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Sophistics, Rhetorics, and Performance;
or, How to Really Do Things with Words
Barbara Cassin
"How to do things with words?" How can you really do things with nothing
but words? It seems to me that sophistics is in a way the paradigm of dis
course that does things with words. Doubtless it is not a "performative" in
Austin's sense of the word, although Austin's sense varies considerably in
extension and intension. But it is for real a discourse that operates, that
transforms or creates the world, and has what I call a "world effect."
Making the connection with performativity is all the more tempting,
as epideixis, the word that serves in Plato to designate sophist discourse,
cannot be rendered better than by "performance," on condition that "perfor
mance" is also understood in the sense of contemporary aesthetics as a "hap
pening," an "event," an improvisation that requires engagement (Gorgias is
the inventor of discourse ex tempore, according to Philostratus)?something
like an "exploit."1
"Performative" is Austin's own invention, acclimated to French by
Austin himself at a colloquium held at Royaumont (Austin 1962); there
after it was immediately adopted and popularized by Emile Benveniste
(1966). "Performance"is a much older term, which, after ceaseless borrow
ings to and fro between English and French, has seen its meaning shifted
and extended accordingly. Kleins Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary
of English Language (Klein 1971) maintains that in English "performer"
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BARBARA CASSIN
was coined from Old French parfour ir (from medieval Latin perfurn ire
and/or parformer, in addition French borrowed the term at least three
times, if the Dictionnaire culturel de la langue francaise (Rey 2005) is to be
believed: in 1869, by analogy with the vocabulary of horse races to mean
the "manner of developing a subject, of executing a work in public"; in
1953, to denote "individual result in the accomplishment of a task"; and
in 1963, in the wake of Chomsky, to mean the opposite of "competence.
In sum, the word is a fluid, bilingual term that bridges sport (perfor
mance in the sense of a record), technique (performance in the sense of
the output of a machine), psychology (performance of a test), linguistics
(performance/competence), and modern art (performance in the sense o
happening).
Let us start with the relationship between performance and performa
tive. It is a way to interrogate the status of rhetorics, for which Austin, with
out naming it, reserves a somewhat unstable place between the "locutionary"
on the one hand and the "illocutionary" or performative on the other, calling
it the "perlocutionary" ("per" precisely as in "performative").2
But it is not of Austin that I will speak. Austin is simply the contempo
rary frame of reference that informs us today: he "invented" the performa
tive as such for us, by trying to isolate it. And he never hides the difficulty,
the permeability, of his taxonomy. Just one citation is enough to show the
difficulty. In the seventh lecture of the twelve that make up How to Do
Things with Words (quite late then) he writes: "It is time [...] to make a fresh
start on the problem. We want to reconsider more generally the senses in
which to say something may be to do something, or in saying something we
do something (and also perhaps to consider the different case in which b
saying something we do something). Perhaps some clarification and defi
nition may help us out of our tangle. For after all, 'doing something' is
very vague expression. When we issue any utterance whatsoever, are we not
'doing something'?" (1975, 91-92).
In the framework of the generalized theory of speech acts, the differ
ence between the locutionary, the illocutionary, and the perlocutionary has
for a long time been in a "tangle". It is not so easy to differentiate between
the three. All three are, precisely, "acts" of language, and without doubt the
categories are at once abstract, slippery, and overlapping. The "locutionary"
or "constative," a "normal" statement, is an utterance that "says something";
it is an "act of saying something" (1975, 100): "The cat is on the mat" has
a meaning (both a "sense" and a "reference") and is susceptible of being
either true or false. For its part, the "illocutionary," or performative in strict
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sophistics, rhetorics, and performance; or, how to really do things with words
sensu does something "in saying" it (1975, 99): "Excuse me" or "The session
is open," has a "force" and is susceptible of "success" or "failure" ("felicity"
or "infelicity"). Finally, the perlocutionary does something by saying it: to
convince, persuade or mislead has an effect and produces consequences.3
The difference between the performative-illocutionary and the perlocu
tionary, between force and effect, is all the more labile as the illocutionary,
to be felicitous, is itself "linked with effects": in particular, "an effect must
be achieved on the audience if the illocutionary act is to be carried out"
(1975,116).4
It is the difficulty of stabilizing this difference between "force" and
"effect" that leads me to reflect on what I call "performance before the
performative" as an invitation to shake up the status of rhetorics.
In truth, my interest is in what unites three types of objects I have been
working on in recent years. And the answer is something like discursive
performance. Trying to explain this to myself, I would like to set out a route
that traverses various epochs and places as well as various literary genres
and disciplines.
