The Phenomenal Presence of Invisible Legs: Beckett and the Actor

ed, and conceptualized” (Garner “‘Still Living Flesh’: Beckett, MerleauPonty, and the Phenomenological Body” 448). 2. Kuhn’s influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), specifies that landmark scientific advancements such as Newton’s Principia should be understood as paradigms because “[t]heir achievement was sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity. Simultaneously, it was sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve” (10). Further, the dominance of a particular paradigm influences the way new knowledge is constructed: “In the absence of a paradigm or some candidate for paradigm, all of the facts that could possibly pertain to the development of a given science are likely to seem equally relevant” (15). 3. Both “Stanislavsky” and “Stanislavski” are accepted transliterations of the Russian name. 4. This notion of personhood has been problematized by many scholars. Nikolas Rose, in his Foucaultian study Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood, presents a “critical history” of personhood, noting that “it is only at this historical moment [i.e. the current one], and in a limited and localized geographical space, that human being is understood in terms of individuals who are selves, each