The Seventh Function of Language

Hearing me say “It’s late,” my receivers believed that I wanted to go home and they offer to accompany me. Success? But what if, in fact, I wanted to stay? If someone or something deep inside me wanted to stay, without me even being aware of it?

“In fact, in what sense does Reagan claim to be Reagan, president of the United States? Who will ever know him, strictly speaking? Him?”

The audience laughs. Everyone is at maximum attentiveness. They have forgotten the context.

It is now that Derrida chooses to strike.

“But what would happen if in promising ‘Sarl’ to criticize him I went beyond what his Unconscious desires, for reasons we’ll analyze, and do everything I can to provoke him? Would my ‘promise’ be a promise or a threat?”

In a whisper, Bayard asks Judith why Derrida pronounces it “Sarl.” Judith explains that he is mocking Searle: in French, as far as she understands, “Sarl” signifies “Société à responsabilité limitée,” a private limited company. Bayard thinks this is quite funny.

Derrida goes on:

“What is the unity or identity of the speaker? Is he responsible for speech acts dictated to him by his unconscious? Because I have mine, too, which might want to give pleasure to Sarl inasmuch as he wants to be criticized, or cause him pain by not criticizing him, or give him pleasure by not criticizing him, or cause him pain by criticizing him, to promise him a threat or to threaten him with a promise, or offer myself up for criticism by taking pleasure in saying things that are obviously false, enjoying my weakness or loving exhibitionism more than anything, et cetera.”

The whole audience turns toward Searle, of course, who, as if he had anticipated this moment, is sitting in the exact center of the tiered seating. The lone man in the middle of the crowd: it’s like a scene from Hitchcock. His face remains impassive under this barrage of scrutiny. He looks like he’s been killed and stuffed.

And besides, when I make phrases, is it really me who is speaking? How can anyone ever say anything original, personal, unique to him, when by definition language obliges us to draw from a well of preexisting words? When we are influenced by so many external forces: our times, the books we read, our sociocultural determinisms, our linguistic “tics” so precious that they form our identity, the speeches we are constantly bombarded with in every possible and imaginable form.

Who has never caught a friend, a parent, a colleague or a father-in-law repeating an argument they have read in a newspaper or heard on the television almost word for word, as if he were speaking for himself, as if he had appropriated that speech, as if he were the source of those thoughts rather than a sponge for them, rehashing the same formulas, the same rhetoric, the same presuppositions, the same indignant inflections, the same knowing tone, as if he were not simply the medium through which a newspaper’s prerecorded voice repeated the words of a politician who himself had read them in a book whose author, and so on … the medium through which the nomadic, sourceless voice of a ghostly speaker expresses itself, communicates, in the sense of two places communicating via a passage.

Repeating what he has read in a newspaper … to what extent can the conversation with your father-in-law be considered a citation?

Derrida has returned seamlessly to the central thread of his argument. Now he touches on his other principal argument: citationality, or rather, iterability. (Simon is not sure he’s really grasped the distinction.)

To be understood, at least partially, by our receiver, we must use the same language. We must repeat (reiterate) words that have already been used, otherwise our receiver will not be able to understand them. So we are always, fatally, in some form of citation. We use the words of others. Now, as with Chinese whispers, it is more than probable—it is inevitable—that through repetitions each and every one of us will employ the words of others, in a slightly different sense to those others.

Derrida’s pied-noir voice becomes more formal and bombastic:

“Even that which will ensure the functioning of the mark (psychic, oral, graphic, whatever) beyond this moment, namely the possibility of being repeated, even that begins, divides, expropriates the fullness or the intrinsically ‘ideal’ presence of intention, of the desire to express, and a fortiori the harmony between meaning and saying.”

Judith, Simon, the young black-haired woman, Cixous, Guattari, Slimane, everyone in the lecture hall, even Bayard, is hanging on his every word when he says:

“Limiting even that which authorizes, transgressing the code or law that it constitutes, iterability irreducibly inscribes alteration in the repetition.”

And he adds, imperiously:

“The accident is never an accident.”

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