Beckett and Derrida

This Element systematically compares the main shared traits of Beckett and Derrida, especially their critique of sovereign subjects.

This Element explores the connection between Beckett and Derrida's oeuvres, focusing on their shared historical and personal contexts. It explores their engagement with beginnings, origins, genetic grounds, and critiques of sovereignty, revealing why Derridean deconstruction mirrors Beckett's literary achievements.Uncannily similar projects, Beckett's and Derrida's oeuvres have been linked by literary and philosophy scholars since the 1990s. Taking into consideration their shared historical and personal contexts as writers whose main language of expression was 'adopted' or 'imposed', this Element proposes a systematic reading of their main points of connection. Focusing on their engagement with the intricacies of beginnings and origins, on genetic grounds or surfaces analogous to the Platonic khôra, and on their similar critiques of the aporias of sovereignty, it exposes the reasons why multiple readers, like Coetzee, consider Derridean deconstruction a philosophical mirror of Beckett's literary achievements.