It is interesting how Leo Bersani talks of Beckett's aesthetic of failure. For Bersani, Beckett "has yearned to fail more explicitly and more consistently than any other artists we know."
Here is the beginning of Bersani's essay on Beckett:
Perhaps the most serious reproach we can make against Samuel Beckett is that he has failed to fail. Failure is the ideal of nearly all Beckett's characters, and, in one of his rare theoretical statements, Beckett himself has said that "to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living."
Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment (1993)
But this quotation from Beckett is hard to grasp. It's from "Three Dialogues" in Disjecta. Let me spend some time pondering on it.
