Echo: Reading The Unnamable through Kant and Kristeva

Do we really know how to respond to Beckett's writing? Or are we still grappling with it, poorly, clumsily, from an unnecessary remove? The following essay will stage yet another attempt to close in on one of Samuel Beckett's most elusive texts: The Unnamable. We will try to close in on it by way of a figure: the echo. Echo—in evoking this term, from the beginning, are we not just proposing yet another name for that which must remain unnamable? Perhaps. It is not only a name, though, but also resonates as a deposit—a depositing which returns only what has been invested in it: Do you read me? If so, you find yourself. The name you give me, I don't deny it—I repeat it, I echo it. Like a child echoing, for instance: the echolalia of incomprehension. Overcome, baby talk repeats the Name of the Father. Or, according to another route, it repeats unknowable Reason. Or like a woman spurned, call her Echo, her body renounced by a treacherous child-god who finds and founds himself in the mirror of rhe Other. Only the music of her voice would remind us, only that voice would be a remainder. Or like a lessness less than the voice: a mark, no, a mark of a mark receding even as we speak—unreadable, unnamable.