Objects in Beckett’s Ill Seen Ill Said Abstraction, Affect and the Impossibility of Absence

In Ill Seen Ill Said, appearance, disappearance and reappearance flattens out the opposition of the abstract and the concrete, while affect becomes an intermediary between the eye and the gaze, offering a subjective modulation of the inert world of petrified ‘things’. A muted scansion of reduction appears as the essence of change in objects. Numbers also oscillate between abstract and concrete, becoming the trace of an inexorable materiality.