Farewell to Farewell: Impossible Endings and Unfinished Finitudes

This chapter accounts for the impossible, yet desired ending of returning to re-experience a particular event; as examples of study, it uses T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death, Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape as well as Pina Bausch’s Béla Bartók’s Opera: Duke Bluebeard’s Castle in order to account for a simultaneous longing and fear to end the process of returning. Such experience aims to comprehend the uncontainable event, to finish its unfinished business. The unresolved event demands a return to it, in order to be able to say, finally, but not once and for all, farewell to farewell. The following writing argues that endings, like performance itself, escape from us, forming an experience that is not quite yet and that specific uses of repetition in movement, structure or writing invite the spectator to go back to them, again and again, in an attempt to restore or repair the experience, or come to terms with it.