Of Der RIDEOlogy*
Dragan Kujundzic
To laugh at oneself, just as we
would have to laugh to laugh out
entire truths – for this the best have up to now not had a sense of truth, and the most gifted
too little genius!– Friedrich Nietzsche, A Merry Science
The lecturer stopped reading, put a folded napkin in front of him, unfolded it and took out of it the metal top of a cup of yogurt on which was written Yes, he showed it to the listeners and accompanied this gesture with the following story: "While I was writing this paper I am now reading, in Ithaca, one morning they served me this yogurt whose name is Yes. The advertisement on the plastic cup states: How can you say 'No' to this Yes?" Laughter broke out among the listeners. Even the lecturer himself laughed out loud.
The lecturer who told this story was Jacques Derrida, and his listeners were participants at a conference on deconstruction held at the University of Urbino in July 1984. The lecture Derrida had interrupted with a witty story, and laughter, was "Ulysses grammophone: hear say yes in Joyce."1
I shall begin my dialogue (that is to say, my response) to this text of Derrida's by initially describing what might be called the communication situation in which Jacques Derrida and his listeners found themselves at that moment – since it seems to me that this situation can, within the theoretical framework into which I would like to transpose it, tell us about some features of Derrida's writing, and also about his relation to philosophical tradition. As for the places in Derrida's presentation that I have marked with italics (and taken thereby as markers or sailing co-ordinates in my circumnavigation and voyage towards Ithaca – an Ithaca of Homer's, Joyce's, Culler's, Derrida's, but also mine), I would like to orient a discourse that would try to embrace the laughter that still comes to me from Urbino, and to write down an "exercise in style" about it. The reader may become convinced, however, that this essay will only theorize or generalize the impossibility, in fact, of writing about laughter. This is the premise on which my text – and I venture to say Derrida's "Ulysses grammophone: hear say yes in Joyce" – is based. That is to say, on the gaps, fissures, or differences that are created by laughter. I shall attempt to introduce a discourse which will confirm it (say "yes!" to it).
Urbino, Summer 1984. Photo by Outi Pasanen
Before proceeding further I would like to recall to the reader some of the basic tenets of speech act theory which are implicit in Derrida's writing (and my own here), as they help to map out the sailing plan of his writing and of his humorous story, a plan which both affirms and annuls speech act theory, and without which an understanding of Ulysses-gramophone is perhaps only made more difficult.
What is the theory of speech acts? The text on which the construction of this (today very much discussed) branch of linguistic pragmatics is based, is a study by the British philosopher J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words.2 Having perceived that in language, that is to say, speech practice, there are some dimensions which do not permit certain utterances to be considered according to the criteria of true/false, and that there are significant aspects of linguistic communication which make it possible to do things with words (and that these doings or acts do not depend on the mentioned criteria) – such as, for instance, "I command", "I confirm", "I bet", Austin (not unlike Saussure) tries to establish a descriptive procedure of certain speech acts that would be focused on conventions and contextual factors – that is, on the system (langue) which makes it possible for a certain utterance (parole) to have meaning. Austin observes that an utterance or 'speech act' can have constative features (ones which would belong, according to Jakobson's well-known classification, to the referential function of language), but performative features as well, which make it possible for an utterance to perform an act. According to Austin, utterances can have a locutionary force which enables them to refer to factual states. Austin terms a second class of utterance the illocutionary force of reminding, stating, regretting, ordering and even negating ("I suppose French is my language", to cite an example from Derrida's Ulysses- gramophone). Finally, a perlocutionary act is one which motivates the listener to perform some action, though this energy can also be possessed by speech which does not make explicit the act which the listener should perform. The speech of seducers radiates to a great extent with this energy, as we are reminded in a text which deals with Don Juan and Austin's seductive strategy.3 For our purposes let us remark that a witty story is also an utterance which bears in itself perlocutionary force. The act to which it tries to lead the listener is laughter. And the English expression "to make someone laugh" (literally: to do something to make someone laugh), bears in itself quite a precise description of perlocutionary force.4
Austin believes that it is possible to make a detailed description of circumstances or the context which enables an utterance to be realized as constative or performative, or, to phrase it differently (as philosophers of language might phrase it) that it is possible to dissolve the phenomenon of meaning into a hierarchy of factors which allow meaning to be manifested and realized. The rules of the language-system with which Saussure was concerned, and structural linguistics as well, would bear account to the meaning of the locutionary act. The aim of speech act theory is, conversely, to concern itself with the meaning of the illocutionary act, or, as Austin phrases it, the illocutionary force of utterance.
