Beckett and La Mettrie: From Man a Machine to Techno-Human Being

In Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre, Krapp’s Last Tape stands out as the first theatrical play to feature a technological apparatus as a central agent of the performance. This innovative dramaturgy invites audiences to analyse human processes in connection with the functioning of the machine. Beckett’s interest in mechanist theories has often been related to his study of René Descartes and post-Cartesian philosophers. In this lineage, Julien Offray de la Mettrie appears as the most radical thinker of anthropological materialism, but one who remains underexplored in Beckett studies. In recent years, the eighteenth-century physician and philosopher has been celebrated as a forefather of neurophysiology and as an early thinker of the posthuman condition. By proposing a parallel reading of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and La Mettrie’s Man a Machine, this chapter investigates how both texts open unexpected avenues for thinking about what it means to be human in the context of changing paradigms of humanness. After an analysis of Krapp’s mechanistic digestive and creative processes through the Lamettrian concepts of continuity and organisation, the chapter focuses on Krapp’s imagination and sensuality via La Mettrie’s neurophysiology. The chapter eventually reflects on selfhood and the ever-growing technological assistance of cognitive processes.