On Sade’s Sovereign Excess: Beckett Translating Blanchot and Bataille

In this essay, I situate Beckett’s effort to translate numerous documents of and around the Marquis de Sade for the seventh volume of Transition in the context of his contemporary experiments with an aesthetics of failure. What catches his attention concerning the renewal of Sade in France after the Second World War, I argue, is a form of literature animated by the impossible – that is, weakness, dispossession, and inoperativity –, which undermines the logic of representation at the basis of anthropocentric and humanist subjectivity. I proceed to elucidate Beckett’s translations of excerpts from Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille on Sade, with an emphasis on the question of sovereignty on its aesthetic, ethical, political, ontological, and literary registers. Their readings critically reassess the modern biopolitical configuration of sovereign power and violence that reduces human life to nothing, all the while tracing a certain excess of being that traverses the language of Sade’s body of work. This notably sovereign excess, when displaced in the space of literature, dismantles the self-sufficient and autonomous subject on the one hand and taps into an insurgent potential of revolt on the other. My contention is that Beckett’s hitherto unpublished translations convey what he shares in common, albeit from a distance, with Blanchot and Bataille after Sade, alongside a wider counter-current of late modernist literature attuned to writing, thinking, and living from the standpoint of the impossible.