Originally published: 2012

How to cite the original publication:
Nas, Alparslan. “Beckett & Ionesco: The Absurd & Resistance.” Le Néant dans la pensée contemporaine (The Nothing in Contemporary Thought), edited by Norbert-Bertrand Barbe, Bès Editions, 2012, pp. 529–533.

This is a revised and copyedited web edition of the original chapter prepared in August 2026. Its central argument and theoretical framework have been preserved, while its language and organization have been updated for a wider readership.

“I do not know that meaning, and it is impossible just now to know it.”
—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

The Absurd and the Resistance to Meaning

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus describes the feeling of the absurd as the consequence of a rupture between the human desire for meaning and a world that offers no satisfactory response. A world that can be explained—even inadequately—remains familiar. Once its illusions disappear, however, the individual becomes a stranger, exiled from both the memory of a lost home and the promise of a future one. The absurd emerges from this “divorce” between the individual and life, between the actor and the setting in which the actor must perform.

For Camus, the loss of meaning does not justify suicide. On the contrary, it demands persistence. One must continue to live without appealing to a transcendent explanation capable of resolving the contradiction. This is why the apparently hopeless characters of the Theatre of the Absurd continue to struggle, wait, speak, repeat themselves, and resist. Their actions may not lead to conventional forms of progress, but they nevertheless constitute an effort to exist.

Camus defines a feeling of absurdity rather than the absurd as a stable philosophical object. The distinction matters. The absurd cannot be reduced to a single meaning because it names the breakdown of meaning itself. Any attempt to define it conclusively therefore risks contradicting the condition it seeks to describe.

Eugène Ionesco approaches the problem in a similarly paradoxical way. He defines the absurd as that which is “devoid of purpose”: once severed from religious, metaphysical, and transcendental foundations, human beings become lost and their actions appear senseless or useless (Esslin 23). Yet this definition necessarily employs the language of senselessness to explain senselessness. Rather than resolving the paradox, it performs it. The word absurd lacks a stable signified and therefore resists the very process of meaning assignment.

If the absurd cannot be firmly defined, how can we define the Theatre of the Absurd? Martin Esslin, who popularized the term in his influential 1961 study, connects it to the broader “anti-literary” movements of postwar Europe. He compares it with abstract painting, which rejected narrative and literary elements, and with the French nouveau roman, which displaced conventional characterization in favor of objects and impersonal description (26).

Literature, however, cannot become abstract in precisely the same way as painting. A literary text is composed of signs that invite interpretation and some degree of imaginative concretization. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros become “abstract” not by eliminating meaning altogether but by frustrating the reader’s efforts to stabilize it. Both plays challenge established structures of interpretation, literary production, and social thought.

This resistance constitutes their absurdity. Beckett’s play develops a counter-performance that asks the reader to read differently, without expecting narrative closure or stable reference. Ionesco’s play depicts an individual resisting the strangely seductive harmony of a society transformed into rhinoceroses. In both works, resistance is not merely one theme among others. It is the principle through which the absurd takes form.

Resisting Concretization

Maurice Blanchot argues that what most threatens reading is the reader’s insistence on remaining fully himself before the work—the confidence of someone who already “knows how to read” (The Space of Literature 198). His observation can be understood as a warning against interpretive mastery. A reader who immediately fills every gap, explains every ambiguity, and visualizes every uncertainty may end up consuming the text rather than encountering its strangeness.

Reading need not eliminate a work’s blanks. It can remain in their company.

In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir’s inability—or refusal—to provide a full account of his surroundings exemplifies this alternative form of reading. Asked to describe the landscape, he replies that it is indescribable: there is almost nothing there, except a tree (Beckett 79). His account refuses the descriptive fullness expected of conventional drama. The setting remains a gap rather than becoming a coherent world.

A comparable moment occurs in Rhinoceros. When Jean asks Berenger what he thought about the rhinoceros that has just charged through the street, Berenger replies that it meant nothing to him; it merely created a great deal of dust (Ionesco 18). While the other characters become absorbed in arguments about the animal’s existence, origins, and anatomical features, Berenger initially remains indifferent. He is more embarrassed about failing to shave before seeing Daisy than he is concerned with explaining the rhinoceros.

Jean, by contrast, represents discipline, rational organization, and willpower. He believes that every event should be subjected to explanation and that a properly regulated individual should remain in control. His confidence becomes ironic when he later transforms into the very creature that he had attempted to classify.

The rhinoceros therefore occupies the position of a gap in the play. It is unfamiliar, fascinating, and uncanny. Most of the characters try to master this gap by explaining it. When explanation fails, they resolve the uncertainty in a more radical way: they become rhinoceroses themselves. They no longer need to interpret the gap because they have dissolved their identities within it.

