사무엘 베케트의 극에 나타난 수행성과 퍼포먼스

Performativity and Performance in Samuel Beckett"s Drama

  The absence of socio-cultural contexts in Samuel Beckett"s plays has led the spectator to view his work as primarily concerned with representing metaphysical issues. Beckett"s plays indeed address themes like self, language, and being which in many ways represent existential and humanist concerns. A recent critical discourse, however, elaborated by Judith Butler and premised on J. L. Austin"s theory of the performative speech act and Jacques Derrida"s deconstructive reinterpretation, allows a reading of Beckett"s apparently existential issues in terms of the performativity of cultural norms and embodied performance acts. Butler argues that gender is “a forcible citation” of social norms, while in Endgame Beckett in a similar vein has his characters reiterate, through their storytelling and rituals, the cultural ideals of order, death, and ending. Beckett"s characters are obsessed with conforming to the ideal of ending, but in doing so their bodily performance subverts cultural order. The characters" performance renders the process of ending that of game-playing, making their body the site of negotiations with regimes of power.