Performatives after deconstruction [Paperback edition first published 2014] 9781441123466, 9781441147226, 9781441184801, 1441123466, 9781472591357, 1472591356

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Performatives After Deconstruction



Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from Bloomsbury. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research. Adorno’s Concept of Life, Alastiar Morgan Adorno’s Poetics of Critique, Steven Helmling Badiou and Derrida, Antonio Calcagno Badiou, Marion and St Paul, Adam Miller Being and Number in Heidegger’s Thought, Michael Roubach Crisis in Continental Philosophy, Robert Piercey Deleuze and Guattari, Fadi Abou-Rihan Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, Jay Lampert Derrida and the Future of the Liberal Arts, edited by Mary Caputi and Vincent J. Del Casino, Jnr Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, Joe Hughes Derrida, Simon Morgan Wortham Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure, Nicole Anderson Domestication of Derrida, Lorenzo Fabbri Encountering Derrida, Simon Morgan Wortham Foucault’s Heidegger, Timothy Rayner Foucault’s Legacy, C.G. Prado Gabriel Marcel’s Ethics of Hope, Jill Graper Hernandez Gadamer and the Question of the Divine, Walter Lammi Gadamer’s Poetics: A Critique of Modern Aesthetics, John Arthos Gilles Deleuze, Constantin V. Boundas Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling, Sharin N. Elkholy Heidegger and Authenticity, Mahon O’Brien Heidegger and Happiness, Matthew King Heidegger and Philosophical Atheology, Peter S. Dillard Heidegger and the Place of Ethics, Michael Lewis Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change, Ruth Irwin Heidegger’s Early Philosophy, James Luchte



In the Shadow of Phenomenology, Stephen H. Watson Irony of Heidegger, Andrew Haas Jean-Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness, Daniele Rugo Kant, Deleuze and Architectonics, Edward Willatt Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer Michel Henry, Jeffrey Hanson Nietzsche and the Anglo-Saxon Tradition, Louise Mabille Nietzsche’s Ethical Theory, Craig Dove Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, James Luchte Phenomenology, Institution and History, Stephen H. Watson Post-Rationalism, Tom Eyers Ricoeur and Lacan, Karl Simms Sartre’s Phenomenology, David Reisman Simultaneity and Delay, Jay Lampert Thinking Between Deleuze and Kant, Edward Willatt Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?, Gregg Lambert Zizek and Heidegger, Thomas Brockelman

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Performatives After Deconstruction Edited by Mauro Senatore

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

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www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Mauro Senatore and Contributors, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-2346-6 ePub: 978-1-4411-4722-6 ePDF: 978-1-4411-8480-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents Notes on Contributors Acknowledgement Introduction: Positing, the Performative and the Supplement Mauro Senatore

ix xii

1

Part 1 Promising Hospitality: l’Étranger Gives the Law in D’Alembert’s ‘Genève’  Ellen S. Burt

43

2

Performative Perfume  Diane Davis

70

3

The Performative and the Normative  Matthias Fritsch

86

1

Part 2

4

Performativity as Ek-Scription: Adonis After Derrida  Herman Rapaport

109

5

Living On: The Absolute Performative  Francesco Vitale

131

6

Archive-Abilities  Simon Morgan Wortham

146

Part 3 7

The Performativity of Art  Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield

169

8

Passive Performative  John W. P. Phillips

186

Part 4 9

Departures: The American Future of Psychoanalysis Martin McQuillan

207

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10 Laruelle Contra Derrida: Performative Realism and the Logics of Consistency  John Mullarkey

223

Epilogue: No Sooner Said Than Done  Alexander García Düttmann

235

Bibliography Index

243 253

Notes on Contributors Ellen S. Burt is Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Irvine. Her works include Poetry’s Appeal: Nineteenth-Century French Lyric and the Political Space (1999) and Regard for the Other: Autothanatography in Rousseau, De Quincey, Baudelaire and Wilde (2009). Diane Davis is Professor of Rhetoric & Writing and English at the University of Texas at Austin and Kenneth Burke Professor of Rhetoric and Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. She is the author of Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter (2000) and Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations (2010); co-author of Women’s Ways of Making It in Rhetoric and Composition (2008); and editor of The UberReader: Selected Works of Avital Ronell (2007) and Reading Ronell (2009). Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield is Reader in Theory and Philosophy of Art at the University of Reading, and a member of the Academic Board of the Forum for European Philosophy, London School of Economics. He has published widely in continental philosophy, philosophy of art and aesthetics, and recently has given a number of performative readings of his ideas at leading galleries in Europe and the UK. Matthias Fritsch studied philosophy in Cologne, New York, Berlin and Philadelphia and joined the faculty of Concordia University in Montréal in  2002. His research in social and political philosophy focuses on historical justice, theories of democracy, and the critical theory of society. To date, he has published a monograph (The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida, 2005), a range of articles in scholarly journals, and translated authors such as Heidegger, Gadamer and Habermas into English. Alexander García Düttmann lives in London and teaches philosophy at Goldsmiths (University of London). He is also Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art. Recent publications include: Erase The Traces (2004), Visconti: Insights Into Flesh And Blood (2006), Derrida and I: The Problem of Deconstruction

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(2008), Participation: Consciousness of Semblance (2011) and Naive Art: An Essay on Happiness (2012). Martin Mcquillan is Professor of Literary Theory and Cultural Analysis and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University, London. His recent publications include Deconstruction After 9/11 (2008), Roland Barthes, or, The Profession of Cultural Studies (2010) and Deconstruction without Derrida (2012). He is the editor of The Politics of Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy (2007), Deconstruction Reading Politics (2008), The Origins of Deconstruction (2010) and The Post-Romatic Predicament (2012). He is also series editor for ‘The Frontiers of Theory’ list published by Edinburgh University Press. John Mullarkey is Professor of Film and Television Studies at Kingston University, London. He has published Bergson and Philosophy (1999), PostContinental Philosophy: An Outline (2006), Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality (2010), and co-edited Laruelle and Non-Philosophy (2012) and The Bloomsbury Companion to Continental Philosophy (2013). He is currently working on a book entitled Reverse Mutations: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy. John W. P. Phillips teaches critical theory, literature and continental philosophy in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is the author, with Ryan Bishop, of Modernist Avant-garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology (2010) and co-edited Beyond Description: Space Historicity Singapore (2004) and Problematizing Global Knowledge (2006). Herman Rapaport is Reynolds Professor of English at Wake Forest University and has published books on Derrida and deconstruction, among them, Heidegger and Derrida (1989), The Theory Mess (2001) and Later Derrida (2003). The Literary Theory Toolkit (2011) also includes discussions of Derrida’s writings as well as a chapter on performance and performativity. Mauro Senatore is a postdoctoral fellow and Adjunct Professor of French Contemporary Philosophy in the Instituto de Humanidades at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago (Chile). He is the editor of the special issue of Parallax (‘Conjurations’, 2011) and, with Francesco Vitale, of L’avvenire della decostruzione

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(2011) and of the translation of Rodolphe Gasché’s The Tain of the Mirror into Italian (2013). In  2010, he organized the conference Performatives After Deconstruction at Kingston University, London. Francesco Vitale is permanent Lecturer of Aesthetics and of Hermeneutics of the French Philosophical Text at the University of Salerno (Italy). His recent works include: Derridario (2012) and Mitografie. Derrida e la scrittura dello spazio (2012), Spettrografie. Derrida tra singolarità e scrittura (2008). He is currently working on a project on the relations between deconstruction and the sciences of life. Simon Morgan Wortham is Professor of English and Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University, London. He is co-director of the London Graduate School. His recent books include Counter-Institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University (2006), Derrida: Writing Events (2008), The Derrida Dictionary (2010) and The Poetics of Sleep: From Aristotle to Nancy (2013).

Acknowledgement My thanks are to Martin McQuillan. Only now I understand he had already imagined this work since the first time we met.

Introduction: Positing, the Performative and the Supplement Mauro Senatore

The performativity of the performative There is a deconstructive gesture of retracing Austin’s theory of the performative back to the philosophical tradition of positing (setzen).1 This gesture is conjured up by Werner Hamacher in a passage of ‘Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-Language and Derrida’s Specters of Marx’ (1999), in which he singles out the question of the performativity of the performative and, thus, of the ultimately performative condition of the performative in general, of the absolute or autoperformative. First, Hamacher sheds light on a certain tradition, across modern European philosophy, that takes account of that ‘mode of saying which corresponds to nothing given, nothing present, nothing extant’ and, on a more profound level, of ‘the prospective structure of language in general’. This tradition unfolds itself through the multiple elaborations of the ‘discourse of action’ from Hobbes on, up to Fichte’s ‘discourse of the originary act’ (Thathandlung), which consists in the fundamental or self-founding proposition (I    I), namely, ‘the autothesis of the transcendental I’. Hamacher acknowledges in the act (or, perhaps, as Derrida would say, the operation)2 of self-positing or autothesis the general trait of this tradition: ‘Language was no longer thought of as the correspondence of a statement or a pre-existing object but as the autonomous or autonomizing act of a social or individual subject positing itself ’ (Hamacher, 1999a, p. 189). Ultimately, language itself amounts to the very self positing itself in the autothesis. According to Hamacher, what is known as speech act theory and, therefore, the notion of the performative, must be read in light of the above-elaborated tradition. Following the classical formulation, he explains that the performative is a successful speech act when ‘conducted within certain

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conventions’.3 As the term itself suggests, Hamacher writes, it must ‘perform’, that is, realize, execute or fulfil those pre-established conventions or rules. Therefore, ‘classical speech act theory does not inquire after the conditions under which conventions can be linguistically prepared and established – and precisely for this reason, it cannot account for the performativity of its performatives’. The preparation and establishment of those conventions consist in the very act of self-positing or autothesis and, therefore, in the very performativity of the performative as autoperformative. The essence of the performative speech act can also be understood as its being self-founding, self-referring and independent from any instance outside language itself. Finally, according to Hamacher, speech act theory is unable to explain the constitution of the subject: ‘it proceeds from self-governed, intentional subjects who merely reproduce themselves in their linguistic conventions’ (p. 190).4 In this introduction, I will trace out a certain line of deconstruction reading the performativity of the performative as selfpositing or autothesis or, in other words, reckoning with the (auto)performative as the speech act of self-positing. Repeating a Derridean movement, I will affirm the necessity to detach autothesis or the autoperformative from an athetic and non-performative unconditionality, which is admitted by autothesis itself and, yet, cannot be encompassed by it (the very heteronomy and iterability of positing and of the performative). This affirmation claims a certain affinity with the announcement elaborated in the Preface to Rogues. Two Essays on Reason (2003), in which Derrida calls for the urgency of thinking a certain unconditionality without sovereignty, and which I propose reading, elsewhere, as a reformulation of his early, decisive reading of the Hegelian notion of recognition elaborated in ‘Violence and Metaphysics: an Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Lévinas’ (1964).5

Autoperformative and self-positing Emile Benveniste’s chapter ‘Analytical Philosophy and Language’, first published in Les études philosophiques (1963) and, then, included in Problems in General Linguistics (1966), is a seminal text for the deconstructive tradition I aim to posit in this text. The chapter reads the proceedings of a conference held in Royaumont in  1962 and is devoted to the analyses of the ordinary language developed by the ‘Oxford philosophers’. The publication, entitled La philosophie analytique, includes Austin’s essay ‘Performatif/Constatif ’, which represents the main source of Benveniste’s reading. First, Benveniste identifies the contribution

Introduction

3

of the Oxford philosophers to the understanding of language with a certain operation of freeing it ‘from the conventional frames of reference’ (Benveniste, 1971, p. 231). This remark anticipates Benveniste’s reading of Austin’s notion of the performative in terms of self-referring. Secondly, the text focuses on Austin’s essay published in the proceedings by recalling the distinction between performative and constative (or declarative) speech acts and the notion of the ‘unhappiness’ of the performative (‘the circumstances which can render it null and void’, p. 233). Benveniste attempts to demonstrate that the notion of the performative effectively accounts for the general structure shared by certain kinds of statements. From this perspective, he points out that the performative in general must be understood as an ‘act of authority’ (having the ‘force of law’) insofar as it presupposes a constituted authority or a right to produce a certain statement. ‘A performative utterance that is not an act does not exist. It has existence only as an act of authority’. This authority refers to a constituted subject, ‘the person making the utterance’, that Benveniste identifies, through a remarkable gesture, with the chairman of an institutional session. ‘A meeting of an official nature cannot begin until the chairman has said, la séance est ouverte’.6 He does not inquire into the constitution of the authority or the right of the chair, that is, into the ‘force of law’ as the ultimate foundation (or the performativity) of the performative in general. However, a few paragraphs later, when reckoning with the ‘self-referential’ trait of performative statements, he brings to light a certain operation of self-constituting, which retraces the performative back within a peculiar philosophical tradition. ‘This leads us to recognize in the performative a peculiar quality, that of being self-referential, of referring to a reality that it itself constitutes by the fact that it is actually uttered in conditions that make it an act’. Self-referring, as the self ’s referring to what it constitutes, namely, itself, is absolute and unconditioned self-constituting. To this extent, it accounts for the very authority of the uttering subject, that is, for the very self-constituting (force) of authority itself. By putting into relief this self-referential trait, Benveniste reckons with the performativity of the performative, the autoperformative. He points towards the ultimate ground of singular performatives, the uttering subjectivity positing itself as such: ‘the act is thus identical with the utterance of the act’ (p. 236). In his close reading of Austin’s performative, in the essay ‘Setzung and Ubersetzung’, which first appeared in Diacritics (1981) and, then, published in the study on de Man entitled The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man (1998), Rodolphe Gasché draws attention to Benveniste’s passage on the act of self-referring/self-constituting. He finds in this reading of the performative the

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theoretical elaboration of ‘an act within the act of language’, that is, of ‘a selfreflexive or self-referential act’, which grounds every particular performative and, on a more profound level, language in general. The aim of Gasché’s essay is to measure the effects of de Man’s re-elaboration of Austin’s notion of the performative against a certain European philosophical tradition (from Fichte on). I will focus on his proposal of retracing the performative back to Fichte’s notion of self-positing and, in Heidegger’s language, to the positing of metaphysics. The initial gesture of the essay resonates with Benveniste’s declaration of interest in the Oxford philosophy: Gasché affirms that Austin’s revolution in philosophy consists in isolating the general situation of the ‘total speech act’ to which the constative statements must be referred back as a linguistic function among others.7 Austin demonstrates, he observes, that ‘the assumption by analytical philosophers that the business of language is to make statements upon facts depends on an illicit abstraction of the constative function from the total speech act situation’ (Gasché, 1998, p. 12). The total speech act must be thought as the general structure of the performance of every singular speech act or the performative condition of speech act in general, the autoperformative or the self-referential speech act, the foundation of language in general. Within this insight, Gasché reformulates Austin’s revolution as ‘the attempt to reinscribe the linguistic functions of stating, denominating, describing, referring, etc., within the situation of the performance of these functions’, which ‘determines itself as a performative act, itself no longer referential but which can include within itself, as part of itself, an act of reference’ (pp. 12–13).8 According to Gasché, the first trait of the total speech act (the auto­ performative) amounts to its ‘being enacted by a subject fully present to itself ’ or a ‘self-present “I”’ (Gasché, 1998, p. 13). From the perspective of the total speech act, this enactment does not simply account for the already constituted subject (‘I’) of a singular utterance but for the general situation of performance, that is, for the autoperformative as (the act of) a self-constituting subject (‘I’). Therefore, Gasché observes, the total speech act must be considered as an ‘absolute act’ or ‘pure doing’ (p. 14) to the extent that it is related to a subject absolutely present to itself, and, therefore, that it is the act of a self-constituting subject, or it is itself self-constituting. He advances a definition of the total speech act as the ultimate foundation of language in general: ‘it is a fully present act of a selfasserting subject that is fully present to itself ’. The second trait of the total speech act, in Gasché’s examination, is identified with its illocutionary structure, that is ‘to perform an act in saying something’ and, therefore, the general situation of

Introduction

5

performance. He explains that the priority of the illocutionary in accounting for the structure of the total speech act is due to ‘systematic’ reasons insofar as it is, by definition, a self-referential act (‘an act within the act of language’) encompassing the linguistic function of referring, and, therefore, the self-referring and selfconstituting ground of language. The illocutionary articulation of the total speech act can be detached from the singular act of language only by means of the theoretical operation that Austin’s revolution amounts to.9 As Gasché points out, Austin recognizes ‘a natural break between the illocutionary act and its consequences’ (p. 15), a break which cannot be registered in any physical speech act. Reckoning with this break, a certain reading of the illocutionary brings into focus the non-physical premise of language in general, the general situation of performance, absolute or pure doing, etc.10 In order to name the illocutionary premise of language, Gasché retrieves the overdetermined term of self-affecting, which, in this case, plays out as a trope of self-referring, self-constituting, pure doing and so on, and, at the same time, conjures up a certain reading of the modern philosophical tradition of the absolute subjective ground. The illocutionary, qua self-referential or absolutely constitutive act, can be described as the speculative movement of self-return (in Gasché’s terms, of ‘folding back upon itself ’, ‘reflecting upon itself ’) or self-reappropriation, which Derrida identifies with the Hegelian operation of mastery and takes up as the main target of a certain deconstruction of positing and of the performative.11 From this perspective, Austin’s revolution can be measured, according to Gasché, against a certain understanding of the modern European philosophy: it can be read as ‘the re-introduction of the notion of self-reflection and selfreferentiality’ (p. 18). One can legitimately speak of ‘revolution’, Gasché notes, within the context of the analytical philosophy, whereas, ‘to a reader familiar to the development of continental philosophy’, Austin’s move must result as ‘suspect’, at least, ‘because of the amazing lack of historical comprehension’ (for instance, testified by the fact that ‘Austin does not employ the philosophical terminology of reflexivity’). However, as Gasché’s essay suggests and I will attempt to confirm through my examination of a certain line of deconstruction, Austin’s theory of the performative inaugurates a new, singular field of notions and relations for rewriting the texts of tradition. After the reading of de Man’s disruption of Austin’s theorems, Gasché addresses the metaphysical tradition, in light of which the theory of the performative should be reconsidered, and Heidegger’s reading of this tradition. He proposes to find in Fichte’s elaboration of the notion of positing, a fundamental source of speech act

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theory and, therefore, to outline the ‘positional’ trait of the performative. Fichte’s notion of positing, Gasché explains, accounts for the active positing of being. To this extent, ‘all objective positing’ (as singular positing) ‘presupposes a selfpositing’ (Gasché, 1998, p. 38), namely, the ultimate foundation of all singular positing or the act of a self-positing I. The self of self-positing does not relate to the ‘subject’, which is determined in opposition to a posited object and, thus, to the subject of a particular positing, but to the unconditioned and absolute subjectivity (‘a self (Ich)’) of positing itself qua ‘reflecting’ or ‘returning’ upon itself.12 As Gasché notes, ‘the infinite activity of the self-positing self secures the self ’s being through its reflection of itself into itself ’. Moreover, he evokes the notion of constitution suggesting the affinity between self-positing and selfconstituting: ‘the self has constituted itself in the act of self-positing’. Referring to Fichte’s text, Gasché outlines that self-positing as pure activity grounds every objective positing or activity of a subject: ‘the pure activity of the self is, as such, a condition of any activity that posits an object’.13 Therefore, Fichte’s deduction of self-positing is a ‘genuinely speculative theory’ to the extent that it isolates the ‘non-empirical act (Thathandlung)’ (p. 39) of the unconditioned ground of all objective/subjective positing. As results from Gasché’s brief survey, Austin’s theory of the performative (qua autoperformative) reproduces the theoretical gesture of Fichte’s theory of self-positing. Gasché remarks that this affinity can be reformulated in relation to their notions of presence. Both Fichte’s and Austin’s acts describe a movement of self-reflection or self-return by which they constitute their own present being or presence. In both cases, there is no present being, no presence, before (or without) that movement. ‘Before this inversion of the self [upon itself] there is no self ’. Here, Gasché countersigns Heidegger’s reading of a certain philosophical tradition as ‘a metaphysics of subjectivity’, where he attempts to reinscribe the examined notions of positing and of the performative. According to Heidegger, this tradition presupposes the theory of the unconditioned or unposited foundation of all intentional or linguistic acts (viz., the ‘spirit’) as subjectivity. Positing, then, as the act through which the self asserts itself in its being before all intentionality, or as the act through which the self asserts itself in its being before all intentionality, or as the act that precedes the speech act’s becoming an act of denomination or of communication, is dependent on the conception of the spirit as a subject or of language as the predominant manifestation of the subject’s subjectivity. Such a notion of positing is the positing of metaphysics. (Gasché, 1998, p. 40)

Introduction

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Let me focus on Gasché’s remarks on Heidegger’s elaboration of the ‘original meaning of positing’ in the essay ‘Hegel and the Greeks’ (1958). Heidegger contests Hegel’s ‘dialectical’ and ‘speculative’ reading of the Greek notion of being (‘as the indeterminate immediate’) ‘from the perspective of absolute subjectivity’. As Gasché points out, according to Heidegger the reading of the indeterminateness or abstraction of the Greek being presupposes a certain understanding of the ‘essence of being’ as absolute subjectivity. ‘When Hegel conceives of being as the indeterminate immediate – Heidegger observes – he experiences it as what is posited by a determining and conceiving subject’. Therefore, being is bound to the relationship with a self-positing subject, to the presupposition of an unconditioned and absolute self (in Gasché’s terms, the spirit). In Heidegger’s interpretation, Hegel is acknowledged as unable to set being ‘free into its own essence’ and, therefore, to account for ‘presencing, that is to say, an enduring coming forth from concealment into unconcealment’ (Heidegger, 1998, p. 333). Thus, he points towards a notion of being which is more original than absolute self-positing and, in fact, is allowed by the latter. To this extent, Gasché quotes a long passage from the essay, where Heidegger insinuates the idea of a certain ‘disclosure’ (Gasché translates it ‘unconcealing’) that might have been already ‘at play’ or, perhaps, the very ‘site’ of ‘being’ as ‘the first emergence and first manifestation of spirit’ and, therefore, of absolute subjectivity (p. 332). As Gasché notes, this disclosure might ‘have already taken place’ before (or, I would propose, given place to) self-positing. Referring to Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, he suggests that this movement of unconcealing, more original and freed from self-positing, can be referred back to ‘the Greek sense of thesis’ (Gasché, 1998, p. 43). Therefore, through a different elaboration of the notion of being, here Heidegger dissociates the Greek tradition of thesis from the modern philosophy of positing and opens onto other unconditioned premises. In the following sections, I will touch upon some deconstructive readings of the performative and of positing in general (see, in particular, Derrida and Hamacher) that refuse the break between thesis and positing and take into account the unconditioned exposure of positing to the other and its structural repeatability.

The text of the archi-promise In this section, I propose focusing on Michel de Certeau’s elaboration of the performativity of the performative in the chapter ‘The Circumstances of the

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mystic Utterance’ in The Mystic Fable (1982).14 He conjures up a certain notion of the autoperformative in order to account for the preliminary condition of mystic communication. Derrida’s reading of de Certeau’s text in ‘A Number of Yes’ (1987) allows me to bring into focus his elaboration of the movement of representation or substitution (more precisely, of the Hegelian dialectic of the master and the slave) that is structurally inscribed in the very operation of selfpositing (and of the autoperformative). De Certeau identifies the a priori of dialogical spaces with the volo, which stands for a certain will to speak and read the other. ‘The relation – he observes – is only possible for persons who are entirely resolved, or who wanted it’ (de Certeau, 1995, pp. 165–6). Referring to Meister Eckhart’s understanding of the volo, de Certau proposes to speak of ‘a performative verb’ or a speech act: ‘Not: I would like [. . .], but: I will’ (p. 166). This act is associated to the self-positing of the subject of mystical communication: ‘the position of a subject fit to “hear” mystic discourse’ (p. 167). Ultimately, the volo is the performative speech act of the foundation or inauguration of the textual space where mystic discourse and readings can always be repeated.15 As a certain openness of the reader, the volo must be absolute (i.e., ‘not bound by any precise object’, p. 166). Therefore, the performative speech act ‘I will’ can be rewritten as ‘I want (everything, nothing, God)’. To this extent, it formulates a demand that necessarily overflows the textual space of the mystic discourse: ‘discourse postulates, to be read, a demand it cannot satisfy’. Finally, the volo is the opening and, at the same time, the ‘vanishing point’ of mystic discourses (p. 167). Retrieving a distinction that could be referred back to Nietzsche’s demarcation between erkennen and setzen (or, according to de Man’s interpretation, which I will examine later, between constative and performative), de Certeau describes the volo as the very beginning of science, as a postulate: ‘knowledge is made possible by an initial decision’.16 Furthermore, given the elimination of the predicates and complements of the verb and, therefore, the absolute reference to the presence, he reformulates the volo more generally as ‘origin in the present, the principle of beginning’. In a passage that would deserve further examination, he accounts for absolute wanting as a movement of selfreturn and, at the same time, self-refusal.17 He explains that ‘once this link to a particular [particular object and particular subject] has been removed, the will turns back upon itself and identifies itself with its opposite’. Therefore, ‘to want all’ and ‘not to want anything’ are the same. The volo amounts to the very act of ‘renonciation of one’s will’, to Eckhart’s Gelassenheit or Abegesheidenheit.18 Finally, de Certeau engages in a direct confrontation with Austin’s notion of the

Introduction

9

performative in order to demarcate the performative speech act of the volo. He takes up the essential requisite of the performative as self-referring (‘that act does not postulate a reality or knowledge prior to its utterance’) and, thus, as autoperformative (‘it is the accomplishment of a beginning’). At this point, he remarks the first difference between the ‘I will’ and Austin’s performative, between the ‘yes’ of the volo and the ‘yes’ of a contract. The a priori of mystic communication (qua absolute wanting) presupposes the elimination of all conventions and conditions: this elimination is the very requisite of its felicity. ‘It leaves the field – de Certeau outlines – in which efficacy is measured in terms of the transformation of linguistic acts into social contracts’ (p. 173). Therefore, the very ‘performativity’ of the performative ‘I will’ is its founding or institutive trait. Finally, de Certeau determines this speech act as the act of ‘forgetting oneself ’, which creates the void of pure volition (‘the a priori for the “I”’), and as the absolute ‘yes’ (‘a “yes” as absolute as the volo, without objects, without goals’, p. 174). Now, let me turn to Derrida’s elaboration of the structural repeatability (or iterability) of the absolute performative in the essay ‘A Number of Yes’, written in homage to Michel de Certeau and devoted to the previously commented chapter from The Mystic Fable. Resting on the relation between the volo and the absolute ‘yes’, Derrida describes the latter in terms of ‘absolute performative’, as an unconditioned engagement or promise giving place to any utterance: ‘it [the archi-originary yes] engages one in a kind of archi-engagement, alliance, consent or promise that merges with the acquiescence given to the utterance it always accompanies’ (Derrida, 2008b, p. 238). Being presupposed as ‘the very condition of any determinable performative’, it accounts for the performativity of the performative. And, yet, Derrida remarks that this yes only ‘resembles’ the absolute performative, that it is only a ‘quasi-transcendental’ performative and it is ‘almost at the origin’ (pp. 238–9). Here, he brings to light the process of representation (the detour or the différance of a representative) that is structurally allowed by the archi-engagement or archi-promise of the yes. ‘Let us suppose a first yes, the archi-originary yes that engages, promises and acquiesces before all else’, Derrida writes. This yes is ‘first second’ to the extent that it presupposes another yes, which it comes to confirm, repeat or preserve. From this perspective, it is the representative or the supplement that the other yes has admitted since its positing.19 Therefore, positing is always iterable and always to come: ‘it [the first yes] is originarily, in its very structure, a response’.20 In turn, the supposed first (already second) yes already mobilizes the possibility of its confirmation, repetition, preservation. It originally demands for another yes, for a yes to come.

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Performatives After Deconstruction

As Derrida explains, ‘it must at least in advance be tied to a confirmation in another yes’. There is an original duplication of the yes, an original process of replacement or substitution, différance itself, according to which the yes posits itself by always implying its own iterability and, thus, by always releasing a repeatable substitute (a slave) – that is the very text of the archi- or selfengagement of the yes – and a demand for confirmation, repetition or preservation. The yes originally posits itself by writing or posting (to) itself (the very text of the engagement that it takes with itself).21 Derrida suggests that this process amounts to the ‘institution’ of the I (saying yes), that is, to the selfpositing of the I (mastery, ipseity). Since ‘this “second” yes [the yes of confirmation or the yes to come] is a priori enveloped in the “first” [the archi-originary yes]’, or, in other words, since the first one already allows and demands to be repeated, then, the first yes is already second, a representative or a supplement, the repeatable text of the original (self-)engagement. ‘This last, the first, is doubled in advance’: its absolute positing allows the ‘project’, the ‘mission’ or ‘emission’, the ‘send-off ’ [envoi] of the second, a certain servile condition of the first and of the self-positing of the I.22 Derrida notes that this duplication ‘divides, splits in advance the archi-originary yes’ insofar as it can always be a mechanical repetition or a forgetting. Therefore, the movement of representation (or, a certain master/slave dialectic at play in this movement) constitutes the very chance and, at the same time, threat of the yes and of the foundation of the I. ‘This repetition threatens the yes as well: mechanical repetition, mimicry, thus forgetting, simulacrum, fiction, fable’ (p. 240).

The fore-structure of language In the third essay of Memoires for Paul de Man (1986), entitled ‘Acts’, Derrida recognizes in de Man’s work the ‘movement’ of ‘an unprecedented bringing into play and a subversive reelaboration of Austin’s theorems and of speech act theory’, which he deems ‘indispensable’ for a ‘rigorous deconstruction’ (Derrida, 1986, p. 111).23 In this section, I will take into account de Man’s notion of the performative as the positional perspective of language and Hamacher’s elaborations of this notion. I will focus on the essay ‘Rhetoric of Persuasion (Nietzsche)’ (1975, 1979),24 where de Man refers the performative back to Nietzsche’s critique of the metaphysics as ‘positing’, and on ‘Promises’ (1978, 1979),25 where he draws attention to the promissory structure of language in general. A certain notion of

Introduction

11

the performative is put to work by de Man within his search for ‘the “definition” of text as contradictory interference of the grammatical with the figural field’ (de Man, 1979, p. 270), that is, for the fact (‘aporia’) that a text can be read from ‘such a double perspective’, which, at the same time, makes it possible and impossible, readable and unreadable. As de Man suggests in the conclusions of ‘Rhetoric of Persuasion (Nietzsche)’, the performative and the constative are the ‘two incompatible, mutually self-destructive points of view’ that rhetoric as text admits. Therefore, the performative is conceived as one of the polarities of the aporia that, at the same time, ‘generates and paralyses’ a text (p. 131). In this context, de Man announces a certain ‘compulsion’ to deconstruction and, therefore, to the ‘allegorical narrative’ of the impossibility (and the unreadability) of text, which, unavoidably, relapses into the constitutive aporia of text, for instance, the aporia between performative and constative language.26 However, it is worth anticipating, that, when he deals with the promissory dimension of language in ‘Promises’, de Man thinks of the performative (qua autoperformative) as the ultimate foundation of language or as self-positing language. Let me read, first, de Man’s attempt, in ‘Rhetoric of Persuasion’, to rearticulate Austin’s notion of the performative within Nietzsche’s deconstruction of a certain philosophical tradition of positing, namely, metaphysics, which begins with Aristotle. In his remarks on Nietzsche’s fragment on Aristotle’s ‘law of contradiction’ (de Man, 1979, p. 120), de Man reformulates the distinction between ‘erkennen’ and ‘setzen’ in terms of ‘speech acts’, retrieving Austin’s general distinction between constative and performative utterances. ‘To know’ is characterized as ‘assuming the prior existence of an entity to be known’ and, therefore, ‘not itself predicating attributes but receiving them’ (p. 122). Putting emphasis on the ‘nonpositional’ trait of the predication of attributes in relation to a pre-existent and independent state of things, de Man suggests that ‘to know’ should be identified, perhaps, more appropriately, as ‘a speech fact or a fact that can be spoken’. Therefore, as Nietzsche remarks, the principle of contradiction is the ultimate ground of knowledge, for it secures the self-identity of entities, and, at the same time, it is already knowledge since it presupposes that selfidentity as given. In fact, the fragment reads that ‘one should consider all the more rigorously what presuppositions [Voraussetzungen] already lie at the bottom of it [the principle]’ (p. 120). I will return to this point after addressing de Man’s definition of ‘positing’. Following Nietzsche’s fragment, he observes that it accounts for the ability of language to ‘predicate entities’ and, thus, is ‘a genuine act of speech’. At this point, de Man remarks that, according to a certain

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Performatives After Deconstruction

‘classical’ tradition, the principle of contradiction consists (or must consist) in a fact of speech or a constative statement: ‘it is the ground of all knowledge and can only be so by being a priori given and not “put up”, “gesetzt”’.27 As de Man points out, Nietzsche’s ‘deconstructive’ reading of tradition amounts exactly to ‘showing that this is not the case’, that the ultimate ground of knowledge is a positing or a so-called speech act. De Man explains that the principle of contradiction is a ‘verbal process’ or a ‘trope’ (a metaphor) analogous to ‘conceptualization’, carrying out the ‘substitution of a semiotic’ (in this case, ‘the sensation of things’ or ‘the contingent, metonymic link of the sensation’) ‘with a substantial mode of reference’ (i.e., ‘the knowledge of things’ or ‘the necessary, metaphorical link of the concept’). This unwarranted substitution, which leads to ontological and epistemological claims, is understood by de Man as an uncontrollable ‘aberration’ to the extent that it is inscribed in the very structure of language. ‘It cannot be refuted, but we can be made aware of the rhetorical substratum and of a subsequent possibility of error that escapes our control’ (p. 123). This account of text in terms of ‘rhetorical substratum’ points towards a certain definition of text itself as an aporetic structure allowing for two incompatible perspectives (e.g., grammar and referential meaning, but also predicative and non-predicative language) and, therefore, for deconstruction. De Man proposes a remarkable description of positional speech acts under the perspective of their temporal structure. Positional language is by definition ‘hypothetical’, ‘future-projected’ or ‘prospective’: ‘all “setzen” is “voraussetzen”, positional language is necessarily hypothetical’. However, this description already finds in positional language the uncontrollable aberration of the unwarranted substitution of ‘a pre-positional statement’ for ‘an established, present knowledge’. The temporal structure of positional language must be deconstructed as a trope, a ‘metaleptic reversal’ of ‘past errors’ into ‘future truths’. Ultimately, according to de Man, ‘position’ is structurally ‘aberrant’ (de Man, 1979, p. 124) to the extent that it always carries out that temporal reversal: it sets in motion the deconstructive reading of its aberration. Now, following, with de Man, ‘the play of the verb-root “setzen”’ in Nietzsche’s text, it is possible to verify that the deconstructive reading of the traditional principle is again elaborated in ‘a positional mode’, that is, for instance, it projects a past assumption as a future knowledge.28 This complication seems to refer back to the formulation of the temporal aberration of positional language. However, as de Man suggests, it can be thought more generally as the error that necessarily affects deconstruction qua deconstruction of the referential mode. ‘This complication is characteristic

Introduction

13

for all deconstructive discourse: the deconstruction states the fallacy of reference in a necessarily referential mode’ (p. 125). Perhaps, text in general (including deconstructive texts) is an aberrant positing. De Man introduces Austin’s notion of the performative in order to account for positional or predicative language and, therefore, for a certain structural perspective from which language tout court can be looked at. Interestingly, he uncovers ‘a referential mode’ within performative language and, therefore, the very aberration affecting language as positional language. ‘Performative language is no less ambivalent in its referential function than the language of constatation’ (p. 127). Referring to other Nietzschean texts that would confirm this ambivalence, de Man proposes to understand Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics as a deconstruction of the performative (‘of the illusion that the language of truth (episteme) could be replaced by a language of persuasion (doxa)’) and, therefore, on a more profound level, as a narrative of the structural ‘indecidability’ between the performative and the constative. Perhaps, a deconstruction of the structural complication of deconstruction, that is, of the referential mode of the deconstruction of reference. Finally, the critique of metaphysics would be an elaboration of text as what can be seen from two incompatible and indecidable perspectives. In fact, de Man observes, ‘the episteme has hardly been restored intact to its former glory, but it has not been definitively eliminated either’ (p. 130). Therefore, the notion of the performative, as it is elaborated in this essay, that is, as structurally articulated to the constative and, thus, as structurally ambivalent, accounts for the rhetorical substratum of text in general. In ‘Promises’, de Man conjures up the performative mode of promise in order to reckon with the structure of law, institution and foundation. From this perspective, I anticipate that that mode describes the very structure of the autoperformative as the act of a self-founding subjectivity. De Man is commenting on a passage from the Social Contract (1762), in which Rousseau outlines the future-oriented dimension of legal acts.29 In his reading, he rearticulates Rousseau’s text in the wake of speech act theory by evoking the temporal dimension of positional language. ‘The speech act of the contractual text . . . signals toward a hypothetical future’. ‘Promise’ comes to name this future-projected, prospective or hypothetical language of the social contract. ‘All laws are future-oriented and prospective; their illocutionary mode is that of the promise’. As the occurrence of the term ‘illocutionary’ testifies, de Man develops his confrontation with Austin’s theory taking up the notion of promise as a performative feature.30 The law displays the temporal articulation

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Performatives After Deconstruction

of promissory language according to which there is an irreducible split between the time of the promise and its realization: ‘the present of the promise is always a past with regard to its realization’. This articulation can be retraced back to de Man’s elaboration of the aberration of positional language as substituting past assumptions with future facts. In Rousseau’s text, the promissory structure of law poses the question of ‘the people’ in the name of which law speaks and which is still to come, or, in other terms, of the non-coincidence between the time of the law and that of the people, that is, of the future-projected dimension of the speech act of the law. Rousseau writes: ‘it follows that when the Law speaks in the name of the people, it is in the name of the people of today and not of the past’. First, de Man proposes understanding the temporal split by recalling the aporetic articulation of grammar and referential meaning that constitutes text in general and, thus, by supposing that the split itself can be looked at from the perspective of a nonreferential and non-applicable language. Therefore, ‘the eternal present of the contract’ would never ‘apply as such to any particular present’ like ‘the people of today’ (de Man, 1979, p. 273). But, he takes his investigation of the temporal articulation of the law further by reformulating it as the impossibility of the ‘état present’ of the people of today. At this point, it becomes evident that, through the reading of Rousseau’s text, de Man is reckoning with the operation of the selffounding or self-constituting of the law (or the people) and, thus, with the split admitted in the operation itself and dividing the law (or the people) from itself. Promising is the (speech) act accounting for this operation; it is autoperformative or self-promising, in which the self can be thought as law, people, general will, etc. Following Rousseau’s text, de Man explains the impossibility of the people of today with its being ‘voiceless’. According to Rousseau, the question is to find ‘an organ with which it can state the will of the people’, that is, to fill the structural division found in the operation of self-constituting. Rousseau continues by suggesting the affinity between the mode of promising and that of announcing: ‘who will give it the necessary foresight to shape the people’s actions and to announce them in advance?’ In other words, how can the people constitute itself, namely, what it is not constituted yet, through the speech act of the law? From this perspective, de Man seems to suggest that promising would consist in the self ’s giving itself the organ required to articulate the promise. The use of the term ‘restoring’ (‘the promise that will restore its voice and its sight’) evokes once again a movement of self-return or self-reappropriation. Here, de Man is outlining the promissory articulation of the self-constituting act of the people formulated

Introduction

15

by Rousseau in the following terms: ‘the people subject to the Law must be the authors of the Law’. Finally, de Man remarks, the situation is without solution, ‘only a subterfuge can put this paralysis in motion’. According to Rousseau, this subterfuge is represented by the ‘lawgiver’ who, being an individual, can ‘give’ a face/sight to the people to come and, therefore, unblock the aporia of selfconstituting. However, de Man remarks, the lawgiver is not simply an individual but also a rhetorical figure or a trope of the very operation of self-constituting, re-turn and reappropriation. ‘But this individual is also a rhetorical figure, for his ability to promise depends on the metaleptic reversal [I outline ‘reversal’] of cause and effect’. The lawgiver who can articulate the promise is exactly the self or the people that constitutes itself and, thus, its right to do it or to promise, the very possibility of its self-constituting. As Rousseau’s text puts it, ‘men should be, prior to the laws, what they are to become through them’. Let me remark that, while the metaleptic reversal is understood in ‘Rhetoric of Persuasion’ as the general structure of positional language, here it accounts for the aporetic operation of the self-constituting, self-promising or self-positing of language. At this point, Rousseau finds in God (‘the forceful genius that presides over enduring laws’) the ultimate ground of that movement, of the autoconstitution of the people and the law. It is only within a teleological horizon that the people or the law can be constituted, that the promise can be articulated. ‘The temporal and causal reversal that puts the realization of the promise before its utterance – de Man points out – can only occur within a teleological system oriented toward the convergence of figure and meaning’. With this remark, he returns to the initial exposition of the temporal dimension of promissory language as the noncoincidence of the time of articulation with that of actualization and suggests rereading it as the very aporia of self-constituting (qua self-promising). In this context, ‘the notion of the divine authority’ consists in a traditional attempt to remove this aporia, which, instead, a certain deconstruction of the performative commits itself to take into account.31 Now, de Man observes, despite the deconstruction of promising at work in the Social Contract, this text articulates further promises and can be looked at from the perspective of a promissory mode. ‘Yet it promises a great deal. For example . . .’ (de Man, 1979, p. 274). This possibility is determined as uncontrollable and unmasterable; perhaps, it attains the very structure of language tout court as positional, future-oriented, prospective and, ultimately, promissory (or, somehow, metaleptic): ‘this model is a fact of language over which Rousseau himself has no control’. Text in general is promising or promissory to the extent that it constitutes or promises itself, or,

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Performatives After Deconstruction

in other words, it gives itself the right to constitute or promise itself.32 Promising is already absolute self-promising. At this point, de Man retrieves Heidegger’s expression ‘Die Sprache spricht’ by remarking the promissory dimension of language and, therefore, by proposing to reformulate it as ‘Die Sprache verspricht (sich)’. This version of Heidegger’s formula can be read as the fundamental proposition of self-founding language, which is necessarily self-promising and, therefore, reappropriating its own ability to articulate promises. ‘Die Sprache verspricht (sich); to the extent that it is necessarily misleading, language just as necessarily conveys the promise of its own truth’ (p. 277). In my reading, this operation of rewriting testifies that de Man’s elaboration of the performative mode of the promise points towards a deconstruction of a certain tradition of self-founding and self-positing. In the essay ‘Lectio. On de Man’s Imperative’ (first published in  1989, and, then, included in Hamacher, 1999b), Hamacher evokes de Man’s elaboration of the notion of the imperative as an investigation into the original constitution of language. Furthermore, referring to his reading of the promissory structure of law, he finds in the promise the very movement of the imperative and, thus, of that original constitution. In ‘Rhetoric of Persuasion’, de Man determines Nietzsche’s deconstructive reading of Aristotle’s principle of contradiction as ‘an imperative concerning that which should count as true’. He understands the notion of the imperative as a performative mode implying a certain failure or inability ‘to do things’ in the present of the utterance itself. ‘Something one has failed to do can become feasible again only in the mode of compulsion; the performative correlate of “I cannot” is “I [or you] must”’ (de Man, 1979, p. 123). It seems that, here, ‘compulsion’ refers to the very speech act of the imperative. According to de Man, positional language presupposes this imperative mode and, thus, the temporal dimension by which language itself demands or compels what, in fact, cannot be done. Hamacher proposes reading the notion of the imperative as the very scene of the constitution of language and, therefore, as the process of self-constituting (or self-positing) language. Language constitutes (or posits) itself by demanding or compelling that there is a language, that ‘there shall be language, a language, one language’, as Hamacher suggests. This is what is commanded, first of all, ‘in all demands’ (Hamacher, 1999b, p. 210), that is, in all positings of language. Therefore, the imperative of language is the ultimate ground of all linguistic act, the very autoperformative of language itself. As Hamacher points out, ‘“language” is not to be understood as a given structure or a teleological process but as the imperative that there ought to be

Introduction

17

(one) language’. Every singular linguistic act implies the need and demand of language itself. Perhaps, one can think of a ‘linguistic function’, the very scene of the imperative, claiming for the independent subject of a linguistic act. ‘We do not make use of language without first being in need of it and therefore demanding it – and with it ourselves’ (Hamacher, 1999b, p. 211).33 The principle of language qua imperative is not a transcendental condition of possibility but a demand or a compulsion allowed by the condition itself. Paraphrasing the above-quoted passage from de Man, Hamacher remarks that the ‘it must be’ of language also means ‘it cannot be’. And, therefore, speaking is not simply speaking of language, that is, presupposing the absolute constitution of language, but also admitting the imperative structure of that constitution. In other words, speaking precedes the very constitution of language and remains suspended at the demand of it. ‘Speaking – and therefore speaking of language – we are still speaking before language, before its arrival, and do not stop speaking it away from us’ (p. 212). Here, I single out the reference to a certain fore-structure of language, which accounts for the scene of its self-constitution. This reference is developed further when Hamacher proposes retracing the performative of language back to the reading of the structure of the law elaborated by de Man in ‘Promises’. First, that imperative is assumed as a law of language and, thus, as the speech act of its constitution. ‘The proleptic trait of the imperative turns into a law – a law of language’. But this means that the imperative as the law of language articulates itself as a promise: it articulates the promise of language. (Self-)Promising comes to account for the very structure of the autoconstitution of language. Language speaks before or ahead of itself in the performative mode of promise, it promises itself. ‘Language is promised in the law of language . . . is “foresworn”, “forespoken”, spoken in advance of itself, spoken before it, as constituted, can speak’ (p. 215). Let me examine more closely the reading of de Man’s account of the promise as the speech act of the law (of language). Hamacher remarks that the promise describing the imperative of language, the promise of language, is the promise of the ultimate ground of all individual, linguistic act. ‘The imperative of language, of reading . . . contains the promise of a future language, a future understanding, in such a way that the formal conditions of all individual acts of understanding are outlined in this project’. This project can be called ‘transcendental’ to the extent that it concerns the autoconstitution of language. Hamacher re-elaborates de Man’s argument about the metaleptic movement of the speech act of the law and, more in general, of self-constituting, to account for the transcendental project of

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Performatives After Deconstruction

language. This transcendental character, he observes, implies that movement to the extent that it amounts to the constative description of a matter of fact (that there is language) which is the very content of the promise (there will/must be language). In other words, it amounts to the speech act of a self-constituting (self-promising or self-demanding) language. ‘The performative act of promising a possible understanding must be structured as an epistemologically illegitimate figure, as metalepsis . . . For what is announced by the promise only for the future is asserted to be already effective in the present’. In de Man’s language, the promise of language can be looked at from these two incompatible perspectives. Hamacher suggests that this rhetorical figure (‘of confounding a future with a present’, p. 217) describes the very movement of all logic or dialectic of presupposition, that is, of self-positing. In Hamacher’s reading, de Man’s investigation into the metaleptic figure of the absolute self-constitution (of the people) becomes an investigation into the original constitution of language and understanding. It uncovers the aporia between the constative and the performative, which is required by that constitution and, at the same time, paralyses it. So the constative moment of disclosing a possible understanding is not only in constant conflict with its performative function – and thus makes the establishment of the law itself into an illegitimate act – but this unavoidable and irreconcilable conflict within the original constitution of understanding becomes valid as an endless suspension of this very constitution. The interlacing of constative with performative brackets both: the presupposition of a possible understanding could be formulated only under the condition that it is given, and is givenness only under the condition of presupposition. (Hamacher, 1999b, p. 218)

The aporia, or conflict, within the promise of language operates simultaneously as a condition of possibility and of suspension. It accounts for an irreducible oscillation between the ‘presupposition’ and the ‘givenness’ of a self-constituting or self-promising language. It makes the transcendental and original project ‘a fiction that can neither be proved nor verified’. Consequently, this situation of structural suspension concerns the promise as the speech act of the law of language and, therefore, the imperative of language. Hamacher reconsiders de Man’s rewriting of Heidegger’s sentence ‘Die Sprache spricht’ within the perspective of this examination of the promissory movement of the transcendental and original project of language. Heidegger’s sentence is interpreted as the constative description of a fact, an already constituted (and self-constituting) language or the very ground of all linguistic act. In other words, the sentence simply declares the original project of language. ‘Heidegger’s apophthegm “language

Introduction

19

speaks” still courts the misunderstanding that there is an already constituted language and that this language could correspond to its own Being’ (p. 218). As Hamacher’s note suggests, the (auto)constitution of language unfolds itself as the performative mode of the imperative and, thus, as the law of language and the speech act of the promise. It betrays a certain fore-structure according to which language constitutes itself by demanding or promising itself and, therefore, by remaining suspended in this demand or promise. Therefore, Hamacher proposes to read de Man’s rewriting as a more profound insight into the structure of the transcendental project of language. First, there can only be a promise of (a not yet constituted) language. ‘As finite, language is never already constituted but is always in the process of its constitution; it is language always only as promised’.34 Second, this promise remains always paralysed by its own aporetic structure. Therefore, there can only be a suspended promise of language. ‘Since its promise can never be fulfilled by itself as promised, this promise, which is also the suspension of language, brackets itself ’ (Hamacher, 1999b, p. 219). At this point, let me return to a remarkable footnote on the deconstruction of the original project of language. Hamacher refers to a certain ‘play of the afformative in language’, which, in my examination below, I propose reading as the very deconstruction (heteronomy and repeatability) of the autoperformative. The afformative is allowed by the original constitution of language, which, somehow, the autoperformative is unable to account for. If the very constitution of language is not only one speech act among others but is the performative, the formative par excellence, and if the operation remains suspended and thus keeps all its dependent performatives suspended as a result of its fore-structure . . . then the “operation” cannot be thought simply under the rubric of performative alone. (Hamacher, 1999b, p. 218)

The transcendental project of language, as it has been described through the reading of de Man’s text, only admits an operation that can explain its aporetic structure and, therefore, its remaining suspended. According to Hamacher, this operation must be thought as ‘its condition of formation and as de-formation, as pure positing and as deposing, ex-position – as afformative’ (Hamacher, 1999b, p. 218). Here, he does not develop the relation between the afformative and the autoperformative of the transcendental project. Rather, he seems to detach ‘pure positing’ from a certain thinking of self-positing (self-constituting, self-promising, etc.) and to anticipate that, as simultaneously ‘de-posing’, it prevents self-positing from closing upon itself (as, I would suggest, a certain unconditioned exposure to the other and a certain structural repeatability of self-positing). The thinking of this ‘pure positing’

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Performatives After Deconstruction

is the ultimate development of the deconstruction of the autoperformative and of the original constitution of language. I will comment on some key articulations of Hamacher’s notion of the afformative in the following section. However, in the following, I am referring to an earlier text in which he elaborates the afformative function of language in relation to the fore-structure of language. In a footnote to the essay on Benjamin’s Critique of Violence entitled ‘Afformative, Strike’ (1991–92), Hamacher introduces the notion of the afformative within a certain reading of the original constitution of language. Notably, in this text, he demarcates a specific tradition of thinking the pre- or fore-structure of language, represented by de Man and Derrida (‘following Heidegger’, Hamacher, 1992, p. 1143, he suggests), from the theory of the (auto)performative as the act of an absolute subjectivity positing itself. First, Hamacher points out that his examination is concerned with the performativity of the performative or the autoperformative, that is, with the speech act of the conventions or institutions which, according to a certain tradition, the performative requires as pre-established conditions of validity (‘only those [performatives] capable of instituting such conditions themselves’, p. 1142). On a more profound level, Hamacher adds, the autoperformative accounts for the ultimate foundation of language, the very ground of all linguistic act. (Here, the performative is always associated to the activity of positing, instituting, founding, constituting, etc.) The autoperformative is the very act of a selfconstituting or self-positing language. ‘It [language] posits itself in an act of absolute autothesis’. I propose to read this perspective as the elaboration of de Man’s remarks on positional language. As I pointed out in my examination of ‘Lectio’, this reading of the autoperformative of language brings to light the irreducible fore-structure of language, its articulation as/of a transcendental project or promise. Ultimately, the autoperformative of language rests on the aporia between the constative and the performative, givenness and presupposition, which is the very condition of its possibility and suspension. ‘In order to be language, it must always presuppose itself . . . language would permanently – and this is the sign of its finitude – announce itself, speak before itself ’ (p. 1142). The transcendental performative of language, that is, the performative of its constitution or foundation, draws together the possibility of ‘a language which is always arriving’ and the very paralysis of this possibility, since it is ‘always yet to come’ and, therefore, ‘never language itself’. That performative is the very promise of language, the promise of a self-promising language, which, at the same time, is a paralysed promise, that does not promise at all. ‘The absolute performative of language would be the promise of language’. This promise is the original constitution of language, the very ground of all linguistic act:

Introduction

21

‘language speaks precisely – Hamacher notes – in that it promises’. As he suggests above, the promissory structure of language accounts for its very ‘finitude’, that is, for a certain function of self-positing language, which cannot ever be encompassed by language itself and, thus, interrupts it (in another vocabulary, I would speak of a certain being-for-the-other of language itself).35 Hamacher evokes a certain line of deconstruction referring to the already recalled texts on the promise by de Man and Derrida36 and characterized by a singular concern with ‘the pre-structure of the performative trait of language’, what he names the promise of language. As Hamacher anticipated, the promise of language is always the promise of promise or non-verifiable promise, perhaps, non-promise, to the extent that ‘the fact [I outline, ‘the fact’] that it is infinitely yet-to-come coincides with its infinite nonarrival’. Therefore, the promissory structure of the autoperformative of language entails a certain non-performativity or non-performative operation. In Hamacher’s terms, there must be a linguistic dimension which does not allow language itself, as the autoperformative, the act of self-positing language, to fold upon itself, which, in fact, resists the movement of the self ’s folding upon itself. Towards this dimension, which Hamacher names ‘afformative’, a certain deconstruction of the autoperformative should ultimately point: ‘a dimension in which language itself does not correspond to itself as act and in which, instead of acting, language abstains from any action’. Therefore, the autoperformative of language is originally finite and repeatable since it always opens onto a non-encompassable dimension of language, an absolutely other. Perhaps, it is always ‘exposed’ tout court. Hamacher uses the term ‘exposed’ to account for this opening of the performative onto a certain ‘abyss of language’; yet, I would suggest, the term can be used absolutely, as a sign of the original finitude and repeatability of language itself. This abyssal dimension of language, which is irreducible to any self-positing, could perhaps be thought of as a certain unconditioned unposited which articulates the structural traits of pure positing and de-posing. Therefore, the autoperformative is necessarily ‘exposed’ to this unposited. Finally, as Hamacher notes, ‘afformation means also exposing to the unposited’: it names the linguistic function of the exposure (to a certain unposited or abyss).

