On What Mutters: The Unnamable Subject of Practical Reason - Finnis..Raz...Beckett..Cha

Gearey, Adam (2024) On What Mutters: The Unnamable Subject of Practical Reason - Finnis..Raz...Beckett..Cha. Law and Literature , ISSN 1535-685X. (In Press)

Abstract

Why read Beckett’s The Unnamable and Cha’s Dictée alongside the philosophy of practical reason? Such a reading does not seek to reject practical reason, or to suggest that it can be replaced by thinking that draws on literary texts. The point is to make practical reason strange through its encounter with what mutters or murmurs, resists a name and, at the same time, obligates speech. If we address this peculiar concern, then we might be able to engage with the troubling sense of non being that haunts the subject of practical reason; and this theme will be pursued through texts by John Finnis and Joseph Raz. Cha and Beckett compel us to think about the constitution of the subject as a being capable of bearing its own non being. In so doing, we encounter a radical indeterminacy that is inseparable from the productive work of the unconscious; its metaphorization of the inherent flaws in being. This ‘is’ what is unnamable. In terms borrowed from Abraham and Torok we can see this figuring of a constitutive flaw as an endless, ongoing project of introjection. To make use of a psychoanalytic term like introjection is not to suggest that psychoanalysis offers a symbolic key that will unlock the secrets of the texts with which we will be dealing. Rather, we are in pursuit of terms that will allow us to relate themes together in a productive way. To put this in Beckettian terms, we will be addressing an endless – and endlessly interrupted- desire to start again. To read again. Read differently

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