Derek Attridge noted that
Derrida had written on Kafka, Joyce, Mallarmé, Blanchot, Francis Ponge, Paul
Celan, and even Antonin Artaud,
but not on Samuel Beckett, even though he
(Derrida) had devoted seminars to Beckett's work.
So, why not Beckett?
Derrida had
no real answer, but noted that, whereas he could find some take-off point in
Joyce, Celan, and Blanchot -- an odd word or phrase like He war, Schibboleth or pas --
the Beckett texts for some reason resisted him:
"When I found myself, with
students, reading some Beckett texts, I would take three lines, I would spend
two hours on them, then I would give up because it would not have been
possible, or honest, or even interesting, to extract a few 'significant' lines
from a Beckett text."
To which Derrida then added this strange
non-sentence: "The composition, the rhetoric, the construction and rhythm
of his works, even the ones that seem most 'decomposed,' that's what 'remains'
finally the most 'interesting,' that's the work, that's the signature, this
remainder which remains when the thematics is exhausted (and also exhausted, by
others, for a long time now, in other modes)" . As if the absolute singularity or alterity of Beckett's texts was no
longer an event to be engaged or elaborated but an absolute (or
"abyssal") limit, a deadline receding into a past that never was.
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