We first stop in ancient Greece: the primal scene of Parmenides/
Gorgias, where one understands the distinction between "faithful discourse"
(truly reporting things) and "efficacious discourse" (doing things for real),
between ontology-phenomenology on the one hand and logology on the
other. One understands the distinction and at the same time acquires
the means by which to call it into question, to the profit of a generalized
logology. That is to say, one reevaluates ontology as a discourse that acts, as
an absolutely successful performance, even.
The model for the sophist performance is epideixis, in the rhetorical
sense of the term, and the model for rhetorical epideixis is the Encomium of
Helen. It is an epideictic performance that produces not only persuasion but
a "world effect": we are now in a world in which the innocence of Helen?
from Euripides to Offenbach and Hoffmansthal?is thinkable and even
plausible.
We then pass through the South Africa of the end of the last century,
taking up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which aimed at
and thematized the effect of a doing with words. Of course, it did not
operate with words alone, because it was a concrete apparatus (Foucault
would have said "dispositif"); but to the extent that the goal was to make
a rainbow people, to construct a common past and produce reconciliation,
it was essentially words, statements, and stories that were required of this
apparatus.
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BARBARA CASSIN
Finally, we arrive in the here and now, at the Vocabulaire europeen des
philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Cassin 2004), whose Hum
boldtian foundation is the difference between the worlds that different
languages produce, the impact of the plurality of languages on discursiv
performance.
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sophistics, rhetorics, and performance; or, how to really do things with words
together: the physics that speech uncovers gives way to the politics that
discourse creates. Thanks to the sophists?the "masters of Greece," as Hegel
put it?one effectively attains here the dimension of politics, as an agora
for an agon: the city is an ongoing creation of language. It is even, as Jacob
Burkhardt and Hannah Arendt say, "the most talkative world of all."
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BARBARA CASSIN
Into those who hear it comes the shiver of fear, pity full of tears,
mournful longing, and faced with successes and failures belonging
to foreign actions and bodies, by the intermediary of discourses, the
soul experiences a passion of its own [ep'allotrion tepragmaton kai
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sophistics, rhetorics, and performance; or, how to really do things with words
With this praise of poetry as a "speech with metre" (ibid., ?9), we are not
simply within rhetoric, in the classical sense of the term. Tyrannical and
demiurgical, discursive performance is double: it has an effect on the soul,
which passes from the strange or foreign to the proper with nothing but
words. At the same time, though, it has a world effect; the object of dis
course, the "fiction," takes on consistency and becomes reality.7 As Jean
Francois Lyotard underlines in The Differend: "It is not the addressee who
is seduced by the addressor. The addressor, the referent, the sense are no
less subject than the addressee to the seduction exerted" (1983, 84).
In fact, the world is transformed: with sophistry, we said, one goes
from physics to politics. The eulogy shows itself to be a moment of political
invention, which serves to forge a passage from the communion in the values
of the community (including the communion in the values of language, via
the meaning of words and metaphors, as Nietzsche emphasized) to the
creation of new values.
The first two paragraphs of the Encomium of Helen testify to this
passage and begin to produce it. I don't wish to recite the entire analysis,
just to sketch it out by quoting the paragraphs:
Order, for a city, is the excellence of its men; for a body, beauty;
for a mind, wisdom; for an action, virtue; for a speech, truth. The
opposite is disorder. Man, woman, speech, deed, city, thing, should
be honored with praise if praiseworthy, and incur blame if blame
worthy; for to blame the praisable or to praise the blamable is of
equal error and ignorance.
It is to the same man that it befalls to say with rectitude what
must be said, and to contradict those who blame Helen, a woman
which brought together, in one voice and one soul, the poets'
[songs], the auditors' credence, and the noise of a name which
bears the memory of misfortunes, / want, giving logic to discourse,
to have brought to an end the accusation against she of whom we
hear so much abuse, demonstrate that those who blame her are
wrong, show the truth and put an end to ignorance. (?1-2)
It is in this way that, the "self" giving logismon to the logos?"come and
pass from the one to the other in my discourse"8?the liturgy (kosmos,
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BARBARA CASSIN
kallos, sophia, arete, aletheia) opens onto a happening that performs another
world.
It seems to me that here we are closest to the labile frontier between the
35?
