-political stakes of Samuel Beckett's literary and aesthetic practice of failure by elucidating the impulse of perseverance in the three novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) alongside other texts, as well as the wider implications of perseverance on the transnational dispersal of the modern novel and writing in general. By drawing on newly available archival sources—including letters, manuscripts, and translations—, it resituates Beckett's novelistic innovation of "going on" under the threat of the impossible within a strand of literature, visual art, and philosophy in postwar France, especially in connection to Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, and Georges Duthuit around the notion of inoperativity (désœuvrement). Blanchot sketches some of these resonances in The Book to Come, where he tracks how the literary experience of inoperativity culminating in the three novels exhibits the destitution of the subject, work, and language. To lay bare the sheer materiality and finitude of coexistence is to simultaneously refuse all forms of human power and domination. Perseverance, within this confluence, does not maintain fidelity to the event of being, as Alain Badiou argues by way of Spinoza's concept of the conatus ; instead, it opens onto the infinite outside within and through the uneventfulness of everyday life. Ultimately, Beckett's experimentation with the genre of the novel, as part of a countercurrent of inoperative literature and art, on the one hand dismantles the possessive and acquisitive space of the subject as work, and on the other hand improvises entirely different ways of persevering at the interstices of writing, reading, living, and dying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]