Derrida's Secret and Symptom: A Certain Impossible Possibility of Writing the Event

Kyle Kinaschuk

doi:10.29173/mruhr50

Abstract

In this paper, I will attempt to conceptualize the event through Derrida’s late lecture “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” which he presented “spontaneously” at the Canadian Centre of Architecture in Montreal on April 1st 1997. Furthermore, I will analyze how a certain conception of the event emerges out of the conversations between Derrida, J.L. Austin, and John Searle, especially considering the essay that “started” the much-discussed debate between Derrida and the Anglo-American speech act theorists; namely, through a reading of Austin’s How to Do Things With Words. Derrida’s “concepts” of iterability and the perverformative will be mobilized to think through the ways the event, if it can be written that it exists, is undoubtedly beyond the categories of the performative and constative; however, recourse to the many impossible-possible aporias that populate Derrida’s late texts such as the decision, forgiveness, and invention will be necessary to understand this difficult position. The symptom and the secret, then, will be related to the event through an interrogation of “verticality” while analyzing the event’s capacity to disrupt established modalities of temporality.

Highlights

“Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as the question of the ghost.” – Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx
An evocation of the question before the question puts into question a perception of temporality and being that is grounded in an ontological economy of presence and is, inextricably bound to the Derridean quasi-‐concepts of trace, archi-‐writing, the supplement, the wholly other, and différance: “this trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what is called the present by means of this very relation to what it is not; what it absolutely is not, not even a past or a future as a modified present”
Of the paper, my concern will be to come to terms with what it means for the event to “defeat” both the constative and performative utterances; in order to take up Derrida’s claim sincerely, a solicitous reading of J.L Austin’s How to Do Things With Words must be undertaken

Summary

Introduction

“Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as the question of the ghost.” – Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx. In the concluding paragraphs of “A Certain Impossible Possibility,” Derrida says that “a pure event, worthy of the name, defeats the performative as much as the constative.

Results

Conclusion