ABSTRACT
The interplay of the economy of narcissism and object-choice with the 'grammatical contortions around person, subject and auto-designation' that Katz traces in Beckett brings out the importance of the accusative in Beckett's language. The grammatical contortions around person, subject, and auto-designation are linked to a general economy of narcissism and object choice. Beckett's narcissistic structure is in fact unthinkable without the component of the echo that is, subjectivity as a temporality of belated returns and retrievals, which both enable and disable the apparently static structure of specular self-contemplation. The body as language, language as body to give respectively the primary Beckettian and Joycean inflections of the problem allow the exterior and interior to remain places, but displaced, non-symmetrical places. The 'component of the echo' makes Beckettian subjectivity 'a temporality of belated returns and retrievals'. Katz's vocabulary here draws upon that used by Derrida, in his reading of Freud in The Post Card.