The aporia of positing This section focuses on Hamacher’s attempt to think the afformative as the structural dimension of the exposure of (self-)positing to a certain unconditioned

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unposited. In the following text, I aim to demonstrate that this attempt mobilizes a rigorous elaboration of the tradition and the vocabulary of positing by taking into account the removed functions of de-posing, ex-pos(-it-)ing and of the unposited.37 To this extent, a certain line of deconstruction, the deconstruction of the autoperformative, can be read as theoretically and terminologically welded to a line of modern European thought, the tradition of positing from Kant on. In the following reading of Hamacher’s text, one can touch upon the deconstruction of the theory of the performative as a thinking of the unconditioned exposure (and, as I would suggest, through Derrida, of the iterability) of positing. In this perspective, my examination will centre on Hamacher’s elaboration of the aporia of positing in his readings of Fichte’s proposition of self-identity and Hegel’s speculative inversion. In the opening essay of his book Premises. Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan (1999), entitled ‘Premises’, Hamacher brings into focus the movement of finite understanding. First, he evokes the traditional representation of this movement as the act of ‘stabilization’ of ‘the incomprehensible’ (‘the foreign’ or ‘the irreducibly other’) into an ‘object of representation’ and, therefore, as the mastery of the subject. The irreducibly other is ‘made into a cognized, controlled, reduced other of this subject’. In other words, the act of understanding is the very ‘constitution’ of the object and, therefore, of the master/ subject, its autoconstitution. Hamacher remarks that this so-called movement of understanding describes a ‘leap’ to the extent that it goes from ‘an understanding exposed to the incomprehensible’ to ‘a self-consciousness that posits its object’ (Hamacher, 1999b, p. 5), from the exposure to what, by definition, cannot be comprehended to the mastery of a self-positing subjectivity. Therefore, he proposes to discuss this leap through the reading of Hegel’s account of Greek mantics as ‘intuition of nature’ (proceeding from a certain wonder, thaumazein), as it is elaborated in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837). Hegel finds the beginning of mantics in thaumazein, that, according to Aristotle, is also the beginning of philosophy and which Aristotle himself defines in Metaphysics (982b, 12) as an aporon, that is, as Hamacher explains, ‘a place without any outlet, an impasse, something incomprehensible’. Therefore, the starting point of the movement of the understanding of nature is an aporia, a certain relation to an irreducibly other. But, it implies that this relation cannot ever be sublated and, thus, that the understanding of nature is always accompanied by the relation itself: ‘in every one of its steps philosophy [understanding, in general] remains bound to it [the aporia]’. Hegel seems well aware of this point insofar as he accounts for

Introduction

23

the intuition of nature as self-positing. At the beginning, he sees a relation of the spirit to the natural of nature as ‘to something that is at first foreign’. According to Hamacher, it is the very relation to the aporia, what cannot ever be sublated, and, thus, the very beginning of finite thinking and understanding, a certain structural exposure. The aporia is determined as ‘a non-given, something that holds itself back, something foreign to which spirit entertains no “positive” relation’, perhaps, a certain unposited to which understanding is, by definition, exposed. However, as Hamacher suggests, there is a ‘nevertheless’ at some point, which announces the exchange of perspectives: from the relation with the aporia to the positive relation of a self-positing spirit with the object. Hegel writes: ‘Greek spirit relates to . . . something to which it nevertheless has the intimating confidence and the faith that the natural bears something within itself that would be friendly to spirit, something to which the spirit could relate in a positive manner’ (Hamacher, 1999b, p. 6). As the reference to a certain ‘positive’ relation specifies, what the natural bears within itself is posited, or, as Hamacher suggests, ‘presupposed’, and, thus, requires the very position or the mastery of a self-positing spirit. This position consists in the performative of supposition or faith to the extent that the ultimate ground of position itself is a self-positing subjectivity.38 In other words, the spirit recognizes itself the authority, the power or the credit to posit its object and, therefore, to master the foreign. ‘It is this supposition of faith – Hamacher notes – that turns the foreign into something friendly’ (‘a “positive” relation’). The movement of supposition and, thus, of self-positing does not absolve the spirit from the aporetic relation to the foreign or the irreducibly other, yet this relation is the very condition of that movement. It can be read as the structure that allows for the spirit to fold back upon itself, for the very self-reflexivity of the self-positing spirit: in Hamacher’s terms, ‘the resistance from which experience must rebound and turn back on itself ’.39 This structural resistance opens up ‘positionality itself ’, that is, a certain economy where the object is only ‘the positing and self-positing of the spirit’ (p. 7). Therefore, the operation of understanding the natural of nature describes the circular path (or economy) of the self-return and self-reappropriation of the spirit, that always admits the relation to the aporia, what, in Derrida’s terms, can be called restricted economy or the speculative engagement of the self with itself.40 In fact, the spirit begins with its relation to the aporia and, thus, by positing the object, it posits itself, its mastery; to this extent it returns to or reappropriates itself within a circle (perhaps, I would suggest, writing or posting

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itself). Hamacher determines positionality in the following passage: ‘The path of spirit . . . leads it from its presupposition of an absolute other to this other as other of itself, and in this way it returns spirit to itself ’. It is worth remarking that Hamacher speaks of the relation to aporia in terms of ‘presupposition’ anticipating the distinction between the presupposition of the positing and the self-positing of the spirit, the self-presupposition, and the structural condition of its exposure to a certain unposited.41 The presupposition of aporia accounts for what provokes understanding by ‘remaining incomprehensible’ and, therefore, for what makes understanding ‘incomprehensible’, that is, unable to comprehend itself if not always exposed. Hamacher reformulates these questions affirming ‘the double law’ of understanding: ‘the law of hermeneutic reduction’, which corresponds to stabilization, appropriation, mastery, etc., and ‘the dismaying law of de-posing’, which prevents any position, understanding and so on. He points out that understanding is possible only if it does not understand (itself). In fact, by understanding, it does not understand the aporia, the non-understandable, its very origin or condition; whereas, by holding on the aporia, it does not understand yet. Therefore, Hamacher concludes, ‘understanding is possible only between these two impossibilities – the hermeneutic parousia of spirit in its autoposition and de-posing’ (p. 10), which amounts to saying that, in de Man’s terms, it admits an aporetic condition of possibility.42 At this point, let me draw attention to the beginning of the essay ‘The Second of Inversion’ (1999), where Hamacher finds the ‘greatest performance’ of Hegel’s speculative inversion ‘in death as the abstract negation of entities as such’. He recalls the overdetermined passage from the Preface of Phenomenology of Spirit about the ‘magical force’ of the spirit performing the speculative inversion of the negative into Being. This passage is the key source of a certain French tradition of Hegelianism from Kojève on.43 According to the circular path of self-presupposing described above, Hamacher accounts for the movement of self-showing or self-positing subjectivity taking its departure from an aporetic condition of dismemberment or negativity and reappropriating itself. The speculative inversion would consist in ‘turning its own non-reality into Being’ (Hamacher, 1999b, p. 339) and, thus, in the absolute position of the spirit. Let me quote the seminal text of the Phenomenology’s Preface: Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched

Introduction

25

by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass onto something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and dwelling with it. This dwelling with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. (Hegel, 1977, p. 19)

Hamacher observes that what makes the inversion possible and, therefore, what grants the magical force of spirit, is the ‘transformation of death into something dead’, ‘into a face’, that is, a finite determination or a determinate negation (in Derrida’s vocabulary, a certain deferring of the self-destructive desire of the master, a certain self-writing).44 Ultimately, this transformation is a perfor­mative supposition and autosupposition. To this extent, Hamacher speaks also of the conversion of ‘the negation of the I into the pure energy of the I’. Remarkably, the speculative inversion, as Hamacher notes, inheriting a gesture typical of de Man’s deconstruction, can be thought as the rhetorical figure of prosopopeia in the sense that it substitutes the abstract negation of death with a finite determination.45 Death as such has always already been reappropriated within the circular path of the spirit, the restricted economy of sense and life, or a speculative selfengagement. Somehow, from Derrida’s perspective, the prosopopeia can be seen as the text of this engagement, the contract that the spirit writes or sends to itself and that calls for preservation and the credit of others. Perhaps, I dare remark, the irreducible alterity of death is the very origin of that engagement, the structural condition of all determination (or prosopopeia) and of self-positing I, namely, of positionality itself; it has already given place to it. ‘The abyssal shapelessness of death’ is the unposited to which every shape or positing and, thus, the selfpositing ground of all shape and positing are structurally exposed. In what follows, I return to the interrupted reading of ‘Premises’ to trace out Hamacher’s elaboration of a certain modern line of thinking ‘positing’ from Kant to Heidegger, which can be compared to the previously examined elaboration by Gasché. I will linger on this passage of Hamacher’s essay in order to reconsider the position of deconstruction (as the thought of the aporia of positing and of de-posing) in relation to the modern philosophical tradition. Hamacher evokes Kant’s thesis on Being as an absolute position (Position oder Setzung), that is elaborated in the treatise The One Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763), as the initial formula ‘for the fundamental thought of modern metaphysics’ and, therefore, I add, for a certain tradition of positing, in

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which Hegel’s speculative inversion and, finally, the entire line of deconstruction I am reckoning with can be reinscribed. Kant’s text reads: ‘Existence [Dasein] is the absolute position of a thing. [. . .] If a thing is considered posited in and for itself, then Being [Sein] is as much as existence’. First, Hamacher observes that Kant understands the absolute position as the pre-predicative and relationless presupposition of the Dasein of a thing and, therefore, of Sein in general: ‘it refers purely to the existence of “a thing in and for itself ” regardless of all relations to possible predicates’. Second, he explains that the relationless and absolute presupposition must presuppose in turn a relation to a subjectivity (‘the subject’). As the Critique of Pure Reason suggests, in relation to the modalities of Being, this subjectivity is ‘the subject of knowledge’ (Hamacher, 1999b, p. 11). Therefore, Hamacher comments, the absolute position is ‘the original act of the cognitive subject’. In other words, the absolute positing of Being, or of the existence of a thing, is ‘a positing of knowledge’ of the cognitive subject. This positing is the absolute foundation of Being and of the existence of a thing. It is worth noting that Hamacher accounts for this original act of positing as a ‘dictate’ of a subjective and self-dictating consciousness, as the (speech) act of a self-constituting or self-recognizing master. Finally, looking at the theory of positing as the cornerstone of Kant’s ontology, he proposes speaking of ‘auto-’ and ‘onto-’ theseology (p. 12). Hamacher attempts to account for the articulation of pure positing and de-posing, namely, the afformative, which is structurally admitted by autoposition and, yet, being irreducible to self-positing, necessarily interrupts its circular movement. He shows that the unconditioned positing cannot simply be self-positing and, therefore, that it is necessary to detach self-positing itself from what he calls the afformative dimension of positing. First, the unconditioned positing, that is, the very auto-presupposition (spirit, etc.) ‘must be without presupposition and a subjectless positing’. However, ‘by positing itself, it already posits itself, and so the positing that it is first supposed to perform must already allow itself to be presupposed’. As Hamacher points out, this presupposition cannot be reappropriated within a certain positionality or mastery of positing to the extent that it is allowed by the very movement of self-positing. It accounts for the being of absolute positing ahead of itself, for its fore-structure, for the fact that positing promises itself, it is never yet arrived and, therefore, never arrives, and so on. ‘Such an allowance, admission, or concession of a presupposition – Hamacher notes – can no longer be thought according to the logic of positing’. Rather, it is the very origin or structural condition of self-positing: perhaps,

Introduction

27

what has already given place to and, at the same time, suspended self-positing. Following Hamacher’s reading, it can be thought as ‘the opening that remains independent of the positing’ (Hamacher, 1999b, p. 13), that, by definition, resists it, perhaps, as an exposure which is necessarily related to an aporia or an absolutely other (as the very iterability of self-positing). More in general, the movement of self-positing opens onto another which ‘withdraws from the power, the faculty and the possibility of positing’, which, therefore, prevents any original positing from reflecting or bending back on itself, or, in other words, from being ‘performed’. Ultimately, this opening is the structural difference dividing the original (self-)positing from itself: ‘it is in need of a difference with respect to itself that can under no condition be reduced to a thetic act’. Therefore, the (auto)performative of faith and supposition finds in a selfpositing subjectivity, in the spirit, its ultimate foundation only if the latter has already admitted a certain difference with respect to itself. The original positing is self-founding at the very condition of opening onto an absolutely other, which is also the condition of the infelicity (perhaps, restlessness) of its performative.46 As Hamacher explains, ‘only by allowing something other than itself can it then grant admission to itself ’ (p. 14). What is at stake is the very origin of absolute positing, a certain thaumazein, a relation to aporia, which can at no moment be conjured away. From this perspective, Hamacher’s reading of the fore-structure of the original positing can be retraced back to his reading of the origin of Greek mantics and, more generally, to Aristotle’s idea of the beginning of philosophy. It is worth remarking that the unposited aporia is also called ‘non-positing’ as it resists positionality in general, it does not collaborate to the positing and the self-positing of spirit; rather, it abstains from them. ‘Positing must leave out to a non-positing’. The structural concession to non-positing consists in a condition of possibility and of interruption for the original positing and, thus, for positing in general: it opens up its very possibility and, at the same time, remains nonencompassed. A certain deconstruction of modern metaphysics must take into account this condition of the original positing and its implications. Hamacher proposes reformulating the very structure of the original positing in light of this condition. ‘It must not be able to be what it must be able to become. It can claim to be only in the form of a demand for Being, not as a thetic Being but only as an imperative “Be!”’ Therefore, the autoperformative of the original positing must be understood as the performative mode of the imperative. From this perspective, de Man’s reading of the imperative dimension of positional language (‘it must’ and ‘it cannot’) can be understood

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as the ultimate term of a certain deconstruction of the tradition of positing. At the same time, as Hamacher suggests in evoking the mode of a ‘dictate’, this imperative can be taken as a reformulation of mastery as the autoperformative of a self-dictating I.47 As de Man brings into focus in his reading of the imperative, it accounts for the future-oriented dimension of language and positing in general. Hamacher seems to find in the imperative the very finitude of positing, that is, its exposure to an unposited or non-positing other and, ultimately, the movement that supplements or represents it. ‘Finite reason cannot ground itself ’ (Hamacher, 1999b, p. 14), he concludes. In the tradition of positing supposed by Hamacher, Schelling’s line ‘Be! That is the supreme demand of criticism’ stands for ‘the most pregnant formula of the [already, I dare add] Kantian aporia of positing’, insofar as it uncovers the imperative mode of the original positing and the implications of its finitude. ‘The principle of being’ is transformed into ‘the unfounded demand for Being’, where ‘unfounded’ alludes to the fact that it is the very demand or imperative of foundation. The effects of the imperative mode of the original positing or of foundation are that ‘from its inception, positing is exposed to something else’ or it is ‘exposed positing’ tout court (‘it is thus ex-position’, p. 15), the Aussetzung der Setzung, since the exposure is necessarily related to the absolutely other, the aporia and so on.48 Finally, the deconstruction of the fundamental thought of modern metaphysics is a rearticulation of the vocabulary of positing taking into account the functions of the structural prefixes un-, non-, ex- and de-. This rearticulation brings about a certain re-elaboration of the notion of ‘premise’, which, according to the metaphysical tradition described above, the autoperformative of the original positing should account for. In fact, at the end of the essay, Hamacher observes: ‘Just as exposure can no longer be thought in accordance with the logic of positing and that of Being conceived as position, it is no longer possible to think of the “pre” of this “premise” simply as something that still “belongs” to positing’ (p. 38). Now, let me conclude by focusing on Hamacher’s early encounter with Fichte’s theory of positing. In the essay ‘Position exposed. Friedrich Schlegel’s poetological Transposition of Fichte’s absolute Proposition’ (first presented in  1979 and, then, revised and included in Premises), he examines Fichte’s ‘fundamental’ proposition (which he identifies as ‘the principle of modern ontology’, Hamacher, 1999b, p. 237) by attempting to think of the pure positing (and de-posing) – a certain afformative function – that is structurally admitted by the self-positing subjectivity.49 Here, the key concepts of speech act theory, the constative and the performative, are conjured up and rearticulated so as to account for the structural

Introduction

29

‘inconsistency’ of Fichte’s proposition. At the beginning of his examination, following Fichte’s exposition, Hamacher demarcates the proposition ‘I    I’ from the ‘continuum’ of conditioned propositions to the extent that it is a performance of absolute and unconditioned positing. ‘It performs – Hamacher explains – the unconditioned, pre-logical positing that is not itself posited because it is pure positing, sheer thesis with no other actor and no other content than itself ’. The proposition is ‘not itself posited’ and, thus, does not allow by definition any pre-structure or presupposition (of itself). Therefore, it is ‘fundamental’ as it is the self-positing ground of the continuum of particular propositions: ‘a proposition in which the ground is posited for all thinkable propositions as long as it posits itself as this ground’. Hamacher suggests measuring this proposition against Kant’s onto-theseology according to which Being is absolute position. ‘In contrast to Kant’, he notes, Being is not a position of the subject of knowledge but ‘is itself the position of the self ’ (p. 231), and, thus, self-positing. In other words, the proposition does not presuppose any subject (‘it is the subject itself as mere speaking’, pp. 231–2) or place (‘it cannot be posed from somewhere outside’, p. 231) from which it would be pronounced. (Therefore, from the perspective of language, the fundamental proposition is mere and unconditioned speaking as well as sheer thesis.) Finally, it consists in the positing or the accomplishment of the Being as I and of the I as Being. At this point, Hamacher brings to light a certain structural asymmetry within the sentence ‘I    I’ by acknowledging that ‘in the very proposition the proposition itself is posited as posited’, that is, as self-positing and, therefore, as self-presupposing, etc. According to Fichte, he remarks, this double perspective from which it is possible to look at the fundamental proposition, unconditioned positing and being posited, must be understood in terms of ‘a unity of active positing and of the resulting fact of the I’ (which can be identified with the very movement of reflection). Fichte’s text reads: ‘the “I am” is an expression of both an enactment and a deed done [namely, Thathandlung]’. Following Hamacher’s commentary, the fundamental proposition draws together, by definition, the incompatible elements of ‘pure positing’ (or ‘the action of the proposition’) and ‘positivity’ (or ‘the fact of the proposition’, p. 232), that is, of absolute and unconditioned positing and of the self-positing ground or subjectivity. Here, Hamacher seems to retrieve de Man’s account of the aporia of text in general, according to which it can be looked at, simultaneously, from the double perspective of grammar and referential meaning.50 In fact, he transposes de Man’s analysis, which takes its leave from the reading of the structure of the law,

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into the examination of the foundation of all proposition. Rewriting de Man’s passage, Hamacher establishes the two incompatible elements of the fundamental proposition as ‘action’ (Handlung) and ‘deed’ (Tat) and applies to them de Manian predicates such as, on the one hand, ‘open’, ‘irreferential’, and, on the other hand, ‘closed’ or ‘determined’. The synthesis of those elements and of their predicates, the fundamental proposition amounts to according to Fichte, must be read as the movement of the ‘translation’ or ‘limitation’ of a certain positing into a certain posited. Because it [this proposition] posits itself, transposing and translating itself into an “itself ”, it must always re-orient and once again limit the relationless enactment of mere positing by means of its product in which alone it can find an object of reference and the fixed point of its provenance, namely the reflective subject. (Hamacher, 1999b, p. 233)

Hamacher proposes reformulating the structural aporia between the two series of act and fact in terms of incompatible propositions. They would account for the two incompatible functions of the fundamental proposition, pure and unconditioned performance, on the one side, and its description as posited or as such, on the other side. ‘One is absolute, subjectless, and objectless performance, and another which grasps this performance as a form of free subjectivity and knows it in a reflective manner’. Therefore, the synthesis of these propositions (the copula of self-identity) is understood by Hamacher as a ‘leap’ or ‘a metabasis eis allo genos’ (p. 233): it unfolds itself as the reorientation of pure positing within the limits of a self-positing subjectivity. At this point, it seems unavoidable to rethink the aporia of the fundamental proposition and, therefore, the two corresponding propositions without calling into play ‘the concepts drawn from speech act theory of the performative and the constative’ (pp. 233–4). However, as Hamacher points out, these concepts can be taken up only by reconsidering their functions in relation to the fundamental character of Fichte’s proposition. First, the performative must be conceived as the performance of pure and unconditioned positing or, as Hamacher suggests, as ‘a positing without presuppositions’ and, therefore, as ‘a positing of the minimal conditions for the conventions, rules or norms of linguistics and social intercourse’. The constative, in turn, cannot simply refer to a pre-existing state of things, but to absolute and unconditioned positing as posited, that is, ‘the imposing act of the transcendental I’ (or, self-positing). Therefore, they represent the two irreducible and incompatible perspectives of the fundamental proposition, pure performance and self-positing subjectivity. As Hamacher observes, Fichte’s proposition can accomplish itself as a constative

Introduction

31

proposition, that is, as the description of the self-positing ground or subjectivity, only by presupposing the pure performance of unconditioned positing. ‘In order for the proposition to be able to realize its constative character . . . it needs an absolutely nonrelational, performative positing’. This positing should not be ‘the action of an I’ and, thus, a self-positing subjectivity, that implies a presupposition and, therefore, the limitation of pure positing, and, yet, is the very content of the constative proposition. But, in fact, Hamacher points out, Fichte supposes positing precisely as ‘a subjective action directed by and toward a subject’ and, therefore, as the very positing of the content or object of the related constative. Hamacher calls this positing as an operation of petitio principii, as the conditioned positing of a presupposed self-positing subjectivity. ‘The entire principle of the I would be a petitio principii that would contain nothing but an affirmation unable to clarify its structure’. This reading of the structural aporia of the fundamental proposition points towards a thinking of unconditioned positing (or performance) as the articulation of pure positing and de-posing, as the unconditioned unposited or athesis admitted by the self-positing subjectivity and interrupting its return to itself, as afformative, iterability, etc. The movement of petitio principii accounts for the very structure of the fundamental proposition as the constative description of a self-positing subjectivity. Hamacher writes that ‘if Fichte characterizes mere positing, pure performance, as an action of the I, he hastens to anticipate the result of this positing, refers it to something already posited and interprets it ex post facto, as its production’ (p. 234). This is precisely what always happens when the fundamental proposition turns into its own fait accompli. In this case, the performative is taken to posit what the related constative describes as posited and, therefore, to presuppose itself, as self-positing, self-promising, self-engaging and, perhaps, conjuring Derrida’s ghost, as self-writing.

Note on the contributions In what follows, I gathered together the writings of scholars whose works have been provoked in different ways by the encounter of deconstruction and the performative. Part One revolves around the question of the ‘historicity’ (to take up Fritsch’s expression) of the performative or, perhaps, the performative of historicity as the minimal structure of language and experience. In the first chapter, Ellen S. Burt develops a close reading of D’Alembert’s article ‘Genève’, from the Encyclopédie, which focuses on the performatives that constitute the scene of hospitality. The emphasis is put on their being iterable and ghostly texts.

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Diane Davis, in the second chapter, invents the concept of ‘perfumative’ force in order to rethink the performativity of the performative in terms of responseability. The part ends with Fritsch’s proposal to read Derrida’s engagement with the performative as the task of rearticulating Heidegger’s originary responsibility with Austin’s insight into the performativity of constative discourses. Davis’s ‘ethical overload’ and Fritsch’s ‘normativity’ conjure up two parallel traditions at stake in a certain deconstruction of the performative. Part Two of the volume develops a certain deconstructive thinking of the event into the thought of the performative structure of the event itself. In the first chapter, Herman Rapaport evokes a French tradition of thinking of disappropriation (excendence, outside, ek-scription, immixtion) in order to reread the poems of Adonis (and vice versa). He isolates the performative contradiction of the signature – obsessive trace or supplement of singularity (see the expression ‘9/11’) – as the ultimate condition of singularity itself. The second contribution by Francesco Vitale traces a narrow path that takes the investigation into the structure of the performative back to the question of survival as the ultimate condition of life. Focusing on Derrida’s reading of Blanchot’s narrative, Vitale proposes thinking of the performative as a self-attestation that originally passes through the repetition and confirmation of traces. In the third chapter, Simon Morgan Wortham elaborates a deconstructive thinking of the event resting on the notion of archive as a performative (or life-death) machine. Tracing out Derrida’s elaboration of this machine, he evokes the logic of supplementarity that regulates it. Part Three develops a close reading of Derrida’s concept of the mark as the minimal trait of a generalized performative. Focusing on Derrida’s disseminated reflections on painting and photography, Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield sheds light on the supplementary structure of the performativity of art. In particular, he reckons with the logic of countersignature in order to uncover the relation of signature to the event as to its necessary supplement. The second contribution, by John W. P. Phillips, develops a comparative reading of Derrida’s deconstruction of Austin’s performative and Nietzsche’s deconstruction of the performative grounds of morality. Through a close reading of Signature, événement, contexte (SEC), he aims to demonstrate that the minimal structure of the mark accounts for the structural passivity and autoimmunity of the performative. Part Four of the book deals with the ‘future’ of performative institutions, which, paraphrasing the first chapter’s title, would necessarily be ‘American’. Martin McQuillan focuses on the ‘cruelty’ of the future (of deconstruction, psychoanalysis,

Introduction

33

theory, etc.) recalled by Derrida in his address ‘States General of Psychoanalysis’. Unfolding the scene of the arrival in America of the European theorist (Freud, Lacan, Derrida), McQuillan’s chapter puts emphasis on a certain comic and autoimmunity of the performative that he proposes calling ‘resistance’ (an essential resistance to theory). In the second chapter, John Mullarkey stages a provocative confrontation between Derrida’s philosophical enterprise of saying inconsistency and Laruelle’s non-philosophical realism. In the wake of Laruelle, he accounts for a general, performative practice of thinking committed to retracing philosophical representations and decisions back to their immanence to the Real. The epilogue by Alexander García Düttmann lets several voices speak around Derrida’s farewell sentence ‘I smile at you from wherever I might be’. One of these voices suggests that the performative premise of any saying (‘no sooner said than done’) betrays the heterological element of force, perhaps, the iterability of every new self-affirmation.

Notes 1 This text is indebted to the first part of Gasché’s The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (1986), which I deem an essential source for any attempt to address the modern tradition of the philosophy of reflection, where the logic of positing is at stake, and to measure Derrida’s work against this tradition. Let me recall how Gasché proposes reconsidering Austin’s notion of the performative in light of a certain philosophy of reflection: ‘Thus, Austin’s so-called devolution of analytic philosophy amounts to nothing more nor less than the surreptitious reintroduction of the problem of reflection in order to solve the problems left in the wake of logical positivism. His revolution consisted of hinging the entire representational function of language, with which Russell and Whitehead were exclusively concerned, on a constituting selfreflexivity of the linguistic act. To speak of the “performative function” of speech acts is to apply a new word to a very old problem’ (Gasché, 1986, p. 76). 2 Cf. Derrida, 1978, p. 254, where Derrida countersigns Hyppolite’s translation of the Hegelian Thathandlung (the master’s act of putting life at stake, in the Phenomenology’s chapter on self-consciousness) into the French ‘opération’. 3 Cf. Austin, 1962, pp. 14–15: ‘Besides the uttering of the words of the so called performatives, a good many other things have as a general rule to be right and to go right if we are to be said to have happily brought off our action . . . Now if

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we sin against any one (or more) of these six rules our performative utterance will be unhappy’. 4 On the question of the subject of the performance, see Lecture V in Austin, 1962, pp. 53–66 (in particular, pp. 60–1). 5 Cf. Derrida, 2005e, p. XIV: ‘It would be necessary to distinguish “sovereignty” (which is always in principle indivisible) from “unconditionality”’; and Derrida, 1978, p. 119: ‘If the finite totality was the same it could not be thought [se penser], or posed as such [se poser], without becoming other than itself (and this is war)’. 6 For Derrida’s elaboration of the figure of the chairman, as a trope of a certain Aristotelian-Hegelian tradition of mastery and ipseity, see, for instance, ‘Signature, Event, Context’ (1971), where he recognizes this position to Paul Ricoeur and ‘Psychoanalysis searches the States of its Souls. The impossible Beyond of the sovereign Cruelty’ (1996). 7 For the understanding of ‘stating’ as a function of the ‘illocutionary act’ and, more generally, for the concept of ‘total speech act’, see in particular Austin, 1962, pp. 132–46, Lecture XI, and Austin, 1962, pp. 146–63, Lecture XII. 8 As Gasché himself points out at the end of the commentary on Austin (‘The total Speech Act’), his reading of the performative as autoperformative draws on the interpretation of the second part of How to do Things with Words as the theoretical operation of the ‘generalization of the performative’ and thus, ‘of reflexivity’ (Gasché, 1998, p. 18). 9 See Gasché, 1998, p. 18, where he argues that Austin’s theory refers to ‘a purely theoretical construct and ideal object’. 10 For Gasché’s recourse to the term ‘prefix’ in order to account for the illocutionary structure of the utterance, see Gasché, 1998, p. 17. 11 For Derrida’s deconstruction of positing, I refer to the remarks developed in the following section and, more generally, to my PhD dissertation Positing and Iterability. Derrida’s thought of the Performative (2012). Furthermore, for a sophisticated definition of speculative self-return, see Gasché, 1986, p. 21: ‘Thomas Aquinas had remarked in De veritate that reflection is directed both at the reproduced image or concept of an object and at the act of reflecting itself. Indeed, such a reflection provides the missing link; the third, in truth, first moment of reflection is found in the recognition that the object reflected by the mirroring subject is not just any object but rather this subject’s symmetric Other in other words, a representation of its alienated self. With such an alienating positing of itself as object, its reflection truly becomes an act of bringing back, a

Introduction

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recapturing recognition. In the reflection of the mirror-subject as an annulment of the mirroring subject’s former alienation, the reflection of Other becomes a reflection of self. The mirror’s self-reflection is the embracing whole that allows it to release itself into Other, which explains why it faces an object in the first place and why it returns reflexively to itself ’. 12 Cf. Gasché, 1998, p. 39: ‘This pure activity of the self “has no sort of object, but returns upon itself ”’. 13 Cf. Gasché, 1998, p. 39: ‘The pure activity is the condition of possibility of the objective activity of the subject’. 14 It is worth noting that in this chapter, de Certeau refers directly to the French translation of Austin by Gilles Lane (Quand dire, c’est faire, 1970) and to Benveniste’s Problèmes (1966–74). I am grateful to Silvano Facioni for drawing my attention to a certain line of the French reception of Austin in the 1970s. In particular, I recall that, in 1969, de Certeau founded the series Bibliothèque des sciences religieuses, which also includes the publication of Jean Ladrière’s L’Articulation du sens. Discours scientifique et parole de la foi (1970), that is based on Austin’s theory of performative language. 15 In ‘Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority’ (1989), through the reading of Montaigne and Pascal, Derrida finds the ‘mystical’ in the performative force of law and discourse and, at the same time, draws attention to the structural supplement of the law itself (its text). 16 For de Man’s reading of Nietzsche’s distinction between positing and knowing, I refer to the next section. 17 Cf. Derrida, 2005e, pp. 100–1, where Derrida elaborates the movement of ‘selfrefuting’ as a certain restlessness or autoimmunity of self-positing sovereignty. 18 Let me follow Derrida’s commentary on this point. First, he questions whether ‘this determination of the yes is still dominated by what Heidegger calls a metaphysics of the will, in other words by the interpretation of Being as the unconditional will of a subjectivity whose hegemony marks all modernity, at least from Descartes to Hegel and to Nietzsche?’ (Derrida, 2008b, p. 236). Then, taking into account the reference to Eckhart and Heidegger, he observes: ‘This Gelazenheit bespeaks the non-willing in the most unconditional willing. Such that the very unconditionality of a willing without end and without object turns the will into a non-will’ (p. 237). Therefore, he concludes, ‘if the very unconditionality of willing turns into non-willing [. . .] then no “metaphysics of will” is rigorously identifiable’ (p. 238).

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19 For a reading of ‘the trace structure of affirmation – “yes, yes”’ as ‘the irreducible or inseparable supplement of the unconditional’, see Morgan Wortham, 2010, pp. 139–40. 20 For a close development of this thought of the iterability of positing, let me recall the following passage from ‘Force of Law’: ‘Every positing (Setzung) permits and promises [permet et pro-met], posits ahead; it posits by setting [mettant] and by promising [promettant]. And even if a promise is not kept in fact, iterability inscribes the promise as guard in the most irruptive instant of foundation. Thus, it inscribes the possibility of repetition at the heart of the originary. [. . .] Positing is already iterability, a call for self-preserving repetition’ (Derrida, 2002a, p. 272). The elaboration of positing in terms of ‘differantial representativity’ (and, thus, in light of a certain interpretation of the Phenomenology’s notion of mastery) is, in my view, the key articulation of Derrida’s investigation of the performativity of the performative. 21 For a reading of self-positing/self-return as self-writing/self-posting (and, therefore, as différance), I refer to Derrida’s examination of the notion of mastery (i.e. the Herrschaft of the pleasure principle) in ‘To Speculate – On “Freud”’, in which he speaks of a simulacrum of contract, that the master can only take with himself by addressing to himself the text of the engagement itself (and to my forthcoming commentary on this examination). 22 For the servile condition of the master, I refer to Derrida’s confrontation with a certain French tradition of the master/slave dialectic in ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve’ (1966). In particular, see Derrida, 1978, pp. 254–5. 23 Along this line of deconstruction, let me refer to the forthcoming works of Andrzej Warminski, Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory and Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics: For De Man (in press), which are expected to be essential contributions on the configuration of decon­ struction and the performative that I aim to bring into focus in this introduction. 24 First published in 1975 with the title ‘Action and Identity in Nietzsche’ in Yale French Studies (1975), and, then, included in de Man, 1979, pp. 119–31. 25 First published as ‘Political Allegory in Rousseau’ in Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1978) and, then, included in de Man, 1979, pp. 246–77. 26 For the notion of deconstruction compulsion and the definition of figural allegories, see, respectively, de Man, 1979, p. 125 and p. 275.

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27 On de Man’s notion of the imperative, see de Man, 1979, pp. 123–4 and, below, the following section of this introduction, in which I read Hamacher’s re-elaboration of de Man’s imperative as the original project of language (in the wake of Schelling). 28 Cf. de Man, 1979, p. 125: ‘Gesetzt, es gäbe ein solches Sich-selbst-identisches A gar nicht . . .’. 29 Cf. de Man, 1979, p. 273: ‘Far from preventing the evils that attack the State, [the members of the State] are rarely on time to remedy them when they begin to perceive their effects. One has to foresee them well in advance in order to avoid or to cure them’. 30 On the notion of the illocutionary act, see Austin, 1962, p. 99: ‘. . . the performance of an illocutionary act, i.e. performance of an act in saying something as opposed to performance of an act of saying something’. 31 I remark that, in ‘Declarations of Independence’ (1986), Derrida develops an analogous reading of the text of the American declaration of Independence as the autoconstitution of the people. 32 Cf. de Man, 1979, p. 276: ‘Just as any other reader, he [Rousseau] is bound to misread his text as a promise of political change’. 33 Hamacher identifies this linguistic function with referentiality: ‘Referentiality is a function rather than a contingent possibility that we could simply neglect, because the very possibility of language depends on the imperative demand to engage in its referential project’ (Hamacher, 1999b, pp. 211–12). 34 Cf. Hamacher, 1999b, pp. 218–19: ‘In an, as it were, objectively ironic combination of Heidegger’s sentence with the vocabulary of Freud, de Man writes at the end of his essay on promises: “Die Sprache verspricht (sich)”’. 35 Here I refer to Derrida’s reading of Lévinas’s notion of the originally dative dimension of language and, more generally, of the finitude of the absolutely other, in ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Lévinas’ (1964). 36 As regard Derrida, I am referring to the third essay of Memoires for Paul de Man (‘Acts’) in Derrida, 1986, pp. 89–153. 37 In a footnote to ‘Premises’, Hamacher explains that a thinking of the structural possibility of non-understanding (as well as non-positing) brings about devastating effects upon the vocabulary of positing and the topology of metaphysics as onto-theseology (that rests on the Kantian notion of Being as absolute position). Cf. Hamacher, 1999b, pp. 19–20: ‘And this affected the entire vocabulary by which the concept of understanding had been defined: not only the vocabulary of thesis, position, positing, Setzung, Gegenständlichkeit,

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Stellung, Vorstellung, and Darstellung but also that of substance, constancy and consistency’. 38 For the role played by belief in Hegel’s elaboration of the notion of mastery in the Phenomenology’s chapter on self-consciousness, see Williams, 1997, p. 63: ‘Although the slave can and does “recognize” the master, his recognition, as slave, is deficient because it is coerced, and thus provides the master an unreliable, distorted recognition. Believing the slave, the master lapses into false consciousness. Not believing the slave, the master must remain suspicious and “on guard”. Thus the “winner” looses’. 39 It is worth remarking that Hamacher determines the leap from the aporia to the object as ‘the contraction of difference into position’ supposing a certain relation between difference, as the irreducibly other, and position as autoposition. 40 For these concepts, I refer to Derrida, 1978, p. 255 and Derrida, 1987a, pp. 262–3. 41 On the presupposition of the spirit, see Hamacher, 1999, p. 9: ‘Wherever this speculative inversion takes place there must be a circular path between spirit and nature. Its logical form is the self-presupposition of spirit in its other – and “spirit” is nothing but this self-presupposition’. 42 Cf. Hamacher, 1999b, p. 11: ‘There is understanding, including selfunderstanding, only from the aporia – and the aporia is what asemantically, alogically, adialectically grants understanding, including dialectical understanding, by refusing it’. 43 I refer to the examination of a certain French tradition (Kojève, Hyppolite, Bataille, Derrida) of the Hegelian wagen (Eng. ‘putting at stake’, Fr. ‘mettre en jeu’) developed in my PhD dissertation. 44 Cf., for instance, Derrida’s reading of the servile condition of the Hegelian mastery as the very inhibition of self-destructive and uneducated pleasure in Derrida, 1978, p. 255. 45 Cf. Hamacher, 1999b, p. 340: ‘Meaning can only be affixed to a death for which subjectivity has lent an aspect, a countenance, according to the pattern of its own shape’. 46 Here I refer to Derrida’s elaboration of the restlessness of positing in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ in the wake of Hyppolite’s reading of the Hegelian predicate of unrhuig. 47 On the proposal to understand the performative of ‘dictating’ as the speech act of sovereignty and, more generally, of ipseity, see Derrida’s reading of Benveniste’s investigation after the common etymological root of mastery and the self-sameness of the same, in Derrida, 2005e, pp. 11–12 and Derrida, 2008b, pp. 66–8.

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48 In the final pages of ‘Premises’, Hamacher draws attention to Heidegger’s remarkable attempt, in ‘On the essence of truth’, to depose a certain ontotheseological and onto-tautological terminology. As he remarks, Heidegger singles out a certain ‘letting-be’ as ‘freedom’ and ‘ex-posing itself to beings as such . . . into the open’ (or ‘exposing’ tout court). This ‘exposure to an open arena’, as Hamacher puts it, cannot be looked at from the perspective of positing and positionality. Cf. Hamacher, 1999b, p. 38: ‘As the exposure of positing – the Aussetzung der Setzung, the interruption of every positional act, the exposition of every possible position – it draws on an opening, an unposited space, and a place impossible to posit’. It is not possible to compare here this reading of Heidegger’s text with Gasché’s investigation of ‘Hegel and the Greeks’, but it is worth drawing attention to their parallel elaboration, in light of Heidegger’s work, on a certain implicit prefix of positing, the ex-, referring to the unposited place of positing itself. 49 I recall that in a note of ‘Setzung and Übersetzung’, Gasché recognizes the originality of Hamacher’s deconstruction of Fichte’s notion of positing (see Gasché, 1998, p. 275). 50 Cf. de Man, 1979, p. 270: ‘We call text an entity that can be considered from such a double perspective: as a generative, open-ended, non-referential grammatical system and as a figural system closed off by a transcendental signification that subverts the grammatical code to which the text owes its existence’.

40

Part One

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1

Promising Hospitality: l’Étranger Gives the Law in D’Alembert’s ‘Genève’ Ellen S. Burt

An analysis of hospitality in an Enlightenment text gives a closer view of deconstruction’s contribution to the theory of the performative in terms of the promise, brought into crisis where the speech act involves those who do not speak the same language, or who, speaking the same language, do not share a social contract. In his definition of conditional hospitality in De l’hospitalité, Derrida seems to accept Austin’s position according to which the performative must meet the conditions of a context to be termed happy. The laws of conditional hospitality consist in ‘the conditions, the norms, the rights and the obligations that are imposed on hosts and hostesses, on those who offer as on those who receive welcome’ (Derrida et al., 1997, p. 71). The performatives of conditional hospitality are the rituals of the place as it opens itself to the outside, between host and guest welcomed into the closed space prepared for hospitality. The list would comprise the many theatricalized performances whereby a familiar space is opened and dedicated for a more celebratory use: acts of invitation and thanksgiving, rituals of welcome and farewell, toasts and acts of offering, honouring and praise and even speech acts that warn of precincts off limits.1 Each performative of opening would nonetheless take place within limits, on pain of desecrating the place by virtue of which its hosts offer hospitality and thereby setting off operations of hostility and foreclosure that also lie within the region of hospitality, or hostipitality in Derrida’s suggestive coining. To be a successful host or welcome guest is to make use of the performatives that have meaning within the delimited space, to act one’s part as to the manor born. Therein lies an important difference with Austin’s theory of the performative that leads to Derrida’s claim that, strictly speaking, conditional hospitality is

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impossible. For a hospitality that requires an intimate knowledge of the protocols from all participants would be no hospitality, since only those already at home in the context could be happily received there. While receiving an outsider is a chancy affair, risking as it does violations of the house by the guest as well as by the host’s xenophobic operations, yet a performative of welcome that takes no chances would be empty. The well-known corrective offered by Derrida to Austin’s theory in ‘Signature, événement, contexte’, which makes the happiness of performatives repose on the risk of misfire, is an early marker of his interest in the performatives of conditional hospitality, as speech acts that thrive on and threaten the opening of context. In a similar vein, Derrida speaks of ‘a structural pervertibility’ to the promise and the necessity ‘that the possibility of a misdeed (méfait) be at work in a benefit (bienfait)’ (Crépon et al., 2004, p. 197). The Austinian performative is challenged from another direction by Derrida’s discussion of unconditional hospitality. There the critique affects Austin’s philosophical project of classification of language, starting with the performative/ constative distinction. As described by Derrida, the performatives of absolute hospitality are thoroughly unconventional. It is not within a given space as coded performances of its possibilities that they take place, but in a before or after, with the act of unbinding that deconstitutes the determinate hospitalities of place (in keeping with the meaning of absolute, ‘untied’) and begins to rebind otherwise. Derrida says that the law of unconditional hospitality enjoins: ‘Let us say yes to the arriving ones, before any determination, before any anticipation, before any identification’ (Derrida et  al., 1997, p. 73). A welcome in advance, before identifying the one welcomed even as a guest, is one indication of temporal openness. Another is the lag time injected into the performative. Derrida’s statement of the law of absolute hospitality provides a case in point. His ‘let us say’ recommends verbal acquiescence to a fait accompli, to having always already welcomed before welcoming. The first yeses of absolute hospitality might well strike as descriptions that only retrospectively would be confirmed to have been acts of reception. As Derrida writes the law, it tells of a second impossibility for hospitality. If no one knows that the scene is one of hospitality, if there are no preparations, no identifiable actions of hosting, if no one cares to know your name, how is that hospitality and not indifference? How to know that an act of reception has occurred? Absolute hospitality appears as impossible as conditional hospitality, albeit for different reasons. The temporal problem Derrida raises affects Austin’s taxonomy, which implies the ability to identify the players in a determinable context. Where

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the latter dismisses parasitical utterances and looks to sharpen lines between illocution and perlocution, performative and constative, phatic and rhetic, etc., with hospitality Derrida invites in parasites, settles in on the limit cases and the chances they offer for transformations.2 One interesting point of divergence concerns the pressure that the temporality of the unconditional law puts on the political performative that is the promise, with its confident projection forward of a teleology. The promise is a recurrent leit-motif in How to Do Things with Words, where it is called ‘one of the more awe-inspiring performatives’ (Austin, 1975, p. 9) because it sets beings into relations of mutual obligation, creating the context with respect to which strangers are to be identified. That the promise is fundamental to Austin is clear enough from the terms he chooses – felicity, happiness – to judge performatives. As the performative of the law itself, the promise has an exceptional status: it appears as what could be called a super-performative, on whose presumed felicity rides that of the performatives of conditional hospitality in the context. The promise seems the general form establishing the future potential for the conditional laws of hospitality to be brought into accordance with the absolute law of hospitality, through a telos that would make unconditional law the horizon towards which the conditional laws of each particular community are tending, in line with de Man’s statement: ‘All laws are future-oriented and prospective; their illocutionary mode is that of the promise’ (de Man, 1979, p. 273).3 However, the law of unconditional hospitality as formulated by Derrida introduces a reservation into the law itself as to its force, in the form of the aforementioned time lag between the moment of reception and of recognition; it reorients the attention of the receiving group backwards, and in other ways dislodges the teleology of the promise. With this reorienting, the social contract appears as open and in process, since the formal welcome of those received unconditionally has yet to occur and the approbation to the law, the yes in answer to the ‘let us say yes’, lies ahead.4 As for identified strangers, they test the limits of context where the performatives of conditional hospitality are concerned. Magnets for empirical misfires, disadvantaged as not possessed of full knowledge of the place, its customs and even its language, this heterogeneous group blunders into defined contexts to upset the smooth functioning of its rituals. However, as described above, the arrival of strangers is also an occasion for the impossible to be realized and the conditional hospitality that the house’s strictures seem devised to foreclose on to take place.

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Performatives After Deconstruction

In the openness of unconditional law, where the identification of the stranger is delayed, the stranger is one for whom a name and a welcome remain to be devised. Yet, the stranger must have a double nature if it is to represent the as-yet-unidentified arriving ones. It must be unique and belong to no group while bringing a new group into focus. Its doubleness allows the unvoiced yes of absolute hospitality to be bound to the determinate welcome of the political order, or an ethics – the idea that one owes something to man in general (Simmel, Kant) and perhaps even to the animal or the ghost (Derrida et al., 1997, p. 73) – to be linked to a politics that prescribes laws to a determinate group.5 The impossible thing that is absolute hospitality appears possible through the stranger’s representation of the beings left out of the home space, including crucially and most strangely, the host: Strange logic but so enlightening for us, the logic of an impotent master who awaits his guest as a liberator. It is as if the stranger held the keys. It is always the situation of the stranger, also in politics, to come as a legislator to make the law and liberate the people or the nation by coming from outside, by entering into the nation or the house, into the home that lets him enter after having called him . . . it is as if the master were, as master, the prisoner of his place and his power, his self-sameness, his subjectivity (his subjectivity is hostage). (Derrida et  al., 1997, pp. 109–11)

Let’s set aside for the moment Derrida’s telling insistence on the as if to note the crucial function of the stranger in the transformation of the place. The coming of the stranger-liberator creates an interim between an old regime crumbling away and a new one not yet instituted, freeing the master into enjoyment of his subjective capacity to act freely. The stranger’s arrival to represent a more abstract commonality than the parochial of shared place ties puts her on the side of a law-giving transcendence.6 The theologico-political is not far off, and the entrance of a liberator-legislator readies the people for a covenant that is to move it a step closer to reconciling the claims of a narrow community with those of humanity. In what has been gleaned so far from Derrida’s comment, the host awaits a stranger-lawgiver to reintroduce the promise on the far side of any temporal disturbances caused by its uncertain time of arrival. The welcome testifies to a step taken by the host out of a spatially determined context and towards the temporal realization of a promised reconciliation between human and divine justice. However, the emphasis on mimesis and the simulacrum makes clear Derrida’s reserve concerning the theologico-political model. If there is a promise here, it

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is a feigned one, and as such, it is ‘in a peculiar way hollow or void’, subject to the problems that for Austin plague parasitic utterances, ‘said by an actor on the stage . . . introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy’ (Austin, 1975, p. 22). For de Man’s Rousseau, the lawgiver is an imposter who substitutes her own for the divine voice (de Man, 1979, p. 274); Derrida’s stranger makes use of the simulacrum to mediate between the unconditional law and conditional laws. The particular stranger speaks for the arriving ones in general, but through make-believe. In what follows, we will look at promises and lies in an eighteenth-century systematic text that featured a very overt attempt to transform the law. The text is D’Alembert’s article ‘Genève’ from the Encyclopédie, which – while much praising the republic – sought specifically to reform the laws on the mimetic arts and to further its destiny as a beacon for religious toleration.

‘Genève’ ‘Genève’ was written by D’Alembert from material culled during a three-week visit to Voltaire, himself a long-term visitor to the city.7 Published in France in 1757, it was instrumental in bringing about the temporary suspension of the encyclopedic enterprise and driving the publication of its subsequent volumes into clandestinity. The article’s double birthplace hints at its hybrid status, halfway between an offering of thanks from an erstwhile guest and a travelogue from a returned traveller whose descriptions of foreign customs are to instruct those at home. The stance of stranger-guest is reflected in diverse decisions throughout – in D’Alembert’s curiosity about idiosyncratic laws and customs, his discreet focus on the systems of hospitality interesting to travellers, the praise he heaps on the small city and even the enthusiastic suggestions he makes to improve its attractions. The observer edifying his fellows is visible in D’Alembert’s ironical gaze, the comparisons made with the home space, or the occasional comment on the effect the city has on the outsider.8 In the tradition of the Lettres persanes or the Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, a visit to another polis becomes a means to launch a critique of French laws and customs by a process of denaturalization that views them as one set of rules among others. In ‘Genève’, a sharp polemic against Catholic dogmaticism is set off against the freedom of thought D’Alembert praises in the Protestant republic. Each of D’Alembert’s publics was irritated by the article. It was not simply his recommendation to establish a theatre that was criticized. The praise he offered to the republic for its religion also came under fire. Voltaire put down the difference

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in receptions to cultural difference as organized by religious belief. In a letter to the Genevan pastor Jacob Vernes, Voltaire claims that D’Alembert ‘says that the French clergy accuse him of having praised you too much whereas you complain of not having been praised properly (comme il faut)’ (Voltaire, 1971, p. 316).9 The difference in reception is a context-related question of social codes: the French Catholic clergy understand praise as a ritual gesture to be offered in regulated quantities, whereas the Genevan pastors are concerned above all with propriety, defined as the convergence between the way of saying and meaning, which D’Alembert’s irony interrupts. Voltaire’s D’Alembert analyses the problem as a distant observer, a cosmopolitan subject outside the conflict between cultures, viewing the article as misfiring according to the rules of the performative as ‘an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances’ (Austin, 1975, p. 15), the persons the right ones, the procedure correctly and completely executed, the certain thoughts or feelings assumed to be present being so present, and the persons appropriately conducting themselves subsequently. If the fact that D’Alembert’s text transgresses both codes is almost a matter for congratulation to Voltaire, however, it is because the article follows the protocols of reason in its judgements of the cultural blindnesses and holy things of each place. The universals consulted by the philosophical observers stand in contrast to the sectarian rules governing the reactions of both clergies. The readers of ‘Genève’ have been attentive to its rationalism, but have paid little attention to its presentation of hospitality. Discussion has naturally tended to centre on the two points picked up directly in Rousseau’s Lettre à D’Alembert, namely, the proposal for a theatre and the depiction of the ministers as Socinians,10 while neglecting any connection of these two motifs to hospitality. Yet, D’Alembert’s discussion of the republic places Genevan hospitality at the barely disguised centre of its analysis, even going so far as to make the laws of the republic originate in the Reformation with the foreigner Calvin, who, in his account, was invited to a city teeming with refugees from the Inquisition to give them their laws. For D’Alembert, Genevan hospitality is not just a charitable institution but underpins ongoing efforts of the polis to maintain the laws consonant with its democratic principles. The rule of law in D’Alembert’s representation is a rigid formal system; it is only in the acts of hostipitality between hosts and visitors that can be seen republican struggles with the demos in its human multiplicity, which those strangers represent. If Geneva has managed to assure itself ‘all the advantages and none of the drawbacks of democracy’ (Diderot et al., 1995, VII,

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576a), it is by way of rules devised for the reception of the humanity at its gates. In D’Alembert’s understanding, Geneva is a city of strangers, made a polis by a lawmaking stranger, into which strangers have periodically to be injected. His recommendation to open a theatre in the city and his statements on Genevan Socinianism have to be placed in the context of his description of the hospitable republic, now to be examined.

Strangers in ‘Genève’ The path to citizenship. Where possible, Geneva’s laws convert strangers into citizens. Calvin, whom D’Alembert calls a lawgiver, tendered a promise of religious tolerance and created a path to citizenship that separated the flood of refugees of conscience arriving in sixteenth-century Geneva into four groups according to their access to full rights and duties. Concerned with the formal description of this path and not with the empirical results (which historians agree led to a nepotistic aristocratic elite),11 D’Alembert applauds the orderly access offered to the good things of the republic. Strangers born abroad can settle as inhabitants by permission of the magistrates: ‘The inhabitants are strangers who have the magistrate’s permission to remain in the city where they are nothing more than that’. Their sons born on Genevan soil are called natives and enjoy ‘a few more privileges than their fathers but . . . are excluded from government’ (Diderot et al., 1995, VII, 576a). As Rousseau will explain in Du contrat social, these groups participate as residents of the town of Geneva, but they are not part of the polis, which is reserved for the next two groups:12 namely, the bourgeoisie, a mixed group made up of natives who have earned greater access and children of citizens who have lost full access by being born abroad, and the citizens proper, who are native-born bourgeois enjoying full political and economic rights.13 So long as D’Alembert is looking at immigration, he sees the government of Geneva as orderly and democratic, providing a potentially unruly demos jostling its way into the city access to the rule of law by means of conditional hospitality – here as graded invitations to approach and settle each into an assigned place at the feast of republican rule of law.14 The four classes of residents possessed of permissions and privileges have to be distinguished as a whole from another group, the temporary visitors who remain unassimilated. From the perspective of the orderly republic’s selfrepresentation, the étrangers threaten a crisis in the republic’s smooth self-

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symbolization, as an indeterminate population in excess who crowd into the rationalized groups and bloat them. While, from one point of view, the stranger’s lack of a proper place disqualifies her from belonging and makes her a threat to the idea of one place per resident, from another, the same quality lets her represent the demos, whose multiplicity the law has reduced. It is useful to remember Georg Simmel’s definition of the stranger as an individual with whom a group assembled by resemblances based on spatial proximity entertains a more abstract sort of resemblance: ‘with the stranger one has only certain more general qualities in common, whereas the relation with organically connected persons is based on the similarity of just those specific traits which differentiate them from the merely universal’ (Simmel, 1971, p. 146). In D’Alembert’s discussion, and considered from the perspective of the republic, the stranger is the representative of the demos insofar as it exceeds the controls built to order and contain it. Thus, D’Alembert’s Geneva emits contradictory demands: shelter some strangers as representative of the demos; cordon off the law-abiding residents from strangers as dangerous elements exposing the city to the excesses of hospitality. This double demand, while nowhere explicit in ‘Genève’, finds perfect expression in a policy that establishes Geneva as the continental leader in the field of public health, according to D’Alembert; namely, small pox inoculation.15 With an inoculating hospitality, newcomers expose the body politic to strangers in infecting doses that preserve it from mortal contagion;16 the logic of immunizing ties together D’Alembert’s comments on Genevan hospitality and his anxiety about the unrest of an unruly demos. It is significant of D’Alembert’s vision of Geneva as a model republic operating with the regularity of a good Swiss clock that the multifarious strangers too are divisible into clusters, each of which is paired off with its tidy divisions of residents. Étrangers 1. ‘The poor passersby’. A short paragraph constituting the sole description of Genevan hospitality per se, describes strangers paired with but sealed off from the town’s poorest and most recent residents, its inhabitants: In Geneva, the hospitals are not as elsewhere a simple retreat for the sick and infirm poor: hospitality is exercised toward poor passersby: but above all, a multitude of small pensions are drawn from it to be distributed to poor families, to allow them to live without moving and giving up their work. The hospitals spend triple their income per year, so abundant are the alms of every kind. (Diderot et al., 1995, VII, 577b)

The hospital across Europe shelters the poor of the city, so Geneva’s outreach to wandering strangers can be seen as a distinguishing feature, linked to its history

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as refuge for Protestants fleeing persecution. For D’Alembert, however, it is also significant that Genevan hospitals offer generous pensions to the poor families to let them stay in their houses. In effect, the hospital isolates penniless wanderers from the recently arrived inhabitants, freed to live and work in the town as members decontaminated of wanderlust. It houses the former as representatives of the unsettled mass, distinct from the latter with their settled attachment to the town. The line runs between a ‘retreat’ offered to wanderers and a space of ‘work’ kept for Genevans. Étrangers 2. ‘Their enemies’. A second set of strangers arrives in Geneva as hereditary enemies, represented in the Encyclopédie by the armies of the Duke of Savoy.17 Savoy’s exemplary status as enemy was attained most notably in the attack called the Escalade, made one December night in  1602, during which the Duke’s mercenaries attempted unsuccessfully to slip in under cover of darkness.18 Geneva treated the visit as an aggression on its hospitality, construed as its power to govern entrance (they came over the wall), to inspect visitors (they came at night), to prepare a reception for its visitors (it was a surprise attack), and even more fundamentally, on its definition of law as instantiated in the promise, for the Duke of Savoy had attacked despite repeated peace treaties and ‘without a declaration of war’ (Diderot et al., 1995, VII, 575a). In attacking the city’s conditional laws of hospitality, the visitors hit at the very notion of man as obligated by his word. Geneva’s response was to hang the captured perpetrators as ‘highwaymen’ (VII, 575b), in advertisement of how it would receive future attacks on its sovereignty over its hospitality. D’Alembert comments on the reception as a preservative measure against war: ‘Duke Charles Emmanuel finding his armies repelled and his generals hung gave up on seizing Geneva’ (VII, 575b). The example separates the natives on whose unflagging fidelity the republic has depended over more than one generation, from rogue peoples whose word cannot be relied on from one day to the next and who can be trusted neither to keep the peace they declare nor to declare an outbreak of hostilities. The theory that the reception accorded the lawless band of marauders inoculates operates at the level of the relation established between rival nations in the enduring peace that D’Alembert makes follow the episode. Étrangers 3. ‘Étrangers surprised to see’. During the long peace ushered in by the Escalade, the danger no longer comes solely from strangers without. It also lurks within, as a falling away from strict adherence to republican constitutional principles occasioned by habit and the stimulation of private interests through commerce. The residents especially open to this corruption are the bourgeois – as noted, a mixed group made up of industrious natives and those born abroad

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of citizens who had sought to improve their prospects elsewhere. Internal corruption affects the trader class insofar as its members habitually enter into contracts that mimic the original promise holding Genevans within walls. The former are short-term agreements between adversaries seeking advantage; pledges in word only, they hide a war of interests. The latter bind for generations; inaugural promises that link disparate peoples into one through reference to the common good, they command the respect of all members.19 D’Alembert’s comments on language indicate the problem. Genevans speak their intentions straight out. In this, they model themselves on early reformers like their lawgiver Calvin, who wrote ‘in French with a purity singular in his time’ (Diderot et al., 1995, VII, 575b) or like the Port-Royal authors who wrote without the ‘barbarous rhapsodies of their adversaries and contemporaries’ (VII, 575b) and more latterly on their ministers who soberly preach moral lessons in the vernacular (VII, 578b).20 In a city with laws against sumptuary display, burghers follow the reforming spirit, expressing intention plainly, eschewing decorative ornament and of course, the theatre. But the plain speech supposed to reveal the operation of the good faith covenant can be empty and the lips can promise in lieu of the heart. Emerson’s definition of comedy as ‘a nonperformance of what is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance’ or ‘some seeming, some keeping of the word to the ear and eye, whilst it is broken to the soul’, suggests that farce, the only theatre allowed in Geneva, would be apt to bring this out (Emerson, 2010, pp. 83/87). In farce, the sensuous seeming substitutes for the spiritual; it unmasks the possibility of taking a pledge of the lips for the performance to the soul but does not heal the discrepancy. What then of the role of the varied class of strangers welcomed in industrious Geneva through its trading agreements and its agreements with friendly nations – strangers ranging from traders and ambassadors, philosophes come on short-term visits to study the city or visit Voltaire, fashionable people come to consult the famous Docteur Trochin, or more casual tourists? On the one hand, they are a source of the danger, since they carry into the republic the corrupting contracts and obey the city’s laws out of private interest only. On the other, given the impurity already within, they reveal the corruption and operate like a magnet to draw it to themselves. But the greater significance of this group can be seen in the role D’Alembert claims foreign nations took in helping put down internal dissension during the long peace ushered in by the Escalade: ‘A few inner dissensions, the last of which

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broke out in 1738, have from time to time slightly altered the republic’s tranquility; but fortunately all was pacified by the mediation of France and the confederated Cantons’ (Diderot et al., 1995, VII, 575a).21 The stranger nation has an observer status that lets it pacify competing interests. Its members make good mediators because they are traders in terms as well as goods. They know about figurative language and the arts and are ‘surprised to see that in a town where decent and regular spectacles are forbidden, vulgar, witless farces are allowed’ (VII, 577a). Possessed of comparative ability, they can judge the relation of a discourse to a rule, can compare the laws of one place to another or test the relation of a given law to public happiness under it, but more especially can tell the city which of its laws are in accordance with its constitution – as does Montesquieu in judging the Genevan law that takes away rights from a son who does not discharge his father’s debts ‘a beautiful law’ (VII, 576b). Aesthetic judgement allows the jurist to appreciate which are the laws of Geneva in keeping with the first laws of the republic – in this case, its insistence that a debt incurred binds generations – and which are those that compromise and alter them. Commercial strangers also serve the function of inoculating the future citizens who are to arise out of the bourgeois class and provide the inner group from which the city’s magistrates must be chosen. As future citizens, the bourgeois have to become versed in the skills of aesthetic judgement to which the strangers have access, even as they adhere to Genevan first principles of virtue linked to plain language. Here, the problem arises of how to contain the gift of comparative arts brought by this stranger class. D’Alembert’s famous proposal to establish a closed theatre in Geneva resolves the dilemma. The theatre is to be a school to educate its citizens-to-come into a properly regulated aesthetic judgement and a place to remember the difference between civic virtue and its mere simulation, between necessary and ornamental comparison: its ‘decent, regular spectacles . . . would form the citizens’ taste and give them a fineness of touch, a delicacy of sentiment that it is very difficult to acquire without this aid’ (Diderot et al., 1995, VII, 576b). Rather than merely revealing a discrepancy between promise and performance like the farce, these classically regular plays achieve their harmonious fit. Étrangers 4. ‘Famous étrangers’. In everything said until now, D’Alembert has been dealing with already identified groups and thus with conditional laws. But in the case of visitors paired with the citizen class, he brings forward only a few examples of what one hesitates even to call a group, so singular are its members, each of whom is named. They are paradoxical in having the double character

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of visitor awaited, even called for, yet unanticipated. Voltaire is one of a few ‘famous étrangers’ (Diderot et al., 1995, VII, 577b) who have retreated to Geneva, which city has awarded him ‘the same marks of esteem and consideration he has received from several monarchs’ (VII, 577b). The other famous strangers D’Alembert names are John Calvin and Michael Servetus, whom Calvin had burned at the stake as a heretic. These exceptional strangers have two features in common. In the first place, they are publicly exiled from their home spaces and as such are exemplary of anyone who has been deprived of the shelter of conditional laws. They raise the issue of le droit des gens, defined in the article ‘Droit’ as ‘a jurisprudence that natural reason (raison naturelle) has established over certain matters for all men, and that is observed by all nations’ (V, 126b). Explaining that there are two sorts of droits des gens, those suggested by reason, and those arising from long habit, the article goes on to underline the necessity of such unwritten laws between states: The different nations, although most are divided in interest, are tacitly agreed to observe in peace as in war certain rules of propriety, humanity and justice: such as not making attempts against the lives of ambassadors or others sent to make proposals of peace or truce; not poisoning fountains; respecting temples; sparing women, old men and children: these and other similar customs, which over time have gained force of law, form what is called le droit des gens, or right common to diverse peoples. (Diderot et al., 1995, V, 127b)

In the Essai sur les moeurs, Voltaire specifically makes le droit des gens provide for the right of a stranger to find temporary shelter from theologico-political storms.22 With exile, the stranger passes into the open where he can appeal for shelter only in the name of unconditional law.23 The will of humanity in ‘Genève’, as found in the republic’s promise of hospitality to strangers, is to be extended to those fleeing religious persecution everywhere, including from Geneva itself. As a figure of resemblance among proximate equals before conditional law, the citizen is challenged by a competing system of evaluation that attributes human rights to foreigners chased into exile. The celebrated visitors make visible a zone of conflict between conditional and unconditional laws of hospitality. For D’Alembert, it is singular strangers who pose in purest form the problem of unconditional law, as unique beings without conditional rights who seek happiness and freedom. They come to Geneva attracted by ‘its agreeable situation and the freedom enjoyed there’ (VII, 577b). They are the strangers who, in Derrida’s words, ‘as if . . . held

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the keys’ and promise liberation to the master who is ‘as if . . . the prisoner of his place and his power’ (Derrida et al., 1997, pp. 109–11). A further feature shared by the three visitors is an exceptionality revealed by the fact that each is invited by name ahead of time on account of writings on religion and tolerance, as though the hosting city had called each to liberate it from the confines of a place grown dogmatic. Calvin was brought to Geneva on account of his reputation as Protestant jurist, which Geneva intended to make use of: ‘These peoples desiring to make their town famous, called there Calvin . . . who enjoyed a great reputation’ (Diderot et  al., 1995, VII, 575b). The invitation to Servetus – lesser-known writer, doctor, humanist and Socinian thorn in Calvin’s side – was indirectly issued but was so pressing as to make it clear that strangers are not free to refuse such invitations. Voltaire’s Essai explains that Servetus had read Calvin’s writings advocating tolerance (the general invitation Geneva extended to refugees of conscience); had disputed with Calvin on points of religious doctrine as laid down in his Institutio Christianae Religionis (accepting Calvin’s invitation to examine the meaning of the gospels each according to his own light); had escaped his home in Vienna after being denounced to the Inquisition, imprisoned and tried – all at Calvin’s secret instigation (an ‘invitation’ that deprived Servetus of the freedom to refuse hospitality); had stopped off on his flight to Italy at the sign of the Rose on the outskirts of Geneva (inns invite conventionally) – where he was denounced by Calvin, who, still operating through instruments, had him imprisoned (another form of hospitality), brought up on trial and burnt (Voltaire, 1963, pp. 244–6). Voltaire’s call has to be read through D’Alembert’s description of the city as already ‘the sojourn . . . of Philosophy and freedom’ (Diderot et al., 1995, VII, 577b), a city where the tolerance that Calvin had preached to France had never been fully instituted, and where Voltaire could publish freely. Voltaire finished revising his tendentious Essai sur les Moeurs in Geneva, publishing it there in 1756. Voltaire stands in a doubly exceptional position, then. On the one hand, he is a unique and celebrated individual representing humanity as deprived of all but human rights. On the other hand, called to Geneva on account of his writings, and obliged like any visitor to respect the laws to which he owes no allegiance, he enjoys a particular freedom: as foreigner, he can publish in Geneva texts he could not publish safely in France under its censorship laws, but texts that, were he a citizen of Geneva, he could not publish safely either. France made its jurisdiction over books depend on the place of publication. In Geneva, however, what Rousseau ruefully called the magistrates’ right to ‘epilogue’ on texts, depended

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on the author’s citizenship, independently of where and even in some cases whether those texts had been published.24 Voltaire inhabits a space D’Alembert calls one of ‘freedom’, but that is actually closer to an open, unregulated space, where a foreigner benefits from the laws allowing the publication of most foreign books, laws meant to favour the Genevan book trade and the propagation of Protestantism across Europe.25 Voltaire’s position is exceptional both in that he is called to represent humanity on the matter of religious tolerance and human rights, and in that he enters an interstitial place where the laws have no purchase. Voltaire penetrates a secret place inside the city, yet stands without as a speaker for all humanity outside the protection of conditional law.26 Having set Voltaire up as the celebrated stranger for the present, the one with the keys to the city, D’Alembert then quotes a passage from one of his letters that has the force of a promise: “It is no small example of the progress of human reason, says M. de Voltaire, that they have published in Geneva with public approbation (in the essay on universal history by the same author) that Calvin had an atrocious soul, as well as an enlightened mind. The murder of Servetus today seems abominable.” We believe that the praise due this noble freedom of thinking and writing is to be shared equally between the author, his century, and Geneva. How many countries where philosophy has made no less progress, but where the truth is captive, where reason does not dare raise its voice to blast what it silently condemns, where too many cowardly writers, called wise, respect prejudices that they could combat with as much decency as surety? (Diderot et al., 1995, VII, 578)

In this complex passage, one author, D’Alembert, quotes and comments upon a text by another author, Voltaire, which loosely quotes and comments upon the public’s reception of a text by himself. Voltaire’s act here is to frame and distance Calvinism as a past ideology, even as he declares a new state of affairs, ‘today’, he says, or ‘the century’ as D’Alembert confidently adds in a commentary that expands into a call for similar transformations elsewhere. There are at least three moves evident in Voltaire’s words that it would be hard to know whether to judge as culturally blind blunders or adroit manoeuvres. The first move consists in Voltaire’s acting as if he were not the author of the judgement on Calvin, in an indirection not to be anticipated by Geneva, which always wants to bring the speech home to the speaker and the writing to its author. The second move attributes the publication of the text, the Essai sur les moeurs, to the enlightened laws of the Genevan press, as if the freedom Voltaire enjoys with other foreigners belonged to Genevans as well.27 In a third move, Voltaire

