Rene — Keenan — Drift: Politics and the Simulation of Real Life
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Territories/Islands
An earlier version of this paper by Tom Keenan was given in February 2005 at a conference in honor of Jacques Derrida jointly organized by Peter Goodrich of the Cardozo Law School and Anselm Haverkamp of New York University.
Drift: Politics and the Simulation of Real Life
THOMAS KEENAN
For Jacques Derrida
But here is yet one more turn, and it is political: is it not also democracy that gives the right to irony in the public space? Yes, for democracy opens public space, the publicity of public space, by granting the right to a change of tone (Wechsel der Töne), to irony as well as to fiction, the simulacrum, the secret, literature, and so on. And, thus, to a certain nonpublic public within the public, to a res publica, a republic where the difference between the public and the nonpublic remains an undecidable limit. —Jacques Derrida, Voyous
In his discussion of the “felicity conditions” of the performative utterance, J.L. Austin provides an amusing and unforgettable moment when he introduces the “low type.”[1] He has been explaining that performatives—making promises, christening ships, opening meetings or conferences—are to be judged not by their truth or falsity or their correspondence with reality but simply by their success or failure, because what matters most about performatives is whether or not they take place. How they happen, though, or what else needs to be in place in order for them to take place, is the question. “When I say ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’ I do not describe the christening ceremony, I actually perform the christening,” writes Austin.[2] What matters is that the thing gets done, and events like this have a chance of succeeding only if their corresponding speech acts are performed properly— that is to say, by the right person, addressed to the right object, using the right words, uttered at the right time and place. The power does not reside simply in the words themselves, however necessary the words are. They are not magic words or incantations; they are contextually bound formulas. So they cannot be repeated out of context, or by the wrong person, and have any chance of working. Context, which precedes the utterance, conditions its success or failure.
For instance, imagine all the dignitaries are lined up at the shipyard for the christening of that new ship. “You have been appointed to name it,” Austin writes. You’ve learned the correct formula, the bottle of champagne is in your hands, and you’re right on the verge of smashing it across the bow as you utter the words that give the ship its name. “But,” imagines Austin, “at that very moment some low type comes up, snatches the bottle out of your hand, breaks it on the stem, shouts out ‘I name this ship the Generalissimo Stalin,’ and then for good measure kicks away the chocks.” Needless to say, says Austin, “We agree that the ship certainly isn’t now named the Generalissimo Stalin, and we agree that it’s an infernal shame and so on and so forth.”[3] The interruption may have been rude, disruptive, and irritating, but Austin does not think it is dangerous. It requires no policing. There is no doubt that the ship did not get named. As Derrida has pointed out, Austin insists that the mere repetition of the formula, even “a perfectly legitimate and agreed procedure,” has no effect whatsoever when it “has been invoked in the wrong circumstances, namely by the wrong person, this low type instead of the person appointed to do it.”[4] That, in fact, is the point of the story, to underline the nonnegotiable character of “circumstances” or context and to disqualify mimicry, representation, or repetition of the performative phrase.[5] The context automates the protective or policing function because it comes first. Thus Austin can analyze the failure further: “we might look at it differently and say that this is a case where the procedure has not as a whole been gone through correctly, because part of the procedure for naming a ship is that you should first of all get yourself appointed as the person to do the naming and that’s what this fellow did not do.”[6]
So, unappointed, the low type and his and her attempted takeover—a sort of hijacking, however peaceful—of the ceremony are destined, by definition, to failure. In How to Do Things with Words, Austin (taking the place of the low type) explains that “my ‘action’ was ‘void’ or ‘without effect,’ because I was not a proper person, had not the ‘capacity’ to perform it”; in other words, given the context, which is to say the pre-given identity of the speaker, it never had a chance. The “action” was empty precisely insofar as it was a “mockery.”7 Austin’s analysis of the performative utterance structurally isolates the context from the utterances within it. Context precedes and governs, enables and disables, those speech acts—from a seemingly unreachable distance. And the circumstances have the force of law.[8]
Austin quickly abandons the story of the low type and does not pursue his or her fate, because there is no need to do so. In a very real sense the speech of the low type, “not a proper person,” does not take place: it is unheard, even unhearable; it barely counts as speech. It is noise, a disturbance, a “misfire” barely distinguishable from a backfire, effectively unrecognizable as a speech act at all … a kind of “lowing,” we might say. In the summer of 1989, just as the question metonymized by Stalin was finally fading from the geopolitical stage, the matter of a performative, now biopolitical, again arose.[9]
