“모든 것은 그 자체로 나뉜다”: 베케트의 『말론 죽다』와 소진의 기술

Abstract

The narrator and narrated of Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies announces his mission to be “making an inventory.” Malone’s inventory has been mentioned consistently within Beckett studies but in-depth scrutiny has not been given. It was not Beckett scholars but Gilles Deleuze who concentrated on this fundamental problematics. There are myriads of references to Beckett in Deleuze’s works throughout his publishing career. One of Deleuze’s favorite lines appears in Malone Dies, “Everything divides into itself”, which Deleuze develops into the central theme of his long essay on Beckett’s television drama, “The Exhausted.” The sentence forms a formula that epitomizes “inclusive disjunction”, one of the main concepts behind Deleuze’s philosophy. According to Deleuze, Malone’s inventory is a form of writing that plays with this inclusive disjunction as well as an art of exhausting. For Deleuze, exhausting accompanies the exhaustion of the exhausted. Consequently, exhausting is an art joined or rather disjoined with “a fantastic decomposition of the self.” This study attempts to analyze the significance of writing as an inventory focusing on Malone Dies based on Deleuze’s visionary interpretation of Malone’s enigmatic line.