a(lways) b(e) c(iting)October 3, 2013

On “cite”

“Let’s see, or rather, cite:…” (65)

“Why do I cite this? Not just for fun.” (158)

“I have cited at length and shall continue to, so the reader is now forewarned.” (40)

“I cite this paragraph of ‘sympathy.’” (101)

“As always it is better to cite, but I shall permit myself to underline…” (61)

“…thus conforming to the rule that I adopted or imposed upon myself by force: not to cite any other text signed by me…” (103)

“In imposing the convention upon my readers, I have agreed not to cite anything but Sec among the writings which carry, among other things, ‘my’ own signatures, but I never said that I would not cite John R. Searle, co-signatory, director, and, within the limits of his liability responsible for the Reply.” (67)

“…it should suffice to re-cite Sec… First, I shall cite the Reply…” (86)

“…it gives me pleasure that I would not like to miss…” (40)

“I like and am obliged to cite frequently, so as not to be suspected of injustice or abuse of language…” (124)

“Of course, I am not suggesting that it suffices to cite a few phrases or to mention some titles of books in order to argue seriously.” (158)“I shall cite once again, re-citing what was cited by Sarl although within much presence-of-mind to what was being read and being written…” (51)

“As might be expected, I choose to cite at length.” (79-80)

“With a more active, attentive, and present intention, Sarl would have been able to remark a passage like the one I am not compelled to cite, for reasons of clarity.” (58)

“Note that, having cited these phrases of Searle in their context, I did not criticize them directly or head-on…, as you might have done, following the logic of objection you address to me.” (118)

“…in this or that mode in the texts I have cited and which for the sake of clarity I shall cite again in an instant.” (121)

“A great number, of varying types, which seem to cite themselves (can a signature be cited, and if so, what are the consequences?) and to constitute the objects of the study, the themes and examples of an analysis, no less than the seal of the analyst.” (32)

“Adding up all the quotes, I believe that I will have cited the Reply from beginning to end, or almost.” (101)

- Will have?

“…Sec names writing in this place where the iterability of the proof (of God’s existence) produces writing, drawing the name of God (of the infinite Being) into a graphematic drift that excludes (for instance) any decision as to whether God is more than the name of God, whether the ‘name of God’ refers to God or to the name of God, whether it signifies ‘normally’ or ‘cites,’ etc., God being here, qua writing, what at the same time renders possible and impossible…” (83)

“…performatives can always be cited…” (87)

“Furthermore, I shall cite at length in order to limit the confusion, the denials or the selective simplifications which it seems to me the Reply has introduced into the debate.” (40)

“I shall cite Sarl again, copiously, and I shall make every effort not to leave the slightest detail obscure.” (88)

“…hot can one expect Sarl to have paid attention to all the other statements he didn’t cite?” (99)

“But it must be. I believe that I would not agree with anything else in this article, which I unfortunately cannot cite and criticize here in its entirety.” (156)

“In short, to cite you…would…be neither possible nor necessary without this play of differánce.” (147)

“…I prefer to cite the Reply:…” (50)

“Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the current sense of this opposition), in a small or large unit, can be cited, put between quotation makes; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable.” (12)

“As always it is better to cite, but I shall permit myself to underline…” (61)

“The proof? Here it is. Of course it’s a quotation, taken from the very statement cited and hence presumably read by Sarl, but which evidently requires rereading.” (98)

“…Sarl has paid insufficient attention to the very letter of the very phrase that was cited; Sarl was inattentive to what this citation said about what should not be confused with citation.” (98)

“…can be mimed, cited…” (70)

“…thus potentially of being mimed, feigned, cited, played, simulated…” (92)

“…just as every phrase endowed with grammaticality that is cited in a certain context…can also signify…” (81)

“(already cited)” (72)

“…is generally cited in English (we shall mention certain consequences of this)…” (38)

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On “seal”

“What infelicity of this—I mean, of Searle’s seal? It resides in the fact that if Searle speaks the truth when he claims to be speaking the truth, the obviously true, then it copyright is irrelevant and devoid of interest: everyone will be able, will in advance have been able, to reproduce what he says. Searle’s seal is stolen in advance. Hence, the anxiety and compulsion to stamp and to seal the truth. On the other

hand, however, if Searle had the vague feeling that what he was saying was not obviously true, and that it was not obvious to everyone, then he would attempt passionately, but no less superfluously, to preserve this originality, to the point of provoking the suspicion, by virtue of his repeated and thus divided seal, that his confidence in the truth he claims to possess is a poor front for considerable uneasiness. Divided seal—is, as you can verify, a citation from Signature Event Context (‘it … divides its seal.’ p. 20), from the section that plays with signature and proper names.” (31)

“I have just said this in order to avoid the imprudence and haste that would be implied in calling an event such as this seal a speech act.” (31)

- Because of how I read now, I have to think of italics as a hyperlink and cannot think of it as anything otherwise. This leads to me reading “this” as either nothing more than “this” or as a reference to another issue (“ ‘ ‘ ‘Copyright © 1977 by John R. Searle’ ‘ ‘ “), which I think it is, but to be honest, I cannot honestly tell.

