“Ought” implies “can’t”
Much taken by Daniel-at-Different-Maps’s take on Beckett in his recent post on “writing as drive”:
This is the proper meaning and value of Beckett, the Beckett ceaselessly cited who cannot, must, will go on – this resolution, equating to much more than mere stoicism; amounting to a kind of beautiful and stolen freedom. In this instance, which might be any instance whatever, Beckett realizes his own impotence, his own irrelevance, his own spurious stupidity, but despite it all, he steals himself and continues. In this specific case, continues to write – the truth that Beckett expresses here occurs at an immanent textual moment, relating immediately to further textual production, but – contra all vulgar Derrideans, who would genuflect before language – this is not the important point, which is rather the following: what Beckett decides here, in this phrase, in this moment, elevates writing – elevates it by subtracting from it, manoeuvring thus on this basis to change it from an exalted activity – vulnerable on such a basis to the implacably reactionary superego, into an incidental and cool generic procedure of truth.
“I can’t go on, I must go on, I’ll go on,” – the key term is this middle one, temptation switches sides here, becomes a temptation to quit, from the original temptation to move, which had in fact had spurred the initial beginning, at some point before this phrase even has begun to be seen. In other words, taking leave from a personal and idiosyncratic pathology, Beckett has become unable to proceed on this basis, for the reason that this basis now seems pathetic and weak against the tremendous weight of the work he has done, which threatens to explode language itself. The excess of this supremely immodest consequence is now oppressing the writer in an insistent and authoritative voice: “Who am I to say these things, do these things, who I am to write in this ridiculous way?” The genius of Beckett is he realizes the answer, “I am nobody at all – and for the very reason, the reason that I am nobody at all, I am anyone – and since I am anyone, I will go on, with this axiom, to serve as my watchword: because somebody could.”
First of all, this is quite correct: that “I can’t go on; I must go on; I’ll go on” is not an expression of stoicism, of the “must” outweighing the “can’t” in some weary subject dutifully (or resignedly) soldiering on. “Must” and “can’t” are in contradiction: precisely nothing can “go on” unmodified from the aporetic moment of their convocation. To put it another way, “I can’t” is something other than a somewhat hyperbolic synonym for “I don’t feel like it”: it is a statement of fact about some “I”, and about what is and is not possible for that “I”. An “I” that “can’t go on” cannot simply decide to go on anyway (or accept the necessity of going on, irrespective of its own inclinations in the matter): whatever it is that goes on, from that point, cannot be the same “I” as it was before.
It is on this basis that it is possible to locate the violence of the primary school teacher’s perennial insistance that “there’s no such word as can’t“: what this amounts to is a demand that the child to whom it is addressed, an “I” from whom some demonstration of performativity is expected but for whom the required action is impossible, be destroyed and replaced by an “I” with the necessary competance. What makes this violent, however, is not the demand itself, but the refusal to recognise that the demand can only be fulfilled through the destitution of the “I” to whom it is addressed. It is violent because it posits, in place of the child as she is (and will have, perhaps painfully, to cease to be), a child who is already capable, who will never have been anything other than capable, and whose temporary appearance of incapacity is merely a sign of stubbornness.
The instructor may believe with the utmost sincerity that the potential to do X is already latent in the child, and that the only obstacles to its realization come either from a deficit in “self-esteem” or from the machinations of some perverse will-to-fail. According to this belief, there is no radical discontinuity between the failing child and the child who will one day succeed: failure is without irony redefined as “deferred success”. But Beckett’s “Try again. Fail again. Fail better” cannot adequately be paraphrased as “Try again. Defer success again. Approximate success more closely with each iteration”: the standard by which each failure is to be judged “better” than the last is the standard of failure, not that of success (cf Ewa Ponowska Ziarek’s The Rhetoric of Failure for more on this distinction: there, “failure” emerges as something like Derridean destinerrance, the deflection of the telos of the subject by the other).
The subject for whom “ought” implies “can” will never emerge from the tarpit of Beckett’s “I can’t go on. I must go on”. There is however, for this subject, another subject: the transferential subject-supposed-to-, who is also by implication the subject-supposedly-able-to-, the subject for whom the (morally or practically) impossible is possible. That this other subject is a projection, formed out of the subject’s own desire for full competance, is no obstacle to the operation of transference, in which some arbitrary figure – for example that of the analyst in the Lacanian clinic – is elected to bear the weight of the subject’s expectations, without possessing to any degree the means to satisfy them. This, I would suggest, is the position of Daniel’s writer who “goes on”, who assumes “the tremendous weight of the work he has done” in spite of being entirely bereft of any personal attribute or competance that would make him worthy of it. To be the destitute writer-who-goes-on, for whom writing has become “an incidental and cool generic procedure of truth”, is to be in the position of the hapless transferential object of the now-blocked, incapable writer whose pathological immodesty first set the process of writing in motion.
July 29th, 2006 at 1:55 am
As well as considering the movement from ‘can’t’ to ‘must’, and the violence of this normal injunction, we can also consider the ‘going on’, which is to say the life that’s compelled. If this movement from ‘can’t’ to ‘must’ is a movement from the impossible to the necessary, it’s life itself that suffers this movement. When one ‘cannot go on’, life is spoken of as impossible, and as devoid of potential, but when we ‘must go on’ life becomes necessary, as the one thing that we always need. In life as drive, life is the one genuinely bare essential. In the ultimate statement of drive, when life is rendered as what must be, life’s only possibility is as bare life.