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sophistics, rhetorics, and performance; or, how to really do things with words
possible only because one is engulfed in the kairos, "at this instant," when,
unlike at Nuremberg, there are "neither winners nor losers." From this the
commission drew its singularity: it was a commission, not a tribunal; it
was presided over not by a judge but by a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize;
it didn't set out penalties but recommended amnesties; and, in what con
cerns us here, it didn't examine court cases but listened to depositions,
declarations, stories.
Memory: unlike the first historical amnesty, that of the Athenian
decree of 403 BC, after the tyranny of the Thirty and the civil war, it is not
an amnesia ("amnesty" and "amnesia" are one and the same word, a doublet,
in ancient Greek10). On the contrary, it was a politics of memory: its task
was to construct a common past so as to constitute a new community, a
"rainbow people," with its archives consultable online and its publicity (the
sessions of the grand theater of the itinerant commission moving from
town to town were broadcast on television on Sunday evenings?one could
never say "I didn't know"). But still there was no "overmemorization," nor
was there a need for an infinite memory: only "enough of the truth for," in
the words of the Commission's Report itself, had to be obtained?enough
of the truth for sharing a common past and living together (Truth and
Reconciliation Commission 1998, 1.1.70). The truth that was obtained,
carefully distinguished from historical truth, was an explicit production,
a construction out of discourse.
Speech: speech is the key to the apparatus and is legible in the conditions
of the amnesty. These conditions are defined by the law of July 1995
that organized the commission as such, two years after its "invention" in
sunset clauses. The three legal conditions that had to be met for an act
to be susceptible of amnesty, and therefore amnestied, were the following
(I mention the first two so as not to mutilate the apparatus):
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BARBARA CASSIN
One sees here that like in sophistry, language "does things," "constructs
reality," while acting on those who listen and those who speak.
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sophistics, rhetorics, and performance; or, how to really do things with words
The second component leads from the sophists and from Aristotle to
Tutu via Hannah Arendt. It is linked to the construction of human being
in his very humanity, that is to say, in his political being, his politcalness,
and with what Aristotle takes from the sophists in order to counter Plato's
philosopher-king, to wit the construction of politics in language.
The commission was sophistico-Aristotelian-Arendtian in that it
rehumanized all those who appeared before it by allowing them to speak.
It made all of them, victims as well as perpetrators, animals endowed with
logos, discourse-reason, and thus political animals, "more political than
the others," as Aristotle specifies. They could once again appropriate what
is proper to man. No longer were they "monkeys" or passers-by stuck in
silence, nor even were they executioners rendered mute by the horror of the
crimes that they had to deny so as to continue existing.
The third component is cathartic and therapeutic: it leads from
Protagoras (to "change a worse state into a better state") or Gorgias to Tutu
via Freud. I would like simply to underline the importance of this the
matic of the logos-pharmakon across antiquity and relate the therapy of dis
course to the matrix of its expression that one finds, yet again, in Gorgias's
Encomium of Helen:
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BARBARA CASSIN
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sophistics, rhetorics, and performance; or, how to really do things with words
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BARBARA CASSIN
As a third step I would like to start from the recent Vocabulaire europeen
des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Cassin 2004). An impossible
book: over twelve years, 150 collaborators worked on philosophical texts
written in fifteen European languages, or languages constitutive of Europe.
We started from "untranslatables," that's to say symptoms of the difference
between languages?not what one doesn't translate but what one doesn't
stop (not) translating: after Babel with happiness. But it is well known
that the Greeks were, to borrow Arnaldo Momigliano's expression "proudly
monolinguistic"?so much so that hellenizein signifies "to speak Greek"
as well as "to speak properly" and "to think and act as a civilised man";
barbarizein, by contrast, mixes the foreign, the unintelligible, and the inhu
man. How then can working on the Greeks furnish us with the slightest
grasp of the difference of languages?
It is very simple?in any case I believe that I can simplify with the
ontology/logology key. Either one begins with things. Or one begins with
words.
