Beckett, Neurodiversity and the Prosthetic: the Posthuman Turn in Contemporary Art

This chapter argues that the posthuman in Beckett provides the most fertile ground for intermedial adaptation of his work in the contemporary arts. It focuses on the intersections between Beckett and posthumanism by analysing examples of how selected contemporary artists in different media draw on his work in order to expand and explore normative categories of human embodiment and subjectivity, such as the interface between the machinic, the prosthetic and the corporeal in work by Rebecca Horn (1970s–2010s), and neurodiverse theatre performance that reconfigures modalities of subjectivity and agency in Jess Thom’s Touretteshero production of Not I (2017). The chapter draws into the discussion an exploration of how ideas of silence, recalibrated by neurodiversity, are rendered somatic through Anne Niemetz’s and Andrew Pelling’s sound work Dark Side of the Cell (2004).