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[T]he fact that failure provides the norm of saying arouses a fallacious hope within the subject, a hope that Beckett identifies perfectly: the hope of a maximal failure, of an absolute failure that would have the merit of turning you off both language and saying, once and for all. This is the shameful temptation, the temptation of subtracting oneself from the imperative of saying. The temptation to have done with the “on,” no longer to suffer the intolerable prescription of ill saying.

Since well saying is impossible, the only hope lies in betrayal: to attain a failure so complete it would elicit a total abandonment of the prescription itself, a relinquishment of saying and of language. This would mean the return to the void—to be void or emptied, emptied of all prescription. In the end, the temptation is to cease to exist in order to be. In this form of failure one returns to the void, to pure being. This is what we call the mystical temptation, in the sense in which it appears in Wittgenstein, in the last proposition of the Tractarus. To reach the point at which, since it is impossible to speak, one can only remain silent. To reach the point at which the awareness that it is impossible to say “it,” that is, the awareness that “it” has failed absolutely, firmly places you under the sway of an imperative that is no longer the imperative of saying, but the imperative of silence.

In Beckett’s vocabulary this is called “going.” Going where? Well, going away from humanity. In truth, like Rimbaud, Beckett thinks that one never leaves. He recognizes absolutely the temptation of leaving humanity, the temptation of failing both language and saying to the point of disgust. To leave existence once and for all, to return to being. But Beckett corrects and ultimately rejects this possibility.

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Alain Badiou. Handbook of Inaesthetics. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005. 101-2.