언어의 한계: 베케트와 비트겐슈타인

초록

This thesis is a conjecture on some of the common themes of interest that Beckett must have found in Wittgenstein. Rather than raise Wittgenstein’s philosophy as yet another ‘theory’ to read Beckett’s work, it is more of an attempt at materializing some of the common themes of understanding between the two writers. The problem lies in the resistance against the metalanguage in Beckett’s work, but more seriously with the resistance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy against any attempt at theorizing. For Wittgenstein, philosophy was not a body of doctrine but an “activity”. The most common theme that unites the two writers can be summarized as the ‘limits of language’. This is the theme of the early work of Wittgenstein, and for Beckett, the theme runs through his entire oeuvre. The limits of language discussed in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is the disparity between what can be said and what cannot be said. For Wittgenstein, the limits of language is tantamount to the limits of the world, thinking and meaning and the process of delineating the limits inherently involves the paradoxical process of thinking about the unthinkable. Such an examination of the limits is also one of the key themes in Beckett’s work. The space in Beckett’s plays calls for not simply a choice between either the inside or the outside of the limits but an annotation upon the contradictory relationship between the inside and the outside. The thesis will concentrate on the shared interest of the two writers on the issue of ‘contradiction’ or ‘contradictory forms’ within the context of the limits of language.

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