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Being Jacques Derrida
Mario Ortiz-Robles
University of Wisconsin, Madison
mortizrobles@wisc.edu
(c) 2005 Mario Ortiz-Robles.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi. Ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.
1. Without Alibi, a collection of five essays written by Jacques
Derrida in response to various provocations both in France and in
the United States, is not without its own alibis. It is, first of
all, a book that came into being at the suggestion of Peggy Kamuf,
one of Derrida's most reliable American translators, and, in this
case, also his editor, compiler, and virtual collaborator. As
Derrida tells us in his foreword--or alibi of a foreword,
sandwiched as it is between the editor's preface and the
translator's introduction--the book is "more and other than a
translation" since it is "countersigned" by Kamuf. In her own
telling, the collection seeks to trace the "movement of response
and engagement" that characterizes the reception of Derrida's work
in the United States and his own critical reaction to that
reception. Kamuf's collection is, in this sense, Derrida's
American alibi, or "elsewhere" ("alibi" in Latin), an apt
description of the act of translation and a compelling
prescription for an ethics of authorship, or of countersignature
as performance, that the book can be said to be enacting. It is in
this regard tempting to group Without Alibi together with other
collaborative works Derrida published late in his life. I am
thinking here of the very different and very differently
conceptualized collaborations he performed with a number of French
women, Elizabeth Rudinesco (For What Tomorrow...), Catherine
Malabou (Counterpath), Hélène Cixous (Veils and Portrait of
Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint), and Anne Dufourmantelle
(Of Hospitality).
2. Unlike these books, Without Alibi is a peculiarly American
product, and not only because it is, as Derrida puts it, a
"native" of "America," referring no doubt to the fact that the
book was published in America by an American university press
without, as it were, a French alibi. Indeed, there is no "French
original" to this book, even if all five essays were written in
French and four were delivered, in French, as lectures before
audiences in both France and the United States. The fifth, "'Le
Parjure,' /Perhaps/: Storytelling and Lying," which was the only
piece originally destined for publication, was written for a
volume commemorating the work of his "friend and eminent
colleague" J. Hillis Miller. Two of the lectures (both of which
have appeared in print elsewhere) were also delivered with a
specifically American alibi: "Typewritter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)"
was first read at a conference held in 1998 at the University of
California, Davis, on Paul de Man's posthumously published
Aesthetic Theory, and "History of the Lie: Prolegomena" was
presented at the New School for Social Research in New York as
part of a series commemorating the work of Hannah Arendt. To use a
designation elsewhere explored by Derrida, the book has thus been
thoroughly "copyrighted" in America (and copyrighted, at least
materially in this instance, by the trustees of Stanford
University, which Kamuf calls a "great university" and which,
incidentally perhaps--a professional alibi?--sponsored the
conference at which Derrida delivered "The University Without
Condition," the only essay in Without Alibi not to have appeared
in print before). America is thus, in this collection, one of the
most persistent alibis for the labor of translation and editing
and collaboration and even copyright Kamuf so ably performs. Being
Jacques Derrida's "elsewhere," Kamuf does an admirable job of
bringing together five texts that, in their different ways,
trouble the conditions of production that have brought them
together in the first place. And if, as Kamuf writes in the
introduction, the "essential trait" shared by all five essays is
the notion of sovereignty, then we can say that it is American
insofar as, today, sovereignty can be given the name "America"
even as it actively, and without alibi, claims it as its own
copyright.
3. The book is peculiarly American for another reason. Its "essential
trait" may well be a different sort of collaboration or about a
different sort of copyright. Derrida's complex, often critical, at
times openly hostile, and ultimately fruitful collaboration with
the work of J.L. Austin (particularly How to Do Things with Words,
the lectures Austin delivered at Harvard), and speech act theory
more generally, becomes a compelling alibi for the choice of
essays in this collection. I may be seen to be using the term
"collaboration" somewhat loosely here: Derrida's critique of
Austin, whose performativity as an intervention is too often
allowed to go unnoticed, could hardly be said to entail a working
together, or co-labor. In addition, the far from collaborative,
and, indeed, belabored, debate that took place in the 1970s
between Derrida and John R. Searle, who seemingly took upon
himself the task of responding for and in the name of Austin to
Derrida's initial critique, revolved on one of its axes around the
question of copyright and the incorporation of various
collaborators, real or virtual, into a single legal identity, a
"Limited Inc," as it were. Yet, as the essays in Without Alibi
demonstrate with their citational and iterative use of
performativity, the term "collaboration" can be understood in the
active sense of "working with" others, a joint intellectual labor
that, to use Austin's catchy phrase, does things with words. In
the spirit of Derrida's treatment of ethics and responsibility in
his later work, this co-labor may be said to entail an engagement
with or response to the call of the other as the horizon of
performative force. The word "collaboration," of course, trembles
under the weight of its political history and, especially, of that
of Paul de Man's wartime writings, an act that remains
categorically "without alibi," no matter what revanchist purposes
they have served his detractors. Derrida's patient, arduous, and
no doubt painful response to de Man's wartime writings--one of
whose moments or occasions is the essay "'Le Parjure,' /Perhaps/:
Storytelling and Lying" that appears in this volume--is, at least
in part, articulated by his understanding of what it is to do
things with words: a co-labor responsive to the other's call.
