ABSTRACT
Le Depeupleur is a text expanding into an increasing complexity of description without any final totalization. Samuel Beckett has variously described 'Bing as the result or miniaturization of Le Depeupleur abandoned because of its intractable complexities and a separate work written after and in reaction to Le Depeupleur, reiterating the ambivalent intertextual relationship of the pieces. The referential expressive model of the Beckett text as constructed within a certain critical discourse gives way to an intertextuality which deconstructs the fictional wholeness of the work in relation to the 'vision' which supposedly founds the language of the text. David Watson takes as a given the reconceptualization of realistic mimetic representation consequent upon the arbitrary nature of the Saussurean sign, and turns severally to Jacques Derrida, Freud and Lacan in order to explicate concepts and areas central to recent Beckett criticism.
