PART
Derrida in Montreal
(A Play in Three Speech Acts)
Argument and Dramatis Personae
Although Sec [âSignature Event Contextâ] 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. (âLIâ 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 endâand 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 âcommunicationâ to the CongrĂšs International des SociĂ©tĂ©s de Philosophie de Langue Française, which had set for itself that year the theme of, precisely, âCommunication.â1 It was there that Derrida would first deliver âSignature Event Context,â his most significant workâhis signature workâon speech act theory, and in particular on John L. Austinâs 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 CongrĂšs 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 âSignature Event Contextâ by recalling, precisely, the context of his talkâa talk, that is, a communication on the theme of âcommunication.â He begins with this question: âIs 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?â (âSECâ 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 Austinâs direction), for example, says Derrida, the âcommunicationâ of a movement, of a shock or a tremor, a disease or a forceâthis word âforce,â just like âcontext,â 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 (âSECâ 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 âcommunication,â that is, the French word communication and the (univocal) concept to which it would supposedly refer.
It is at this pointâwe are just a few paragraphs into the essayâthat 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 âcommunicationsâ 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. (âSECâ 310/368)
Drawing attention once again to the context of his talk in Montreal, a CongrĂšs des SociĂ©tĂ©s de Philosophie de Langue Française, Derrida recalls that the word âcommunicationâ is, obviously, a French word, a word of the French language, and that it cannot be so easily communicatedâor translatedâinto 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 âcommunication,â in this case a communication about the nature or meaning of âcommunication,â it would be very unusual, indeed hardly ordinary, to speak in English of a talk as a âcommunication.â One might speak, say, of a White House press or news release as a âcommunicationâ or, probably better, a âcommuniquĂ©,â but it is not common to speak of an academic talk at a conference or congress as a âcommunication.â 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 âto demonstrate why a context is never absolutely determinable, or rather in what way its determination is never certain or saturatedâ (âSECâ 310/369). And he will want to show that this is the case not simply in fact but in principle, that this âstructural nonsaturationâ belongs to the very nature of a context (âSECâ 310/369). While the organizers of the conference might thus have thought that the theme of âcommunicationâ had been sufficiently delimited or circumscribed by the context and through an âimplicit consensusâ on the part of participants that they would deliver communications on âcommunicationâ as discourse âwithin the horizon of an intelligibility and truth of meaningâ (âSECâ 310/368), Derrida is already suggesting that some of the most important work in communication theory is being done by those who, like Austinâthough, again, his name has not yet come up beyond the epigraphâhave 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 âthe theoretical insufficiency of the usual concept of contextâ (âSECâ 310/369), and then, in line with what he argues in Of Grammatology and elsewhere, the necessity of âa certain generalization and a certain displacement of the concept of writingâ (âSECâ 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 âwithin the general field of writing thus defined that the effects of semantic communication will be able to be determined as particular, secondary, inscribed, supplementary effectsâ (âSECâ 310â311/369). 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, whichâand we here begin to catch a glimpse of Derridaâs strategyâmakes 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 Austinâs text but from a footnote about three quarters of the way through the text: âStill confining ourselves, for simplicity, to spoken utteranceâ (âSECâ 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 essayâs three sections, âWriting and Telecommunication,â with a brief overview of the ways in which writing has typically been understood in the Western philosophical tradition. As Derridaâs subtitle already suggests, it has been understood as a kind of âtele-communication,â a powerful means for the communication of meaning that âextends very far, if not infinitely, ⊠the field and powers [pouvoirs] of a locutionary or gestural communicationâ (âSECâ 311/369â370). 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 (âSECâ 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 Ătienne Bonnet de Condillac (1714â80), who, in his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (Essai sur lâorigine 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 âinspired,â Derrida notes, by Condillacâs contemporary, the English philosopher William Warburtonâa 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, âlike all philosophy,â says Derrida, âpresupposes the simplicity of the origin and the continuity of every derivation, every production, every analysis, the homogeneity of all ordersâ (âSECâ 311/370). We will want to keep our eye on this word origin, which will attract Derridaâs attention when he turns to Austin a bit later in the essay, the simplicity of an originâor sourceâthat 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 (âSECâ 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 âabsence of the addresseeâ: âone writes in order to communicate something to those who are absentâ (âSECâ 313/372). Writing is understood in terms of the absence of the addressee, though this absenceâand this will be a second trait that Condillac shares with others in the traditionâis understood as merely temporary, that is, as the modification and progressive extension of some presence (see âSECâ 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 âa written sign is proffered in the absence of the addresseeâ (âSECâ 315/374), but if there is to be a specific difference to writing, if âabsence in the field of writingâ is to be âof an original kindâ (âSECâ 314/374), then that absence must be not only deferred but also, Derrida contends, brought to an âabsolute degreeâ (âSECâ 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 âmust remain legible [or readable, lisible] despite the absolute disappearance of every determined addressee in generalâ (âSECâ 315/375). That is, in order to be something different than speech, writing must be ârepeatableâiterableâin the absolute absence of the addresseeâ; it âmust be able to function in the radical absence of every empirically determined addressee in generalâ (âSECâ 315â316/375).
After recalling that the word iterability comes from the Sanskrit itara, me...