To accompany the lecture on Beckett in the modernism unit, here is a lecture by Alain Badiou on Krapp’s Last Tape, in which he also reflects on “the space that lies between French and English”, a space he describes as “a perpetual torment”. He provides a commentary not only upon the play, but also on the negotiation of working in and between multiple languages, which is of course also an important consideration for us in this international unit.
Working across languages is a irreducibly ethical undertaking of hospitality and welcome that implicates the reader both as host and guest. To read across languages is to welcome the foreigner, to welcome difference, to permit linguistic and cultural immigration, and it lays upon the shoulders of the reader the ethico-political responsibility that inevitably comes with the double possibility of welcome and rejection. To read across languages is also to set out on a voyage, to emigrate, to make oneself vulnerable, to be exposed as (and to) the foreigner, to risk incomprehension, and to become beholden to the hospitality of another way of thinking and writing. It is an existential voyage that brings about a change in the voyager, creating a “before” and “after” that is only ever the effect of a genuine encounter. There is something both beautiful and visceral about this privilege and responsibility of reading what has come to be called “world literature”: it is not to be taken lightly.