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congratulates the Genevans on their reception of the work. The assumption of the Genevan magistrates was that works published by foreigners from Catholic countries, which naturally reflected the mistaken beliefs of their authors, would be destined for foreign markets.28 The rationale Voltaire presents for praising Geneva – that no public outcry was provoked by his denunciation of Calvin – while it would have made sense to a Frenchman, who could have deduced a transformation in public attitude from a lack of scandal over a heterodox text published in France, would not have the same effect to a Genevan, who would expect a Frenchman’s books, wherever printed, to display Catholic views. There is, however, a deeper feint which these moves, whether blunders or manoeuvres, partly hide, a feint that is to liberate the city from orthodoxy and establish it on a more tolerant footing. That deeper feint is centred on the division between the two sentences of the quoted passage. At first glance, the first sentence is a constative that makes a true-false statement about things in the world: ‘It is no small example of the progress of human reason that they have published in Geneva with public approbation . . . that Calvin had an atrocious soul, as well as an enlightened mind’. But upon closer examination, it has a performative dimension, too, what Derrida calls an affirmative force, which he equates in ‘Negotiations’ with the ‘always presupposed, always prior’ ‘time of foundation’ (Derrida, 2002c, p. 27), which is never present but has to be recalled. It seems impossible to separate knowledge from power in the affirmation: there is progress of reason and this case of reception, which shows Calvinist orthodoxy discarded but not his enlightened laws, is put forward in illustration of it. Reason’s progress is taken as given, affirmed as a state of affairs on the basis of which otherwise unintelligible human events can be understood. As for the second sentence, organized around the deictic ‘today’, it contains a clear performative, positing as it does a Genevan consensus on Servetus’s death and making all future events into so many pieces of evidence for testing the truth of the assertion that Servetus’s murder seems abominable. It can be understood as what Derrida calls a position, stance or instituting gesture, which he distinguishes from the affirmative, as a ritual performative is distinguished from a founding covenant or a dialectical, negotiable argument from a nondialectical, non-negotiable foundation (p. 25). The affirmation sets the beginning of human history as progress of reason along with the iconoclastic judgement against Calvin in the past. That judgement on Calvin is not concerned with the act of a private individual, but with his lies as lawmaker. In proclaiming religious tolerance while conniving at Servetus’s death

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to consolidate his power in Geneva, the basis for Voltaire’s claim that Calvin had an atrocious soul, Calvin was perjuring himself with respect to the idea that writings testify to the beliefs of those individuals who write them, just as ‘certain thoughts or feelings’ (Austin, 1975, p. 15) are supposed to accompany speech acts. In effect, Voltaire attacks Calvin’s hypocrisy in burning Servetus while approving of his declaration of toleration,29 and Geneva’s calm reception of the critique now allows the historical deduction that its citizens have so far evolved on the path of reason as to be ready for a more tolerant God. Voltaire’s treatment of the Essai’s arrival sets Calvinist trinitarianism in the past as an ideology no longer fully operational in Geneva. It is, of course, no surprise to find Voltaire at home where it is a matter of universalizing reason and deism, and Derrida’s distinction between affirmative and position taking so far has only helped arrive at a better understanding of Voltaire’s strategy in his critique. But a more unexpected point is that it is the reception of a foreign text and a parasitical form of hospitality related to texts that show Geneva to be ready to take a step towards tolerance. For the Essai is published in the Genevan context as a text not designed to circulate there, where it is a free signifier, the linguistic equivalent of a stranger, without title or author. Voltaire, however, acts as if its appearance in a context to which it has no relation but the contingent one of publication constitutes its special relevance to that context. This reading move is spectacular in its daring; it violates the rule for Geneva’s censorship that makes authorial identity secure the place where the work is to be received and its content examined. The text’s strangeness consists in its ability as a free signifier to be taken up in and liberate a heterogeneous content in a context to which it has been made to refer. It is by way of Derrida’s analysis of absolute hospitality that we can see that Voltaire’s affirmative of Geneva’s increased toleration relies on the word’s ability to be received before being identified or understood. Not the human stranger but the estrangement of language from its speaker stands behind Voltaire’s affirmative. Voltaire’s strong gesture of making a foreign text relevant to the Genevan context involves a Platonizing metaphysics for it supposes that the artifices of authors (who wrote the text and where) are ontologically secondary to things made by artisans (where was the material object of the book made and received).30 Voltaire does not claim that the gods have dictated any laws to him, but in quoting a book published in Geneva as if it were relevant to public opinion and Genevan freedom, a theologically based logocentrism is installed. In short, the first half of Voltaire’s lie consists in passing off the publication of the text

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in Geneva, which is owed to various contingencies like Voltaire’s residence in Geneva or the French publication laws, as an event manifesting the divine plan for humanity. The sentences affirm the existence of a universal progress of reason in which publication constitutes an important milestone but reveals nothing about where that history is going. Voltaire is entirely faithful to the foundational character of the affirmation: the Essai’s reception locates an epoch-making change in Geneva’s unexpected shift in public opinion, but the affirmation remains general and does not say what the opinion is or whether the case is a step in reason’s triumph or defeat. Those are the functions of Voltaire’s second sentence, where a speaker voices an opinion attributed to the general self as to the meaning of the murder. Today, asserts Voltaire, ‘the death of Servetus seems . . . abominable’. The term ‘abominable’ has religious connotations – abominari means ‘deplore as ill-omened’ – and it suggests a new cult is forming around the ashes of the martyred humanist. The positing statement of opinion on which everyone agrees actually contains several dialectically opposable interpretations of Servetus’s death. Consider, for instance, a first difference within the statement, considered as a distilled report of what others say. In the context of the futureoriented, teleological history thus proposed, the word ‘seems’ would oppose two appearances, the death as seeming a bad omen, perhaps because it predicts a spreading fanaticism, to the potential it seems to others a good omen, an inoculatory case so horrible it has wiped out persecution, just as hanging the Savoyards brought peace to Geneva. Furthermore, the uttered position may be understood not as a report but as reflecting the speaker’s own sentiment. Then, no comparison would be involved, and the statement would stand on its own authority. Here is what Voltaire thinks: the death was a murder, a killing for a private motive rather than an execution or a sacrifice. As a rationalist, he does not believe in omens but in naming things, in judging the cold case of Servetus’s death. For such a speaker, seems opposes is, is in truth, and the sentence means ‘The murder of Servetus today seems, but is not in truth, abominable’. The secrecy with which Voltaire shrouds the particular I who speaks as such in the ‘today’ that identifies the speech act, while apparently presenting himself as speaking for the general public, makes for the rest of the lie. The second sentence thus presents an agreement that is a recipe for conflict and for dialectical working through, first because some will argue that it’s a good omen and others that it’s a bad omen, then because there is a disagreement as to whether it has public significance at all, and finally because there can be a

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question as to whether the historian himself doesn’t infect the scene with his interests. For instance, the Frenchman Voltaire lives in Geneva; that is why he can plausibly be thought to know what Genevans think, but it also means he can have been at work on Genevans, leading conversations onto Servetus as engaging his favourite topic of religious intolerance, inviting people to come to the plays he puts on privately or doing publicity for his book. In this corrupting mixture of speech act and ventriloquized speech, the various determinations of the position taking, all Austin’s conditions, problematize and ironize the affirmation of progress. One can already predict, on the basis of the issues raised around the position-taking phrase that ‘the very positivity of the institution will threaten, corrupt, cover over the affirmation’ (Derrida, 2002c, p. 26). The analysis has shown that Voltaire’s affirmation reposes on the reception of a disruptive text, whereas the consensus involves speech acts, whether reported or not. It is the affirmative’s undecidability, its ability to function as both performative and constative, that provides the sanctioning backdrop for a proposed transformation of the conditional laws. Because such instability is threatening, however, it has quickly to be buried and a sharp distinction between performative and constative to be set up, as Voltaire does by positing a negotiated agreement that accepts the universe’s orderliness and agrees to differ on the particular meanings to be ascribed to it. Both parts of Voltaire’s promise rely on a supplementary system of hospitality related to language. His decisive affirmative that history occurs as a progressive enlightenment takes the alienation of the text with respect to its author as its model, making the ability of texts to arrive without setting off identificatory procedures, as evidence of the openness of unconditional hospitality. As for the position taking, Voltaire’s representation of opinion is a speech act that, behind its posited impersonality, is an address by a particular I. Voltaire wants to keep his I out of the picture, yet at every point his speech acts reveal it, as if his language were stuck to him and could not help over and over setting him before us as the self posited by the discourse. There is no doubt that, just as Voltaire denounces Calvin’s lies, so his positing of a future for Geneva in line with his interests will lend itself to critique. A less positive history is brought into view here, in which promises follow promises, hypocrisies other hypocrisies, lies other lies. It should be said that Voltaire is aware of the problems posed by the promise. In the last chapter of La Philosophie de l’histoire, Voltaire comments on the blasphemy and treachery of any lawmaker ‘who dared to feign that the Divinity had dictated his laws to him’. It is blasphemy to announce as from God ‘truths

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engraved in all hearts’ (Voltaire, 1969, p. 27); it is treachery to establish political laws ‘with a view to one’s interest’ (p. 275) and ‘by subjecting one’s country to one’s own opinions’ (p. 274). Voltaire nonetheless prefers blasphemy and treachery to the alternative. There have been legislators ‘who have instituted admirable laws, without attributing them to Jupiter or Minerve’ (p. 275) and who have done so without fooling anyone. Unfortunately, their method, as his example of Rome’s success in imposing laws on its empire would indicate, is war. In the case of the promise considered, where peaceful change is envisaged, the nature of the rational universe is the God in whose name Voltaire blasphemes; public opinion is what he makes the arbiter.

Concerting and disconcerting promises A negotiation, Derrida says, always entails ‘get(ting) one’s hands dirty’, ‘compromise’, ‘impure things’, to be sure, in view of making possible some relation to the unconditional, which is the place of risk and possibility: ‘Negotiation operates in the very place of threat, where one must [il faut] with vigilance venture as far as possible into what appears threatening and at the same time maintain a minimum of security’ (Derrida, 2002c, pp. 16–17). Are there more than Voltaire’s two hands getting dirty here? In the passage under discussion, D’Alembert’s act redoubles Voltaire’s as he promises greater publicity to Voltaire’s inaugural promise. How is that redoubling to be understood? Is it a new promise, a repetition or an indication of complicity, a sort of gentlemen’s agreement in which each has compromised? There is reason to ask the question. ‘Nous’ is the pronoun of choice in D’Alembert’s article, suggesting a group of subjects speaks. Rousseau explains that he has learnt from Diderot that the article was ‘concerted with some high-level Genevans’ (Rousseau, 1995, I, p. 494) and elsewhere says that Voltaire is behind it. With some disingenuousness, Voltaire complains repeatedly that people suspect him of having plotted with D’Alembert.31 And of course, the charge of complicity was often levelled against the collective enterprise of the Encyclopédie, so much so that an anthology of the polemics advertises the accusation in its title: ‘Le Secte des empoisonneurs’.32 The performative as concerted by more than one is not a category in Austin, where it is linked to the first-person in the speech act. It seems evident that no meaningful collaboration can occur on an inaugural performative, which must be each time unique. When D’Alembert affirms that

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there is a history of the aestheticizing of politics in which Geneva is exemplary, or when, taking it that Plato’s Republic is relevant to Geneva, he proposes joining ‘the wisdom of Lacedemonia to the politeness of Athens’ (Diderot et al., 1995, VII, 577a) so as to make it ‘the model of perfect political administration’ (VII, 578b), he echoes the structure found in Voltaire to different effect. In a later text where he responds to the charge that the philosophes formed a sect, D’Alembert explains the non-dialectizable uniqueness of a philosopher’s thought, which accepts neither exchange nor simulation: ‘each one has his opinions which he would not give for/as those of his neighbor (qu’il ne donneroit pas pour celles de son voisin), and if one were to reproach them for anything, it would certainly not be the excessive uniformity of their systems’ (D’Alembert, 1967, p. 75). As for Voltaire’s and D’Alembert’s instituting gestures, insofar as both contain considerable dialectical tensions, each argues so thoroughly with itself that it is hard to talk of concert. For D’Alembert, Geneva will be exemplary not for religious tolerance but for the formal perfection of its political system and theatre in a European, and not a universal history. There were well-known differences between Voltaire and the Encyclopedists on the matter of deism. The argument for concert cannot be made by way of the promise viewed as a discreet locutionary act. Yet, there is another set of negotiations to consider. The grammar of the text, the ordering and placement of its parts, the written neighbourhood where the performatives are set, constitute a linguistic context, which, in the case of ‘Genève’, is overwhelmingly that of description. Within this description, Voltaire’s speaking for the Genevans of the present and D’Alembert’s recommendation to establish a theatre in Geneva stand out, so much so that Rousseau for one felt justified in saying that the recommendation to establish a theatre doesn’t belong in the article (Rousseau, 1995, V, p. 3). The textual economy of ‘Genève’ has D’Alembert placing a recommendation to establish a theatre in Geneva before Voltaire’s recommendation to instal a more tolerant religion. Among the rationales D’Alembert lists for changing Geneva’s conditional laws to welcome a theatre, he notes one where such placement might matter: If actors were not only suffered in Geneva, but first contained by wise laws (réglements), then protected, and even given consideration once they had become worthy, finally placed absolutely on the same line as other citizens, this town would soon have the advantage of possessing what is thought to be so rare and is only so through our fault: an estimable troupe of actors. Let us add that this troupe would soon become the best in Europe; people full of taste and a disposition for the theater . . . would come running to Geneva. (Diderot et al., 1995, VII, 577a)

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The laws are wise in providing a closed theatre that will distinguish the comedy to be contained from the comedians to be inoculated with other citizens. They are also wise to a danger of timing. By inviting comedians to Geneva, the laws make their coming appear a result of the writing of the laws. Comedians will have come to Geneva and performed their feats only as a consequence of the laws favouring them. The reversal of cause and effect that makes the actors a group to come covers the feigning of the lawmaker, Voltaire. In asserting that it will be a progress to integrate comedians into civic life, D’Alembert takes it that feigners have not already been so integrated. In short, placing the passage on comedy before the passage containing Voltaire’s inaugural gesture is tantamount to giving it an inoculation in the right spot: it doses the body politic so it need not fear simulation in Voltaire’s lawmaking.33 While Voltaire and D’Alembert denied that the article was concerted, then, the grammar of the two lawmaking ventures – a proposal to institute a theatre set before the proposal for a greater toleration – may persuade otherwise. It is placement that makes for the effect of concerted promising, a performative effect perverse in being based on what the French call an agencement, an arrangement of parts, not an agent – which arrangement thus appears the likely result of two hands in a conspiracy. Against this persuasion of concert, it can be remarked that the whole rigorous logic of D’Alembert’s article is to dose the city against various menaces by little injections of the thing feared. From the perspective of this logic, welcoming a troupe of actors is pure D’Alembert. In this supposition, the article is his own and it confronts the menace of undecidability located in ‘Voltaire’ as text. Chief among the motives for establishing a theatre would be that its presentation of action as characterizing human figures hides and limits the threat represented by compositional features, which promise without a responsible agent responsible. Tragic reversals rarely involve scenery falling on the heads of the players, as the grammar makes occur here, and D’Alembert’s desire for ‘regular plays’ in lieu of farces indicates a desire to banish the irruptive possibilities associated with the textual logic.34 It is evident that Derrida’s ‘structural pervertibility’ is at work in a promise made by a ‘society of men of letters’ (as the Encyclopedists were called on the work’s title page). On the one side, that pervertibility seems a good thing, first because it allows ‘a promise worthy of name . . . in what it might possess of the revolutionary’. On the other, pervertibility is a name for the possibility that the best of promises – the promise of human freedom and reason – can easily become its opposite, the necessity ‘that the possibility of a misdeed (méfait) be at work in a benefit (bienfait)’ (Crépon et al., 1994, p. 197).

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As presented in ‘Genève’, the unconditional law of hospitality is affirmative and comes in its purest form from texts; the conditional laws of hospitality from man. In the necessary but dangerous attempt to relate the two, one finds oneself engaged in ‘the worst, the most necessary, or the most difficult in negotiation, (that) is the negotiation between what does not negotiate (and which is nondialectical, nondialectizable) and the dialectizable’ (Derrida, 2002c, p. 26). Judging from the events following the publication of ‘Genève’, D’Alembert’s attempt to inoculate against the dangers of the feint did not work. An outbreak of suspicion against the Encyclopedists as a new sect led France to force the Encyclopédie into clandestine publication, and Geneva to encourage Voltaire to exchange his place of exile from Geneva to Ferney, just over the border in Burgundy. While a theatre did open in Geneva in 1766, four years after Geneva had burned the books of its native son Rousseau and Rousseau had renounced his citizenship, it was mysteriously burned to the ground two years later. It is well known that D’Alembert wrote nothing more for the Encyclopédie but articles on mathematics and quit his co-directorship of the enterprise in disgust. Less well known is that in a late passage he wrote on inoculation, he speculated no longer on how well it would preserve from smallpox, but on whether it might increase the risks of mortality from the disease. His solution was to exclude the practice from the city, inoculating against the dangers of inoculation by establishing near Paris, ‘outside of the city’s walls, a house of inoculation’ (D’Alembert, 1967, p. 123). For D’Alembert in ‘Genève’, conditional hospitality is an artificial, contained bloating of the city’s population promoted to preserve it against the dangers of a promiscuous, unconditional hospitality; after ‘Genève’, it will have become what has to be preserved against.

Notes 1 In ‘Shakespeare and Hospitality: Experience Economies from Hannah Arendt to Errant Romeo’, a working paper presented at UC Irvine on 19 May 2011, Julia Lupton discussed a hospitality linked to theatricality and the ‘rezoning’ of space for celebration in Romeo and Juliet. Her invitation to respond to the paper led me to a divergent tendency in hospitality, located around the intruder, Romeo. It showed up with particular vividness in the play’s last act, where extra bodies are lodged in tombs opened for the purpose, as if to reveal a violent hospitality related to cryptic spaces of reading and writing rather than visible spaces of representation. This chapter starts to explore the possibility.

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2 ‘If in order that a promise be a promise it must conform, like any performative, to a certain number of rules (the first person, the present, a certain number of conventions, of rites), it loses its singularity; it risks becoming a coded politeness, a rite. Thus, a promise worthy of the name, in what it might possess of the eruptive and incisive, interrupting the ordinary course of history, in what it might possess of the revolutionary, must subvert codes, laugh at codes and not conform to all the codes ruling performatives. The promise happens (arrive)’ (Crépon et al., 2004, p. 199). That a promise might not be made by a first person, that it might arrive unexpectedly, as a stranger, to disrupt habits, are the issues to be taken up. 3 See also Derrida, 1986, and Hamacher, 1994. 4 The happiness of the promise underlies other performatives for Austin: thus, for the success of a performative, one must first constitute the I as an authority to be obeyed, this being, as he says, one of the uncertainties ‘that underlie the debate when we discuss in political theory whether there is or is not or should be a social contract’ (Austin, 1975, p. 29). 5 See Georg Simmel, 1971. In his 1995–97 seminars on hospitality, Derrida discusses Kant’s Perpetual Peace in relation to hospitality and le droit des gens. 6 The stranger as lawgiver is almost invariably declined in the masculine. The simulacrum helps bring that into question. See McNulty, 2006, on the matter. 7 The article appears in Volume VII of the 35-volume Encyclopédie (see Diderot et al., 1995, 578b–578a). For a discussion of the article ‘Hospitalité’ and of French ‘inhospitalities’ in the eighteenth century, see Still, 2011, out too recently to be more than mentioned in this study. 8 For example, the following comment from ‘Genève’: ‘Sumptuary laws . . . that would be regarded in France as too severe and almost as barbarous and inhuman, are not harmful to the true comforts of life’ (Diderot et al., 1995, VII, 576b; my emphasis). 9 Lettre à Jacob Vernes, 24 décembre 1757. 10 Naigeon, the author of ‘Unitaires’, sees Socinianism as an antitrinitarianism characterized by tolerance and a belief in the Gospels insofar as they are in conformity with reason. The Socinians are ‘a sect of hidden deists’ (Diderot et al., 1995, XVII, 388a) who hide the metaphysical hypothesis of a natural order by trying to make it fit with scripture. 11 Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui called it an aristo-démocracie. In 1781, according to Guichonnet, 1974, 61 per cent of the population were natives or inhabitants without political representation. Historians have shown a Genevan aristocracy in place by the early 1600s (see Favet, 1998).

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12 Rousseau speaks approvingly of D’Alembert’s discussion of Geneva’s political organization, while adding a fifth class of inhabitants, the étrangers. See Rousseau, 1995, IV, pp. 361–2. In this chapter, the French term étranger has been kept to remind of its polyvalence. Both noun and adjective, étranger has a range of English equivalents, meaning stranger, foreigner, foreign land, extraneous, unconnected, foreign, unknown. 13 Keate, 1761, dedicated to Voltaire, provides an English complement to D’Alembert’s article. Keate details the costs of becoming a citizen. ‘The Inhabitants are Strangers, who have purchased of the State, for seven or eight Pounds sterling, Letters of Protection, by Virtue of which they are suffered to keep House, and enjoy various Privileges . . . being subject to the Laws and Ordinances of the City’. He comments that the burgesses pay very dear for their privilege and notes the annual charges to Inhabitants and Natives for permission to engage in commerce (pp. 64–5). 14 Keate sets the number of inhabitants at 25,000 and the number of those under Genevan jurisdiction higher: he claims some 5,000 abroad pay taxes to Geneva (Keate, 1971, p. 62). 15 ‘After England, Geneva was the first to receive inoculation against small pox, which has so much difficulty becoming established in France, but which nonetheless will become established there . . .’ (Diderot et al., 1995, VII, 577a). 16 D’Alembert was very interested in this much debated question, which he took up in D’Alembert, 1783, pp. 265–376. In the article ‘Inoculation’, Dr Trochin, its leading proponent in Geneva, underscores the freedom of the inoculated subject and opposes any threats from the preservative, the danger of surprise disease: ‘It can be seen to begin with that one is free to choose (le maître de choisir) the age, place, season, moment, bodily and mental disposition, the doctor and surgeon in whom one has the most confidence. By preparation one can forestall extraneous accidents (accidens étrangers), epidemics, complications, which are likely responsible for the entire danger in small pox . . . What a difference between an expected evil and one that surprises, consternates, that fear by itself can make fatal; or that, producing ambiguous symptoms, can lead the ablest doctor into error’ (Diderot et al., 1995, VIII, 759a; my emphasis). 17 According to ‘Genève’, these strangers are so suspect that some centuries after the last big attack, the walled city’s fortifications to the south are still especially heavy, as if in preparation for further hostility from the same quarters. 18 D’Alembert’s account is followed throughout without concern for small inaccuracies.

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19 Voltaire provides a false etymology for the term Huguenot that goes in this direction. He derives it from ‘eidgnossen, allied by oath’ (Voltaire, 1990, II, p. 241). 20 According to Adams, 1991, D’Alembert attended a Genevan church service only once. 21 Throughout the eighteenth century, there were revolts against the increasingly nepotistic Petit Conseil. In the mediated 1738 conflict that D’Alembert mentions, the issue was the onerous taxes levied for the improvement of the city’s fortifications. See Dufour, 1997, for a brief account. 22 Voltaire claims that Calvin has broken every law in putting Servetus to death, and among them, the droit des gens, since Servetus was a stranger fleeing the Inquisition in France and was asking for the shelter owed by humanity (Essai, II, 241–50). 23 In a recent article, Marian Hobson has commented on Diderot’s vision of an anthropologically determined ‘general will of humankind’ as a possible political foundation. D’Alembert’s idea of an exiled Voltaire representing humanity’s claims in a city that welcomes him as a legislator can be tied to a similar vision. See Hobson, 2010, p. 69. 24 According to Rousseau, living in France was the best choice if he was ‘to dare to tell the truth; knowing full well that continuing as I wished never to print anything in the State without permission, I owed no one an account of my maxims and their publication anywhere else. I would have been much less free in Geneva itself, where, no matter where my books were printed, the magistrate had the right to epilogue on their contents’ (Rousseau, 1995, I, p. 406). His works are subject to examination in Geneva as a citizen, whereas he can only run into trouble in France by publishing there. See Lettres écrites de la montagne in Rousseau, 1995, IV, pp. 759–74, for a view of Geneva’s censorship laws operating in the case of Émile and Du contrat social; and pp. 876–85, for a discussion of the greater exposure of Geneva’s citizens than strangers to injustice in its press laws. 25 On the book trade, see Piuz and Mottu-Weber, 1990, pp. 474–84. On censorship, Jostock, 2007. Jostock examines the tension between the magistrates, who looked on books as merchandize and worried about the health of the book trade, and the pastors, who were concerned with the book’s ideological purity. 26 Cf. Voltaire, 1963, pp. 109–11. Readers of Derrida’s early work on Rousseau and on metaphor will recognize in the stranger the structural equivalent of a supplement called in to close a metaphorical system. The supplement has to be outside the system, not exchangeable within its terms in order to close off the

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system and represent its common value; as metaphor it is more than all the rest. At the same time, the supplement immediately becomes just another member within it, exchangeable in its terms, and as such suspect. 27 As a resident, Voltaire sometimes ran afoul of Genevan law. Although, according to Keate, foreigners were exempt from the laws against sumptuary display, they were not exempt from those against the theatre, and an early play he put on earned Voltaire a remonstrance from the magistrates (Keate, 1761, p. 162). The Essai and the passage cited in ‘Genève’ were discussed by the Compagnie des Pasteurs who commended the pastor Jean Jacob Vernet for responding to them. See Voltaire, 1971, pp. 500–1, for extracts. 28 Small Geneva was concerned that its powerful neighbours not be offended. Bonnant, 1999, explains that ‘in Geneva, censorship rests on two pillars: prudent governmental policy with respect to foreign powers, especially France, and Calvinist orthodoxy, watched over by the Compagnie de Pasteurs’ (pp. 179–80). Still, missals and books of magic were the only books touching on religion meant for the Frankfurt fair and the foreign market that could not be printed in Geneva. 29 Servetus’s private letters to Calvin provided an important basis for the Genevan trial. His verbal professions of belief in Christ’s divinity were not sufficient to outweigh them. At the time of his condemnation, according to Robert Willis, only Calvin had seen a copy of the incriminated book. In Vienna, during Servetus’s trial for heresy, those same letters – without proof that he had published a heretical text in France – were considered insufficient to get a verdict. See Willis, 1877, especially, p. 252 and pp. 490–1. 30 See Adorno, 1992, II, pp. 286–91. Foreign words mark ‘the incursion of freedom’ (p. 289), breaking through the illusion of natural language to recall its artificiality. 31 See, for instance, the Lettre à Jacob Vernes, 29 décembre 1757 (Voltaire, 1971, pp. 325–6), where Voltaire denied any foreknowledge of ‘Genève’: ‘I do not yet have the new volume of the encyclopedia and I know absolutely nothing about the matter’. In fact, he wrote to congratulate D’Alembert on the article in early December. In the same letter to Vernes, he uses precisely the terms found in the passage quoted by D’Alembert: ‘That they detest Servetus’s abominable murder and the atrocious customs that led to this murder’ (p. 317), making it perfectly clear to Vernes – but absolutely unprovable since the words repeated from the article were, of course, his own – that he had indeed read it. In March 1758, he complained to D’Alembert: ‘I cannot get the idea that I was your accomplice out of the priests’ heads’, Lettre à D’Alembert, 25 mars 1758 (p. 486).

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32 See Vissière, 1993. 33 And potentially that of the ministers as well. In several letters, Voltaire underscores that the containment of the theatre is also a means to hide the open secret of Geneva, which is that the ministers are comedians: ‘He reveals their secret, I confess, but it is that of comedy, and nothing is more public among you than this secret’ (Lettre à Elie Bertrand, 27 décembre 1757, Voltaire, 1971, p. 319). 34 Aristotle does include one such case in his Poetics, where the statue of Mitys falls upon the author of Mitys’s death – as it happens, at a festival where hospitality is in operation (see Aristotle, 1927, p. 39).

2

Performative Perfume Diane Davis

Jacques Derrida’s contribution to the theory of performativity involves, among other things, a redescription of the basic unit of communication not as the word or symbol but as the ‘mark’ or ‘trace’, which cannot, he insists everywhere, be restricted to human communication. The ‘mark’ is the heart of any sign, which could be a word but also, for example, a deictic gesture, any inscription of difference and so of meaning. Up against traditional speech act theory, which posits an intending subject at the centre of every performative utterance, Derrida describes ‘iterability’ as the structure of any mark, and so of any locution, prior to and as the condition for any illocutionary or perlocutionary determination – an insight that ends up nudging performativity into the realm of the inhuman. Iterability names the structural repeatability of the sign: for a sign to be a sign, it must be repeatable, whether or not it is ever empirically repeated. It indicates the originary contamination of the sign; there is no ‘authentic’ articulation of meaning that does not involve contamination-by-repetition, or by simulation, or dissimulation. In what J. Hillis Miller calls an ‘extraordinary two-hour seminar’, Derrida notes that even the most heartfelt ‘I love you’ (‘Je t’aime’) is a citation, a declaration ripped from a prior context and remixed and repurposed for another. More disturbingly for some: even the ‘I’ in ‘I love you’ is a citation. The condition for the communication of the ‘content’ of this and any message is the citation of the ‘I’ itself. To say ‘I’, to posit myself as the subject of the utterance is already to recite, to reiterate – mechanically, automatically – the iterable, the repeatable, the imitable. Despite the multiplicity of differences that may be in play, when ‘I’ say ‘I love you’ with all the feeling in the world, it is no less an imitation than when Alex –the famous African Grey parrot who could count, discern shapes and colours, and use more than 100 English words – said ‘You be good. See you tomorrow. I love you’ to his trainer hours before he died (see Carey, 2005). What

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Derridean deconstruction announces is that the ‘origin’ (as Austin calls it) of any speech act, the intending subject who means what he says and says what he means (and for Austin, it seems always to be a ‘he’), is already the effect rather than the source of the performative act. If iterability is the structure of locution, then there is something automatic in any utterance and the so-called authentic response (the responsible response) depends on what is usually described as its opposite: reaction. So when ‘I’ respond to you in the most singular way available to me, when ‘I’ respond to your question with every intention of being truthful and thoughtful – I am nonetheless also (at the very least) reacting mechanically and so irresponsibly or non-responsively: the ‘iterability that is essential to every response’, Derrida writes, ‘and to the ideality of every response, can and cannot fail to introduce nonresponse, automatic reaction, mechanical reaction into the most alive, most authentic, and most responsible response’ (Derrida, 2008a, p. 112). Traditional speech act theorists are, of course, not the only thinkers who ground their notions of performative power in the presumption of an indivisible border between response and reaction, between linguistic existence and merely living: between the letter ‘as such’ and the trace or the mark. What is at stake in beginning with the word or the signifier, rather than with the trace or the mark, Derrida shows, is the protection and continued promotion of the metaphysical distinction between language and life (or, if you prefer, between the symbolic and the real), and therefore between ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’. Certain nonhuman animals, we now know, do indeed respond to specific questions, positing themselves as the subject of their utterances. And/but the performance of a response – whether by a human being or, say, a parrot being – is structurally dependent upon mechanical reaction. Which is to say: even the seizing of performative power (‘I love you’, ‘here I am’, etc.) remains at a certain level without power, without mastery, without authority, without sovereignty. That is one layer of performative powerlessness exposed by Derrida. But the layer that will most interest us here is, conceptually speaking, at least one level down; we could say it’s on the down-low. It concerns this response and its impetus: what calls for the performance of an I – which is already a yes, or a yes? – before there is a self to decide to respond or to assume responsibility for performing this response? We are not talking about the content of a message or about a ‘yes’ that would be the opposite of a ‘no’. ‘The yes to which we now refer’, Derrida writes, is anterior to any affirmation or negation, any ‘yes’ or ‘no’ that might be uttered or enacted. This would be a yes that all dialectical alternatives would already ‘assume and envelop’.

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Performatives After Deconstruction Before the Ich in Ich bin affirms or negates, it poses itself or pre-poses itself: not as ego, as the conscious or unconscious self, as masculine or feminine subject, spirit or flesh, but as a pre-performative force which, for example, in the form of the “I” (je) marks that “I” as addressing itself to the other, however undetermined he or she is: “Yes-I”, or “Yes-I-say-to-the-other”, even if I says no and even if I addresses itself without speaking. The minimal, primary yes, the telephonic “hello” or the tap through a prison wall, marks, before meaning or signifying: “I-here”, listen, answer, there is some mark, there is some other. Negatives may ensue, but even if they completely take over, this yes can no longer be erased. (Derrida, 1992a, p. 298)

The ‘telephonic yes’, Derrida writes, indicates ‘that there is indeed another voice, if not an answering machine, on the other end of the line’ (p. 274).1 For ‘a yes never comes alone, and we never say the word alone’ (p. 288). But we are not yet in the realm of the word here: ‘I say the yes and not the word “yes” because there can be a yes without a word’ (p. 296). As soon as there is a mark, there is ‘some other’ on the way and an obligation to respond. The response that is called for, that is required by the coming of an other, by an other’s approach, by the yes of the other, is a function not of alphabetic language but of the mark or the trace, of difference and différance. And this yes that is, as Derrida says, ‘more ancient than knowledge’, is not something a subject does; it is not the task of some preexisting subject or self. The ‘minimal, primary yes’ gives a self to be – it’s the condition for the positing of a self, ‘I’, who must (then) sign for it, be responsible for it. Yes, yes. ‘The position of the I, of being, and of language’, Derrida writes, ‘still remains derivative with regard to this yes’, which is already both a response and an address (p. 299). Yes indicates that there is an address to the other. This address is not necessarily a dialogue or an interlocution, since it assumes neither voice nor symmetry, but the haste, in advance, of a response that is already asking. For if there is some other, if there is some yes, then the other no longer lets itself be produced by the same or by the ego. Yes, the condition for any signature and of any performative, addresses itself to some other which it does not constitute, and it can only begin by asking the other, in response to a request that has always already been made, to ask it to say yes. (Derrida, 1992a, p. 299)

As soon as there is a mark or a trace, any inscription of difference, there is also an other that is not reducible to me or appropriable by me, and that requires from me a response – a yes or a Yes-I – that is simultaneously a response and a return

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call. ‘The yes says nothing and asks only for another yes, the yes of an other’ (p. 299). This yes is ‘radically non-constative’, Derrida notes; it ‘names, describes, designates nothing’. It is ‘through and through and par excellence a performative’ (pp. 297–8). And yet, unlike any performative utterance analysed by speech act theorists, it takes place without a given context, without conventional rules or standards, without authority, without the intention to bring about a determined event. It is powerless. But ‘yes addresses itself to some other and can appeal only to the yes of some other; it begins by responding’ (p. 301). The response that is called for, commanded, the yes that has no need of the word, is not a speech act but what Derrida calls ‘the transcendental condition of all performative dimensions’. It is a ‘pre-performative force’, or a ‘perfumative’ force: ‘In the beginning was the adverb, yes, but as an interjection, still very close to the inarticulate cry, a preconceptual vocalization, the perfume of discourse’ (p. 297). A perfume has no power, no matter how overwhelming its force may be. But, once again, we are not addressing a dialectical opposition; the powerlessness of this performative perfume precedes and exceeds the power/ powerless dichotomy. Performativity: a power without power. Not a power seized by a pre-existing subject who grasps the totality of his or her pre-existing context, but a response to an imperative that comes from the other and through which both the self and the im-mediate context are instituted, produced, transformed. The imperative that issues from the coming of some other, of an other that I do not produce or constitute (the wholly other, then, le tout autre), has no specific content; it is pure injunction: respond. With no need for words, in a dimension or arena or temporality anterior to signification, le tout autre ‘says’ simply: il faut parler – you must speak, it is necessary to speak.2 This performative event, which is already implied in any speech act, involves not so much sovereign subjectivity as compelled responsivity, ‘my’ responsibility to respond, to respond without the power to do so: parler sans pouvoir, as Maurice Blanchot puts it: ‘— Yes, speak to me now. — I cannot. — Speak without the ability to do so. — You ask me so calmly to do the impossible’ (Blanchot, 1999, p. 44).

Im-possible responsivity Famously distinguishing a certain sense of the unconditional from an ‘inherited theological fantasy of sovereignty’, Derrida affirms not the power of a sovereign will to institute or transform – a power in which ethical and political theory in the West seem overly invested – but the thinking of an unconditional response-ability

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without sovereignty, a limitless and not simply ‘human’ obligation to respond (to perform a reciprocal response) to an undeconstructable, ‘quasi-transcendental’ call (demande, injunction, imperative), which precedes and will forever exceed the realm of the performative designated by speech act theory. The performative event is an event precisely to the extent that it involves a responsibility to this ‘outside’, to this other that can never be mastered or normed, but which never stops calling (interrupting, coming) and to which ‘I’ can only say yes in ‘a sort of oath before the letter’, before any understanding or contemplation (Derrida, 1999, p. 33). Slam the door against this ‘outside’ (or pretend to) by institutionalizing whatever the performative institutes (including the ‘I’), and you slam the door on the ‘eventness of the event’. In a dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy, Ann Smock explicates the scene from Blanchot’s Awaiting Oblivion to which we’ve been alluding, a scene that allegorizes this unconditional injunction from within the interhuman relation – a frame that Derrida continuously questions. ‘When another human being approaches and you are face to face with him, you must speak’, Smock writes. ‘You’re under an obligation to respond to him, answering the demand, which his nearness is, that you should hear him – hear him and thus let him speak’. This demand, in other words, comes not from some speaking subject (just like me) but from the coming of an other, of the wholly other, in or as the other’s approach. Smock continues: The other who approaches speaks and asks you to make it so that he can speak: Blanchot says you hear him asking you to find the words with which he’ll make you hear him. Isn’t it just as if your duty were to answer for language in the absence of language – in the absence, that is, of any common usage, shared assumptions, or common ground to start from? (Nancy and Smock, 1993, p. 311)

That would be the condition for an event, an event worthy of its name: no context, no precedent, no shared law or convention or norm through which to understand or in which to ground a response that is nonetheless required of you. You must respond, but without understanding to what or to whom, and with no clear way (no path or programme) through which to do so. Both the ‘what/ whom’ and the ‘way’ will have to be instituted precisely through the response, which is ‘through and through and par excellence a performative’, as Derrida puts it. Back to Smock: In this situation, there is nothing to start out from, nothing to base anything upon. You have to answer an utterance (an entreaty, a question, a command, who knows?) that you have never heard and that you won’t have heard until

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you’ve answered. For if you have to answer (“Il faut parler”), it’s so that what, or rather whom, you are obliged to answer might be heard. Thus you must speak without being able to – without knowing what the question is that you must answer or even if it is a question; you must answer without understanding for what or whom it is that you’re accountable. (Nancy and Smock, 1993, p. 311)

Without your yes, which is required before you understand, before you have the power, the injunction will go unheard; the response receives and inscribes the injunction. Yes, yes. There is no sovereignty in this interruptive scene of address – in this speech before speech – no subject who says what she means and means what she says, no world, even – no more and not yet: it’s both the apocalypse and the genesis of the world. There is only a response-ability, subjection to a limitless obligation that is coming in from a no-one (le tout autre) and that requires an ‘I’ (‘yes I said yes I will Yes’) so that something might be said or done that will bring a world into being. Smock: You must speak just as the power to speak departs from you – just as the world wherein speaking is a possibility and a thing you can do recedes and leaves you face to face with the other as if you two were the sole vestiges of a world long over with. Yet this is the beginning, the start of the world where people can approach, can hear and answer one another, speaking together. The obligation that speaking initially is (“Il faut parler”) must be the duty of vouching for this world – the one where people recognize and acknowledge one another – when it is coming, precariously, unexpectedly, and implausibly, to be. (Nancy and Smock, 1993, p. 311)

This sort of command performance, this performance of a response without power, without understanding, without limits or precedents, without convention or law, is the ‘originary performativity’ that so interests Derrida – whereas typical academic theories of performative power, not so much.

Ethical overload When he acknowledges in a reply to Simon Critchley in June 2000 that he has become ‘suspicious, whatever its fecundity, its necessity may be, of the theory of performativity’ (Derrida, 2000, p. 466), Derrida is reiterating – 21  years after presenting the first version of his ‘Signature Event Context’ at the Congrès international des Sociètès de philosophie de langue francaise in Montreal – a

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caution against situating ethical or political thought solely within the realm of performative power, as if the event of the ‘performative event’ were something that could be calculated and managed. For, wherever ‘we suppose that these performative languages, performative communications, produce events’, Derrida insists, they also ‘give rise to institutions’ and so neutralize ‘the eventness of the event’. To put it another way, performativity for me is – I have this impression more and more – that which produces events, all institutions and acts in which responsibility is to be assumed; but it is also that which neutralizes the event, that is to say, what happens (ce qui arrive). Wherever there is the performative, whatever the form of communication, there is a context of legitimate, legitimizing, or legitimized convention that permits it to neutralize what happens, that is, the brute eventness of the arrivant (l’événementialité brute de l’arrivant). (Derrida, 2000, p. 467)

The problem with what typically calls itself the performative – which is ‘so necessary, so new in Western academic discourses, so fertile also’ – is that in the precise instant that it conjures and legitimizes a possible future, it shuts out futurity, any ‘to come’ (à venir), neutralizing the im-possible event through the very ‘performative authority’ (the legitimate and legitimizing context, convention, law) that grants it. The possible names that which is ‘within the power of someone, some “I can”’, as Derrida puts it in Rogues. The im-possible remains ‘foreign to the order of my possibilities, to the order of the “I can”, ipseity, the theoretical, the descriptive, the constative, and the performative’. An event, if it is to be an event, can only be im-possible, ‘an unforeseeable coming of the other, of a heteronomy, of a law come from the other, of a responsibility and a decision of the other – of the other in me, an other greater and older than I am’. The im-possible is not the opposite of the possible but the condition for the possible, in other words. It ‘precedes me, swoops down upon and seizes me here and now in a nonvirtualizable way, in actuality and not potentiality. It comes from on high’, Derrida writes in a passage that could have been written by Levinas, ‘in the form of an injunction that does not simply wait on the horizon, that I do not see coming, that never leaves me in peace and never lets me put it off until later’ (Derrida, 2005, p. 84). The condition for any performative event is this limitless injunction, this ‘you must respond’, which comes from elsewhere, from another time zone, from the ‘outside’, and without a rule book. It comes through as an unlocatable call, an obligation without conditions, an address which, in compelling a response, grants the institution of

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a ‘self ’ as its effect – as an ‘accusative that derives from no nominative’, as Levinas has put it (Levinas, 1998, p. 11). ‘It is a matter’, Derrida writes elsewhere, ‘of an ethical and political imperative, an appeal as unconditional as the appeal of thinking from which it is not separated. It is a matter of the injunction itself ’, he insists (Derrida, 1994b, p. 30), of the injunction and the command performance of a response before comprehension. Academia’s political investment in the theory of the performative (specifically via Habermas in this case, but also via Bourdieu and social constructionist readings of Butler, for example), Derrida continues, ‘has fertile, liberating effects, but also protectionist effects’. Any performative theory that presumes that the institution of norms or rules will silence or respond once and for all to the demand made on me by this unconditional appeal is not only protectionist but irresponsible. Response-ability cannot be normed or institutionalized – once that happens, it is no longer responsible; it no longer has anything to do with ethics. A settled ethics is no ethics at all. Inasmuch as the ‘performative is a power’, Derrida reminds us, it is ‘not only a power, but a legitimizing and legitimized power’, and any politics, law or ethics that bases itself ‘solely on performative power’ is ‘always at the service of powers of legitimation’. This is why the ethical, as well as the political, must remain ‘exposed to a place where constative language as well as performative language is in the service of another language’ – which is to say, the language of the other. Derrida: And there the question is posed of infinite responsibility. Habermas thinks that in the idea of infinite responsibility there is an ethical overload (surcharge), but the ethical overload has to be overwhelming (surchargeant), it overwhelms (surcharge), and the arrival of the other is the overload. One cannot eliminate the overload and control things by norms within discourse. When there are norms, it is finished, everything is done, everything follows from the norms. There is no more responsibility when there are norms. Thus, if one wants to normalize, to norm the ethical overload, it is finished, there is no more ethics. There is ethics precisely where I am in performative powerlessness. (Derrida, 2000, p. 467)

There are ethics when I remain exposed to an infinite obligation to respond, but without limits or precedents, and so without the authority or the power to do so. Wherever there is a rule book or a law book, wherever power has been restored and limits (legitimate contexts and conventions) have been established, and wherever ‘I’ operate within those limits and conditions, there are no ethics

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and no responsibility. ‘If responsibility were not infinite’, Derrida insists, if it could be limited or settled, you could not have moral and political problems. There are only moral and political problems, and everything that follows from this, from the moment when responsibility is not limitable. As a consequence, whatever choice I might make, I cannot say with good conscience that I have made a good choice or that I have assumed my responsibilities. This is the infinitude that inscribes itself within responsibility. (Derrida, 1996b, p. 89)

In the face of this infinite responsibility, one must act; there is an urgency that will not wait. And yet, nothing is settled by this required decision: ‘undecidability is not a moment to be overcome by the occurrence of decision. Undecidability continues to inhabit the decision and the latter does not close itself off from the former. The relation to the other does not close itself off ’ (p. 89). Derrida is interested not so much in ‘speech acts’, then, but in the ‘perfumativity’ that is their condition of possibility, in what he describes in Specters of Marx as the appeal or the political injunction, the pledge or the promise (the oath, if one prefers: “swear!”), the originary performativity that does not conform to preexisting conventions, unlike all the performatives analyzed by the theoreticians of speech acts, but whose force of rupture produces the institution or the constitution, the law itself, which is to say also the meaning that appears to, that ought to, or that appears to have to guarantee it in return. (Derrida, 1994b, p. 31)

It is in this absolute rupture between present and past that a future is inaugurated, a to-come (à-venir) that does not simply follow from what was, a future for which no preparation is possible. There is a violence inherent in this ‘originary performativity’, a violence ‘of the law before the law and before meaning, violence that interrupts time, disarticulates it, dislodges it, displaces it out of its natural lodging: “out of joint”’. This violence initiates from a pledge, a promise made ‘even before, perhaps, a decision confirms it’, and that ‘responds without delay to the demand of justice’ (p. 31). Not to the demands of the law, from within the limits of the law, but to an injunction that precedes and exceeds the law. The ghost scene in Hamlet (‘Swear!’) allegorizes this originary performativity in which a limitless ethical and political injunction comes in as an address from elsewhere (here, from a ghost), demanding a response, a yes, before meaning can be established or the law can provide conditions. The ‘originary performative’ to which Derrida refers involves not performative power but a powerless

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responsivity or reciprocity, a countersigning of the performative command: ‘Swear!’ Yes-I swear; I promise; I pledge to respond without understanding why or how – or even who or what ‘you’ are – without access to any rule or precedent, without power or possibility. Yes, yes. This is the ‘originary performative’, the performative event that serves as the condition for any speech act. And/but once it is codified and legitimated, institutionalized as a convention or law, there is no more responsibility and no more event. Performative power arises precisely from the conditions and limits it acknowledges and within which it operates: the aim of this power is to ‘eliminate’ or ‘norm the ethical overload’ and so to close off the relation to the other, to any future-to-come (l’à-venir qui vient à l’ouvrir), often with the best, most ethical intentions.

The limits of the performative In his essay ‘On Forgiveness’, Derrida reminds us that the international institution of the juridical concept ‘crime against humanity’ was a performative event; though it was ‘of a scope still difficult to interpret’, it was ‘produced and authored by an international community on a date and according to a figure determined by its history’ (Derrida, 2001b, p. 29). Its authors did not simply describe existing crimes committed by a state or organizational policy (murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, etc.), but instituted a transformational concept under which to gather these existing crimes that gave the Nuremberg Tribunal, and then other international tribunals, the power to both try and prosecute them. Prior to the institution of this concept in 1945, there was, legally speaking, no such thing as a ‘crime against humanity’, no matter how many state-sanctioned murders, exterminations, enslavements, deportations and other ‘inhumane acts’ had been committed against civilian populations. For the Nuremberg trials even to begin to address the atrocities committed by Nazi criminals, it was necessary to create this special category of crimes that couldn’t be neatly classified as ‘war crimes’. There was no known precedent in the histories of war of a country routinely engaging in the mass murder, deportation, enslavement and extermination of its own citizens, and for the purpose of no particular wartime objective: there was no apparent connection between Germany’s war aims and its establishment of the concentration and extermination camps into which it forced millions of its citizens. The institution of this category of crimes, then, was in some sense a performative event: it

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inaugurated new ways of thinking and talking about these crimes, as well as new ways to legitimately respond to them. They are no longer only ghastly crimes, but the worst, most heinous, most unforgivable crimes: crimes against humanity. The inauguration and institutionalization of this juridical concept took place in urgent response to an overwhelming ethical imperative, to a call for justice beyond the law, beyond the limits or precedents of the law. The law that is now in place and on which international tribunals are based owes itself both to the performative power that articulated and inaugurated this concept within a certain authorized context and/but also to an ‘originary performativity’ in which an infinite appeal was answered by a pledge, a promise, an oath made in the name of justice. And yet, as necessary, as ethical, as responsible as that response was at that moment – and who would ever deny its necessity or its ethico-political responsiveness? – what Derrida wants to point up is that it also marked the silencing of a certain ethical imperative (‘it is finished’, as he says). In prescribing and institutionalizing the object, the only possible object, of an imprescriptible injunction, this performative ‘event’ eliminates (or aims to eliminate) ‘the ethical overload’, to limit and control it, to make it manageable. It institutionalizes a way of thinking and responding that ends up suspending both thought and responsibility. If there is responsibility or decision one cannot determine them as such or have certainty or good conscience with regard to them. If I conduct myself particularly well with regard to someone, I know that it is to the detriment of an other; of one nation to the detriment of another nation, of one family to the detriment of another family, of my friends to the detriment of other friends or non-friends. (Derrida, 1996b, p. 89)

In several texts, Derrida notes that the institutionalization of this concept, ‘crimes against humanity’, legitimates and further perpetuates, among so many other things, the presumptions of a philosophical and theological humanism. ‘Only a sacredness of the human can, in the last resort, justify this concept (nothing is worse, in this logic, than a crime against the humanity of man and against human rights)’, he writes. The meaning of this sacredness is grounded ‘in the Abrahamic memory of the religions of the Book, in a Jewish but above all Christian interpretation of the “neighbor” or the “fellow man”’, so that the ‘crime against humanity is a crime against what is most sacred in the living, and thus already against the divine in man, in Godmade-man or man-made-Godby-God (the death of man and the death of God would here betray the same

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crime)’ (Derrida, 2001b, pp. 30–1). The international institutionalization of this Christian principle is also the international legitimization of a strict limitation regarding the potential victims of these most heinous and unforgivable acts.3 ‘Crimes against humanity’ are crimes against what is sacred in a human being – indeed, they are to be considered crimes only when they are committed against members of the genus-species Homo sapiens. But ‘do we consent to presume’, Derrida asks, ‘that every murder, every transgression of the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” concerns only man . . . and that, in sum, there are crimes only “against humanity”’ (Derrida, 2008a, p. 48)? Using the word genocide unapologetically, he insists that ‘there are also animal genocides: the number of species endangered because of man takes one’s breath away’ (p. 26). One should neither abuse the figure of genocide nor too quickly consider it explained away. It gets more complicated: the annihilation of certain species is indeed in process, but it is occurring through the organization and exploitation of an artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every presumed norm of life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation. As if, for example, instead of throwing a people into ovens and gas chambers (let’s say Nazi) doctors and geneticists had decided to organize an overproduction and overgeneration of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals by means of artificial insemination, so that, being continually more numerous and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing numbers for the same hell, that of the imposition of genetic experimentation by gas or fire. In the same abattoirs . . . If these images are “pathetic”, if they evoke sympathy, it is also because they “pathetically” open the immense question of pathos and the pathological, precisely, that is, of suffering, pity, and compassion; and the place that has to be accorded to the interpretation of this compassion, to the sharing of this suffering among the living, to the law, ethics, and politics that must be brought to bear upon this experience of compassion. (Derrida, 2008a, p. 26)

That we who call ourselves human share with certain animals an inability to not suffer, a vulnerability and a passivity with regard to suffering, is not even a question, Derrida insists; it is ‘undeniable’. ‘No one can deny the suffering, fear, or panic, the terror or the fright that can seize certain animals and that we humans can witness’. And yet, there are indeed many who do try to deny it, based on the same putative sacredness or specialness of human beings reinforced by the law, and who ‘violate not only animal life but even and also this sentiment of compassion’. Today, therefore, ‘war is waged over the matter of pity’, Derrida notes,

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a war that ‘is probably ageless’ but that is now passing through ‘a critical phase’. And he suggests that it is ‘a duty, a responsibility, an obligation’ to think this war, to think it because it concerns precisely ‘what we call “thinking”’ (p. 28). The unconditional ‘appeal of thinking’ does not begin with rules or proofs or precedents or limits of some kind; what begins there, within established boundaries for thought, is no longer thinking but the mechanistic deployment of a programme or method. Like ethics, thinking begins, if it begins, in the night of aporia, when no methodological path is open and no rules or precedents seem to apply. Thinking takes place, if it ever does, Derrida insists, only when we are unarmed (or disarmed): vulnerable and in the dark. From here, with no transition, he continues: ‘The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there’ (pp. 28–9). That is to say, thinking begins, perhaps, precisely where responsibility is called for: not in the face of a shared ‘humanity’ or in a shared language – that is the limit that the law established – but in the face of a shared yet unreadable passivity and vulnerability, a powerlessness that precedes and exceeds the law and the word, and that obligates me without limit or precedent to respond. According to him, thinking – along with ethics and any performative event worthy of the name – begins, if it’s ever going to, right there, where the institutionalized boundaries and limits do not and cannot apply, leaving us face to face with this once again infinite responsibility, this limitless obligation, this ‘ethical overload’. The point is not that the performative (any more than the constative) is unethical. It is that the moment performative (or constative) language is no longer ‘in the service of another language’, responding to the language of the other, it can only be ‘protectionist’ – and from there, it is finished with ethics, with responsibility, with thinking. A limited or conditional responsibility (or thinking) is no responsibility (or thinking) at all. Any theory of performativity that embraces its power of possibility without acknowledging its dependence on a certain powerlessness and im-possibility aligns itself with legitimizing convention and so is finished with ethics (il est fini). The hope of the performative is not that its power might be mastered and harnessed to normalize better, more politically and ethically correct standards of behaviour or discourse, but that its rupturing force might throw time and its normative limits, including the limits of the self, ‘out of joint’, leaving us open (again), vulnerable (again) to the gift of futuricity, a to-come for which I cannot prepare. It’s there, without power or possibility, Derrida writes, that ‘I expose myself to the event, to the arrival of an event for which no performative is ready’ (Derrida, 2000, p. 468).

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Performativity on the down-low The arrival of an event ‘is a burden (charge), an infinite responsibility’, Derrida notes, but it is not simply one that ‘I’ assume. ‘I cannot assume the responsibility that overwhelms me. I am infinitely overwhelmed as a finite being by a responsibility that cannot but be infinite – and impossible to assume’, Derrida writes. I can perhaps think it, I must think it and respond to it, but I cannot take a decision that assumes it or settles it. ‘There, concerning responsibility, performativity is a luxury of authority. To be able to have the right and the power to produce the performative, there must naturally exist a right and a condition. If I provide these conditions, it is finished’ (Derrida, 2000, p. 468). No more responsibility. Responsibility, which is by definition infinite, both demands decisions and exceeds them, overloads them. There is no decision, strictly speaking, that does not pass through the crucible of undecidability (otherwise the decision is not one), but the decision does not finally overcome undecidability – no more than the response finally overcomes responsibility. There is no way to put the limitless injunction to rest, no way to eliminate the ethical overload without eliminating ethics itself. When ‘I’ respond, when ‘I’ perform a response, that decision comes not from me but to me: a decision comes to me. If I could decide, it wouldn’t be a decision. The decision qua decision is not so much taken as received; it arrives in a moment of madness and can only be grounded and justified after the fact. It arrives, ‘I’ respond, and things happen on the ethico-political scene. But Derrida insists that this originary performativity remains irreducible to the public realm and to any determinate politics, including the politics that typically goes by the name democracy. This performativity is not apolitical, but it does precede and exceed the political, confirming each time that ‘we are not defined through and through by the political, and above all not by citizenship, by the statutory belonging to a Nation-State’ (Derrida, 2001b, p. 54). However, this pre-performative force is even less reducible to the ‘private’ realm, a locution that presumes the interiority of a subject who has experiences. No, it takes place in the open but in the dark, in the realm of the secret, in Derrida’s parlance, which is ‘coextensive with the experience of singularity’ (Derrida, 1996b, p. 82). The yes upon which everything depends and the decision that arrives in a way that both takes me (out) and gives me (to be), is not a secret ‘that I keep within me; it is not me’. Even when everything is permitted to be said, he insists – for example, in literature, which has the right to say anything – ‘the secret is kept

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absolutely’. We are not talking about ‘the secret of representation that one keeps in one’s head and which one chooses not to tell’ (pp. 82–3). In that sense, there is no secret to tell: the secret is that there is no such representable secret. But there is a realm that withdraws, that recedes into the night and to which I have no access – it fundamentally affects me but without ever flipping on the lights. Performative perfume emanates from this realm. What happens (to me) here is not a secret I won’t tell but a secret that makes me be; it is therefore not available for narration. To try to tell this secret would put me in a position resembling the one in which the ‘I’ in Blanchot’s La folie du jour finds himself, interrogated by representatives of the law who demand from him a story, a récit, about an event that has greatly affected him, that has taken him out, taken away his sight (his light), and/but that he has no capacity to narrate, that he cannot comprehend or relate to, that remains for him covered in darkness. There is a concept of politics and democracy as openness – where all are equal and where the public realm is open to all – which tends to deny, efface or prohibit the secret; in any case, it tends to limit the right to secrecy to the private domain, thereby establishing a culture of privacy. (Derrida, 1996b, p. 83)

But he insists that any thinking of a ‘democracy to come’ begins with the secret as secret, with respect for its inaccessibility as the basis on which ‘the public realm and the realm of the political can be and remain open’ (p. 82). The secret, this secret, is irreducible to politics, but it is the motor of the ethical and the political. In his description of the performative powerlessness that structures pure forgiveness, Derrida insists that ‘this zone of experience remains inaccessible, and I must respect its secret’. It must remain intact, inaccessible to law, to politics, even to morals: absolute. But I would make of this trans-political principle a political principle, a political rule or position taking: it is necessary also in politics to respect the secret, that which exceeds the political or that which is no longer in the juridical domain. This is what I would call the “democracy to come”. (Derrida, 2001b, p. 55)

This ‘democracy to come’, in other words, would involve not an ‘openness – where all are equal and where the public realm is open to all’, but an openness to the coming of the other, each time; a willingness to bend the rules with the utmost respect to those same rules, in order to ‘allow the other come or announce its coming in the opening of this dehiscence’. This is also, he muses, ‘perhaps what is called deconstruction’ (Derrida, 2007b, p. 44).

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Notes 1 Avital Ronell famously examines the ‘telephonic “hello”’ in The Telephone Book (1989). 2 Levinas describes the imperative that issues from ‘the face of the Other’ (le visage d’Autrui) slightly differently: ‘To see a face is already to hear: “You shall not kill”’ (Levinas, 1990, pp. 8–9). However, this ‘saying’ of the face, Levinas tells us, is both an interdiction against murder and, simultaneously, an invitation to speak. In that sense, ‘You shall not kill’ already says ‘You must speak’ and vice versa. 3 Whereas Jankélévitch proposes in L’Imprescriptible that ‘forgiveness died in the death camps’, Derrida’s response is: ‘Yes. Unless it only becomes possible from the moment that it appears impossible’ (Derrida, 2001b, p. 37).

3

The Performative and the Normative Matthias Fritsch

This chapter will investigate, in the context of Derrida’s work, the relation between the performative and the normative. While all commentators agree that, ever since Derrida’s reading of Austin’s speech act theory, the performative plays an indispensable role in his work, there is widespread disagreement in the secondary literature on whether Derrida proposes, as part of his work on ethics, religion and politics, an ineliminable normativity, and what it involves. The overall goal here will be to show that the performative ‘after Derrida’ must take note of a tension between performative power and normative impotence, between self-staging and presubjective relations to alterity. The demonstration will proceed in six steps. First, I will argue that Derrida does not quite fit into the standard narrative of the performative after Austin in the recent humanities. This is in part because this story leaves out that a temporality in which moments do not coincide with themselves instals in each event a basic, general performativity, as Heidegger argued without, however, using the word. Derrida’s elaboration of the Austinian performative in terms of Heidegger’s event of being makes it advisable to distinguish the performative in general from the performative in the strict sense. The former names the performativity of every event beyond a narrower restriction to linguistic speech acts. From the performative in the strict sense, which supposes a self-assertive speaker, we must then further distinguish the subject’s constitutive relatedness to others. To call such exposure to alterity ‘normative’ requires that we distinguish it from the sense of normativity prevalent in most normative theory as well as in some recent interpretations of Derrida. The final section concludes that, despite the necessity of these distinctions, the performative power of self-affirming speakers stands in a relation of co-implication with the normative affirmation of alterity, including non-human others.

