In Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett, through the absurd form in which “nothing happens”, dramatizes the crisis of meaning and the predicament of desire that confront the modern subject after the death of God. This paper re-reads the play through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis. It argues that Godot is not a substantial symbol such as God, death, or hope, but the incarnation of the Big Other and a pure, empty signifier of desire. His fundamental absence is both the ontological precondition for the emergence and persistence of desire and a manifestation of the Real that exposes the incompleteness of the symbolic order. “Waiting” rather than a transition toward an endpoint, is the circular reproduction of desire itself: The highly repetitive structure of the two acts reveals the infinite deferral of desire and the self-deceptive construction through which the subject, by means of blind faith in the future, evades the nothingness of being. The master-slave relationship between Pozzo and Lucky, which mirrors the two tramps, reveals, under the double illumination of the mirror stage and the master-slave dialectic, the fate of the subject split and alienated in the gaze of the Other. The failure and rupture of language further attest that desire is ultimately unsayable. Beckett does not end in nihilism. By disclosing the truth of the dialectic of desire, he calls upon the subject to traverse the fantasy, confront the nothingness of existence, and assume responsibility and create meaning within the absurd, thereby opening an ethical possibility of redeeming the absurd.
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Shen, M., Chen, S. (2026) The Absence of Godot and the Dialectic of Desire: A Re-reading of Waiting for Godot from the Perspective of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Journal of Social Development and History, 2(3), 42-47. https://doi.org/10.71052/jsdh/MWCL6237