No Trace Anywhere of Life, Perhaps: Autology and Hauntology in Imagination Dead Imagine

Abstract

This essay interprets Imagination Dead Imagine as the product of Beckett’s own autology, in Arnold Geulincx’s sense of the term. The Cartesian occasionalist advanced that self-inspection culminates with the revelation of human beings’ fundamental ignorance and impotence. I suggest that the short text borrows Geulingian themes and imagery to offer a dazzling vision – from the point of view of eternity – of the radical atomization and opacity of the human condition. Furthermore, I explore how Beckett generates a specifically Geulingian commentary on a debate that obsessed him throughout his life: the problem of the subject-object relation and the self-to-self relation in artistic representation. Finally, I propose to read the paradoxical imperative ‘imagination dead imagine’ as a Geulingian axiom in its own right, that is, as an inescapable obligation whose fulfilment is quasi-impossible.