The Fifth International AIDS Conference was about to open in Montreal, and once again the people whose lives depended on the proceedings of the conference were locked out of it. I am not sure whether we can still appreciate how profoundly different things were then in the struggle against HIV and AIDS on the North American continent. As the conference began, a reporter for the Guardian wrote: “More than 10,000 scientists, condom salesmen, psychiatrists, and drug company representatives employed in combating Aids yesterday gathered in Montreal for the largest conference in medical history… The only Aids interest group scarcely represented are the victims.”[10] The exclusion was categorical. “Up until that June day, the conference was a members-only event for the AIDS establishment, a chance for scientists to hobnob with their fellow wizards while dispensing wisdom and press releases to beleaguered doctors and a fawning press,” wrote activist-journalist Ron Goldberg. People with AIDS, he said, had been to that moment “presented mainly as abstractions, their lives reduced to statistics on spreadsheets, their needs and desires mere sidelights to the noble pursuit of science.”[11] Then something different happened. As Rex Wockner recounted: To their own astonishment and to the cheers of many conference participants, more than 300 members of ACT/UP New York, Toronto’s AIDS Action Now, and Reaction SIDA of Montreal marched into the Palais de Congres, commandeered the escalators, entered the main conference site, took over the stage, demanded that the microphones be turned on, and, in the name of persons with AIDS, “officially” opened the Fifth International Conference on AIDS on June 4th… Responding to posters and banners criticizing government inaction on AIDS, about half of the thousands of people awaiting the opening ceremonies cheered and applauded the disruption. After half an hour of chanting and stomping by demonstrators, Toronto activist Tim McCaskell took the main microphone and announced, “On behalf of persons living with AIDS in Canada and around the world, I would like to officially open the Fifth International Conference on AIDS.” Referring to the disruption, McCaskell continued, “This conference has now changed international AIDS conferences forever.”
On a day when the Chinese army clashed with demonstrators in Beijing the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) evening news devoted several minutes to the anger of the AIDS activists in Montreal. “It wasn’t the way the Fifth International Conference on AIDS was supposed to begin at all,” the CBC correspondent reported.[12] Goldberg wrote: “There we were, the uninvited guests, taking our rightful place at the heart of the conference.”[13] How do the uninvited come to take a rightful place in politics? That is a fundamental question about politics. What happened? Misfire? Low types? A shame? Can we agree that the conference certainly wasn’t officially opened?
No: with that sentence, that formula, that performative (“I would like to officially open the Fifth International Conference”) repeated or uttered by a distinctly unqualified speaker, the conference actually opened. There was an interruption, a negotiation, a deal, and an effective utterance: whether it was happy or unhappy, felicitous or infelicitous, fire or misfire is an ethical or political judgment now. But we can say that, shame or no, the conference opened, and opened differently, it opened or turned into something else, it opened with and for and through the very people about but not with whom it had previously spoken. And the protesters never left, ever, as Goldberg reported: [I]t was only when we refused to leave the auditorium and instead parked ourselves in the VIP section that the crowd realized that our action was more than just a symbolic protest. Despite threats and rumors of a potential “international incident,” we remained in our seats, alternately chanting and cheering, and giving notice that PWAs were “inside” the conference to stay. From that point on in the crisis, researchers would have to make extra room at the table for PWAs and their advocates.[14] Austin’s low types succeeded, more or less, not only in quoting (“mentioning”) the performative but in actually using it, actually opening the conference, performing the act that in a strong sense the context was designed to prohibit. In technical terms, they used and mentioned the phrase at the same time, in fact. Which means that the act not only failed to respect the context but outright changed it: accomplishing the speech act also meant transforming the conditions in which it was spoken and received, thus transforming the political context of AIDS discourse and science.
The context changed. Uncounted, unaccounted-for speakers entered and made themselves heard, made themselves into something else, by rewriting the context and the conference. Perched on the edge of the rules, on the edge of the law or of the political sphere, they succeeded in breaking and changing the law at the same time, in breaking into and thus transforming the political conditions that rendered speech and action intelligible.
