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C O N C E P T S
plicit interest in iiow speech acts might actually do something by breaking
or evading the rules.^^ For Derrida himself, though, particularly interest
ed in how things often fail to go quite as expected or prescribed, the per-
formativity o f language is fundamental to the possibility o f inauguration,
change, which is precisely not rule-governea!, though o f course made pos
sible by rules and procedures in place, which language cites as it attempts
something new. This interest in the link between iterability and transfor
mation is Butler’s Derridean inheritance/'*
In fact, Austin and Butler seem to have two different sorts o f acts in
view. Austins examples appear to be singular acts, which can be accom
plished once and for all, if I meet the conditions o f felicity. I f I am the um
pire o f a soccer match in progress, I can, by declaring that a kick was good,
make it a goal. In the performative theory o f gender, by contrast, no act in
itself brings something about. I become a man only through massive, daily
repetition o f conventional procedures.
But the notion o f the speech act itself raises questions about this
distinction, between singular acts and iteration. As Derrida shows in his
reading o f Austin, the iterability that is the condition o f possibility o f per
formatives introduces a gap that puts in question a rigorous distinction
between singular events and repetitions. But this apparent difference be
tween two sorts o f act brings us back to the problem o f the nature o f the
literary event, accentuating a distinction that was concealed in the appro
priation o f the notion o f performative for thinking about literature. On
the one hand, the literary work seems to accomplish a singular, specific act.
It creates that reality that is the work, and its sentences accomplish some
thing in particular in that work. For each work, one can try to specify what
it and its parts accomplish, just as one can try to spell out what is promised
43. Hillis Miller is certainly right to stress that Austin’s own attempt to do
something radically new in philosophy needs to be taken into account in drawing
such a contrast (see Miller, Speech Acts in Literature), but it is nonetheless true that
Austin never tries to theorize how something not allowed for by the rules might
take place or how one does something one is not authorized to do (as in a decla
ration of independence).
44. It is important to recognize, though, that the performative cannot ac
count for the event, which, if it is truly an event, erupts. “The event belongs to a
perhaps that is in keeping not with the possible but with the impossible. And its
force is therefore irreducible to the force or power o f the performative” (Derrida,
Without Alibi, 235).
in a particular act o f promising. This, one might say, is the Austinian ver
sion o f the literary event.
But on the other hand, thinking o f Butler’s model, we could say that
a work succeeds, becomes an event, by a massive repetition that takes up
norms and, possibly, changes things. If a novel happens, it does so because,
in its singularity, it inspires a passion that gives life to these forms, in acts
o f reading and recollection, repeating its inflection o f the conventions o f
the novel and, perhaps, effecting an alteration in the norms or the forms
through which readers go on to confront the world. A poem may very well
disappear without a trace, but it may also trace itself in memories and give
rise to acts o f repetition. Its performativity, then, is less a singular act ac
complished once and for all than a repetition that gives life to forms that
it repeats.
This double approach may help us to reflect on the nature o f litera
ture as event. Derrida notes that literature is
an institution that consists in transgressing and transforming, thus in producing
its constitutional law; or, to put it better, in producing discursive forms, “works,”
and “events” in which the very possibility o f a fundamental constitution is at least
“fictionally” contested, threatened, deconstructed, presented in its very precari
ousness. Hence, while literature shares a certain power and a certain destiny with
“jurisdiction,” with the juridico-political production of institutional foundations,
the constitutions of states, fundamental legislation, and even the theological-ju-
ridico performatives which occur at the beginning of law, at a certain point it can
only exceed them, interrogate them, “fictionalize” them: with nothing, or almost
nothing, in view, of course, and by producing events whose “reality” or duration
is never assured, but which by that very fact are more thought-provoking, if that
still means something.'*^
Butler’s model helps us— although this is in no way her goal— to conceive
o f this unusual performativity that interrogates by repeating foundational
acts— in a repetition that can have critical value, as it animates and alters
forms that it repeats.
The fortunes o f the performative are striking in the disparities among
the various conceptions and assumptions. Austin’s initial challenge to a
philosophical assumption that language was above all a means o f repre
sentation and that truth or falsity must thus be the primary categories o f
45. Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” 73.
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