ABSTRACT
I remember once giving a lecture about Derrida, and one of his disciples
came up to me and said: ‘You made a mistake: you can’t use the word
‘‘reality’’ when you talk about Derrida.’
Edward Said, ‘Literary Theory at the Crossroads of Public Life’1
It may be proposed that the way to deconstruct the performative is through a
poetic realism. The performative is already supposed to be a deconstruction of the
truth, and although I do not promise we can go beyond this, I hope that we can.
