Waste Articulated: Derrida via Beckettean WATT

Abstract

The event is coexistive with becoming, and becoming is itself coexistive with
language … Everything happens at the boundary between thing and propositions.
(Deleuze, The Logic of Sense)

In reference to Valery’s definition of poetry (The poem: a
prolonged hesitation between sound and sense) Agamben writes:
“poetry lives only in the tension and difference (and hence also in
the virtual interference) between sound and sense, between the semiotic
sphere and the semantic sphere.” (G. Agamben, “The End of Poem”, in: The End of Poem, Stanford UP 1999, 109) –
This breech within lan-guage suggests a certain void which dissimulates
every-thing said from within, thus becoming a discourse that, as Foucault put
it, means not a structure but an existential figure. The question one can pose
here is: What would be the hesitation “between sound and sense” and how to
articulate the very difference between something and nothing – the difference
which “is” the space making the difference between sound and sense possible? –
The Beckettian Watt (examined in a fragment) approaches
the problem indicating a possible path to trace.