베케트의 『쿼드』: 광학적 기하학의 세계

Beckett’s Quad: The World of Optical Geometry

This paper explores the exact nature of “a relentless Spinozism” which Gilles Deleuze relates to Samuel Beckett’s late television drama. I find that the pervasive presence of Spinozism in Beckett’s oeuvre is much more substantial than any scholar has ever conjectured or attested. In this paper, I discuss Beckett’s Quad applying two related concepts of Spinoza: the spiritual automaton and the method of optical geometry. Unlike popular views on Beckett’s television drama which regard the images on the screen as direct projections of the mind’s eye, I discuss the camera-eye as an impersonal mind’s eye, a kind of spiritual automaton designed to accomplish the task of exhausting the possible. Tantamount to, or more deterritorialized than the usual amnesiac witnesses of Beckett’s other television drama, the camera-eye “equals to a combinatorial world.” In other words, the camera eye of Quad becomes the world through the process of combination. The most conspicuous intertextual area between Beckett and Spinoza can be found in their entirely radical, revolutionary vision of “a Life” to liberate life from all the oppressive and suffocating system of morality and paternal linguistic language. By inventing the scientific method of optical geometry, which enables them to see, through the impersonal lens projected by light, not only the compositional and fluctuating geometric structures common to all modes but also the illuminated essences, the light in itself and for itself. I analyze Quad exactly in these terms, that is, the geometric, virtual figures and lines as the common notions of the human animal and the central point, the danger zone E, as representing the exhausted space, never to be trodden by any people although it coexists and makes all the realization of an event possible.