Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2025

"then die of shame": Reading Beckett’s Not I with Lacan

Sean Kennedy
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Joseph Valente
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Résumé

This chapter attempts to read Beckett’s short play Not I in the light of Lacan’s concept of “hontology”, whereby the defacing process of shame (“la honte” in French) is construed, paradoxically, as an ontological experience, one in which the self experiences its own being as the experience of the shame of being. In his 1992 book Beckett, French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu suggests that Beckett’s fiction is the continuation of Beckett’s interrupted psychoanalysis with Bion as self-analysis, but barely mentions his works for the stage. As later commentators have shown, however, Not I can productively be read as a reworking of the patient-analyst relationship, reduced to its most basic components: a disembodied but explicitly female ‘Mouth’ spills out what appears to be her life-story at breakneck speed, in the presence of a silent, gender-neutral ‘Auditor’. However, the title of the play, ‘Not I’, indicates the play’s point of departure from and radical subversion of the psychoanalytic contract—Mouth’s insistence on telling her story in the third person. While Mouth’s narrative is largely unemotional, one particularly enigmatic scene in a public ‘lavatory’ (or is it the theatre?) explicitly conjures up the affect of shame—the hontological shame which, according to Lacan, is inherent to the experience of discovering oneself both a speaking subject (hence a subject of lack) and a desiring, embodied subject. One response to shame is the urge to heal the wounded ego by recreating strong identifications, an urge which Mouth in Not I fiercely resists. While her rejection of identification can be seen as a symptom of her alienation and failure to enter the social sphere of intersubjective exchange, I propose instead that in her resistance to the pronoun ‘I’ (in her refusal, that is, to be cured of her shame), Mouth claims the possibility of fictionalising, creating her third-person narrative from within the place of shame. I discuss the ethical need to recognise the specificity of her shame as the shame of one particular subject, a poor old Irish woman who has undergone multiple traumas, and offer that Lacan’s concept of hontology may be a way of reconciling the notion of an ontological (hence universal) sense of shame with the intractable uniqueness of this subject’s shame, grounded in the multiple components of her subalternity.

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Dates et versions

hal-05029289 , version 1 (10-04-2025)

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  • HAL Id : hal-05029289 , version 1

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Alexandra Poulain, Sean Kennedy, Joseph Valente. "then die of shame": Reading Beckett’s Not I with Lacan. Irish Shame - A Literary Reckoning, Edinburgh University Press, pp.195-208, 2025, 9781399546911. ⟨hal-05029289⟩
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