The Exhausted in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957)

This article explores the philosophical implications of Samuel Beckett’s dramatic work and his encounter with Gilles Deleuze at the level of sensations and thoughts. In Endgame, Beckett’s tragic vision of human existence resonates with Deleuze’s perception of the subject’s exhaustion and situatedness in a clinical state. The subject suffers from physiological and logical exhaustion. Beckett exhausts the space to dramatise the subject’s existential struggle and the limitations of his will within the absurd confines in (post)modernity. Thus, the exhausted seated person has no potentialities to construct other possibilities of a livable world.