For them it was a matter of acquiring, in an active way, the status that seems to go without saying. “Think of us all as human,” read the headline later that week in the Toronto Star, and the slight misquotation from a speech at the conference by a person with AIDS—who actually said “think of people like me as a human being first and a person with AIDS second”—underlined what was at stake in the transformation.[15]
The interest of this little fable is not just as a story of an unusual political act, or an unprecedented speech act, or a powerful rights claim (the reading of a manifesto), but as the opening or invention of a new political space. The Montreal protestors did not merely claim preexisting rights. They had no rights prior to this, in both the limited and the extended sense, in this context. In this zone, a matter of (their, among others) lives and deaths, they had no access; they did not count. They were excluded, but not simply excluded. They were condemned, banished, or abandoned. Here they claimed, and enacted, the right to claim rights, the right to politics, the right to be human, to participate in a forum and a community, to sit at a table and speak and be heard.
How did it happen? We will misunderstand the event fundamentally if we accept it simply as evidence of the triumph of “free speech,” of liberal-democratic institutions, of individuals finally able to speak in their true voices and make their own claims, an assertive subjectivity that refuses exclusion or censorship and cannot, ultimately, be contained or repressed. Austin, after all, is right: the circumstances do matter, almost entirely. They are not at the disposal of speakers to change at will—they let us speak, give us a place, make us subjects.16 But the rules, contexts, and capacities are not absolutely fixed either, and one version of the basic question of politics is this: How do they change? How are they changed?
Judith Butler has shown in her powerful reading of “a politics of the performative” that “the conditions of intelligibility [for utterances] are themselves formulated in and by power, and this normative exercise of power is rarely acknowledged as an operation of power at all.”[17] This means that a certain operation of censorship determines who will be a subject depending on whether the speech of such a candidate for subjecthood obeys certain norms governing what is speakable and what is not. To move outside the domain of speakability is to risk one’s status as a subject. To embody the norms that govern speakability is to consummate one’s status as a subject of speech. “Impossible speech” would be precisely the ramblings of the asocial, the rantings of the “psychotic” that the rules that govern the domain of speakability produce, and by which they are continually haunted.[18]
So how does impossible speech get spoken, if it does?[19] I won’t fully undertake the analysis here, but my suggestion is that the structure of this act is best understood in terms of the reading Derrida has given of Austin’s propositions on performative utterances. In “Signature Event Context” (a speech given in Montreal twenty-something years before the Fifth International AIDS Conference), the emphasis appeared to be on failure, on challenging or undermining the capacity of the context, in Austin’s analysis, to hold onto and secure the successful “firing” of the performative utterance. So Derrida famously wrote:
And this is the possibility on which I want to insist: the possibility of disengagement and citational graft which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written, and which constitutes every mark in writing before and outside of every horizon of semiolinguistic communication; in writing, which is to say in the possibility of its functioning being cut off, at a certain point, from its ‘original’ meaning [vouloir-dire] and from its participation in a saturable and constraining context.[20] But it turned out, of course, that this is not just what made performatives fail: “you cannot deny that there are performatives that also succeed,” Derrida says, as if to himself, later in the essay, “and one has to account for them: meetings are called to order, people say ‘I pose a question’; they bet, challenge, christen ships, and sometimes even marry.”[21]
Derrida goes on to show that they succeed, of course, for the same reasons Austin thought caused their failure: precisely because “the formula I pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage, [is] identifi- able as conforming to an iterable model, identifiable in some way as a ‘citation.’”[22] Without the repetition nothing would get started. This repetition and recognition, implicit citation, is the everyday life of language. Strangely, this structure of repetition and quotation is what, for Derrida, enables novelty, invention, creation—not just that new meetings could open and new ships get named, but entirely new kinds of things could come into existence—and this is the heart of the analysis for my purposes: Every sign, linguistic or non-linguistic, spoken or written … can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engender new contexts to infinity, in an absolutely illimitable [non saturable] way.[23]
The citation is not simply a meaningful utterance, either. Derrida’s emphasis is on the “force” of the utterance, the “breaking force” or force de rupture that structures every utterance or every mark.[24] It can, it must be able to, break out of any given context, be detached from its circumstances, and not become nonfunctional.
A written syntagma can always be detached from the chain in which it is inserted or given without causing it to lose all possibility of functioning, if not all possibility of “communicating,” precisely. One can perhaps come to recognize other possibilities in it by inscribing it or grafting it into other chains. No context can entirely enclose it.[25] Derrida names this force with the word “drift [dérive]”—an “essential drift bearing on writing as an iterative structure, cut off from all absolute responsibility, from consciousness as the ultimate authority.”[26] The break from context is also the emergence of speech—or writing—as act, the break with the semantic or hermeneutic horizon.
