베케트와 데리다 - 잃어버린 침묵을 찾아서

Beckett and Derrida: In Search of the Lost Silence

&nbsp;&nbsp;Derrida briefly comments that he feels so close to Beckett that he cannot even respond to the singularity of Beckett&quot;s idiom, nor deconstruct Beckett&quot;s ‘unnamable’ Cogito. Yet the comparative study in depth on Beckett and Derrida is extremely scarce, and the systematic comparison on their strategic writings to escape the logocentric frame does not even exist.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;This paper detects where arises a point of profound affinity and absolute proximity when they both try to render in their writings the silence assumed as being lost in the logocentric discourses and binary system. For this task, the present paper proceeds as follows: first, Beckett and Derrida have a double attitude toward language. Second, taking their such stances as a point of departure and the basis of this paper, it addresses that both Beckett and Derrida use the language and the binary opposition only to erase them. Third, they both turn to the style and the rhythm of their singular languages in order to evade the grid of binary oppositions, in turn outwitting and casting aside all the conceptual frames. Fourth, they both do the infinite word-play, mingling with a verbal buffoonery, in order to dismantle the meaning generated and protected by the binary structure. Such "linguistic potlatch" is not the kind of word-play that the New Critics once cherished and practiced. Quite the contrary, it jolts and destablizes the polysemy couched in the semantic frame. Lastly the silence that both Beckett and Derrida opt for is still a different language, or a different verbal art, gained after a rigorous and subtle play against the logocentric language in the quardrilateral space, that is, in the grid of language. Beckett once again with his legendary humility describes the silence he tries to tease into his writing as a "pell-mell babel of silence" "which is not silence." Then such silence is not, of course, the "phenomenologial voice" that Husserl and many other major philosophers seek after so desperately, nor, despite the strong temptations and many daring attempts by the critics, the kind of a silence presupposed by the various oriental sages, associated with the pre-Cogito or pre-expressive Cogito completely immune from language.