ABSTRACT
The contours of Emmanuel Levinas' notion of ethical subjectivity gesture towards a radical alterity that lies beyond the cognitive spaces of the Cartesian 'intentional self'. The radical intervention of Levinas and Derrida within the climate of poststructuralist and postmodernist thinking signal a significant departure from the Enlightenment project of 'humanism' that was deeply imbued within what constituted a 'return' to the fashioning of the anthropocentric sovereign 'self'. The Levinasian post-humanist ethics of 'hospitality' gesture towards a kernel of radical alterity, messianicity and an impossible act of 'waiting'. The chapter would take up Samuel Beckett's seminal text, Waiting for Godot and attempt to read it in the light of ethicality and radical alterity vis-a-vis the theoretical contours of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida's thinking on the ethics of hospitality and messianicity. Godot as the radical 'other' resists co-option within the normative registers of 'Symbolic' language and the cognitive 'intentional self'. Vladimir and Estragon's endless waiting for the transcendental 'Godot' becomes an ethical act as it marks a subjective movement towards a differential space of 'un-becoming' that is akin to the Levinasian notion of the gift of 'pure hospitality'. The chapter would consequently attempt to understand how this ontological departure from the ipseity of the egological 'self' towards a radical and differential 'other' marks Beckett's notion of the 'post-human' whose ethical moorings differ significantly from the other contemporary literary practitioners of postmodernism and poststructuralism. The chapter would conclude by attempting to locate Beckett's text within the Blanchotnian aesthetics of negation: one that evokes the un-doing of the teleological spaces of the letter/litter of literature and retroactively opens up a messianic kernel of 'be-ing' and 'be-coming' which lay outside the confines of normative literary hermeneutics.
