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A Cogito for the Dissolved Self:"Writing, Presence, and the Subject in the Work of Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze Sarah Gendron There is a tendency among Beckett scholars to equate Beckett's work with his life. Beckett himself encourages this type of reading by peppering his work with supposed childhood memories, references to his Irish background (Irish towns, foods, street names, and so on), and by allowing both his English and French language texts to be colored by Irish colloquialisms. Despite the many references in his texts that seem to beg for autobiographical interpretation, I would suggest that Beckett's work is less an example of autobiography than an illustration of what H. Porter Abbott refers to as "auto-graphy" (35-46). Rather than attempting to define or give shape to his own life—to make himself present to himself through writing—his work explores the notion of the self, the subject, and its relation to the written word. Beckett's work thus dialogues with so-called postmodern thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Beckett, Derrida and Deleuze evoke elements of traditional narrative and of the self in order ultimately to problematize any beliefs we might have about narrative and about the writing/written subject. From their work, we learn that the self is capable of producing text, but it is in turn subject to being produced by text, even, in the end, reduced to nothing more than text itself. [End Page 47] I. "Self Presentation:" Western Theorizations of Presence and the Self Of Grammatology is Derrida's major work on the history and status of writing in Western civilization. It is here that he challenges the long held speech/writing power structure. An offshoot of this hierarchy that is significant in this text is the question of how presence relates (or does not relate) to both writing and to our conceptualization of the self. Focusing primarily on Rousseau's work as the object of his inquiry, Derrida examines the role that presence has historically played in the construction of the stable, distinct, authoritative, phenomenological subject—a concept of the self that was theorized by Descartes, Rousseau, Hegel, and countless other Western philosophers. According to this model, the self is determined and known only through self-presence. In the case of Descartes, the subject is formed by applying systematic doubt to everything about which the mind cannot be absolutely certain. The Cartesian self is therefore what remains after everything external to the mind, and everything that could be potentially deceptive, has been eliminated. This subject then is arrived at by making the self as "present" to the mind as possible; by a process of self-reflexive mediation. The question many post-structural thinkers have asked themselves is whether or not self-presence is even possible. And if it is not possible, what then becomes of the concept of the phenomenological subject? Jean Starobinski examines this predicament as it relates to Rousseau, who lauded both the healing properties of the present time, saying "The great remedy to the miseries of this world is the absorption into the present moment" ("Le grand remède aux misères de ce monde, c'est l'absorption dans l'instant présent,")1 and the related, but certainly not identical idea of presence of being.2 Like Descartes, he also based his abstraction of the self on this notion of presence. Yet, as Starobinski notes, in order to show himself for what he really is—to reveal his "true self" to both himself and to the world—Rousseau does not himself cultivate presence at all: I would love society as much as any other man, where I not sure of showing myself there not only to my disadvantage but quite other than I really am. My decision to write and to hide myself was perfectly suited to me. With me present, no one would ever have known what I was worth. (Rousseau 116, my emphasis) As Starobinski argues, paradoxically Rousseau must hide "in order to make himself more visible" (125). He must be absent in order to be present. In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze makes a similar argument about...
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