El tema de las cinco galletas: Murphy, Foucault y la crítica de Beckett al neoliberalismo.

Autores/as

  • Dominic Walker University of Sussex

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24162/EI2019-9150

Palabras clave:

Samuel Beckett, Murphy, biopolítica, neoliberalismo, galletas

Resumen

La novela Murphy, de Samuel Beckett, surgió de un relato corto titulado “Lightning Calculation”, una historia sobre galletas y la trágica inconmutabilidad de nuestras elecciones. Probablemente, Beckett tomó prestado este raro americanismo de Thorstein Veblen, que lo emplea para describir al sujeto económico “neoclásico”, un “hedonista calculador de rayos de placer y dolor”. En este artículo se argumenta que el dilema de Murphy es consistente con el sujeto “neoclásico” de Veblen y, con mayor razón, con el sujeto neoliberal expuesto por Foucault en The Birth of Biopolitics. Partiendo del texto de Freud, “El motivo de la elección del cofre”, en este ensayo se sugiere que, si bien la muerte puede que no sea ya la prerrogativa del “poder soberano”, aún así se considera como la coacción de “maximización de utilidad” con el “límite de presupuesto” final en el tiempo de la vida humana.

Biografía del autor/a

Dominic Walker, University of Sussex

Dominic Walker teaches on the University of Gothenburg’s English programme at the University of Sussex in Brighton. After finishing his PhD at Sussex on “Samuel Beckett and Economics”, he is now working on a project about the influence of literature on the development of modern mainstream economic thought.

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Publicado

31-10-2019

Cómo citar

Dominic Walker. (2019). El tema de las cinco galletas: Murphy, Foucault y la crítica de Beckett al neoliberalismo. Estudios Irlandeses, 14(2), 8–20. https://doi.org/10.24162/EI2019-9150