?A Cogito for the Dissolved Self:?Writing, Presence, and the Subject in the Work of Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze

Abstract

There is a tendency among Beckett scholars to equate Beckett's work with his life. Beckett himself encourages this type of reading by peppering his work with supposed childhood memories, references to his Irish background (Irish towns, foods, street names, and so on), and by allowing both his English and French language texts to be colored by Irish colloquialisms. Despite the many references in his texts that seem to beg for autobiographical interpretation, I would suggest that Beckett's work is less an example of autobi? ography than an illustration of what H. Porter Abbott refers to as auto-graphy (35-46). Rather than attempting to define or give shape to his own life?to make himself present to himself through writing?his work explores the notion ofthe self, the subject, and its relation to the written word. Beckett's work thus dialogues with so-called postmodern thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Beckett, Derrida and Deleuze evoke elements of traditional narrative and of the self in order ultimately to problematize any beliefs we might have about narrative and about the writing/written subject. From their work, we learn that the self is capable of producing text, but it is in turn subject to being produced by text, even, in the end, reduced to nothing more than text itself.