Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot

• Theme: Absurdity, time, and the void.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

Beckett’s Waiting for Godot—a play in which “nothing happens” in two acts—reveals the profound archaeology of subjectivity unmoored from its ethical teleology. Through Foucault’s philosophy, we may understand this masterpiece not simply as a theatre of absurdity, but as a ruin of care—a space where the technologies of the self collapse into repetition, detachment, and surveillance by emptiness.

In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault examines ancient ethics as a mode of self-formation, where pleasure was intertwined with practices of virtue, moderation, and temporality. Estragon and Vladimir, however, embody a post-ethical self—not liberated, but abandoned. Time stretches but does not progress. Recollection falters. The body is only something to be poked, inspected, abused, or forgotten. There is no telos of care—only inertia.

Foucault’s genealogy of the subject helps us see how the play dramatizes the dismantling of subjectivation. Estragon and Vladimir do not possess selves—they perform fragments of them. They await a being named “Godot,” who never arrives, and thus they remain in a suspended state of existence without anchoring. Here, Foucault’s Care of the Self is inverted: where ancient Stoics sought clarity and mastery, Beckett’s tramps wallow in amnesia, interdependence, and decentered identity.

Yet this is not nihilism. Beckett stages a resistance to the demand for meaning—a refusal of totalizing truths, which resonates with Foucault’s critique of Enlightenment rationality. “Godot” is both everything and nothing—a placeholder for religious salvation, metaphysical purpose, or political agency. By waiting, Vladimir and Estragon inhabit the disciplinary void, much like prisoners in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, whose days are structured not by purpose but by routine, surveillance, and punishment of deviation.

Pozzo and Lucky introduce another Foucauldian node: the dynamic of power and submission, where the master's selfhood is dependent on the slave’s silence. Lucky’s monologue—erratic, accelerating, and collapsing—mirrors the collapse of language itself as a disciplinary technology. It becomes a torrent of undifferentiated citation, a failed archive of knowledge, revealing Foucault’s insight that discourses do not uncover truth, they produce regimes of knowledge.

Thus, Waiting for Godot becomes a meta-ethics of despair: an excavation of what remains when the care of the self is no longer possible.