In an oddly allegorical (or “literal”) way, that’s what happened in Montreal. The act broke with or breached the context and in doing so changed it decisively, turned it into something new. The citation of the inaugural formula was not simply successful. It was not, in an important sense, successful at all—because it was not possible. Starting from this impossibility, it did something different, beyond possibility and mere success.[27]
We are far from Austin’s certainty about the distinction between the actual act and its mockery, between a proper person and one who is not. In the confusion, questions open up, as best summarized in Butler’s critique of Bourdieu’s “conservative account of the speech act,” which fails “to consider the crisis in convention that speaking the unspeakable produces.”[28] Butler’s example comes from the U.S. civil rights movement:
But is there a sure way of distinguishing between the imposter and the real authority? And are there moments in which the utterance forces a blurring between the two, where the utterance calls into question the established rounds of legitimacy, where the utterance, in fact, performatively produces a shift in the terms of legitimacy as an effect of the utterance itself? … By understanding the false or wrong invocations as reiterations, we see how the form of social institutions undergoes change and alteration and how an invocation that has no prior legitimacy can have the effect of challenging existing forms of legitimacy, breaking open the possibility of future forms. When Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus, she had no prior right to do so guaranteed by any of the segregationist conventions of the South. And yet, in laying claim to the right for which she had no prior authorization, she endowed a certain authority on the act, and began the insurrectionary process of overthrowing those established codes of legitimacy.[29]
With the utterance, with the admission and assimilation of the previously uninvited guests, a new context was engendered, new speakers emerged, the place and time changed and with it the force and meaning of the public sphere and the identities of those within it. An AIDS conference that recognizes people with AIDS is structurally different from one that excludes them, and the sense of the activity within it transforms. The active end of exclusion meant that a new public sphere opened up, accomplished a mutation in the conditions in which AIDS discourse (including science) was spoken and received. New speakers were engendered that day and with them new rights. In his reading of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Derrida asks “who signs” a declaration of independence, the founding act of a political space or institution.[30] The agents of such a declaration are obviously not authorized to make it—that’s the point—and it is only with the advent of the act that they become recognizable subjects of the political realm designated in the document. In that sense, these speakers did not preexist their declaration, neither in Philadelphia nor in Montreal, and so the allegory is not simply one of the uplifting triumph of liberalism, freedom, and the active agent or subject. To declare one’s independence and not already be free seems a bit odd. On the other hand, if one is already free, what’s the need of the declaration?
One cannot decide—and that’s the interesting thing, the force and the coup de force of such a declarative act—whether independence is stated or produced by this utterance… Is it that the good people have already freed themselves in fact and are only stating the fact of this emancipation in the Declaration? Or is it rather that they free themselves at the instant of and by 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 essential to the very positing or position of a right as such, whether one is speaking here of hypocrisy, of equivocation, of undecidability, or of fiction.[31]
If a subject emerges here, it is an impossible one, an effect of the “future perfect.” “In a sort of fabulous retroactivity, … the coup de force makes right, founds right, gives right, gives birth to the law.”[32]
We owe the concept of “the right to have rights” to Hannah Arendt and her chapter on “The End of Human Rights and the Decline of the Nation State” in The Origins of Totalitarianism.[33] The phrase is unusual, and Arendt derives it from an equally unusual one, a category she discovers: “the rightless.” She has no happy stories like mine from Montreal.
Arendt’s bleak chapter, rather, assesses what she calls the gaping distance between the idealism of human rights discourse and “the situation of the rightless themselves,” for whom “the internment camp—prior to the 2nd World War the exception rather than the rule—has become the routine solution.” She traces the situation to the liberation of man from the bonds of king, God, and nature … to Enlightenment, in other words.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that from then on Man, and not God’s command or the customs of history, should be the source of Law. Independent of the privileges which history had bestowed upon certain strata of society or certain nations, the declaration indicated man’s emancipation from all tutelage and announced that he had indeed come of age.[34]
Man was liberated into uncertainty: “individuals were no longer secure in the estates to which they were born or sure of their equality before God as Christians.” The grounds or the surroundings outside of politics disappeared as sources of certainty, authority, or security: to be free was precisely to be exposed to this basic insecurity. The doctrine and discourse of human rights provided the vocabulary in which this recognition was voiced, and it was designed both to affirm and to respond to and protect against this insecurity. The discourse of rights testified to the accomplishment of a dizzying, vertiginous maturity; of necessity “no authority was invoked for their establishment; Man himself was their source as well as their ultimate goal.”[35] Arendt’s unhappy but nevertheless inspired idea was to use this discovery of the existence of something that ought to be impossible, human beings without rights, to think again about the condition of possibility of politics itself. Without guarantee, or at least without guarantee outside of politics, we are left to our own devices—to artifice and invention, yes, but we are also exposed to the possibility of losing everything. So what have the rightless lost? “The calamity of the rightless,” she writes, is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion—formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities— but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them.[36]
They are not oppressed within a political system, trapped inside a community, coming out on the losing side of a political battle. Rather, the “barbedwire labyrinth into which events had driven them” exists in a space “outside the pale of the law,” outside any recognizably political place.[37] They are only, merely, human. And Arendt wryly underlines that this is not good at all. “It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellowman,” she says.[38] “Humanity,” the appeal to which may sometimes seem like an effort to escape from politics (this was Carl Schmitt’s claim, more or less, in The Concept of the Political[39]), is a fully political category, as it turns out— and with devastating results.
Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity… This new situation, in which “humanity” has in effect assumed the role formerly ascribed to nature or history, would mean in this context that the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. It is by no means certain that this is possible.[40]
Rights are thus coextensive with or “constitutive of” politics, as Claude Lefort later pointed out,[41] for better and for worse. So what is a polity? What is the space or stage of politics as it is conducted by human beings left alone, by emancipated human-all-too-humans? Arendt describes it in different ways— centrally, it refers to “a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective”—but she underlines that this space of politics becomes apparent precisely in the moment of its disappearance: We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global situation… Before this, what we must call a “human right” today would have been thought of as a general characteristic of the human condition which no tyrant could take away. Its loss entails the loss of the relevance of speech (and man, since Aristotle, has been defined as a being commanding the power of speech and thought), and the loss of all human relationship (and man, again since Aristotle, has been thought of as the “political animal,” the one who by definition lives in a community).[42] Rights are constitutive of politics, in the broadest possible sense: at stake here is this very right to have rights, which is to say, the right to politics itself, the right to create political or public things, including oneself, the right to enter into the political sphere, the right to a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions, to the relevance of speech and thus to relationship.[43] With their expulsion the rightless have not just been deprived of this or that particular right but of access to any rights, to rights themselves. And if rights can be lost, Arendt says—lost and not regained—it is because they are not derived from or guaranteed by anything else. “The right that corresponds to this loss and that was never even mentioned among the human rights cannot be expressed in the categories of the eighteenth century because they presume that rights spring immediately from the ‘nature’ of man.”[44]
How does this happen, this battle for (access to, or even the constitution of) politics and the public sphere itself? For Lefort it happens in language—or at least not without language. He argues that “in reducing the source of right to the human utterance of right, the French and American declarations made an enigma of both humanity and of right.” They constitute a declaration that was in fact a self-declaration, a declaration by which human beings, speaking through their representatives, revealed themselves to be both the subject and object of the utterance in which they name the human elements in one another, “spoke to” one another, appeared before one another, and therefore erected themselves into their own judges, their own witnesses.[45]
The rights of man are declared, and they are declared as rights that belong to man; but, at the same time, man appears through his representatives as the being whose essence it is to declare his rights. It is impossible to detach the statement from the utterance as soon as nobody is able to occupy the place, at a distance from all others, from which he would have authority to grant or ratify rights. Thus rights are not simply the object of a declaration, it is their essence to be declared.[46] The paradox was that rights are named by human beings—and that in itself indicates their ability to name themselves, designate themselves in their humanity, in their existence as individuals, and to designate their humanity in their mode of co-existence.[47]
But the sad fact is that it is precisely this coexistence which cannot be counted on, cannot be taken for granted or secured. This community is not the precondition for politics but its creation—and it requires regular recreation— so although democracy is defined by the lack of any given or natural exclusions from this sphere, it is never free from exclusion. The struggle over the limits of this space, over access to the stage of politics, is in fact the political struggle.