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The standard narrative of the performative The death of an author inevitably provokes an ‘after’, even if we know quite well that the works continue to perform. Let the Nachlass be considerable, and the texts too rich for a summary judgement, he can no longer write. So the survivors are called on to categorize, to distance themselves in their conclusions, to say what the work is and what it is not, and what the latecomers still have to do. It is this double necessity – of death’s after and the work’s performative resistance to it, hence of a concluding inconclusiveness – that Derrida’s concept of the performative still gives us to think. As a contradictory injunction – conclude but let it live, appropriate but respect its independence, etc. – cannot be measured up to, the oeuvre continues to address us. The conjunction of two motifs I just mentioned, that of the oeuvre (‘great books’, works of art, etc.) and that of the performative, has come to be central to the self-understanding of at least some of the humanities. As academic disciplines, the humanities owe their own survival, not exactly ensured in recent times, to redeploying the concept of the human. Since the Western tradition has often defined the human by the making and performing of works, rethinking performativity ‘after’ Derrida will come to affect the future of the humanities and the human.1 Here, such rethinking will be undertaken in view of the exposure of work to passivity, of the possible to the impossible, of power and sovereignty to an incalculable affirmation in response to which the human subject, performer of works, alone may come to be. As we will see, affirmation, of the self as much as of the other, implies a basic normativity. Hence, what is to be clarified is the relation between the performative and the normative in and beyond Derrida’s texts. If we may accept that an oeuvre is in some sense a speech act, Derrida goes further in proposing not merely the event of the performative, but the performativity – in a sense to be specified – of every event, of anything happening at all. This generalization of the performative may seem counterintuitive from the viewpoint of familiar distinctions between the human and the nonhuman, culture and nature, language and its other. In part no doubt because these traditional binaries continue to operate in recent academic history, the generalization will also seem counterintuitive from the perspective of the development of the notion of the performative. For if we accept for the moment that the story of the performative as a speech act in the recent humanities began with Austin’s discovery of linguistic acts that do not report facts but make them,

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of utterances as events sui generis, then performatives seem at first to make up a subset of events: promises, baptisms, bets and so on. This set supposes, first, a language with its grammatical rules as well as its social conventions that determine when an utterance counts as, to stay with some of Austin’s examples, a promise actually made, the christening of a ship, the conclusion to a marriage ceremony and so on. Second, the performative supposes competent speakers who limit their purported sovereignty by following these rules and conventions with the right kind of serious, honest intentions (Derrida, 2002d, p. XXXIII), thereby converting subjection to norms into an authorization and a social power, as when a priest performs a marriage ceremony by the book.2 According to the ‘standard narrative’ (Loxley, 2007, p. 2) of the fate of the performative in the humanities, first Austin and then Searle broadened the notion of the performative to all linguistic utterances, including seemingly theoretical or constative ones, but describing fictional or literary works as derivative of serious uses of the rules and conventions (see Austin [1962] and Searle [1969]). Other thinkers, such as Stanley Fish, Shoshana Felman and Jacques Derrida, problematized the boundary between ‘serious’ and ‘non-serious’ or ‘fictional’ utterances, thereby drawing attention not only, as Austin did, to the performativity of all language use, but to the literary indeterminability of all meaning, the ‘as if ’ that accompanies all events, as well as to the involuntary opacity of speakers and the strange secrecy of the social bond. Feminists and queer theorists, Judith Butler in particular, sought to spell out the implications of this deconstructive performativity – already an ‘after’ Derrida – for hegemonic constructions of social, in particular gender, identities that subjects perform under the normalizing effects of cultural registers and rules. This, in turn, sparked new insights and helped to establish new academic programmes, such as Performance Studies, devoted to resituating the relation between the supposedly real world and theatrical performances on stage.3 Despite the crucial place he occupies in this (already exclusionary) story, and thereby in the recent human and social sciences, Derrida remains difficult to place in it. At first it seems this is because, in the wake of Heidegger much more than Wittgenstein or Austin, he attributes performativity to being in general. The deconstructive ‘hauntology’ insists that the spectres that no ontology can ever fully capture have already addressed us, the human performers. The address or, if you wish, performativity of being is not often sufficiently appreciated by those commentators who stress the Austinian provenance of the performative. The focus is often on what happens in and ‘after’ Derrida, to the neglect of what

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Derrida himself calls the ‘above all Heideggerian premises of deconstruction’ (Derrida, 2005d, p. 137). A brief discussion of Heidegger’s address of being may thus be helpful.

Heidegger’s responsibility For the Heidegger of Being and Time, human existence (Dasein) is characterized by the care for its being, not merely in the sense of survival, but in the sense of questioning its being and the meaning thereof. While its being as well as being in general is given to Dasein, the meaning of being and its interpretation being initially taken over from tradition, the gift (Gabe) is always at the same time a task (Auf-gabe): contrary to, say, a stone, being for Dasein has to be interpreted and assumed. The ‘ultimate demand’ for Dasein, says Heidegger, is that it ‘takes upon itself again, expressly and explicitly, its own being-there and be responsible for it’ (Heidegger, 2004a, p. 254).4 In this taking up, not only does the gift or event of being precede the self, but the self in fact comes about only in such a responding or corresponding. As Heidegger writes, ‘Only in responsibility [Verantwortung] does the self first reveal itself ’ (Heidegger, 1997, p. 194). To assume, then, a self prior to responsibility in this sense is to misinterpret the being of subjectivity. Given this gift of being as a task, Heidegger, both early and late, can also speak of being addressing itself to Dasein in the form of a call, rendering Dasein the one who has always already been addressed to take up her or his being. Dasein is characterized by an originary being-guilty (Heidegger, 1984, pp. 280–90). Dasein cannot be thought without the call of conscience having addressed itself to it, calling it to its own being itself as a self from where all secondary choices, including moral ones, first of all become choices emanating from an agent who could be held accountable for them. This is not to say that Heidegger’s responsibility is to be identified with accountability in the classical sense of an unchanging self who is the cause of its acts, as in Kant’s non-phenomenological, noumenal, self-beginning.5 But it does indicate that a self must, for Heidegger, be radically singular to assume its responsibility, and such singularity is not given but acquired in an ongoing project. Without singularizing individuation, Dasein lacks a sense that only it can respond to the call, the call that singles it out as the only one who can meet the obligation. For Heidegger, it is not in confronting other social beings but death, as that which no one else can take over from me, that the source of singular responsibility is to be

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found. An accountable self emerges in response to the originary call to authentic temporalization in the face of death.6 Later in his work, Heidegger found it misleading to make of human existence the starting point of the ontological inquiry into being. Instead, he emphasized the anteriority of being and its calling. Along with this change from Dasein to being came another move from question to answer. Responsibility is transformed from the priority of Dasein’s solicitous interrogation of being to affirming being and its address. In the later Heidegger, Dasein is not first of all questioning being but rather called by the event of being and its ‘sending’ by way of language, a language that now precedes Dasein to call it into being. In the context of his famous ‘original ethics’ (ursprüngliche Ethik; Heidegger, 1978, p. 34), then, Heidegger develops the notion of being’s ‘tasking’ Dasein by demanding of it an originary, non-voluntary affirmation of being and of language (Zuspruch, Zusage; Heidegger, 2003, p. 175). It is in the form of this address of being that Derrida primarily picks up Heidegger’s ontological performativity, even when he locates its source in the experience of the event rather than in the thought of being (Derrida, 2002c, p. 94). As we will elaborate, with and beyond Heidegger, Derrida stresses the way in which affirming being and language is a way of affirming a non-chosen social bond, a faith and a pledge made to others.7 As we cannot here detail Derrida’s reading of Heidegger, we should note that interpreting being in terms of a process of temporalization (rather than in terms of presence) leads to generalizing the performative to the event of being, the timespace in which phenomena can appear. For if a being’s coincidence with itself is not given, a being must, to put this now in Austinian rather than Heideggerean terms, perform its existence. This is the point at which, we may say, Derrida joins Heidegger’s originary responsibility with Austin’s insight into the performativity of even constative (e.g. ontological) discourses. The affirmation of the futurity of being (‘come!’) then expresses the desirability of events in both their unpredictability and in what we must predict and may hope of them. Our relation to the event is not so much cognitive (‘why is there something rather than nothing?’) but performative (‘let there be something rather than nothing’, p. 94).

The performative in the general and the strict sense We should then ask to what extent this generalization of performativity to all events follows in the wake of Austin’s famous conclusion, the one that saw the performative, previously only a special kind of utterance, usurp all of language,

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including constative uses of it (Austin, 1962, p. 142ff.). On the one hand, one may indeed see Derrida push this generalization further by drawing the consequences of discovering the performativity of all constative discourses, including attempts at merely describing being itself. On the other hand, the generalization is not to all linguistic utterances made by human subjects but to being, to the event of life. This, we may say, is the source of a certain duplicity in Derrida’s understanding of the performative, and his use of this idiom. If we merge Austin’s discovery of the performativity of all constative discourses with Heidegger’s address of being prior to the subject, performativity can name the iterability and normativity of all being, the call of the event. But this sort of generalization or merging with Heidegger is problematic to the extent that with the notion of performativity, it appears to maintain the performer as sovereign subject, authorizing itself by appropriating social conventions and norms. The excess of the event of language and, if we must, of being over the subject ought to be marked in a way that Austinian performativity does not. This excess is not always flagged by Derrida nor always noticed in commentaries (for an exception, see Bischof, 2005, pp. 218–62). Given the attempt to mark this excess while retaining the idiom, we should not be surprised to find that the performative is used in two senses in Derrida’s work, a duplicity post-deconstructive performativity would do well to take into account. (a) In a more general sense, performativity is attributed to all events, linguistic or not. In this usage, no distinction is made between a performative and a normative (or affirmatively other-directed) dimension; in fact, here the performative is the normative, in a sense of normativity we will seek to specify in a moment. (b) In more restricted usage, what Derrida calls ‘the strict sense’ (see below), the performative is associated with an active subject who, as a competent performer of speech acts, draws on ‘the power of language in general’ as well as on existing institutions and conventions, to affirm her own authority. Despite the frequency with which Derrida invokes the performative, there are only a few passages in which these two senses are distinguished. The first passage to which I will refer is found in a note to ‘The University without Condition’. Right after recalling his treatment of the later Heidegger’s ‘pre-originary acquiescence’ in Of Spirit and elsewhere, Derrida says that the first usage, the one that merges normative affirmation and the performative, should be understood to be merely ‘provisional’: I am provisionally associating affirmation with performativity. The “yes” of the affirmation is not reducible to the positivity of a position. But it does, in fact,

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In this passage, affirmation is said to ‘resemble’ the performative, but the latter is associated with a ‘power’ that is undermined, preceded and exceeded by the unconditional affirmation of the alterity of the event. In ‘Psyche: Invention of the Other’, Derrida makes clear that for him, affirmation is still performative in a general sense, the sense I referred to as (a), but it is not only that. The difference between affirmation and performativity is there said to lie principally in the institutions and conventions by means of which performative power authorizes itself. Performativity is necessary but not sufficient. In the strict sense, a performative still presupposes too much conventional institution to break the mirror. The deconstruction I am invoking only invents or affirms, lets the other come insofar as, while a performative, it is not only performative but also continues to unsettle the conditions of the performative and of whatever distinguishes it comfortably from the constative. This writing is liable to the other, opened to and by the other, to the work of the other; it is writing working at not letting itself be enclosed or dominated by that economy of the same in its totality, which guarantees both the irrefutable power and the closure of the classical concept of invention, its politics, its technoscience, its institutions. (Derrida, 2007c, p. 46)

Many readers of Derrida will have noticed that this opposition between institutional power and the alterity that, while eluding such power, it must affirm, returns in the famous ‘Force of law’ as the opposition between law and justice. Law supposes a performative power that institutes and enacts it. Since no anterior conventions can ever fully justify such institutions and such enactment, law cannot do without some violence erupting in and through it. But this power or violence, precisely because it cannot ever be non-performatively constative (‘this act is just’ or ‘this law is fully justified by those preceding it’, etc.), is itself committed, in advance, to promise justice and non-violence beyond the law (Derrida, 2002b, p. 256). Similarly, ‘Faith and knowledge’ argues that religion and science both draw on the normative performativity of an irreducible faith

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(‘I have faith in you, I trust you’) and promise (‘I promise to speak the truth, and to continue to speak to you, so trust me, believe me’) that enables ‘performativity in general’, including the technical institution of modern science whose performativity Lyotard analysed so trenchantly in The Postmodern Condition.8 The ineluctable profession of faith, not of knowledge but of faith, Derrida argues, is at home in particular in the university, in the institution of the professor, even there where she claims, with good reason, to merely describe the way things are, rather than to produce more works. The significance of this distinction, as well as of the co-implication of the performative and the normative in Derrida’s work, should be duly noted. Given this significance, what the notion of performativity ‘after Derrida’ – so one that wishes to inherit and rework deconstructive insights – must come to appreciate above all, it seems to me, is that this duplicity in the performative is not accidental. It is not a mere double usage that careful analysis, in the style of ordinary language philosophy, could simply dissociate. Rather, the duplicity is bound up with performativity itself. The reason for this duplicity, to anticipate what will be elaborated below, is that performative power must perform itself while, or better: by, unconditionally exposing its ‘self ’ to the other. This is why Derrida insists upon the necessity of separating the inseparable, namely, unconditionality from sovereignty (Derrida, 2005e, p. 141 and pp. 195–6), or affirmation from performativity ‘in the strict sense’. The point will be to think the co-implication of performative self-affirmation and normative otheraffirmation. On this view, sovereign power is both conditioned and subverted by a presubjective, non-voluntary affirmation of the future, the unconditional call ‘come!’ It is because we must not only distinguish the general and the restricted sense, but also think their inseparability, the ultimate indivisibility of self and other, that it may seem appropriate, despite the confusions it invites, to use the term ‘performativity’ in both senses. In the first passage we just read, Derrida indicates the inseparability by saying that affirmation ‘resembles’ a performative speech act. The resemblance stems first of all from the fact that both the affirmative and the performative are contrasted, for similar reasons, with a third term, the constative or the descriptive. Indeed, whenever Derrida contrasts the constative and the performative, and argues that, in agreement with Austin, there is a certain performativity even in the constative (Derrida, 2002d, p. 111), then performativity is the broader category, including and often even meaning in particular unconditional affirmation. But when performativity is contrasted with the experience of the event, the performative and the affirmative come

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apart. The emphasis then shifts towards the normativity of the event in general, a normativity that undermines the performative power of a subject and its speech acts. The event is then precisely that point at which the distinction between the constative and the performative no longer holds. As Derrida puts it in ‘The University without Condition’: After having made this pair of concepts [Austin’s constative-performative] count for a lot, I will end up designating a place where it fails – and must fail. This place will be precisely what happens . . . the event . . . which cares as little about the performative, the performative power, as it does about the constative. (Derrida, 2002d, p. 209)

Briefly put, then, the openness of the event is said to subvert the performativity of both constative and performative language use: ‘The event defeats both the constative and the performative . . .’ (Derrida, 2007a, p. 456). But before we return to the place where the event exposes the non-present source of normativity, we should explore a little further the performativity of all events and the normativity of affirmation as well as their co-implication in a double performativity.

The performativity of the event As indicated, in Austin the performative supposes a competent speaker, and so is restricted from the beginning to linguistic acts intended by a subject or an agent. From his first reading of Austin in the late 1960s, Derrida aims at overcoming this ‘linguisticism’ and the related unquestioned presupposition of an intentional speaker. The move from linguistic acts to events of being indeed opens Derrida’s reading of Austin in the famous ‘Signature Event Context’. The essay begins by noting that ‘communication’ is not restricted to linguistic exchanges but includes physical passageways, the communication of movements or of forces, and so on. This plurality of meaning is not merely polysemious but rather disseminative, so not governed by a core or proper meaning. Nor is this plurality of meaning easily controlled by context (Derrida, 1982, pp. 309–10). After showing, by the focus on ‘writing’, that the iterability of marks implies their ‘acting’ or performing (‘agir’) even in the absence of the author – an absence that is not just a mere supplement or modification of presence, thus entailing the ‘death’ or non-presence-to-self of the sender and receiver – Derrida argues that this performative iterability ‘would be valid not only for all the orders of “signs” and for a languages in general, but even, beyond semiolinguistic communication, for the entire field of what philosophy

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would call experience, that is the experience of Being: so-called “presence”’ (pp. 316–7). This non-linguisticism of iterability and of performativity, Derrida later insisted, is often missed by commentators (e.g. Derrida, 2001a, pp. 76–7). This is why Derrida, from early on, preferred to speak of ‘marks’ rather than ‘signs’, ‘phonemes’, ‘morphemes’ and the like. Marks are not necessarily linguistic elements in non-totalizable networks, networks of which Derrida sometimes says that they are co-extensive, not with language, but with life (Derrida, 2001c, p. 108). Codes not written by human beings but operating through them, such as genetic ones, are made up of marks.9 Marks perform even beyond subjective intentions. Subjects are themselves put into play by a performativity that precedes them and engages them prior to their formation of a will, prior to the power to invoke or evade social conventions. To suggest that all constatives have a performative dimension, but to restrict this performativity to the universe of all human-made conventions at the disposal of a subject, is to go only half the way. If performativity must be able to function in the absence of the author, if then the force of differential iterability is operative in and through the language user, then the latter cannot subsequently distance herself from this performativity and attain a standpoint external to the conventions on which performative speech acts draw. Thus, Derrida argues against what Austin calls the ‘total context’ (Derrida, 1982, p. 322), and so against the control by a subjective intention that orients itself to a social norm in order to authorize its acts. The attempt to think performativity or iterability as determined by a context totalized by a speaker, however idealized and teleologically projected into the future this totalized context may be, cannot account for ‘infelicities’ and the risk of failed speech acts. Going half way with performativity, then, requires casting failures into a separate, subordinate realm of ‘non-serious’ or ‘literary’ uses of language. Going all the way with performativity means thinking, in this very differential iterability, the possibility of both success and failure, and indeed of both in the same act or event. Otherwise, the risk of failure may be recognized, as explicitly by Austin, but it will at the same time be viewed as secondary and merely accidental. Derrida indicates that this double gesture of noting but belittling the risk of failure in the name of ideal types, ‘typical of the philosophical tradition he [Austin] prefers to have little to do with’, is inconsistent with Austin’s otherwise salutary denunciation of the ‘fetish’ of the value/fact distinction (Derrida, 1982, p. 323). Already at this point, then, the insistence on a violence or force exceeding justification by norms in a metalanguage, and preceding the conscious intentions of subjective users of the norms, is associated with a kind of normativity that is,

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at this level, not distinguishable from what Searle calls ‘brute facts’ (Searle, 1969, p. 50), events that a constative language could merely describe. The conjunction of these two gestures – the denial of the availability of a total context or a metalanguage and the rejection of the fact-value distinction – returns frequently in Derrida’s work. The generalization of the performative and the normative to all events, linguistic or not, is thus justified first of all negatively. The argument is one that we also find canonized as ‘post-modern’, in problematic ways, in response to Lyotard’s writings on the performative in The Postmodern Condition. The basic claim is that the inevitable historicity of our human condition does not afford us a metalanguage in which purely descriptive, constative language could be formulated. No object, not even in the natural sciences, is approached immediately, in absolution from a lifeworld, from language and prior approaches to it in the tradition of the science. If we cannot survey an inheritance from the outside, but always find ourselves in its midst, then to respond to it is to add to it and its provisional authority, that is, to perform it, even if the response seeks to be subversive. This adding to a heritage and to its authority is what is meant by performativity. There is no metalanguage that secures the righteousness, the neutrality or the good conscience of the performer – even if a claim to a certain neutral theoreticism remains vital to the social and human sciences and their right to critique, which we would not want to abandon (Derrida, 2002d, p. 218). To better understand why the presubjective performativity without objective metalanguage consists first of all in the performative invocation of the future in its bare openness (‘come!’), it may be worth citing a longer passage. In Archive Fever, Derrida makes this point with regard to Yerushalmi’s reading of Freud’s book on Moses: The strange result of this performative repetition, the irrepressible effectuation of this enactment, in any case what it unavoidably demonstrates, is that the interpretation of the archive (here, for example, Yerushalmi’s book) can only illuminate, read, interpret, establish its object, namely a given inheritance, by inscribing itself in it, that is to say by opening it and by enriching it enough to have a rightful place in it. There is no meta-archive . . . One will never be able to objectivize it [the archive] while leaving no remainder. The archivist produces more archive, and that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out of the future . . . The [unconditional] affirmation of the future to come: this is not a positive thesis. It is nothing other than the affirmation itself, the “yes”, insofar as it is the condition of all promises or of all hope, of all awaiting, of all performativity of all opening toward the future, whatever it may be, for science or for religion. I am

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prepared to subscribe without reserve to this reaffirmation made by Yerushalmi. (Derrida, 1996a, pp. 67–8)

In Given Time, Derrida makes the same point – the unavailability of a metalanguage in which one could merely describe, say, a tradition or a language, and thus the necessity of a performative dimension even to scientific works – with regard to Mauss’ famous The Gift. There, he also identifies the performative and the normative, using, in his own voice, indeed the very word ‘normative’ (as well as ‘prescriptive’ and ‘morality’) without, however, distinguishing the performative and the normative: A discourse on the gift, a treatise on the gift must and can only be part or party (partie prenante ou parti pris) in the field it describes, analyzes, defines. That is why, that is the way in which, that is the very thing he must, he owes, he ought to [il doit]: He is first of all and from the first indebted. The theoretical and supposedly constative dimension of an essay on the gift is a priori a piece, only a part, a part and a party, a moment of a performative, prescriptive, and normative operation that gives or takes, indebts itself, gives and takes, refuses to give or accepts to give – or does both at the same time according to a necessity that we will come back to. But in every case, this discursive gesture is from the outset an example of that about which it claims to be speaking . . . No doubt, as with every “il faut”, this law of the “il faut” is that one must – il faut –go beyond constatation and prescribe. One must – il faut – opt for the gift, for generosity, for noble expenditure, for a practice and a morality of the gift (“il faut donner”, one must give). One cannot be content to speak of the gift and to describe the gift without giving and without saying one must give . . . (Derrida, 1992b, p. 62)

To be inserted in non-totalizable histories from which I must inherit, and which I cannot transcend in a merely descriptive metalanguage, means that I cannot but give back to these histories and traditions by responding to the performativity of an injunction. Historicity, the inadvertent, always already insertion into histories and traditions not of our choosing, imposes the law of the law: we must give, we must develop and support a morality of gift-giving. But we must also be unfaithful and appropriate from the traditions, values and conventions, for our own self-authorization and profit, in ways we cannot ever come to comprehend or survey in toto: ‘. . . the contrary is also necessary: It is necessary [il faut] to limit the excess of the gift and of generosity, to limit them by economy, profitability, work, exchange’ (Derrida, 1992b, p. 62). We will return to this duplicity of the performative, which here in fact amounts to a contradictory demand. Let us first note, however, that this

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historicity connects what at first glance seem to be two different reasons for the quasi-ontological, general performativity: the unavailability of a metalanguage, and the insight, referenced above in the brief discussion of Heidegger, into the performative responsibility called forth by the non-coincidence of time. The basic anachrony or disjointure of time disallows a mark’s self-identity. Or rather, such identity is never there, present and available to the onlooker. Identity cannot be merely described in a constative mode, as if it was already given. It is always to be established, to come. Its existence is thus inseparable from the demand to establish its existence. That is why the event of being is associated with the performative invocation of the future ‘viens!’ As Derrida puts it, ‘One must think the event from the “come [viens]”, and not the reverse’ (Derrida, 2002c, p. 94). In other words, we should not delude ourselves into supposing that we can first state the event, the being of what is or takes place, in a purely constative mode, and then discuss how we respond to it, invoking or denying this or that event. Rather, the being of the event, Derrida insists, already includes the call for its coming, and in fact for its remaining to come. The happening of the event comes from the future that we cannot but invoke in a performative mode.

Normative performativity and normative theory This is what Derrida seeks to bring to the fore when, more and more in his work over the years, he writes about the event of being in normative and social terms. But how and why should we distinguish, under the umbrella of performativity, the performative and the normative? What might the latter mean here? Even if we grant some kind of quasi-ontological performativity, should we not distinguish between descriptive terms like the event, or being, and, clearly normative terms, such as hospitality? As I have argued elsewhere, it is not always appreciated that the many ethical and political concepts that populate Derrida’s later texts in particular – concepts such as affirmation, the messianic, responsibility, decision, friendship, democracy, hospitality, faith, the promise, and justice – are different ways of thinking the event of being and the ineluctably performative relation to it. On the other hand, as I also sought to suggest, it is easy to believe, mistakenly I think, that the coincidence of, say, hospitality and the event, implies that no genuine source of normativity is suggested by Derrida (see Fritsch, 2011). One reason for these significant differences in Derrida-interpretations lies, I believe, in the recondite duplicity of the performative, both in Derrida’s work and in any performative, autodeconstructive structure. Above, I began to try to tackle

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the duplicity by distinguishing a general and a strict sense of the performative. It may help to see, further, that from the latter, we can, and indeed should, distinguish what I call the normative. When we do so, the normative will stress a relationality of the self that commits the self ’s performative power in advance to others. This commitment is genuinely open to the other, and not a mere egoism extended to (some) others for circumstantial reasons (say, because ego realizes it needs these others for its self-preservation), because the incalculability or futurity of the relation to the other is not merely accidental, but constitutive of the self. The commitment is genuinely normative, for the performative selfrelation mandated by the disjointure of time and space has already turned into a non-voluntary welcome extended to the other and the other others. Before proceeding, we should clarify what here is meant, and above all, what is not meant, by ‘the normative’. It is important to point out that no ethical code, no norms or policies, are entailed by, or can be derived from, the normative side of general performativity, even if Derrida maintains that the responsibility he locates at the level of the event is ‘the root of all ulterior responsibilities (moral, juridical, political)’ (Derrida, 1995b, p. 276 and p. 290). As an account of the source or root of morality, this performativity, however normative, is situated at a different level from that at which we inherit, formulate, justify and revise norms, codes, rules, laws and policies (without, for all that, supposing clearly distinguishable levels). Just as the performativity of the event is not itself a particular performative more or less consciously made by a speaker drawing on antecedently given social conventions, so the normativity of affirmation is not itself a particular norm or a code. The reason for this non-derivability of norms or codes lies in the duplicity of the performative, a duplicity (Derrida would say ‘aporia’) that undermines the self that seeks to authorize itself and to gain a good conscience by subjecting itself to such codes, norms or conventions. We said above that the event already includes a call for its coming, and in fact for its remaining to come. This explains a basic duplicity, even self-contradiction, in the call. For if the event ever came to pass, if identity was to ever become established once and for all, it would not be happening at all. The call calls for the event to come, but at the same time, for it not to come once and for all, to leave the future open for further calls. The call promises a future call. It promises its own repetition, but not a repetition of the same. And in so performing ‘itself ’ by dividing itself, it sweeps living things and self-affirming subjects along with them, committing them to each other, but also to an irresolvable duplicity, even contradiction or self-division. Promise the truth to the other, but reserve the right to lie for what you take to be your own benefit, your performance. Give

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without reserve to the other, but limit the gift by work, profit, investment, and so by the return to yourself. Welcome the other unconditionally, but make sure to keep your property, so you can remain the host. Normative moral or political theory could not content itself with this analysis, and with good reason. Such theory seeks a moral code, a coherent body of norms, that tell us in what cases, if any, we may lie, how much we are asked to give, and where hospitality ends. Thus, it seeks to end violence in theory, even if it knows well that it may be next to impossible to do so in practice. It seeks to authorize, and invest with the possibility (by no means the actuality) of a good conscience, the subject of normative performance. That is why we may say that both those who reject any ‘normativism’ in Derrida10 and those who take his use of moral and political terms in straightforward normative terms, share a common premise: they overlook the connection between the performative and the normative, either by neglecting the performativity of the normative or the normativity of the performative. It may then even appear, despite Derrida’s explicit claims to the contrary, that deconstruction is a constative, descriptive discourse even when it states the ineluctable openness to the other. For instance, in his fine book Radical Atheism, Martin Hägglund turns against ‘normativist’ interpreters of Derrida, such as John Caputo, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi: The ultratranscendental description of why we must be open to the other is conflated [in a number of influential misreadings of Derrida] with an ethical prescription that we ought to be open to the other. However, Derrida always maintains that one cannot derive any norms, rules, or prescriptions from the constitutive exposition to the other. (Hägglund, 2008, p. 31)

Our discussion suggested that ‘the constitutive exposition to the other’ is to be understood as a ‘normative’ or ‘prescriptive’ relation, and in the passage on the gift from Given Time cited above, Derrida seems to say so using these very words (Derrida, 1992b, p. 62). It is equally true, however, that Derrida claims that ‘one cannot derive any norms or rules’ from this. For instance, in Rogues we read that ‘no ethics, no politics, no law can be deduced from this thought’ of the khôra as the spacing and temporalization of the event (Derrida, 2005e, p. XV). Hence, we must distinguish these two senses of the normative, just as we distinguished two senses of the performative. Hägglund’s text is helpful because it brings to the fore the sense of the normative that is indeed operative in much of contemporary political and moral theory – but not in Derrida. Three features of the normative in this sense stand out. These

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three features are prevalent in much of contemporary normative theory, and we may suppose that the noticeable parallels to what Derrida found problematic in the speech act theory of Austin and Searle (in which an intentional subject authorizes herself by subjection to rules and conventions) are not incidental. Taking them together, normativity on this view involves a capable agent choosing an action on the basis of a principally free will in view of normative rules that prescribe non-violence. Let us look at these features more closely. First, for Hägglund, the term ‘normative’ characterizes an action that ‘one can choose’ (Hägglund, 2008, p. 31), that is an ‘act of will’ (p. 35). Against this, Hägglund rightly mobilizes the insight that the subject only comes about with the ultratranscendental account in which it is ‘constitutively’ exposed to the other. However, as we saw, neither the performative nor the normative, the way they are understood here, needs to presuppose the voluntary subject so dominant in the Western tradition. Heidegger and Derrida in fact link the notion of subjectivity as in principle steadfastly mastering its will to a presentist account of time, the denial of which, as we saw, prompted the alternative account of an originary, non-presentist responsibility or performativity characterizing what we are here still calling ‘agency’. Second, as we can also learn from the passage we cited, in line with much contemporary political and moral theory, Hägglund uses ‘normative’ to refer to an action that places itself under, or is judged in view of, a norm or a prescriptive rule. Derrida, however, dissociates his treatment of ‘ethical questions’ from such a rule-bound understanding of the ethical. In a 2004 interview with l’Humanité, Derrida said: ‘In a way, ethical questions have always been present [in my work], but if by ethics one understands a system of rules, of moral norms, then no, I do not propose an ethics’.11 Thus, from the absence of ‘an’ ethics or ‘a’ politics consisting of laws or rules to which a subject can subject itself or not, we need not conclude that nothing normative or prescriptive is thought and performed in and by Derrida’s work. Similarly, we should not conclude that there is no performativity in Derrida’s work from its putting into question the givenness of conventions authorizing speech acts. Finally, for Hägglund as again for most contemporary normative theorists, the normative involves prescribing non-violence. He writes, ‘In Derrida’s work there is no support for positing the other as primordially Good or for prescribing a nonviolent relationship to him or her or it. On the contrary, Derrida’s notion of alterity is inextricable from a notion of constitutive violence’ (Hägglund, 2008, p. 76). As we saw, however, one may theorize the ineluctability of a prescriptive ‘promise of nonviolence’ made to the other without positing

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the other, descriptively, as fundamentally good. In fact, the prescription can be thought while providing arguments that neither the self nor the other can be fundamentally good, can ever fulfil the promise of non-violence: I think that there is, in the opening of a context of argumentation and discussion, a reference – unknown, indeterminate, but nonetheless thinkable – to disarmament. I agree that such disarmament is never simply present, even in the most pacific moment of persuasion, and therefore that a certain force and violence is irreducible, but nonetheless, this violence can only be practiced and can only appear as such on the basis of a non-violence, a vulnerability, an exposition. I do not believe in non-violence as a descriptive and determinable experience, but rather as an irreducible promise and of the relation to the other as essentially non-instrumental (Derrida, 1996b, p. 83)

As indicated, this ‘originary violence’ is rooted in the duplicity of the performative, which turns every attempt at self-affirmation into an affirmation of the other, without possibility of return to the self. We should look at this duplicity more closely.

The separation and co-implication of the performative and the normative Now that we know what the normative does not mean, does it not collapse back into the performative? How can we still distinguish between the performative and the normative? And why do we use only one word, performativity, for both, apparently confusing the matter? We want to understand, then, both the need to separate the normative within performativity, and the co-implication of the normative and the performative in the strict sense. These two issues, separation and co-implication, are hard to distinguish because they seek to name the same process, the same performativity: the self comes about only in affirming others, taking from and giving to them, performing, working on, living its relatedness to others. To highlight this relationality without preconstituted relata, it appears necessary to differentiate the normative from the performative in the strict sense, unconditionality from sovereignty. I already indicated that, in his appropriation of Heidegger’s originary call of being, Derrida emphasizes, perhaps in line with Heidegger’s ‘being-with’ (Mitsein), the ‘intersubjectivity’ of the call. The call of the event of being takes place between beings as an originary consent or acquiescence – the distinction

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between the active and the passive is premature at this presubjective level – to be with the other, a pledge to the social bond, a promise to affirm and welcome others. At this level, the beings or marks are not yet divided into regions, such as natural and cultural, non-human and human, non-linguistic and linguistic. For human beings, however, we can be sure that the other beings will include, though not be restricted to, other human beings: ancestors first of all, but also the unborn as well as contemporaries who still don’t quite share my time. There are several reasons to caution against the language of ‘intersubjectivity’ that I just used: the others include other beings to whom we do not readily attribute subjectivity, and in those cases that we do, ‘intersubjectivity’ seems to presuppose a kind of shared time or shared horizon of intelligibility, a common ‘space of reasons’ whose constitution – both its coming about and its shape or form – remains at issue in an ongoing movement of construction and destruction. Further, we already saw that Derrida’s appropriation of the Austinian performative problematizes the supposition of a subject who authorizes herself by appropriating norms that are, often without further ado, thought of as shared in a common social space, equally at the disposal of competent speakers. Derrida’s appropriation of the language of performativity, then, calls into question the equality of subjects in a shared time and space. The performative call of the event precedes the human subject, even if the call is inseparable from other human beings. Unsurprisingly, then, the performativity that emerges with a disjoined time involves asymmetry: the call precedes the formation of subjectivity. A subject is, in part, called into being by its ineluctable, performative response to the call. As the constitution is at each time incomplete, no ‘each time’ corresponding to itself, the response cannot ever be adequate to the call. The subject cannot measure up to it. It always comes too late for it. Affirmation engages the subject before the formation of its will. It performs the speaker as she performs her acts. A speaker can perform a linguistic act, for example, make a promise, only by being im-performed, subtended in his intentionality and mastery, by the promise of language or being. The promise engages and delivers the speaker to the other in unmasterable ways: to a singular other, to all other others (human and non-human), and to the self as othering in the process. A performer is preformed, but also de-subjectivized or a-formed. In the words of Werner Hamacher, the performative is an ‘afformative’ (see Hamacher, 1994). Performative relationality, human and otherwise, in conjunction with this imperformance or afformance, is the reason why stating – or even performing, as Derrida certainly does in his works – the performativity of the event is

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insufficient. Within the performative in the general sense, we ought to stress the source of normativity in an anhuman alterity to which performers are bound and exposed. To seek to separate the normative from the performative is to insist on presubjective asymmetry, imperformance and preoriginary relatedness, human and non-human. As the performing self emerges only in and through its relations to others, its self-authorization affirms and welcomes the others in the same gesture. Performativity is double because the performer of speech acts, the writer of oeuvres, is never alone. It may sound paradoxical, and such a sound should not be a mark of distinction, but ascertaining the duplicity of performativity in general, separating the performative in the strict sense from the normative, is a way of staging their inseparability, the belonging, in disjoined or futural time, of other and self, difference and identity. To use the term performativity in both a general and a more restricted sense reflects, or better indeed performs, what each living entity lives on a perpetual basis, namely, the attempt to affirm itself as different from the others who are, however, also needed for such self-affirmation on the very inside of the affirmation. The preoriginary relation to the other, and the contradictions in which it involves subjects, affects, in ways that would merit closer scrutiny, the more common understanding of performativity and of normativity. The performativity of the event involves both a sovereign subject that performs, performatively authorizes herself to perform this or that act, to seize the possible, and the experience of the unconditional surrender to passivity, to the impossible not subject to the power of sovereignty. It is this co-implication of agency and alterity, of sovereignty and unconditionality, that marks the performative ‘after’ Derrida.

Notes 1 On the connection between the academic humanities, the human as labouring animal, and the changes the latter underwent in the twentieth century, see Weber, 2001. See also Hamacher, 1996. 2 This link between subjection and authorization, freedom and responsibility, in fact remains the dominant way to understand the performativity of the human subject in the story of the performative that stretches from Austin via Searle to Habermas and the semantic inferentialism of Brandom (see, for instance, Brandom, 2008). Though this part of the history of the performative is often

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overlooked, it would be intriguing to show that it happens alongside Derrida in a complicated relation of outward indifference but subtle approximations. 3 Even if J. Hillis Miller, in telling his very own story of the performative, recently sought to argue that Austin-inspired performativity and performance studies have nothing to do with one another; see Miller, 2009, pp. 133–73 (‘Derrida’s special theory of performativity’). 4 Here and below, the translation is my own. 5 The difference between responsibility and Kantian accountability is emphasized in particular by Raffoul, 2010. 6 The role of death in the call to responsibility is the touchstone of Levinas’s critique of Heidegger. The literature assessing Levinas’s claim that death is never mine but comes from an interpersonal realm of alterity is, of course, vast, beginning with Derrida’s own ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ (1964; in Writing and Difference), and continuing with his Aporias (1993). I cannot enter that discussion here. 7 Consider this passage: ‘One day very late in his life, Heidegger in his own way said that when he had said earlier that questioning (Fragen), or the question (Frage), was the piety of thought (Frömmigkeit des Denkens), well, he should in fact have said, without contradicting himself, that “before” the question, there was what he called acquiescence (Zusage). A consentment, an affirmation of sorts . . . When you address someone, even if it’s to ask a question, before the question is formulated, there must be an acquiescence, an “I’m talking to you, yes, yes, welcome; I’m talking to you, I’m here, you’re here, Hello!” . . . There is, then, a certain “yes” at the heart of the question, a “yes” to, a “yes” to the other, which may not be unrelated to a “yes” to the event, that is to say, a “yes” to what comes, to letting-it-come. The event is also what comes, what happens [arrive] . . .’ (Derrida, 2007a, pp. 442–3). Cf. the note from Of Spirit in which Derrida links Zuspruch to the notion of ‘being-guilty’ (Schuldigsein) and to the origin of responsibility (Derrida, 1989, pp. 132–3). 8 Consider this passage: ‘. . . the “lights” and Enlightenment of teletechnoscientific critique and reason can only suppose trustworthiness. They are obliged to put into play an irreducible “faith”, that of a “social bond” or of a “sworn faith”; of a testimony (“I promise to tell you the truth beyond all proof and all theoretical demonstration, believe me, etc,”), that is, of a performative of promising at work even in lying or perjury and without which no address to the other would be possible. Without the performative experience of this elementary act of faith, there would neither be “social bond” nor address of the

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9 See Derrida’s references to biological traces early on in Derrida, 1976, p. 70. See also Vicki Kirby’s fascinating discussion, in part by drawing on Derrida’s 1975 seminar on the work of biologist François Jacob (Kirby, 2010). 10 That is the term Ernesto Laclau uses to characterize the position he and Hägglund reject in interpreting Derrida (Laclau, 2008, p. 182). 11 Cited in Raffoul, 2008, p. 271. The original interview is Jacques Derrida, ‘Jacques Derrida, penseur de l’evenement’, interview by Jerome-Alexandre Nielsberg, l’Humanite, 28 January 2004. Derrida attributes a similar view to Levinas while questioning the distinction between what I called ‘levels’ (here, a ‘pure’ one and an impure one): ‘It is true that Ethics in Levinas’s sense is an Ethics without law and without concept, which maintains its non-violent purity only before being determined as concepts and laws. This is not an objection: let us not forget that Levinas does not seek to propose . . . moral rules, does not seek to determine a morality, but rather the essence of the ethical relation in general . . . in question, then, is an Ethics of Ethics [that] . . . can occasion neither a determined ethics nor determined laws without negating and forgetting itself ’. See ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ in Derrida, 1978, p. 111.

Part Two

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Performativity as Ek-Scription: Adonis After Derrida Herman Rapaport

In a seminar from the mid 1980s entitled ‘The Fantom of the Other’, Jacques Derrida made several references to an Arabic poet, Ali Ahmad Said Esber, under the rubric, ‘Émigré de l’interieur/extérieur . . .’ .1 In particular, Derrida was fascinated with the emigration of this Syrian poet out of himself by means of taking on the name Adonis. In losing his name and exchanging it for another, the poet could step outside of himself into a world of ‘universal access’, given the literary allusion to a familiar Western myth. As Derrida relates, the poet felt that because he always already carried an infinity of names within him, it would be possible to tear his given names from the soil, thereby detaching from the identitarian borderlines of place. In this way, one takes the name and performs it, par hasard. One throws a name into the global public sphere, performing oneself as Adonis, a clichéd figure of antiquity, not of the poet’s time and place, whose literary identity nevertheless functions as something of a cultural passport. Adonis: does the name stand alone outside of subjectivity? And does it set limits ‘as though from without, articulating its end, making its dispersion shine forth, taking in only its invincible absence’ or remoteness? It’s not Derrida that I’m quoting here, but Michel Foucault’s seminal essay ‘La pensée du dehors’ (1966), in which it’s not unthinkable that one might relate Adonis’ experience of the outside with a ‘laying desire bare in the infinite murmur of discourse’, something Adonis, the poet, knows all too well, My language crawls on the edge of an abyss and between the ecstasy of sunflowers and the lips of an invisible demise I dangle No between

almost

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in Perhaps n/ever and denial is an epoch and each epoch is an object a flame that drags the body’s alphabet and dies out (Adonis, 2010, p. 151)

Like Foucault, the poet is aware that ‘the gods had wandered off through a rift in language’. Not only have the gods wandered off, but language (the alphabet), the body, as well as petty Arab rulers, if not their lands and cities (Foucault, 1987, pp. 15–16). If, in the Western mythological context, anemones spring from Adonis’ wandering blood, his soul is carried off to Tartarus. Such mythology, as Foucault might have agreed, was intended to lay desire bare in an infinite murmuring (or repetition) of discourses among the poets, which our modern Adonis performs as an Arabic writer who murmurs in the idiom of Tammuz, the mythical Adonis’ Middle Eastern precursor.

A successful performative is impure Although Derrida is also orientated to the dehors, he doesn’t quite follow Foucault’s pensée, because he is mainly interested in the performativity of ‘sa propre signature idiomatique’, the invention of one’s own idiom – c’est à dire, son nom. Indeed, ‘the Fantom of the Other’ seminar was intended to speak to the idiomaticity of philosophy by which Derrida meant the relationships between the singularity of what one reads of any given philosopher, his or her own idiom (Derrida also considers Wittgenstein, Arendt, Adorno, Kant, de Toqueville, Descartes, and so on), and the natal language in which or outside of which they are speaking. This relates to a much later interview, ‘Language is Never Owned’, that concerns Derrida’s recollection of Paul Celan, a poet not entirely so different from Adonis, of whom one could say that idiomatic to him was his silence. ‘I do not know how to interpret this. I believe there was in [Celan] a kind of secrecy, silence, and exactingness that made him find words not indispensable . . .’ (Derrida, 2005f, p. 98). Of course, much could be said about the idiomaticity of the break, gap or silence in Celan, and most immediately the axiom that follows from Derrida’s consideration of Celan’s silences (relevant to Adonis as well) is that language cannot be appropriated. ‘When you look for what is most idiomatic in a language – as Celan does – you approach that which, throbbing within the language, does not let itself be grasped’ (p. 101).

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If Adonis interests Derrida in ‘the Fantom of the Other’ seminar, it is on account of his exilic idiom, which, as it happens, Derrida addresses but never analyses, given that the remarks on Adonis are only very preliminary; however, in thinking about Adonis, Derrida is wondering about how idiom is situated somewhere between national and international identity, something that is of interest to readers of Adonis who have noticed that his poems are filled with the bewildering fragmented realities of the Middle East, and Lebanon in particular, over which is layered Adonis’ experiences of the West, especially in the poem ‘A Grave for New York’ which is prescient in light of the Twin Towers disaster that was occurring always already some 30 years before the event, as if the poem were a missive functioning as a missile.2 In anticipation of a look at ‘A Grave for New York’ that will conclude this chapter, the following passage from Derrida’s ‘Border Lines’ is especially relevant. Nationalism and universalism. What this institution cannot bear is a transformation that leaves intact neither of these two complementary poles. It can bear more readily the most apparently revolutionary ideological sorts of “content”, if only that content does not touch the borders of language and of all the juridico-political contracts that it guarantees. It is this “intolerable” something that concerns me here. (Derrida, 1979, p. 94)

In ‘Border Lines’ it is translation, not idiom, that is of major concern, though the two are so closely related in Derrida’s mind that the difference between them would be hard to establish. Adumbrating Monolinguism of the Other (1996), Derrida was already saying that ‘one never writes either in one’s own language or in a foreign language’ (p. 101), something that coincides with his view in ‘the Fantom of the Other’ seminar that Adonis, the name, performs this alterity of never writing entirely in one’s own language or in a foreign language, a condition that one generally associates with the émigré. (Adonis settled in Paris in 1985.) Derrida’s remark in Monolinguism that ‘I have only one language yet it is not mine’ is what he terms a ‘performative contradiction’ (Derrida, 1998b, p. 2) and speaks to an experience of foreignness, of what is external and other, given that language is never mine and can never be mine alone. At the same time, Derrida is invoking an idiomaticity – that is, a register of language unique to oneself, that comprises a language others cannot appropriate and that performatively suspends, decides and sets in motion – an idiomaticity that yields a certain unreadability or untranslatability, which is to say, a silent non-transferability of what is said and written.3 So that when Adonis writes that ‘The sun is a funeral . . . the Arab

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map like a horse dragging its hooves . . .’ (in ‘A Grave for New York’), we are immediately reminded that idiomaticity retreats not only from ordinary language but conventional literary language as well (see Adonis, 2004). For Adonis this retreat is strategic in that it is intended to challenge the political, social and cultural order of things, both within the Arab world, which Adonis has controversially rejected as doomed on account of its inability to detach religion from politics, and the Western world outside, which he has rejected as crudely materialist and exploitative. As the critic Khalida Said has written of Adonis: ‘there can be no relaxation, no pause for breath, no final form, instead, continuous, ever-renewing creativity, unending risks bursting forth’ (Adonis, 2004, p. 194). Indeed, this burst is the eruption of what his informed readers call a ‘modernist idiom’, which refers to an explosive rupturing of language that opposes itself not only to the imposition of colonialist languages in the Middle East, but to fundamentalist tendencies within Arab culture itself. That is, the ‘modernist idiom’ establishes itself as a complex borderline between the national and the international, the regional and the global, but also between what can and cannot be said. The establishment of such a writerly borderline is not unique to Adonis. Elias Khoury’s so-called formless narrative writing has similarities, which is why it has been associated with Adonis’ literary group, Mawaqif, in Lebanon. Not surprisingly, this idiom of writing is said to imitate the deconstitution of politics, society and culture in light of the geographical impact of wave upon wave of civil conflict. In such writing, there is no rest or sense of finality, so that the writing refuses closure. As the writer Naguib Mahfouz has put it, according to Edward Said: in Lebanon ‘the past is discredited, the future completely uncertain, the present unknowable’ (Said, 2000, p. 323). Hence, the writing is set adrift in the movement of the writer’s disappearance, as he silently recedes from not only the presence of place but from the presence of historical chronology. And yet the writing, which emanates out of dispossession and de-temporalization, remembers times and places and recalls historical moments, however unmoored they are from any particular, concretized historical event. Moreover, this writing crosses borders in the sense that for all its attention to Arab cultural precedent, it is ‘modernist’, and hence Western, which speaks to a cultural hybridization that doesn’t leave the ‘two complementary poles’ of nationalism and universalism intact, but advances what Derrida in the quotation from ‘Border Lines’ called the intolerable, namely, the manner in which the irresolution of the regional and the global defies the master narratives of geopolitics. This relates to Derrida’s observation in ‘Signature, Event, Context’ (1971) that a successful performative is impure, that something about it misfires and

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is infelicitous, and speaks to the instability of meaning as a fixed or even entirely self-identical form of signification. That is, the poetry of Adonis and the writing of others in the Mawaqif group enjoy success, given that performativity in their work is impure and rupturing, that it instantiates the instability of meanings across borderlines, something whose intolerability becomes acute in such works as Adonis’ A Time Between Roses and Ashes, of which ‘A Grave for New York’ is a part.

Ex-scription In ‘Border Lines’ Derrida observes that ‘a text lives on only if it is at once translatable and untranslatable’ (Derrida, 1979, p. 102). Without an idiomaticity that doesn’t quite translate, the text won’t survive. And yet, in Derrida’s ‘Des tours de Babel’, which shadows ‘Border Lines’ to some extent, the text also doesn’t quite survive its own idiomaticity. ‘What the multiplicity of idioms comes to limit is not only a “true” translation, a transparent and adequate interexpression, it is also a structural order, a coherence of construct’. If idiom is an ‘internal limit to formalization, an incompleteness of the constructure’ (Derrida, 2007c, pp. 191–2), it is excessive (in exceeding or exploding limits) and recessive (private, reticent, inaccessible, withdrawn, hidden, secretive) in a way that deconstitutes borderlines. Therefore, something of the idiom situates itself outside of or beyond the very subject to whom it is most proper. This is what interests Derrida when in ‘the Fantom of the Other’ seminar he notices how Descartes’ idiom is more proper to Americans – this is Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation, according to Derrida – than to Descartes himself. Something of Descartes’ idiom exceeded him to such an extent that it could instal itself in a totally foreign country where it is spoken, unbeknownst to the very population that speaks it. But how does this trait of Descartes, this trait that is the idiom of Cartesianism, make this leap across (geographical) borders? Derrida answers: obviously by way of writing. The same thing will be said of what I call writing [écriture], mark, trace, and so on. It neither lives nor dies; it lives on [sur]. And it “starts” only with living on (testament, iterability, remaining [restance], crypt, detachment) that lifts the strictures of the “living” rectio or direction of an “author” not drowned at the edge of his text. (Derrida, 1979, p. 103)

In terms of idiomaticity, this means that as writing, mark or trace, the idiom lives on outside or exterior to the very person to whom it is most internal and

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private, as his/her remains . . . a remainder that remains on account of its being detached and repeated. Something that remains of Descartes’ idiomatic way of thinking crossed over to America where it took up residence in a population unfamiliar with French, a population for whom the name Descartes probably meant nothing, as if the name were an externality that has seemingly nothing to do with the source of the idiom that Americans perform so much better than anyone in France (if de Tocqueville is to be believed). But think, too, of the nearer example at hand, that is, of the Derridean term ‘deconstruction’ and how that lives on after Derrida himself, something that speaks to the idiom advanced by Mauro Senatore: performativity after Derrida, a performativity that comes about as a trait or trace at once, undecidably, ‘of Derrida’ and ‘after Derrida’. It is this trait that I will refer to as ‘ek-scription’. When Adonis writes, ‘I scatter – am diffused – my surfaces spread and I own none of them’ (Adonis, 2010, p. 125), one suspects that the idiomatic name Adonis is part of an ek-scription of the self.4 We know what it is to inscribe, to perform the name as a signing or marking that establishes one’s participation in if not belonging to a community. To inscribe is to make a mark that establishes one’s presence as the bearer of the mark whose function is to situate one among other bearers, or to commemorate the presence of one at a certain time and place. The inscription of the name verifies one’s existence in terms of a belonging or adhering to. Ek-scription, by contrast, speaks to a writing that has neither an internal nor an external limit. It is a writing that has left the subject behind, that renounces belonging and attachment, and that exposes itself as severance: as a violence of the trace that is outside of even language. Each word or phrase breaks and splits up the unity of language, its connections, with the result that writing as an ek-scription adjourns sense, identity and world. Ek-scription disappropriates the one who writes; it is even inherent in the performance of signing one’s name insofar as the written name gives us leave not to be present in person. It is as if the name as an externalized mark dismisses or does away with us. As we will see later in quite some detail, Derrida identifies the performativity of ex-scription with the cinder. However, for now it is useful to note that ek-scription enables escape, and may well be a figure for escape, a performativity that Emmanuel Levinas discusses in ‘De l’évasion’. ‘With escape we aspire only to get out. It is this category of getting out, assimilable neither to renovation nor to creation, that we must grasp in all its purity. It is an inimitable theme that invites us to get out of being’ (Levinas, 2003, p. 54). In ‘De l’évasion’, being is the prison house, and thus Levinas speaks of a ‘need for excendence’. He writes: ‘escape is the need to get out of oneself, that

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is, to break that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I [moi] is oneself [soi-même]’ (Levinas, 2003, p. 55).5 In this sense, Adonis is the mark or trait of escape or flight, an ek-scription of the self, which is the opposite of self-positing. ‘My insides reduced, no place in them for me to live . . . Something separates me from me’ (Adonis, 2010, p. 125). Or as Derrida puts it in ‘the Fantom of the Other’ seminar with respect to Trakl, ‘Ein Fremdes auf Erde’. The cities dissolve, and the earth is a cart loaded with dust. Only poetry knows how to pair itself to this space. (Adonis, 2010, p. 125)

Here, at the opening of Adonis’ poem ‘Desert’, the pairing is an escape or ek-scription that performs an excendence (in Levinas’ vocabulary) that is motivated by the impulse to escape an unbearable situation. ‘The best thing one can be is a horizon’ (‘The Beginning of Poetry’). ‘I hang my death / between my face and this hemorrhage of talk’ (‘Desert’). ‘They took him to a hole, burned him’ (‘The Book of Siege’). ‘Desert’ is about Beirut and the destruction of houses. ‘And his house is graveyard’. its wound is a fall that trembled to its name – to the hemorrhage of its name and all that surrounds us – Houses left their walls behind and I am no longer I.

If the wound is Beirut, it is only referred to as ‘the city’, a place/no-place that escapes naming, of which the proper name is no longer the name. One still speaks of the bombing of London or Coventry, but Adonis avoids the name Beirut when he speaks of its destruction in this poem. Rather, ‘its wound is a fall’. ‘Each thing recites its exile’, its being written out. Here, the names hemorrhage, leak their contents painfully. Each thing performs its departure from itself, its wandering off in what will always be some sort of desert or waste land, no matter how built up or civilized it may appear. A page in a book bombs mirror themselves inside of it

Evidently, the words we read are shards, fragments of something that once was, that had a name that could contain its contents, or with which it could call itself identical. ‘And I am no longer I’. ‘Each thing recites its exile’.

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This is the world as ek-scription, and because ek-scription disappropriates the human subject, it makes possible, as Levinas claimed, an ek-stasis that is experienced as ecstasy. Guard the last pictures of her topography – she is tossing and turning in the sand in an ocean of sparks – on her bodies are spots of human moans. seed after seed are cast into our earth – fields feeding on our legends, guard the secret of these bloods. I am talking about a flavor to the seasons and a flash of lightning in the sky (Adonis, 2010, pp. 197–200)6

Ecstasy, in the wake of disaster, compensates for determined significance and is the effect of a movement of signs that escape Being as self-identical and hence as appropriable. Whatever transcendental signified had once existed has now become subject to effacement even if bits of it are still legible. That is, if the transcendental signified is destroyed, it nevertheless makes the trace visible, ‘the very idea of the sign’ (Derrida, 1976, p. 23). So that just at the moment this sign/trace becomes visible, one can speak of an ecstatic moment – a pleasurable eruption of the outside – in which the I is no longer I and what before was submerged in ‘determination’ is released as a freedom that is otherwise than being (in Levinas’ sense: otherwise than suffering, pain, burden, limitation). Hence, Adonis’ aestheticism: the sublimity of his poetic phrasings. Ek-scription, as Adonis practises it, is an instituting of the ek-static trace which is, in Derrida’s terms, ‘unmotivated’ but not ‘capricious’. Ek-scription indicates ‘the absence of another here and now, of another transcendental present, of another origin of the world appearing as such, presenting itself as irreducible absence within the presence of the trace’. This, then, describes an ‘arbitrariness of the sign’ in terms of the exteriority or outside of the graphie or trace as detached from the protocols of what Derrida calls ‘natural attachment’ (p. 46). The unmotivatedness of the sign requires a synthesis in which the completely other is announced as such – without any simplicity, any identity, any resemblance or continuity – within what is not it. Is announced as such: there we have all history . . . The trace, where the relationship with the other is marked, articulates its possibility in the entire field of the entity [being], which metaphysics

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has defined as the being-present starting from the occulted movement of the trace. (Derrida, 1976, p. 47)

If ek-scription performatively announces, it is not necessarily a resemblance, not the product of an intention, and, as such, not motivated, determined, and thereby directed in advance by someone’s will. Recall Descartes’ idiom emigrating to America as an unmotivated trait, in Derrida’s account in ‘the Fantom of the Other’ seminar. What one calls history is the coming to pass of an otherness where the relation to the other is marked, traced or written from a point outside (dehors). What would be such a marking? In Adonis’ ‘Desert’ it is the wound, the incision of the shrapnel fragment, the ruins left after a bombing run. Entities (things, beings) are constituted in terms of the trace, incision or rupture that comes from the exterior, which in the case of Adonis’ poetry refers to the approach of the calamity of war, this catastrophe that announces and institutes itself from outside or beyond – from those unknown places that are not where one lives. Entities, Derrida says in De la grammatologie, are ‘structured according to the diverse possibilities – genetic and structural – of the trace’. In Adonis’ case, the traces are of the violence of war among which ‘a memory seeks its shape/among dust and fire’. Levinas sharpens the notion of an ek-scription when he writes that ‘A trace in the strict sense disturbs the order of the world’, a disturbance that Adonis is writing about, for example, in ‘Desert’, which is what accounts for the fragmentation of the language into detached phrases that pull away from the synthesis of the sentence or proposition. ‘If the signifyingness of a trace consists in signifying without making appear’, Levinas writes in ‘The Trace of the Other’, that trace sets up a relationship with illeity, with the il or ils, the he or the they.7 But to what Other is Adonis making an appeal? ‘And gallows are set up / myrtyrs, commands . . .’ (Adonis, 2010, p. 201). It’s never a question of there just being traces, but of the ‘il’ that leaves those traces, and this ‘il’ or illeity is absolute alterity, which is to say, something that is impossible to think that has an illeity preceding Otherness.

Writing in an idiom of the dead In a question and answer session after some remarks on reading Heidegger, Derrida addressed the trace as neither present nor absent. He added, ‘I would prefer ashes as the better paradigm for what I call the trace – something which erases itself totally, radically, while presenting itself ’ (Derrida, 1987b, p. 177).8

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But can trace and ash be substituted by a phrase – il y a là cendre – that partakes of their non-being? Could the performativity of a little idiomatic phrase correlate to ash, after-burn and holocaust? Here, one immediately encounters the performative relation between ek-scription, idiom and excendence. In Feu la cendre, Derrida writes, More than 15 years ago a phrase came to me, as though in spite of me; to be more precise, it returned, unique, uniquely succinct, almost mute. I thought I had calculated it cunningly, mastered and overwhelmed it, as if I had appropriated it once and for all. Since then, I have repeatedly had to yield to the evidence: the phrase dispensed with all authorization, she had lived without me. She, the phrase, had always lived alone. (Derrida, 1991, p. 20)

At issue is whether the idiomatic phrase, il y a là cendre, and the cinder aren’t identical. The phrase appears to exist in Derrida’s mind as something that precedes him and that exists outside of him. ‘The sentence . . . imposed itself upon me with the authority of . . . a judgment: cinders there are’. Not only that, but the phrase, inherently idiomatic, arrives with (if not as) a trace. Là written with an accent grave: là, there, cinder there is, there is, there, cinder. But the accent, although readable to the eye, is not heard: cinder there is. To the ear, the definite article, la, risks effacing the place, and any mention of memory of the place, the adverb là . . . but read silently, it is the reverse: là effaces la, la effaces herself, himself, twice rather than once. This sentence, in which each letter had a secret meaning for me, I used again later, whether a citation or not, in other texts: Glas, The Postcard, for example. (Derrida, 1991, p. 20)

The cinder is the trace that comes unbidden and, upon first hearing (as ‘la cendre’) carries the erasure of its place (‘là’), as if it were merely some ash falling out of the sky, free and unmotivated. And yet in that erasure of the accent grave, the order of words has been disturbed. That is, the performative is impure. It misfires and is infelicitous. Il y a là cendre is Derrida’s idiomatic reappropriation of Heidegger’s il y a l’Etre, announced in French in his ‘Brief über den “Humanismus”’. However, Derrida is also reappropriating Levinas’ il y a in Existence et Existents, which was also a self-conscious play on Heidegger’s phrase. Ned Lukacher, who translated the essay Feu la cendre, reminds us that both il y a la [là] cendre and feu la cendre are idiomatically self-destructive performative idioms. The title Feu la cendre indicates, by virtue of its double displacement of the two meanings of feu, yet a further connection – to mourning: “fire”, but also

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“deceased” or “departed”. Among the options for a more literal translation are “Fire, Cinder”, “Burn the Cinder”, or “The Late Cinder”, “The Bereaved Cinder”, in the archaic sense of “bereaved” as “separated” or “taken away”. Feu is a homonym of fut, and echoes fût: fire burning within the passé défini of the verb “to be”, within l’être/lettre. (Derrida, 1991, p. 11)

In considering these verbal entanglements, it is useful to digress for a moment and recall a remark by Jacques Lacan that will be important as a guiding thread. At the end of a seminar session on 9 March 1955, Lacan tells us: ‘I would prefer to introduce another term which I will leave to your reflection with all the double meanings it contains – the inmixing [immixtion] of subjects’. Hence, ‘the subject enters and mixes in with things – that may be the first meaning. The other one is this – an unconscious phenomenon which takes place on the symbolic level, as such decentered in relation to the ego, always takes place between two subjects’ (Lacan, 1988, p. 160).9 We’ll be coming back to this issue of the taking place ‘between two subjects’. For now, consider that the idioms of Feu la cendre come to Derrida as ek-scription, for even the unconscious, as Derrida sees it in ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, contains ‘no present text in general’, as it too is constituted in terms of the trace in which signification ‘begins with reproduction’ and whose ‘presence is always reconstituted by deferral, nachträglich, belatedly, supplementarily . . .’ (Derrida, 1978, p. 211). In that context, the phrase il y a là cendre is especially apparent as an always already reconstituted presence that comes retroactively, belatedly and supplementarily, as if from outside, given that it was initially added on to the book, La dissémination, and not once but twice: first, in the belated close to ‘La pharmacie de Platon’, where it derails the argument, and, second, in the acknowledgement to J. Hillis Miller and others, where it stymies sense, appearing in small print on the very last page of the volume. But if the phrase returns as textual trace, it also comes to the sleeping Derrida’s bedside as a female revenant who is personifying and playing the cinder. He could have imagined her name to be Cindy, but, in fact, it’s a hybrid interlingual play on words: Cinder [Cendre]-elle-là. The idiom il y a là [la] cendre would therefore exemplify an example of Lacanian inmixing that has numerous filiations, hybridity and even proper names –among them, Cinderella, but also, as we will see, the much more chilling proper name, Auschwitz, that, as we will see at the end of this section, the cinder explicitly recalls for Derrida, and that strongly interposes itself between subjects as a traumatic obstruction or impasse.10 It is this sort of impasse between subjects that Derrida repeats when he records Feu la cendre with Carole Bouquet for Éditions des femmes.

