vii Acknowledgements My fi rst debt of gratitude is to Stan Gontarski, who approached me about submitting a manuscript to Edinburgh University Press's Other Becketts series and whose comments, in addition to those of anonymous reviewers at the press, helped sharpen and shape the work, pushing me to explore the ramifi cations of Beckett and phenomenology for ecological thought. Jackie Jones showed enthusiasm and support for the project from the beginning, and Ersev Ersoy kept things running

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... hly and enjoyably over many months. Working with Edinburgh has been a pleasure thanks to the energy, intelligence and professionalism of everyone at the press with whom I've worked. This book, like many fi rst academic books, has its seed in my doctoral dissertation, which I submitted to the University of California at Berkeley and which also grew out of my study at the University of Cambridge. Though very little of that work survives in the present volume, I would like to acknowledge the professors and mentors who not only refi ned the line of argument I pursue in this book but strengthened my habits of thinking and questioning. I'm grateful to Judith Butler for directing my dissertation and especially for her incisive reading and generative conversations, in Berkeley, Cambridge and Paris, which enabled me to alight upon and pursue the link between the body and agency. Ramona Naddaff and Anthony Cascardi modelled philosophical-literary scholarship, and they offered encouragement and continued support. I'm grateful also to Suzanne Geurlac, who reread Husserl with me, and to Kaja Silverman, in whose seminar I fi rst read Merleau-Ponty. The generosity of the Gates Cambridge Trust supported this project in its early stages and introduced me to a global community of scholars across the sciences and humanities that remains a source of inspiration and friendship. I gratefully acknowledge