Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature [Hardcover]

The late Jacques Derridas notion of literature is explored in this new study. Starting with Derridas self-professed inability to comment on the work of Samuel Beckett, whom Derrida nevertheless considered one of the most interesting and exemplary writers of our time, Asja Szafraniec argues that the shared feature of literary works as Derrida understands them is a double, juridical-economical gesture, and that one aspect of this notion (the juridical) is more hospitable to Becketts oeuvre than the other. She then discusses other contemporary philosophical approaches to Beckett, including those of Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, and Alain Badiou. The book offers an innovative analysis of Derridas approach to literature, as well as an overview of current philosophical approaches to contemporary literature, and a number of innovative readings of Becketts work.Asja Szafraniec obtained her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Amsterdam. I know of no author who brings to the page such a deep understanding of Derrida's philosophy along with such a delicate, piercing awareness of the singularity of Beckett's text and its place in the literary institution. Szafraniec makes an important contribution to discussion on transactions and interconnections between Samuel Beckett and Jacques Derrida, two writers engaged in very different kinds of deconstructive operations That Beckett may have exposed the exhaustion of literature in order to evade the inevitable delusions that language engenders is an extraordinary thesis, which Szafraniec makes credible. This is a remarkable and valuable work in many respects, in particular because it is not only the first, to my knowledge, to systematically explore the relation between Derrida and Beckett, but also because it puts Derrida's vision of literature to the test in the context of a corpus of writings that does not belong to the canon of literature with whl.