Introduction

Beckett's distorted and dismembered bodies have become part of the global cultural imaginary of the twenty-first century. In order to explore the concept of embodiment, this chapter briefly considers the legacy of Cartesianism and the critical frameworks of psychoanalysis and phenomenology. Some of these can be connected to the facts of Beckett's life: his reading in philosophy and psychoanalysis, and his sessions of psychotherapy in the 1930s. Maintaining a kind of double vision encompassing both historical and contemporary perspectives can foreground the ways in which the body is a not a stable historical entity, but, rather emerges as a function of specific conceptual and cultural frameworks. Beckett's drama produces new modes of intercorporeal embodiment out of the materials of subjection and vulnerability. Rather than indulgence in tragic despair, Beckett's theatre presents a radical transvaluation of vulnerability and otherness, using the public space of the stage to interrogate the laws and norms that judge and marginalize non-normative identities and bodies.