“Imagine the scene: Austin’s will is about to be unsealed. Although the envelope has not yet been entirely opened, the lawyer of one of the sons begins to speak: ‘Once one has a general theory of speech acts…’ Once? We still don’t know if Austin had one to was going to have one.” (94)

“Each time that the question of the ‘ethical and teleological discourse of consciousness’ (ibid.) arises, it is in an effort to uncover and to break the security-lock which, from within the system—inside of the prevailing model of speech acts governs the current theory in its most coherent and even most productive operation—condemns the unconscious as one bars access to a forbidden place. By placing under lock and key, or by sealing off; here, by prohibiting that that Unconscious—what may still be called the Unconscious—be taken seriously; be taken seriously, that is, in (as) a manner of speaking, up to and including its capacity for making jokes.” (73-74)

“Namely, the proper name, which suddenly finds itself removed. It can thus transform itself, at once, and change itself into a more or less anonymous multiplicity. This is what happens to the ‘subject’ in the scene of writing. That Searle’s seal should become, at once and without waiting for me, Sarl’s seal, is therefore anything but accidental. It is a little like the multitude of stockholders and managers in a company or corporation with limited liability, or in a limited, incorporated system; or, like that limit which is supposed to distinguish stockholders from managers. Even here, the signatory is no exception.” (57)

“Effects of signature are the most common thing in the world. But the condition of possibility of those effects is simultaneously, once again, the condition of their impossibility, of the impossibility of their rigorous purity. In order to function, that is, to be readable, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to be detached from the present and singular intention of its production. It is

its sameness which by corrupting its identity and tis singularity, divides its seal [sceau].” (20)

“Or rather, the signatures, since it can hardly have escaped the attention of anyone that there are a great number of them and that they are curiously situated on the lower edge (within? without?) of a section entitled, precisely, Signatures. A great number, of varying types, which seem to cite themselves (can a signature be cited, and if so, what are the consequences?) and to constitute the objects of the study, the themes and examples of an analysis, no less than the seal of the analysis.” (32)

“For it will have the supplementary advantage of enabling me to avoid offending individuals or proper names in the course of an argument that they might now and then consider, wrongly, to be polemical. … And, after all, isn’t this the very question which, posed by Signature Event Context, will have involved us in this improbable confrontation? It is as a reminder of this, and not to draw the body of his name into my language by subtracting one r and two e’s, that I thus break Searle’s seal (itself already fragmentary or divided).” (36)

“Or Limited Inc, which aside from its use-value in the legal-commercial code that marks the common bond linking England and the United States (Oxford and Berkeley), also mentions in translation a seal related to the French code (s.a.r.l.); condenses allusions to the internal regulation through which the capitalist system seeks to limit concentration and decision-making power in order to protect itself against its own ‘crisis’; entails everything said by psychoanalysis about incorporation, about the limit between incorporation and non-incorporation, incorporation and introjection in the work of mourning (and in work generally), a limit in which I have been much interested in during these last years, with the result that texts such as Glas and Fors (two untranslatable titles) become, in principle, inseparable from our debate and indispensible for a minimal reading of the title Limited Inc.”

A few things on these quotes:1. I think that this word “seal” is quite important for Derrida because of the multiple meanings that can be attributed to it along with the more clear reading of ‘signature.’ The idea that the seal is an object which joins two things together directly relates to what JD is discussing prior to his first invocation of ‘seal.’ The two things that are sealed together are different (opposed? complementary? dichotomous?) frames of time: “past now or present…future now or present,” which is broken (?) in the act of reading that which the seal is attached to. The wax seal on an envelope is not only a distinction being made for the author/sender of the message, but holds within it a distinct necessity to be broken. Searle…Sarl…seal…Seal.2. I find it odd that for every assignment previous to this I did not excise texts with the amount of wordage that is present in this write-up. I can’t really say why this is the case for Derrida and not for someone like Heidegger. Have I been infused with a sense of context? Is it the writing of Derrida that makes

one feel as if extensive quotation is fully necessary? Do I just like typing out from a book instead of from a PDF? Are his sentences just really long?

***

A Short Note on Reading Terror

It’s quite odd reading Derrida with a pencil and having to erase things. A misplaced trace of eraser and you have a brand new accent hovering over a word, causing lengthy linguistic confusion that can only be solved with tactile sense but because one is convinced to resolve the issue with sight (and thought) the reader is stuck in a mode of perception without the most important preceptor. Where else would we even find the possibility of such a problem?

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“I have cited these facts in order to delimit certain concepts…” (159)