This essay examines some aspects of Thomas Bernhard’s works concerning the catastrophe of meaning, by the thought of two philosophers: Aldo Giorgio Gargani and Jacques Derrida. It is possible to escape from the ordinary procedures of criticizing the catastrophe, mostly based on language, through the device of Bernhard’s writing? With this in view, the essay inquiries the issues of the endless phrase, the repetition, the role of the other within the monologism in Bernhard’s writing, against the background of its relationship (...) with Austrian culture. Bernhard’s writing exhausts the language of the catastrophe but, at the same time, it works as an ethical-aesthetical device capable of producing different meaning. (shrink)