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.

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….

I.T. has made this clear to both of us with a pair of pliers.

“…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.