Larvatus Prodeo

In Signature, Event, Context, Jacques Derrida wrote:

By definition, a written signature implies the actual or empirical nonpresence of the signer. But, it will be said, it also marks and retains his having-been present in a past now, which will remain a future now, and therefore in a now in general, in the transcendental form of nowness (maintenance). This general maintenance is somehow inscribed, stapled to present punctuality, always evident and always singular, in the form of the signature. This is the enigmatic originality of every paraph. For the attachment to the source to occur, the absolute singularity of an event of the signature and of a form of the signature must be retained: the pure reproducibility of a pure event.
Is there some such thing? Does the absolute singularity of an event of the signature ever occur? Are there signatures?
Yes, of course, every day. The effects of signature are the most ordinary thing in the world. The condition of possibility for these effects is simultaneously once again, the condition of their impossibility, of the impossibility of their rigorous purity. In order to function, that is, in order to be legible, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to detach itself from the present and singular intention of its production.

What Derrida is discussing here in this paper, which later sparked a major stoush with analytical philosopher of language, John Searle, relates back to his original concept of deconstruction - that language is not transparent. His argument arises from the British philosopher J. L. Austin’s How to do things with words which argued that performative instances of speech were parasitic on the ordinary meaning of words. Derrida argues that no such distinction is possible, and that all speech is inherently parasitic - every speech act is an iteration as well as a citation. This also goes to his critique of the metaphysics of presence represented in Husserl’s work. If I write a note to myself, or a shopping list, my reading of the note later is not pure - it’s contaminated by how I’ve changed in the meantime, other subtexts that occur, the vicissitudes of memory and so on. The example of the note is chosen because the intention of the author and their original meaning should be absolutely transparent if the author and reader are one and the same. But they’re not, he suggests, and all language is like that. To cut a very long story short, because I want to start citing someone else talking about the Russian studies vampire, Derrida later expanded on his concept of the signature as part of his “ethical turn” to argue that nevertheless we, and our ghosts and traces, must be held responsible for what we sign even if our intentions can never quite be present to ourselves.

So the event in question for which the context is Derrida’s signature is very strange. Because it involves a vampire, and a seeming irresponsibility of his own signature. Read on, over the fold, for this tale of horror and strangeness at UC Irvine. And draw your own conclusions.

Continue reading ‘The vampire and the signature’s ghosts’