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C O N C E P T S
d’araignée mondiale” for the World Wide Web, or “un courriel” for an e-
mail, but “unauthorized” French speakers persist in speaking o f sending
each other “un mail,” and they invariably prevail.
Derridas broadly based account accomplishes something scarcely ev
ident in Austin’s more narrowly drawn specification o f the performative:
to link the concept o f performative language to the creative power o f lan
guage and to the problem o f origination in general. Austin’s title is How to
Do Things with Words, but his account can imply that we are doing things
with words primarily when we gather ourselves hereby to perform a pub
lic, authorized act, according to socially stipulated rules, whereas language
acts in singular yet iterable ways all the time.
The performative thus relates to the general problem o f acts that
originate or inaugurate, acts that create something new, in the political as
well as literary sphere. In literature, Derrida writes,
this experience of writing is “subject” to an imperative: to give space for singular
events, to invent something new in the form of acts of writing which no longer
consist in a theoretical knowledge, in new constative statements, to give oneself to
a poetico-literary performativity at least analogous to that of promises, orders, or
acts of constitution or legislarion which do not only change language or which, in
changing language, change more than language.^'*
Not only is the performativity o f literature analogous to that o f constitu
tions and other acts o f inauguration; literature, he observes, is “a system of
performative possibilities that accompanied the modern form o f democ
racy. Political constitutions have a discursive regime identical to that o f the
constitution o f literary structures.
One way to explicate this claim is to say that the act o f constitution,
like that o f literature, depends on a complex and paradoxical combination
of the performative and constative, where in order to succeed, the act must
convince by referring to states o f affairs but where success consists o f bring
ing into being the condition to which it refers. Literary works claim to tell
us about the world, but if they succeed, they do so by bringing into being
the characters and events they relate. Something similar is at work in inau-
24. Jacques Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” inter
view by Derek Attridge, in Derrida, Acts o f Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New
York: Roudedge, 1992), 55.
25. Ibid,
gural acts in the political sphere. Derrida asks, o f the Declaration o f Inde
pendence o f the United States, made in the name o f the “good People” o f
the colonies, whether
the good people have already freed themselves in fact and are only stating the fact
of this emancipation in [par] the Declaration? Or is it rather that they free them
selves at the instant of and by [par] the signature of this Declaration? . . . This
obscurity, this undecidability between, let’s say, a performative structure and a
constative structure, is required in order to produce the sought-after effect. It is es
sential to the very positing or position of a right as such.^®
In fact, this “good people,” in whose name the declaration is issued,
“does not exist before this declaration, not as such. I f it gives birth to itself,
as free and independent subject, as possible signer, this can hold only in
the act o f the signature. The signature invents the signer.
The people be
come a people only through the declaration their representatives sign on
their behalf, yet the declaration depends on its being made in the name o f
a people that does not exist as such until their autonomy is declared. More
over, in the Declaration o f Independence the key sentence reads, “We,
therefore, the Representatives o f the united States o f America, in Gen
eral Congress Assembled, . . . do, in the Name, and by the Authority o f
the good People o f these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare. That
these United Colonies are, and o f Right ought to be Free and Indepen
dent States.” Is independence stated or produced by this utterance? The
declaration that these states are independent looks constative but is a per
formative that is supposed to create the new reality to which it refers, but
to support this claim, the assertion is made (fundamentally constative, as a
claim about a state o f affairs) that they ought to be independent.^* A similar
structure underlies the famous “We hold these truths to be self-evident,”
where the truth o f self-evidence is buttressed by a performative holding or
deeming that nevertheless puts in question their alleged self-evidence. It is
26. Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” New Political Science
15 (summer 1986): 9.
27. Ibid., 10.
28. Derrida’s analysis seems to me to reverse or at least to blur this point.
He writes of this sentence, “the ‘and’ articulates and conjoins here the two discur
sive modalities: the to be and the ought to be, the constation [constat] and the
prescription, the fact and the right” (ibid., 11). But it is the assertion of what ought
to be that is constative and the declaration that it is the case that is performative.
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