Bowie Beckett and Being

Addressing their shared passion for literature art and music this book documents how Samuel Beckett and David Bowie produce extraordinarily empathetic creative outputs that reflect the experience and the effect of alienation. Through an exploration of their artistic practices the study also illustrates how both artists articulate shared forms of human experience otherwise silenced by normative modes of representation. To liberate these experiences Bowie and Beckett create alternative theatrical musical and philosophical spaces which help frame the power relations of the psychological verbal and material places we inhabit. The result is that their work demonstrates how individuals are disciplined by the implicitly repressive social order of late capitalism while simultaneously offering an informed political alternative. In making the injunctions of the social order apparent Beckett and Bowie also transgress its terms opening up new spaces beyond the conventional identities of family nation and gender until both artists finally coalesce in the quantum space of the posthuman.