La Matière, le langage, la lumière : du trivial au spirituel dans les pièces théatrales, radiophoniques et télévisuelles de Samuel Beckett

Always making their way (“[. . . ] like Friars minor on a journey bent”) towards an elusive point, “eternal third (party)” or “distant-here”, Beckett, like Pascal in his time, continually warns us against two fatal errors: “1° to take all literally. 2° to take all spiritually. ” By accepting the unknowable, at the crossroads of three ways (matter, language, light), the author was able to convert the Irish trivial spirit (the wit. . . ) – this ironic, though sometimes mystic moor – into spiritual flesh, into a (non-)visual way of expression. The Beckettian language – not inevitably textual, when it is work for the theatre, radio or television… – works for the “transsubstantiation” of matter into light, connects the concrete to the abstract, although light may still fall within the province of phenomenon, as a vestige of a new aesthetic big-bang. With Beckett, in the face of the doubt cast on the “being-there” as well as the “hereafter” (the beyond), I preferred to use the concept of “other-there”. For “[. . . ] there is nothing elsewhere”, everything is in “the other-there” of a luminescent passage, of a trace, a mirage, or of a real lucidity. The paradoxical solution of mystical realism, of a spirituality without god, religion or obviousness, opens up to “expatriation”, to the slip – or the surge – “towards the unknown in oneself”, this indistinguishable “out-subject” or this “spirivial other-there”, at the fork of the ways