Residual Figuration in Samuel Beckett and Alberto Giacometti

<p>In 1945 Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) brought back to Paris six matchboxes filled with the work of his war years: minute figurines that crumbled upon a single touch. Around this time Irish playwright Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) began writing plays first <em>Eleutheria</em> and then <em>Waiting for Godot</em>. When they came together in 1961 to collaborate on a re-staging of Godot both had turned their attention to different types of figures: Giacometti to lanky attenuated figures that seem to erode into their environment and Beckett to increasingly disembodied characters such as Henry and Ada in <em>Embers</em>. What can we make of this turn in depicting figures that seem to make and unmake themselves in our processes of perceiving them? Through a close examination of Beckett's dramatic works and Giacometti's art Lin Li traces the development of this peculiar type of figuration and uncovers its implications on personhood rhetoric and inter-medial reading.</p><p>Lin Li is research associate at the University of Antwerp.</p><p></p>