Class Acts

Derrida on the Public Stage

Michael Naas

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780823298419
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Class Acts examines two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida's work as a philosopher, his public presentations at lectures and conferences and his teaching, along with the question of the "speech act" that links them. What, Michael Naas asks, is one doing when one speaks in public in these ways?The book follows Derrida's itinerary with regard to speech act theory across three public lectures, from 1971 to 1997, all given, for reasons the book seeks to explain, in Montreal. In these lectures, Derrida elaborated his critique of J. L. Austin and his own subsequent redefinition of speech act theory. The book then gives an overview of Derrida's teaching career and his famous "seminar" presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. Naas then shows through a reading of three recently published seminars—on life death, theory and practice, and forgiveness—just how Derrida the teacher interrogated and deployed speech act theory in his seminars. Whether in a conference hall or a classroom, Naas demonstrates, Derrida was always interested in the way spoken or written words might do more than simply communicate some meaning or intent but might give rise to something like an event. Class Acts bears witness to the possibility of such events in Derrida's work as a pedagogue and a public intellectual.

PART

Derrida in Montreal
(A Play in Three Speech Acts)

Argument and Dramatis Personae

Although Sec [“Signature Event Context”] never suggested beginning with theatrical or literary fiction, I do believe that one neither can nor should begin by excluding the possibility of these eventualities. (“LI” 89/166)

I am no playwright, and I have absolutely no pretensions to ever becoming one, but as I began to write about Derrida and speech act theory, and so, inevitably, about Derrida and Montreal, I began to get the impression that I was in the process of writing not so much an essay, lecture, or talk but a play. Or rather, I began to get the impression that I was not writing at all but rather witnessing or transcribing a play that had already been written by Derrida himself, that had even been staged by him, a play that might have gone under the title Derrida in Montreal, a play that had been performed or played out in three distinct acts on the topic, as chance would have it, of the speech act, that is, on so-called speech act theory, three acts not only written and staged by Derrida but actually performed by him live over the course of some twenty-six years in Montreal. While there may be other acts, that is, other colloquia or conferences in Montreal that Derrida participated in over the course of his long career, these are the three of which I am aware, and all three have the particularity of addressing this question of the speech act and of the kind of event that takes place in or through it.

What follows, then, is, as it were, a single play, divided into three acts, with three different set designs, two quick costume changes, and two intermissions that, let me tell the reader in advance, will take place not in Montreal, or even in Canada, but down below the border, in the United States. For while everything that happened in Montreal with Derrida was absolutely unique, singular, and without comparison with anything Derrida did or experienced in the United States or elsewhere, there was nonetheless always a back-and-forth, a kind of shuttle diplomacy or free trade agreement between the two countries that was constantly being negotiated or renegotiated, and that will be true, as we will see, from the first act of this play right through to the end—and even beyond. Three acts, then, two intermissions, and perhaps, if anyone is still here by the end, an encore or two, and the whole thing, with just a few exceptions, written in and for a single language, namely, the French language, la langue française, which will turn out to be in this production not just the medium or the element for the play but, in Quebec, one of its dramatis personae.

Act 1: The Context (1971)

This first act is the one most everyone knows best. It is August 1971, and Derrida is in Montreal, at the University of Montreal, to be precise, delivering a lecture or, as one would say in French, a “communication” to the Congrès International des Sociétés de Philosophie de Langue Française, which had set for itself that year the theme of, precisely, “Communication.”¹ It was there that Derrida would first deliver “Signature Event Context,” his most significant work—his signature work—on speech act theory, and in particular on John L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. It is a lecture that would stir up a lively debate at the time with Paul Ricoeur, who had opened the Congrès the day before, and that would in the years following lead to an even livelier debate, or, truth be told, to a polemical and even acrimonious exchange, between Derrida and the American philosopher John Searle over the reading and the legacy of the speech act theory of John Austin.² We will get just a taste of this latter during our first intermission.

