154
C O N C E P T S
this impossible combination o f performative and constative that particu
larly interests Derrida as he explores the possibility o f acts o f inauguration
or invention. Unlike Austin, who took the impossibility o f distinguishing
rigorously between performative and constative as grounds for a retreat,
Derrida insists that inaugural events require both— that the contradictory
combination, “a performative structure and a constative structure, is re
quired in order to produce the sought-after effect.”
The tension between the performative and constative dimensions of
literary and philosophical utterance is what emerges, in all its philosophi
cal and political ramifications, in the analyses o f Paul de Man. De Man,
one might say, starts from the difficulty Austin encounters o f separating
performative and constative but takes this difficulty to be a crucial feature
of the functioning o f language that cannot be remedied by approaching
the matter differently, as Austin tried to do. If every utterance is both per
formative and constative, including at least an implicit assertion o f a state
o f affairs and a linguistic act, the relation between what an utterance says
and what it does is not necessarily harmonious or cooperative. On the con
trary. For de Man the moments that show us language at its most charac
teristic are utterances that exhibit a paradoxical or self-undermining rela
tionship between performative and constative, between what they do and
what they state.
Recall the Frost poem discussed in Chapter i:
The Secret Sits
We dance round in a ring and suppose.
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.^’
This poem depends on the opposition between supposing and knowing.
To explore what attitude the poem takes to this opposition, what values
it attaches to its opposing terms, we can ask whether the poem itself is in
the mode o f supposing or o f knowing. Does the poem suppose, like “we”
who dance round, or does it know, like the secret? As a product o f the hu
man imagination, the poem might seem an example o f supposing, a case
o f dancing around, but its gnomic, proverbial character and its confident
29. Robert Frost, The Complete Poems (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1958),
495
-
The Performative
155
assertion o f the fact that the secret “knows” make it seem very knowing in
deed. So we can’t be sure. But what does the poem show us about know
ing.^ The secret, which is something that one knows or does not know—
thus, an object o f knowing— here becomes by metonymy the subject o f
knowing, what knows rather than what is or is not known. By capitalizing
and personifying the entity, the Secret, the poem performs a rhetorical op
eration that promotes the object o f knowledge to the position o f subject;
it presents knowing as something produced by a rhetorical supposition or
personification. The knowing secret is produced by an act o f supposing.
The poem thus foregrounds the dependency o f its constative assertion,
that the secret knows, on a performative supposing that creates the sub
ject supposed to know— a remarkable involution for an apparently simple
couplet, but such are the intricacies o f the struggle between performative
and constative.
In de Man’s essays, whether on Nietzsche, Rousseau, or Proust, the
constative is the inescapable claim o f language to transparency, to repre
sent things as they are, to name things that are already there (sometimes he
substitutes cognitive for constative to emphasize the epistemological stakes:
“The interest o f Rousseau’s text is that it functions performatively as well
as cognitively”).^® The performative for de Man consists o f the rhetorical
operations, the acts o f language, that undermine this claim by imposing
linguistic categories, organizing the world rather than simply representing
what is. In Nietzsche, he writes, “ [t]he critique o f metaphysics is struc
tured as an aporia between performative and constative language.” ^^ The
“aporia,” the “impasse” o f an undecidable oscillation, as when the chicken
depends on the egg but the egg depends on the chicken, here entails that
the only way to claim that language functions performatively to shape the
world is through a constative, such as “Language shapes the world” ; but on
the other hand, there is no way to claim the constative transparency o f lan
guage except by a speech act. The propositions that perform the illocution-
ary act o f stating necessarily claim to do nothing but merely display things
as they are; yet if you want to show the contrary— that claims to represent
things as they are in fact impose their categories on the world— ^you have
no way to do this except through claims about what is or is not the case. So
30. Paul de Man, Allegories o f Reading: Figurai Language in Rousseau, N i
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
