Psychoanalysing Mind-Body Narratives through Beckett and Artaud

“The body has a privileged status in contemporary thinking, but it typically marks the point at which thinking stops and brute material reality is asserted. Sarah Meehan O’Callaghan’s stunning Psychoanalyzing Mind-Body Narratives Through Beckett and Artaud marks a radical break from this unfortunate tendency. Through the narratives of Beckett and Artaud, O’Callaghan finds how the body appears not as a limit that thought cannot surpass but as a point of impossibility within thought. Through her approach, she discovers a compelling new way of conceiving the mind-body problem, as this relationship becomes the expression of subjectivity itself. A revolutionary work for a world in which we are losing touch with the body as its priority becomes more vehemently asserted.” - Professor Todd McGowan, University of Vermont, USA

“While providing original and insightful analyses of key Beckett and Artaud theatre works, this book makes a vital contribution to the intersection of psychoanalysis and embodiment studies. It draws on the Lacanian Real to argue that that the body is fundamentally unknowable, but that cultural narratives or visual fantasies of the ideal, able and productive body seek to elide this foundational gap in our knowledge and the trauma it produces. Sarah Meehan O'Callaghan argues that, in very different ways, the theatre of these two playwrights, in theory as well as practice in Artaud’s case, work on the spectator to dismantle the normative perceptual, linguistic and representational structures that conceal the ontological trauma of embodiment. This trauma is part of the human condition of both having and being a body but is most acutely experienced by those who are marginalised through illness, age or disability. Through her readings of Beckett and Artaud’s theatre, the author powerfully challenges those narratives and images of normative embodiment in culture, aesthetics and psychoanalysis. Beautifully written, this is a carefully argued and accessible account of the relevance of Lacanian theory to the fact that ‘when it comes to our relation to the body, we are not masters in our own homes’.” - Professor Anna McMullan, Professor in Theatre and Director of Research for Film, Theatre & Television, University of Reading, UK

“Artaud’s madhouse insight of a possibly impossible ‘body without organs’ has spun remarkably diverse takes and controversies – O’Callaghan uses it in part here to re-ground and re-think the vagaries of the body. O’Callaghan creates a teeming, empirically rich discussion around psychoanalysis, debility, anguish, Beckett’s 'chronic bodies' among other critical topics, extending the discussion of already fertile fields.” - Jay Murphy, author of New Media and the Artaud Effect and Artaud’s Metamorphosis