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As it happens, Lukacher struggled with the difficulties of translating the il y a la [là] cendre, given that the phrase came between Derrida and Lukacher, too, as an uncrossable obstacle. Lukacher: By rendering idiomatic il y a by “there is”, we install the intransitive verb “to be” where, properly speaking, it does not belong, for in the French idiom what is in question is not the “being” of the entity but its “there-ness”. As in the German Es gibt, (literally, “it gives”; idiomatically, “there is”), il y a makes no determination concerning the ontology of the essent. Each time we read the refrain “il y a là cendre”, “cinders there are”, we should remember that the delicate vulnerability of a cinder leaves open the question of its being or non-being. We should hear within “cinders there are” something like “it has cinders”, or “it gives cinders”, or “cinders persist”, where what “it” may be and what “persistence” might entail are among the questions the phrase poses without implying that it already has the answers. (Derrida, 1991, p. 2)

Lukacher is noting the internal divisions of the idiomatic expression, which, as he well knows, repeat or mirror feu la cendre insofar as one encounters a monstrous inmixing between/among social subjects living and dead, present and spectral. Moreover, the il y a la/là is intended to come between not just Derrida and his readers and/or translators, but between Derrida and the two main thinkers he has on his mind, Heidegger and Levinas. If Derrida is extending the idiomatic tradition initiated by Heidegger, and taken over by Levinas, by linguistically radicalizing a theory of the trace, which appears to be his most obvious motive, he is also adding nothing to what Heidegger and Levinas wrote, insofar as his handling of the cinder instantiates a negativity so radical that it cannot add anything. That is, the ek-scriptions, il y a là cendre and feu la cendre, take place outside or between the philosophical horizons of Heidegger and Levinas in a way that does not reconcile, explain or extend them. Still, the cinder is the remainder (reste) of a philosophy and, de facto, a critique of it (its negation, Hegelians might say) insofar as it removes itself or sets itself apart from them. That said, the phrase ‘cinder’ is also an existent that as an irreducible perdurance returns as revenant, as an obsessive trace that performatively gives rise to a speculation and fantasy that interposes or interjects itself between subjects in order to frustrate and block their relation. So that the ‘she’ that returns – this spectral, metaphysical Cinder-ella – is the late cinder, who, in the context of Derrida’s relation/non-relation with Celan’s thinking and poetizing on mass death, recalls the victims of the Holocaust. It is ‘she’ that comes between subjects: Jews and non-Jews, but also between Derrida and the anti-metaphysical tendencies of

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Heidegger and Levinas, which are being tested by the idiom of the cinder in which a metaphysics on the hitherside of metaphysics is being disclosed in anticipation of a more full-fledged philosophical workup of ‘hauntology’ that Derrida will publish in Specters of Marx (1993). So I will be very brief. Certainly “Auschwitz” as you [Richard Rand] correctly state has never been “very far from my thoughts”. It would be easy to show this, though I have no wish to do so. The thought of the incineration (brûle tout) of the holocaust, of cinders, runs through all my texts, well before Of Spirit which speaks exclusively of this, and well before Cinders which includes the necessary references, and well before Shibboleth (for Paul Celan) whose sole theme it is. What is the thought of the trace, in fact, without which there would be no deconstruction? [This] is a thought about cinders and the advent of an event, a date, a memory . . . . Auschwitz has obsessed everything that I have ever been able to think. (Rand, 1992, p. 211; emphasis added)

Lacanian inmixing In the tape recording of Feu la cendre that Derrida made with Carole Bouquet, the ‘she’ [elle-là] is given voice and speaks alongside Derrida. But is this phrase always female? ‘For nearly ten years, this specter’s comings and goings, unforeseen visits of the ghost. The thing spoke all on its own. I had to explain myself to it respond to it, or for it’. What Derrida calls ‘this fatally silent call’ is said to have spoken ‘before its own voice’, a speaking that is made audible in ‘Cinders’: ‘to breach a way into the voices at work’. In other words, Cinderella isn’t exactly the subject of this phrase, its owner, because the phrase is ek-scribed and as such is en dehors, outside of any subject’s absolute claim upon it. For this reason, the tape recording had to be a performance whose occurrence is indeterminate, even haphazard. In certain cases, in the absence of indications to the contrary, it is the indetermination itself that makes the experience of the gramophonic act so perilous: too much freedom, a thousand ways, all just as legitimate, to accentuate, to set the rhythm, to make the tone change. (Derrida, 1991, p. 24)

In other words, the text as an ek-scription cannot be voiced in the sense of sounding natural or right, because it cannot be adjusted to any sort of intentional speaking (or motivation – recall De la grammatolgie) that pre-exists in the author’s mind. Even the ‘she’ is ek-scribed. The performance of ‘Cinders’,

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therefore, is the inverse of performing a work by, say, Samuel Beckett who had a strong internal sense of how the lines in his plays were supposed to sound and fit together. For Derrida, by contrast, the point is that la voix des cendres – which is essentially what Derrida would have identified with the idiomatic – will never be able to render the script in such a way that it will sound properly unified. ‘The most contradictory decisions were required simultaneously: the same syllable should be pronounceable on two incompatible registers. But then again it shouldn’t be’. Addressing performativity quite directly, Derrida asks: Under what conditions does one take the risk of vocalization, the very act I had awaited, having already described, it, given notice of it. Above all dreaded it as the impossible itself, some would say the “prohibited” [interdit]? On the page it is as though each word were chosen, then placed in such a way that nothing uttered by any voice could gain access to it. (Derrida, 1991, p. 24)

The ‘inter-dit’ is the prohibited, but it is also the inter-said, the things said, inaudibly perhaps, betwixt and between that intermix, to use Lacan’s word. They cut across one another, rub each other out, impede one another and/or they say the same thing differently (la/là). It is ‘still a question of caesura’, Derrida says; which is to say, of severance. Of course, the fact that the two subjects, Derrida and Bouquet, are both reading already implies a cut or division, an inter-dit, that opens up the possibility for voicings, but that also prohibits the emergence of voice per se. ‘Who will decide whether this voice was lent, returned, or given? And to whom?’ (p. 25). The entanglements here are said to be aporetic, ‘impossible’, which raises the question, is this what one ought to be calling deconstruction? And is this performativity we are provisionally calling deconstruction idiomatic to Derrida: a speaking before and after speaking that is the trace of speaking: its ek-scription, its écriture? If so, this would be the exposure of a severance or caesura that returns as a violence of the trace outside of language as a self-present phenomenon, the trace of an incomprehensible persecution and suffering that one thinks obsessively without mastering or controlling, and that comes between people, that interjects itself as a confusing impasse, as a fantasy or series of speculations that cannot be traversed, so that one winds up in a relation/non-relation between subjects, in this case, between Derrida and the actress, Carole Bouquet. Or, from another perspective that can only be mentioned briefly, as it could only be included in a longer version of this chapter, one ought to consider the relation/non-relation that Derrida had with Paul Celan, an inmixing that concerned their silences and, of course, Celan’s ek-scriptions and suicide. All of this would speak to Lacan’s

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mention of ‘non-traversal’, which is what his concept of inmixing addresses: an interjected impasse in the interpersonal and the symbolic (language).

September 11 – A grave for New York Adonis’ A Time Between Ashes and Roses collects three long poems, ‘Introduction to a History of Petty Kings’, ‘This is my Name’ and ‘A Grave for New York’. In general, the collection addresses the state of the Middle East after the Six Days War in  1967 in which Israel, in self-defence, had defeated its neighbours in a humiliating turn of events that included the conquest and annexation of lands. In addition, Adonis is despairing the violence that has ripped various communities and nations apart in the Middle East, in particular, Lebanon. As I write this, Adonis is protesting the Syrian government’s handling of unrest in Syria and has written open communiqués to the Syrian government, via Syria’s press, calling for an end to the slaughter of civilians. A Time appeared some 40 years ago in 1972 and was revised for republication in 1996. Judging from the translations, particularly those of Shawkat M. Toorawa and Khaled Mattawa, the gulf between the Arabic and the English is quite vast. Toorawa’s translation, which is complete, is considerably more readable than Mattawa’s because of an attempt to establish narrative cohesion, whereas Mattawa is more inclined to allow the words to disperse pointillistically across the page so that the gaps between words and phrases become much more expansive. In terms of ‘modernist idiom’, Mattawa’s translation is by far the more sophisticated and linguistically satisfying, particularly if one is used to H. D. and Louis Zukofsky, but Toorawa’s translation is critical if what one wants is to get a sense of what Adonis is ‘trying to say’ in a more conventionally hermeneutical sense, especially given Adonis’ political agenda. Poems such as ‘A Grave for New York’ aren’t intended to be mere verbal abstractions in the same way that Feu la cendre doesn’t give up on argumentation. Throughout A Time, one senses the ek-scription of the poet. For example, ‘My ashes are a dwelling place’, he writes in ‘An Introduction to the History of Petty Kings’. That is, il y a là cendre. As in Derrida, the cinders are verbal, spectral traces. However, in Adonis there is the observation that if there are cinders, it is only because initially there are cities. ‘Civilization is a vehicle for the / wounded and the city is a pagan rose, / A tent: / So the story begins, or so the story ends . . .’ (Adonis, 2004, p. 8). From tent to metropolis, the city, whether it be Beirut, Damascus or Jerusalem, sutures civilization to war, the wound to the rose, and ash to dust. ‘The expanse was my thread – I, the astral crater, I reconnected /

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And I wrote the city’ (p. 9). Earlier, there is mention that between blood and the rose there is a ‘thread of sun’, which is presumably what is bringing the city into being as écriture, as planetary ek-scription. And I wrote the city (while the city was being dragged along and lamentation was its Babylonian walls), I wrote the city Just as the alphabet flows Not to heal a wound Not to reawaken the mummy But to arouse differences . . . / Blood Unites roses and ravens / To cleave the bridges To bathe the grieving faces In the hemorrhage of ages (Adonis, 2004, p. 9)

One imagines this thread-sun to be a solar god who relates how it writes the city into being with its beams of light, as if the city were a book, which in a sense it is to Adonis, given that all of its particulars are traces that when examined together would tell us a story of the city and its people, a story that for all its differences won’t be entirely unidentical with the stories of other cities, say, even as far away a city as New York. What is self-evident in Adonis’ poetry is that statements such as ‘I walk on the ice of my pleasures’, ‘I walk between miracle and confusion’ or ‘I walk inside a rose’, speak to a collapse of ordinary experience, so that instead of being shown correlations and comparisons, ‘I walk as if between miracle and confusion’, actions are merged and confused with their hypothetical conditions of existence. At various moments in A Time everything appears to be undergoing metamorphosis and fusion, with the result that objects don’t impose limits on actions, so that it is entirely possible to walk inside a rose. Too, ideas are suddenly turned into substantives (‘histories are swarms of locusts’, ‘sadness rusts’), and personifications seem to erupt quite spontaneously, ‘Baghdad fell to yearning’. Statements are often broken in mid course, which is obviously meant to suggest a world in bits and pieces, if not some sort of post-world in which the fragments are all we have. And whether we are to put the fragments together is left open to conjecture in many instances. Of course, one can opt for suture or continuity (narrative), but how do we know we should? After all, this is a poetry of absence, a book of the dead. I shall see the face of the raven In the features of my country, and I shall call This book a shroud (Adonis, 2004, p. 95)

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If on a national level Adonis is lamenting the destruction of a city such as Beirut, across borders he is lamenting the destruction of all cities, too, including that of New York, which like all cities is an écriture du dehors, a writing of the trace, an ek-scription. So that when we hear of the Statue of Liberty in ‘A Grave for New York’ – the French musical genre of the Tombeau comes to mind – we are directed to the book that Liberty is holding, since this correlates so well to the notion of city as book or scripture. New York, A woman – the statue of a woman in one hand she holds a scrap to which the documents we call history give the name “liberty”, and in the other she smothers a child whose name is Earth. (Adonis, 2004, p. 125)

Of course, this is not how Americans are taught to understand the Statue of Liberty, and, in fact, Adonis has intentionally interposed something of a muddle or mix-up between himself and the American public, or New Yorker, to be more specific, because he is questioning the relation between history and liberty in terms of, presumably, the projection of American power whereby children of the Earth (who or what they are is left open, though one may well imagine them to be Third World children living in poverty) are being suffocated. The statue is grossly being misrepresented, of course, as its lifted arm and torch are conspicuously being revised out of the description, or refigured in such a way that the torch of Liberty is doing the smothering by scorching the earth with its fire. Here, of course, the statue is being ek-scribed in a way that puts it under erasure, as parts are intentionally effaced for the sake of a political transformation that addresses itself to readers outside of New York and America.11 Recall what the solar god told us in ‘Introduction’: ‘I wrote the city . . . to arouse differences’. I said: I tempt Beirut, “Seek action. The Word is dead”, the others say. The word has died because your tongues have abandoned the habit of speech for the habit of mime. The Word? Do you want to discover its fire? Then, write. I say, “write”. I do not say “mimic”, nor do I say “transcribe”. (Adonis, 2004, p. 135)

The ‘I’ in this case suggests the fusion of Adonis with Walt Whitman whose ‘Song of Myself ’ is often being alluded to in the poem in order to show an invagination between the two that gestures to the deconstruction of borderlines between not only Adonis and Whitman, but between the cities of the Middle East and

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New York. Here, Adonis is adapting Whitman’s idiom to his own, writing in Whitman’s expansive style in order to pull the so-called ‘American experience’ out of its exceptionality by ek-scribing it into an Arabic set of urban contexts. Key is that this is not to be done by mimicking, translating or transcribing, for, to recall Derrida’s passage about nationalism, universalism and the intolerable, what Adonis shouldn’t bear is a transformation that leaves the complementary poles of a dialogue between nations intact; for what one must do is threaten the ‘borders of language’ and ‘all the juridico-politico contracts that it guarantees’. Adonis’ implicit response in his metacritical passage above is to argue that the fire associated with the Word – for example, revolution – is to be associated with the performative imperative, ‘write’. ‘Write’ is what ‘you’ must do performatively if you wish to transform society, and it is only viable from a revolutionary point of view if the writing abdicates its conventional communicative functions. As Foucault noted in his essay on the dehors: ‘We now know that the being of language is the visible effacement of the one who speaks’ (Foucault, 1987, p. 54). So that not only does the signifier take precedence over any signified and even pull away from it, but in so doing the writer is exceeded and abandoned. Sylviane Agacinski, in the context of discussing Soren Kierkegaard’s well-known essay on repetition, has termed this an abandonment of self for the sake of getting swept way into ‘an abyss, an infinity of stars’ (Agacinski, 1997, p. 133), by means of lyrical writing. In place of self-identity, she speaks of there being an explosion of words, a dispersal without return. A Time Between Ashes and Roses appears to conform rather well to this aesthetic. And yet the ‘I’ or ‘self ’ emerges suddenly in the middle of this verbal sweeping aside as a revolutionary subject that calls itself the ‘hour of dreadful agitation and shaking loose of minds’, as if in the midst of this explosion or dispersal, the subject – whose identity is fluid – always returns to resume its capacity to be a social actor by laying claim to the ‘I’. ‘And I tempt Beirut and her sister capitals . . .’ And the Word is all directions and all time. The Word – the hand, the hand – the dream: I discover you O fire. O my capital, I discover you O poetry and I tempt Beirut. She wears me and I wear her. We wander like rays and we ask: who reads, who sees? The Phantoms are for Dayan, the Oil flows to its destination. (Adonis, 2004, pp. 139–40)

The ‘I’, now presumably Adonis himself, is walking around lower Manhattan ‘where rivers of gold of every hue flow’. But the ‘I’ who tempts Beirut is quite

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different from the ‘I’ who walks the streets of New York City, given that the tempter of Beirut is a revolutionary figure who has the power to move the emotions of people, whereas the figure who is walking around the Wall Street area feels powerless and is mindful of American wealth and the military projection of its powerful interests abroad. Upon observing the wealth of Wall Street, the ‘I’ ruminates in an oracular voice, ‘and I saw among them Arab rivers bearing millions of corpses, victims / and offerings to the Great Idol. And between the victims were sailors / cackling as they rolled down the Chrysler Building, returning to their / sources’ (Adonis, 2004, p. 143). Speaking of New York, Adonis in the persona of the Arab visitor says, ‘Every wall in you is a graveyard. Every day is a black gravedigger, / carrying a black loaf, a black tray, etching / with them the history of the White House . . .’ (p. 145). And in addressing Harlem, the ‘I’ speaks more in the voice of a redeemer or deliverer: ‘I do not come from outside: I know your hatred, I know its delicious / bread’. But, of course, he does come from the outside, too. Both inside and outside and neither inside nor outside, he is ‘living on’ borderlines. Speaking as a revolutionary voice to Harlem’s AfricanAmerican population, we hear, ‘You are the eraser with which to wipe away the face of New York’ (p. 147). If the speaker is nomadically moving through the city’s locales, he is identifying with the poets Whitman and the pre-Islamic Urwa ibn al-Ward, who both had accepted a monistic world view: Whitman, ‘I am large. I contain multitudes’; Urwa, ‘I divide my body into many bodies’ (Adonis, 2004, p. 157). Hence, in A Time one is being spoken to by multiple ‘I’s’ who are part of the same ‘I’, located in many different places that are all the same place, whether earthly or not. So that ek-scription and ek-stasis are one. Even as concrete a reference as ‘And in the morning I woke up screaming: Nixon, how many children have you killed today?’ (p. 163), there is a multiplicity of utterance, a screaming from outside of oneself, since the I who screams is all of us together, those of us who hate war and the arrogance of powerful states that blindly project their power. Here, a collectivity of peoples is being invoked and assembled across borderlines – national, social, religious, cultural, political – that from today’s perspective can retroactively track the many destinerrancies of American overreach whose ‘collateral damage’ is counted in terms of anonymous children’s bodies ‘accidentally’ killed in distant lands. Towards the end of ‘A Grave’, a clock is said to ‘indicate the moment’, which for Adonis appears to signal the beginning of an insurrection (of an intifada to come) whereby Harlem takes on Wall Street in order to bury it. ‘New York   the grave’ (Adonis, 2004, p. 171). Yet, this is but a fragment, a fleeting figment of

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imagination, ‘where the Thousand and One Nights multiply, / where Buthayna and Layla / vanish, where Jamil travels between stone and stone, and where not a soul find Qays’ (p. 175). New York’s grave or tombeau is ultimately that of Adonis’ desert world in which over eons one looks back at the great civilizations and sees only ruins in the forms of graveyards, as in the case of Egypt’s greater and lesser pyramids, the trace remains in Libya of Roman butchery in long-abandoned coliseums, the plethora of artefacts left over from the Mesopotamians, or the ruins of a once great civilization in a squalid modern Athens. All great cities are graveyards to come. In remarks on the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, Derrida commented on an ineffability that is strangely relevant to Adonis’ ‘A Grave for New York’, if not to the whole of A Time Between Ashes and Roses. Something took place, we have the feeling of not having seen it coming, and certain consequences undeniably follow upon the “thing”. But this very thing, the place and meaning of this “event”, remains ineffable, like an intuition without a concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all, out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to . . . repeating . . . endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem . . . that admits to not knowing what it is talking about. We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11 . . . the telegram of this metonymy, a name, a number . . . points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that . . . we do not know what we are talking about. (Derrida, 2003, p. 86)

September 11, the idiom, may well be an untranslatable ek-scription that crosses borders, a telegraphic trace that is to be repeated endlessly in the absence of all intimacy, and that therefore occurs outside. September 11, therefore, relegates one to the outside of speech – that is, of speaking – which makes it more secret than what is most interior to consciousness. As such, September 11 performs as an idiom to be endlessly repeated and performs as an intuition of something that lacks a concept. Moreover, this idiom is of the order of a phrase such as feu la cendre or il y a là cendre, though it is also what Adonis was thinking of as a grave for New York, a hole or abscess or cut in which something outside our understanding is encrypted – buried and encoded – much the way an idiom is buried in consciousness, ready to hand and yet enigmatic, familiar and yet entirely strange. That this idiom, 9/11, is encrypted in the grave that is New York’s Ground Zero doesn’t in any way prevent it from crossing borderlines, however one wants to constitute them, something that speaks to the performativity of an ek-scription, a performativity that calls up the phantom of an other.

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Notes 1 ‘Le Fantôme de l’autre: Nationalité et Nationalisme philosophique’ is comprised of 13 seminar sessions, 1984–85. The manuscripts are part of the ‘Jacques Derrida Papers: 1946–2002’ (150 boxes, 15 oversize folders) and are collected in the Critical Theory Archive at the University of California at Irvine. 2 See ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now: Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missives, Seven Missiles’ in Derrida, 2007c, pp. 387–409. Originally, this paper was delivered in Ithaca, New York, in 1984. In this essay, Derrida speaks of rhetoric as a transmission, delivery system or missile that is directed into the future, even as the future is sending something to us, a trace (for example) of some catastrophe as yet to come, which fulfils the rhetoric (its wishes, fears, reservations, horrors, apocalypses). The Twin Towers catastrophe would be an example with respect to Adonis’ poetry. 3 Hence ‘We never speak only one language’ (Derrida, 1998b, p. 7). 4 ‘Body’. This poem is part of Singular in a Plural Form in which there is repeated mention of one’s being externalized on a cosmic scale. ‘I own regions that I do not know / Ash turns me into legions, and flames drag me before them’, or ‘What abyss can fit me now?’ (Adonis, 2004, pp. 152–3). 5 The themes of On Escape (1935) were radicalized in Existence and Existents, published shortly after World War II. 6 In this and other poems, the poet/text is the desert: vast, unsheltered, open, abyssal, a trope for erasure and oblivion. 7 See Levinas, pp. 356–7. 8 This is an outline to a talk that Derrida extemporized and covered four topics relative to Heidegger: questioning, essence, animality and epochality. 9 The comment that I’ve cited follows a discussion of Freud’s famous case of Irma in which the mouth, as Lacan sees it, posits a muddle on account of its lack of clear definition as a distinct thing. Those who have read the Freud/Fliess letters know how this muddle is part of a very botched medical procedure for which Freud and Fliess were responsible. Lacan didn’t have access to the incriminating letters that in the 1950s had been suppressed by Freud’s daughter, Anna, but his intuition didn’t exactly fail him, either. 10 This inmixing is very pronounced in Celan’s poetry in which the German language has been tampered with to a very great extent. Moreover, one thing that I don’t think Derrida ever discussed was the fact that Auschwitz itself is an idiom that means to ‘sweat out’ in German. Here is Heidegger’s use of the term

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in the context of Ernst Jünger’s The Worker in Heidegger, 2004, p. 15. Although Heidegger wanted to keep some distance from the Holocaust, I wonder if this passage can do this, given that it is addressing ‘the worker’, which is a concept the Nazis intentionally perverted in the camps, as well as addressing Jünger, a prominent Nazi himself, who famously led the Wehrmacht on horse under the Arc de Triomphe. So here too there is some inmixing and destinerrancy to go around, which is the kind of thing Celan was especially good at spotting. Yet another note by Heidegger: ‘ “Macht”, “Wille zur Macht”, Jungers Unklarheit’ (p. 21). That is, Jünger’s muddle: that as a National Socialist he hadn’t figured out power. 11 An interesting parallel might be the paintings of the German painter, Neo Rauch, whose political allegories also traffic in such distortions. There, again, the issue of the muddle or impasse that interposes itself between subjects comes to mind. Here, of course, that impasse is visual.

5

Living On: The Absolute Performative Francesco Vitale

Always prefer life and constantly affirm survival . . . I love you and am smiling at you from wherever I am. These are the conclusive lines of the short handwritten text that was read on 12 October 2004, on the occasion of Jacques Derrida’s funeral and distributed to those present. The moment of mourning cannot exhaust the reading of it. The question of survival is eminently theoretical, the heart of deconstruction itself. Secretly, it beats under the whole elaboration of deconstruction. Shortly, by means of survival, Derrida suggests how to grasp the movement of différance, as the irreducible and structural condition of the life of the living, before the supposed opposition of life and death, that has always organized and oriented the determination of the meaning of these terms. In order to demonstrate this statement, it is necessary to return to Derrida’s interpretation of linguistic acts by following a determinate path which it is worth reconstructing step by step: (1) this interpretation searches for the condition of possibility of the performative linguistic act; (2) it focuses on a certain experience of the performative dimension of writing (in particular and for essential reasons, of literature); in which (3) it is possible to look at survival as the irreducible structure of the living. An irreducibly performative structure, according to a dimension of performativity that is different from the performativity of linguistic acts and, yet, is related to the latter because it amounts to its irreducible condition of possibility. Before proceeding along this track, so as to breach a way (via rupta), it is necessary to establish its more general coordinates. Derrida explicitly affirms the theoretical relevance of the notion of survival for his work. Let me read the last words of Learning to Live Finally, the interview given by Derrida to Jean Birnbaum, in wait for the imminent death:

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As I already said, from the outset and long before the experience of survival that are actually my own, I noted that survival is an original concept, which defines the structure itself of what we call existence, the Da-sein, if you will. We are, structurally speaking, survivors, marked by this structure of the trace, of the testament. That said, I would not endorse the view according to which survival is defined more by death, the past, than by life and the future. No: deconstruction is always on the side of the affirmative, the affirmation of life. Everything I have said at least since Parages (1986) about survival as a complication of the opposition death-life proceeds with me from an unconditional affirmation of life. Survival is life beyond life, life more than life, and the discourse I undertake is not death-oriented, just the opposite, it is the affirmation of someone living who prefers living, and therefore survival, to death; because survival is not simply what remains, it is the most intense life possible. (Derrida, 2007b, p. 96)

Survival is the irreducible, structural condition of existence. Let me remark the generality of the term ‘existence’ and the possible alternative: the Heideggerian notion of Dasein. Like Dasein and, on behalf of it, survival precedes and conditions the determination of human individuality as psyche, soul, subject, speculative or phenomenological consciousness, etc. In order to understand survival as the irreducible and structural condition of existence, it is necessary to detect, on the one hand, its matrix (the differential trace) and, on the other hand, its affirmative bearing (the yes, the unconditional affirmation of life). As I will point out, in order to understand survival and, thus, to affirm it, as Derrida himself conjures us to do, it is necessary to get through a certain experience and interpretation of the performative. ‘Always prefer life and constantly affirm survival . . .’ is a performative utterance: it does not describe, it is an order, a prayer, a call for swearing or promising, that is, somehow, forced out in the instant of death. Beyond this evidence, which is, perhaps, trivial, the notion of survival as the structural condition of life rests on a certain interpretation of the condition of possibility of the linguistic performative. In particular, I will follow the traces of the yes. In ‘A Number of Yes’, which was published in 1987, Derrida understands the yes as the exemplary performative by means of which it would be possible to return to a ‘quasi-transcendental’ or ‘quasi-ontological’ performativity that, within any linguistic utterance, within the constative–performative opposition, would be the condition of possibility of all utterance. However, in order to find in this quasitranscendental performativity the structure of the survival, it is necessary to look at literature. Once again in an interview – and this is the second coordinate

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of our path – Derrida explicitly affirms the link between a certain concern for literature and the instance of survival: What counted for me [in literature] is the act of writing or rather since it is perhaps not altogether an act, the experience of writing: to leave a trace that dispenses with, that is destined to dispense with the present of its originary inscription, of its “author” as one might say in an insufficient way. This gives one a way that is better than ever for thinking the present and the origin, death, life or survival. Given that a trace is never present without dividing itself by referring to another present, then what does being-present, or the presence of the present mean? The possibility no doubt carries beyond what is called art or literature, beyond in any case the identifiable institutions of that name. (Derrida, 1995b, p. 346)

Literature is the major way to grasp the articulation between the structural condition of life and that of writing, in which life is inscribed.1 It is therefore necessary to come across the experience of writing as it manifests itself in literature in order to understand the structure of survival. With particular attention to that literature which questions the sense of the experience of writing. The reference to Parages in the above-quoted passage from Learning To Live Finally prompts us to head towards Maurice Blanchot, in order to identify the literature Derrida is concerned for. The central part of Parages, which is dedicated to Blanchot, is the essay ‘Living On’, which was published first in English in a well-known, collective volume (1979, 2011).2

The double yes: From the linguistic to the absolute performative In ‘A Number of Yes’, Derrida acknowledges to Michel de Certeau a certain engagement with the yes, that takes him from the performative linguistic act of the uttered yes to a more original performative, another yes, which is presupposed by all linguistic act, without being ever uttered, and stands for its condition of possibility: What he has said to us on the subject of the yes was not simply a discourse on a particular element of language, a theoretical metalanguage bearing on one possibility of utterance, on one scene of utterance among others. . . Because a yes no longer suffers any metalanguage; it engages the “performative” of an originary affirmation and remains thus presupposed by every utterance on the subject of

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the yes. Moreover – to put it aphoristically – for Michel de Certeau, there is no subject of any kind that does not arise from the scene of the yes. The two yesses we have just discerned (but why are there always two? We will ask ourselves this question again) are not homogeneous, and yet they are deceptively similar. That a yes should be presupposed each time, not only by every statement on the subject of the yes, but also by every negation and every opposition, dialectical or not, between the yes and the no, this is perhaps what immediately gives the affirmation its essential, irreducible infinity. (Derrida, 2008c, p. 232)

Therefore, one can isolate the conditions of possibility of linguistic act only by going from the linguistic yes-performative to the original and non-linguistic yes-performative, to the original affirmation that stands for the condition of possibility of existence and, therefore, of life. In fact, Derrida outlines that for de Certeau this original affirmation anticipates and conditions the very possibility of the constitution of the subject (psyche, soul, consciousness, . . .). On the other hand, Derrida himself retraces the original affirmation back to the transcendental dimension when he determines as ‘arche-originary’ the yes ‘that gives the first breath to every utterance’ (p. 236), and, therefore, posits this original affirmation at the same level of arche-writing [archi-écriture] and arche-trace [archi-trace], namely, at the level of structural or ‘quasi-transcendental’ (and not a priori) conditions of possibility. That’s why this notion of original affirmation resists the Heideggerian objection according to which it would be the ultimate development of the ‘metaphysics of the will’, the modern declination of the ‘metaphysics of the presence’ (p. 238). The original affirmation anticipates by far the constitution of any form of subjectivity, that is, of the necessary support to the exercise of will. It precedes that constitution as its very condition, remaining itself ‘unconditioned’ (p. 239) and, thus, independent from any voluntary, conscious and self-present deliberation: The archi-originary yes resembles an absolute performative. It does not describe or state anything but engages one in a kind of archi-engagement, alliance, consent, or promise that merges with the acquiescence given to the utterance it always accompanies, albeit silently, and even if this utterance is radically negative. Given that this performative is presupposed as the condition of any determinable performative, it is not simply one performative among others. One could even say that, as a quasi-transcendental and silent performative, it is removed from any science of utterance, just as it is from any speech act theory. It is not, strictly speaking, an act; it is not assignable to any subject or to any object. If it opens the eventness of every event, it is not itself an event. It is never present as such. What translates this nonpresence into a present yes in the act of

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an utterance or in any act at the same time dissimulates the archi-originary yes by revealing it. (Derrida, 2008c, pp. 238–9)

In ‘A Number of Yes’, Derrida sketches out the general traits of this ‘arche-originary affirmation’, of this ‘absolute performative’ (engagement, alliance, promise), without describing its dynamic and structure. Only in an indirect fashion is it possible to bring to light its articulation with the structural condition of existence and, thus, of life. In this perspective, it is necessary to refer to literature, or rather, to narrative (récit), to a singular narrative: Blanchot’s Death Sentence [L’arrêt de mort] (1978).

Living on: The absolute performative Before performing this step, let me clarify the exemplarity of narrative in general (récit), of its origin and structure. Derrida insists on the term ‘récit’, which in English looses the original, semantic density. In French, ‘récit’ refers to ‘repetition’, ‘quotation’, ‘recitation’, to the performance of an attestation where something passed away is repeated. The origin and structure of narrative (récit) imply the call for a testimonial act with regard to a past present. A narrative is structured around such a call, which is, somehow, its very origin and condition: I suggest, for example, that we replace what might be called the question of narrative [récit] (“What is a narrative”?) with the demand of narrative. When I say demand I mean something closer to the English “demand” than to a mere request: inquisitorial insistence, an order, a petition. To know (before we know) what narrative is, the narrativity of narrative, we should first perhaps recount, return to the scene of one origin of the narrative (will that still be a narrative?), to that scene that mobilizes various forces, or if you prefer various agencies or “subjects”, some of which demand the narrative of the other, seek to extort it from him like a secret-less secret, something that they call the truth about what has taken place: “Tell us exactly what happened”. The narrative must have begun with this demand, but will we still call the mise en scène of this demand a narrative? (Derrida, 1979, p. 87)

Therefore, a narrative has to do with the present attestation of a present which is already past at the moment of attestation. From a phenomenological perspective, I can go back to the living presence of the past present through the ideal objectivities (traces, signs, words) that refer to it. According to Derrida, this is the metaphysical illusion of phenomenology, as well as of any

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philosophy founded on the immediacy of the presence, including speech act theory. Conversely, only the possibility of a trace that is absolutely different and independent from the immediate presence it refers to as already passed away, only this possibility grants the constitution of the present, even if always and just in view of a further reference, a reference to come or a deferred one. In a phenomenological language, since the beginning, for the consciousness that constitutes itself through the retention of a trace of experience there is no trace of the living present of experience but only the trace of the deferring of (from) this present, which is oriented towards the to-come.3 Therefore, Derrida is concerned for narrative in general and, in particular, with Blanchot’s narratives. In the above-mentioned passage from ‘Living On’, Derrida refers to The Folly of the Day [La folie du jour] (1981) in order to take up the interpretation proposed in ‘Pas’, the first essay included in Parages. Here, he detects a certain staging of the demand of narrative as the very origin of the narrative itself and thus of its institutionalization in what we name literature. In La folie du jour the narrative I must respond to what happened, it must tell the truth about what was present and, yet, he affirms not to remember at all. The injunction comes from a doctor and a police chief, institutional instances that ask the narrative voice to institute itself as a narrative subject within the order of the metaphysics of presence. Only the possibility to return to the living presence of the past present grants the truth of the ideal objectivities that refer to it. A witness must be able to re-present the living present he/she was present to. In staging the law imposed to the novel from outside La folie du jour solves the narrative itself from this bind and shows, through the very march of the narrative, the impossibility of such a presence and, at the same time, the necessity of deepening the search for the ultimate condition of attestation up to the heart of life. That’s why Derrida, instead of dealing with Shelley’s The Triumph of Life, reads L’arrêt de mort: Within the boundaries of this session, I shall propose a fragment, itself unfinished, detached from a more systematic reading of Shelley, a reading oriented by the problems of narrative [récit] as reaffirmation (yes, yes) of life, in which the yes, which say nothing, describes nothing but itself, the performance of its own event of affirmation, repeats itself, quotes, cites itself, says yes-to itself as (to an-)other in accordance with the ring [anneau], requotes and recites a commitment [engagement] that would not take place outside this repetition of a performance without presence. This strange ring says yes to life only in overdetermining ambiguity of the triumph “of ”, “over” [de] life, “over”, “on” [sur] life, the triumph marked in the “on” of “living on” [dans le sur d’un survivre]. (Derrida, 1979, p. 103)

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Once it is loosed from the submission to the institution called literature and, thus, to the order of the metaphysics of presence, La folie du jour reveals in an exemplary fashion the structure of the double yes as the structural condition of attestation: given the absolute alterity of the trace with respect to the living present it refers to, the narrative attests the necessity of the self ’s referring (renvoi) to the other as other, to what is other than the living present – the iterable trace – to relate to itself and therefore being itself. From this perspective, the double yes, original affirmation and absolute performative, stands first for the self-affirmation that necessarily passes through the repetition of the trace, through the confirmation of the trace as the trace of the self. This selfaffirmation through the confirmation of the traces elaborated by experience is necessarily entailed in  all linguistic acts and constitutes their condition of possibility. For Derrida it is necessary to demonstrate that, through the reading of L’arrêt de mort, (1) the structure of the double yes, which is presupposed by all speech act, is an articulation and an effect of the irreducible structure of the life of the living; (2) that the latter depends on the arche-originary yes, an unconditional yes to life, which structures the life of the living before its constitution as a subject, as a consciousness that reappropriates itself in its presence to itself in a punctual and living present; and (3) on the basis of this unconditional yes to life it is necessary to describe the dynamic of the life of the living in terms of survival. At the end, it must be possible to find in survival itself the absolute performative. Derrida insists on the semantic density of the title, which is dispersed in the English translation The Sentence of Death. The French ‘arrêt de mort’ means certainly ‘death sentence’ but ‘arrêt’, when alone, can also mean interruption, suspension, pause, arrest. Furthermore, Derrida observes that the occurrence of ‘arrête’, which already comprehends ‘arête’, with one ‘r’, that refers to a line of contact or intersection: Arrête, with two “r”, is thus indeed that which orders the arrêt (stopping/ decision), but the ar(r)ête, as a noun, is also that sharp dividing line [limite aiguisée], that angle of instability on which it is impossible to settle to s’arrêter. Thus this dividing line functions also within the word and traces in it a line of vacillation. This line runs within L’arrêt de mort, within what the arrêt de mort says, the expression “arrêt de mort”, the title L’arrêt de mort – all of which are to be distinguished. (Derrida, 1979, p. 109)

We are not before a mere linguistic speculation. According to Derrida, the narrative itself asks us to reckon with the semantic density of its title: it is divided

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into two parts, which are linked by no evident diegetic relation. The first part develops into two main episodes: a first one, in which (the sentence of) death is suspended, deferred, life goes on, and another one, in which (the sentence of) death is definitive, or, rather, so it seems, because, in fact, it ends up leaving the reader unsure about death: is it definitive or still deferred? It is clear that the two episodes send one back to another so as to make the line which should separate them (as well as life and death) unstable and permeable. Both episodes are referred by the narrator that speaks in the first person (Je), they concern the same person, a woman, a friend, perhaps, a lover of the narrator, that calls her with what could be the initial of her name: J. (in relation of omophony with Je). Since the beginning, one knows that the woman is affected by an incurable disease and ‘should have been dead already. She thus lives on [Elle sur-vit donc]’ (Derrida, 1979, p. 112). She survives to her own death till she takes the decision (l’arrêt) to die with the help of the narrator, but only later, after the episode of the delay of the death which seemed unavoidable, the narrator will decide to give death to her, even if he is no longer sure of the consensus of the woman. Therefore, death remains sure and the novel stops (s’arrête) by leaving it definitively suspended: death never presents itself, it is never present even if it remains present in any instant of J.’s life. In this suspension (arrêt) that interrupts and delays (arrête), that defers the already decided death (l’arrêt de mort), Derrida finds the dynamic of différance at the heart of life: the mutual, differential relation between life and death that structures and orients the movement of the narrative and by means of which it is possible to understand the dynamic of the life of the living as survival: The arrêt de mort is not only the decision that determines what cannot be decided: it also arrests death by suspending it, interrupting it, deferring it with a “start”, the startling starting over, and starting on, of living on [la diffère dans le sursaut d’un survie]. But then what suspends or holds back death is the very thing that gives it all its power of undecidability – another false name, rather than a pseudonym, for differance [différance]. And this is the pulse of the “word” arrêt, the arrhythmic pulsation of its syntax in the expression arrêt de mort. Arrêter, in the sense of suspending, is suspending the arrêt, in the sense of decision. Arrêter, in the sense of deciding, arrests the arrêt, in the sense of suspension. They are ahead of or lag behind one another. One marks delay; the other, haste. There are not merely two senses or two syntaxes of arrêt, but beyond a playful variability, the antagony from one arrêt to the other. The antagony lasts from one to the other, one relieving the other in an Aufhebung that never lets up, arrêt arresting arrêt, both senses, both ways. The arrêt arrests itself. The indecision of the arrêt

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intervenes not between two senses of of the word arrêt but within each sense, so to speak (Derrida, 1979, p. 114)

Let me follow Derrida’s reading of the episode where J. seems dead and yet comes back while the narrator (Je), who is certain of the ineluctable, calls her with her name. It will help us understand the dynamic of différance at the heart of life and, finally, to encounter the unconditional yes to life as the irreducible condition of this dynamic. As she survives to death, J. cannot remember what happened, even if her state has changed; suddenly she looks happy with the delay of her own death, that, however, she ignores: The reaffirmation, the récit of life marks its discreet triumph in a “gaiety” (the words “gay” and “gaiety” recur five or six times) the memory of which is terrifying, would “be enough to kill a man”. Gaiety, reaffirmation, triumph over (triumph of the “on”, “over”, sur, hyper . . .): over life and of life, life after life [sur-vie], at the same time between life and death in the crypt, more than life [plus-que-vie, plus-de-vie], when it’s over (and over again), reprieve [sursis] and hypervitality, a supplement of life that is better than life and better than death, a triumph of life and of death; a living-on [survie] that is better than truth and that would be la chose par excellence: sur-verité, truth beyond truth, truth beyond life and death (Derrida, 1979, p. 132)

The unconditional yes to life, the reaffirmation of life is not the manifestation of a will to life, which would presuppose a self-present consciousness able to affirm its own will. In fact, J. does not remember anything: J. has never been present to what has happened to her (i.e., conscious), and, yet, without being aware of it, she is happy of having delayed the death, which, in turn, has never been present to as such. According to Derrida, this happiness without consciousness is the very manifestation of the unconditional yes to life, of the absolute performative, that structures the life of the living at a biological, natural and, thus, unconscious level, before and independently from any constituted subjectivity or consciousness: There is a great deal to be said about this gaiety, about the quality of the experience thus designated to describe what is proper to an act or instance of living on, the levity of its affirmation, of the yes, yes, of the yes to yes [du oui, oui, du oui à oui] without self-recollection [sans mémoire de soi], the yes that, saying and describing nothing, performing only this affirmation of the yes saying yes to yes, must not even have, and know, itself [s’avoir et se savoir]. But this “need not” or “must not” is also an interdiction that interposes an unconscious between the event and the very experience of it, between the living-on and the present,

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conscious, knowing experience of what that comes about [de ce qui arrive ainsi]. I (the one who says me, that is to say, me) do not know what has happened, what will have happened to me. (Derrida, 1979, p. 132)

Through the story of J. and Je, one learns that the unconditional yes to life says yes to the injunction to live that comes from the to-come and structures the life of the living by pushing it to live on beyond the present: life, or the absolute performativity. The logic immanent in the living is not the conservation of identity, of self-presence, which would be pure and immune from alterity or difference: it is not the conservation of life before death as a so-called natural accident, external and contingent with respect to life: This “vivre, survivre” delays at once life and death, on a line (the line of the least sure sur-) that is thus one neither of clear-cut opposition nor of stable equivalence. “Living, living-on” differs and defers, like différance, beyond identity and difference. Its domain is indeed in a narrative [récit] formed out of traces, writing, distance [éloignement], teleo-graphy. Tele-phone and tele-gram are only two modes of this teleo-graphy in which the trace, the grapheme in general, does not come to attach secondarily to the telic structure but rather marks it a priori. (Derrida, 1979, p. 136)

Once it is thought of in terms of survival, the logic of the living seems to have a telic structure, it is its own self-reaffirmation, that is, the repetition of itself beyond the present towards the future. This is the unconditional yes to life, the absolute performative, the irreducible condition of the living.

Traces of life in the text It is time to account, through the notion of survival, for the articulation between the unconditional yes to life, that structures the life of the living, on a natural and biological level, as reproduction and self-repetition, and the ideal objectivities (traces, signs and words) that consciousness elaborates in order to relate itself to the experience and to give a sense to life. The narrator (Je), that, as a witness, should refer the occurred event, attests his being present at the occurring of the past event and, thus, finds himself in the same condition as J.’s, he is a survivor: in his narrative there is no trace – and there couldn’t be – of an event in its present and punctual occurrence, there is only a trace of iterable traces (signs, words) elaborated in order to refer to an event in a posterior moment, the moment of

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the narration, that is absolutely other than the present to which it cannot relate, and yet, exactly for this reason, it can ensure the survival to come: The unnarratable event of J.’s coming back to life [de la survie] holds the récit breathless for an interminable laps of time that is not merely the time of what is narrated: the one who narrates is also, first, one who lives on [survivant]. This living on is also phantom revenance (the one who lives on is always a ghost) that is noticeable (re-markable) and is represented from the beginning, from the moment that the posthumous, testamentary, scriptural character of the narrative [récit] comes to unfold. (Derrida, 1979, p. 138)

The absolute inaccessibility of the living present, necessary to the elaboration of an iterable trace, does not affect the possibility of testimonial attestation. Conversely, it makes the attestation possible, it demands for it according to the telic and performative structure of survival: ‘Différance – arrêt de mort or triumph of life – defers (differs like) the narrative of (from) writing [La différance, arrêt de mort ou triomphe de la vie, diffère (comme) le récit d’écriture]’ (p. 136). By means of survival, it is possible to rewrite the genesis and structure of the elaboration of the ideal objectivities (traces, signs, words) according to the opening of a to-come in the name of which we should engage our testimonial attestation, according to the protention that structures the subjectivity through its irreducible, biological determination. In particular, for Derrida, the structure of survival permits us also to reconsider the questions of writing and reading, of the translation and interpretation of texts and, thus, of the transmission of the legacy they represent for us: A text lives only if lives on, and it lives on only if it is at once translatable and untranslatable (always at once, and: ama, “at the same time”). Totally translatable, it disappears as a text, as writing, as a body of language. Totally untranslatable, even within what is believed to be one language, it dies immediately. The triumphant translation is neither the life nor the death of the text, only or already its living on, its life after life. The same thing will be said of what I call writing, mark, trace, and so on. It [ça] neither lives nor dies; it [ça] lives on. And it [ça] “strats” only with living on (testament, iterability, remaining [restance], crypt, detachement that lifts the structures of the living rectio or direction of an “author” not drowned at the edge of his text. (Derrida, 1979, p. 102)

Derrida will return to these issues from 1990 on, for instance, in Specters of Marx, to account for the irreducibly spectral dimension of ideal objectivities; in Faith

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and Knowledge, Poetics and Politics of Witnessing and Demeure, in relation to testimonial performativity as the condition of attestation. And it is in Demeure, which in fact focuses on Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death, that the question of survival comes back in relation to testimony.4

Living ouverture To conclude, one could say that the logic of survival, that is immanent in the biological structure of the living, consists in the self-protention through the traces of alterity in which the living binds itself to itself and affirms itself as such; and, therefore, as spatio-temporal differing (espacement) through traces which, being produced in view of a reference to come, must differ from the living present. To support this thesis, which could seem risky, I will refer to some key points in Derrida’s work that anticipate Living On. In Freud and the Scene of Writing, published in 1966, Derrida already acknowledged the necessity of the iterable structure as the answer to the logic of survival: No doubt life protects itself by repetition, trace, différance (deferral). But we must be wary of this formulation: there is no life present at first which would then come to protect, postpone, or reserve itself in differance. The latter constitutes the essence of life. Or rather: as différance is not an essence, as it is not anything, it is not life, if Being is determined as ousia, presence, essence/ existence, substance or subject. Life must be thought of as trace before Being may be determined as presence. (Derrida, 1978, p. 254)

It is not by accident that on that occasion Derrida identifies survival with the function of the iterable trace, as the inscription retained in the memory, which constitutes itself as a writing preceding any recourse to the empirical writing (arche-writing): We must account for writing as a trace which survives the scratch’s present, punctuality, and stigme. . . .. Writing supplements perception before perception even appears to itself [is conscious of itself]. “Memory” or writing is the opening of that process of appearance itself. The “perceived” may be read only in the past, beneath perception and after it. (Derrida, 1978, p. 282)

From this perspective, it would be even more interesting to reread the unpublished seminar ‘La vie la mort’ of 1975. In the first part, Derrida addresses the notions of ‘trace’, ‘code’, program’ and ‘text’ in contemporary biology. In

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particular, he refers to François Jacob’s La logique du vivant, first published in 1965. As Derrida remarks, Jacob describes ‘the heritage as a ciphered program of a sequence of chemical radicals’: the heritage ‘becomes the transfer of a message repeated from generation to generation. In the kernel of the egg is the program of the structures to be constructed’ (Derrida, 1975). The logic of the living is a logic of retention and reproduction, archive and transmission. It is exactly in this perspective that one can grasp survival as the performative structure of the living: ‘all begins with self-reproduction’ (Derrida, 1975), as Derrida states categorically. He is also more precise: Jacob’s description of the logic of the living imposes the recourse to the logic of différance, of trace and text as an irreducible necessity. It is not a simple metaphor or a vague analogy: Not only are there message, communication, transfer of communication – in fact one could be tempted to say that this communication or language determined as communication, does not consist in a text. There is text only to the extent that there is regulation and archive, code and decipherment. Or, what modern genetics discovered, reproduction, which is the essential structure of the living, functions as a text. The text is the model, the model of models. (Derrida, 1975)

At this point, once detected the earliest traces of survival in Derrida’s work, we must return to the beginning, to what at the beginning could seem the end and, thus, relaunch the opening onto the to-come: ‘Always prefer life and constantly affirm survival. I love you and am smiling at you from wherever I am’. Reaffirming survival means to affirm the unconditional yes to life, before the traditional opposition between life and death, before a conception of life as a full presence or the punctual self-identity of a supposed living, absolute and unconditioned present. Such a life could only be attributed to the God of metaphysics, in its historical variations, and, once projected or imposed to the natural living, it would merge with death itself, with its denegation. In fact, survival amounts to the irreducible condition of the possibility of the life of the living but also, at the same time, what exposes it irreducibly to death. To elude the possibility of death would also mean to remove the possibility of life. It is therefore in the name of life, of another conception and experience of life that Derrida engages our attestation for a survival to come. The possibility of the to-come, in contrast with the supposed living present and its institution, is the dimension that structures a priori the life of the living and it is to the structure of a performative ante litteram, which I defined ‘telic’, that one should refer to in order to rethink life as well as the structures and institutions in which it is inscribed; the genesis and structure of what one conventionally calls subjectivity as well as the institutions

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of knowledge, politics, economy, religion, society, etc., which are established on a notion of subjectivity that, at this point, seems unable to account for them.

Notes 1 Derrida had already posited this articulation in 1964 when he uses for the first time the notion of survival in relation to the dimension of affirmation: ‘Life negates itself in literature only so that it may survive better. So that it may be better. It does not negate itself any more than it affirms itself: it differs from itself, defers itself, and writes itself as differance’ (Derrida, 1978, p. 95). 2 In what follows, I will refer to the first, English version of Living On (Derrida, 1979). 3 Here, I refer to Derrida’s early works on Husserl and Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference, in particular, to those texts in which the deconstruction of Husserl’s living present is taken up through the notions of ‘arche-trace’ and ‘arche-writing’ and is extended to the metaphysics of presence in general. Regarding speech act theory, see, for instance, ‘Signature, Event, Context’ in Derrida, 1982, pp. 307–30. Cf., in particular, p. 322: ‘Austin has not taken into account that which in the structure of locution (and therefore before any illocutory or perlocutory determination) already bears within itself the system of predicates that I call graphematic in general, which therefore confuses all the ulterior oppositions whose pertinence, purity, and rigor Austin sought to establish in vain. In order to show this, I must take as known and granted that Austin’s analyses permanently demand a value of context, and even of an exhaustively determinable context, whether de jure or teleologically; and the long list of “infelicities” of variable type which might affect the event of the performative always returns to an element of what Austin calls the total context. One of these essential elements – and not one among others – classically remains consciousness, the conscious presence of the intention of the speaking subject for the totality of his locutory act. Thereby, performative communication once more becomes the communication of an intentional meaning, even if this meaning has no referent in the form of a prior or exterior thing or state of things. This conscious presence of the speakers or receivers who participate in the effecting of a performative, their conscious and intentional presence in the totality of the operation, implies teleologically that no remainder escapes the present totalization. No remainder, whether in the definition of the requisite

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conventions, or the internal and linguistic context, or the grammatical form or semantic determination of the words used; no irreducible polysemia, that is no “dissemination” escaping the horizon of the unity of meaning’. 4 Let me refer to my reading of the articulation experience-trace-testimony in Vitale, 2009, and of testimony and survival in Vitale, 2011. It is when working on Demeure that the urgency of confronting the ‘early’ Derrida around the question of the survival of the living (on) came out.

6

Archive-Abilities Simon Morgan Wortham

(Archivable) Abstract How might we think of the humanities as an archive beyond archivization, indeed as the archive of a future to come, perhaps even one name for the future itself? How might we reimagine the humanities – beyond acts of guardianship or preservation – as a pathway to new knowledges, new techniques, new thought and relationships? How might we think the humanities this way, without succumbing to the current idea of research ‘impact’ which tells us that non-academic ‘benefit’ is really now the only way to rethink and transform the humanities’ value for our times? If, as Derrida suggests in Archive Fever, we do not yet have a fully developed and hence ‘archivable concept of the archive’ (Derrida, 1996a, p. 36), the future of its concept – to which Derrida in effect links the future of all concepts, since there is no concept without the archive – must be thought with the utmost care. For where would one archive an archivable concept of the archive? In order to function as repository in a traditional sense, this very same archive (archive of the future) would by definition be larger than and thus exceed the definition that it was tasked to hold or store (i.e. the very concept of the archive; but also, therefore, precisely the definition of itself). At just the moment of affirming an archive that might archive the concept of the archive, this very same archive would thus be radically non-self-identical with the archive as such (i.e. in its concept as such). The profound heteronomy of such an archive would redefine – that is to say, limit but also transform – the very possibility of archive thinking and, indeed, archive practice. (Here, to borrow the phenomenological terminology

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in question in Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena, the indicative field overruns the expressive function of an ‘archivable concept of the archive’.) For Derrida, the archivable mark is always singular – it is something like an irreplaceable incision in language – and yet the irreducible possibility of re-marking (i.e. the iterability of every mark, which cannot but transform as it repeats) is what makes for the uncontainable force and unprogrammable future of every singular event or inscription. In this sense, far from serving merely as a site of deposit, consignation or conservation, the archive unavoidably conjures the future – interminably, inventively, indeed beyond any exercise of volition or agency. (The archive is thus, in one sense, a performative machine, a life-death machine – it institutes or invents anew as much as it conserves and monumentalizes – which nonetheless operates beyond the performativity of a subject or subjectivity whose performances are designed to demonstrate and indeed dominate the field of the masterable-possible.) Thus, perhaps unsurprisingly, Derrida’s Archive Fever recalls to itself or conjures up his much earlier text ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ – a text which it by no means simply archives, re-marking instead precisely this essay’s thinking of the ‘unarchivable’. Here, for Freud, the model of mnemonic inscription that comes closest to psychic memory (the mystic writing pad) gathers, stores or records only on the strength of that which cannot be gathered, stored or recorded as such (i.e., by or for a rational, conscious subject). For the inscribed or perceptual marks of the mystic pad cannot tell the whole story of the machine’s ingenious operation(s). Put differently, the Wunderblock fashions its markings as somewhat akin to the products of an ‘unconscious’, which itself remains unpresented or unpresentable, and thus yet to come. In Derrida’s Paper Machine, meanwhile, the archivable deposit – the book, let us say – takes its place, or its slot, only by dint of a metonymic series, which runs from thesis or book, to library and institution, to law and statute, to state deposit and nation state. Yet, this metonymic chain is the site of constitutive slippage as much as stable linkage. Once more, the place or slot of the archive opens on the strength of a margin of difference, which is also an unencloseable opening to the other. Paper Machine asks us to be highly cautious about thinking that the rise of new technology and media implies simply the irreversible destruction of a papercentric (concept of the) archive – a papercentricity that, as far as such thinking is concerned, might therefore be consigned, once and for all, to the archives. Instead of just tracing the more or less dramatic impact of new mediatic and technological forms and practices upon the very possibility of the archive, it might therefore be possible to argue

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that the archive of the humanities – indeed, the humanities as archive – in fact guards or, as Derrida elsewhere puts it, double-keeps a legacy whose event is still to come. Far from presenting the humanities as simply the residue of an intellectual or cultural past (as so often happens nowadays), one might thereby rethink the humanities in terms of an indispensable archive-ability going beyond the archive ‘itself ’, one which perhaps grants the possibility of a future as such. And yet, such archive-ability as irreducible potentiality may perhaps alter irredeemably what is meant by and done in the name of the humanities. As Samuel Weber has pointed out, the use of the suffix ‘-ability’ in the writings of Walter Benjamin (where it is found in recurring terms such as translatability, reproducibility, citability and so on) and in the work of Jacques Derrida (iterability receives most attention from Weber) always ‘entails a virtuality that is never fully actualizable and therefore involves an “experience” of movement and alteration rather than a reproduction of the same – or of the self ’ (Weber, 2008, p. 15). As Weber puts it, such ‘-abilities’ do not emerge ‘merely as an anticipation of a possible realization’, or in other words as the prospect of a fully possible possibility, but instead become ‘immediately effective qua possibility itself ’ (p. 45). (For Weber, ‘im-mediate’ suggests the idea that such possibility does not emerge as simply a means to an end; although neither should such possibility be construed as a simple ‘end’ in itself, but rather a way of thinking difference as, precisely, constitutive.) What is involved in ‘-ability’ words in both Benjamin and Derrida, then, is a possibility, potentiality or transformativity which, much less than a simple add-on, in fact turns out to inhabit from the outset the very structure of the term that it modifies. For instance, iterability for Derrida names the necessary possibility of the mark’s repeatability – and not, as Weber points out, ‘the manifest fact of repetition’ (p. 58) – which therefore supplements the mark at its very origin, so that différance or divisibility is in fact constitutive of its (therefore non-self-identical) ‘presence’. Moreover, since such ‘impossiblepossibility’ – in contrast to a fully possible potentiality – by definition exceeds the given or supposed capacities of the subject construed as rational agent or sovereign presence (or, in other words, since this ‘possibility’ goes beyond the ‘masterable-possible’), Benjamin’s or Derrida’s ‘-abilities’ elude containment by any conception of the ‘human’, the ‘humanistic’ or the humanities. Such ‘-abilities’, in other words, are always on their way to becoming ‘other’ by dint of a more original potentiality or virtuality than that which is found in the traditional conception of the human being.

