Abstract:In Beckett, the violence of discourse appears in voices from behind : voices that force one to speak (the “extorted voice”), anonymous voices belonging to an already-said (interdiscursive dialogism) “whispered” to the subject, or “chloroformed voices”, belonging to the “order of discourse” and its procedures of control. This violence – associated with the subject’s dispossession of mastery over his saying and the difficulty of subjectivation – is essentially envisaged in The Unnamable and How It Is.
