The following is a transcript of an interview conducted by Dr Asijit Datta (SRM University-AP, India) of Prof Jonathan Boulter (Western University, Canada) for a webinar called ‘Samuel Beckett, Spectres and Posthuman Spaces’ that was held over Zoom on November 27, 2020. This interview between two Beckett scholars is an attempt to locate the positions and meanings of the aspects of home/space/refuge for the abandoned, destitute characters in the works of Samuel Beckett. Beckett’s homeless wanderers are in the condition of the neither, a space that is only motion without direction. Beckett’s physical reduction of his characters and their necessary expulsion from home are explored through the lens of Heidegger’s notion of ‘thrownness’ or Geworfenheit. ‘Thrownness’ precedes the idea of homelessness and is the precondition of being. For Heidegger, in a reductive way, directionality and disseverance characterise the human, but the Beckettian moments of movement and walking, without purpose, are absent from Heidegger. Beckett tends to point towards the origin of the subject without a ground or all necessary groundedness. The colloquy concludes with a discussion concerning the condition of the posthuman in Beckett. To face the Beckettian posthuman is to confront a discursive posthumanity

This dialogue between Prof Claire Colebrook (Pennsylvania State University) and Asijit Datta is based on an online discussion, “Ecology, Extinction, and Posthumanism” which took place on the 1st of August, 2020 during the raging days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The transcript echoes Colebrook’s sentiments that the ethical demands of the climate hazard or the imminent extinction cannot be addressed to a particular subject or ‘we’. The predominant tension is concealed in the idea of the human and its values. As humans, we refuse to ask whether there is a future where life continues with endless possibilities for us. For Colebrook, the inability to adopt such a stance emerges from the historical condition that we as language-beings have always been the ones to define life, the ones that are essentially racing towards extinction. Following the extinction experiments of Husserl and Bergson, Colebrook contends that only the death of the ethical and political subject can provide us with alternate modes of survival in this world. This conversation engages with issues like the COVID-19 pandemic, American politics, and post-apocalyptic cinema to arrive at an imagination that requires the annihilation of the human as we know it

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