Endgame and the Life to Come

Abstract

This paper revisits the interpretations of Endgame by Theodor Adorno and Stanley Cavell via an unusual route: Samuel Scheffler’s afterlife conjecture. Scheffler’s thought experiment—based on a doomsday scenario that Beckett’s characters already appear to inhabit—seeks the achievement of the ordinary in an age of climate change by disclosing our evaluative dependence on future generations. I suggest that the paradigm shift to a global subject lies not in the dystopian fiction Scheffler looks to, however, but the “shudder” of the ‘I’ in aesthetic experience, the model for which is Beckett’s Endgame.