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Archive and event In his interview with Giovanna Borradori conducted just a few weeks after the attacks in the United States on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, Derrida dwells on Borradori’s opening suggestion that ‘September 11 (le 11 septembre) gave us the impression of a major event’ (Derrida, 2003, p. 85). Throughout the dialogue, Derrida offers a clear and compelling account of what is at stake in analysing this ‘event’. With great incision, he explores how ‘the impression of a major event’ must be understood in terms of the intersection of highly determined political, military and media interests and powers. In particular, the ‘ritual incantation’ of the name to which the ‘event’ was so quickly reduced – ‘September 11’, ‘9/11’ – sought at once to ‘neutralize the traumatism and come to terms with it through a “work of mourning”’ (p. 93), while at the same time maintaining a mechanical repetition, ‘a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain’, which in the end ‘admits to not knowing what it’s talking about’ (p. 86). Now, Derrida’s thinking of the event – that is, the event that might indeed be worthy of its name – implies an irreplaceable and unmasterable singularity, a pure idiomaticity (strictly speaking, beyond even the idiom) that evades its own appropriation by any given language, discourse or context, and which therefore dislocates the interpretative horizon on which it is hoped or expected to appear. (‘A major event should be so unforeseeable and irruptive that it disturbs even the horizon of the concept or essence on the basis of which we believe we recognize an event as such’, Derrida, 2003, p. 90). Yet this ‘absolute surprise’ and ‘unanticipatable novelty’ (p. 91) doesn’t simply place the event forever outside the ‘world’, in some simple sense. Instead, it is precisely what is non-appropriable in the event (for instance, the irresolvable and uncontainable aporia which marks the event and advent of the ‘demos’: that is, the non-disentangleable rift between freedom and equality) which in fact charges it with world-opening force. This is one reason why ‘9/11’ leaves the impression of a major event. As Derrida points out, if in the aftermath of the attacks the Americans, and indeed the entire world, could have been reassured beyond all doubt that the destruction of the Twin Towers constituted an absolutely unrepeatable violence, an outermost horizon of evil that would never again be crossed, the ‘work of mourning’ might have been both a smoother and more short-lived process. Yet ‘9/11’ remains an event to the extent that it cannot be consigned to the past, but continues to inflict upon us the traumatism of the ‘to come’. The event of ‘9/11’ is the event of this ‘to come’. (‘It is the future that determines the unappropriability of the event, not the present

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or the past’ (p. 97); ‘An event always inflicts a wound in the everyday course of history, in the ordinary repetition and anticipation of experience’ (p. 96); ‘One day it might be said: “September 11” – those were the (“good”) old days of the last war. Things were still of the order of the gigantic: visible and enormous! What size, What height! There has been worse since. Nanotechnologies of all sorts are so much more powerful and invisible, uncontrollable, capable of creeping in everywhere. They are the micrological rivals of microbes and bacteria. Yet our unconscious is already aware of this . . .’ (p. 102).) Thus, ‘9/11’ may be ‘an ineffaceable event in the shared archive of a universal calendar’, but the archiving of the event does not so much store, deposit, consign or contain it, as tremble with its very impression (even if the date or datedness of ‘9/11’ seeks to fix, stabilize, memorialize or amortize the event, at the same time this designation harbours the prospect of a terrifying, intensifying, radically transforming repeatability). And this ‘impression’ is itself an event, as Derrida insists (p. 88). (At one point in the interview, he notes that ‘the real “terror”’ of ‘9/11’ came not so much from the actual attacks but rather from the exploitation of their ‘image’ in the media ‘by the target itself ’ (p. 108), so that the event was produced as much by the target – the United States – as by the Islamist hijackers.) It is not just, as Derrida writes of the archive in Archive Fever, that there is ‘accumulation and capitalization of memory on some substrate and in an exterior place’ (p. 12) – an extrinsic support, a detachable prosthetic which the event in its irreplaceable singularity threatens to absolutely exceed and thus incinerate – since the archiving of the event in precisely its impossible transaction with the event is itself . . . something of an event. What we are thinking of here, between the impression and the event, recalls, in Derrida’s Paper Machine, the impossibility of thinking of paper – until recently, and perhaps still today, the means we privilege for recording our impression of events – as simply passive and secondary in relation to the act or event of writing. Here, paper is not so much a historically circumscribed, technological convenience, an extrinsic support for the psychic or imaginative process, which joins itself to bodies and materials only in order that, through writing, evanescent thoughts (events of thinking) may be concretized or ‘stored’. Instead, for Derrida, paper itself provides the very figure for considering the paradoxical divisibility of its host of its traits, feuilles or folds. In particular, Derrida regards paper’s supposed function as a subjectile or bodily support for the traces or marks ‘that may come along and affect it from the outside’ to be part of a ‘discourse’ that is ‘heavy with . . . assumptions’ (Derrida, 2005d, pp. 42–3). This ‘discourse’ becomes

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problematic at the point when we ask whether, when we say ‘paper’, we mean ‘the empirical body that bears this conventional name’ (my italics) or whether we are ‘already resorting to a rhetorical figure’ (p. 52). The problem is apparent, in other words, when we come to understand that the notion of ‘an empirical body that bears’ the name of paper already gives itself over to a figure of speech, so that the reference to the ‘empirical’ here is not in fact supported merely ‘empirically’. How could ‘paper’ support the figure of itself as (a) body? The advent of paper is therefore an event to the extent that the impression it bears is also in some way unbearable (it cannot itself bear it), and this transaction between the bearable and unbearable, like the aporia of the demos, leaves open a future (for paper, says Derrida, whatever we may come to mean by that term beyond a ‘discourse . . . heavy with assumptions’, and perhaps beyond the apparent waning of a papercentric era). This notion of transaction significantly recurs throughout the interview: unconditional hospitality, for instance, as an absolute openness to the other which itself transcends the political, the juridical and perhaps even the ethical, must inevitably transact with certain ethico-political and legal conditions in order for an effective hospitality – a determinate giving – to take place. Here, the unconditional ‘risks being nothing at all’ unless it enters into this transaction, which is the place of ‘political, juridical, and ethical responsibilities’ – yet such a transaction between the conditional and unconditional, like that which takes places between the impression and the event, is itself ‘each time unique, like an event’ (pp. 129–30). To put this somewhat differently, the negotiation with the non-negotiable is itself at once non-negotiable, beyond negotiation or calculation, and always to be negotiated. In the interview with Borradori, Derrida grapples more than once with this thought of the event and its impression: The “impression” cannot be dissociated from all the affects, interpretations, and rhetoric that have at once reflected, communicated and “globalized” it, from everything that also and first of all formed, produced, and made it possible. The “impression” thus resembles “the very thing” that produced it. Even if the so-called “thing” cannot be reduced to it. Even if, therefore, the event itself cannot be reduced to it. The event is made up of the “thing” itself (that which happens or comes) and the impression (itself at once “spontaneous” and “controlled”) that is given, left, or made by the so-called “thing”. We could say that the impression is “informed”, in both sense of the word: a predominant system gave it form, and this form then gets run through an organized information machine (language, communication, rhetoric, image, media, and so on). This informational apparatus is from the very outset political, technical, economic. But we can and,

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I believe, must (and this duty is at once philosophical and political) distinguish between the supposedly brute fact, the “impression”, and the interpretation. It is of course just about impossible, I realize, to distinguish the “brute” fact from the system that produces the “information” about it. But it is necessary to push the analysis as far as possible. (Derrida, 2005d, pp. 88–9)

In this passage, the event and the impression are brought into a highly complicated relation of antagonistic, unstable intimacy. While we should always seeks to distinguish the ‘brute fact’ of the event from the ‘impression’ that is produced of it by the ‘organized information machine’, nevertheless this impression is itself, in another sense, part of the event, as much indissociable and ‘spontaneous’ as ‘controlled’ and ‘informed’, Derrida tells us. (In other words, its apparent spontaneity is always to some extent ‘controlled’, for sure; yet, for all that, such spontaneity is not merely, or not totally, controlled. Indeed, the ‘impression’ thus carries within itself a divisible trait that redoubles the inextricable divisibility of impression and event.) If to distinguish the ‘supposedly brute fact’ from the system that produces the ‘information about it’ requires us to assume our philosophical and political duties, nonetheless presumably the word ‘duty’ is chosen carefully by Derrida here, as a term which everywhere in his own thought would come to be associated with the conditional rather than the unconditional. Much less than directing us towards a ‘pure’ and unmediated experience of the event, then, this dutiful undertaking once more calls for a complex transaction, in fact an always irreconcilable yet necessary negotiation, between the conditional and unconditional, between the unappropriable and the call for a ‘movement of appropriation’ which must nevertheless always falter somewhat at the ‘border’ or ‘frontier’, calling up a sense or impression of incomprehension that is itself, first of all, an event (Derrida, 2005d, p. 90). Or, rather – giving rise to a new impression, perhaps, transacting riskily between acknowledged or ‘produced’ incomprehension, on the one hand, and, on the other, the profound call for another intelligibility – producing itself as event.

Archive and impression ‘But what is an impression in this case?’ (Derrida, 2005d, p. 88). It is in a ‘seemingly “empiricist” style’, Derrida tells us, ‘though aiming beyond empiricism’, that he deploys the term ‘impression’ (and one might begin by disputing whether ‘empiricism’ has its origins in the empirical):

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. . . as an empiricist of the eighteenth century would quite literally say . . . there was an “impression” there, and the impression of what you call in English – and this is not fortuitous – a “major event”. (Derrida, 2005d, p. 88)

Of course, ‘impression’ is a term that comes to Derrida, somewhat unexpectedly, as he responds to a call from Elisabeth Roudinesco, placed several years before the ‘Autoimmunity’ interview, to participate in an international colloquium on ‘Memory: The Question of Archives’. Derrida thus speaks of how this term comes to inhabit the title of a lecture that was to be revised and published as Archive Fever: I undoubtedly owe you, at the beginning of this preamble, a first explication concerning the word impression, which risks, in my title, being somewhat enigmatic. I became aware of this afterward: when Elisabeth Roudinesco asked me on the telephone for a provisional title, so as indeed to send the program of this conference to press, almost a year before inscribing and printing on my computer the first word of what I am saying to you here, the response I then improvised ended up in effect imposing the word impression. (Derrida, 1996a, p. 25)

Impression: a word that is itself conjured, or conjures itself, between surprise and inscription, between the provisional and the enigmatic, between that which is improvised and that which imposes itself, between writing and event, between the other’s call and the press, between initial incomprehension and a text to come. A text on the archive and the event – of psychoanalysis. On the one hand, the archive takes places in a situation of ‘domiciliation’ or ‘house arrest’ (Derrida, 1996a, p. 2), abiding in a more or less permanent dwelling which, however, marks the ‘institutional passage’ from the private to the public though not necessarily from the secret to the non-secret (the archived text may – indeed, cannot but – always keep in reserve what in its attestation can never be reduced or exposed to mere ‘evidence’ or ‘proof ’). The archive is formed through acts of consignation which entail not only ‘assigning residence or . . . entrusting so as to put into reserve (to consign, to deposit), in a place and on a substrate’ but also ‘the act of consigning through gathering together signs’ (p. 3), about which more will be said later. While it is undoubtedly the aim of consignation to ‘coordinate a single corpus, in a system of synchrony in which all elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration’ (p. 3), nevertheless this very same feature of the archive renders it ‘eco-nomic’ in a ‘double sense’: ‘it keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatural fashion’. Thus, every archive is at once ‘conservative’ and ‘institutive’, at once highly traditional and, in making its own law, radically inventive or revolutionary (p. 7). Relatedly, the archive is not merely the passive

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receptacle and, thus, external substrate or support of what comes to be archived. Rather, it makes its own law in a situation which is neither simply autonomous or autofoundational (for how can law found itself in a lawful fashion?) nor crudely heteronomous (the archive can never simply found its own law, to be sure; yet, nonetheless, Derrida ask us to think of the archive as not merely the inactive recipient of another’s desires, strategies or interests). Similarly, and according to a similar transaction ‘between two orders or, rather, between order and its beyond’ (Derrida, 2003, p. 133), the very production or event of psychoanalysis is not indifferent to the conditions of its archivization and archivable impression. Writing of ‘the geo-techno-logical shocks which would have made the landscape of the psychoanalytic archive unrecognizable’ (‘MCI or AT&T telephonic credit cards, portable tape recorders, computers, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences, and above all E-mail’) (Derrida, 1996a, p. 16), Derrida says: I will limit myself to a mechanical remark: this archival earthquake would not have limited its effects to the secondary recording, to the printing and to the conservation of the history of psychoanalysis. It would have transformed this history from top to bottom and in the most initial inside of its production, in its very events. This is another way of saying that the archive, as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique in general is not only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past which would exist in any case, such as, without the archive, one still believes it was or will have been. No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. (Derrida, 1996a, p. 16)

While, as Derrida tells us in ‘Autoimmunity’, the event is to be thought of as irreducible to its ‘impression’; nevertheless, the conditions of archivization transact with the very event or advent of psychoanalysis in order to produce its event. A few pages later, Derrida goes on: . . . [we] should not close our eyes to the unlimited upheaval under way in archival technology. It should above all remind us that the said archival technology no longer determines, will never have determined, merely the moment of the conservational recording, but rather the very institution of the archivable event. It conditions not only the form or the structure that prints, but the printed content of the printing: the pressure of the printing, the impression, before the division between the printed and the printer. (Derrida, 1996a, p. 18)

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Here, once more, the ‘impression’, in the sense of the very pressure of printing, names an intimate friction, a dynamic (hostile–hospitable) transaction between the printer and printed, between the event (of psychoanalysis) and its impression ‘in print’. This pressure of the impression is at once singular in its occurrence, finding or making ‘its trace in the unique instant’ (p. 99) where momentarily one cannot be separated from the other; and yet this apparent synchronicity which might otherwise translate the archive’s dream of a ‘single corpus’ or ‘unity of an ideal configuration’ is disrupted at the origin, since the impression is always divisible, repeatable, iterable: ‘The possibility of the archiving trace, this simple possibility, can only divide the uniqueness. Separating the impression from the imprint’ (p. 100). The impression, in other words, ‘would have been possible . . . only insofar as its iterability, that is to say, its immanent divisibility, the possibility of its fission, haunted it from the origin’ (p. 100). If I am here citing copiously from Derrida, in order perhaps to fashion a text that archives the traces of his thought according to a law which must be both conservative and institutive, but which also seeks to conjure an impression of the event of his thinking, then a just few more quotations may be called for: Unlike what a classical philosopher or scholar would be tempted to do, I do not consider this impression, or the notion of this impression, to be a subconcept, the feebleness of a blurred and subjective preknowledge, destined for I know not what sin of nominalism, but to the contrary, as I will explain later, I consider it to be the possibility and the very future of the concept, to be the very concept of the future, if there is such a thing and if, as I believe, the idea of the archive depends on it. (Derrida, 1996a, p. 29) It is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is the question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come. Perhaps. (Derrida, 1996a, p. 36)

For Derrida, the notion of the ‘impression’ of an event as at once distinct and indistinct from the event, a part of that of which, in other senses, it is not a part, itself may be considered by some to amount to a weak concept or subconcept; yet, the complex logic of the impression as it unfolds painstakingly in the texts we are reading here is, in fact, crucial to a thinking which, instead of consigning the event to an irreplaceable and irretrievable past, or indeed to an indivisible instant or unique present, entails perhaps the very possibility of a concept of

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the future – that is, a future for the event as the ‘to come’, insofar as it remains restlessly worked or bound into a complex relationship with its ‘impression’. Here, as we have already said, the archive of the event is not thinkable merely as a stable and exterior site of consignation or depositing, not least since the very idea of the archive calls for new forms of thinking which resist the notion that we might call upon ‘an archivable concept of the archive’. Thus, the archive and the concept of the archive do not find their origin or foundation – or indeed their future – in what is, simply, archivable. For Derrida, one might even say, this makes the archive, for us, today and tomorrow, an event, perhaps. (And, as such, Derrida once more moves us away from the idea that an archive simply accommodates, violates, monumentalizes, amortizes the event.) Certainly in Archive Fever, the question of the psychoanalytic archive is bound to a thinking of the psychoanalytic event to come, an event which not only marks ‘in advance’ the entire landscape of our intellectual, disciplinary, historical and cultural ‘archive’, but which is still destined to transform it: I wish to speak of the impression left by Freud, by the event which carries his family name, the nearly unforgettable and incontestable, undeniable impression (even and above all for those who deny it) that Sigmund Freud will have made on anyone, after him, who speaks of him or speaks to him, and who must then, accepting it or not, knowing it or not, be thus marked: in his or her culture and discipline, whatever it may be, in particular philosophy, medicine, psychiatry, and more precisely here, because we are speaking of memory and of archive, the history of texts and discourses, political history, legal history, the history of ideas or of culture, the history of religion and religion itself, the history of institutions and of sciences, in particular the history of this institutional and scientific project called psychoanalysis. Not to mention the history of history, the history of historiography. In any given discipline, on can no longer, one should no longer be able to, thus one no longer has the right or the means to claim to speak of this without having been marked in advance, in one way or another, by this Freudian impression. (Derrida, 1996a, p. 31)

Thus, as Archive Fever turns its attention to an extended reading of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, the very event of Yerushalmi’s book is viewed by Derrida in terms of ‘dramatic turn’ and ‘stroke of theater’ (p. 37) which, in a rather sudden and surprising way, threatens to unravel a painstaking work of scholarship fit for the archive itself. This comes at the point when Yerushalmi departs from the classical norms and conventions of scholarly writing in order to apostrophize inventively according to a complex

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fiction which hails Freud’s spectre: ‘Professor Freud, at this point I find it futile to ask whether, genetically or structurally, psychoanalysis is really a Jewish science; that we shall know, if it is at all knowable, only when much future work has been done. Much will depend, of course, on how the very terms Jewish and science are to be defined’ (p. 37, italics added by Derrida). This question of psychoanalysis as perhaps a Jewish science (since as Yerushalmi points out it can only be decided in the future) radically transforms ‘the relationship of such a science to its own archive’, transforming in turn the meaning of the terms or concepts being used here, and, for that matter, their (conceptual) relationship to one another: ‘science’, ‘archive’ (‘Jewish’, too) (p. 45). Orienting them – even and especially according to their ‘rich and complex history’ – towards an unprogrammable future. Or, rather, opening them to it. Thus, the archive, the very ‘structure of the archive’, is ‘spectral’ (p. 84) in the sense that, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father in Specters of Marx, it begins by coming from the future.

Singularity and event This laboriously worked body of citations from Derrida has been crafted in order to contribute to a certain line of debate that, in fact, crosses and divides the entire humanities. One way to capture a sense of the controversy in question is to turn our attention to Timothy Clark’s The Poetics of Singularity (2005). For Clark, the concept or quasi-concept of singularity – a term which involves us in a reading of Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot, Gadamer and, more recently, contemporary critics such as J. Hillis Miller and Derek Attridge – has provided the means for those within a broadly deconstructive tradition to oppose or resist the ‘cultural politics paradigm’ which today seems largely to dominate the entire field of interpretation. For Clark, this paradigm may be understood in terms of acts of interpretation where the chosen object of study – the literary text, for example – is in the last analysis referred and reduced to its cultural or historical ‘context’, or located in terms of a ‘politics of identity’ which gives texts meaning in terms of ‘ethnicity, nationality, religious affiliation, class or gender’ (Clark, 2005, p. 1). Such a paradigm, suggests Clark, might be judged to stealthily reintroduce ‘intellectual dogmatism’ in its very manner of proceeding, as well as provide a cover for ‘the premature good conscience of much politically engaged criticism’ (p. 2). ‘Singularity’, meanwhile, has established the means to ‘affirm an understanding of the “literary”’ in terms that refuse ‘to be conceptualisable

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or mastered’ (i.e. merely ‘archived’) by the paradigmatic framework of ‘culture’ itself (p. 1): ‘Singularity names the specific being of a text or work, inflected so as to underline its resistance to being described in general categories or concepts’ (p. 2). Singularity, therefore, may be allied in certain of its key features to that dimension of Derrida’s thinking about the event which emphasizes what is ‘unforeseeable and irruptive’, the ‘absolute surprise’ and ‘unanticipatable novelty’ that makes an event worthy of its name. And yet, Clark notes, the argument ‘that literature should finally be valued rather because it is inassimilable to fixed stances or cultural programmes’ than because it might be understood in terms of its cultural significance is ‘now becoming rather shop-soiled’ (p. 1).While singularity has ‘borne the main weight of the argument’ in books like Hillis Miller’s Black Holes (1999) or Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature (2004), Clark worries that the argument is sometimes made ‘with a rather vaguely self-justifying force’ (p. 2). Singularity is ‘good’ because it evades or disrupts paradigmatic mastery, but for this very reason the analysis of singularity must be brought up short if one is to avoid repeating the paradigmatic approach of describing the object according to ‘categories or concepts’ which become more ‘general’. The singularity of singularity, in other words, can tend to encourage a rather sterile opposition in which the impasse between ‘culturalist’ and ‘deconstructive’ approaches sediments into mutually self-justifying hostility. And according to which deconstructive thought may be perceived as running the risk of giving way or giving ground on the still-crucial question of the ‘historical’, the ‘political’ and so on. Now, it is certainly not my interest here to reappropriate these terms in their classical meanings for the deconstructive tradition, or, for that matter, to broker a deal between two very different modes of enquiry. Rather, through close attention to some relevant texts by Derrida, I simply want to demonstrate that the thinking of singularity, the singularity of the event for example (and, for Derrida, what ‘event’ could not be ‘singular’, what ‘singularity’ could not be an ‘event’?), certainly need not come at the price of a poorly thought-out antagonism towards all that might fall outside the ‘pure’ event construed as unique and aparadigmatic. What we have learnt from Archive Fever and the ‘Autoimmunity’ interview about the impression and the event, or the event and the archive, does not so much (if at all) reconcile the event of a text with the question of the context that receives and interprets it, as reformulate the very question of the ‘event’ so that the impression and the archive form an inextricable part of its thinking. This, in turn, equips us, indeed, requires us, to carry a deconstructive thinking of the event into the very ‘archive’ of all of our

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‘culture’ and ‘disciplines’ whatever they may be – including, as Derrida puts it, ‘the history of texts and discourses, political history, legal history, the history of ideas or of culture, the history of religion and religion itself, the history of institutions and of sciences . . . Not to mention the history of history, the history of historiography’. How ‘history’ is repeated here! – but it is a repetition which, as it opens onto new horizons, indeed horizons without horizon, transforms the meaning of the term it repeats. As something of an event, perhaps.

Metonymies of the archive I mentioned the Greek word biblion not to sound scholarly, or even – it’s too easy – to explain the word bibliothèque. I spoke Greek to observe in passing that biblion has not always meant “book” or even “work” . . . does any oeuvre, be it literal or literary, have as its destiny only a “bookish” incorporation? This must be one of the very many questions that await us. (Derrida, 2005, pp. 5–6)

In ‘The Book to Come’, Derrida notes that biblion ‘didn’t initially or always mean “book,” still less “oeuvre”’, but could instead ‘designate a support for writing’ – paper, bark, tablets (p. 6). Thus, biblion itself gathers and extends a series of ‘metonymies’; metonymies which, perhaps in the very nature of their metonymic relations, do not so much harmonize particular instances by dint of an overarching generality, referring varied examples to a single point of origin, as indicate a series of uneven shifts and potentially unstable movements, as much historical as they are linguistic. If in Greek bibliotheke means ‘the slot for a book’, its ‘place of deposit’ – linking our sense of the library to a more original notion of storage, putting, depositing – one should nevertheless not forget that this supposed ‘act of immobilizing, of giving something over to a stabilizing immobility’, as Derrida puts it, in fact only takes place under the banner or in the wake of a word that itself gathers without exactly ‘setting down, laying down, depositing, storing’ (pp. 6–7). ‘The idea of gathering together, as much as that of the immobility of the statutory and even state deposit, seems as essential to the idea of the book as to that of the library’, he writes, adding that ‘there will be no surprise in rediscovering these motifs of the thetic position and the collection: of the gathering together that is statutory, legitimate, institutional, and even state or national’ (p. 7). Here, no doubt quite rightly, an entire ensemble is gathered up – thesis, book, library, institution, law, statute, state deposit, nation state – although also laid down somewhere between a metonymic series and a thetic

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order. However, if, as Derrida contests, ‘all these motifs are themselves collected together in the question of the title’ (p. 7) – that which allows orderly depositing (classification, cataloguing and so forth) – then what function is biblion to assume, and what limits does it assign, as the very term which gathers? In ‘Paper or Me, You Know . . .’ Derrida observes that the ‘norms and figures of paper . . . are imposed on the screen: lines, “sheets,” pages, paragraphs, margins, and so on’ (Derrida, 2005, p. 46), while a papercentric language still pervades the discourse of computer programmes (‘cut’, ‘paste’ ‘clip’, etc.). Nevertheless, here he allows himself to wonder about the future of the bibliothèque in view of ‘texts, documents, and archives that are further and further away from both the support that is paper and the book form’. ‘“What about the book to come?” Will we continue for long to use the word library for a place that essentially no longer collects together a store of books?’ What happens when, sooner or later, libraries become spaces that are dominated by ‘electronic texts with no paper support, texts not corpus or opus – not finite and separable oeuvres; groupings no longer forming texts, even, but open textual processes offered on boundless national and international networks, for the active or interactive intervention of readers turned coauthors, and so on’ (pp. 7–8). ‘The Book to Come’ was presented to introduce a discussion with Roger Chartier and Bernard Stiegler at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF), in March 1997. In May 2003, Derrida returned to the BNF in order to celebrate the donation to the Library by Hélène Cixous of an archive of letters, notebooks and dream journals. Just as any testimony worthy of its name must keep a secret at precisely the point it is weighed as reliable attestation, keeping in reserve that which is radically heterogeneous in relation to ‘evidence’ or ‘proof ’, so this encrypted writing ‘smuggles in that which is and remains unavowable, even as it is being avowed, brings it in clandestinely, as contraband’, as Derrida writes in Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius (Derrida, 2003, p. 31). The library is thus transformed through the encryption of this address, the unavowable-avowed, hence the readable-unreadable. Speaking thus, speaking secretly, beyond its own depositing, storage or potential immobilization, the Cixous archive inhabits the theatricalized space of the psyche, engages or disturbs the other, its scenography becoming that of the ‘unconscious’. Cixous’s texts engage the memory, pervade the dreams, of the true guardian of the archive. As Derrida tells us in ‘The Principle of Reason’, faithful guardianship (of knowledge, tradition, the archive, the institution) paradoxically entails keeping what one does not have and ‘what is not yet’ (Derrida, 1983, pp. 154–5) – the possibility of the to come – since to keep without a certain ‘double keeping’, to merely defend, encircle or enclose, is

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to risk the greatest infidelity – just as those who blindly assert the principle of reason badly negotiate a tautological circle on the one side (reason’s grounds or justification is . . . reason) and what is abyssal on the other (if reason cannot ground itself in reason without risking irrationalism or question-begging, what is its foundation?). The faithful guardian must therefore observe a certain ‘strategic rhythm’ of the ‘blink’, neither keeping a hard-eyed watch over reason’s transparent good sense, nor falling into blind dogmatism, but opening and closing the eye in (viewless) view of a certain barrier and a certain abyss. Such a ‘double keeping’ demands of the faithful guardian that he or she gather in a certain way of nongathering, a gathering of what cannot be gathered, a winking eye cast over what cannot be brought to light. And since the Cixous archive ‘addresses the library’s unconscious’ as much as its double-keeping guardian – who must avow the unavowable, keep beyond keeping – its gift implies a certain transformation of the BNF itself, intruding on or prizing open that metonymic series (thesis, book, library, institution, law, statute, state deposit, nation state) in order to expose and commit the Library to the ‘unconditional’, beyond or in spite of the ‘national’. As Martin McQuillan, in his foreword to Derrida’s text, puts it: The donation of the Cixous archive to the BNF is a dangerous gift because it compels the library to avow what it cannot comprehend, to guard what it cannot have, to house what it cannot master. Rather, the donation of Cixous’s letters, notebooks and, above for Derrida, her dream journals . . . represents an abyssal opening beyond the eyes of the library. (Derrida, 2006, p. XI)

The Cixous archive thus remains unmasterable by any form of sovereignty: ‘she has handed over to the BNF an all-powerful, powerless other’, as McQuillan puts it, the name of which might be . . . literature itself. Literature’s secret, the unavowable-avowed. As McQuillan notes, Derrida insists that ‘the corpus remains immeasurably vaster than the library supposed to hold it’ (p. 72). This strange relation between the part and the whole not only exposes the BNF to its supposed ‘outside’, to the ‘unconditional’. It also recalls, in Glas, the very question of the anthological. Digging into the roots of this word, we find something like its original meaning in the gathering of flowers. In Glas, the flower is a part, a figure or example, of the whole of rhetoric or poetics. Yet as ‘the poetic object par excellence’, or as the very ‘figure of figures’, the flower simultaneously partitions, sets apart, distinguishes, determines, delimits these fields in general. The flower is both – and seemingly impossibly – gatherer and gathered. As Derrida therefore observes, the flower comes to ‘dominate all the fields to which it nonetheless belongs’ (Derrida, 1990a, p. 14). At which point, of course, it simultaneously

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stops ‘belonging to the series of bodies or objects of which it forms a part’. Not unlike Cixous’s archive, therefore, the flower is only to be comprehended, only to be gathered, as an ‘all-powerful, powerless other’. This aporia, which Derrida names as that of a ‘transcendental excrescence’, is also perhaps that of philosophy, whose asymmetrical contract with the university consists in the fact that, in one sense, philosophy belongs to the university which, in another, it itself partitions or allots. And the same aporia concerns the relation of literature to its institution, or, here, to the library. Again, a problem of gathering, putting, depositing, keeping, holding. In Archive Fever, it is the death drive that is to be discovered at or as the foundation of the Freudian archive. The death drive is the ‘original proposition’, which stops psychoanalysis from becoming ‘a lot of ink and paper for nothing’ (Derrida, 1996a, pp. 8–9). But the death drive, as Derrida calls us to remember, ‘not only incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mneme or to anamnesis, but also commands the radical effacement, in truth the eradication, of that which can never be reduced to mneme or anamnesis, that is the archive, consignation, the documentary or monumental apparatus as hypomnema, mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum’ (p. 11). If the death drive is indeed invoked as the principle reason for conserving psychoanalysis’s paper(s), no wonder that the ‘archive always works, and a priori, against itself ’ (p. 12). The ‘silent vocation’ of what psychoanalysis archives is therefore to ‘burn the archive’, ‘incite amnesia’, and thereby refute ‘the economic principle’ of the archive as ‘accumulation and capitalization of memory on some substrate and in an exterior place’ (p. 12). In The Post Card, Derrida recounts his own promise not to ‘bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame’. Derrida is required to take this oath before he is permitted entry to Oxford’s Bodleian in order to view the original illustration by Matthew Paris of Socrates and Plato, the image at the ‘centre’ of the book. Yet, Derrida recites (re-cites) his promise with certain omissions: Did I tell you, the oath that I had to swear out loud (and without which I would have never been permitted to enter) stipulated, among other things, that I introduce neither fire nor flame into the premises: “I hereby undertake . . . not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame . . . and I promise to obey all the rules of the Library.” (Derrida, 1987a, p. 211)

What do these ellipses suggest? At the first time of asking, their insertion means that Derrida’s promise is not recited in full, it is not recited as the or a full promise. At the second, they imply that something other, some other than the fire or flame

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just mentioned, has suddenly been incinerated by dint of an elliptical gap. But what exactly incinerates, here, what burns, if not the fire and flame that Derrida openly states and refutes in the cited part of the promise? While by the more dutiful insertion of ellipses Derrida would seem to observe (indeed guard) the ‘proper’ rules of quotation, in contrast perhaps to The Post Card’s wholly errant and insupportable general convention of ‘the blank of 52 signs’, the recited promise nevertheless burns with elliptical omissions, omissions however which are not of ‘fire’ and flame’. Does Derrida’s recitation, his text, break or keep its promise? Does something or nothing burn? Or both, impossibly, undecidably, beyond memory or forgetting, economy or aneconomy? 5 June 1997: ‘I am sending you Socrates and Plato again . . . my small library apocalypse’ (Derrida, 1987a, p. 11, the blank of 52 spaces replaced by my own ellipses). 7 September 1977: The one that I call Esther. You know, I confided to you one day, why I love her. Her or her name, go figure it out, and each letter of her name, of her syngram or her anagram. The quest for the syngram Esther, my whole life. One day I will divulge, I do not yet accept them enough to tell them. Only this, for you, today. Estér is the queen, the second one, the one who replaces Vashti for Ahasheuros. What she saves her people from, a holocaust without fire or flame. (Derrida, 1987a, p. 71)

Here, once more, Derrida’s guardianship is of the unavowable-avowed, while the one he loves saves, just as, in Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius, the BNF must ‘[s]ave in its unconscious’ nothing other than the unsaveable-saving Cixous dream-archive. Her ‘people’ saved from ‘a holocaust without fire and flame’ – but, then, if from this flameless, fireless holocaust, from fire-and-flame itself? Does nothing or something burn? Like the question itself, the Cixous archive should remain open, without condition (an open secret). Derrida ventures that, if the archive ‘is to be meaningful, that is, if it is to have a future, [it] should be at the heart of an active research centre, of a new kind, open to scholars from all parts of the world’ (Derrida, 2006, p. 83). This, of course, was Derrida’s dream for the International College of Philosophy. McQuillan, meanwhile, wonders about what possible ‘architecture’ might ‘link the Cixous collection at the Bibliothèque Nationale to the Derrida archive at the University of California, Irvine and to any future deposit of Derrida letters and manuscripts’. Indeed, he wonders how the archive might ‘stay open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, to accommodate all the researchers of the world linked by the thread of Cixous-Derrida? What would be the paces, virtual or imagined, material and concrete, of such a Centre

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without centre?’ (p. XIII). The ‘enormous problematic of the archive and the other’, as McQuillan puts it, into which we are thrown by Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius reintroduces the question of computerization and electronic media, one that Derrida tackles with the utmost rigour in Paper Machine. Will the technological developments associated with Derrida’s own generation keep the archive endlessly open while causing paper to get burnt up by something like a death drive? (As Derrida observes, Cixous ‘always writes by hand, no matter what, she writes using a tool – pencil or pen – that is, without a machine or machine-tool; without a typewriter or a word processor. Something which is fairly unusual and of critical importance for the archives of which we speak’, p. 39. Writing and the hand is a question that interests Derrida in many places, of course.) For Derrida, such a notion of the traditional archive’s demise is perhaps not altogether in keeping with his thought of what the archive double-keeps: For what we are dealing with is never replacements that put an end to what they replace but rather, if I might use this word today, restructurations in which the oldest form survives, and even survives endlessly, coexisting with the new form and even coming to terms with a new economy . . . (Derrida, 2006, p. 72)

The archive and the anthological A moment ago, we remarked upon the fact of a very strange relation between the part and the whole, the Cixous archive and the national library, whereby for Derrida ‘the corpus remains immeasurably vaster than the library supposed to hold it’ (Derrida, 2006, p. 72). This always supplemented and never stable relation of part and the whole, then, not only incites or agitates biblion’s metonymic series but also exposes the BNF to an ‘unconditional’ exteriority (which, in fact, also resides in its very depths). The deconstructive force of the archive recalls, as we’ve suggested, the very question of the anthological in Glas. In some ways, the two questions – that of the archive and that of the anthological – might therefore be gathered together, so that the architecture (virtual or otherwise) that one could dream up to connect the Cixous archive at the BNF to the Derrida archive in California might also extend itself so as to establish links with the various anthologizations of texts involving these two thinkers and writers. The anthological as much as the archive, then, puts the question of gathering, putting, depositing, keeping.

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In Glas, as we are reminded, anthology is, at root, a flower-gathering. However, the standing of the ‘root’ is immediately complicated, to the extent that the flower is as much what gathers – ‘the poetic object par excellence’ or the very ‘figure of figures’ (Derrida, 2006, p. 14) – as that which is gathered; so that, maddeningly, the anthological cannot itself be gathered on the strength of a flower-gathering that is itself gathered by the flower. The part is larger than the whole, and therefore cannot support what supports it. For how is one to gather – or comprehend – the flower, if it in fact determines the entire field within which – and of which – it becomes the principal figure? A slightly infuriating deconstructive logic gathers itself up here so as to arrest, block, impede gathering itself. Glas gathers together Hegel, Genet, Sartre, along with many others, some secretly or in silence, encrypted in the text. Glas, with its two great columns, its two (tree-)stumps of writing, standing rigidly upright like pillars, like towers, or like tombstones, risking perhaps a fall into the deadening (castrating) monumentalization of the work. But two columns that are also wound about or wound around – two columns that indeed grow up from the ground – by what is planted and propagated in Glas, so as to compose the text ‘in liana and ivy’ (Derrida, 1990a, p. 18). ‘Liana and ivy’: namely, that which weaves, braids, binds, grafts, overlaps and sews together the parts of the text that would otherwise appear to stand apart, banded erect. Genet, for example, ‘has made himself into a flower. While tolling the glas (knell), he has put into the ground, with very great pomp, but also as a flower, his proper name, the names and nouns of common law, language, truth, sense, literature, rhetoric, and, if possible, the remain(s)’ (Derrida, 2006, p. 12). It follows that the style of Glas, at its peak, would have everything to do with ‘the erectile stem – the style – of the flower’ that, when the bloom flowers at the stem’s summit, nonetheless sees ‘the petals part’ (Derrida, 2006, pp. 21–2) and the flower head divide (decapitate itself). The flower in anthologization thus becomes, as Derrida puts it, ‘(de)part(ed)’. No longer just a bit of a larger whole, but the very part that at once allots or partitions a generality, thereby effectively deconstructing its normative workings, the flower holds or harbours in itself ‘the force of a transcendental excrescence’ (p. 15). This suggests an odd outgrowth or projection (an extended-distended architecture?), an ‘extra’ part that both enlarges a figure (the flower), making it larger than the whole (of itself), larger than the rhetoric or poetics it comes to distinguish or define; but which also distorts, ruptures and interrupts the entire economy and the very idea of a whole or of a generality, of which it somehow remains an (excrescent) part. Obviously,

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one can detect here the logic of supplementarity inscribing itself at the very origin of what is supplemented. The anthologized part becomes an outgrowth and supplement which in an originary way both constitutes and deconstitutes, constructs and deconstructs the whole, the body (of a thesis, book, library, institution and so forth). The flower – the anthological part that is (and is not) gathered – is ‘(de) part(ed)’, then, by force of this ‘transcendental excrescence’ that sets it apart from the ‘series of bodies or objects of which it forms a part’. The anthological (gathered/not gathered) part is consequently singular, not in the simple sense that it is uniquely individual, but rather because it is what insistently remains, beyond the logic of ‘part’ and ‘whole’, in the wake of its own ‘transcendental excrescence’. The somewhat ghostly remains of the anthological or ‘(de)part(ed)’ part are therefore always already ‘at work in the structure of the flower’ – the structure of the anthological – as a ‘practical deconstruction of the transcendental effect’ (Derrida, 2006, p. 15): In little continuous jerks, the sequences are enjoined, induced, glide in silence . . . They are always only sections of flowers, from paragraph to paragraph, so much so that anthological excerpts inflict only the violence necessary to attach importance {faire cas} to the remain(s). Take into account the overlap-effects {effets de recoupe}, and you will see that the tissue ceaselessly re-forms itself around the incision {entaille}. (Derrida, 2006, p. 25)

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7

The Performativity of Art Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield

The performative fiction that engages the spectator in the signature of the work is given to be seen only through the blindness that it produces as its truth. Derrida 1993b, p. 65

The iterability of art as a problem for performativity Every mark is iterable. So Derrida, 1988 (passim). Yet, no text by Derrida is devoted to the work of a visual artist, the performativity of which could be contended to be as significantly questioning as those of the literary writers that Derrida has enjoined for their ‘critical performativity’, their putting into question what literature is, say Joyce or Mallarmé (Derrida, 1992a, p. 42). But performative works which are critical in this self-questioning way cannot be said to be the preserve of literature, or at least not without arguing that the structure of iterability in the hands of painters and film-makers is such that what painting and film-making is or does cannot be performed by them as a question; such an argument would be not at all tenable and Derrida nowhere makes it. At the same time, however, Derrida constantly called for the interruption of and interference in philosophy by the ‘performative’ arts, and stated often that it was a duty and obligation of the Collège International de Philosophie (CIPh), of which he was founding director, to allow for such performative interruption and spacing. Indeed, the inauguration of the college was itself to be unprecedented in virtue of its performatively doing just that. Additionally, Derrida has engaged in what we might call collaborations with artists, to the extent that he has co-signed works with them.1 And perhaps most importantly of all, there is no other philosopher whose own work has performed a visual spacing as variously, as experimentally and as rigorously as Derrida.

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Yet, Derrida’s first deconstruction of performativity is carried out with no regard for the visual arts. There is much about fiction in ‘Signature événement contexte’ (Sec), the paper in which Derrida’s deconstruction of performativity is first set forth, but visual art is not touched upon. The question of the performative is at this stage very much one of speech act theory. Of the earliest writings on art, all subsequent to Sec (1971) but coming quite soon thereafter (1974–78) and collected in the volume La verité en peinture (The Truth in Painting), those which engage with philosophies of art rather than the work of artists, in particular the texts on Kant and Heidegger, make no feature of performativity either.2 Performativity is, though, broached in the writings on specific artists, but remains tied to the instance of a certain kind of writing in art, writing in both Derridean senses of the word: as text and as general writing (écriture) where the former would be but one example of the latter, and that instance is the signature. Thus, the first serious consideration of performativity in visual art is the work on, and with, Valerio Adami, which in large part is given over to how Adami uses Derrida’s signature in his works, notably in two gravures which are titled by Adami Study for a Drawing after Glas but then retitled, or baptized, by Derrida, and which are stated in the ‘Liste des oeuvres’ in the text in question as ‘réalisée en collaboration avec Jacques Derrida’ [my emphasis] (Adami and Derrida, 1975, p. 27).3 We shall come back to this. But, to repeat, at the outset of Derrida’s prolonged engagement with performativity, we might say at the very moment of Derrida’s encounter with it, visual art is nowhere regarded. With what significance is it, then, that in the debate which follows the original reading of Sec, objections to the notion of iterability focus on art? The primary worry is that iterability appears not to take account of the singularity of artworks. Art is nowhere mentioned in Sec, yet Derrida twice admits in the discussion provoked by it that the question of the artwork is fundamental. Our task, then, is to work out why a question omitted from the original presentation should nonetheless be fundamental to it. Sec was presented to the Fifteenth Congress of the Association of Societies for Philosophy in the French Language, University of Montréal, in 1971. Derrida’s was one of three plenary papers devoted to ‘Communication’. The other two were given by Paul Ricoeur and Roland Blum. The roundtable discussion which followed the plenary was published in the Proceedings of the Association as ‘Philosophie et communication’.4 It is the encounter between Derrida and Ricoeur that interests us, as well as the exchanges involving Roger Marcotte and Gilles Lane. All three objectors wish to claim that artworks are not iterable. Marcotte argues that in the case of an artwork [une oeuvre d’art] ‘iterability is impossible because, if an

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artwork is repeated, it’s a copy’ (Derrida et  al., 1992, p. 151). Likewise Lane, worried that a mark must be essentially iterable and asked by Derrida to show one which cannot be iterated, gives the example of the artwork (p. 155). The dialogue with Ricoeur concerns the repetition of a piece of music. For Ricoeur the ‘essential problem’ with the artwork is how we recognize its sameness. In a bad performance of a symphony by Beethoven, what exactly is repeated if I do not recognize it as the same? (pp. 156–7). In answer to the first question, Marcotte’s, but its conclusion also stands as a response to Lane, Derrida undertakes first an Husserlian analysis of the artwork as a structure of retention and anticipation. There must be some particular ­noematic content to a work if it is to be recognized in its singularity and ideality, its sameness to itself. But how is this singular identity constituted? For Derrida it is irreducibly a matter of experience, the event of the singular artwork cannot exist independently of my experience of it, it is in the experience of the work that the condition of its identity is to be found. The experience inscribes a trace structure, which is the condition of a certain return and repetition. (We should mark here the fact that in The Truth in Painting, Derrida will maintain that with the notion of the trait so central to that text, for instance the trait of the signature in Adami, he is ‘follow[ing] the logical succession’ (Derrida, 1987c, p. 11) of what he meant by broaching [entamer] in Sec: ‘that which opens, with a trace, without initiating ­anything’ (Derrida, 1988, p. 12).) However, the condition of a work’s identity is at the same time that which allows it to be repeated. And if it can be repeated, it is divided from itself. A work’s iterability is that which divides it from itself in allowing it to be repeated, in which repetition it is re-marked as different. Iterability, then, is the condition both of a work’s identity, and of its difference. But the form of iteration that constitutes the singular visual or plastic artwork is not of the same type as for other works, for example written ones. Indeed, ­Derrida invokes a ‘differential typology of iteration’ [une typologie différentielle de l’itération] to account for this, in which the ‘multiplication of exemplars’ in literature implies a different relation to the original than does the singular event of the one statue or the one painting, the one exemplar of these as opposed to copies of them. The form of iteration is different for literature than it is for music, which, in turn, is different in its iterability to painting, to architecture and so on. Derrida’s claim that there is no mark that is not iterable is something also objected to by Ricoeur, for again it does not seem to take account of artworks. The discussion centres on music and the iterability of a Beethoven symphony. During their brief and somewhat elliptical exchange, Ricoeur appeals to the notion of a ‘non-reidentifiable iterable’ [l’itérable non ré-identifiable] to account

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for a bad performance in which the original cannot be identified. If it is repeated then it is the same, if not it is other. Derrida counters this with ‘noniterable identifiable’ [l’identifiable non itérable], arguing that in order to recognize a bad performance one must retain something, some fragment, a memory of the original. To say that one does not recognize the bad performance as the same requires that there be something iterated in that second performance, and what is iterated there is something of the original. Ricoeur: where the original is ‘a sort of expert witness?’ Derrida: yes, but one which is repeatable. The discussion comes to an end at this point. But what we must take note of here is the idea that an artwork bears within itself two opposed modalities of the same thing: iterability and the non-iterable. That what is other about it is non-iterable, non-repeatable. Yet, at the same time, repetition is precisely what ‘others’ that which is repeated. In what is later admitted to be an abuse of etymology (Derrida, 2001, p. 67), iterability for Derrida is the conjoining of the disjunctive pair iter and alter: iteration and alteration, alteration in iteration, where repeating something at once alters it.5 What Ricoeur’s and Derrida’s little dialogical knot leaves us with is that an artwork has a twofold alterity: its otherness is that which is not repeatable, its otherness is that which comes about through being repeated. And in response to the thrice put objection that visual artworks in virtue of their singularity do not conform to his model of iterability, Derrida proposes that the iterability of singular works is both different from and the same as the iterability of works where the relation to the original is itself one of repetition. Different in that the experience is singular according to the medium or material support, but same in that there would not be singularity were it not for iterability. There are different types of iteration for the different mediums of art, and the difference between an artwork that is singular and one that is multiple consists in our experience of the relation between the work and its repetition. Derrida does not subsequently go on to set out a differential typology of iteration based on a work’s material support (the support being something he would later call, following Artaud, its ‘subjectile’). But what he does do is develop a series of terms for that which is iterable about the artwork. One of those is the signature, discussed at the end of Sec (pp. 19–21), and developed at length right from the beginning of ‘Limited Inc a b c. . .’, his response to Searle’s critique of Sec (pp. 29–34); and, more pertinently for the present paper, the countersignature, mentioned just once in the three essays comprising the book Limited Inc, and only then in passing. We find in the countersignature Derrida’s way into the performativity of the visual artwork.

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The signature, countersignature and art as performative fiction From the off, Derrida makes explicit that the question of art, a question that is performed by art, is that of the signature. His first and major book on art, The Truth is Painting, ‘is signed Cézanne’. Why? Because the title itself is a saying of Cézanne (Derrida, 1987c, p. 2). The title of the book in question, the question of this book, and what this book promises, ‘is signed Cézanne’. According to Derrida, Cézanne’s signature ‘is linked to a certain type of event in the history of painting’. And that event is the performativity of the signature itself. The signature is the performance of a promise. What is promised is the truth, in painting, or the truth in painting, or the truth in painting, in painting, something Cézanne promises in a letter to Emile Bernard. What interests Derrida is not just that Cézanne utters one performative (in writing) which promises another (in painting), but that Cézanne is doing something (truth) which is made possible by that which the speech act theorist would want to oppose to truth (fiction). In this way art is performative fiction. But in fiction making truth possible, as if painting can only be true through being fiction, there is opened the possibility for the dissolution of another conceptual hierarchy: that of text over image: that the truth value of writing and of speech is made possible by the performative fiction of the picture. But, here, Derrida also goes in the other direction. If Cézanne promises to tell in painting whatever truth there is to tell, then he is promising to be a painter; he promises a painting act with a speech act. But that painting act will itself say. What it will say will be shown or done with painting, and painting will have done or shown a truth that was not already there. But for Derrida, this ‘pictorial doing’ would be one that has ‘the value of saying’, because the painting will be ‘occupied’ by speech. Then whatever it says is ‘nothing that will be there’ Derrida, 1987c (p. 9). It will not be there because it will not be in what is seen, but in what the seen says. Then, as a painting, it will be without its truth. But perhaps this is the truth in painting, that its truth be not present. This would be where the performativity of painting departs from the hand of its signatory. If, on the other hand, the truth of the art of painting is pictural and not discursive, if painting is not discourse, then because it is pictural its relation to its signatory is also put into question. If the truth is in painting then we do not need to know of the signatory that he is a painter; such would be the force of painting that we would not even need to know that it had been signed by a painter (p. 8). And as it happens, there is an important sense in which Cézanne’s paintings, even

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though they are signed in and by Cézanne’s hand, are not signed by Cézanne but by his supporter and collector Victor Chocquet, who owned many canvases by Cézanne and insisted on the artist signing them, including various portraits of Chocquet himself, the only time Cézanne attached his own name to his work.6 Painting is a performative fiction. But the fiction is not restricted to the paintings, because for there to be such paintings and for those paintings to be performative of the truth in painting, Cézanne must mean what he says and we must be able to understand what he says and say what he paints: for Derrida intention, truth and sincerity. And it is to ask whether painting can be understood in such terms, in the terms, that is, of speech act theory and the performative/ constative distinction on which it rests, that Derrida writes his book The Truth in Painting. The book, then, promises if not to answer then at least to unfold the question of whether a theory of performativity is pertinent to painting. ‘Does speech-act theory have its counterpart in painting?’ he asks, ‘Does it know its way around painting?’ And what is significant here is the formal realization on Derrida’s part, by which I mean the realization in the form of his writing, that the question can only be unfolded performatively. Thus in this sense there is no difference between those texts in The Truth in Painting which do not explicitly mention performativity and those which do, for in both sorts of text there is the performing of the question of art’s performativity. And what is performed is the partition of any edge or line [trait] which would enclose or constate the ‘system’ of painting from what it is not, but which at the same time for Derrida would open that system to its outside (Derrida, 1987c, p. 7). The signature remains. And it remains as a question after Derrida’s writing on art, and that question is whether the signature was always a literary act in Derrida, was always in the end a speech act. In an interview on visual art in 1990, Derrida says ‘I relate to Van Gogh in terms of his signature’ (Derrida, 1994a, pp. 15–16). But in this instance he does not refer simply to the name attached by the artist, but to how the artist ‘signs while painting’. The act of painting is to make a mark the presence of which remarks the absence to the viewer of the body making it. The relation between artist and viewer involves the body of the artist in the mode of its absence. There is an experience of the signature of Van Gogh only to the extent that it is countersigned by Derrida’s own body becoming involved with the painting as a remainder of the painting act. However, the attestation to the being of the work that the countersignature is could not happen were it not for the institutional space in which the encounter with the work takes place. And that space too is a countersignature, a sociopolitical one, without which

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there would be no work of art. There cannot be just one countersignatory. Were there just one countersignature to it, the work would be simply what it is in the form of a unity confirmed by the authority of a single name. Moreover, that which countersigns comes before the signature it countersigns. The autobiographical performativity of the artist’s signature could not take place without there first being the institution of the work setting up the conventions by which the work is legitimized as work. The work is public before it is private, before it is proper to the intention of an artist; indeed, the conventions thus established delimit in advance what the propriety of an artwork is. But the constative authority by which the institutional space legitimizes the artwork and inscribes its place in an economy of knowledge will be founded on the performative act bringing that institution into being.7 The temporality of the artist’s signature is such that it is preceded by that which countersigns it – even if it is not known who or what does the countersigning. And it is also preceded by that which comes after it, in the sense that it only emerges if what it is is attested to by the countersignature of its addressee: ‘The origin of the work ultimately resides with the addressee, who doesn’t yet exist’ (p. 19). The form that such attestation takes in Derrida’s case will be the texts he writes about the art he countersigns. But this brings with it another paradoxical aspect of the relation an artwork has to its receiver. On the one hand, there is the singular event that is the work of art. And it is this event that must be attested to by the countersignature that the writing on it is. And on the other, that countersignature cannot attest to the event’s singularity without doing it a certain violence.8 Immediately then, such violence cannot simply be deemed to be negative. No matter how faithfully the countersignature seeks to ‘repeat’ that which it countersigns, or reproduce the ideality of that which it countersigns, be it in the form of a performance of a piece of music or a catalogue essay on a painting, there will be an alteration of that which is countersigned. And it is precisely the ideality of a mark which allows it to be repeated in contravention of what its signatory might intend. Countersigning a work of art can mean gainsaying the signature, as happens when Derrida ‘ignores’ the order performed by the signatory of Titus-Carmel’s Cartouches, where the author’s performative becomes an imposition in the face of what the countersignatory might say and feel compelled by the work to say (Derrida, 1987c, p. 219). But this imposition, as we will see, is not an accident that befalls the performative, it is the fate of all performatives. A countersignature then does two things, it both lets the artwork be in attesting to the event of the

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work: it happened; and alters it, even to the extent of producing it: here it is. The signature proper is carried off by the countersignature, leaving . . . ‘text’, a remainder which we ‘no longer know which of the two partners will have signed first’. ‘There is text’ avers Derrida in Signéponge of the poet Ponge, not when there is no signature but when we cannot establish a temporal, and therefore intentional, priority between signatures (Derrida, 1984, p. 130). When Derrida says of an artwork ‘it waits for me’, he means that the artwork is not what it is until I have countersigned it (Derrida, 1994a, p. 16). To this extent the artwork awaits itself. Thus, when I countersign a work, distinctions such as inside/outside object/subject negation/affirmation lose their pertinence. In affirming the work I negate the work as an autonomous object, and what the work is emerges in the text ‘there is’ between it and me.

Who or what signs? The blindness of signatures But then we might wonder why in the above interview on visual art some 15 years after his Ponge book, Derrida asserts that the signature cannot perform in the visual arts what it can in literature and poetry: [I]n a pictorial work, for example, or a sculptural . . . one, the signature cannot be both inside and outside of the work. Ponge can play with his name inside and outside of a poem, but in a sculpture the signature is foreign to the work, as it is in painting . . . Ponge can sign his name within a poem. In the case of painting, it isn’t possible. There are cases in which painters inscribed their names in their work, but not in a place where one normally signs, thus playing with the outside. But one still has the impression that the body is foreign, that it is an element of discursivity or textuality within the work. It is apparently heterogeneous; we can’t transpose the problematic of the literary signature into the field of the visual arts. (Derrida, 1994a, p. 17)

Derrida seems not to allow for the signed proper name to be seen as pictorial, as image rather than text, or in other words, as painting rather than writing. As if the name ‘Cézanne’, painted ‘in painting’ in  all the painted canvases signed ‘Cézanne’, could never been seen as painting after all, only as writing. And that, even as writing, the writing by Cézanne of what Chocquet wants naming, the signature of Cézanne cannot be seen explicitly to perform the question of who or what signs – the question, that is, of the instituting countersignature. Then what is to be made of paintings in which the signature functions as no less a

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compositional element than any other bit of paint; for instance, the late 1950s and early 1960s paintings of Robert Ryman in which the signature appears as rhythm. In Ryman’s Study Z (1961) for example, Ryman’s name, if it is a name, is a line, a line which divides itself on the inside of the one frame such that the signature is repeated and takes over the canvas, playing as determinate a role as any other painted part of it. And there are those paintings where the signature becomes a figure that displaces the ground. Take Goya’s Portrait of the Duchess of Alba from 1797, where again the signature is repeated. Here, the artist inscribes his name ‘Solo Goya’ upside down to the viewer on the sand beneath the feet of the Duchess (his patroness), dressed in mourning, where she happens to be pointing. And the pointing finger wears a ring engraved with Goya’s name. The truth in pointing here is the obligation to countenance the signature as the ground of painting and a play on the subject of the portrait; this painting is one that shows the question of the hand that signs. Goya is asking, performatively raising the question ‘in painting’, who or what is signing my painting? What or who does my signature mean? Goya’s signature stages the relation between painter and his patron. And insofar as it seeks not so much to authorize what is seen as to become the question of authorization seen, it organizes the point of view of the question of who or what signs. But in all these cases, the signature could only function performatively if the name ‘disappears’ into what it signs. In all cases, then, the signature is both inside and outside the picture. As a ‘pictorial doing’ the signatures here are not ones which would have the value of ‘saying’ or the status of discourse – they are the traversal of the border between text as pictorial and text as readable, the signature in these cases is the line which would open the picture out to a readability (Goya) and a sense (Ryman) which puts into question the distinctions between picturality and discourse, sensation and understanding, image and text, art and literature. In a pictorial work ‘the signature cannot be both inside and outside of the work’ (Derrida, 1994a, p. 17)? It’s as if Derrida has forgotten what he himself said, or rather did, or rather in collaboration with the artist Adami did and said – and indeed drew. For we have the example of another artist in whose oeuvre is unfolded, staged and put to work the question of who or what signs, and the question of who or what countersigns, and that artist is Derrida, or rather it is Adami in works which appear to have been signed as well by Derrida. Signed in the following ways: with the appearance within the frame of one of two Studies for a Drawing after Glas (but whose is the frame in this case?), or perhaps more

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accurately both in and under the frame for the ‘da’ is obscured, of Derrida’s signature, with the appearance within the frame of both Studies (but what is the frame here?) and on the frame of one (but then where is the frame?) of text written by Derrida, and with the acknowledgement in the ‘Liste des oeuvres’ that both works, the same two works in which appear Derrida’s signature and his text, are collaborations between Adami and Derrida. The question ‘who signs?’ is not simply one that is imposed on the drawing or drawn from it by Derrida’s text ‘about’ it, it is one which Derrida asks only because the drawing stages it, and stages his drawing it (Derrida, 1987c, p. 166 and p. 178). ‘χ signs this picture’ says Derrida, where χ is the chiasmatic crossing ‘privileged by all the texts I’ve sold under my name’ (p. 166). This χ, this image written by Derrida and cited by Adami, is more than just a quotation from Glas, this χ is the process of co-signing which is at the origin of there being any text by ‘Derrida’ at all. This text, this drawing by Adami in collaboration with Derrida in which appears the χ that signs, may have come ‘after’ Glas, but what comes after is in this case given by Derrida’s countersignature in the form of the text ‘  R’ which begins by suggesting that he may have betrayed Adami by having ‘let’ himself be framed by him. As if it were up to him. Adami’s compositions are decompositions of the scores that Derrida ‘pretended’ to sign, but this ‘pretension’ is no accident or misfortune happening to the texts in question as a consequence of a Derridean taste for secrecy play or corruption, it is the name for the way in which a text, any text, awaits its reader, so then its writer, in the form of the signature that counters. This is the sense in which Derrida can say that Adami’s signature ‘was waiting for me’, as if he Derrida has been read in advance and, in being read by Adami’s drawing of his text, the one Derrida baptizes thus naming as if for the first time, ICH, written in advance, written before he has written and written by what he writes of (p. 156). But then again, what if in this collaboration Derrida has forged Adami’s signature, the one that appears in both Studies? All of these questions may be ‘out of range of ’ the drawings’ signatories, but the signature is the event of their being staged as questions and, in its own way here in these drawings, presented as answers in the form of signed visual artworks and, as with all visual artworks, as answers which beg the question of a countersignature. The same question, of who or what signs or countersigns, is to be seen again, this time in Derrida’s analysis of the artist’s self-portrait, in Memoirs of the Blind. When one gazes at a self-portrait, one is occupying the same place that the artist himself occupies in painting his portrait. In being face-to-face with the artist, one stares from where the artist himself stares, looking at his own face in the

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mirror. Then what one is looking at when in front of a self-portrait of an artist is a self-portrait of oneself – as other. The spectator replaces the mirror in which the artist sees himself. But in so doing, the spectator makes the painter, and therefore the model, blind. The painter can no longer see himself. But, this is necessary if the painter is to see himself as an artist and to paint himself at work. The spectator becomes the condition of the artist’s sight. The only way an artist can see himself working is to blind himself. He blinds himself by looking at himself in the mirror. In looking at himself in this way, he assigns a place, his place, to the spectator. The spectator’s seeing blinds that of the artist. But at the same time, the moment the artist does this is the moment the spectator cannot see the artist. The distinction between subject and object, and the temporal order of dependency between them, is made no longer apposite. When Derrida says about this structure and this movement that the spectator ‘put[s] to work the sought after specularity’ (Derrida, 1993b, p. 62), what this means is that the work performatively prescribes a point of view to the spectator in which the spectator performs what is shown by the work itself. But we would not see what is shown by the work were it not for the performative way the spectator is put to work by it. We become the double of the artist’s eyes, the spectator a prosthesis of the artist himself. There is no such thing as a non-technical or a pretechnical point of view. All seeing requires a technological prosthesis, and all points of view are produced by technology. Even the camera is unable to efface itself as a technological apparatus in the face of the real or the live. Indeed, the real and the live are themselves productions of the camera. If digital photography, the taking of images without a material support, has shown us anything it is that to record an image is to produce it. Derrida calls this photographic performativity (Derrida, 2010, p. 5). If we can erase images that have no material support, then we no longer have to record images in order to take them: we produce them. Digital imagery mimics photographic or cinematic imagery, but in doing so becomes more performative than that which it mimics – or rather, makes explicit what was always implicit in such technology. Points of view are produced rather than occupied. And there never was pure perception, or live and direct perception (Derrida, 1990b, p. 176). At least not until the presence of camera technology claimed that it was able to bring something to us live. There is no unalterable, uniterable experience, no experience which in being repeated by the camera is left unaltered by it (Derrida, 2010, p. 9). And if technology was always there then it is iterable also. There is iterability too at the heart of the non-iterable in the form of the unique

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and once-only instant of the photograph. For if a photograph can archive the present moment, the very presentness of a moment, then the present must be divisible. The photograph can be of the present and separated from the present as a reference to its singularity, and this implies that the present is both divisible and irreplaceably unique (p. 3). But if the photograph can archive the noniterable, then in an important sense it is passive. This would be the ‘beyond of art’ of photography, the ‘beyond’ to any conception of photography as art (p. 9). The instant, that which has no duration, is not something that can be mastered, and to that extent it is beyond art. Then the art of photography is conditioned by non-art. Derrida is right to equate this beyond of art to its opposite, hyperaesthetics. And between the two would be the totality of the photographic act. But the totality would have duration, and that would be the technology. So the passivity of being exposed to the instant is not a pure passivity. One might say that the photographic act is the act of passivity. Derrida calls it acti/passivity (p. 12). A passivity produced by the technology, a technology the practice of which, photography, is between art and non-art.

The principle of ruin and the touch of the countersignature We are afforded another glimpse of the co-originality of signature and countersignature in the relation of artwork to spectator, or the co-anoriginality at the origin of a work, if we look at what Derrida has to say about what an oeuvre of art is. Derrida puts it most succinctly when he states about oeuvres that they are ‘as contextualizing as they are contextualized’ (Derrida, 2001a, p. 15). To this extent, the series of photographs by Marie-Françoise Plissart entitled Droit de regards comprises an oeuvre. In his text countersigning it Derrida names the series ‘un photo-performatif ’. In the act of its showing, the series performs without saying so the relation of image to discourse and the question of the order of dependency between the two. The photographs bring with them the conditions of their readability and of what can be said about them.9 And Derrida’s text says what can be said about them while holding the two apart, the contextualizing and the being contextualized. One might say that this is the performativity of Derrida’s text: it performs otherwise the problem of which the photographs ‘show without saying so’, but does so from the other side, the side of discourse. But it can only do so by allowing itself to become spatialized by the images, and admitting that it is already spatialized by them. If as a consequence

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we do not easily recognize such a text as ‘philosophy’, moreover that the text itself does not recognize itself as philosophy, it is because the performativity of Derrida’s text is its not presupposing any hierarchical mastery over that of which it speaks, and its acknowledgement that it is marked and interrupted by that which the photographs themselves perform. The only responsible response to Plissart’s photographs – and this is Derrida’s countersignature to the series – is to spatialize his own discourse on them, or in other words to have his words operate in a non-discursive or not simply or decidedly discursive way, or rather to allow their discursivity to be regulated not by philosophy so much as by what they discourse on (Derrida, 1994a, p. 20). Writing which would let the non-discursive appear or show itself in the discursive in a performative manner would be one that narrows the gap between theory and practice, between knowledge and creativity, and one that dissolves any hierarchical relation between these. And in so doing, it would pose the question of philosophy’s future. Performativity the risk to philosophy – and its chance. And at the same time the performative countersignature must reckon with its powerlessness, with its inadequacy to any duty or debt obliging it, and with its defeat – indeed, even its suicide (p. 38). In other words, it is doomed to failure. There is no possible ‘counter’ that would not be opposed to the event it countersigns. The performative is not just irruptive, it is protective. It irrupts into and disturbs already existing conventions, but at the same time those same conventions in turn protect what interrupts from interruption. Thus, the performative countersignature is already denuding the event of its interruptive and irruptive force. The passivity of the countersignature has at its heart an active counter to itself. The conventions setting up the conditions of possibility of the new are the conditions of the impossibility of the new. The performative act at once produces both the event of the new and the conventions that would legitimize that event and institutionalize its repetition. If what the performative brings into being belongs to the realm of the possible, it can be appropriated, in the form of a repetition or copy. Then what is performatively brought about becomes something known, something theoretical, something constative, at the expense of or as an obstacle to the coming of what might be ‘event-like’. Such is the ‘pervertibility of the performative in general’ (Derrida, 2005d, p. 92). The artwork cannot happen unless countersigned, yet that same counter­ signature is already on the way to neutralizing the work. The performativity of the countersignature is necessary, but not sufficient (Derrida, 2007c, p. 46). The countersignature introduces a ‘principle of ruin’ into the very thing it

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countersigns (Derrida, 2005d, p. 90). Thus, one must be wary and mindful of the performative effects of one’s utterances and works, no matter how irruptive these might be. We cannot with any surety or good conscience say whether we have done justice to that which we countersign. If the countersignature is not to defeat the performativity of that which it countersigns, then it must happen in an utterly unexpected way, and even unbeknownst to the one countersigning. The defeat of the performative leaves us only the ‘perhaps’ and the ‘impossible’ (Derrida, 2000, p. 278). Only the impossible has a chance of arriving. And if an event should arrive – and in an essential way it cannot, or at least not such that we can say with any certainty – then it will do so with a force which exceeds that of any performative. And if an event should arrive, and because in an essential way it cannot for it is impossible, then there would be nothing of which we would be more certain. The caress is just such a defeat, a non-negative defeat, a fortunate one: the caress ‘couldn’t care less about the performative or the constative’ (Derrida, 2005g, p. 79). To the question he raises in his book on touching – ‘How is one to touch, without touching, the sense of touch? Shouldn’t the sense of touch touch us, for something to come about at last – an event . . . before any constative statement, any performative mastering act or convention . . . ?’ (p. 135) – does Derrida himself not touch upon an answer in the form of the washes of the artist Colette Deblé – ‘au-delà du contact, livrés au tact absolu, à la caresse qui consiste à toucher sans toucher, ces corps inaccessibles restent singuliers, certes, absolument seuls, solitaires, insulaires’ (Derrida, 1993c) – works whose singular tact is achieved through citation and recitation, a ‘séricitation’ which sets to work the quote in painting, in such a way that the work of the quote can be seen to be giving birth, a birth which is both recalled and anticipated in the pregnancy of preceding generations, generations which are then generative and performative of what follows them. And in the philosophical texts of Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida finds a performance of tact so tactful that it takes place prior to the distinction performative/constative. Nancy’s touch denudes both poles of the opposition of a power which would make present that of which he writes, while nonetheless incorporating it into a writing following Nancy Derrida names excription (Derrida, 2005g, p. 224). In ‘homage’ to the way in which Derrida writes of binary oppositions, Alain Badiou, whose teaching at the ‘Collége International de Philosophie’ is touched, it has to be said, by a love for the performativity of art’s interventions in a space co-original with philosophy’s, rechristens a term central to his own work, inexistence, inexistance, with an ‘a’, an a as silently touchful

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as the one encrypted into and reaching out from Derrida’s own neologism différance (Badiou, 2007, p. 46). Badiou characterizes the stake of Derrida’s writing thus: ‘to inscribe the impossibility of the inscription of the inexistent as a form of its inscription’, where the inexistent (inexistant) is caressed and thus sensibilized or visibilized in the act of its vanishing by a work of words which slide (p. 40 and p. 45). I mentioned earlier that Derrida calls for the intervention of performative practices in the teaching of philosophy. What then would be the performative force of a work of art introduced into the institution of philosophy, under the aegis of the failure of that performative? The call for one sort of performative act to intervene in another would be made to destabilize the constative conventions of both, and intensify the visibilizing of the necessary failure. The performative force of a work of visual art would be that which would destabilize the legitimizing role of the conventions of the philosophical, and of art. One could argue that what makes art contemporary today is its anyway doing this vice versa, that it calls for and actively performatively welcomes the philosophically performative as a constitutive irruptive force. But what it stages is not simply a doing, but something of a visible space and temporal gap between the act and its failure, a space both before and after any performative/constative distinction that would decide and delimit in advance. Perhaps there is no such thing as the performativity of art – perhaps what art does is set up a space in which a doing and its failure is staged, such that the viewer is touched. Art may possess the performative power to set up its own context for its happening, in the form of the totality of an oeuvre (Derrida, 2007c, p. 374); but whatever that event might be, whatever marks might be produced, no matter how ideal and singular they may be, the mark will possess an iterative power to divide and separate from itself, allowing it to work in other contexts and to produce other contexts. We have focused on the signature, but iterability is such that any mark is always already diverted, erring, on its way somewhere else (p. 360). In turn, the reconstitution in any interpretation or countersignature of an original or ideal context of that mark will itself involve a performative operation. Interpretation or countersigning will never be just theoretical – this is shown by Derrida’s collaboration with Adami (Derrida, 1988, p. 132). There is no simple or pure distinction between theory and practice that affords a space called theory in which one can avoid or be protected from the problem of practice. Derrida’s philosophy is performative in the sense that it does not so much speak about a work as perform the problem of what it is to speak of a work.

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If the deconstruction is of a binary opposition, for instance inside/outside, what the inside of a work, what the outside, he will bring the two poles of the opposition to touch. It is at the point of their touching that their difference will be found, but also their sameness; or in other words, where they touch is where their oppositionality recedes or withdraws. The two come together and touch at the border of an artwork, but where this border is exactly is not fixed or decided in advance, it is produced in the encounter. To narrow the gap between theory and practice is to lie them across each other or side by side transversally, like brothers or cousins. The philosophical inheritance of such relations is dispersed. The performativity of art produces an event which we would be unable to see if seeing ‘by itself ’ were only able to culminate in representation, theory, objectivity, reporting. In this sense can we understand the necessity to ‘become blind’ and have one’s eyes made (Derrida, 1993b, p. 122). This is what artworks do, they make our eyes. First they blind the simple act of seeing in us, then they make our eyes and produce us as respondents to what they give to view. A work produces its respondent, and the respondent performs the work in countersigning. This is what is meant by saying that deconstruction is in an artwork, and that works are in deconstruction, always already. Of course, to be produced as an apt respondent, to perform your production, your being made, you have to be extraordinarily responsive. And if you are responsive to being produced in this way, you will become most productive – a productivity at the service of a certain passivity and determinate responsivity, letting works become what they are through a performative response to them. There was no one more performatively productive in this sense than Derrida.

Notes 1 See for example, Derrida and Katz (2000), a book which in two limited editions, one of ‘100 exemplaires numérotés’, the other in ‘15 exemplaires Hors Commerce numéroté de I à XV’, is signed personally by both Derrida and Katz; and the ‘collaborations’ with Valerio Adami (see below). 2 Respectively, ‘Parergon’ (1974/8), and ‘Restitutions’ (1978), in Derrida, 1987c. 3 The gravures in question appear in an issue of Derrière le miroir devoted to Adami’s work, which comprises a series of lithographs and drawings by Adami, ‘Le voyage de dessin’, accompanied by a text by Derrida, ‘  R (par dessus le marché)’; they are described thus: ‘ICH, sérigraphie originale réalisée en

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collaboration avec Jacques Derrida (collection Placards) 100x75cm’, and ‘CHI, sérigraphie objet double face 48x36cm réalisée en collaboration avec Jacques Derrida’. 4 Reference to the existing English translation of this discussion are sometimes slightly modified. 5 See Derrida, 1988, p. 7: ‘(iter, again, probably comes from itara, other in Sanskrit, and everything that follows can be read as the working out of the logic that ties repetition to alterity)’. 6 This according to Jack Flam as quoted by Haus (2004). Further, there is a suggestion reported by the Museum of Metropolitan Art that many of Cézanne’s signatures are in red because only at the last minute was the decision made as to which to include in the Impressionist exhibition of 1877, at which point Chocquet requested Cézanne to sign them. See under ‘References’ at www. metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/110002445. 7 For instance, the performative utterance which is the professing of faith in their discipline by professors institutes a space interior to the university for the constative. 8 Derrida is guided in his committal of a necessary violence in order to do justice to the imperative to let a text speak, I believe, by Heidegger, who contends that what a thinker thinks lies unsaid in what his texts say, and if we are to expose this hidden law of text it is necessary to expend ourselves on it. Take, for instance, the expression of this idea in the opening lines of Heidegger’s ‘Plato’s doctrine of truth’: ‘Die “Lehre” eines Denkers ist das in seinem Sagen Ungesagte, dem der Mensch ausgesetzt wird, auf daß er dafür sich verschwende’. On the one hand, then, the work has happened, it has spoken. On the other it has not happened, it remains unsaid, and what has happened has gone unsaid. And the only responsible response to the work is to say, that is perform, what has happened unsaid in it (Heidegger, 1976, p. 203). 9 See Derrida et al., 1985, p. XXXI: ‘. . . mais qui, dans l’acte même de sa performance, démontre ce qu’elle sous-entend sans jamais le dire. Voilà pratiquement, pragmatiquement, un photo-performatif au sujet du discours, de la loi, de leur essence pornologique’.

8

Passive Performative John W. P. Phillips

Questions The opening sentence of ‘Signature événement contexte’ (SEC) takes the grammatical form of a question: ‘Est-il assuré qu’au mot de communication correspond un concept unique, univoque, rigoureusement maîtrisable et transmissible: communicable?’ (Derrida, 1972, p. 367). Not merely a performative, but a performative contradiction (this ‘strange figure of discourse’), the question presupposes its own paradoxical answer, yes and no: if to the word communication there did not correspond a certain communicable concept then the question itself would have had no chance. Even if it remains uncertain whether the concept corresponds to its word in a univocal and rigorously controllable way, it nevertheless behaves before and beyond my conscious intention as if it did. It’s like the ‘name of God’ in Aquinas and the ‘several sense of being’ in Aristotle: the correspondence word/idea (its verbum or logos) is neither equivocal nor univocal but analogical.1 The conceptual rigour of the word does not succumb to the confusions and ambiguities of polysemy because its plurality is a matter of dissemination, according to which its trace – its difference from self – allows it to operate in relative independence from every determined context and to resist any event of determinate violence. The pairing of a provisional (and analogically a priori) determination and the indeterminate future of its in-principle infinite repeatability produces a quasimetaphysical figure, the structure of the mark. The concept that corresponds to the word communication, its origin absent in its repetition, reserves itself for performative events to come. What this means is that the rigorous purity of the concept is undermined not by relative institutional contexts but by its citationality, which haunts it, certainly, if only to reserve it from those contexts absolutely.

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Derrida’s ‘strange figure’ performs an operation that is reminiscent of several similar forms. Russell’s paradox (‘does the set of all sets that do not belong to themselves belong to itself?’), the liar paradox (‘the proposition “I am lying” is true if and only if I am lying’) and Gödel’s famous incompleteness theorem (which demonstrates the necessary possibility of true statements that cannot be proved) are only the most familiar. But there’s more at stake than might be suggested by these common paradoxes of mathematical logic. It is worth noting that the paradox is produced each time by an act of simultaneous self-reference and citation. It is a matter of producing a necessary possibility that reserves from an otherwise closed context an element irreducible to it. We find among the earliest of Derrida’s published writings, propositions that affirm such possibilities. In the early essay ‘“Genèse et structure” et la phénoménologie’, Derrida affirms Husserl’s originality in distinguishing the notion of arithmetic unity from the psychological constructions of conscious temporality. An arithmetic unity operates as an ‘already given’, Frege’s criticism of this ‘given’ as a ‘bloodless specter’ (blutloses Gespenst) suggests already the work of the trace – the etiolated simulacra of written marks – and anticipates Derrida’s conclusion: ‘The question of the possibility of the transcendental reduction cannot expect an answer. It is the question of the possibility of the question, opening itself, the gap on whose basis the transcendental I . . . is called upon to ask itself about everything’ (Derrida, 1981, pp. 167–8). The famous demonstration (borrowing a formula more or less verbatim from Hegel), concerning the auto-affection of the question posed-to-self, evokes again the structure of the mark in repetition: ‘in emerging from itself, hearing oneself speak constitutes itself as the history of reason through the detour of writing. Thus it differs from itself in order to reappropriate itself’ (p. 166). The opening, the given of consciousness, of correspondence regarded now as a kind of telos without end, does not originate in some ahistorical topos (topos ourianos or topos noetos). It doesn’t originate anywhere, but nor does it summon some bad infinity, some infinite horizon. It is produced solely through the difference of the mark from itself in its repetition. A difference that operates on the basis of a mark’s repeatability, and which distinguishes nothing, does so not to appear as such but rather to insist restlessly as if elsewhere (but nowhere): whence the raising of the questions.

Again the performative: That perhaps it does not exist A little more than half way through SEC, the analysis turns to the problematic of the performative as presented in J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words.

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Until this point in the text, the demonstration has been dedicated, with more than even the usual painstaking philosophical consistency, to the details of a type of necessary possibility: ‘the possibility of extraction and of citational grafting which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written, and which constitutes every mark as writing even before and outside every horizon of semiolinguistic communication’ (Derrida, 1982, p. 320). The main principle of what comes to be known as iterability is thus established. The philosophical claim, which might otherwise be in danger of slipping by unnoticed, recurs in the slightly enigmatic subheading to the section on the performative. The claim already stands out in the statement about the constitution of the mark as writing: iterability (‘the possibility of extraction and of citational grafting’) constitutes the mark as writing ‘even before and outside every horizon of semiolinguistic communication’. This possibility comes as if from outside, before and beyond, all semiolinguistic communication and in this way animates it with its force. The crucial sense, as if from outside, operates, then, as a kind of basic predicate of what for the time being is named by writing. Two consequences: first, writing (or at least what writing names) cannot be restricted by any closure of discourse, but rather its effects operate across a wider sphere than can be accounted for by any available category of discursive, semiolinguistic activity; and second, writing names a force, or at the very least an impetus, that animates the experiential world as if from outside. The reappearance of the name of writing in the subheading reinforces the importance of the function of the analogy as if: ‘Les parasites. Iter, de l’écriture: qu’elle n’existe peut-ệtre pas [The Parasites. Iter, of Writing: That Perhaps it Does Not Exist]’ (Derrida, 1982, p. 382). The heading comes as enigmatic only if you fail (as an attentive reader of philosophical history would not) to recognize the satire on Descartes’s Latin, the subheading of the ‘Fifth Meditation’: ‘De essentia rerum materialum; & iterum de Deo, quod existat [Of the essence of material things; and again of God, that he exists]’ (Descartes, 1992, p. 154). The satire implies an amusing double analogy: as material things are to God, so parasites are to writing. Double because the relation of material things to God already operates analogically (‘& iterum’ – and again2) in the ‘Fifth Meditation’. The essence of a material thing is not separable from the thing but rather constitutes its internal structure. In the case of a triangle (any actual triangle found here and there), its properties always eternally and immutably belong to it. In the case of God (whose existence according to the established scholastic doctrine is his essence), ‘existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than the fact that its three angles equal two right angles can be separated from the

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essence of a triangle’ (p. 160). The notorious and endlessly troublesome proof of God by analogy with ‘the truths of mathematics’ doesn’t really prove anything beyond the imperfect tautology of its premise, but the amusing echo in SEC – its distorted repetition – helps to orient Derrida’s text towards the high stakes of its main claim. Throughout SEC, Derrida treats the mark as if it was an object whose internal structure defines its essence. If by the internal structure of the mark, we are to understand conditions that immutably and eternally belong to it, then a mark would not be a mark independently of the a priori possibility of its repetition, that is, unless it could be repeated in illimitable permutations of extraction and citational grafting. But in the case of the mark, which Derrida treats as unique, its internal structure immediately robs it of this very predication. The structure that belongs to it cannot, after all, be said to be internal to it, for the structure (repeatability ad infinitum) implies an immediate (a priori) externalization of structure itself. The becoming external of its structure constitutes the internal structure of the mark. The first section of SEC concerns the effects that this inevitable and necessary yet endlessly paradoxical structure has on the classical notion of communication. Writing, occupying the space that the analogy reserves for it (that of God), perhaps does not exist. Existence is then reserved for the parasites, which by analogy with material things exist only parasitically. But then in that case, in the absence of the certain existence of writing, everything is parasite; parasites are all there are. The only thing that would save us from this dire consequence is the hope/anxiety of a perhaps (peut-être rather than être as such: haunting rather than ontos) in connection with a quasi-transcendental writing. So SEC proceeds to treat the performative too, to questions concerning its essence and internal structure. The performative (if there is any) would be an act that ‘communicates a force by the impetus [l’impulsion] of a mark’. (So already we know that whatever else is said about the performative it will be inhabited, as it were parasitically, in its internal structure, by the mark.) The performative ‘effectuates something and always transforms a situation’. In contradistinction to the structure of the so-called constative utterance, these properties constitute the performative’s ‘internal structure’ (Derrida, 1982, p. 321). Derrida extracts from Austin’s freewheeling yet painstaking and insistent text an outline of the internal structure of the performative. It is worth considering this methodological procedure according to which the philosophical claims of a text may be isolated and outlined. The writer supposedly need not explicitly intend such claims

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(though this is one of the objections that philosophy puts to deconstruction), but to the extent that philosophical work is at stake then they constitute the basis on which a philosophical response is possible. It shouldn’t have seemed at the time strange to treat a locution as a kind of act; but this is one of the supplementary divergences from tradition that marks Austin’s text. And it provides one of the reasons for Derrida’s stated interest in it. It’s not strange at all to treat acts in general philosophically, of course. Questions of ethics and politics are bound up entirely with the relative values of and distinctions between kinds of act. Acts like a praxis in Aristotle (an act produced from a culture of habit) or an act of will in Kant (an action governed by a law of reason): these are regularly treated to the kinds of question concerning their internal structure that Derrida here poses to Austin’s performative. So, in the final chapter of Austin’s book – its widely influential conclusion – the performative emerges in a subtly self-effacing way as the special vehicle of a transformed theory of communication in general, according to which any locution may be distinguished according to the nature and extent of its illocutionary and perlocutionary forces.3 The performative becomes the privileged object of a special theory within the general theory of speech acts. And the general theory now treats language as a system of objects with predicates equivalent to those that belong to the objects (the acts) of ethics or morality. This equivalence resonates not so much with the traditions of Kant or even of Aristotle but, as Derrida suggests, it conforms more to a tendency that is found in one of its most extreme forms in the destructive gestures of Nietzsche, aimed especially at the metaphysics of morals. The purpose in pushing the internal structure of the performative to its logical extreme lies in the interest to be gained from making clearer a kind of structure that would otherwise remain obscure. In order to establish the singular purity of the performative utterance, Austin has apparently been forced to either ignore or explicitly exclude every instance of performativity that is infected to a greater or lesser extent by what can only be understood as effects of writing (in Austin’s word, ‘parasites’). Austin’s ‘doctrine of locutionary and illocutionary acts in the total speech-act’ absorbs and transforms the distinction, with which his lectures began, between constatives and performatives. Accordingly, every statement understood in the context of the ‘total situation in which interlocutors find themselves’ must be liberated from the traditional doctrine, which regards a statement in terms of its truth or falsity. So the perhaps beguiling but also disturbing situation arises in

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which, for instance, an apology, or a blessing or a curse, is grasped entirely within the context (the ‘total situation’) affected by its illocutionary force. It is no longer a question of whether the speech-actor is genuinely sorry (whether the apology is true or false) but it is rather a matter of whether or not the apologetic act succeeds – whether or not the act effectuates apology. (In the case of the blessing and curse, equivalent implications follow.) While Austin does not discount the kind of utterance by which a speaker ‘describes what their feelings are’, these are distinct from the so-called ‘behabitives’ like apology, blessing, curse and so on. To the extent that the performative, as the privileged object of the special theory of speech acts, serves as the model for the total speech act, certain conditions must pertain for the success of, say, an apology. No longer regarded as a property of a proposition, as the expression of a corresponding content, the significance of the communicative act must be located elsewhere and in a different manner. The speech act does not express a content but rather it effects a situation under certain conditions. If these conditions are not met then it fails. This is Derrida’s neat summary of the conditions, as Austin outlines them, for the pure performative: ‘Through the values of “conventionality”, “correctness”, and “completeness” that intervene in the definition, we necessarily again find those of an exhaustively definable context, of a free consciousness present for the totality of the operation, of an absolutely full meaning that is master of itself: the teleological jurisdiction of a total field whose intention remains its organizing centre’ (Derrida, 1982, p. 323). Austin gives a reason for his failure to establish the notion of the performative in ideal philosophical purity: ‘this was based upon a belief in the dichotomy of performatives and constatives, which we see has to be abandoned in favour of more general families of related and overlapping speech-acts’ (Austin, 1962, p. 150). In that case, the conditions (exhaustive context, centre of conscious intention and so on) remain in play. Derrida, though, offers an alternative: ‘Austin has not taken into account that which in the structure of locution (and therefore before any illocutionary or perlocutionary determination) already bears within itself the system of predicates that I call graphematic in general, which therefore confuses all the ulterior oppositions whose pertinence, purity and rigor Austin sought to establish in vain’ (Derrida, 1982, p. 322). The problem can hardly be overstated. To allow that the predicates of writing are essential, that they constitute the internal structure of the speech act, would be to allow chaos to reign. The marks of writing play a purely destructive role as the parasites or simulacra of an otherwise absent knowing or intending, in Austin no less than in anyone else concerned with the maintenance

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of a central position for conscious intention. No less, in particular, than in Plato. In ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, Derrida states the case with great force via Plato’s politicographic condemnation of writing: ‘Writing has no essence or value of its own, whether positive or negative. It plays within the simulacrum. It is in its type the mime of memory, of knowledge, of truth etc.’ (Derrida, 1980b, p. 105). Writing, ‘in its type the mime’, names at best the absence of type, governing the otherwise ubiquitous appearance of parasitical marks. Austin’s infelicitous performatives perform exactly these roles: in play, as theatre, by citation and so on. A short and relatively late passage will help illustrate what is at stake. In the essay published as the second of two in Voyous (2003), Derrida returns once more to the distinction between constative and performative speech acts. The problem with a constative sentence is that, regarded entirely in terms of its descriptive capacity, it relegates the event as such to the repeatable consistency of the theoretical discourse about it, and thus to the act of conception that best characterizes the traditional stereotype of the philosophical subject. As Derrida writes, the event is ‘neutralized’ by the constative statement. This is not, however, Derrida’s only objection. The performative also fails, no less than the constative, to avoid an instituting act of neutralization – in precise ways, in fact, it exactly repeats the annulment: Now, just like the constative, it seems to me, the performative cannot avoid neutralizing, indeed annulling, the eventfulness of the event it is supposed to produce. A performative produces an event only by securing for itself, in the first-person singular or plural, in the present, and with the guarantee offered by conventions or legitimated fictions, the power that an ipseity gives itself to produce the event of which it speaks – the event that it neutralizes forthwith insofar as it appropriates for itself a calculable mastery over it. If an event worthy of this name is to arrive or to happen, it must, beyond all mastery, affect a passivity. It must touch an exposed vulnerability, one without absolute immunity, without indemnity; it must touch this vulnerability in its finitude and in a non-horizontal fashion, there where it is not yet or is already no longer possible to face or to face up to the unforseeability of the other. (Derrida, 2005e, p. 152)

These propositions, now tinged with the familiar reference to the autoimmunological nature of the structure, repeat those made at the conclusion of SEC. The sense of ‘vulnerability’ in that essay is located as a possibility of accidental failure, which as Derrida’s reading of Austin demonstrates cannot be distinguished from the possibility of the successful event. ‘Austin’s procedure . . . consists in recognizing that the possibility of the negative (in this case, of

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infelicities) is in fact a structural possibility, that failure is an essential risk of the operations under consideration; then, in a move which is almost immediately simultaneous, in the name of a kind of ideal regulation, it excludes that risk as accidental, exterior, one which teaches us nothing about the linguistic phenomenon being covered’ (Derrida, 1982, p. 315). Two ‘almost immediately simultaneous’ moves together provide the forceful configuration: recognition of the necessity of failure (the necessity of the accidental); and exclusion of the accidental (as accidental). These two almost simultaneous moves are together productive in a way that neither of them on their own could have been. On the one hand, the recognition of the negative ‘as a structural possibility’ destroys the ideality in the name of which the almost immediate exclusion of the negative must now be made. The ideality is produced, in other words, only via a moment of danger that is quickly (or simultaneously) projected to its outside. On the other hand, the exclusion on its own simply destroys the possibility. The moment of vulnerability, both necessary and accidental, suggests that resources, in giving rise to some ideal situation, must at the same time be excluded from the situation to which they gave rise, for their presence alone is regarded as a danger to it.4 There would be no ideal – no institution, no structure and no protected ensemble – without the contradiction of the two operations. In the case of performative utterances, Austin expels to the outside of the felicitous context all possibilities of an accidental (or infelicitous) event. Yet, these possibilities remain necessary for the so-called felicitous event too. The parasitical instance in fact describes the general sphere of possibility (the iterability of the written mark as the most general paradigm of possibility). Yet, it is only via the exclusion of this sphere of possibility, now (almost immediately) figured as parasitic, that a legal establishment can be produced and maintained, for instance in the mundane examples of a wedding or the naming of a ship. The moment of vulnerability, this passivity without indemnity, must thus be both figured in a certain way and excluded from the sphere it makes possible. These are preconditions for the operations of immunization that accompany the ideality of any legal or political structure. Can we do without such ideality? If not, we are faced with a paradoxical situation: the logocentrism that excludes iterability from its sphere would mark not, as in a Nietzschean idiom, the history of an error, but it would operate as the configuration of unavoidable conditions of thought, action, event and relation generally. It is not enough to simply identify the iterability of the mark as a condition of possibility, for the values that are made possible by it are only realized through its exclusion from their sphere.

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The performative, then, according to the warped logic of an autoimmune operation can behave in more or less the opposite way to that intended by Austin. A ‘pure’ performative – which satisfies the conditions that Austin prescribes – would be no more immune from the effects described as ‘parasitic’, than are those supposedly etiolated theatrical performatives (signatures, coded rituals, play and so on). A well-adjusted, happy performative is just as likely to affect, for instance, the hypocritical simulacrum of an event rather than the thing itself. A signature, however, opens the event to the possibility of the irreducible force of its quasi-transcendental outside. Derrida’s brief discussion of forgiveness (the short interview ‘On Forgiveness’) draws out the character of the paradox in two ways. First forgiveness itself – if it gathers to itself the unique force of a performative event – must do so as the asymmetrical assembly of at least two singularities: the forgiving and the unforgiveable. Forgiveness in this aspect would be unthinkable unless there was something to forgive, an act, a wrong. In the aspect of wrong – of crime – the act would need to be first of all beyond forgiving, conjuring forgiveness only in the figure of its impossibility. Forgiveness then becomes thinkable to the extent that it remains unthinkable. Then, an act of forgiveness accordingly has no chance unless it happens to fall into in one of the many compromised, conditional forms – say in the demand for remorse or in response to or exchange for an apology. Even the most blandly hypocritical and parasitic of such acts trade on the madness of unconditional forgiveness, which on its side remains inassimilable to all the institutional norms and programmes that nevertheless offer it its only chance. The formal outline of the aporia involves the situation in which a value (in celebrated instances: justice, democracy-to-come, forgiveness, friendship and so on) is experienced as ‘the possibility of the impossible’. The aporia takes the form of a division where one side ‘coexists with that which cannot coexist with it’. Earlier versions of the formula describe the working of the trace in its strange doubling of time: ‘The impossibility of coexistence can be posited as such only on the basis of a certain coexistence, of a certain simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous, in which the alterity and identity of the now are maintained together in the differentiated element of a certain same’ (Derrida, 1982, p. 55). The demand is that, instead of the cinematic formation of an event that follows and responds to a prior event, we think the event on the basis of an instant divided from itself and in a mutually more or less hostile relation to itself. The cinematic consciousness is no doubt today as powerful as it has ever been in neutralizing the force of irreversible historical trends (the unforgivable criminality of events of the twentieth century

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merging into the twenty-first), which gives us all the more reason to insist on the impossibility of the impossible.

Inhabited structures and etiolated performatives In Austin’s text, everything proceeds as if the passage from the constative to the performative should occur as a philosophical ‘programme’, which wouldn’t by its own account change anything of its object except how we understand it. It aims at an ever more thorough system of classifications of what would continue to occur in language anyway, independently of its analysis (Austin, 1962, p. 164). It aims for nothing more than an albeit quite forceful theoretical linguistics. If Austin’s text were to bring about an event, it would thus be an event of theory, of understanding, of explanation. It would be an expositive. Derrida’s brief and slightly cryptic remark connecting Austin to Nietzsche, however, again raises the stakes considerably. The issue concerns the substitution of the value of force for the value of truth (‘for the opposition true/false’). ‘It is this, in a thought that is nothing less than Nietzschean’, writes Derrida, ‘which seems to me to beckon towards Nietzsche; who often recognized in himself a certain affinity with a vein of English thought’ (Derrida, 1982, p. 322). Beckoning towards Nietzsche (‘faire signe vers Nietzsche’), summoning him, inviting him into the dialogue, Austin’s absorption of the constative into the theoretical sphere of speech acts now takes a dramatic turn. Is Derrida’s engagement with Austin yet another substitution for an otherwise absent reading of the Nietzsche text itself? If no major readings of Nietzsche exist in the way that, say, readings of Aristotle, of Plato, of Hegel and so on do, then a feasible task (which I will not attempt here) would be to construct (as it were originally) Derrida’s critical reading of Nietzsche by treating as its traces those texts that deliberately place Nietzsche in the background of some specific tendency or event. ‘Le supplement de copule’, for instance, first published in the same year as SEC, begins with an account of an ‘immense problematic’ (Derrida, 1982, p. 179).5 Beginning with the question – ‘is philosophical discourse governed . . . by the constraints of language?’ – Derrida’s opening paragraphs quickly outline the dominance of what he calls Nietzsche’s ‘critical operation against metaphysics’, which occurs within ‘a very particular and very complex historico-theoretical figuration’ (p. 177). The problem, as we (at least today) understand it, concerns the struggle between two incompatible logical systems:

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one that, however it might be plagued by its own internal paradoxes, nonetheless privileges a value of truth in relation to which the linguistic event would be merely the somewhat unfaithful (contingent, arbitrary, relative) servant; and another that turns away from the value of truth, revealing philosophical concepts as ‘empty husks’ governed and limited by linguistic structures within a historicity or genealogy of such concepts. In the first case, the value of truth is to be preserved from various – more or less destructive – forms of communication. The ‘Écriture et télécommunication’ section of SEC, taking its point of departure from ‘the classical discourse’ on communication, locates the possibilities inherent in the maintenance of a concept, in its transfer from one instance to another, solely in the predicates of a writing that is nevertheless generally excluded or exiled to the outside of the communicative sphere as such. Not only does philosophy fail to protect the concept from the vulnerabilities to which it is exposed when carried off by written marks, but also it fails to recognize how the concept is positively animated – and this is its only chance – by the very predicates of this writing. An aporetic situation thus emerges, according to which writing, in classical terms, both exposes the concept to fatal danger and yet ensures its survival. The so-called ‘dangerous supplement’ of writing therefore also saves the philosophical concept from another, different, kind of threat in the form of doctrines that in varying levels of sophistication would exhaust the effects of conceptual or signifying content within a communicative context, whether this is construed in a theoretico-historical or a more local (analytic) fashion. So the ‘exhaustively definable context’ of Austin’s ideal speech act might indeed be said to have some rapport with the ‘very particular’ historical horizon that is marked most radically and violently by the imprint of Nietzsche. Among others, of course: ‘Nietzsche was surely more violent and more explicit’, writes Derrida, ‘than anyone else’ (Derrida, 1982, p. 177). I believe that it’s helpful to distinguish quite rigorously between deconstruction as it operates in forms that follow, and are thus mobilized by, the effects of the repeatability of the trace and the possibility of citational grafting, on one side, and, on the other side, as it operates in the writings of those like Nietzsche and Heidegger, whom Derrida himself at this time describes as already practicing a kind of deconstruction. The problem of the performative after deconstruction, indeed, will take us somewhere beyond the distinction between these deconstructions: deconstruction (D1) and deconstruction (D2). The main complexity of the ‘immense problematic’ referred to in ‘Le supplement de copule’ has to do with a mode of philosophy that marshals its forces

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in the cause of a critical operation against philosophy. It is a matter of operating within structures that for one reason or another must be criticized, ultimately destroyed, and therefore of mobilizing forces that these offending structures generate. Here, repeating an already familiar argument, Derrida identifies the problem as that of a supposed linguistic limitation. The Nietzschean thesis, which proposes a linguistic limit for philosophical conceptuality, can only propose this by using existing philosophical propositions about language: Nietzsche determines as liberation (or liberty of thought) the movement which would finally free us from the language and the grammar that until now have governed the philosophical order. Quite traditionally, he thus comes to define the law of language or of the signifier as a “slavery” from which one must be freed, and, at the most critical or “overturning” moment of his enterprise, he remains a philosopher provisionally. (Derrida, 1982, p. 178)

Liberation from this limitation must take the form of unruly or illogical elements of the philosophical system, particularly metaphor, which is also capable of producing the philosophical illusions that are taken to be truths. (Derrida is here quoting from several sources that have since become indelibly associated with deconstruction.) So if Nietzsche ‘has to appeal to philosophical schemes . . . in his critical operation against metaphysics’, then ‘this is not an incoherence for which a logical solution is to be sought, but a textual strategy and stratification that must be analyzed in practice’ (p. 179). The deliberate echoes of earlier passages reinforce an already too strong sense of what a certain deconstruction entails. The most obvious of these echoes (a famous passage from ‘The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing’ that is repeated almost verbatim in an equally famous paragraph from ‘Structure, Sign and Play’) identifies ‘a hesitation’ in the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger. This hesitation, he says, ‘is not an “incoherence”: it is a trembling proper to all post-Hegelian attempts and to this passage between two epochs’. The historical (or as Derrida puts it, ‘historiale’) question, within which this hesitation arises, is thus located between Hegel – a kind of overwhelming philosophical marker, the last representative of a classical system and also therefore the harbinger of its interminable demise – and then Nietzsche, Heidegger and so on (elsewhere they are joined of course by Freud), the practitioners of an inevitably disingenuous deconstruction that denies the provenance of its own resources. Derrida proceeds to outline what appears to be, and what has been taken as, a programmatic statement: ‘The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside’, it begins, ‘they are not possible, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures’

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(p. 24). The echo of Hegel, from the great ‘Preface’ to the Phenomenology, is at once too obvious and too well acknowledged to require further examination here. It is worth observing, though, that whenever such a programmatic statement appears in Derrida’s texts of the time, it is hardly ever followed by any attempt to mobilize the programme, but it is rather followed by what at best can be regarded as detours into less well charted, less intimidating, territory. In ‘Le supplement du copule’, Derrida appears to flee from the problematic he sets up with reference to Nietzsche and Heidegger into a soundly philosophical reading, a critique of a more or less classical kind, of Émile Benveniste’s attempt to explain Aristotle’s metaphysical categories as determined by linguistic structures. ‘Rather than follow this immense problematic onto the high seas, so to speak, perhaps it would be better, given the demands and limits of this essay, to take our point of departure from the propositions of a modern linguist’ (p. 179). If Benveniste’s propositions, which privilege linguistic structure over philosophical conceptuality, operate as the limited and more easily engaged substitute text for a critical reading that would engage the ‘immense problematic’ represented by Nietzsche and Heidegger, then perhaps Austin’s propositions about performatives, which ‘beckon toward Nietzsche’, operate as the more limited and easily dealt with substitute for Derrida’s critical reading of Nietzsche’s turn away from truth. Austin would thus come across as Nietzsche’s supplement or at least as a kind of retrospectively marginal element of his philosophy. A further complexity attaches to the situation, though, to the extent that while nothing, since the epoch that begins with (and after) Hegel allows any return to classical structures (at least not to the doctrines or teachings that animate them), these same structures nevertheless seem peculiarly if uncannily resilient. The emphasis that Austin lays on the first-person speaker, the present intention at the centre of the speech act, feels a bit archaic. And just as it is introduced (a necessary condition for a felicitous performative), it not only immediately signals a possible parasitic or etiolating substitute – a poem, a play, a signature – but also it is more or less neurotically affirmed against these etiolating simulacra, in an interminably redoubled movement of exile: the I returns a pale ghost of its own pale ghost, and so on. The exact structure that Derrida abstracts from Austin’s text is already inhabited by the structure of the trace (‘the performative communicates a force by the impetus of a mark’), and so it already implies this paradoxical turning of inside out/outside in. This can now provide a clue to the difference between what we might acknowledge as the two kinds of deconstruction (D1 and D2) to which I have just referred. In the first case, ‘operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and

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economic resources of subversion from the old structure’ (p. 24), deconstruction would become visible (in the familiar form) as an enterprise destructive of itself. And all philosophy is in this sense deconstruction. In the second case, the very idea of an inhabited structure already lies in ruins, begins in ruins.

The moral performative It might be worth attempting to think these alternative and quarrelling modes of deconstruction (D1 and D2) together. In its most conventional reading, Nietzsche’s ‘critical operation against metaphysics’ aims to bring about the destruction of errors and to dream (at least) of more appropriate ways of feeling about actions, that is, to learn not only how to think but also – and more ambitiously – how to feel differently [um zu fühlen]. The sphere of errors could not, of course, be more complicated, for it is Sittlichkeit itself that Nietzsche has in the sights of his destructive programme, a programme that ranges across diverse traditions of morality and ethics. Whether in Greek notions of character attained through habit or in terms of a transcendental (categorical) law of reason, the metaphysics of morality forms a kind of historical sedimentation in which delusion is ‘firmly rooted’ (Nietzsche, 1997, p. 184). The familiar distinction between doing and thinking gives rise to further increasingly subtle distinctions – arguments of ‘two kinds’ – that each time at length give way to the new thought. For example, a famous passage from Morgenröthe identifies two ways of denying morality [‘Es giebt zwei Arten von Leugnern der Sittlichkeit’]. To deny morality can mean: ‘first, to deny that the moral motives which men claim have inspired their actions really have done so’ (Nietzsche, 1997, p. 103). This kind of assertion exhausts morality by reference to deceptions (‘especially self-deceptions’) in language: morality names a hypocritical discourse. This could mean: people act so as to be recognized and respected as virtuous or by way of alibi or for political expedience (and the person of greatest virtue has all the more to lose in the risk of letting their guard down). According to this first kind of assertion, the moral ‘performatives’ (apology, forgiveness, justice, friendship) which accompany acts that, as Nietzsche elsewhere in Morgenröthe says, ‘exhibit the laws and habits of mankind’ perform under the hypocrisy of a lie. The first kind of denial thus turns on the familiar denunciation of the simulacrum. The second kind of denial of morality (‘this is my point of view’, writes Nietzsche) means: ‘it is admitted that they really are motives of action, but that in this way it is errors which, as the basis of all moral

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judgement, impel men to their moral action’ (p. 103). The subtlety of the second kind does not of course preclude suspicions that the first kind ‘in very many cases . . . may be justified and in any event of great general application’. But this second assertion locates as the ground of moral actions a deep-rooted sphere of historical error: Sittlichkeit. The provocative analogy is with alchemy: ‘Thus I deny morality as I deny alchemy, that is I deny their premises: but I do not deny that there have been alchemists who believed in these premises and acted in accordance with them’ (p. 103). Thinking differently and ultimately learning to feel differently (‘perhaps very late on’) will therefore have to occur on the grounds on which performatives operate or, in a better formulation in light of this second kind of assertion against morality, the hypothetical performative grounds. Such grounds would be hypothetical rather than categorical. A short aphorism, again employing the economy of analogy, from Book IV, ‘Das “ansich”’ [The ‘in itself ’] (Nietzsche, 1997, p. 210), takes issue with the metaphysics of morality (Kant’s noumenon, from which the categorical imperative is supposed to issue, is suggested but the power or force of the Greek dynamis is operating here too: Nietzsche’s mode of destruction uses the resources of the sphere to be destroyed). It begins: ‘Formerly we asked: what is the laughable? As though there were things external to us to which the laughable adhered as a quality’. The laughable (suggesting a slightly absurd subject–predicate relation) is lined up by analogy, in a quasi-historical register that is prevalent throughout Morgenröthe, with metaphysical qualities (the good, the beautiful, the sublime, evil). Laughter is not a quality to be predicated of something but rather a state of being, and so: We have thought the matter over and finally decided that there is nothing good, nothing beautiful, nothing sublime, nothing evil in itself, but that there are states of the soul in which we impose such words upon things external to and within us. (Nietzsche, 1997, p. 133)

The statement could easily enough be read in support of the second assertion denying morality: words carrying imaginary qualities express a false presupposition when predicated of external and internal things and feelings. But that does not seem to be the end of the story or the point of the aphorism. ‘We have taken back the predicates of things’, it continues, ‘let us take care that this insight does not deprive us of the capacity to lend’ (p. 133). The ‘in itself’ does not then disappear. The German Änsich refers also to the potential, the capacity (or force) of abstraction, and implies something more powerful than merely a false predication. The false predication disguises but also carries out the force

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of abstraction. It is a performative in the most radical sense. Morality therefore emerges as a sphere of performative abstractions (good, evil and so on). One other passage will allow a provisional conclusion. A familiar one from the much later Götzen-Dämmerung [Twilight of the Idols] concludes with the proposition, ‘“truth”, at this stage, designates all sorts of things which we today call “imaginings”’. Immediately following this, the text reads: Moral judgments are therefore never to be taken literally: so understood, they always contain mere absurdity. Semeiotically, however, they remain invaluable: they reveal, at least for those who know, the most valuable Realitäten [the obvious translation would be ‘realities’] of cultures and inwardnesses which did not know enough to “understand” themselves. Morality is mere sign language, mere symptomatology: one must know what it is all about to be able to profit from it. (Nietzsche, 2005, p. 183)

To read morality as a sign language, as a semeiotic system, is to acknowledge that it reveals realities for those capable of interpreting it correctly. Read in this way, moral judgements are neither true nor false in the subject–predicate sense (in that sense they are meaningless) but rather they are revealing of reality, of a state of mind, of a culture, a custom, a tradition. This is the Nietzschean argument that, rightly or wrongly, has a more or less direct connection to Freud’s way to the unconscious, to Heidegger’s Dasein, to Foucault’s discursive modalities (and so on) and indirectly, perhaps, a connection to Austin’s performative. But a performative would not succeed, would not be able to produce an event, unless its provocation remained outside the sphere within which it is supposed to operate. Its provocation – an aporetic element of the structure, an element without which the structure would fail, but which must be excluded from it – ensures that a project designed to rethink and ultimately to revise the (unconscious) grounds of (conscious) intention will also fail. A performative worthy of the name – an act – requires a minimal passivity on the part of the actor, who must therefore adopt the peculiar role of the passive actor. The combination of the unconditional madness of the trace (on one side) and the conditioned, institutional spheres whose very survival requires the retreat of the trace (on the other) can be thought in terms of a passivity in action: the performative passion (with this thought no doubt a disturbing remnant of the theological tradition of sacrifice). This is also why deconstruction cannot be conceived in any other way than as divided in itself. In which case, deconstruction as such cannot be conceived at all, for it develops according to an internal structure – in the incessant becoming

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external of its internal structure – determined by a technically inconceivable division, that of the trace. Nevertheless, on one side and in a Nietzschean style, existing structures might be put to the critical philological question. Nietzsche’s destruction of morality seems indeed to require exactly the kind of positivist scepticism that refutes forms of mystification in knowledge from the point of view of a naturalism that is typical of (though not of course reducible to) formative strands of nineteenth-century science. Just as propositions that have accepted the grounds of alchemy cannot be considered in terms of their truth or falsity (because the premise in alchemy itself is already simply in error), so too the propositions of morality, predicating acts of goodness or evil (of felicity or infelicity), must be rejected and their grounds reconsidered from the point of view of a scientific semeiotics. The explicit Nietzschean complication here resides in the impossibility of emerging from an inherited language so that objective work may be brought to bear on its origins. This impossibility requires as wide a repertoire of the techniques of formal adventure as any new (gay) science can muster. And the writing of such a science – variously aphoristic, theatrical, playful, angry, arch – will therefore appear strikingly at odds with the expectations of most scientific discourses. Inevitably, then, on the other side, the doctrine of the trace, which informs the very possibility of this Nietzschean science (as the possibility of the impossible), also imposes perhaps devastating limits on it. A further implication follows. If the vulnerability of the Nietzschean science lies in its failure to carry itself off without remainder, then the space of its exteriority – the remainder itself – suggests, at the very least, a role for the powerful reinscription of the nondiscursive ‘truth’ of classical metaphysics. In that case, the possibility of the Nietzschean mode of philosophizing – which can only proceed on the basis of a radical performativity – lies outside performativity itself, in a mode of critical thought that Nietzsche’s teaching is otherwise mobilized to destroy.

Notes 1 See Aristotle, 1933, 1028a, 10–15: ‘We speak of “being” in several senses [to on pollachos legetai] . . . It signifies first the “what” of a thing, that is, its individuality; and secondly of what quality or quantity or any other such category it is predicated’; and Aquinas, 2006, p. 86–7: ‘The word “God” is used neither univocally nor equivocally but analogically. When a word is used univocally it has exactly the same meaning in each application, when it is used

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equivocally it has an entirely different meaning in each case, but when it is used analogically its meaning in one sense is to be explained in reference to its meaning in another sense’. 2 Iterum (French derechef) can mean ‘a second time’ or ‘again’ [repeat] in the sense of ‘likewise’. 3 ‘The doctrine of the performative/constative distinction stands to the doctrine of locutionary and illocutionary acts in the total speech-act as the special theory to the general theory. And the need for the general theory arises simply because the traditional “statement” is an abstraction, an ideal, and so is its traditional truth and falsity’ (Austin, 1962, p. 148). 4 Aristotle (1996, p. 85) and Hegel (1991, p. 120) in more or less the same terms both affirm the role of the warrior in the act of founding the state (i.e. a monarchy or empire); but once the state is established such actions can only appear in the negative form as crimes, and so the founder must always be banished outside the boundaries of the domain they founded. 5 ‘Le supplement de copule’ belongs with several readings of more or less contemporary figures that are substituted, as the lesser challenge, for a general and supposedly more difficult sea of problems that Derrida consistently identifies with Nietzsche. Most evidently, the essays on Artaud in L’écriture et la différence (‘La parole soufflé’ and ‘Le théâtre de la cruauté et la cloture de la representation’) and the readings of Levi-Strauss in De la grammatologie but also the notorious ‘Le structure, le signe et le jeu’. Three short and specific pieces, complex and rigorous as they are, hardly amount to a more complete engagement.

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9

Departures: The American Future of Psychoanalysis1 Martin McQuillan

Theatre of cruelty Taking Derrida’s essay ‘Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty’ as my point of departure, I would like to discuss three exemplary moments in the performative history of psychoanalysis in America: Freud’s 1909 ‘Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis’ at Clark University, Lacan’s visit to the Yale School in 1975 and Derrida’s fictionalization of his travel to America in the ‘Envois’ section of The Post Card. Throughout, I would like to keep at the forefront of our minds the question of cruelty and the unique and unusual place that cruelty plays in both American culture and the history of psychoanalysis in America. What I find most striking about Derrida’s address to the ‘Estates General of Psychoanalysis’ in Paris in July 20002 is that in thinking the question of cruelty, his text so overtly addresses the double opening of America and the performative. This may not be obvious to other ears and may require a little unpacking before we set off on our travels with Freud, Lacan and Derrida. Derrida’s essay is a performance, in every sense of that word in English.3 On first reading, the essay seems to suffer from a kind of structural dementia in which Derrida moves between a reading of Freud, an oration to the assembled Estates General, considerations on the death penalty, the French Revolution and the question of sovereignty. On a third or fourth reading, one can see a strategy of detour at work in which Derrida leads his audience through a range of reference in order to arrive at the idea of detour itself as a response to the sovereign identity of both cruelty and the Estates General before him. Present at the behest of René Major and Elizabeth Roudinesco, he takes his distance

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from the project of the Estates General by both flagging up the problematic history of the palyonymic appropriation of the idea of the Estates General, and by emphasizing his own complex relation to psychoanalysis. He begins by saying to his audience ‘without identifiable addressee: “Yes, I am suffering cruelly”’ (Derrida, 2002d, p. 238). Put on stage by Major and Roudinesco in front of a live audience of Freudians and Lacanians, Derrida is conscious of deconstruction’s difficult relation to psychoanalysis in which it has, over the years, had to be cruel to be kind. He is torturing himself in the performative circumstances of what we might recognize as psychic cruelty. However, he does not abuse his audience, rather if he makes them suffer, by going the long way round, it is for the pleasure of it. The deconstructive critique of psychoanalysis is irreducible (we shall return to this) and has something of the family romance about it (we shall also return to this). Derrida teases his audience with a gloss on the ‘it’s not going well’ (Derrida, 2002d, p. 243), ostensibly referring to the circumstances under which the Estates General first raised its appeal and with an oblique reference to his own tableau noire in Specters of Marx. He is also autocritiquing his own performance in front of this potentially challenging audience, ‘it’s not going well’. I am reminded at this point of the British comedian Ken Dodd who after explaining his own brand of innuendo-laced humour through Freud as a release of psychic energy, he notes, ‘the trouble with Freud was that he never played the Glasgow Empire’. Here, Derrida is playing to a difficult crowd, as he reminds us, one as equivocal and sovereign as the original Estates General of 1793. In a certain sense, Derrida is not just a cuckoo in the nest at the Estates General but the arrivant for psychoanalysis and accordingly that which gives it a future: What happens, comes about, comes to pass, or, as we say in French ce qui arrive, the event of the other as arrivant (the one who or which arrives), is the impossible that exceeds and puts to rout, sometimes cruelly, that which the economy of a performative act is supposed to produce in a sovereign manner. (Derrida, 2002d, p. 254)

The arrival of Derrida at the Estates General is a new departure for psycho­ analysis; a gathering that, as Derrida points out, distinguishes itself from other historic psychoanalytic convocations as an internationalization of psychoanalysis during an epoch of globalization. It is not that as Freud says to Jung, ‘If I am Moses, then you are Joshua and will take possession of the promised land of psychiatry, which I shall only be able to glimpse from afar’ (Derrida, 2002d, p. 256). Rather, the relation between deconstruction and psychoanalysis is

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much more of the order of an intifada that throws stones at the sovereign cruelty of the state of psychoanalysis. In the grand amphitheatre of the Sorbonne where the Estates General was held, Derrida creates his own theatre of cruelty, pointing out the thin line between sadism and masochism but blurring the borders between who is inflicting punishment on the other and who is taking pleasure in it. On the one hand, the Estates General is a form of collective punishment in which Derrida arrives to offer a corrective to the territorial ambitions of Major and Roudinesco. On the other hand, Derrida is feeling uncomfortable, bound and lashed by a three-line whip to appear there. It is not clear who holds the whip hand in this relationship. Perhaps, it is because it is upmost in his mind, but Derrida in this essay explicitly connects the Estates General of Psychoanalysis to the historic Estates General of 1793 and so to the death penalty and then to capital punishment in America today. He also draws a comparison between the ‘convulsive crisis’ that ‘this country [the US] is undergoing with regard to the death penalty’ (Derrida, 2002d, p. 262) and the historic crisis it has undergone with regard to psychoanalysis. This history is inseparable from a certain history of the Revolutionary, from the modern formation of the state and the development of international law and everything that falls out from it, including human rights and global declarations against torture as a crime of universal jurisdiction. This convulsion is still ongoing, as Mao Tse Tung may have said, it is still too early to judge the effects of the French Revolution. However, Derrida states on one of his detours ‘I am purposely piling up allusions to the United States, where the destiny of psychoanalysis is waging its most critical and perhaps, on more than one front most decisive battle’ (pp. 266–7). If for Derrida, the question of cruelty is the issue for the future of psychoanalysis in the first year of the twenty-first century,4 it is a matter ‘of the indissociable tie between cruelty and state sovereignty, state violence, the state that, far from combating violence monopolizes it’ (p. 268). Therefore, this Freudian future is, for Derrida, decisively a question of the cruelty that lies in the United States of America. Peggy Kamuf captures this in her translation of ‘Etats d’âme de la psychanalyse’ as psychoanalysis searching ‘the States of Its Soul’. Kamuf had wanted to call the collection ‘What lies in America’ but Stanford University Press declined. The United States, or Americanness, is also a performance. If I might be allowed to paraphrase Paul de Man, America is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament. Derrida points out in this essay the performative mastery involved in the ‘I can’ and the ‘I may’: ‘the mastery of the performative that still dominates and thus neutralizes (symbolically, in the order of the “symbolic”, precisely) the

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event it produces, the alterity of the event, the very arriving of the arrivant’ (Derrida, 2002d, p. 276). One might say, along with Seth MacFarland’s Stan Smith, ‘we are Americans not American’ts’. The Estates General is an event like no other, or more precisely an event precisely like another (a more original Estates General) that involves it in a performative claim for domination and mastery. Psychoanalysis is American in the same, but different, way that deconstruction is decisively American. That is to say, the future of psychoanalysis will have been decisively American in the same way that the future of deconstruction will have been American. These futures that have already been, might be characterized as a certain appropriation of psychoanalysis and deconstruction in America: a domestication and creolization. This claim on the future of psychoanalysis takes the form of a performative prescription, a can-do attitude towards psychoanalysis. However, despite the arrival of deconstruction and psychoanalysis in America, as Derrida suggests in this essay, ‘the hospitable exposure to the event, to the coming, to the visitation of the unpredictable arrivant cannot be made into the horizon of a task, not even for psychoanalysis’ (p. 276). By this, I think, Derrida is clearly referring to his own appearance at the Estates General: he is not there to offer a future or programme for Freudian thought. His arrival must necessarily be of a different order, namely, that of a departure. Not of a ‘yes we can’ but of a ‘it could be worse’ or ‘it’s impossible’. The future of psychoanalysis, the new psychoanalysis of Major and Roudinesco’s Estates General is a new Enlightenment, ‘a revolution that, like all revolutions, will come to terms with the impossible’ (p. 277), negotiating with the non-negotiable and calculating with the unconditional. On the other hand, the performative is a question of the possible, of the ‘I can’ or the sworn faith of the ‘I must’ and thus of the law, state and sovereignty in general. In this sense, the performative is always an issue of cruelty, of prescription and the law and responsibility which is neither a knowing nor a constative description but a question of institution and statute. That is the nature of the Estates General and what ties it indissociably to the general state of the United States. In his closing remarks to the assembly, Derrida describes three future states for psychoanalysis. The first he calls ‘constative’, namely, that of the theoretical description of knowledge, calling on psychoanalysis to be rigorous in its account of psychic life. The second he calls ‘performative’, which he associates with the institution of psychoanalysis and the ‘indirection’ within it that gives a chance to freedom and the thinking of detour that has structured the essay up until this point. The third he calls ‘the im-possible itself ’ (p. 278) beyond the binary logic of constative and performative as orders of power and

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possibility. The other that arrives on the shores of psychoanalysis must be beyond reappropriation and neutralization: the unconditional coming of the other, its event without possible anticipation and without horizon, its death or death itself are irruptions that can and must put to rout the two orders of the constative and performative, of knowledge and the symbolic. Perhaps beyond any cruelty. (Derrida, 2002d, p. 278)

So, Derrida stands before the Estates General not to announce the good news for psychoanalysis but to say, like the Baptist, that there is one that will come after him, and that you know not the hour or the moment. It is perhaps a condition of the Estates General in Paris that the past rather than the future of psychoanalysis is French. It is this French legacy that allows the Freudian school in Paris to lay claim to the mastery of that Future, but the moment one has to ask, what is the future of psychoanalysis for us, you will know that the ‘us’ no longer has proprietorial rights over psychoanalysis.

New York stories 1909. New York has always been a place for fairy tales: a point of arrival to the New World from old Europe, historically defined by statutes of liberty and a freedom beyond sovereign cruelty. The three arrivals of psychoanalysis in America I would now like to consider concern the Eastern Seaboard and the landing of the longboats of psychoanalysis on American soil. Their relation to each other will become apparent in their recollection. In 1909, Freud, at the second time of asking, accepted an invitation to lecture at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, and was accompanied by Jung, Ferenczi and others on his voyage. The improvised and conversational talks at Worcester resulted in the text ‘Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis’. This trip occupies a crucial position within the internal mythologies of psychoanalysis, marking the internationalization of psychoanalysis as a science and the affirmation of its universal truth. In the text called ‘Autobiography’, Freud recalls it as a performative occasion: ‘As I stepped on to the platform at Worcester to deliver my “Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis” it seemed like the realization of some irreducible day-dream: psycho-analysis was no longer a product of delusion, it had become a valuable reality. It has not lost ground in America since our visit; it is extremely popular among the lay public and is recognized by a number of

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official psychiatrists as an important element in medical training’ (Freud, 1964, p. 6864). This inaugural moment of psychoanalysis in America is a story that Freud likes to repeat, reaffirming its significance with every repetition in ‘On the History of Psychoanalysis’ (1914), ‘A Short Account of Psychoanalysis’ (1924), the autobiographical study of 1925, ‘On Psychoanalysis’ (1926), the third revised introduction to The Interpretation of Dreams (1931) and his memorial text for Ferenczi in 1933 in which he credits his late friend as the prompt and structure for the five lectures. The narrativization of origins is an important device within the performative repertoire of psychoanalysis. In his recounting of this event, its recalibration and assessment, Freud is keen to present himself and his gang as the arrivant in America as part of a ‘celebration’ and recognition of psychoanalysis. However, the twentieth anniversary of Clark University is not the same thing, perhaps, as the grand amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, the lectures halls of Yale where Lacan and Derrida visited, or, say, the marble porticos of nearby Harvard. Clark in  1909 was not an especially canonical or sovereign location for the arrival of psychoanalysis in America; unlike the case of deconstruction, which followed de Man from Harvard to Cornell and later to Yale. Freud says of his host Stanley Hall, President of Clark, ‘there was a touch of the “kingmaker” about him, a pleasure in setting up authorities and then deposing them’ (Freud, 1964, p. 6863). In this sense, Hall is the power behind the throne of this Freudian future and Freud himself is not master in his own house: sovereignty is always performatively bestowed and can be cruelly withdrawn. The surety of psychoanalysis in America was less than certain as a result of the Clark visit, it is only Freud’s reconstruction of his own history that retrospectively transforms these lectures in German into an American future. In fact, in the sentences that follow on from Freud’s dream-come-true in the autobiography, he comments on the future corruption of psychoanalysis in America: ‘unfortunately, however, it has suffered a great deal from being watered down. Moreover, many abuses which have no relation to it find a cover under its name, and there are few opportunities for any thorough training in technique or theory’. The future opens psychoanalysis onto the popular, to America as such, and ruins it in a wholly unwelcome way. Just as the founding myth of Worcester is a constant leitmotif in Freud’s writing, so is the banalization of psychoanalysis in America in texts such as ‘Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy’ (1919), the extraordinary text that lies before us to read ‘On the Teaching of Psychoanalysis in the University’ (also 1919, just a decade after the Clark lectures), ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’ (1926) and the ‘New Introductory Lectures’ of 1933. In ‘On Psychoanalysis’, the trip to America is credited with a revitalization of psychoanalysis in Europe

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as well, but unfortunately, as with the American departure, the popularization of psychoanalysis in Europe comes at the price of ‘a very forcible rejection’ of Freudian rigour ‘which often showed an unscientific colouring’ (p. 7141). By the time of the 1930 ‘Introduction to the Special Psychopathology Number of the Medical Review of Reviews’, Freud concludes: I often hear that psychoanalysis is very popular in the United States and that it does not come up against the same stubborn resistance there as it does in Europe. My satisfaction over this is, however, clouded by several circumstances. It seems to me that the popularity of the name of psychoanalysis in America signifies neither a friendly attitude to the thing itself nor any specially wide or deep knowledge of it. As evidence of the former fact I may point out that, although financial support is to be had easily and in plenty for every kind of scientific and pseudo-scientific enterprise, we have never succeeded in obtaining a backing for our psychoanalytic institutions. Nor is it hard to find evidence for my second assertion. Although America possesses several excellent analysts and, in Dr A. A. Brill, at least one authority, the contributions to our science from that vast country are exiguous and provide little that is new. Psychiatrists and neurologists make frequent use of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method, but as a rule they show little interest in its scientific problems and its cultural significance. Quite particularly we find in American physicians and writers a very insufficient familiarity with psychoanalysis, so that they know only its terms and a few catch-words–though this does not shake them in the certainty of their judgement. And these same men lump psychoanalysis with other systems of thought, which may have developed out of it but are incompatible with it today. Or they make hotch-potch out of psychoanalysis and other elements and quote this procedure as evidence of their broad-mindedness, whereas it only proves their lack of judgement. Many of these evils which I have mentioned with regret no doubt arise from the fact that there is a general tendency in America to shorten study and preparation and to proceed as fast as possible to practical application. There is a preference, too, for studying a subject like psychoanalysis not from the original sources but from second-hand and often inferior accounts. Thoroughness is bound to suffer from this. (Freud, 1964, pp. 6231–3)

America respects neither the performative inscription of the institutions of psychoanalysis nor the sovereign mastery of its science. Having stepped into the bright new dawn of the Worcester stage, the lack of rigour in American psychoanalysis must have been a cruel blow to Freud. America gives psychoanalysis an audience and with it a future, but popularity comes at the price of a certain resistance to psychoanalysis, a resistance to reading and what de Man will later

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call a resistance to Theory. This resistance and lack of rigour no doubt leads, in part, to a historical path ending in the worry for the future of psychoanalysis that calls forth the Estates General of 1999 and the question of what is going wrong in the world. Here, we might reflect on Derrida’s elaboration of resistance and psychoanalysis, which he characterizes as both a resistance to psychoanalysis in the world and a resistance to the world in psychoanalysis, and which he does not fail to cite in his Estates General address (Derrida, 2002d, p. 242), going beyond the performative and constative divide of these two resistances to ask of an impossible beyond whether resistance is still an appropriate term for thinking what is wrong and what would it mean to suffer today. Stupidity and quackery seem a cruel and unusual punishment for Freudian psychoanalysis to suffer as its American future. If the new world of psychoanalysis is Hitchcock and Woody Allen, Freud will have been turning in his grave. However, such an unexpected arrival is clearly a demonstration of the cruel ironies of history and the difficulty of predicting the future for psychoanalysis. 1975. Lacan visited America on three occasions5: the 1966 conference on structuralism in Baltimore, a return in October and November of that same year, invited by Roman Jakobson and involving talks at Columbia, MIT, Harvard and Chicago, and a visit to the Eastern Seaboard in 1975 on the invitation of Paul de Man and his student Shoshanna Felman. On this third and final visit, Lacan gave two lectures at Yale: one for the Kanzer Seminar, the other at the Law school on the 24th and 25th of November. He then went on to speak at Columbia and MIT in December. Lacan published ‘Lectures and Conversations at North American Universities’ in the final edition of his journal Scilicet the following year, based on stenotypes and recordings of the talks.6 As with Freud at Clark, the American origins of psychoanalysis for Lacan seem to be related to a certain idea of improvisation and translation, both linguistic and theoretical. After Baltimore on the second of the 1966 visits, Lacan, like Freud before him, chose to speak to a lay audience in a non-clinical, extemporized way. It would seem that the question of the popular and general future of American psychoanalysis already has its roots in the original event of the arrival of the clinical authority. We might understand this as both the performative affirmation of a sovereign authority and the ruin of it by the performative act itself, which translates and opens the same authority it seeks to establish. In the Paris seminar of March 1966, motivated by a concern he has over Paul Ricoeur’s confusion between psychoanalysis and hermeneutics7, Lacan narrates his trips to the United States. He writes that far from being a forward-looking

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country, America on the contrary ‘to me . . . seemed like meeting a past time . . . an absolute past, dense, a past that you could cut with a knife, a pure past, a past all the more essential as it never existed, neither at the place where it’s currently installed, nor at the one where it’s supposed to come from, which is from around here’.8 America, says Lacan, is a ‘mass of dough, absolutely impossible to mold . . . One will not arrive at anything like a reversal of the current, at a reflux . . . at anything at all that may resemble a fundamental change’. This is to say that for the Lacan of 1966, the present of America is its own fabricated past, which is neither European nor American but regressive and untreatable. Lacan concludes that with America ‘everything is left to be done’, which is to say that because of this imaginary, pure and essential past America has a future. This would be a future in which psychoanalysis would play a decisive role: ‘everything is left to be done’. History, as it were, has not yet happened in America.9 Lacan’s comments here are surely informed by his own reception, or lack of it, in the United States at this time. The Anglo-American world had sided against Lacan after the split of 1963 and resolutely turned a deaf ear to him after that. If everything remains to be done in America it is because Lacanianism has yet to arrive there, even though Lacan himself had. The situation and renown of the École Freudienne de Paris had changed dramatically by 1975 in Paris but, stubbornly, America still refused to recognize Lacan (there was only one practicing Lacanian analyst on the continent at this time, Stuart Schneiderman). In her biography of Lacan, Elizabeth Roudinesco characterizes the final trip to Yale, New York and MIT as Lacan bringing a new plague to America. This is the plague of obscurantism. By 1975, Lacan had decided to address his American audience in more strictly analytic terms than he had in 1966, presenting his seminar on the Borromean knot theory and the Joyce section of the symptom essay, much to the perplexity of his scientific audience at MIT where Lacan had a noted exchange with Chomsky who afterwards questioned Lacan’s sanity.10 In the exchanges that followed the lectures at Yale, Lacan remarks that ‘psychosis is an attempt at rigour and in this sense I would say I’m a psychotic, for the sole reason that I’ve always tried to be rigorous’ (Roudinesco, 1997, p. 376). Once again, the question of psychoanalysis in America seems to concern itself with the matter of theoretical rigour and the resistance to it. If Lacan is psychotic then the American academy that resists him and the American clinical practice that Freud deplores, both representative of a future for psychoanalysis that will have been, would be the most neurotic of groups.11 There is then a certain madness in the relationship between Lacan

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and America; even we might say a certain psychic cruelty in the relationship. A cruelty that is derived from the arrival of the proper name of Lacan in America at the time when he is the sovereign authority of psychoanalysis in Paris. This cruelty constantly reasserts itself while in America and is repeatedly undone by the impossible to mould an indifferent continent. By way of example, we might consider an episode related by Roudinesco: Convinced that he was world famous, he wanted to be allowed to make a private visit to the Metropolitan Opera House: “Tell them I’m Lacan”, he bade his three bemused companions. Pamela Tytell solved the problem with very “Lacanian” humour: she phoned the director of the Metropolitan and told him Jean-Paul Sartre wanted to visit incognito. The director was flattered and delighted to have such an eminent visitor and agreed at once. As if warning him about one of the great man’s eccentricities, Pamela advised him not to address the philosopher by name. Despite her efforts, someone did ask after Simone de Beauvoir, but the deception wasn’t discovered: Lacan’s English wasn’t good enough to see through it, and Pamela, acting as translator, did all she could to keep up the pretense. (Roudinesco, 1997, pp. 376–7)

This vignette would seem to be more in keeping with a Marx Brothers film than with the biography of the sovereign of psychoanalysis, and like the episode in A Night at the Opera in which the brothers arrive in New York disguised as Russian aviators, it is a comic story of translation and misrecognition.12 It is followed in the Roudinesco biography by a similar tale in which Lacan strolls around Manhattan in the company of Salvador Dali imagining that the nods of recognition from New Yorkers are directed at him and not at Dali. In the case of the Metropolitan Opera, it is not clear if this is a cruel joke being played on Lacan or on the director of the house. Either way, Lacan’s English is not good enough to recognize the deception, while in the non-academic English-speaking world of 1975, no one is able to recognize Lacan. While the performative prescription of ‘I’m Lacan’ holds no currency in America, the psychoanalyst nevertheless insists on its value: he can and will have a private visit at the Opera House. This insistence on sovereignty is only made possible by the tour de force of a comic translation, like Groucho on the steps of City Hall mediating while the silent Harpo’s fake beard disintegrates. Chico remarks knowingly, ‘we don’t deserve this great reception’ while the scene degenerates into the phoney airmen refusing to stay, so insulted are they by their welcome. This second 1975 scene of psychoanalysis’ arrival in America (the third physical arrival for Lacan) hints at the beyond of the sovereign cruelty of performative origins. America comically puts to rout what Lacan so

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solemnly insists upon. Lacan imagines that he is recognized on the streets of New York because such respect is his sovereign right, but America is nodding back at something else entirely, some other version of psychic analysis. The future for psychoanalysis in America, and so worldwide, which cannot help but be infected by the new Parisian–American academic plague of obscurantism that Lacan brings with him from Paris, is not programmable by Lacan any more than it was by Freud after his Clark university lectures. If psychoanalysis is something that befalls America, or something that infects America, equally the problem of America befalls and infects psychoanalysis in a kind of sublime autoimmunity. Psychoanalysis is as resistant to America as America is to psychoanalysis. As Lacan is reported to have commented to Paul Newman in the lounge of the St. Regis Hotel in New York on Thanksgiving morning 1975, ‘America wipes me out’ (Roudinesco, 1997, p. 376). 22 September 1977. In the ‘Envois’ the narrator (let us not confuse him with Derrida) recounts the scene of his arrival in New York en route to Yale: Yesterday at Kennedy, same scenario as the preceding years, I had the impression it was yesterday: Paul and Hillis waiting for me, come down from Yale (how is an appointment possible, despite all the intervals and transcontinental differences, and the fidelity on which I live, and this miracle before which I will always remain a child?). After saying hello, I made them wait (again), as always, in order to call you from the public booth, the only one that I know here along with the one in Grand Central or Penn Station, the only one from which one is not obliged to call “collect” at the expense of the addressee. In a second I had you in the night, you were going to bed with me in the big bed, and I came out of the airport crushed by the sun (the New York heat in August which never goes away), serene and desperate, amiable with my friends and incapable of re-membering myself. I less and less know where my body is—and all these phantoms, here or there, and at what time. Keep me, keep us, give me time. (Derrida, 1987a, pp. 107–8)

This is quite a different sort of text from Roudinesco’s biography of Lacan or Freud’s own autobiographical writing, but let us not be afraid to mix genres here for that might be one of the lessons of a deconstruction and of performativity in general. It is also quite a different order of arrival in America than the ones that we have looked at previously. However, it will be necessary for us to step beyond the constative of ‘Five Lecture on Psychoanalysis’ and the performative of ‘It is Lacan’ to the impossible of a fiction, if that is what it is, in order to obtain a little leverage on the sovereign cruelty of the relationship between psychoanalysis and

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America. The ‘Envois’ is a love story, not one without its jealousies and paranoia, but one that is perhaps beyond a certain cruelty. In this scene, the narrator having just arrived in America leaves his friends (Paul de Man and Hillis Miller) standing as he calls his lover from a public telephone in the airport. For our purposes, the moment is full of metaphorical possibility. This is not the first time this has happened (‘same scenario as the preceding years’) and later in the text, the following year, 24 September 1978, de Man and Miller will be made wait again while the narrator makes a transcontinental call. So much of The Post Card is concerned with the establishment of psychoanalysis in relation to the history of telecommunication; here, the call from New York to Paris is made publicly by payphone. The Parisian narrator calls back from America and Paris answers the call. The Americans, the Yale School, are left standing, obliged to watch this performance. It is a collect call, made at the expense of the addressee. If they pick up, answer and take responsibility for the call, there will be a price to be paid. The call is made from America to Europe, not by an American but by a Parisian in New York who speaks from America. The destination of the call is Europe, the European addressee answers the call and assumes responsibility for the call from America, a call that is American but not made by an American, it is made by a Parisian lost in New York. That Parisian is dismembered by the call, knowing less and less about his own body, unable to remember himself, caught in a time lag with phantoms, he is disoriented by translation. He is unable to assert the sovereign rights of the proper name, instead when in America he is left ‘serene and desperate’, calm in the face of catastrophe with the only option of being ‘amiable with my friends’ while incapable of recalling his own ipseity; ‘incapable of re-membering myself ’. He is said to be ‘crushed’ by the New York heat, a defeat that may, perhaps, lie beyond cruelty. This scene may serve well in an attempt to understand what happens when psychoanalysis or Theory enters into America. It is crushed but not in a cruel way, it finds its own serene and amiable friends amidst the desperate disarticulation of itself. It is transformed; it has its body of work dismembered and re-remembered in another context: ‘America wipes me out’. This displaced Theory then calls back to its point of origin asking to be recalled and Europe must take responsibility for it. Europe and so in this sense Theory or psychoanalysis itself must pay the price for its having travelled to America and then called home. Europe has no choice but to go to bed with this American wreck, as a faithful lover who welcomes back the destinerrant love who has become unstuck in his travels. A Penelope who offers

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her own unconditional performative: ‘yes I will, Yes’. Of course, when Odysseus eventually returns, he slaughters the suitors who have been carousing in his house and would have claimed his throne, reasserting the rights of a sovereign cruelty. However, in that moment of call and exchange, when the lover answers the narrator, when she collects him just as he is being collected at the airport by de Man and Miller, then there is an impossible experience of love: love without bodies, two disembodied voices, call and answer, taking responsibility for one another. Perhaps, the relationship between psychoanalysis and America is of the order of phone sex. It is temporary, atomized and without a future, other than the promise that if you call I will answer.

The future of an illusion When Derrida discusses psychoanalysis in The Post Card, he is more often than not talking about deconstruction. Throughout ‘Speculer’ Freud is a displaced name for Derrida, whether it is in the use of a fictionalized autobiography to found a science [or ‘Envois’], or, the legacy of a thinking beyond the proper name of its founder; the interests of psychoanalysis and deconstruction seem remarkably similar. In my own essay and at this conference, we have been speaking about a future for Freud and for psychoanalysis, it does not take a great leap of the imagination to understand throughout that we have really been talking about a future for deconstruction. In this particular question, the issue of America and sovereign cruelty will play a determining role. In the episodes above, we have seen that the futures that will have been for psychoanalysis have involved not so much psychoanalysis’ arrival as transformative of America but of America transforming psychoanalysis. America is that which arrives for psychoanalysis, just as it was that which arrived for deconstruction, in ways that were wholly unforeseeable for the young Jacques Derrida when he spent a semester researching phenomenology at Harvard in 1956. In the cases cited above, one can see a certain disappointment that psychoanalysis finds in America. In this sense, America is the displaced name for a certain resistance to Theory.13 It is this resistance that Freud finds most disappointing and which causes Chomsky to row with Lacan at MIT. It infects that with which it has first contact. If obscurantism is the Lacanian plague, the resistance to Theory is the American disease. It is in no way unique or proper to America, for example, it has its strands in the common rooms of European universities, but for

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something as psychotically rigorous as psychoanalysis or deconstruction it is an intense cruelty. This is not a cruelty inflicted by someone, the result say of the exercise of sovereign will. Rather, it is what happens when the complex meets its institutional other. Here, America is the other of complexity. In this relationship there can only be a cruel outcome. As Derrida puts it in ‘Etats d’âme’: ‘Cruelty there is. Cruelty there will have been, before any personal figure, before “cruel” will have become an attribute, still less anyone’s fault’ (Derrida, 2002d, p. 280). Such impersonal cruelty is the condition of the institution, which we have already closely associated with the performative and its futures. Structural cruelty is the disappointment awaiting us whenever we found an institution: a cruelty that is beyond personal determination or blame, one that is not necessarily exercised or desired by someone but is that which happens in an entirely predictable sense. Psychoanalysis and deconstruction both share the same destiny in this respect. One might say, cruelty thy name is America, if it were not for the fact that America, if there is such a thing, also shares the same fate. As Freud puts it in the seventeenth ‘Introductory Lecture on Psychoanalysis’ (1915), ‘success does not always go along with merit: America is not named after Columbus’ (Freud, 1964, p. 10820). Nor is it named after its native inhabitants; such is the imaginary history of a pure past that Lacan complained about in 1966. America, psychoanalysis and deconstruction all share a future beyond the impossible sovereignty of their founder. It is a cruel future in which what was imagined by the initiator is crushed by the August sun that never fades. There is no promised land that a Joshua inherits from a Moses, only resistance as the future of an illusion. This is not resistance that comes from outside, organized by someone or some group, it is a resistance internal and essential to the institution. In this sense, this future resistance that awaits us is always already present as a necessary condition of the launch of complexity or the institution itself. It is a cruelty beyond sovereign determination for which no one is to blame. To be banalized in America, for Freud, Lacan and Derrida, is probably worse than being ignored; this cruelty is a fate worse than death. However, as a future it is a form of survival, perhaps the only way to survive in an institution, especially an institution of one’s own making. Derrida does not fail to cite Freud’s ‘The Future of an Illusion’ in his address to the Estates General as an example of the sovereign performative. Freud is discussing monotheism: Now that God was a single person, man’s relations to him could recover the intimacy and intensity of the child’s relation to his father. But if one had done so much for one’s father, one wanted to have a reward, or at least to be his only

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beloved child, his Chosen People. Very much later, pious America laid claim to being, “God’s own country”; and as regards one of the shapes in which men worship the deity, the claim is undoubtedly valid. (Freud, 1964, p. 267)

No doubt, pious America could equally claim to be the land of deconstruction or of psychoanalysis. However, you do not need to be a father or have had a father to know that there is always a price to be paid for favouritism. That performative domination of the father is always a resistance to him; no one resents the father more than the favourite son. The future of the father, or of the family, is always the resistant child. The future of psychoanalysis or deconstruction will have been the resistance of its own offspring, which exceeds and puts to rout, sometimes cruelly, that which the performative act of succession was supposed to produce in a sovereign manner.

Notes 1 This chapter was first presented at the conference ‘Freudian Futures’, University of Memphis, 4–6 October 2012. I am grateful to Pleshette DeArmitt and Kas Saghafi for the opportunity to present it at Spindel 2012, during a special session on ‘Psychoanalysis and Cruelty’ with Professor Simon Morgan Wortham chaired by Angela Hunter. 2 Given that the Stanford University Press, English-language translation of this essay also appears in 2002, and given the publishing timetable of US presses, and given that Without Alibi is explicitly a book about America, it would seem clear enough that the translator and author understood this address to be an explicit response to the question of America. 3 In British English, one would describe something complex and convoluted as a ‘real performance’. I hope this travels from Austin to Derrida. 4 There is a complex gesture at work within this detour. If the future of psychoanalysis is properly the question of cruelty, then one might ask whether psychoanalysis as such is equipped to answer this question. We might say in response to Derrida: but what would not be proper to psychoanalysis? This might not be a psychoanalytic question and in order to address it, psychoanalysis must draw on some other resource. In other words, in the future psychoanalysis will have to be something other than psychoanalysis. At this point, reading between the lines, the future of psychoanalysis might begin to

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look a bit like deconstruction. Is this the response to the Estates General to be found amidst these feints and turns? 5 See Guéguen, 2012. 6 See Lacan, 1976. 7 See Ricoeur, 1970. 8 Reported by Lacan in his seminar on 23 March 1966. See the seminar ‘The object of psychoanalysis’ 1965–66, unreleased. Quoted Pierre-Gilles Guéguen. 9 I am grateful to Elissa Marder for drawing my attention to the Walter Benjamin text ‘Central Park’ in which Benjamin, following Jules Laforgue, speaks of Baudelaire’s ‘Americanism’ as the imprint of the sovereign conquest of modernity. There is also an alternative tradition in the French idiom of America as the land of no future, the end of the journey with nowhere else to go. Although there is no clear reason why Benjamin’s text has the title it does, one can imagine him sitting with his valise on a bench in Central Park rather than on the Spanish border: either location having no future for him (see Benjamin, 1985). The morale of this story for theorists is that if America features in your future this will be the end of the line. 10 Roudinesco, 1997, p. 379. 11 On why the opposite of psychosis is neurosis for Lacan, see The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, in Lacan, 1993. 12 I have commented on this scene before through Barthes in McQuillan, 2011. 13 See ‘The Resistance to Theory’ in de Man, 1986.

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Laruelle Contra Derrida: Performative Realism and the Logics of Consistency John Mullarkey

Introduction ‘Don’t read this sentence’, ‘I am mute’, ‘I am asleep’, ‘everything is a lie’. These performative contradictions, the source of the many paradoxes that have kept philosophers distracted for centuries, are one major point of entry into the performative aspects of philosophical thought. Speech act philosophers like J. L. Austin, John Searle, Paul Grice and Jurgen Habermas would see such paradoxes in terms of the lack of fit between the content and the execution of an utterance – saying ‘I am asleep’ does not fit well with being asleep (unless, of course, one happens to talk in one’s sleep). The misfit (inconsistency) between the saying and what is said is also important with respect to the performance of philosophies as a whole, and not just particular speech acts. In Emmanuel Levinas’ case, for example, the ethical message found in his major work, Totality and Infinity – concerning the inability of anything in the objective world to totalize our infinite ethical responsibility to the Other – seems to be contradicted by the very writing of Totality and Infinity, which is all too adept at conveying its message objectively. Hence, spurred on in part by Jacques Derrida’s criticisms, the sequel to that text, Otherwise than Being: Or, Beyond Essence, plays a far more complex game with language, between content and performance (or ‘the said’ and ‘the saying’) in order to scupper any false impression that Levinas’ book has something it wants to say. Likewise, Søren Kierkegaard’s whole panoply of devices of indirect discourse in his philosophical writing – irony, use of pseudonyms, parables, mimicry of philosophical styles – was ranged against performatively contradicting his message that Truth is Subjectivity, a message that could never be conveyed objectively through a traditionally written book. Note, however, the emphasis for both of

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these figures on using performance to avoid contradiction, to assure consistency. Derrida, for instance, is famed for supposedly having stopped arguing for his quasi-concept of différance in the 1960s in favour of actually performing it in the 1970s (in books like Glas) in order to be consistent with his message regarding the futility of self-present arguments (logocentrism). Yet, one might say that neither Derrida nor Levinas, nor even Kierkegaard, abandoned all argument in their work; rather, they simply adopted a higher-order meta-argument in order to salvage their consistency, the coherence of their message. For here is the rub: if inconsistency (alterity, différance, multiplicity) is the content of one’s philosophy, of one’s message or argument, then one must invent new ways of consistently arguing, new forms of argument or even of thought. In this chapter, I will examine the work of one figure who takes this exhortation to invent new forms of thought to its performative limit – François Laruelle. Significantly, though, in pushing thought to this practical extreme, he regards the enterprise as the most rigorous extension and consistent use of Jacques Derrida’s own style of thinking (even as Derrida himself decries this transformation of his thought). The conflict between what Laruelle sees as Derrida’s still all too philosophical work and his own mutation of it into performative practice, and so non-philosophy, will give us call to question whether Laruelle’s logic of consistency is itself immune from non-philosophical mutation.

Performative realism: Introducing Laruelle’s non-philosophy Echoing the ideas of Derrida, the ‘non-philosopher’ François Laruelle claims that representational transcendence is the fundamental shape of all philosophy. This transcendent form follows the invariant logic of decision (understood broadly, and not merely in intellectual, voluntary and self-conscious terms) – namely, to explain or represent the Real in one exclusive way – its own. Decision is the invariant structure of philosophy. To ‘decide’ is to cut oneself off from the Real, to represent it – decaedere (de- ‘off ’    caedere ‘cut’). To represent, to cutoff, to decide. But a part cannot actually be a part without belonging to the Real, and so it cannot represent the Real at all. The Real is indifferent to its parts. Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophy’, on the other hand, takes that decisional structure of philosophies and mimes it, performs it, such that, instead of it representing the Real in being cut-off from it, it performs as a part of it, it comes out of it.

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Non-philosophy or, as it has been called more recently, ‘non-standard philosophy’ is not, however, an anti-philosophy. Laruelle is not heralding another ‘end of philosophy’, nor the kind of internal critique of philosophy common in much post-Kantian European thought. The ‘non-’ in non-philosophy should be taken, therefore, in terms similar to the meaning of the ‘non-’ in ‘non-Euclidean’ geometry, being part of a mutation that locates philosophy as one instance in a larger set of theoretical forms. Hence, Laruelle’s use of the term non-philosophy is neither a dialectical negation, nor even something contrary to philosophy. It simply enlarges the set of things that can count as thoughtful, a set that includes extant philosophies, but also a host of what are often presently deemed (by philosophers) to be non-philosophies (art, technology, natural science). Nonphilosophy is also called a ‘science of philosophy’, a science which pluralizes the meaning of its ‘knowing’, looking always to find and generalize the ‘scientificity’ of science. It is crucial to realize that, despite its abstract appearance, non-philosophy is a practical theory; indeed, it is a performative practice – it does things (to philosophy and so also to ‘Theory’ or science generally). This practice of nonphilosophy involves taking the concepts of philosophy and extracting any transcendence from them in order to review them so that they are no longer seen as representations, but are re-envisioned as parts of the Real. Thought is identified with the Real; it is immanent to it – this is Laruelle’s opening hypothesis or axiom – such that one might call Laruelle’s adherence to the Real a ‘performative realism’. And philosophy, in this view, also becomes the material of non-philosophy: it transforms the speech of philosophy into its own speech acts. On account of this apparent ventriloquism, non-philosophy will often look similar to philosophy – like simply ‘more philosophy’, be it Spinozist, Derridian, Deleuzian, Badiouian, etc. This impression itself is neither false nor true but simply the product of philosophical narcissism, which cannot see anything other than itself in other forms of discourse. So, for example, Laruelle’s idea that thought should think of itself as immanent to the Real, rather than as a representation that transcends it, looks like something that Gilles Deleuze might say. Yet, Deleuze would say it in the name of his philosophy, with all its architectonics of virtual versus actual, organism versus Bodies without Organs, war machines, rhizomes, etc. – hence Deleuze’s decision to explain the Real in such and such a way. Even though Deleuze embraces multiplicity and a variety of kinds of thought (artistic and scientific as well as philosophical); nonetheless, the highest thought, the

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creation of concepts, belongs to (Deleuzian) philosophy alone – he explains the Real: not Boulez, nor Artaud, nor Bacon. For Laruelle, however, there is no explaining the Real, because every thought, Deleuzian or not, philosophical or not, is as good or as bad an explanation as any other – for they are all (non-summative) material parts.1 In  all of this, then, one must remember this one thing: Non-philosophy is a practice first and foremost: it is ‘performative’, Laruelle writes, ‘and exhausts itself as an immanent practice rather than as a programme’ (Laruelle, 2012, p. 205). Non-philosophy is also described as a use of philosophy rather than one more new theory of it. Hence, one must ask what non-philosophy does with philosophy (or any other field), rather than what it itself is. Its being is its doing, or performativity. This performative practice involves redescriptions (of thought) that are also revisions of it, or as Laruelle puts it, ‘the unlimited redescription . . . of the vision-in-One itself ’ (Laruelle, 1991, p. 40). Non-philosophy redescribes the raw material of philosophy, and, in doing so, it is performative – producing real effects on how the texts are seen. This raw material comprises what Laruelle regards as the essence of philosophy, which involves the invariant structure of decision that serves to contaminate the One or the Real with itself – that is, its various conceptual presuppositions or decisions that endeavour to transcend the Real, to represent it. This contamination results in a ‘mixte’ of the two. The revisionary descriptions of non-philosophy, on the other hand – called ‘cloning’ or ‘dualysis’ – strive to ‘de-mixte’ or dissociate such philosophical decisions from mediating the Real. It operates in the reverse direction to that of philosophy, therefore, going from the Real to thought (which Laruelle calls a thinking ‘according to’ or ‘alongside’ the Real), rather than from thought to the Real (representing the Real). This reversal or reorientation can also be seen as a change of regard, or posture, towards the body of philosophical work: Non-philosophy is not an intensified reduplication of philosophy, a meta­ philosophy, but rather its “simplification”. It does not represent a change in scale with respect to philosophy, as though the latter was maintained for smaller elements. It is the “same” structure but in a more concentrated, more focused form. (Laruelle, 2012, p. 220)

A ‘more concentrated’ form: this is an idea of abstraction as physical concen­ tration rather than higher-order representation. And it is more ‘focused’: one might even say a better optics or photography. And this optics results in a new democracy of thought. Philosophy does not have the monopoly on

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(philosophical) thinking. As we know, the ‘non-’ in non-philosophy is not a negation of philosophy, but a performed expansion, an ‘amplification’.2 This is why Laruelle’s is emphatically not a ‘philosophy of the no’, but an egalitarian affirmation: ‘I posit the equivalence of all philosophical decisions’ (Laruelle, 2012, p. 83). Furthermore, non-philosophy insists on the identity of all regions of thought, be they in art, science, ethics or technology, but only ‘in-the-lastinstance’. It postulates their ‘identification-in-the-last-instance’, which is a hypothesis of their real identity (p. 38).3 Everything thinks, if we look the right way. So, where metaphilosophy is hierarchical, non-philosophy instead offers a ‘unified theory of science and philosophy’ without hierarchy, without preconditions (Laruelle, 1996, pp. 11–12). Laruelle is profoundly un-Kantian in that neither the conditions of possibility of thought (for Kant), nor its real (virtual) conditions (as for Deleuze) interest him. The ‘conditions of possibility’ are not ‘our problem’ he says (Laruelle, 2011, pp. 41–2).4 Non-philosophy is unconditioned thought – it is self-standing knowing or ‘gnosis’. As the recent Philosophie Non-Standard puts it, gnosticism denotes the ‘equality in principle’ of all knowledges, and its vision thereby strives to replace the ‘struggle’ between thoughts with an ‘equalising’ [égaliser] (Laruelle, 2010a, p. 500 and p. 502). Being without condition means that everything already thinks, though philosophers will never accept this fact as long as they continue to think that there is something singular, or definite, to extant philosophical thought. Of course, there will be those who claim that any attempt to bypass the Kantian turn in philosophy by addressing the Real directly is either naive or simply ‘arrogant’, the latter especially because it reduces all philosophy to one decisional form.5 But, in judging Laruelle in this negative fashion, they also judge the non-philosophical hypothesis of the invariant structure of decision to be a self-attribution of even greater representational powers than those allowed to philosophy. This very judgement, however, can be traced back to an inability to see a rejection of arrogance as anything other than simply more arrogance, a blindness due to the fact that they prefer to think in only one mould, that of representational thought (even as some disavow it). In contrast to the verdict that condemns Laruelle’s ‘arrogance’, therefore, there is the option to see his approach as what it hypothesises itself to be – a thought that is part of the Real. He invites us into this view in order to allow us to experiment, scientifically, with the effects that follow from this in knowledge. Because his thought is incomplete, it claims to be genuinely scientific or experimental, an open-ended experiment in what thought is, or a new experience of thought as immanent (‘expérience’ understood here in two of its French senses).

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More Derridean than Derrida? Laruelle views this work as a more consistent enactment of Derridean thought, albeit one that materializes the aporias that thought uncovers while also criticizing Derrida for retaining a decisional, philosophical form.6 Nonetheless, to return to the main theme of this chapter, we might ask whether Laruelle himself is being consistently non-philosophical in his constant valuation of such consistency. Certainly, consistency is used as a term in the content of what he writes: ‘I content myself with being consistent, which is to say that I try to develop a rigorous science’ (Laruelle, 2012, p. 93). But in the form of nonphilosophy (form here referring to its performative practice) we would ask whether consistency is logically identical throughout his work (which would be a failing in Lareullean terms) or really identical, that is, non-consistent in the sense of broadening our notion of consistency in paraconsistent ways. There is a foreshadowing of this problem in Derrida that is worth pausing over for a moment here. The post-structuralist turn is often marked by Derrida’s interventions of 1966 and 1967 (especially the lecture ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ in 1966) wherein certain positive terms of structuralism, such as ‘law’, ‘science’ and even ‘structure’ itself, were put under the same differential analysis that structuralism had already applied to its classical objects – authorship, meaning, consciousness, history and so on.7 When structuralism turns (on) itself (and so mutates into post-structuralism) it does so, however, in an avowedly reflective and reflexive mode of heightened self-awareness, being no longer able to separate ‘method from truth’. Of course, this metatheoreticism – which identifies the Real with itself in seeing that, everything being philosophizable (as Laruelle puts it), so everything must already be philosophy or at least be accessible through philosophy (Being can be thought by philosophy, Being is philosophy) – is not amenable to Laruelle because non-philosophy is not a heightened reflection, higher-order representation or metaphilosophy (understood in Lacanian terms as second-order logic). Derridean metaphilosophy (even in the mode of theology or literature-as-philosophy) is simply more philosophy (uncreative self-similarity). Non-philosophy must be something more if it is worth commending and needs to be commended. After all, it is difficult to deny that an ongoing condition of philosophy is its desire to avoid contradiction, even at a meta-level (e.g., in the consistent implementation of inconsistency as a value). As we mentioned earlier, Derrida supposedly stopped using logocentric

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argument for différance in favour of performing différance in later works in order to be consistent with the notion that self-present argumentation is an illusion, or at least an effect of this différance. Yet, Laruelle’s contention is that this autoimmune strategy still cannot succeed while Derrida remains ‘philosophical’, given Laruelle’s view that philosophy must always totalize what counts as thought under a current (or its current) definition.8 Laruelle will not so define thought, but leaves it open to ‘determination-in-the-last-instance’, which is a hypothetical or ‘occasional’ determination. It is a thought unconditioned (by philosophy) because it is ‘occasioned’ by the Real. Yet, the ‘it’ here is not a new philosophy but simply all the thoughts (of philosophy, but also of the sciences, arts, politics and so on) re-envisioned as material, as parts of the Real rather than as all about the Real. As Laruelle himself puts it ‘I absolutely do not overturn philosophy; were I claiming to overthrow it, it would be a pointless gesture, a zero-sum game. The entire enterprise would then be contradictory’ (Laruelle, 2012, p. 83). Of course, the philosopher’s perennial reply to all this will be, ‘how does he know?’ How does Laruelle know that non-philosophy thinks ‘alongside the Real’? And his answer will simply be, as it must, because it is Real. He replies to an epistemology, a decision that a philosophical account is needed, with a non-philosophical performance. In fact, this is what happened in the ill-tempered dialogue between Laruelle and Derrida that took place in 1986. The following quotation is indicative of Derrida’s general problems with nonphilosophy: My first question – a big one – concerns the reality of this real which you constantly invoked in your talk, or – and this comes to the same thing – the scientificity of this science, this new science, since this reality and this scientificity seem to be related. You oppose reality to a number of things; you oppose it to totality – it is not the whole, beings as a whole – and you also stressed its distinction from effectivity and possibility. The distinction between reality and possibility doesn’t look all that surprising. But what is rather more surprising is when you oppose reality to philosophy. If we were to ask you in a classical manner, or in what you call the ontologico-Heideggerian manner “What is the reality of this real?”, and whether it is a specification of being, you would, I suppose, dismiss this type of question, which still belongs to the regime of ontologico-philosophical discourse, and even to its deconstruction, since it is easy to assimilate the latter to the former. Such a question would still be governed by this law of philosophical society to which you oppose this real, the new science, community. (Laruelle, 2012, pp. 77–8)

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And when Derrida then asked Laruelle from where he got his idea of nonphilosophy – if not also from philosophy itself – Laruelle replied: I get it from the thing itself. This is as rigorous an answer I am able to give. Because the criterion for my discourse was a rigorously immanent or transcendental criterion, there is no other answer I can give. (Laruelle, 2012, p. 87)

One must admire Laruelle’s audacious call for rigorous consistency: of course, this is the only answer he can give without becoming philosophical again, that is, without showing some sufficient reason, for that would reduce immanence, in this case, to a logic or ‘discourse’. He starts, as he puts it, ‘directly from the One, which is to say from the most radical experience there is. You have to start from the real, otherwise you’ll never get to it’. This is not yet to say that thought is the Real, but to suggest that it is aligned to the Real in a non-representational way. As Laruelle cautions us: ‘the One is not in reality “non-philosophy”, this would be an ultimate philosophical decision of a neo-platonic type; it is absolutely indifferent to philosophy as much as to science, a real and not transcendental indifference’ (p. 92).9 Derrida did not see Laruelle’s realism in these non-philosophical terms; instead, he saw trickery: ‘here, all of a sudden, I said to myself: he’s trying to pull the trick of the transcendental on us again, the trick of auto-foundation, auto-legitimation, at the very moment when he claims to be making a radical break’ (Laruelle, 2012, p. 78). And so we have to make a decision ourselves: should we give Laruelle the benefit of the doubt, then, to allow him to test this hypothesis (thought as identical to the Real-in-thelast-instance)? The alternative choices are to charge him with either sheer folly or philosophical disingenuousness, as he himself acknowledges: I have to tell you that this is an absolutely standard, normal, common objection; it is always the one people put to me first: “You use philosophy in order to talk about something which you claim is not philosophical”. Listen. . . the objection is so fundamental that it is tantamount to indicting me of a crude, rudimentary selfcontradiction. It is entirely obvious that I allow myself the right, the legitimate right, to use philosophical vocabulary non-philosophically. (Laruelle, 2011, p. 88)10

Yes, Laruelle uses philosophical terms like ‘transcendental’ non-philosophically (i.e., extracted from their transcendent and representational usage): they are performed or enacted to give them a new status or produce a different experience. And doing so also ensures that he does not fall into self-contradiction: ‘since I take as indissociably given from the outset a certain use of language, which is not that of the logos, and the One which founds it, I do not contradict myself, I do not relapse into philosophical contradiction’ (Laruelle, 2012, p. 89).

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Yet, we should note this telltale reference to ‘philosophical contradiction’. It begs the question (according to the logic of this essay at least) as to what other kind of contradiction might be in play here, and so of what other kinds of consistency. Might there be types of the two such that non-philosophy, to be itself, must not and cannot argue along the old lines that invoke (as Laruelle still does even here) ‘a requisite degree of internal rigour or consistency’ (Laruelle, 2012, p. 90) as though these were neutral, one-size-fits-all, exemplars (i.e., philosophically transcendent) rather than highly mutable and open to mutation? That philosophy adopts a singular consistent approach to consistency is all too evident to Laruelle.11 It is “a habit” of philosophers, his Philosophies of Difference tells us, of somewhat artificially raising problems of doctrinal coherence in order to give oneself the function and the “benefit” of resolving them. “There were no contradictions! See how good and clever I am, how I have saved this author!” “There is an insurmountable contradiction: see how I know the author better than he himself, how I myself am a good author, more Kantian than Kant, more Spinozist than Spinoza!” In order to avoid this Samaritan poison, we will postulate immediately that all these authors are not only systematic but – taken in their totality – coherent up to the point of their sometimes unbridled manner of making Difference play. We will posit their internal rigor in order better to reject them globally. (Laruelle, 2010b, p. XV)

The obvious question stemming from this bad habit needs to be asked: has not Laruelle himself tried to be more Derridean than Derrida by being rigorous and wholly consistent in pushing the logic of anti-logocentrism (antitranscendent representationalism) to its bitter end? And, as a consequence of this, has he not fallen into a peculiar self-contradiction of his own making, hoisted by his own petard, so to speak? This question is certainly a standard kind of philosophical retort, seeing the consistency (even of inconsistency) as uniform and uniformly applicable, and, thereby, self-annihilating. Alternatively, though, one could also question whether this suicidal logic is one and the same throughout its enactment or performance. Rather, it might be that this very act of Laruelle, the suicide bomber miming Derrida, is actually a necessary qua performative gesture because it could also force the creation of new forms of (in)consistency during its performance. The logic is suicidal (the very opposite of autoimmunization or ‘auto-legitimation’), but it could also be seen as creative when (in its course) it forces another way of envisioning Laruelle’s act beyond the judgements of arrogance, naivety, folly or disingenuousness. If non-philosophy

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turns around (as it must) to look at its own key term, consistency, in a nonphilosophical mode, then it will be both to inflate the meaning of consistency and so also the meaning of non-philosophy. In other words, non-philosophy loses any permanent (transcendental) status, or stance, that sets it outside philosophy because it is simply a more ‘focused’ image (of) philosophy. Everything is nonphilosophizable,12 but this does not lead to vacuous explanations where all things ooze into each other (to be met with an abject horror of groundless thought): rather, what oozes are new forms of perfectly identifiable non-philosophy, or nonstandard philosophy, non-photography being only one of them. Non-philosophy is not singular or special, it is not of a higher-order. Rather, its number is legion. It is indeed everywhere, but hidden in the background, beneath, and behind the philosopher’s gaze at any one time. Hence, it needs to be commended, to be attended to, so that it can be brought into visibility. It may even become philosophy eventually. If it is a metaphilosophy, it is ‘meta’ understood physically as ‘beyond’ our standard 20/20 vision, in the periphery, out of sight, just glimpsed. It is the transformation of what counts as philosophy as seen in the full, centre field of (our) vision. As such, it is always, from the perspective of philosophy, heretical or ‘mutant philosophy’ (‘metaphilosophy’ as ‘mutaphilosophy’).13

Deconstructing (in)consistency Laruelle’s exasperated dialogue with Derrida could mark, then, the moment when deconstruction came full circle to perform itself immanently as ‘occasioned by the Real’. It is a new practice of philosophy rather than a new, reforming theory of it that hopes to supersede Derrida. All the same, we may still ask if there could also be a way for Derrida to respond to Laruelle’s non-philosophy in his own terms and methods, rather than through immanent mutation? And here we turn to the materiality of discourse. Derrida, it should be noted, is a self-confessed literalist – he ‘re-literalizes’ language, words becoming things again by exposing their metaphorical roots in spacing, ‘espacement’, graphemes, the materiality of meaning or logos. After all, the ‘Law of Identity’ in classical Aristotelian theory, is a logical identity (not a Real identity) that rests on a consistency, of ‘A    A’ . But that type of consistency (and corresponding inconsistency, as in ‘A v –A’, ‘either A or not-A’) is also material. Bivalent (either/or) logic is moulded on one specific type of matter and material consistency, the ‘classical dimensions of perception and perhaps of philosophical objects’, as Laruelle himself puts it (Laruelle, 2011,

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p. 75). But there are many consistencies to the material Real that we are a part of, not just the one logic of solids, but also other possible logics of fluids or gases or quantum events. Consistency has different meanings, one of which concerns the way in which a substance, like a liquid, holds itself together – its thickness or viscosity. Not all logics have the hardness that a philosophically ‘rigorous or consistent’ argument is said to have to follow. This is not to privilege imagination, say, over something styled as consistency (singular) per se (which might then be called hobgoblin of the small-minded), but rather to show that there might be different theories of rigour and consistency, ones that some would even find it hard to call ‘a theory’ at all, looking more like ‘actions’ as they do. The material Real also includes our so-called ‘representations’ as parts (with all their various attendant logics) – as performing parts, some of which (those often dubbed ‘realist’) perform their real-ism as well as representing it. New philosophies emerge from other ‘non-philosophical’ subjects (cinema, sport, animals, as well as the current menagerie of hopeful monsters disparagingly named ‘popular philosophy’); but they emerge immanently as a moment within them that then creates a crisis (or mutation) for standard philosophy. The new philosophy does not stand over them, waiting to be applied to them, top-down. Nor does non-philosophy, in Laruelle’s idea of a science of philosophy, stand in that relationship to them either. Indeed, it never stands (still) at all – it is a movement, a temporal phenomenon emerging from the (popular) idea of a non-philosophical subject when normal logic (laws of consistency) breaks down. When new logics emerge, so then the subject (or even object) becomes philosophical, in a (Laruellean) non-philosophical manner. Whether that (non-)philosophical moment solidifies to become a part of the normalized philosophical canon (within a philosophy of sport, of animals, of cinema, etc.), will be due to a host of other factors (economic, technological, political, as well as standardly philosophical). Nonetheless, at these moments of crisis, or revolt, philosophy mutates: that is, the (non-Laruellean) nonphilosophical becomes ‘philosophy’ (as Laruellean non-philosophy views it). That said, however, Laruelle himself would probably deny that there is such ‘becomingphilosophy’, but only on account of the philosophical baggage in the concept of becoming: it is too Deleuzian, too ‘philosophical’ because it is a philosophy of becoming. Understood as mutating-philosophy – the becoming (of) philosophy – though, it could well be a new name for non-philosophy, even as Laruelle thinks it. Performance can move through the ‘impasses’ or aporia of sufficient reason, when it enacts a new kind of thought, of logic and of consistency. After all, there are many candidates for what counts as thought: thinking descriptively, poetically,

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mathematically, affectively, embodiedly, analogically, syllogistically, fuzzily and paraconsistently; thinking through a method of questions, of problems, of dialogue, of dialectic, of genealogy, of historicism, of deconstruction. They are all sciences, for they all articulate new discoveries, new types of logic and consistency. As such, they pursue the programme that Laruelle is always at pains to commend – ‘Invent Philosophy!’ By enacting new philosophies – as Derrida, Levinas, Kierkegaard and Laruelle all do, these thinkers perform their consistencies (plural) in the only consistent manner possible.

Notes 1 For more on this, see ‘“I, the Philosopher, Am Lying”: a Reply to Deleuze’ in Laruelle, 2012, pp. 40–74. 2 See Laruelle, 2010a, pp. 15–44. 3 Cf. also Laruelle, 1996, p. 22. 4 In Laruelle, 1996, pp. 326–8, he speaks instead of a ‘non-Copernican mutation in truth’, which would be such an amplification of Kantianism as to render its critique utterly blunted. 5 See, for example, Harman, 2011. 6 For more on how Laruelle materializes Derridean aporetic thought, see Mullarkey, 2006, p. 158 and p. 161. 7 See Derrida, 1978. 8 Whether Laruelle is fair to Derrida (who also knows much about the aporias of autoimmune gesturing) in seeing him tied to a definition of philosophy, remains to be seen. One outcome of their dialogue, though, as we will see, is that Derrida does come close to saying that, irrespective of what philosophy might be, Laruelle is practising an impossible thought by any philosophical standards. 9 See also Laruelle, 1996, p. 349. 10 For more on this non-philosophical use of philosophical vocabulary, see Laruelle, 1996, pp. 262–8. 11 Though one suspects that, upon closer inspection, inconsistencies might appear, at least to certain points of view. 12 This remark is a corollary of the ‘good news’ Laruelle announces in Laruelle, 1991, p. 246, where he says that ‘not everything is philosophisable’. 13 For more on the various mutant forms that non-philosophy can take (in film or animality, for example), see Mullarkey, forthcoming.

Epilogue: No Sooner Said Than Done Alexander García Düttmann

When I was translating Derrida’s book Of Spirit, which ends with a sort of exchange, or, as he might have called it, a ‘polylogue’, I asked him why, in many of his more recent texts, he had chosen to let different voices speak, an unusual literary device in contemporary philosophy, though Heidegger, for example, wrote a dialogue on language, as is well known, and a series of ‘country path conversations’. Derrida replied: ‘I choose it when I no longer know where to put myself ’. Did he mean that it was a manner of finding a way out in a difficult situation, or that it was a manner of facing the situation and delving deeper into it? Perhaps the two cases are not entirely dissimilar, each case being determined by an appeal to, or a prayer for, yet another voice to speak, a different one. ‘I smile at you from wherever I might be’ (Derrida, 2005c, p. 6). This is the final part of the last sentence that Derrida asked his son Pierre to read out at his funeral. Six months later, the entire message was published in the issue of a French journal devoted to his memory. The issue also published a facsimile of the handwritten text. Someone might say: ‘Derrida still wanted to put himself somewhere in the end. But he did not know where to put himself. So he put himself in an impossible place, in a place that does not exist. He decided to address the ones who would gather to bid him farewell from a place that he had to leave unmapped. In truth, he could not even identify this place as a known or unknown place’. Someone else might say: ‘While refusing to have funeral speeches because he knew how difficult it is for a friend to make such a speech, and not wanting the funeral to be embedded in a ritual, Derrida did not exclude all forms of address. In a way, he turned things around by being the one who addressed the others rather than letting the others address him, though he could no longer address them in person, could only address them in a text, written before his death, in a sort of will read out by the other, in a message transmitted to his own son. Was it a gesture of consolation, a prayer not for himself but for the other, as Derrida

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had taken the place of those who would mourn him? The words that precede the final part of the last sentence are “I love you”. And Derrida does not simply ask his son to replace him, to be his spokesperson and his medium, he also asks his son to accept his legacy by embodying him, by “blessing” everybody present at the funeral. The consolation is a confirmation, a sheltering yes’. ‘Always prefer life’, Derrida admonishes his relatives, friends and pupils, ‘and forever affirm survival’. Perhaps the affirmation of survival is not so different from the affirmation of the instant, or the moment, as Nietzsche conceives of it. Instead of feeling sad and possibly guilty when remembering him, Derrida wants his relatives, friends and pupils, to remember the ‘happy moments’ that they allowed him to share, or in which they ‘gave him a chance to partake’, as if the eternal return were nothing but the memory inscribed in the affirmed moment, a memory that comports the experience of mourning, to be sure, but also the joy of an anticipated reaffirmation, of an awaited performance. In a sense, this performance can consist only in itself, in its own act, in having preferred to act, not in view of accomplishing something, of indulging in sentimentality, giving oneself a kick, or reminding oneself of finitude and mortality, but in order to perform the moment itself, as it were, experiencing the intensity of life as survival. Here, it is no longer a question of looking for a place where one could put oneself. For Derrida, such intensity stems from the fact that survival designates the point of indifference where life and death, self and other, touch upon each other and become indistinguishable. To prefer to live is not so much to choose life over death as to choose what Derrida calls ‘life death’ over the impossibility that annihilates all possibilities. Whoever believes that Derrida’s address is nothing but an ironic fiction or a phantasm, is not taking the idea of survival seriously. Survival has at least two aspects to it that we should distinguish. This becomes clear when we turn to the last lectures Derrida held under the title The Beast and the Sovereign. On the one hand, survival is a ‘phantasm’ linked to finitude as trace, the irrepressible fantasy of knowingly witnessing one’s own death, of surviving oneself while dying, of remaining exposed to whatever might affect one’s body and soul after the body, soulless, has turned into a corpse, and of being able to affect others, those who go on living, as a living dead. On the other hand, Derrida maintains that a prayer is not only a ‘call to resurrection’ for in the prayer, ‘some resurrection’ takes place already (Derrida, 2011a, II p. 288). The one who prays, whether he prays explicitly, conventionally, or simply speaks and seeks to be heard, begs the other, to whom the prayer is addressed, to keep him in mind, to remember

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him. Yet in doing so, praying also proves to be a ‘giving’, a giving of ‘one’s own presence’, as the other is asked ‘to be present’ (p. 287). The one who prays, and, more generally, the one who lives on or survives, resurrects in the other, not merely in another ego but in ‘nobody’ (p. 123), in an otherness that cannot be known and identified, and that could even be the otherness at the heart of an ego or of God. This is why, when Derrida, leaving a trace before leaving, or leaving the trace of leaving, says, ‘I smile at you from wherever I might be’, when he prays his relatives, friends and pupils to listen to him, when he prays and asks them to remember him, he affirms survival and resurrects in a place impossible to map, to locate, to identify as a place. He performs the act of ‘life death’. But what if the prayer went unheard? Would resurrection then not be reduced to a mere ‘call’ and be the manifestation of a ‘phantasm’? Perhaps all that can be said is that one doesn’t know what one is thinking and saying, what one is doing, when one thinks and says that one affirms survival, that one prays, that one resurrects. It is just as impossible not to raise the question of the ‘call to resurrection’ going unheard as it is to answer it unambiguously in the negative, to cease affirming survival on the basis of such an answer. This is why the fact of remaining receptive to Derrida’s ‘I love you and I smile at you from wherever I might be’, as if it were a passionate phrase uttered by a living human being, is not a symptom of wishful thinking and confusion. Stanley Cavell introduces the notion of such utterances in his attempt to widen the theory of the performative ‘beyond the ritual of performance’. Passionate utterances are ‘a mode of speech in or through which, by acknowledging my desire in confronting you, I declare my standing with you, demanding a response from you, and a response now, so making myself vulnerable to your rebuke, staking our future’ (Cavell, 2005, p. 185). ‘I am not less vulnerable, and not less passionate, for having died’, Derrida appears to be telling the ones who survive him, ‘keep responding to me’. Let’s not forget that the smile Derrida mentions hovers over the abyss of an ambiguity. While he carries on smiling at us from ‘wherever’ he might be, he also asks us, in a previous sentence, to smile at him. And he justifies his demand by adding that he will have smiled at us ‘up to the end’. In this sentence, Derrida refers to himself in the third person, does not say ‘I say’ but ‘he says’, as if he did not know where to put himself, as if he were conscious both of the fact that he is writing a note that will be read out by his son after his death, on the way to resurrection, and also of the fact that the ‘I’ here is as refractory to identification as the place of ‘wherever’ and the otherness of the other to

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whom the note addresses itself like a prayer. It would seem that Derrida elicits a future response because of an act that belongs to the past (he smiled at us during a lifetime), or to a present that will almost immediately turn into a past (he still smiles at us as he is dying), or even to an imagined future (he would have smiled at us in the instant of our death, should we have died before him). But not only is it not obvious that such a smile, perhaps a smile of the eyes rather than a smile of the lips, a dreaming smile rather than a smile consciously given, a smile continuously renewed, continuously undoing the petrification of a smirk, a smile without meaning and yet a distinct smile, would not have come already from a place as remote as the ‘wherever’ alluded to in the short text. The ambiguity of a smile lasting ‘up to the end’ resides in that no reader, no listener, not even Derrida as the author of these lines, can tell whether the end is an end without resurrection or not, whether ‘some resurrection’ is ever performed or not, whether the end is an arrival ‘wherever’ or not, and whether resurrection is nothing but a phantasmatic ‘call’ or not, desperate and cheerful at the same time. Derrida does not ask us to smile at him because he once smiled at us but because he continues to smile at us just as he once did. There is an interruption in the exchange that lies in that it proves impossible to control the reaffirmation and to demonstrate that, in the face of someone dead, it is as nonsensical to smile at him as it is to expect a smile back. In other words, it is not, despite appearances, a relation of exchange that is at stake here, but rather, perhaps, a favour. Could it not be said, however, that Derrida himself, as a philosopher or a thinker, listened to more than one prayer for resurrection, and that the force of this listening which translated into the force of writing must have come to him from the place of otherness, from ‘wherever’, as much as from the place he inhabited and made his own while he was alive? And could it not also be said that one could not even try to address the other, in the form of a prayer or otherwise, and that one could not even be led by a ‘phantasm’ and madly call for resurrection, if no resurrection had ever taken place, if the ‘secret appointment’ (Benjamin, 1974, I.2 p. 694) with future generations of which Benjamin speaks in his theses on history had not been kept before it was made? It is impossible for me to read Derrida’s note without hearing a voice speak, his voice. In the case of this text, especially, voice and writing almost converge. This convergence is both the source from which the phantasm nourishes itself and the testimony of a resurrection that is already happening. When, in his lectures, Derrida hints at a resurrection performed in and as a prayer, he is only turning to the other, heterogeneous side of the ‘transcendental illusion’ of

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logocentrism, which he denounces in his earlier texts. It is the illusion of a lively self-presence brought about by the voice speaking to itself. In The Post Card, the proximity of the voice is rendered by the blinding effect of the telephone, at night, when one is alone and shuts one’s eyes as one speaks and listens to the other. But the fact that the mediation of a machine is needed for such proximity to be established, and that the purity of the voice’s tone is filtered by the parasites of the machine’s transmission, suggest that this purity is the result of a ‘subtle and sublime sorting-out’ (Derrida, 1980a, p. 14) or that it is a ghostly purity belonging to a revenant’s voice. Is Derrida’s resurrection a resurrection of the flesh and, if so, how is the flesh transformed in the course of its returning to life, to a higher life, to the more intense life of a ‘survival’ and a spiritual body? Listen to what Jean-Luc Nancy writes in the course of his ‘deconstruction of Christianity’: Certainly, the dead are definitely absent, irrevocably und unbearably so; they are more than just absent, they have disappeared, they have been abolished. Certainly, no work of mourning can ever lessen this abolition. However, if we do not sink into melancholy, if we do not die in the middle of life and turn into living dead, still unable to touch upon the life of the dead, allowing our relationship to the dead to become fossilized, we live, we survive “our dead”, as we say, and this is not simply because of an ego-driven instinct. Rather, it is the continuation of the relationship, and it can be a waiting for, and the approach of, a reunion, in a place we have never heard of, and according to a mode of being entirely unknown to us’. (Nancy, 2010, p. 133)

Could it be said that a relationship is continued if the continuation were onesided, a mere projection? Don’t you feel a certain sense of shame when quoting and analysing Derrida’s note, his epitaph, when trying to figure out how his sentences might and should be understood, and why they are meaningful, and when referring to others in support of the intelligibility of their content, and when speculating on a smile, on an often barely perceptible illumination of the face from which sense seems to emanate, on an acquiescence of the body that transfigures it? Are you not running the risk of putting an end to the strange communication that the sentences announce, call for, and perhaps begin to establish? When hearing or reading them for the first time, they make us grasp immediately and obscurely the meaning of the idiomatic expression ‘no sooner said than done’. But their transformation into sentences that require paraphrase, interpretation, further deconstruction, may undo the alliance of saying and doing, of a constative

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utterance (‘I smile at you’) and a performative utterance. It may weaken the force of addressing the other that pertains to them. Whether Jacques Derrida is dead or not, how he is dead or not, whether we murder him or not, depends entirely on how we relate to these sentences. ‘I smile at you from wherever I might be’. What if this utterance were a ‘telepoietic’ sentence or an ‘absolute performative’ (Derrida, 2002, p. 92) in the sense Derrida uses this notion when elucidating the force of a ‘might’ that makes something happen, the force of an order or a command, a wish or a prayer, on which the idiom ‘no sooner said than done’ (p. 65) depends? The ‘absolute performative’ is not just a saying that is a doing because it has no constative value. Rather, it is a constative utterance that coincides with a performative utterance, a ‘miraculous’ and ‘quasi mystical’ (p. 86) creation of what is named in language, a true ‘event’. On the one hand, making something happen and letting something happen become almost synonymous when an event takes place, as if ‘no sooner said than done’ were the expression of the event of a pure self-affection. On the other hand, Derrida insists on the event’s ‘heterological’ element, on a lack of force that explains the necessity of a ‘letting’ that is not simply a ‘making’, on the substitution that happens when an event takes place. Without a ‘heterological’ element, the event would vanish into the purity of self-affection without leaving a trace. The idiom ‘no sooner said than done’ would amount to a mere ‘tautology’. So that there is a ‘heterological’ (p. 114) element in the event means that the force or the power of making something happen must always also be given to me, a spontaneity bestowed upon me. It means that it is Derrida who says ‘I smile at you from wherever I might be’, and who, in saying so, smiles at us, and that at the same time we don’t know who addresses himself to us in this manner. We will need to find out by responding to the voice that we hear. When we actually hear it, we have started to find out. Hence, the substitution of doing for saying is, if it constitutes an event, an opening in which the otherness of the event resides. So you suggest that the absolute performative expressed in the idiom ‘no sooner said than done’ performs the resurrection that happens in a prayer. If every utterance is a prayer, as Derrida claims, because it asks, tacitly or in so many words, the other to listen to me and to keep in mind what I say, then my giving myself to the other, my resurrecting in and as the other, is a double giving, for I give myself to the other and I also give the other something; both in giving myself to the other and in giving the other something, I let and I make the other come, listen to me, keep what I say in mind. I let and I make the other achieve my resurrection, which is my own resurrection in and as the other,

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and simultaneously the resurrection of the other himself, as if in the event of resurrection one could no longer distinguish between the self and the other, but also without otherness being reduced to self-sameness. It is the Christ who says to Lazarus ‘veni foras’, ‘come out’. Yet neither the Christ nor Lazarus are simply a person, a character or a figure different from another person, character or figure. If there had been no faith in Lazarus, the Christ could not have resurrected him. The Christ ceases to be who he is the moment all traces of faith are erased. As soon as I listen to Derrida saying ‘I smile at you from wherever I might be’, it’s done, a resurrection has happened, an event has taken place. It must, of course, be a listening, not a distracted overhearing of a few words doomed to forgetfulness, to an oblivion that dissolves the alliance between saying and doing, and signals how exposed the absoluteness of the performative must be. That it is a listening, an attention paid, will show in my behaviour, in my relationship to the world and to others, to a past and a future world, to others in the past and to others yet to come. It will show in what I say and do. The otherness that belongs to the absolute performative, to the idiom ‘no sooner said than done’, to the event as the event of resurrection, can either contribute to the performative being felicitous, the idiom proving true, the event taking place, or to their failure, when no one listens and the prayer goes unheard. In short, precisely because there is an unmappable ‘wherever’ from where Derrida smiles at you, there is no ‘view from nowhere’, or only the promise of such a view. Where have you put yourself?

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Index address  60, 72–6, 78–9, 87–91, 105, 160–1, 175, 207–8, 214–21, 235–40 appeal  54, 77–8, 80, 82, 117, 208, 235 Austin, J. L.  1–11, 32–5, 37, 43–8, 58, 60–1, 65, 71, 86–8, 90–5, 103–5, 144, 187–201, 203 Benjamin, W.  20, 148, 222, 238 Benveniste, E.  2–3, 35, 38, 198 call  2, 25, 36, 46, 54–7, 67, 71–6, 80, 89–91, 93, 98–9, 102–3, 105, 121, 128, 135, 151–3, 156, 217–19, 236–9 Cavell, S.  237 Cixous, H.  160–4 conjuration  27, 76, 132, 147, 153, 155, 194 de Man, P.  3–5, 8–21, 24–30, 35–7, 39, 45, 47, 209, 212–14, 218–19 Descartes, R.  113–17, 188 faith  23, 27, 37, 59, 90, 92–3, 98, 105, 160–1, 185, 210, 241 Fichte, J. G.  1, 4–6, 28–31, 39, 229 forgiveness  79, 84–5, 191, 194, 199 Foucault, M.  109–10, 126 Freud, S.  96, 119, 129, 142, 147, 156–7, 162, 207–21 Gasché, R.  4–7, 33–5, 39 Hamacher, W.  1–2, 7, 10, 16–31, 36–9, 103–4 Hegel, G. F. W.  2, 5, 7–8, 22–5, 33–9, 197–8 Heidegger, M.  4–7, 18, 20, 25, 32, 35, 37–9, 86–91, 98, 101–2, 105, 117–21, 129–30, 132–4, 185, 197–8, 229 Husserl, E.  144, 187

imperative  16–19, 27–8, 36–7, 73–4, 77, 80, 85, 126, 185 injunction  73–8, 80, 83, 87, 97, 136, 140 institution  9–10, 13, 20, 32, 48, 60, 74–82, 91–3, 106, 111, 133, 136–7, 143, 147, 153–62, 166, 174–5, 193–4, 210, 213, 220 Lacan, J.  119–22, 129, 207–8, 214–20, 222 Lévinas, E.  76–7, 85, 105–6, 114–21, 129, 223–4, 234 Nietzsche, F.  8–13, 35–6, 190, 193, 195–203, 236 oath  67, 74, 78–80, 162 prayer  132, 235–40 promise  9–21, 26, 36–7, 43–7, 49, 51–6, 60–3, 65, 78–80, 88, 92–3, 96, 98–103, 105, 134–5, 155, 162–3, 173–4, 219–20, 241 response  9, 31–2, 71–8, 80, 83, 87, 90, 103, 181, 184–5, 207, 221, 237–9 Rousseau, J.-J.  13–15, 36–7, 49, 55, 61–2, 64, 66–7 (counter-)signature  72, 110, 170–83, 194 testimony  105, 142, 145, 160, 238 welcome  43–6, 52, 62, 67, 99–100, 103–5, 183, 212, 216, 218 yes  8–10, 35, 44–6, 71–5, 78–9, 83, 85, 91, 96, 105, 132–40, 143, 219, 236

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