Reading Beckett

In the spring of 1989, I was teaching a graduate course on deconstruction, ethics, and literature at Rutgers University, and preparing to fly to California to carry out an interview with Jacques Derrida as part of a new project of collecting, in a single volume, English translations of his most important studies of literary texts. Not long before leaving, I asked the class if anyone had any questions they would like me to put to Derrida – we were studying one of his essays at the time – and I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that the response was, at first, a rather stunned silence. Then one of the students made a suggestion in line with his own particular interests: ‘Can you ask him why he has never written on Beckett?’ (The student was Stephen Dilks, now a respected Beckett scholar.) I did ask the question, and Derrida's answer – later published in Acts of Literature (60–2) – has been quoted and mulled over many times by scholars and critics writing on Beckett. (I think especially of the probing discussions by Asja Szafraniec in Beckett, Derrida and the Event of Literature, Daniel Katz in Saying I No More, and Ewa Ziarek in The Rhetoric of Failure.) Going back to Derrida's comments in preparing this chapter, I was struck by the degree to which they resonated with my thoughts about Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable as we might read them today, no doubt because Derrida's understanding of literature has been highly influential for me. Nevertheless, the implications of his comments have not, I believe, been fully taken on board in Beckett studies (or, for that matter, in literary studies more broadly). Here are a couple of Derrida's remarks in answer to my question: ‘How could I write, sign, countersign performatively texts which “respond” to Beckett? How could I avoid the platitude of a supposed academic metalanguage?’ and ‘The composition, the rhetoric, the construction and the rhythm of his works, even the ones that seems the 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’ (Acts of Literature, 60–1).