Negative Anthropology: Beckett and Humanism

This essay charts Beckett’s engagement with the concept of the human from the 1930s to the 1980s. Considering in particular his rethinking of what he terms “true humanity” (vraie humanité) in his 1945 essay on the work of the Van Velde brothers, his remarks on “humanity in ruins” in “The Capital of the Ruins” (1946), and his response in early 1949 to Francis Ponge’s claims regarding a humanity to come in an essay on the painter Georges Braque, the essay argues that Beckett not only challenges various forms of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, but undertakes a ‘negative anthropology’ that weakens the distinctions between the human and other animate and inanimate forms of being.