ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Beckett’s and Derrida’s shared desire of a “writing without matricide.” Through an analysis of their work in relation to Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and others, it examines modernist writing relation to philosophical and psychoanalytic writing, showing how literature is for these disciplines either their “alibi” or “other space” where their violence is avoided or the only place without alibi or other space, what Beckett called an “infinite here” and what Derrida describes as the space of the unconditional. This aporetic topography makes of literature the attempt to go beyond all transcendental principles and, ultimately, beyond writing itself.
