Abstract
The article deals with Beckett's texts written between 1945 and 1953: Watt and his French trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, Unnamable). Rather than depicting elements of Beckett's poetics, the study highlights particular moments, in which his writing destroys its own matter.
This "writing in spite of language," the verbal/signifying dimension of which is as important as its visual and figural performance, is pursued by a visual reading, an approach I call physiognomy of writing, which outlines the contours of writing and shows it as a profoundly creative process of crossing itself toward other literary and visual forms. The first part explores the heterogeneous relation between subject and speech, and the hybridity of that subject which makes representation impossible.
The second part argues that permanent violence against language and "defiguration" do lead to nothing less than new figures. Taking cue from Lyotard's concept of unreadability signifying visuality in the text, the third part outlines the calligraphic figure that Beckett's writing draws by its rythmical and repetitive fragments, recalling Islamic diwani inscriptions, wherein gesture and visual movement prevail over narrative or meaning itself.