The political implications are unmistakable. Ionesco associated “rhinocerization” with his experience of watching people around him gradually embrace fascism. Their transformation did not occur at once. Step by step, they found reasons to join the dominant movement until their previous identities had been replaced.

Rhinocerization is thus a form of incorporation. Individuals identify with what initially appeared alien or threatening. Berenger’s resistance is not founded on his ability to explain the rhinoceroses better than the others. Instead, he resists the demand that uncertainty must be resolved through conformity.

Forgetting, Thinking, and Ethical Memory

Forgetting is central to Waiting for Godot. Pozzo does not remember meeting Vladimir and Estragon the previous day and predicts that, by tomorrow, he will not remember meeting them today. Godot’s messenger likewise denies recognizing Vladimir, although Vladimir believes that they have already met.

Thinking offers no reliable escape. Vladimir and Estragon suggest that they are no longer in danger of thinking and that what is truly terrible is not thinking itself but the awareness that one has already thought (Esslin 60). Thought becomes another repetitive movement that cannot resolve their situation.

These patterns of forgetting contribute to a form of existence without mastery. The characters continue to act, but their actions cannot be organized into a coherent account of progress. The repeated promise of Godot’s arrival gives structure to their lives while indefinitely withholding its fulfillment.

Berenger’s relationship with thought and memory is more complicated. At the beginning of Rhinoceros, Jean tells him that he does not properly exist because he does not think. Berenger, who experiences life as a dream, describes his body as a burden and uses alcohol to escape the oppressive sensation of being himself. Only by forgetting himself, he claims, can he recognize himself again (Ionesco 24).

Initially, Berenger resists the forms of consciousness represented by Jean: discipline, rational calculation, self-command, and certainty. Yet the spread of rhinocerization gradually transforms him. As supposedly rational characters abandon their humanity, Berenger becomes more reflective and ethically alert. By the end of the play, he is no longer defined by self-forgetting. He remembers his former relationships and recognizes the reality of what has been lost.

This transformation introduces a productive tension into the play. Berenger’s early resistance takes the form of indifference and self-forgetfulness; his later resistance depends on memory and moral judgment. The play does not simply oppose thought to non-thought. It asks what kind of thought remains possible when rationalization itself has become a means of justifying conformity.

Beckett: Resistance Against Language

Lucky’s famous monologue in Waiting for Godot is composed of fragments of philosophical, theological, scientific, and academic discourse. Its syntax continues almost without interruption, yet its proliferating words do not produce a stable argument. Language appears to function while simultaneously disintegrating.

Lucky’s speech recalls Walter Benjamin’s idea of a “pure language” that no longer communicates through ordinary reference. It also exposes what Paul de Man describes as the instability that appears when signifiers can no longer be securely connected to their supposed origins. Beckett does not reveal an original language concealed beneath corrupted speech. Instead, he stages the absence of any stable origin capable of guaranteeing meaning.

Silence is equally important. Beckett repeatedly interrupts dialogue with pauses, suspending the narrative and preventing speech from becoming a transparent instrument of communication. Esslin argues that this devaluation of language allows Beckett to “communicate the incommunicable” (88).

The phrase captures a central paradox. What cannot be communicated must still enter the play through some communicative form. Silence must be written into the script as a stage direction. Meaninglessness must be carefully composed. Lucky’s apparently uncontrolled monologue requires deliberate linguistic organization from its author.

Beckett cannot escape language, nor does his achievement depend on doing so. His work reveals the inseparability of language and non-language. A distorted utterance can only be recognized as distorted against the possibility of meaningful speech; a silence becomes perceptible only within a structure that allows us to hear its interruption.

Waiting for Godot therefore resists language from within language. It contests the promise that words will provide transparent access to reality, coherent identity, or narrative completion. Its difficulty also invites the reader or spectator into the work. Because the text cannot complete its own meaning, it depends on an encounter with someone who must nevertheless resist the desire to complete it too quickly.

Beckett’s celebrated reply when asked what Godot meant—“If I knew, I would have said so in the play”—does not merely withhold an explanation. It preserves the gap that allows the work to remain active.

Ionesco: Resistance with Language

Ionesco’s treatment of language differs from Beckett’s. In Rhinoceros, language is not primarily dismantled through an extended form of nonsensical speech. Instead, human language is gradually isolated as the characters abandon it.

By the end of the play, the stage is dominated by the sounds of the rhinoceroses. Daisy urges Berenger to understand the animals’ minds and learn their language. Berenger objects that their roaring cannot be called language. Daisy, increasingly enchanted by their collective sound, hears singing where Berenger hears noise. She comes to see the rhinoceroses as beautiful, even godlike, and finally joins them.

Left alone, Berenger begins to question his own speech. He asks whether he is still speaking French and concludes that he may call it French because no one remains to contradict him. His language has lost its community of speakers. In one sense, it has become pure and autonomous; in another, it has become socially dead.

