Combining phenomenological analysis and affect theory, this book takes stock of the various ways in which the body in Samuel Becketts drama participates in the affective ecology of performance. If the post-human innovation up until the present has worked to decentre the human, by rendering notions of thinking, experience, and affect impersonal and by developing new models of expression and communication, then this innovation seems to be already underway in Becketts theatre of affect where the assault against language is made possible through the thematising of the body as a mode of...

This book re-examines the Nobel laureate's post-war prose and drama in the light of contemporary trauma theory. Through a series of sustained close-readings, the study demonstrates how the comings and goings of Beckett's prose unsettles the Western philosophical tradition; it reveals how Beckett's live theatrical productions are haunted by the rehearsal of traumatic repetition, and asks what his ghostly radio recordings might signal for twentieth-century modernity. Drawing from psychoanalytic and poststructuralist traditions, Beckett's Late Stage explores how the traumatic symptom allows us...