The "onto-logy" of Parmenidean unveiling opens onto a metaphysics
of adequation. With Plato and Aristotle, things can be described like this:
language is an organon, a "tool," a means of communication, and languages,
as Socrates says in the Cratylus, are simply the different materials that serve
to fabricate this tool, sort of habits of the idea.13 That is why one must start
from things, from what is, and not from words (Craty/us 439b). From this
perspective, it is a matter of getting to the things under words as quickly as
possible, of producing the unity of being under the difference of languages,
of reducing the multiple to the one: translation is then what Schleiermacher
calls dolmetschen, interpreter, a go-between.14
The world that starts from words is a completely different world;
language is no longer considered, firstly or solely, as a means but as an end
and as a force: "Whoever finds language interesting in itself is different
from whoever only recognizes in it the means for interesting thoughts"
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sophistics, rhetorics, and performance; or, how to really do things with words
(Nietzsche 1971,134). Hence the only "there is" is the Humboldtian plurality
of languages: "Language is manifest in reality solely as multiplicity" (1903,
240). Language is and is only the difference of languages. From this per
spective, to translate is no longer dolmetschen but ubersetzen, understand
ing how different languages produce different worlds, making these worlds
communicate, and disquieting them by playing the one against the other,
in such a way that the reader s tongue goes to meet that of the writer.15 The
common world becomes a regulating (or guiding) principle, a goal, and
not a point of departure. This regime is that of the Vocabulaire europeen des
philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles: at bottom it is sophist logology
immersed in the plurality of languages. It then becomes appropriate to ask
oneself about philosophies as they as they are expressed or said, about what
it is to philosophize in languages.
From this point of view, Philosophy (with a capital P) is a tension
between the universal and a multiplicity of singulars. Schleiermacher
describes it perfectly, right down to his "not even":
Now this philosophical gesture is also, and today perhaps above all, a politi
cal gesture. Which linguistico-philosophical Europe do we want? Answer:
there are two that we don't want that I propose to characterize as "every
thing in globish" and "ontological nationalism."
The first catastropic scenario only allows one language to remain,
without oeuvre or author: "globish" ("global English"). Globish and dialects,
that's all. Every European language, French, German, and so forth, would
only be for speaking domestically and would be preserved as an endangered
species via a politics of the patrimony. English itself, that of Shakespeare and
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BARBARA CASSIN
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sophistics, rhetorics, and performance; or, how to really do things with words
The Greek language is philosophical, i.e. not that Greek is loaded with
philosophical terminology, but that it philosophizes in its basic
structure and formation [Sprachgestaltung]. The same applies to
every genuine language, in different degrees to be sure. The extent
to which this is so depends on the depth and power of the people
who speak the language and exist within it [Der Grad bemisst sich
nach der Tiefe und Gewalt der Eixstenz des Volkes und Stammes, der
die Sprache spricht und in ihr existiert]. Only our German language
has a deep and a creative philosophical character to compare with
the Greek. (2002,36)
The Greek language then, and the German, more Greek than the Greek.
I have proposed calling the second catastrophic scenario "ontological natio
nalism," taking up the diagnosis of Jean-Pierre Lefebvre (1990). All the
work of the Vocabulaire europeen des philosophies (Cassin 2004) runs coun
ter to this tendency to sacralize the untranslatable, which constitutes a
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BARBARA CASSIN
The strategy to take to get around these two stumbling blocks may be
named in Deleuzian terms: "to de territorialize. "The two points of impact
of the notion of performance on a work like that of the Vocabulaire may be
grouped together under deterritorialization.
The first relates to what Humboldt designates as the "synonymy of prin
cipal languages": the way different languages produce different worlds that
are neither exactly the same nor completely different. With the Humboldt
of the "Fragment of a Monograph on the Basque" it must be maintained
that "the plurality of languages is far from reducible to a plurality of des
ignations of a thing; they are different perspectives on the same thing, and
when the thing is not the object of the external senses, one is often dealing
with as many different things fashioned differently by each language.
Being is an effect of saying; not only are we perspectivists, or relativists, but
we are also logologists. Humboldt adds: "The diversity of languages is the
immediate condition for us of a growth in the richness of the world and
the diversity of what we know about it. At the same time, this is how the
region of human existence expands, and new ways, of thinking and feeling
are offered to us with determinate and real characteristics" (1996,433).
Such is precisely the ambition of a work like the Vocabulaire, for which
Humboldt, endeavoring to translate Aeschylus's Agamemnon despairing o
ever succeeding, prefigures the design (and the sketch, disegno). "A synon
ymy of principal languages of this sort ... has never yet been attempted
although it may be found in fragments of many writers, but if it was treat
ed with intelligence it would become one of the most seductive works.
The "synonymy of principal languages" relates to the fact that correspond
ing words in each of these languages passes for an expression of the sam
concept. But they only do so with a "difference," a "connotation," a "degree
in the scale of sentiments" that makes the distinction between words and
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sophistics, rhetorics, and performance; or, how to really do things with words
concepts: "So little is a word the sign of a concept that the concept cannot
be born without it, still less be fixed; the indeterminate action of the force
of thought is condensed in a word the way that faint clouds appear in a pure
sky. It is, then, an individual being, of a determinate character and figure, of
a force acting on the spirit and capable of transplanting itself" (2000,33).
