ABSTRACT

I have long wanted to make Grace Kelly’s daughter’s motto in life my own: “Never explain. Never complain!” I seem never to be able to bring it off. I begin again with explanations and complaints.

Explanations and complaints are exactly not promises and excuses, which are structural performatives, whose uttering is their performance. In a certain sense a promise can never quite be kept or broken (although this does not concern the performance of the promise, its utterance), even as, mutatis mutandis, an excuse can never quite be false or true. Explanations and complaints inevitably arise in the rifts and fault lines of this structural (non)necessity of and in promises and excuses. They invoke a future present, and they invariably evoke a past present in order to dissimulate the fact that a performative is structurally (though not necessarily “in fact”) free of the burden of the future.