Book Review: Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature
A review of Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature (Cultural Memory in the Present):
: If there is no such thing as literature — i.e., self-identity of the literary thing — if what is announced or promised as literature never gives itself as such, that means, among other things, that a literature that talked only about literature or a work that was purely self-referential would immediately be annulled. You'll say that that's maybe what's happening. In which case it is this experience of the nothing-ing of nothing that interests our desire under the name of literature. Experience of Being, nothing less, nothing more, on the edge of metaphysics, literature perhaps stands on the edge of everything, almost beyond everything, including itself. It's the most interesting thing in the world, maybe more interesting than the world, and this is why, if it has no definition, what is heralded and refused under the name of literature cannot be identified with any other discourse. It will never be scientific, philosophical, conversational.
– Jacques Derrida, "'This Strange Institution Called Literature': An Interview with Jacques Derrida"[1]
Over the years there have been various efforts to engage Jacques Derrida's conception of literature.[2] I think it is widely acknowledged now that there is (or was) no concept or theory of any sort but instead an ongoing attraction to forms of language that make certain works of writing peculiar enough to trouble the ways in which we make sense of things. Anyhow here is what I think we think we know about Derrida's thinking with respect to literature: