ABSTRACT
Beckett wrote five teleplays and adaptations for television of his stage plays Not I and What Where. These increasingly reduce the body to a series of semblances but also shift the viewer's focus from the image on screen to the conditions of its emergence and perception. Beckett's televisual drama works with the discontinuous circuit of transmission into which the viewer is inserted. Beckett certainly foregrounds the ghostliness of the televisual medium, working in black and white and using other 'anachronistic' techniques such as long takes. Beckett's televisual bodies are excorporated semblances, yet they are summoned into visibility and audibility with some material effort of perception and production—literally, in terms of achieving the visual effects. Beckett's two television adaptations from the stage, Not I and What Where, constitute the most radical denaturalization and fragmentation of the body in his entire oeuvre.
