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This chapter examines Stanley Cavell's suggestion – put forward in his Carus Lectures of 1988 – that Samuel Beckett's Endgame can be read as a work which embodies and develops the idea of Emersonian moral perfectionism. While this suggestion is never fully substantiated by Cavell himself, it is, as I hope to demonstrate here, possible to provide an account of what a perfectionist Endgame might look like by drawing on a range of Cavell's texts, from his early essay on Endgame through to his recent study Cities of Words. In the second part of the chapter, I turn the tables somewhat. After demarcating some of the social limits of Cavell's ethical outlook, I ask what it might mean to rediscover perfectionism in a more politicized form – something which I attempt to do via an exploration of the tragic dimensions of Beckett's play.

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-55503-8_4

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