There's no Lack of Void
Waste and Abundance in Beckett and DeLillo
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4873896 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter Boxall (0000-0001-8282-8810, corresponding author), Peter C Boxall (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 56-70 |
| Publication date | 2008-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | SubStance (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0049-2426 • E-ISSN: 1527-2095 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/sub.0.0005 |
| OpenAlex | W2048479330 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 2 |
The opposition between Waste and abundance offers itself, arguably, as that which structures contemporary culture more fundamentally than any other. The experience of living in the West today is defined by the perception of abundance, or of superabundance. There is more of everything. When George Bush famously quipped to his supporters at a fundraising dinner during his 2004 presidential campaign that they were the “haves and the have mores,” he unwittingly identified a deeper failure in the culture to think of wealth as in any sense limited, or balanced against poverty as its defining opposition. 1 There is only having and having more, without the shadow of having less and not having. The physical sign of relative poverty in the West, accordingly, is not malnutrition, not wasting away, but obesity, as if what remains of poverty can only show itself in a weakened resistance to the dangers of abundance. Where the distribution of resources—commodities as well as capital and mineral reserve—has traditionally been understood as an unequal sharing, as balancing the wealth of the few against the poverty of the many, the global economy has produced, and been produced by, the apparition of a wealth without limit, a wealth that will grow by contact with poverty, until, in Tony Blair’s and Anthony Giddens’s vision of third-way globalization, the market will make everyone rich, will eradicate poverty and suffering. 2 This is a benign version of the horrible sexual appetite that Hamlet so dreaded in his mother, the “increase of appetite” that “grows by what it fed on” (188, 1, 2, 144-145). But if wealth has absorbed or assimilated its other, in a utopian movement towards an unlimited global surplus, this supposed triumph of abundance over scarcity has produced another limit, another kind of boundary. Abundance may no longer be limited by poverty in the neo-conservative political imagination (although of course it is so in the material distribution of wealth, which is as uneven as ever), but it is shadowed instead by the more uncanny figure of waste. The more there is, the more we make, the more we consume, the more waste—that monstrous
Abundance (ecology) · Biology · Composite material · Development economics · Economics · Epistemology · Opposition (politics) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Poverty · Sociology · The Void · Void (composites) · Ecology · Environmental Science · Kierkegaardian Philosophy and Influence · Law · Materials Science · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Samuel Beckett and Modernism
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,57 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2024 (6) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |