Simon is there, with Bayard. They are sitting next to Judith, the young lesbian feminist.
“The word of reconciliation is the speech act through which by speaking a word we make a start, we offer reconciliation by addressing the other person; which means that, at least before this word, there was war, suffering, trauma, a wound…”
Simon spots the Carthaginian princess, which has the immediate effect of muddling his powers of concentration, so much so that he does not manage to decode the subtext of Derrida’s opening words, which suggest he is going to be placatory.
And in fact, Derrida comes calmly and methodically to Austin’s theory, developing some objections to it, in strictly academic terms and in what appears to be the most objective manner possible.
The theory of speech acts, which posits that the word is also an act—in other words that the speaker acts at the same time as he speaks—implies a presupposition that Derrida disputes: intentionality. Namely: that the speaker’s intentions preexist his speech and are perfectly clear to him as well as to his receiver (assuming that the receiver is clearly identified).
If I say, “It’s late,” it is because I want to go home. But what if I actually wanted to stay? If I wanted the other person to keep me there? To prevent me from leaving? If I wanted the other person to reassure me by saying: “No, it’s not that late.”
When I write, do I really know what I want to write? Isn’t it the case that the text reveals itself as it is formulated? (Does it ever really reveal itself?)
And when I do know what I want to say, does my receiver receive it exactly as I think it (as I think I thought it)? Does what he understands of what I say correspond exactly to what I think I wanted to tell him?
It’s clear that these opening remarks deal a serious blow to the theory of speech acts. These modest objections make it perilous to evaluate the illocutionary (and especially the perlocutionary) power in terms of success or failure, as Austin does (in lieu of truth or falsehood, as the philological tradition has done until now).
Hearing me say “It’s late,” my receivers believed that I wanted to go home and they offer to accompany me. Success? But what if, in fact, I wanted to stay? If someone or something deep inside me wanted to stay, without me even being aware of it?
“In fact, in what sense does Reagan claim to be Reagan, president of the United States? Who will ever know him, strictly speaking? Him?”
The audience laughs. Everyone is at maximum attentiveness. They have forgotten the context.
It is now that Derrida chooses to strike.
“But what would happen if in promising ‘Sarl’ to criticize him I went beyond what his Unconscious desires, for reasons we’ll analyze, and do everything I can to provoke him? Would my ‘promise’ be a promise or a threat?”
In a whisper, Bayard asks Judith why Derrida pronounces it “Sarl.” Judith explains that he is mocking Searle: in French, as far as she understands, “Sarl” signifies “Société à responsabilité limitée,” a private limited company. Bayard thinks this is quite funny.
Derrida goes on:
“What is the unity or identity of the speaker? Is he responsible for speech acts dictated to him by his unconscious? Because I have mine, too, which might want to give pleasure to Sarl inasmuch as he wants to be criticized, or cause him pain by not criticizing him, or give him pleasure by not criticizing him, or cause him pain by criticizing him, to promise him a threat or to threaten him with a promise, or offer myself up for criticism by taking pleasure in saying things that are obviously false, enjoying my weakness or loving exhibitionism more than anything, et cetera.”
The whole audience turns toward Searle, of course, who, as if he had anticipated this moment, is sitting in the exact center of the tiered seating. The lone man in the middle of the crowd: it’s like a scene from Hitchcock. His face remains impassive under this barrage of scrutiny. He looks like he’s been killed and stuffed.
And besides, when I make phrases, is it really me who is speaking? How can anyone ever say anything original, personal, unique to him, when by definition language obliges us to draw from a well of preexisting words? When we are influenced by so many external forces: our times, the books we read, our sociocultural determinisms, our linguistic “tics” so precious that they form our identity, the speeches we are constantly bombarded with in every possible and imaginable form.
Who has never caught a friend, a parent, a colleague or a father-in-law repeating an argument they have read in a newspaper or heard on the television almost word for word, as if he were speaking for himself, as if he had appropriated that speech, as if he were the source of those thoughts rather than a sponge for them, rehashing the same formulas, the same rhetoric, the same presuppositions, the same indignant inflections, the same knowing tone, as if he were not simply the medium through which a newspaper’s prerecorded voice repeated the words of a politician who himself had read them in a book whose author, and so on … the medium through which the nomadic, sourceless voice of a ghostly speaker expresses itself, communicates, in the sense of two places communicating via a passage.
Repeating what he has read in a newspaper … to what extent can the conversation with your father-in-law be considered a citation?
Derrida has returned seamlessly to the central thread of his argument. Now he touches on his other principal argument: citationality, or rather, iterability. (Simon is not sure he’s really grasped the distinction.)
To be understood, at least partially, by our receiver, we must use the same language. We must repeat (reiterate) words that have already been used, otherwise our receiver will not be able to understand them. So we are always, fatally, in some form of citation. We use the words of others. Now, as with Chinese whispers, it is more than probable—it is inevitable—that through repetitions each and every one of us will employ the words of others, in a slightly different sense to those others.
Derrida’s pied-noir voice becomes more formal and bombastic:
“Even that which will ensure the functioning of the mark (psychic, oral, graphic, whatever) beyond this moment, namely the possibility of being repeated, even that begins, divides, expropriates the fullness or the intrinsically ‘ideal’ presence of intention, of the desire to express, and a fortiori the harmony between meaning and saying.”
Judith, Simon, the young black-haired woman, Cixous, Guattari, Slimane, everyone in the lecture hall, even Bayard, is hanging on his every word when he says:
“Limiting even that which authorizes, transgressing the code or law that it constitutes, iterability irreducibly inscribes alteration in the repetition.”
And he adds, imperiously:
“The accident is never an accident.”
76
“Even in what Sarl calls ‘real life,’ the possibility of parasitic contamination is already there—that ‘real life’ of which he is so assured, with a confidence that is almost, not quite, inimitable, of knowing what it is, where it begins and where it ends; as if the meaning of those words (‘real life’) could immediately create unanimity, without the slightest risk of parasitical contamination, as if literature, theater, lying, infidelity, hypocrisy, infelicity, parasitical contamination, the simulation of real life did not form part of real life!”
[Words spoken by Derrida at the Cornell conference, 1980, or dreamed by Simon Herzog.]
77
They are bent over like slaves in antiquity pushing blocks of stone, but these are students puffing and panting as they roll barrels of beer across the floor. It is going to be a long evening and they will need reserves. The Seal and Serpent Society is an old fraternity founded in 1905, one of the most prestigious and therefore, in American terminology, one of the most “popular.” Lots of people are expected because we are celebrating the end of the conference tonight. All the guest speakers are invited and this is the last chance for the students to see the stars until their next visit. In the entrance to the fraternity’s Victorian lodge, someone has written on a sheet: “Uncontrolled skid in the linguistic turn. Welcome.” Though entry is theoretically reserved for undergrads, tonight the lodge is hosting people of all ages. Of course, this doesn’t mean that it is open to just anyone: there are always those who come in and those who remain outside the door, in accordance with universal social and/or symbolic criteria.