Nothingness, no-thing, and nothing in the work of Wilfred Bion and in Samuel Beckett's Murphy.

In 1967 a young woman, Sighle Kennedy, was working on her dissertation about the work of Samuel Beckett. She wrote him a letter, asking him to evaluate the validity of her thesis. Beckett wrote a short note back that included the following sentence: "If I were in the unenviable position of having to study my work, my points of departure would be the 'Naught is more real . . . ' and the 'Ubi nihil uales .. . ' both already in Murphy and neither very rational" (Kennedy, 1971, p. 300). The first quotation appears on page l3B of Murphy (1938), where the narrator describes Murphy losing consciousness after his game of chess with Mr. Endon. The full sentence is: "Not the numb peace of their own suspension [the senses], but the positive peace that comes when the somethings give way, or perhaps simply add up, to the