The Badiou / Beckett device and the Aristophan episode of "croaking of frogs"

Abstract

The present article hypothesizes about the comparative possibilities between the Aristophanic episode known as “the croaking of frogs”, a hypotext in Greek comedic tradition, and its revisitation as a “noise-event” both in Watt by Samuel Beckett (1906- 1989) and Citrouilles by Alain Badiou. The frog episode (Βάτραχοι) of Aristophanes (444-385 BC) is rewritten by both contemporary authors around the notions of nomination and lack of communication. Badiou’s interest, both as a philosopher and as a playwright, is to redefine the figures of inarticulacy and the conflicts between being and language based on Beckett’s dramatic postulates: the way in which the Irish author rewrites in Watt the episode of the croaking of frogs and the way in which the author of Being and Event, a great reader and scholar of Beckett, articulates, in his own production, the possible relations between Aristophanes and Beckett as central dramatic authors in his own experience and practice.