Derrida begins “Signature Event Context” by recalling, precisely, the context of his talk—a talk, that is, a communication on the theme of “communication.” He begins with this question: “Is it certain that there corresponds to the word communication a unique, univocal concept, a concept that can be rigorously grasped and transmitted: a communicable concept?” (“SEC” 309/367) In other words, does there correspond to the word communication a single, univocal concept that might then be conveyed, transmitted, and communicated without loss or remainder? And if there is such a concept, how would it be communicated exactly? In what language? What context? And what might this language or this context already assume about the nature of communication itself? For it may be, Derrida already seems to be suggesting, that the very context for such a question, namely, a colloquium in which participants give talks aimed at communicating a certain meaning with regard to communication, will have already predetermined its object by excluding or setting aside other meanings of the word communication in ordinary language (already a first gesture in Austin’s direction), for example, says Derrida, the “communication” of a movement, of a shock or a tremor, a disease or a force—this word “force,” just like “context,” being a key notion for John Austin, whose name has not yet appeared or been uttered by Derrida beyond the epigraph to the essay, which we will come to in a moment (“SEC” 309/367). Derrida is asking, in effect, whether these nonsemantic notions of communication can be so readily excluded from a conference that is seeking to define or understand the meaning of the word or the concept “communication,” that is, the French word communication and the (univocal) concept to which it would supposedly refer.

It is at this point—we are just a few paragraphs into the essay—that Derrida brings on stage for a first time that French language I mentioned earlier. Here he is, putting the question of language into the context of his questions about communication and context:

It seems to go without saying that the field of equivocality covered by the word communication permits itself to be reduced massively by the limits of what is called a context (and I announce … between parentheses, that the issue will be, in this communication, the problem of context, and of finding out about writing as concerns context in general). For example, in a colloquium of philosophy in the French language, a conventional context, produced by a kind of implicit but structurally vague consensus, seems to prescribe that one propose “communications” on communication, communications in discursive form, colloquial, oral communications destined to be understood and to open or pursue dialogues within the horizon of an intelligibility and truth of meaning, such that in principle a general agreement may finally be established. (“SEC” 310/368)

Drawing attention once again to the context of his talk in Montreal, a Congrès des Sociétés de Philosophie de Langue Française, Derrida recalls that the word “communication” is, obviously, a French word, a word of the French language, and that it cannot be so easily communicated—or translated—into other languages without loss or ambiguity. And that is true even for languages such as English that seem to have the same word available to it. For if it is common to speak in French of a paper, talk, or lecture as an oral “communication,” in this case a communication about the nature or meaning of “communication,” it would be very unusual, indeed hardly ordinary, to speak in English of a talk as a “communication.” One might speak, say, of a White House press or news release as a “communication” or, probably better, a “communiqué,” but it is not common to speak of an academic talk at a conference or congress as a “communication.” At the same time as he raises questions of meaning and of context, therefore, Derrida evokes the fundamental and obviously related question of translation.³

Having thus raised in his own unique way, that is, having at once used and mentioned notions of language and communication, Derrida announces that his talk, his communication, will focus on the question of context. In short, he will attempt “to demonstrate why a context is never absolutely determinable, or rather in what way its determination is never certain or saturated” (“SEC” 310/369). And he will want to show that this is the case not simply in fact but in principle, that this “structural nonsaturation” belongs to the very nature of a context (“SEC” 310/369). While the organizers of the conference might thus have thought that the theme of “communication” had been sufficiently delimited or circumscribed by the context and through an “implicit consensus” on the part of participants that they would deliver communications on “communication” as discourse “within the horizon of an intelligibility and truth of meaning” (“SEC” 310/368), Derrida is already suggesting that some of the most important work in communication theory is being done by those who, like Austin—though, again, his name has not yet come up beyond the epigraph—have questioned this horizon and introduced other questions regarding the communication not so much of truth or of meaning but of force.

Hence Derrida says that in what follows he must first show “the theoretical insufficiency of the usual concept of context” (“SEC” 310/369), and then, in line with what he argues in Of Grammatology and elsewhere, the necessity of “a certain generalization and a certain displacement of the concept of writing” (“SEC” 310/369). This displacement, that is, this reinscription and redeployment of the concept or, as we will see, the quasi-concept of writing within a new context will then require a complete rethinking of the category of communication as the transmission of meaning. Instead, therefore, of considering writing to be a secondary, limited form of communication understood as the transmission of meaning, Derrida will want to show that it is actually “within the general field of writing thus defined that the effects of semantic communication will be able to be determined as particular, secondary, inscribed, supplementary effects” (“SEC” 310–311/369). Derrida will thus at once describe or explain the necessity of criticizing the notion of context and, through a sort of performative of his own, displace and reinscribe that notion of context within a rethinking of the problematic of writing, writing in general and the signature in particular. And all of this occurs, recall, before any explicit mention of Austin apart from the epigraph, which—and we here begin to catch a glimpse of Derrida’s strategy—makes reference to writing, or more precisely, to the exclusion of writing. Here is the epigraph, which in addition to addressing writing and not speech is drawn not from the main body of Austin’s text but from a footnote about three quarters of the way through the text: “Still confining ourselves, for simplicity, to spoken utterance” (“SEC” 309/367).

