Proceedings of The 4th World Conference on Social Sciences
Year: 2022
DOI:
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Man’s Tragic Metamorphosis: Samuel Beckett’s Nacht und Träume in Light of Object-Oriented Ontology
Niloofar Rezaee, Mahdi Safari Monfared
ABSTRACT:
Musings on the meaning of being (Dasein) have kept their ground in all philosophies and epochs. Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Heidegger are a few amongst whom took up the concept and defined it. Yet, despite this diversity of thinkers, a thread remains traceable through all their philosophies, Man’s centrality as a defining Subject. All those thinkers presupposed Man’s agency in making sense of his and other Objects’ beings. This perspective, however, was questioned by post-modernist thinkers and tried to be dismantled by post-humanists. Samuel Beckett, one of the pioneers of the postmodernist theatre, incorporated the vision of the fading Subject/Man into his plays. Yet, one could read into his plays as prophetic omens of not only the fading Subject, but his metamorphosis into an Object. This study, thus, argues that Beckett’s trajectory of deconstructing Man’s Subjectivity takes an extreme turn into Object-Oriented Ontology — OOO — in his play Nacht Und Träume. Based on OOO, Man is an Object like every other Object surrounding him. This study investigates Man’s metamorphosis into an Object in light of three other Objects that are thought to be made by Man, Language, The Past, and Philosophy. By showing how instead of being used and defined by Man, these Objects define him, this study will show how Beckett prefigured OOO fifteen years prior to its being introduced to and defined in the realm of philosophy.
keywords: Samuel Beckett, Object, Subject, the Man, Philosophy.