Think, Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the Human. Jean-Michel Rabaté. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. v+240.

Abstract

Think, Pig!" In Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Pozzo fires this command at Lucky, his tethered slave, who responds with an outburst of logorrhea that reduces Western philosophy to gobbledygook. 1 Pozzo's command raises many of the questions that Jean-Michel Rabaté investigates in this learned and inventive study of Beckett among the philosophers. Thinking, as enshrined in the Cartesian cogito, is usually regarded as the faculty that distinguishes the human from the animal. But what if thinking is a Circean enchantress that turns men into swine? Does thinking humanize the pig or piggify the thinker?Lucky's peroration actually bears less resemblance to thinking than to vomiting, which is characteristic of Beckett's work, where utterance is never far from outer-ance, excretion. In any case, to think aloud is something of an oxymoron, given that thinking in silence epitomizes the idea of selfhood as interiority. The thinker is she who, like Hamlet, lays claim to having "that within that passeth show," to possessing a private and inviolable world of thought. To be forced to speak invokes the specter of torture that haunts Beckett's work; to be forced to think, however, takes torture to a new horizon, where what is at stake is not the subject's secrets but the capacity for secrecy itself.Like Lucky, the Unnamable is forced to think-and think aloud-by an unidentifiable torturer. His response to this mysterious injunction is a blizzard of words that blurs the boundary between inside and outside, self and other, human and beast.