The melancholic unnamable: Kristeva and the question of subjectivity in Beckett’s The Unnamable

The study of subjectivity is especially relevant to psychoanalysis since it avoids social and political qualifications, and focuses on the structure of the narrative voice. In this respect, Kristeva’s innovative psychoanalytic notion of melancholia, as an incapacitating desire not to let go of the Real m/Other, is applied in the present article to the ontological impasse of the impoverished figure of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (1958, 2003). It can be formulated as an ontological shade lingering within this precarious state, cast between life and death, and seeking the unnamable Thing which would be the real silence, corresponding at last to a voice of his own, the voice of voicelessness. Kristeva’s solution for this suicidal predicament, adopted in this study, is an aesthetic resort to the poetical dimension of language retrieving traces of the dead m/Other, and the fundamental function of denegation at once affirming and rejecting the m/Other. A semiotic analysis of The Unnamable, considering, among others, the pronouns and commas will reveal a latent materiality in the text: formal derangement. We propose that, through the metaphorical dialectic of the semiotic process and the symbolic representation, the unnamable-reader achieves, on a trans-symbolic scale, a melancholy sublime, the jouissance of formlessness before the unpresentable presence of the m/Other. This will yield our interpretation of the unnamable as an idealized subject-in-process (sujet-en-process) in terms of a pure flow of words: novel as mere ‘going on.’ Therefore, the study presented here is an attempt to bring together the Beckettian destitution of the novel and Kristeva’s black sun through a jouissant dynamism of signs undermining the laws of the very language in which they are continuously generated.