Beyond the Suffering of Being: Desire in Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett

From Firenze University Press Book

Roberta Cauchi Santoro, University of Guelph, Canada

When Samuel Beckett meditated on desire in works such as Proust,
Dream of Fair to Middling Women, and Molloy, he returned often to the
lines quoted above from Giacomo Leopardi’s poem “A se stesso.” Just before quoting this poem in Proust, Beckett catalogues Leopardi as one of
the sages who proposed the only (im)possible solution to living: the removal of desire. The question of the “ablation of desire” (Proust 18), upon
which Beckett reflects, is the same one that puzzled Leopardi, and later
Arthur Schopenhauer (whose philosophy bridges Leopardian and Beckettian thought), when they pondered humans’ insistence on allowing desire to consume their lives.

The centrality of the “ablation of desire” for Leopardi and Beckett,
where the desired experience itself is imagined as the homeland of delusion, has spurred pessimist and nihilist readings. I argue that the pessimist and nihilist labels attributed to Leopardi and Beckett are inadequate
because of the role desire plays in the two thinkers’ work, especially in relation to another central theme in both of their oeuvres: compassion. Although the sage who aspires to a desire-free life is central for both writers,
the sage-ideal Beckett proposes through Leopardi — particularly in Proust,
that monograph so inspired by Schopenhauer — is a failed sage.
Leopardi’s and Beckett’s later work emphatically corrects the ideal of stoic ataraxic bliss they upheld in their early work. Hence, my contention is that,
despite being brought together in their similar aspiration for a desire-free
existence, it is specifically desire that remains central for Leopardi and
Beckett, particularly as it intertwines with compassion. The centrality of
a surprisingly similar notion of human compassion for both Leopardi and
Beckett defies pessimist and nihilist readings of both authors.

The sage-ideal Beckett refered to in Proust by citing Leopardi is also
ultimately not upheld in relation to the aesthetically productive desire-free
moment. Schopenhauer proposes that to be snatched away from desire can transport the individual into a state of pure cognition, where aesthetic appreciation is possible. The individual in a desire-less moment becomes “the
one eye of the world that gazes out from all cognizing creatures” (World
as Will and Representation 1: 221). Leopardi’s ultra-sensitive individual at
the mercy of “souffrance,” who aspires to atarassia [ataraxia], and whose
quiet suffering enables artistic production, foreshadows Schopenhauer’s
aspiration for stoic ataraxy. The stoic’s ataraxic aspiration also clearly prefigures and intersects productively with the Beckettian “suffering of being”
(Proust 19). This ataraxic aspiration attempts to interrupt longing, and is
both a source of pain or suffering and an apt condition for aesthetic appreciation. However, the human being can never perfectly inhabit a realm
free of desire and will. As Schopenhauer asks, “who has enough strength
to survive there [in a state of will-lessness] for long?” (1: 222). Aestheticism requires the elevation of consciousness to the will-less, timeless subject of cognition, but when such a difficult state of pure contemplation is
impossible to achieve, what remains is “the emptiness of the idle will, the
misery of boredom” (1: 228).

In contrast to the dissolution of desire in ataraxia, the desire for the
other is central in Leopardi’s and Beckett’s oeuvres. That is, while the two
writers’ attempts to reach their respective existential cores (Beckettian “suffering of being” [Proust 19] and Leopardian “souffrance”) might seem to
point towards the celebrated nothingness of their existential quest, closer
examination reveals that the attempt to still desire common to both authors is frustrated and outdone by a combative desire that pervades their
(relatively) later work. Hence, while the desire to cease desiring is the philosophical kernel of both authors’ oeuvres, it also draws attention to and
exacerbates the inextinguishable quality of desire.
Looking at Leopardi’s post-1828 poetry, particularly the poems in the
ciclo di Aspasia (which include the quoted “A se stesso”), as well as one of
his last poems “La ginestra o il fiore del deserto,” and examining Beckett’s plays Endgame and Happy Days, I argue that desire in Leopardi and
Beckett should be read as lying at the cusp between Jacques Lacan’s and
Emmanuel Levinas’s theories of desire. Leopardi’s and Beckett’s desire encompasses the struggle between the forces of thanatos and eros; their desire is one of self-preservation as well as a desire that acquires meaning in
social interaction. These forces are also central to the death — as opposed
to sexual — drive at the core of Freud’s pleasure and reality principles and
Lacan’s breached subject in “moi” and “je.” To counter desire as a tension between thanatos and eros, which splits the subject (and is thus based on
lack), I propose that Leopardi and Beckett are inspired by a Levinasian
kind of desire that moulds the subject when called to address the other –
inspiring Levinas’s particular concept of “infinity,” which is opposed to
“totality” and can be pitted against the nothingness crucial to pessimist
and nihilist readings.

Leopardi’s and Beckett’s art, then, is not simply concerned with the
Schopenhauerian attempt to rip the flimsy film of desiring and willing in
order to reach pure aesthetic contemplation. Nor can existential pain simply be eased through the cessation of one’s strivings. In the chapters that
follow, I show how for both authors there is a paradoxical human desire
that, differently from the “subjective spirit of base desire” that Schopenhauer debunks as the stimulating in art (1: 233), compels the individual to
endure his existence. My contention is that the easing of existential anguish
lies in the final acceptance that the human being cannot become void of
desire. This inextinguishable desire — positive in effect, albeit challenging
to experience — can bring about compassion.
Mediated by the Schopenhauerian notion of compassion, the compassionate trait in Leopardi and Beckett can be read in the two authors’ portrayal of desire for the other. This desire can be construed as both Lacanian and, very significantly, Levinasian. Schopenhauer claims that “all love (caritas) is compassion” (1: 401). Compassion, says Schopenhauer, “is apparent in our heartfelt participation in the friend’s well-being and woe and the selfless sacrifices made on account of the latter” (1: 403).

This conception of compassion in Schopenhauer is rooted in Leopardi, where
compassion entails being able to feel other individuals’ suffering. It is a
notion, however, that differs from, for instance, Levinas’s, because while
in Schopenhauer the compassionate human being is able to still desire, in
Levinas compassion undergoes an inverse movement. I argue for a desire
in Leopardi and Beckett that, in spite of any attempt to still its source, paradoxically brings about more of a Levinasian compassion. In “La ginestra,”
Endgame, and Happy Days the self becomes a compassionate subject who
is, as Levinas says, “unable to shirk: this is the ‘I’” (Totality and Infinity
245). The desiring subject thus plays a pivotal role in the desire for the O/
other, a Lacanian desire characterized by a ‘coring out’ effect. Nonetheless, the desiring subject in Leopardi and Beckett can also be interpreted
as characterized by a Levinasian desire in its being-for-the-other. The desire of the subject encompasses Freudian death and life drives, Lacanian
demand versus desire, or what Gavriel Reisner terms “an opposition to desire within the ego […] anti-desire,” pitted against “a force of desire which
supersedes the ego” (14).

This study unfolds in three chapters. In chapter one, I briefly trace the
theme of desire in the specific designated framework. I delve at some length
into the contributions of Leopardi, Schopenhauer, Freud, Lacan, and Levinas, all of whom shape Beckettian desire as the outcome of the human subject’s division. The trajectory of my discussion passes through Leopardi’s desire of amor proprio (building on eighteenth-century Enlightenment conceptions of amour propre) and develops into Schopenhauerian Will as opposed to its negation. It passes through Freud’s death as opposed to life drive and Lacan’s cleaved subject into “moi” and “je,” where the “moi” is specifically equated by Lacan to amour propre.

DOI: 10.36253/978–88–6453–406-0

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