This is the condition that Jacques Rancière reaches in La mésentente [Disagreement], one of the few works of political theory to take serious measure of the impact of deconstruction.[48] Rancière retells the story of the secession of the Roman plebeians on Aventine Hill (from Livy). “How do you recognize that the person who is mouthing a voice in front of you is discussing matters of justice rather than expressing private pain?” The patricians at Aventine do not understand what the plebeians say; they do not understand the noises that come out of the plebeians’ mouths, so that, in order to be audibly understood and visibly recognized as legitimate speaking subjects, the plebeians must not only argue their position but must also construct the scene of argumentation in such a manner that the patricians might recognize it as a world in common. The principle of political interlocution is thus disagreement; that is, it is the discordant understanding of both the objects of reference and the speaking subjects. In order to enter into political exchange, it becomes necessary to invent the scene upon which spoken words may be audible, in which objects may be visible, and individuals themselves may be recognized.[49]
How is this “common” scene constructed? They do not set up a fortified camp in the manner of the Scythian slaves. They do what would have been unthinkable for the latter: they establish another order, another partition of the sensible, by constituting themselves not as warriors equal to other warriors but as speaking beings sharing the same properties as those who deny them these. They thereby execute a series of speech acts that mimic those of the patricians.[50] This inaugural mimesis or copying, citation, returns us to the low type and to those who interrupted the proceedings in Montreal; it also returns us to our epigraph, to Derrida’s unusual claim that a right to irony or to fiction or the simulacrum “opens public space.” As arcane and refined and excessive as such a claim might seem (irony as a basic human right? irony as the right to politics, to rights, to being human?), we are now in a position to grasp it as nothing less than constitutive of politics, of the political space and time itself. Long ago Derrida exclaimed in Limited Inc: “as though … the simulation of real life were not part of real life!”51 As rare as events like those on Aventine Hill and in Montreal might be, they teach us a difficult lesson: there could be no politics without irony, without copying, without enigma, and without drift.
Notes
An earlier version of this paper was given in February 2005 at a conference in honor of Jacques Derrida jointly organized by Peter Goodrich of the Cardozo Law School and Anselm Haverkamp of New York University. The epigraph comes from Derrida’s Voyous (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 133, part of which is translated by Pascale Anne-Brault and Michael Naas as “The Last of the Rogue States,” in South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004): 323–341, 336–337. All translations have been silently modified when necessary.
1. J.L. Austin, “Performative Utterances,” in Philosophical Papers, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 239–240. “Suppose that you are just about to name the ship, you have been appointed to name it, and you are just about to bang the bottle against the stem; but at that very moment some low type comes up, snatches the bottle out of your hand, breaks it on the stem, shouts out ‘I name this ship the Generalissimo Stalin,’ and then for good measure kicks away the chocks. Well, we agree of course on several things. We agree that the ship certainly isn’t now named the Generalissimo Stalin, and we agree that it’s an infernal shame and so on and so forth. But we may not agree as to how we should classify the particular infelicity in this case.” See J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), for another version of the same example: “Suppose, for example, I see a vessel on the stocks, walk up and smash the bottle hung at the stem, proclaim ‘I name this ship the Mr. Stalin and for good measure kick away the chocks: but the trouble is, I was not the person chosen to name it (whether or not—an additional complication—Mr. Stalin was the destined name; perhaps in a way it is even more of a shame if it was). We can all agree (1) that the ship was not thereby named; (2) that it is an infernal shame. One could say that I ‘went through a form of’ naming the vessel but that my ‘action’ was ‘void’ or ‘without effect,’ because I was not a proper person, had not the ‘capacity’ to perform it; but one might also and alternatively say that, where there is not even a pretence of capacity or a colourable claim to it, then there is no accepted conventional procedure; it is a mockery, like a marriage with a monkey. Or again one could say that part of the procedure is getting oneself appointed” (23–24; see also 5–6, 117).
2. Austin, “Performative Utterances,” 235.
3. Austin, “Performative Utterances, 239–240.
4. Austin, “Performative Utterances, 240.
5. What a strange irony that the sole example offered in the Oxford English Dictionary for the phrase “low type” is the following: “1897 W.C. HAZLITT Ourselves 122 It is natural that this low-type Realism should be ruled by circumstances.” Oxford English Dictionary, 1st ed.
6. Austin, “Performative Utterances, 240.
7. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 23–24.
8. My interpretation of Austin is inspired by the readings given his work by Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, as well as Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Judith Butler, Excitable Speech (New York: Routledge, 1997), esp. 141–163; and Gayatri Spivak, “Revolutions That As Yet Have No Model: Derrida’s ‘Limited Inc.’ (1980),” in Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean, eds., The Spivak Reader (New York: Routledge, 1996), 75–106. Pierre Bourdieu quotes the Stalin example in his would-be critique of Austin in “Authorized Language,” in Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991), but he ends up simply reaffirming the most conservative dimension of Austin’s theory: “the power of words is nothing other than the delegated power of the spokesperson” (107).
