A Relentless Spinozism: Deleuze’s Encounter with Beckett

If I begin by stating that this paper will focus on the encounter between Gilles Deleuze and Samuel Beckett, that is, if I suggest that the nature of Deleuze’s engagement with Beckett took, and continues to take, the form of an encounter, this is in part because the notion of the encounter in Deleuze’s work has still not received the attention it deserves.  Most frequently discussed are notions of becoming, planes of immanence, or lines of flight—notions of flux, we might say, rather than those of articulation or delimitation. Yet the articulating concept of the encounter may be singularly more characteristic of Deleuze’s thought than any other, if at the very least because it is characteristic of what thought is for Deleuze, in general.