Solipsism and the nature of True Love
A meditation on the writings of Beckett and Badiou(1)

by Jackie Ireland

For Badiou, in Beckett: “love begins as a pure encounter, which is neither destined nor predestined, except by the chance crossing of two trajectories. Prior to this meeting, only solitude obtains. No Two, and in particular no sexual duality, exists before the encounter. Sexual difference is unthinkable except from the point of view of the encounter, as it unfolds within the process of love…the encounter is the originary power of the Two.” So what do I make of my latest encounter? I was randomly seated next to an artist at a recent Beckett performance in Paris. We chatted, he recognised the Anglophone in me…Have I met you before, I asked? No, but I have seen you at other Beckett events. So, we are both Beckett lovers, that seems to be enough of a reference for the moment. He is looking after an elderly French woman seated elsewhere, so we part at the interval. At the end, before escorting her home, he quickly invited me to lunch. I accepted, and then remembered a date with my solipsistic sister (not to be broken for any old chance encounter with an opportunist male). If he's keen he will wait - the old crones taught. I suggested the following week.

Badiou says “The two, which is inaugurated by the encounter and whose truth results from love, does not remain closed in upon itself”. Tall order, I think. This notion of love is some wonderful idealised trajectory: the solipsistic One, the Two, and Infinity. I want this too. But tell me, Professor Badiou, what comes after the crucial encounter? What needs to happen between the solipsistic artist and his new solipsistic other (me), before infinity is reached?

The artist likes his own company, he says at our informal lunch. He likes to travel the world. He likes to be free. He wants his 'other' to be free also. That's generous. But then, I ask myself (and him), what is freedom anyway. For Beckett, it is a revolted revolt, passively turning away from such constructs as 'freedom'. I feel suddenly clever and smile winningly at the dewy-eyed artist sitting in front of me.

I suggest to him, that I want the impossible (I unashamedly paraphrase my mentors): an encounter which provides a gateway to infinity. Yes that's it! He replies excitedly, I want that too! He doesn't surprise me. We share the 'tireless desire' of the solipsistic One. But how to achieve this positive trajectory? We both, I surmise, have a list of catastrophes to our names. Can I be bothered with this again? But I hate to miss an opportunity for love so I agree to another encounter: a gallery visit. '…a good place to check commonality of intellectual responses' (his words not mine!!!!) So the founding encounter has passed, only to be replaced by a subsequent encounter and perhaps another and another. But what will stop this relationship becoming merely another string of sequential encounters (checking each other out, thinking we know each other etc, etc...)?

Beckett once said that the purest _expression of being was the ejaculation. So presumably during some subsequent encounter the sexual duality of the Two will eventualise. There is no mystery to this element of the plotted trajectory. We will reveal our beings in fluid form. But what is contained in this exchange, and how does it lead to infinity? Let us turn again to Badiou for guidance: “This Two constitutes a passage, or authorises the pass, from the One of solipsism (which is the first datum) to the infinity of beings and of experience. The two of love is a hazardous and chance-laden meditation for alterity in general. It elicits a rupture or a severance of the cogito's One; by virtue of this very fact, however, it can hardly stand on its own, opening instead into the limitless multiple of being.”

To be continued (and multiplied)……………….I hope!

Jackie Ireland

(1) See Alain Badiou, Dissymetries: On Beckett. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003.