On Fragments: A Piece of Art and the “I” – or Not
thing) which thinks” [that is, what that transcendental self sees] are forever incommensurable; the former, what is seen, can only ever be a “simple, and in itself completely empty, representation” of the latter, that which is doing the seeing, an emptiness, which Kant designates via an “X” [Kant, 1929, 331]. The “I” as “simple […] completely empty, representation” is an “X,” an unknown and hence a “not I.” What the “I” is perceiving itself in an act of apperception can never also be coeval with what is doing the perceiving – they must needs be separate and different entities – the one not the other, the one perhaps empty, an empty signifier, the I trying to perceive itself views an “X,” an emptiness, a not “I”. (Sbriglia 2022: 222–225).
Slovoj Žižek explains that “the ‘I’ exists only as exsisting, at a distance from the ‘thing’ that it is” (Žižek 2019: 66). This is the paradox of selfconsciousness with which Kant confronts us, that, as Žižek phrases it, “I am conscious of myself only insofar as I am out of reach to myself qua the real kernel of my being [‘I’ or he or it (the thing) which thinks’],” that “I cannot acquire consciousness of myself in my capacity of the ‘Thing which thinks’” (Kant cited by Žižek 2009:15). But what is the relationship between this empty “X” and the subject itself, the “I”? The point here is not to solve such disjunctions, the conflicted nature of the I. Žižek’s point is that such disjunction is insoluble and yet central to the illusory nature of being. While such issues remain a perpetual feature of ontological philosophy, that enigma itself can be explored creatively.
But the self, or what we generally call the “I,” is evidently a fairly recent inven-tion, what the German philosopher Johanne Gottlieb Fichte, an intellectual descendent from Immanuel Kant, would call the “Ich,” the “I.” Like his predecessors Kant and Descartes, he was interested in subjectivity, consciousness, or more particularly selfawareness or selfconsciousness, our sense of ourselves, not in and of itself, but as the center of everything, and we can pretty much date the invention of the “I,” not only in Germany but the tiny university town of Jena, and at a particular time, at the end of the 18th century, roughly 1789. Goethe was there, as were the Schlegels, August Wilhelm and his wife Caroline, who were translating Shakespeare into Ger-man verse, and Friedrich Schelling’s naturphilosophy, or Romantische Naturphilosophie, would see the self as one with everything living. This would extend German idealism but develop Romanticism as well, and art, literary or plastic, that is, imaginative or material, was its expression and union. Creating what we generally call Modernism, James Joyce was fascinated with German idealism, and with Goethe in particular, as were T. S. Eliot and, our subject in the present text, Samuel Beckett. Those issues dominated his postWar series of French novels, loosely called the tril-ogy. Between their writing, he wrote plays, and the stage offered Beckett alternate possibilities for exploring such issues.