9. I am grateful to Elizabeth Duquette of Gettysburg College for the chance to read her paper on Austin and Cold War rhetoric. Elizabeth Duquette, “The Good Ship Stalin,” paper presented at the annual conference of the American Name Society, New Orleans, December 2001: In a clever reading of the Stalin example in How to Do Things, she argues that “Austin’s [theory of the] performative provided the intellectual foundation for defusing charges about the seemingly boundless ability of words to actively work for the Soviet Union and against NATO and the United States. In carefully and narrowly defining the scope of performative utterances, Austin makes clear the ways in which language can, but equally important for my argument today cannot, be said to cause effects in the world. Yet, at the same time that Austin attempts to specify precisely in what situations words can be said to do actual work, he also exposes mid-century anxieties about the problems of naming and identification central to the HUAC [House Committee on Un-American Activities] hearings.” Re JD: Remembering Jacques Derrida | Keenan | Drift: Politics and the Simulation of Real Life 109
10. Aileen Ballantyne, “Aids Forum Outgrows Venue,” The Guardian, 5 June 1989.
11. Ron Goldberg, “Conference Call: When PWAs First Sat at the High Table,” POZ (June 1998), available online at http://www.actupny.org/documents/montreal.html.
12. Rex Wockner, “Activists Seize Stage at AIDS Conference,” Out Week, 26 June 1989, 8. The only other news report to quote McCaskell, as far as I can tell, is Rosemary Goudreau, “Demonstrators Storm the Stage at AIDS Conference,” Miami Herald, 5 June 1989, 5A: The protest was unprecedented. It began outside the Palais des Congres about an hour before the [opening] ceremony… The protesters pushed their way into the conference hall past security officers guarding escalators to the main meeting room and took over the stage. Almost all were men wearing black buttons with pink triangles and the words “Silence = Death.” For 45 minutes, the protesters chanted and shouted until conference officials cut a deal with them. The microphones were turned on in return for the protesters’ leaving after they read their “manifesto”—a list of demands against discrimination, against mandatory testing and for rights for gay men and lesbians. “On behalf of people with AIDS in Canada and throughout the world, I would like to officially open the Fifth International Conference!” shouted Tim McCaskell, the head of AIDS Action Now of Toronto. Other accounts include Patrick Doyle, “PM Jeered during Speech to AIDS Conference,” The Toronto Star, 5 June 1989, A1; Robert Manor, “Protest Holds Up Start of Aids Conference,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 5 June 1989, 7A; Lawrence K. Altman, “Some Optimism amid Grim Predictions as 87-Nation AIDS Meeting Opens,” The New York Times, 5 June 1989, B4. Video footage of the demonstration is in the ACT-UP collection at the New York Public Library, http://www.actupny.org/nypl/description/01332.html.
13. Goldberg, “Conference Call.”
14. Goldberg, “Conference Call.”
15. Marilyn Dunlop, “Think of Us All as Human, AIDS Victim Tells Meeting,” The Toronto Star, 7 June 1989, A4.
16. I tried to write about some of this at the beginning and end of my Fables of Responsibility (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 16–28, 151–160.
17. Butler, Excitable Speech, 134.
18. Butler, Excitable Speech, 133; emphasis in original.
19. The first presentation of this paper took place at a conference on Jacques Derrida at which I was happily located next to my friend Gayatri Spivak, whom I met long ago in Derrida’s seminar. A smart questioner in the audience asked about my invocation of “the rightless” in the context of the rather privileged militants from ACT-UP, and raised the specter of the “subaltern” and the possibility of her speaking. In rewriting this talk, I rediscovered Dina Al-Kassim’s elegant paraphrase of Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in “The Face of Foreclosure,” Interventions 4, no. 2 (July 2002), 168–174: “She argued,” writes Al-Kassim, “that western liberal and radical efforts to represent the interests of Third World women have the unwitting effect of reinscribing a global class system precisely through the unexamined politics of speech. The representative intellectual, in wanting to/attempting to speak for the other, inevitably rebounds into a descriptive and representational depiction of that other’s speech 110 Grey Room 21 and interest because the subaltern is denied the right of entry. To demand or make room for the subaltern’s speech is equivalent to demanding that the subaltern adopt the discourse of political agency and enter into that enlightenment space of self-representation. This demand effectively censors those others who cannot assume their own ‘image’ in the space cleared for an enlightenment politics by perversely asking that the subaltern cease to be ‘herself’ as the price of becoming a modern subject. Thus the subaltern other is never presented and does not speak in her own name or her own voice because to do so would mean ceasing to be that aboriginal whose knowledge and memory is a priori excluded from the domain of Reason’s cultivation.” Later, reading Spivak’s elaboration of the not-speaking-subaltern in Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Al-Kassim outlines Spivak’s hypothesis of a “‘speaking otherwise,’ … no knowing substitution of that banished Other’s speech. Projecting the perspective of the Native Informant back into the foundational texts of Enlightenment Reason, Spivak restores neither the Native Informant nor his image but the ghostly act of dematerialization that conserves him in the margins of western Reason… Rather, the name of the Aboriginal/Native Informant is spoken again, taken up as the occasion, even the alibi, for a disruptive retelling of our most enabling fictions… This critical position does not speak for others but, instead, imagines a speech that takes stock of the violent proscription of those others” (171). Finally, quoting Spivak on the value of “a figure [that] makes visible the impossible, [while] it also invites the imagination to transform the impossible into an experience,” Al-Kassim notes that Spivak seems to suggest “that a founding foreclosure can become a textual symptom to be ‘played’ in the critical mode.” She comments that “while the graphematic character of such symptoms must always admit the possibility of a perverse performative, it seems to me that the concept of foreclosure itself destines even the transnationally literate critic to the impossibility of knowing one’s positionality fully or even adequately” (173).
20. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, in Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 12.
21. Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” 17.
22. Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” 18.
23. Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” 12
24. Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” 9.
25. Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” 9.
26. Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” 8.
27. See Butler, Excitable Speech, 142, 145, for analysis of the rupture or the break; 146–147, the imposter; and 151, 157, 161–162, transformation and expropriation.
28. Butler, Excitable Speech, 142.
29. Butler, Excitable Speech, 147.
30. Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” trans. Tom Keenan and Tom Pepper, New Political Science 15 (Summer 1986): 8. See also Jacques Derrida, “The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration,” trans. Mary Ann Caws and Isabelle Lorenz, in Jacques Derrida and Mustafa Tlili, ed., For Nelson Mandela (New York: Seaver, 1987), 13–42.
31. Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” 9–10.
32. Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” 9–10.
33. Hannah Arendt, “The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1966), 267–302. This text has recently been the subject of many important readings, notably those of Giorgio Re JD: Remembering Jacques Derrida | Keenan | Drift: Politics and the Simulation of Real Life 111 Agamben in Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Remnants of Auschwitz, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999); as well as the essays by Werner Hamacher, Jacques Rancière, and Etienne Balibar collected in South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004); Etienne Balibar, “Outline of a Topography of Cruelty,” in Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? trans. James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 115–132; and the comments by Derrida in Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (New York: Routledge, 2001).
34. Arendt, “Decline,” 290.
35. Arendt, “Decline,” 291.
36. Arendt, “Decline,” 295–296.
37. Arendt, “Decline,” 292, 294. Arendt notes, anticipating the emergence of contemporary humanitarianism, that the inhabitants of the camp have, in effect, only two institutions: the police and charity (296).
38. Arendt, “Decline,” 300.
39. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 53–58.
40. Arendt, “Decline,” 297–298.
41. Claude Lefort, “The Question of Democracy” and “Human Rights and the Welfare State,” in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 9–20, 21–44; Claude Lefort, “Politics and Human Rights,” trans. Alan Sheridan, in Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society, ed. John B. Thompson, 239–272 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 243–244 (“constitutive”).
42. Arendt, “Decline,” 296–297.
43. Compare Balibar, “Outline,” 119: “The true concept of politics already concerns the very possibility of a community among humans, the setting of a space for encounter, for the expression and dialectical resolution of antagonisms among its various constitutive parts and groups. Seen from that angle, the crucial notion suggested by Arendt, that of a ‘right to have rights,’ does not feature a minimal remainder of the political, made of juridical and moral claims to be protected by the Constitution, it is much more the idea of a maximum. Or, better said, it refers to the continuous process in which a minimal recognition of the belonging of human beings to the ‘common’ sphere of existence (therefore also work, culture, public and private speech, etc.) already involves a totality of rights, and makes it possible. I call this the ‘insurrectional’ element of democracy.”
44. Arendt, “Decline,” 297.
45. Lefort, “Question of Democracy,” 8.
46. Lefort, “Politics and Human Rights,” 256–257.
47. Lefort, “Human Rights,” 39.
48. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, trans. Julie Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
49. Jacques Rancière and Davide Panagia, “Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière,” Diacritics 30, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 116.
50. Rancière, Disagreement, 24.
51. Derrida, Limited Inc, 90.