Though it’s true that ‘can’t’ and ‘must’ are contradictory, life as a question of necessity can only emerge from its rhetorical impossibility. More than this, as life becomes increasingly impossible, its affirmation can increasingly become an affirmation of necessity. As the speaker moves away from life, towards total abjection, despondency, and death, it becomes increasingly possible for a positive affirmation of life to be an affirmation of only ‘going on.’ The more that is taken away from the subject, the less than any particular retrieval will be more than only living. As more possibilities are taken away from life, any affirmation of possibility only becomes a question of necessity. If this weren’t true, the statement ‘I can’t go on’ would be impossible.
This is what distinguishes the ‘must’ from any other statement. Indeed, not only is ‘must’ contradictory here, in fact any statement that follows ‘I can’t go on’ also contradicts it. To say that one ‘can’t go on’ implies the impossibility of going on, so that any statement made after this one immediately contradicts this impossibility. For example, if a man is about to slit his wrists, but then looks up and says ‘I think I’ll make myself some breakfast instead’, this statement contradicts his ‘can’t’ as much as the ‘must’ does. What makes ‘must’ distinct isn’t that it contradicts his initial ‘can’t’, but that it asserts this positive affirmation as a stark affirmation of life as only necessary, in contrast with life as breakfast.
Yet, what both ‘must’ and ‘breakfast’ share is that they both, in ‘vulgar Derridean terms’, come from the outside. Though both are addressed to the impossible subject, which is to say the subject as impossible, neither addresses this subject’s impossibility, which is to say that which makes the subject impossible. Whether in the authorial ‘must’ of life as necessary, or the repressive absurdity of an affirmation of something from outside of the field that grounds one’s reality, both maintain the subject’s unity with his impossibility. The subject and his impossibility remain one, and only in this unity can both be addressed at the same time. The repressive means to life compel the subject to end in the content of this life.
By contrast, if the subject can be split from his impossibility, it would have to be addressed separately from him as a subject. For example, if the teacher asks her incapable pupil ‘why do you feel that you can’t do this?’, the teacher asks the student to question the reasons for her incapacity, opening the split between the pupil’s present incapacity and herself. This is in contrast with the teacher’s assertion ‘there’s no such thing as can’t’, which is spoken to the subject as the one who cannot do, because in this injunction there’s no possibility of the pupil being anything other than her own lack of possibilities. The subject must be split from within, not driven from without.
August 6th, 2006 at 11:34 pm
The gigantic irony of all of this, of course, is that the actual quote – originally misremembered by me in an overly eager Kantian conflation – is not “can’t, must, can” at all, but rather, “you must go, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
August 7th, 2006 at 8:06 am
I like the wrong version better.
August 7th, 2006 at 8:10 am
Actually, no: Beckett was right. I like the right version better.
August 8th, 2006 at 8:12 am
Ummm, I just googled this and found this quote, which is something different again:
“…you must go on, I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me…”
You could abbreviate this as ‘I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on’, which means something in between the other two quotes.
In any case, in Daniel’s account of Zizek’s lectures at Birbeck, Zizek uses the same quote as Daniel does to describe drive.
August 10th, 2006 at 1:02 am
Zizek misquoted.
I.T. has made this clear to both of us with a pair of pliers.
August 10th, 2006 at 2:38 am
As far as I can tell, the only discussion here has been about whether you misquoted Beckett, not whether you misquoted Zizek, or whether Zizek misquoted Beckett in the lecture. Even now this is unclear to me, because ‘Zizek misquoted’ could mean either that you misquoted Zizek, or that Zizek misquoted Beckett.
I’ve tried to look this up on the audio links to the lectures from K-Punk’s site, but they seem to be malfunctioning. In any case, do we know for certain that Zizek used the ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ quote, and not the other? Like Dominic, I like this one more, though it still seems problematic….
August 10th, 2006 at 5:33 pm
Misquote again. Misquote better.
Great posts folks (and including Nina’s essay).
As it turns out, nobody misquoted – everybody misquoted, as Beckett, as ever, simultaneously penned both the right version and the wrong version … (and all in the same paragraph of The Unnamable):
“…you must go on, I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
I can’t help not preventing myself from finding endless further examples of Beckett’s impossibly endless persistence of Drive, viz:
‘finality without end’ (Molloy, 111).
‘at the same time it is over and it goes on’ (Molloy, 36).
‘always the same thing proposing itself to my perplexity’ (Texts for Nothing, 121).
‘yet another end’ (‘For to End Yet Again,’ 15).
‘I knew that all was about to end, or to begin again, it little mattered which, and it little mattered how, I had only to wait’ (Molloy, 161).
‘and always the same old thing the same old things’ (How It Is, 107).
‘all is inexplicable, space and time, false and inexplicable, suffering and tears, and even the old convulsive cry, It’s not me, it can’t be me’ (Texts for Nothing, 113).
‘one can’t go on one can’t put a stop’ [How It Is, 90]
Play it, Beckett.
August 10th, 2006 at 6:24 pm
I’ve obviously replayed the Play It Again again, oops, as I’ve just now seen Nina’s comments on that post from yesterday, where she quotes the very same paragraph. I can’t read earlier comments last. I must read earlier comments first. After I’ve read earlier comments last …
October 12th, 2006 at 3:03 am
“steels himself”, perhaps?
October 12th, 2006 at 5:47 am
More than likely. But “steals himself” has interesting connotations too…