LAUSR

Joseph Anderton provides a rich and enjoyable discussion of the concept of the creature in Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre that brings it in line not only with the notion of the Muselmann but also, using Eric Santner’s On Creaturely Life (2006), with contemporary debates about the post-human, located in a liminal zone between human and animal. In developing his portrait of Beckett’s creatures, Anderton also uses biopolitical concepts of oppression from Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben (especially his Remnants of Auschwitz (1999)), Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida. Anderton argues that Beckett’s interest in the dehumanized individual arose from his experience in the Second World War and its aftermath, especially his loss of Jewish friends in the Holocaust and his personal involvement in helping to rebuild the hospital at Saint-Lô. In his thematic consideration of Beckett’s writing, Anderton argues that the depiction of creatures exemplifies the influence of political events in the Second World War: ‘his post-war work bears the products of the period’ (p. 30). What Anderton calls creatures are those characters that are almost sub-human in their condition and bear a similarity to the Muselmann in the concentration camps, an inmate who was scarcely alive and had ‘abandoned all hope’ (p. 26). In setting out his goal for the book, Anderton states,