Indeed, de Man's own reading of Austin--a reading to which Derrida
returns in "Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)"--has so many
points of contact with Derrida's reading that one can only imagine
it as a collaborative effort, an act of interlocution that was in
no small measure responsible for initiating or inaugurating what
came to be "deconstruction" in America. Derrida's long-standing
engagement with the United States critical scene and with the
reception of his work by the American academy can in this same
sense be profitably thought of as a collaborative critique of
performativity.
4. It is this general critique of performativity, I want to suggest,
that makes the Kamuf/Derrida collaboration in Without Alibi
particularly valuable at a time of increased resistance to theory
and perhaps to non-coercive forms of collaboration. At one level,
many of the topics or themes Derrida pursues in his essays pertain
to explicit performative speech acts of the sort Austin isolated,
such as lying, promising, making excuses, professing, confessing,
and producing alibis of all sorts, and, at another, many of the
concepts Derrida treats, such as the signature, responsibility,
the event, citizenship, the death penalty, and /mondialisation/,
are formulated from within his critique of Austin. At yet another
level--and this is where collaboration nears performative
efficacy--the collection itself encapsulates the history of
Derrida's engagement with the United States critical scene, a
history that, in Kamuf's selection at least, is linked to a
general critique of the performative. Two of the essays in Without
Alibi, for instance, look back upon the work of some of Derrida's
most important collaborators (as in co-workers or sometime
colleagues) in the United States (whether American or not): "'Le
Parjure,' /Perhaps/: Storytelling and Lying" is written for a
collection of essays for J. Hillis Miller, but deals with a
fictional account (Henri Thomas's novel /Le Parjure/) of what may
be read as Paul de Man's life before arriving in the United
States; "Typewritter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)" traces some of the
most salient motifs of de Man's reading of Rousseau's
/Confessions/ as an occasion to revisit Derrida's reading of
Austin and Searle's critique of this reading as it appeared
originally in "Limited Inc a b c."
5. All five essays, in fact, perform or enact this critique, such
that, more than the "essential trait" of the collection, one could
say that performativity is its "alibi" since performativity, in
Derrida, never really achieves the systematicity of a method nor
even the thematic density of a concept metaphor. A discursive
modality that categorically resists allegorization, the
performative precipitates, prompts, and provokes narrative effects
through discrete acts of speech but never itself becomes a central
organizing principle. In her illuminating introduction, "Event of
Resistance," Kamuf characterizes Derrida's return to Austin in the
essays as a response to the tendency (perhaps especially, but not
exclusively, evident in the United States) of taking
"performativity" to be a transformative empowerment. Precisely
because these cultural theories of performativity rely on the
conventionality of speech acts to create the appearance of social
inevitability, Derrida asks us to reconsider and resist the
all-too-neatly reflexive notion that the performative produces the
event of which it speaks. As he writes in "The University Without
Condition": "where there is the performative, an event worthy of
the name cannot arrive" (234).
6. As these examples illustrate, Without Alibi forcefully reminds us
why Derrida was initially drawn to Austin's formulation of the
performative and why he found the various attempts at formalizing
the latter's discovery highly problematic. First of all, insofar
as Austin's isolation of the performative was the formalization of
an always already existing force of language that, while
operative, had never been named, we can consider the confusion
between constative and performative utterances (that is, between
statements that can be said to be true or false and locutions that
actually do something by being uttered) as a particularly
significant instance of the sort of ideological obfuscation
Derrida termed "logocentrism" and whose critique--call the
necessary course it took "deconstruction"--was in itself as
"great" an "event" as he claims Austin's discovery of the
performative to have been. For Derrida, Austin's formulation of
the performative shatters the traditional concept of communication
since the performative is found to be, as act, a nonreferential
force of language that categorically resists the notion of speech
as the transference of a given semantic content oriented towards
truth. And it is precisely the nonreferential aspect of
performative speech acts that was initially of most interest to
Derrida and can even be said to have set the conditions of the
possibility of his critique of Austin since it is the latter's
failure to take account of the general applicability of his own
discovery that destabilizes the oppositions he wishes to formulate
(constative vs. performative; parasitic vs. non-parasitic uses of
language; happy vs. unhappy performatives; etc.).
