Repository | Book | Chapter

In his essay "The Exhausted" Deleuze returns to one of the two variants of the concept of any-space-whatever (espace quelconque) initially developed in Cinema 1. The ontological (as opposed to the historical) any-space-whatever, as it is exemplified in Quad and Ghost Trio, facilitates the extenuation of the potentialities of space. In the course of his discussion of what he describes as the non-determined spaces of the two television plays, Deleuze at one point turns to Beckett's short prose piece "For to End Yet Again" (written in 1975 and first published in French in the collection Foirades) to describe the characteristics of the any-space-whatever which he finds deployed in the contemporaneous Ghost Trio (as well as the later Quad). Such a space is, according to Deleuze, "populated", "well-trodden" and "opposed to all our pseudoqualified extensions' (Deleuze, 1998, p. 160). The sentence borrowed from "For to End Yet Again" to exemplify such a space is: "neither here nor there where all the footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away" (Beckett, 1995c, p. 246). The citation deserves special attention for two reasons. First, the any-space-whatever which it exemplifies is the ontological rather than the historical version of Deleuze's concept. Second, this recourse made by Deleuze to the prose works, in order to support or amplify his argument, takes place in an essay the ostensible purpose of which is to argue for the specificity of Beckett's achievements in the television plays.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137481146_9

Full citation: