From nature to ecology: environmental subjectivity in Samuel Beckett

Can the Beckettian subject respond to the climate crisis in the Anthropocene that gives the human an ironic ecological agency, suffused with the guilt of being responsible for ecological catastrophe? The article uses the Anthropocene as background to initiate a discussion on environmental subjectivity in Beckett. What is the status of ecology in Beckett’s works given their reticence on nature as a concept? Though there is no explicit naming of ecology in Beckett’s work, this article reads his critique of nature as a linguistic and ideological construct to open a dialogue on ecology. It argues that deconstruction of nature clears the space for weather system and ecology to posit a dialectical principle of environmental subjectivity in Beckett. Following Timothy Morton’s work on ecology without nature, it examines Beckett’s critique of nature to arrive at an object-like nonhuman subjectivity. Interacting with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s thought on species, the article also comments on Beckett’s use of species as a concept to arrive at its empty experience as the subject becomes a nonhuman entity, embedded in the environment.