7. The political and intellectual stakes of Derrida's critique of
performativity are certainly very high. In the "History of the
Lie: Prolegomena," for instance, he speaks of the "performative
violence" of state law:
When performatives succeed, they produce a truth whose power
sometimes imposes itself forever: the location of a boundary,
the installation of a state are always acts of performative
violence that, if the conditions of the international
community permit it, create the law . . . . In creating the
law, this performative violence--which is neither legal nor
illegal--creates what is then held to be legal truth, the
dominant and juridically incontestable public truth. (51)
The very real events that performative speech acts can and do
effect within institutional frameworks rely for their efficacy on
a particular misreading or, in a vocabulary Derrida seldom has any
use for, ideology, both in the sense that the performative is
often confused with the constative (insofar as an act is read as a
true or false statement) and in the sense that it is naturalized
as an evident or obvious fact with no history of its own. For
Derrida, it is not enough to identify the force of the
performative and formalize its features (a task, in any case,
undertaken with admirable clarity by Austin himself). One must
also be alert to the instability of the performative/constative
distinction and be ready to live with the constant oscillation
between the two as the condition of possibility of responsible
action.
8. In "Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impossible
Beyond of a Sovereign Culture," the last essay in Without Alibi,
Derrida explores this oscillation within the institutional
confines of psychoanalysis, proposing nothing less than a new
revolution in psychoanalytic reason in the spirit of a States
General of Psychoanalysis. Of the three states or orders he
isolates, it is the performative to which he ascribes the role of
"inventing and reinventing" the institutional, normative,
procedural "laws" of psychoanalysis in contradistinction to the
theoretical or descriptive order of knowledge we associate with
the constative. But it is only when psychoanalysis begins to
contemplate the impossible coming of an event worthy of its name
that the distinction falls apart and, in the face of unpredictable
alterity, the orders of power (constative) and of the possible
(performative) are "put to rout." In practical, should we say
academic, terms, the stakes of this form of deconstructive
practice are also taken into account, not least because the
"event" of Austin's originary formulation is, as Derrida reminds
us, an "academic event" in the first place. Thus, in the sixth of
the seven theses or "professions of faith" with which Derrida
concludes "The University Without Conditions" (in a manner, one
need perhaps not add, that is itself performative), he has this to
say concerning the humanities of tomorrow: "It will surely be
necessary, even if things have already begun here or there, to
study the history and the limits of such a decisive distinction
[between performative acts and constative acts] . . . This
deconstructive work would not concern only the original and
brilliant /oeuvre/ of Austin but also his rich and fascinating
inheritance, over the last half-century, in particular in the
Humanities" (233).
9. Without Alibi has the great merit of exposing us to a significant
part of that inheritance through Derrida's specific engagements
with Austin and through the rich history of what I have called
these essays' "collaboration." Derrida's reading of Austin and the
many debates, commentaries, and countersignatures this reading has
inspired over the years can, I think, be singled out as one of the
events that helped launch and entrench deconstruction in America.
Its force as event might serve as a reminder or emblem of the
stakes involved in conceptualizing the performative: it can
revolutionize the intellectual landscape. To call Derrida's
critique of performativity "American" is then also to point
towards a certain performative violence that, in the service of
institutional truth or of legal expediency (read: copyright), has
been done to the humanities, generally making them less hospitable
to collaboration, countersignature, deconstruction--in short, to
theory.
10. It would therefore be naïve to characterize Peggy Kamuf's
countersignature in Without Alibi as a "performance" of Derrida or
of deconstruction. Naïve because it is not a matter of choice or
intention to utter certain speech acts, and, in so doing or
saying, to transform ourselves into an "other." We do not have
that choice, since the performative/constative distinction turns
out to be, more than a discursive modality, the very condition of
possibility of language doing or saying anything at all. Being
Jacques Derrida, one realizes after reading Without Alibi, is a
far more difficult task than performing a critical role (that
would be, perhaps, just an alibi for responsibility); it is an
impossibly collaborative event towards which Kamuf bravely makes
the leap as though to salute a stranger who only gets stranger
with each subsequent exposure.
Department of English
University of Wisconsin, Madison
mortizrobles@wisc.edu
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