![writing always includes the moment of dispossession in favor of the arbitrary power play of the signifier and from the point of view of the subject, this can only be experienced as a dismemberment, a beheading, or a castration…. It is no longer certain that language, as excuse, exists because of a prior guilt but just as possible that since language, as a machine, performs anyway, we have to produce guilt (and all its train of psychic consequences) in order to make the excuse meaningful…. The narrative [of Rousseau’s Confessions] begins to vacillate only when it appears that these (negative) cognitions fail to make the performative function of the discourse predictable and that, consequently, the linguistic model cannot be reduced to a mere system of tropes. Performative rhetoric and cognitive rhetoric, the rhetoric of tropes, fail to converge.](https://images.tandf.co.uk/common/jackets/crclarge/978041512/9780415123822.jpg "writing always includes the moment of dispossession in favor of the arbitrary power play of the signifier and from the point of view of the subject, this can only be experienced as a dismemberment, a beheading, or a castration…. It is no longer certain that language, as excuse, exists because of a prior guilt but just as possible that since language, as a machine, performs anyway, we have to produce guilt (and all its train of psychic consequences) in order to make the excuse meaningful…. The narrative [of Rousseau’s Confessions] begins to vacillate only when it appears that these (negative) cognitions fail to make the performative function of the discourse predictable and that, consequently, the linguistic model cannot be reduced to a mere system of tropes. Performative rhetoric and cognitive rhetoric, the rhetoric of tropes, fail to converge.")
ABSTRACT
Such language as that in my last sentence, however, would also, with a different twist, be characteristic of Derrida, for example in his recent book, Aporias.9 Derrida’s more recent work, in published essays and books as well as in spoken seminars-his work on gifts, on the force of law, on witnessing, on friendship, on sexual difference, on responsiveness and responsibility, on ghosts in Marx-could be said to be a long exploration of the performative efficacy of language and other signs. Derrida keeps returning in one way or another to an aporia whereby a form of words works performatively, on its own, to bring something singular and unheard of, something not amenable to any law, into the open, while at the same time, after the fact, seeming to be a response to something that was already there. The United States ‘Declaration of Independence’ is paradigmatic of this aporia. The Declaration speaks in the name of the People of the United States that the document itself brings into existence. The people must pre-exist the declaration for it to be efficacious, but the people did not exist before the declaration called it into being.10 Derrida, however, says something similar about a speech act in the form of an apostrophe that brings sexual difference into being. Here is his characteristically scrupulous formulation in ‘Fourmis’, by way of a discussion of Hélène Cixous’s work:
