Issues: The Promise of a Speech Act

This essay celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Research in Phenomenology by reimagining or rethinking the speech act (whether explicit or implicit) that would have launched or inaugurated the journal back in 1971. It does this by rereading Derrida’s signature text on speech act theory, “Signature Event Context,” a text first presented by Derrida in the very year of the journal’s founding. The essay takes Derrida’s theses regarding the speech act’s fundamental relationship to writing, absence, death, and testimony in order to reread some of the first issues of Research in Phenomenology, including the memorial essays contained within them. The essay concludes by suggesting that Research in Phenomenology has done as much as any journal over the last half century to live up to the promise of that original speech act.

The Haunting Letter: Presence, Absence, and Writing in Sab

Written expression allows for communication across absences both spatial and temporal. In fact, Jacques Derrida argues in his essay “Signature Event Context” (1988) that absence is an element of every communication and, because of this absence, meaning shifts with new contexts and displacements. When the titular character of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s 1841 Cuban-Spanish Gothic novel Sab – a black slave in love with his white mistress – dies immediately after finishing a letter, he imbues the writing with his presence by way of his first-person expression and personal narrative, while simultaneously ensuring his irreversible absence from his text by death. That his letter outlives him allows for the reiteration of Sab’s final words and thoughts each time his letter is reread. This play between absence and presence inherent in Sab’s letter is the same essential paradox of the specter as described by Derrida in Specters of Marx (1993). Sab’s combined presence and absence in his letter turns him into a kind of ghost that haunts those who read his words.In this paper, I analyze Sab’s letter and its rippling effect throughout the story. The letter acts to identify Sab — and through him the institution of slavery that he both represents and protests against — as the haunting figure of the novel. This haunting, by its very existence, critiques the remembrance of history.

Introductory Remarks by Sean D. Murphy

Welcome everyone. I am Sean Murphy, the President of the American Society of International Law, and I am delighted to have everyone here for what has become a signature event of our annual meeting.

“ ‘Signature Event Context’ … in, well, context”

This article concerns a moment in French intellectual history when the self-evidences of structuralism become doubtful under the pressure exerted by discourse; it thus treats a second turn within the linguistic turn as it occurred in France. The work of Emile Benveniste, and texts by Jean-Francois Lyotard and Paul Ricoeur, flesh out this development. I use them, as well as John Searle’s response, to approach anew Derrida’s essay “Signature Event Context.” Derrida’s distance from this second linguistic turn thereby becomes visible (including from Lacan’s, Barthes’, and Foucault’s versions of it), and the distinct status of discourse in Derrida’s own thought emerges. Finally, critiquing Derrida’s folding of discourse into a notion of “signifying form” in sec, while drawing on his account there of “citationality,” I sketch new directions for conceiving of context and discourse themselves, ones arguably able to withstand Derrida’s express concerns.

Partnership as Educational Policy Imperative: An Unquestioned Good?

“Partnership” is often promoted as an unquestioned “good” for higher education institutions in relation to its various stakeholder organizations. This paper seeks to problematize this uncritical valorization through a critical interrogation of the concepts and socio-material practices associated with partnership. In the name of partnership, new forms of governance are inaugurated that have far-reaching effects. More specifically, this paper is concerned with a critical analysis of partnership in relation to a longitudinal study of the relational practices between a university and five local authorities within a Scottish educational context. In particular, we trace how a “signature event” transformed a partnership assemblage, from one characterized by a grammar of participation, to a formal partnership aligned with a set of principles that we characterize as a grammar of representation. We argue that this transition led to a new assemblage that enacted new accountabilities, performativities, and alignments under the sign of partnership.

Saussure and the model of communication

One of the less obvious contributions of Saussure is his role in establishing modern communications theory. The sender-message-receiver (SMR) model of communication was developed by Shannon and Weaver (1949, The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press). Within the humanities, it is Roman Jakobson’s version of the SMR model that is most influential. Jakobson’s model creates a methodology for considering such complexities as the sender’s intentions, the context of transmission, metalinguistic codes, the transmission medium, and the relation to the referent. Despite the complexity of Jakobson’s model, it is still bound by the assumption that perfect communication can be achieved through the full recovery of contexts. The most thorough and powerful critique of what’s often called the “transmission model” of communication is found in Jacques Derrida’s “Signature Event Context.” Derrida’s critique begins by demonstrating “why a context is never absolutely determinable” (1988a: 3, Signature event context. In Gerald Graff (ed.), Limited inc., Samuel Weber (trans.), 1–23. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press). In place of context, Derrida proposes the notion of “dissemination” in which a text is radically adrift of the conditions of its utterance or reception. At face value, Saussure’s “speech circuit” model represents an early and underdeveloped model of communication. As if often the case, however, a closer reading of the Cours reveals something far more radical and profound. Closer attention to Saussure’s speech circuit model re-opens many questions in communication theory, and in associated fields such as literary theory, cultural studies, and semiotics.