It is also by the movement of deterritorialization, from the outside of
another language, that one thus succeeds in perceiving how "equivocally"
ones own language is fabricated. It is on Lacan, as a good logologist, that
I will rely to make this heard. One can apply to the languages of philosophy
what he writes in "L'etourdit" regarding the "lalangues" of every uncon
scious: "A language, among others, is nothing more than the integral of
equivocations that its history has left in it" (1973,47).
Instead of being the radical evil of language, as it is in Aristotle,
homonymy, equivocation, is not only the condition for wit and for jokes,
but the condition for what is proper to one language among others. The
choice of symptoms that untranslatables are arises from attention to hom
onymy. It is not difficult to make it heard with some examples. Thus in
Russian, pravda, which customarily one renders by "truth," signifies "jus
tice" primarily (it is the agreed-on translation of the Greek dikaiosune) and
is thus a homonym from the French point of view; inversely, our "truth"
is a homonym from the Slavic point of view, as the term conflates pravda,
which arises from justice, and istina, which arises from being and from
exactness. It is the same with the ambiguity "for us" of the root svet, "light"
or "world," and with the problematic homonymy of mir, meaning "peace,"
"world," and "peasant commune," on which Tolstoy doesn't stop playing in
War and Peace. One could unravel a good part of the dictionary by pulling
on this thread. And that is because it is not only a question of isolated
terms but of networks of terms: what German designates as Geist is some
times "mind" and sometimes "spirit," and the Ph?nomenologie des Geistes is
sometimes the Phenomenology of Spirit and sometimes the Phenomenol
ogy of Mind, making Hegel a religious spiritualist or the ancestor of the
philosophy of mind. And this point also applies to syntax and grammar,
the skeleton of languages, with the amphibologies and syntactic hom
onyms created by the order of words, with diglossia (a high language and
a low language in Russian that one doesn't know how to translate), with
the conflation of tense and aspect in some languages but not in others,
down to the Spanish doublet ser/estar, which makes our "being" even more
equivocal. In short, at least two languages are required in order to know
that a language is spoken, and in order to be able to speak a language.
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BARBARA CASSIN
Basically it is the homonyms of a language that give the best access to the
synonymy of languages.
Hannah Arendt, who wrote her Denktagebuch in several languages,
both as a way of dealing with her exile?"all the same it is not the German
language which has gone mad," she said in her interview with Gunther
Gauss?and as a way of practicing philosophy, thematizes this very pre
cisely as a philosophical gesture.
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sophistics, rhetorics, and performance; or, how to really do things with words
world" means that we are not sure about the essence of things: logology
thus calls into question ontological certainty.
Under the loose notion of performance, I have so far brought together
at least , two types of language act (in French, "actes de langage"): on one
hand, speech acts ("actes de parole") like Parmenides' On Nature as read
by Gorgias and the "statements" from the hearings of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission and, on the other hand, what I would like to
call "tongue acts" ("actes de langue"), with the semantic responsibility, or
the world effects, of bearing the difference of languages. It leaves open
the question of the relationship between performative and performance, a
much vaster category, of which the performative constitutes something like
the tip. But to my eyes, thinking in terms of performance is linked with the
general transformation of the landscape that Austin seeks to accomplish
with the performative. He insists on it in his last lecture when describ
ing the five most general classes of performatives, which, even if he is "far
from equally happy about all of them," nevertheless allow him "to play Old
Harry with two fetishes which I admit to an inclination to play Old Harry
with, viz. (i) the true/false fetish, (2) the value/fact fetish" (1975,151).
And one should not forget this last phrase, at the very end of his final
lecture: "I leave to my readers the real fun of applying it in philosophy"
(1975,164).
NOTES
. Philostratus 1921,1,492.
2. But "per" doubtless doesn't have the same meaning in both cases, even if t
something Austin makes explicit. The "per" of "performance" denotes the accomp
of a "to the end" whereas the "per" of "perlocution" denotes the means, that is,
of "by saying": it is "by means" of saying, and not "in" the saying itself ("in sa
characteristic of the illocutionary or performative) that the perlocutionary acts.
