Curse and Modernity: A Brief Introduction

Abstract

Curse and Modernity:A Brief Introduction Elisabeth Strowick (bio) In recent years, the curse has attracted attention particularly in discussions relating to legal philosophy and the philosophy of religion. As, for instance, Giorgio Agamben has shown, curse and oath make reference to the sphere of the sacred, which in no way precedes language, but rather denotes the link between law, religion, and language.1 Rather than framing the curse in religious or legal philosophy, this MLN special issue is interested in profiling it as a mode of representation in modernity. The appeal of the curse in modern literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis may be surprising. Why the interest in the curse specifically in such discourses that concur that God is dead? What is modernity’s affinity to the curse? Formulated as a thesis: the curse assumes an importance for modernity specifically as a mode of representation. It is by way of the curse as a medium/performative act that modernity first enters the scene at all. The almost complete absence of the curse — itself undoubtedly a linguistic force — within the context of John Austin’s speech act theory is noteworthy. Austin mentions the curse at best parenthetically: as an articulation of emotion (“swearing”2), which falls outside of the [End Page 571] categories of the locutionary, illocutionary, or perlocutionary, as well as in his final lecture, where he ascribes “cursing” to the group of “behabitives”: “[…] behabitives […] are a very miscellaneous group, and have to do with attitudes and social behavior.”3 They “include the notion of reaction to other people’s behavior and fortunes and of attitudes and expressions of attitudes to someone else’s […] conduct.”4 Björn Quiring criticizes Austin’s fencing in of the curse as a mode of reaction to the “behavior of another”5 — a critique that the articles of this special issue formulate as well. Although conspicuously absent in the sense of being explicitly addressed, the curse — it might be argued — is structurally inherent in Austin’s speech act theory. Agamben might serve as an indicator here, insofar as his linguistic-philosophical characterization of oath and curse repeats Austin’s normative orientation of the performative. For Agamben, oath and curse are an expression of the binding force of language; in this respect, the force of the curse is of the same origin as that of the oath. If what is articulated in the oath is the binding force of logos, whose seal is the name of God, the curse therefore results from the false oath, is an expression of the cleaving of the binding force of the word for which the oath stands.6 When transferred to the idiom of Austin’s speech act theory, the binding force of language would have to be seen in the orientation of the performative act toward convention. Austin describes the conditions of the success of a performative utterance as follows: “(A.1) There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, and further, (A.2.) the particular persons and circumstances in a given cause must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked. (B.1.) The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and (B.2) completely.”7 The normative commitment of the performative to convention can be understood as an oath structure. The bond to convention guarantees the success of the speech act, which in turn, affirms convention. The curse would therefore find its place in a break with convention: “Now if we sin against any one (or more) of these […] rules, our [End Page 572] performative utterance will be (in one way or another) unhappy.”8 Does the unhappy performative articulate the curse structure of the performative? And would it then consequently be impossible to classify the curse within a specific category of speech acts — categories that, as Shoshana Felman has shown,9 are continuously subverted by Austin’s own text performance? Would the curse instead mark the very moment of failure that beleaguers Austin’s theory so unceasingly and, indeed, is ultimately a constitutive condition of the performative? Is Austin’s speech act...