After this preamble of sorts, which at once comments on the frame or the context of the communication and introduces the major themes of his own communication, Derrida begins the first and longest of his essay’s three sections, “Writing and Telecommunication,” with a brief overview of the ways in which writing has typically been understood in the Western philosophical tradition. As Derrida’s subtitle already suggests, it has been understood as a kind of “tele-communication,” a powerful means for the communication of meaning that “extends very far, if not infinitely, … the field and powers [pouvoirs] of a locutionary or gestural communication” (“SEC” 311/369–370). It is a claim that Derrida had been making in various other contexts since at least Of Grammatology (1967), published four years before. According to the tradition that Derrida had been analyzing in those texts, a philosophical tradition that begins in Plato, if not before, and extends up to Hegel and Saussure, if not beyond, writing is considered to be a supplement to speech, a powerful supplement capable of extending the powers of spoken and gestural communication in a space and time that are essentially homogeneous with those of spoken and gestural communication (“SEC” 311/370). It is a supplement that thus introduces no fundamental break, no discontinuity, in tele-communication, only a greater and greater extension of the space and time of spoken discourse.

To illustrate these claims, Derrida takes up the example of Étienne Bonnet de Condillac (1714–80), who, in his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines) of 1746, developed a theory of writing that exemplifies many of the fundamental traits of the traditional view. It is a work that was “inspired,” Derrida notes, by Condillac’s contemporary, the English philosopher William Warburton—a Frenchman and an Englishman, notice, already a foreshadowing or an echo, perhaps, of Derrida and Austin, the former taking his inspiration from the latter.⁴ We thus find in Condillac a philosophical discourse that, “like all philosophy,” says Derrida, “presupposes the simplicity of the origin and the continuity of every derivation, every production, every analysis, the homogeneity of all orders” (“SEC” 311/370). We will want to keep our eye on this word origin, which will attract Derrida’s attention when he turns to Austin a bit later in the essay, the simplicity of an origin—or source—that will account for the continuity within space and time of every production of meaning, in short, the continuity in space and time of all communication, written or spoken.

Like other philosophers before him, then, Condillac wishes to maintain the homogeneity of written and spoken discourse but then define the specificity of writing in terms of absence: writing is used to transmit meanings to those who are absent from us in space and time with an efficacy that is unavailable to speech. Insofar as language is, for Condillac, essentially representative, that is, a sort of picture, reproduction, or imitation of some content, writing extends in time and space the powers of representation to those who are absent to us in space, who may in fact be very far away, or absent in time, those in the future, perhaps in a very distant future, who may one day gain access to our original meaning through a series of written signs (“SEC” 312/371).

According to Condillac, then, who is, for Derrida, representative of an entire philosophical tradition, writing must first be understood in relation to the “absence of the addressee”: “one writes in order to communicate something to those who are absent” (“SEC” 313/372). Writing is understood in terms of the absence of the addressee, though this absence—and this will be a second trait that Condillac shares with others in the tradition—is understood as merely temporary, that is, as the modification and progressive extension of some presence (see “SEC” 313/373). Absence is thus always understood in terms of a deferred but eventual presence, and the supplement of writing is what repairs or remedies that absence, thereby restoring an original presence. In other words, absence is understood as the deferred presence of some meaning, idea, or ideal content, and writing is that which conveys or communicates that content in a way that is homogeneous with speech but more powerful than speech in terms of its extension in space and time.

But then what is the specificity of writing when understood as simply a modification or deferral of presence, that is, as a kind of deferred speech? Condillac can say that “a written sign is proffered in the absence of the addressee” (“SEC” 315/374), but if there is to be a specific difference to writing, if “absence in the field of writing” is to be “of an original kind” (“SEC” 314/374), then that absence must be not only deferred but also, Derrida contends, brought to an “absolute degree” (“SEC” 315/374). Only in this way would writing be something more or something other than a mere modification or deferral of presence or a mere extension of speech. The real specificity of writing or of written communication is thus to be found in the fact, Derrida argues, that writing “must remain legible [or readable, lisible] despite the absolute disappearance of every determined addressee in general” (“SEC” 315/375). That is, in order to be something different than speech, writing must be “repeatable—iterable—in the absolute absence of the addressee”; it “must be able to function in the radical absence of every empirically determined addressee in general” (“SEC” 315–316/375).

After recalling that the word iterability comes from the Sanskrit itara, me...