1975,108, see the quote that follows, where the perlocutionary figures in parenthese
3. It should be noted that Austin does not then give an example, in quot
perlocutionary utterance. This difficulty is doubtless linked to the complex defin
perlocutionary acts as "what we bring about or achieve by saying something" (1
This "or," which, for better or for worse, manages the difference between the sp
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BARBARA CASSIN
the listener, recurs on page 118: "The perlocutionary act may be either the achievement
of a perlocutionary object (convince, persuade) or the production of a perlocutionary
sequel."The illocutionary act is distinguished from the perlocutionary act byway of refer
ence to the statement "I ordered him and he obeyed," on the one hand, and "I got him to
obey" (1975,117), on the other. The subtle difference doesn't relate necessarily or directly to
distinct utterances. It is as if the perlocutionary, the utterance of the third kind, appeared
and disappeared between the seventh and the tenth lectures.
4. "So here are three ways, securing uptake, taking effect, and inviting a response,
in which illocutionary acts are bound up with effects; and these are all distinct from the
producing of effects which is characteristic of the perlocutionary act" (1975,118).
5. Here is how Novalis describes logological reduplication: "Everyone ignores what is
characteristic of language, that is that it is quite simply only concerned with itself. That is
why language is such a marvelous and fruitful mystery: someone speaks just for the sake
of speaking, and this is precisely when language expresses the most magnificent truths."
Allow me to refer here also to my Leffet sophistique (1995,113-17). This "speaking for the
sake of speaking" cannot not be compared with the legein logon kharin by which Aristotle
expels the sophists from the community of speaking beings, who, obeying the principle
of noncontradiction, always speak in order to signify something {Metaphysics ioo6an-26,
ioo9a20-2i). See also Cassin 1989.
6. One need only consult ?7 of Being and Time (2008,49-62).
7.1 am deliberately using the risky word "fiction" in the sense of discursive "fab
rication," which should be spelled "fixion" as it is in Lacan, to make us sensitive to two
issues. The first is the "etiolated" or "parasitical" status of literary or poetic creation in
Austin (see, for example, Austin 1975, 104). The second is the fact that the distinction
between genres of discourse is called into question (including the difference between
"philosophy"and "literature," given the oh-how ambiguous status of Greek poetry) when
one takes the logological point of view (here I refer the reader to my Leffet sophistique).
8. Phere de pros allon ap'allou metasto logon; "Now then, let me move from one speech
to another" (82 Bn, DK, II, 290,1. 25; cf. Gorgias 1982, ?9). This is how Gorgias punctuates
his eulogy to poetry, by drawing attention to the act of language that is operating and in
the process of being accomplished.
9.1 rely here on the work by Philippe-Joseph Salazar (2004a and 2004b).
10. The decree stipulates me mnesikakein ("You will not recall the evils of events past")
and punishes those who do with death. See Aristotle, The Constitution of Athens 40:2.
11.1 don't wish to make a point here of the evident difficulties of this, which coincide
with those of the "law of due obedience" in Argentina, because it is not relevant to the
matter at hand.
12. Aristotle Metaphysics (1979, 1009320-22). Here is the context: "One doesn't discuss
with everyone in the same way: some require persuasion, others constraint. On the one
hand, for all those who have maintained this position [the refusal of the principle], having
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sophistics, rhetorics, and performance; or, how to really do things with words
found themselves in an aporia, their scorn is easy to cure: it is not with what they say but
with what they think that one confronts them. But all those who discourse for the love
of discourse, their cure is a refutation of what is said in the sounds of the voice and in the
words [tou en teiphonei logou kai en tots onomasin]."
13. "If all legislators [who name] don't work on the same syllables, this should not be
forgotten: that all blacksmiths do not work on the same iron, whilst making the same tool
for the same purpose; yet, as long as they give it the same form, even if it is from a different
iron, the tool remains correct, whether one makes it here or with Barbarians." (Plato 1997,
Cratylus 389ei~39oa2).
14. Schleiermacher 1999,34-35, and see also C. Berner's glossary, 135-38.
15. I am paraphrasing the well-known bifurcation: "Either the translator leaves the
writer as easy as possible and makes the reader go to meet him, or he leaves the reader as
easy as possible and makes the writer go to meet him" (Schleiermacher 1999,49). And, with
Schleiermacher, I am choosing the reader's uneasiness of the first way.
16.1996,105. Imitation becomes the genial characteristic of a language that would be
lacking in genius, exactly as the hand in Aristotle is the "tool of tools," capable of using,
and thus standing for, them all.
17. Arendt 2003, [15] I, 42-43. See also November 1965 [58] and [59] II, 642-44;
July 1968 [76] and [77] II, 690.
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