베르그송, 들뢰즈 그리고 베케트 문학의 '잠재태'(the Virtual) 혹은 '순수과거'의 시간

The Virtual or the Pure Past in Bergson, Deleuze, and Samuel Beckett's Literature

In this essay I explore Bergson-Deleuze's philosophy of the virtual in conjunction with its literary implications. The ultimate aim of my argument is that Deleuze's essays on literature would be better appreciated if we understand his idea that literary works arise from and participate in the virtual, of which the most conspicuous and finished embodiment, as Deleuze obliquely suggests in his essay "The Exhausted," is the case of Samuel Beckett. The 2nd part of my essay investigates the concept of the virtual in Bergson-Deleuze's philosophy. For Bergson the concept originates from the thinking of duration defined first as the virtual multiplicities. Then, he develops the idea further to include pure-recollection which preexists our perception. Bergson's discovery of pure past implicated in duration and pure-recollection enables Deleuze to systematize his own idea of time culminating in his founding work, Difference and Repetition, as the three synthesis of time. I discuss the intimacy between the second(pure past) and the third(the eternal recurrence) syntheses of time to solve the problem I met with when I tried to figure out why those literary works exploring the virtual(pure past), pure sensation or coexistence of differential elements, employ non-chronological time(the time of Aion) which Deleuze describes as the characteristic of the third syntheses of time. The concluding part of my essay is an explication of Deleuze's essay "The Exhausted" to prove that Beckett's oeuvre epitomizes the literature of the virtual. I consider the possibility of organizing the virtual elements Deleuze finds in certain literary works into a comprehensive theory of the literature of the virtual. The present essay deals with only 'the possible as an aesthetic category'(narration through inclusive disjunction) and 'the aesthetic figure or the fantastic decomposition of the self,' with the rest important elements and qualities such as language(poring holes in language plus 'foreign language') and ethical dimensions of literature yet to be discussed.