Yet Berenger continues to speak. His final refusal to capitulate turns language into the last remaining instrument of resistance. Even when it can no longer guarantee communication, language preserves the possibility of saying no.

This distinguishes Ionesco’s strategy from Beckett’s. Beckett develops resistance against language by disrupting its referential and communicative functions. Ionesco constructs resistance with language by progressively removing everyone who can speak it, leaving a solitary voice against the collective roar.

The distinction is not absolute. Both playwrights expose the fragility of language. Yet they place different pressures upon it: Beckett distorts language until its claim to meaning becomes uncertain, while Ionesco isolates language until its survival becomes an ethical and political act.

Jouissance and the Seduction of Conformity

Roland Barthes uses jouissance to describe a form of textual experience that exceeds ordinary pleasure. A “text of jouissance” unsettles the reader’s cultural assumptions, identity, values, memories, and relationship with language. Unlike familiar pleasure, jouissance emerges through rupture, discomfort, and loss.

In Waiting for Godot, repetition contributes to this experience. Vladimir and Estragon return to the same place, repeat similar conversations, and end both acts still waiting. Their actions resemble a compulsion to repeat: waiting is painful, yet it is also the activity that sustains them. The silences and discontinuities of the play place both characters and spectators in a condition of not knowing.

In Rhinoceros, jouissance appears through collective transformation. The rhinoceros first emerges as a disturbing gap, but its power gradually becomes seductive. Jean, Dudard, the Logician, and eventually Daisy abandon the anxieties of individual identity for the force and harmony of the herd.

Even Berenger briefly envies them. He acknowledges the charm of their song, although he had previously insisted that they were merely roaring. What he hears is the attraction of collective enjoyment: the promise of escaping doubt, isolation, and responsibility by merging with a dominant body.

This is the point at which jouissance acquires a political dimension. Rhinocerization does not spread solely through coercion. It also offers pleasure. The collective appears powerful, beautiful, natural, and liberating. Fascist identification operates through this combination of fear and enjoyment: the individual submits to the group while experiencing submission as fulfillment.

Berenger’s own transformation proceeds in the opposite direction. As rational and disciplined characters join the herd, the previously indifferent Berenger becomes increasingly conscious. He questions the normalization of transformation, names it as evil, and remembers those who have disappeared. His encounter with the seductive power of rhinocerization produces an ethical resistance that he did not possess at the beginning.

The appearance of the rhinoceroses is therefore transformative in two opposed senses. For those who join them, it brings the catastrophic dissolution of individual and ethical responsibility. For Berenger—and for the structure of the drama—it becomes the condition through which resistance can emerge. The play forces him to recognize that he, too, desires the ease and beauty of belonging, and that resistance requires confronting this desire rather than imagining oneself immune to it.

The Absurdity of Resistance

Beckett’s work develops a devalued and discontinuous language through resistance to concretization, stable memory, rational thought, and language’s claim to transparent meaning. Vladimir and Estragon do not overcome the absurd. They continue within it. Their persistence is neither heroic in the conventional sense nor entirely passive. Waiting becomes an absurd performance of survival.

Ionesco’s play moves in a different direction. Rhinoceros engages directly with fascism and mass conformity, but it does not provide a political program for opposing them. Its politics are anti-programmatic rather than apolitical. The play rejects every reassuring solution, including the possibility that Berenger and Daisy might become a new Adam and Eve and repopulate the world. Instead, it leaves Berenger alone before a catastrophe he cannot defeat.

His surviving language is both powerful and powerless. It allows him to refuse, but there is no one left to hear or understand him. Resistance survives as an utterance without a community.

Beckett and Ionesco thus reveal two forms of absurd resistance. Beckett’s theatre resists against language, exposing the impossibility of fully escaping the medium through which meaning is questioned. Ionesco’s theatre resists with language, preserving speech as the last fragile distinction between an individual and an ecstatic collective.

Both plays can ultimately be read as texts of jouissance. They unsettle the reader’s historical, cultural, and psychological assumptions; interrupt familiar habits of interpretation; and bring our relationship with language into crisis. Their absurdity does not arise simply because their worlds lack meaning. It arises because their characters and forms continue to resist—even when resistance cannot promise understanding, victory, or redemption.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press, 2002.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller, Hill and Wang, 1975.

Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. Faber and Faber, 2006.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1968.

Blanchot, Maurice. “Communication and the Work.” The Space of Literature, translated by Ann Smock, University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Vintage International, 1991.

de Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory. University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. Vintage Books, 2004.

Ionesco, Eugène. Rhinoceros, The Chairs, The Lesson. Penguin Books, 2000.

Lamont, Rosette C. Ionesco’s Imperatives: The Politics of Culture. University of Michigan Press, 1993.