政治之閾：論貝克特《粗略的廣播劇二》與《災難》中的失語／困境

The Politics of the Threshold: Theorizing Aporia in Samuel Beckett’s Rough for Radio II and Catastrophe

貝克特（Samuel Beckett）文學泛政治的評述向來頗受忽視，因為作品缺乏劇情且場域不明，因而難以指涉到現實的社會；然而，單看貝克特主動參與二次世界大戰的經驗，及其戰後豐富多產的文學經典著作生成，很難不讓讀者臆測其中的政治關聯，儼然成為學界挑戰與探討的重點。因此，本文聚焦貝克特二戰後的兩齣戲劇《粗略的廣播劇二》（Rough for Radio II）與《災難》（Catastrophe），透過懸置作為失語與困境之雙重討論，檢視文本在語言與政治上的關聯，從而建構貝克特文學的社會政治重要性，藉以反思全球現況與人道危機。本文首先根據兩齣劇作的文本分析，辨識語言上的失語表現；其次，透過引述阿岡本的理論方法，並採用社會政治關聯，彰顯「裸命」與「例外狀態」的主題概念，探討文本中的困境。本文旨在探討文本失語的表現，並藉此將貝克特式模糊隱喻的現實社會與阿岡本主張破壞的閾值困境相提並論，以彰顯貝克特作品的政治底蘊。

The literature of Samuel Beckett is notoriously non-referential to the real world due to ambiguities of locations and plots; however, his experience of the Second World War, and a rich body of work created thereafter, blatantly begs a political scrutiny between them. This article, therefore, examines Rough for Radio II and Catastrophe, two of Samuel Beckett’s plays after the Second World War, in order to rethink the significance of the social-political spectrum, and to reflect on the global humanitarian crisis. I shall center on the study of aporia to investigate its linguistic and political bearings on Beckett’s plays. First, I make textual analyses of both plays to engage various problematic linguistic performances as aporia. Second, I intend to contrive intertextualities with social-political connections by invoking Giorgio Agamben’s theory, to investigate how his conceptual notions of “bare life” and the “state of exception” are realized in Beckett’s work—a marriage of the much neglected political rigor, and an approach that has not yet been sufficiently delved into in Beckett studies. This article intends to juxtapose the level of reality implied in Beckettian ambiguity with Agamben’s proposition of the undermining threshold, so as to devise a political undertone that Beckett’s work proffers.