Samuel Beckett and the Dawn of Object-Oriented Ontology in Act Without Words I

Samuel Beckett’s efforts in dismantling anthropocentrism has ushered a new chapter not only in his oeuvre, which debunks the cliché binary of Man Vs nature, but in the postmodern look at ontology; his negative perspective introduces the man as a hollow body that neither seeks an aggressive independence nor includes a progressive cognitive dominance: the Beckettian man is nothing more than an empty shell. The characters in his plays, too, either lack a perception of the surrounding objects or surprisingly enough see themselves equal to such objects. Beckett’s dramatically negative perception of modern man can be explained as follows: first, the object has left its Heideggerian utilitarian cocoon, and thus cavorts as an object independent of man’s cognitive realm of confirmation; and second, the fall of man from his cognitive throne and into an abyss of stasis reaffirms the former hypothesis. Such a radical shift in his ontological attitude that can best be explained in light of the postmodern philosophy of object-oriented ontology hints at one alarming concept: a holistic ontological effort to reinvent the object as an equal existing entity to man. By debunking the Anthropos as the epicenter of existence, Beckett crafts new layers of being wherein the Hegelian-Nietzschean Übermensche or the creative Leibnizian Monads emerge as the notable absentees; the reality Beckett portrays is founded on the availability or lack thereof of an equal reciprocity between objects and the subject. By examining Beckett’s Act Without Words I and Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology, this essay explores and challenges the fruits of Beckett’s misanthropic reading of the modern man that lends itself to postmodern reversal of the traditional subject Vs. object binary opposition.