Treffer: Towards a Creative Involution

This chapter analyses one of the most compelling discourses in Creative Evolution (1907), which is Henri Bergson's thinking through the issues of nothing. In this discourse, any negation, any inclusion of a ‘not’ in a statement announces ‘that some other affirmation, whose content I do not specify, will have to be substituted for the one I find before me’ (Bergson 1944: 315). Such is the ‘zero’ of Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari's critique of Sigmund Freud's analysis of the Wolf Man, and centre stage in Beckett's first two published, eponymous, English novels, Murphy (1938) and Watt — the former in its pursuit of not annihilation but fulfilment, the latter plagued by self-generated apparitions in the house of Mr Knott. It is the nothingness of routine in the latter that gives way or mounts up to the nothing of existence and the waste of being. Beckett's negations, then, produce or result in neither absence nor void.