SOURCE: Noble, Michael J. “Speaking the Same Language: Samuel Beckett, Jacques Derrida and Vice Versa.” The Journal of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 70 (1993): 81-90.

In the following essay, Noble underscores the common characteristics of the language in Beckett's short stories and Derrida's language theory, contending that “the texts of Derrida and Beckett speak the same ideological and theoretical language.”

The title page of an English edition of a work by Samuel Beckett or Jacques Derrida is likely to include a translation credit because these writers originally wrote in French. But French is not the only common characteristic of the language of these two writers; the texts of Derrida and Beckett speak the same ideological and theoretical language.

Derrida, as a reader of his own writings and those of Beckett, describes such a theoretical language when he answers a question posed to him in an interview...