The attention Derrida focuses on the problems of this theory are motivated by his reserve towards attempts to establish a theory of language whose exhaustive description would confine the various meanings of an utterance: the description of a context, for instance, does not remove the possibility that a certain utterance can recontextualize itself and thus alter its meaning, or that elements can be found in a context that resists description. "Meaning is context-bound, but context is boundless" is Culler's lapidary sentence referring to this problem. In addition to this, by indicating that Austin excluded from his study those utterances which are not "serious" ("I must not be joking, not writing a poem") in order to clear the field of performative utterances of cases which do not fit into his theory, Derrida warns that by marginalizing performatives, intentionality is again introduced on the sly: the literalness of the utterance as "serious" and true comes at the top of the hierarchy and governs over the performative which is merely a "joke" or "poem" and which is thereby given a secondary and subordinate status. The performative becomes only a court jester in the kingdom of literalness.
This cunning of the mind which throws out "frivolous" utterances in order to test the mechanisms which enable a promise to be "true" also has its consequences. Derrida points out that the features which enable an utterance to realize itself as a performative are, in fact, the iterable features of language; that is to say, the linguistic sign: the fact that the sign possesses certain graphemic-meaning identity, that is, the very existence of repeatable formulas and conventional procedures makes it possible to perform the ceremony of marriage or the act of betting or promising regardless of "seriousness", that is, intention. These formulas are codified in an exemplary manner in a literary text: if it were not possible for a character in a play to make a promise it would not be possible in "real" life either. The "serious" is only one act, as Derrida would phrase it, in the gramophone drama or play of sign iterability. Things are also complicated by the fact that the distinction between the performative and the constative is not consistent to its own assumptions in Austin and succumbs to its own hierarchization. An utterance with a prominently performative force such as, for example, our utterance from Ulysses-gramophone ("I suppose French is my language") by a procedure which Austin himself presupposes and allows, that explicit performative verbs can be omitted from performative utterances without them losing their performative energy can also be expressed in the form "French is my language". Yet, this latter is quite evidently the standard form of constative utterance. In this way "Austin's analysis provides a splendid instance of the logic of supplementarity at work. Starting from the philosophical hierarchy that makes true or false statements the norm of language and treats other utterances as flawed statements or as extra-supplementary-forms, Austin's investigation of the qualities of the marginal case leads to deconstruction and inversion of the hierarchy: the performative is not flawed constative, rather, the constative is a special case of the performative."
Let us now set sail toward Ulysses-grammophone: hear say yes in Joyce. I have already mentioned that the navigation will be determined by co-ordinates "outside" Derrida's text – it will be determined by the situation in which a philosopher makes his listeners laugh.
Tuscaloosa, Fall 1995. Photo by Peggy Kamuf
Why hear say yes? As the reader will figure out on his own the word "yes" is itself a good example of a performative act: it confirms, admits, allows without itself possessing a so-called referential function. Derrida claims that "yes" by "its radically non-constative and non-descriptive dimension ... is completely and par excellence, a performative", it is "the transcendental state of every performative dimension. A promise, a vow, an order, an obligation always imply a "yes, I sign to it". A real mine of examples on which Derrida constructs his writing is to be found in Joyce's Ulysses – in this novel "yes" permeates some of its vital portions, performatizes the speech of Ulysses and seducing both reader and theoretician – and this is its performative dimension. It is, to put it in keeping with the voyage we a re making in this odyssey upon the sea of speech acts, the song of sirens to which one studying performatives cannot turn a deaf ear to. And I accept, here and now (and that is another performative) this song. Only I shall not be following Derrida's and Joyce's footsteps about Dublin. On this voyage I am interested, above all, in the similarity between laughter and "yes" (oui rire and oui dire) which open up the road for one another, as Derrida says, and then links their performative energy with his surname. What I am interested in is to discover a connection between "yes" laughter and Derrida's surname, the connection which he himself reveals explicitly but also conceals since he says nothing about it. ("All in all, the telephone slip which made me say or made others hear me saying "Oui dire" made it possible for "Oui rire" to open up a way for itself, just as the consonant difference between "d" and "r". These are, in fact, the only consonants in my surname". [Italics - D.K.])
What is the connection between "d" and "r", between laughter and speaking "yes" which is so strong that the distinction between them is obliterated, their differences, and which links them to Derrida's surname. We are, therefore, embarking on a voyage into a difference which is removed and transposed into Derrida's name.
Both laughter and "yes" cause an explosion which rips through empty space – "yes by its prominent non-referentiality ("the radically non-descriptive dimension of 'yes'") represents the very degree zero of speech, the void, the gap in literalness, the metonymic linkage of speech – it breaks ("as soon as 'yes' appears in the monologue there will be some interruption"), it differs, transposes: when we say "yes" before us breaks a performative void which evades us, which is in constant retreating and displacement (metastasis) since it is addressed to an other, "yes" is, therefore, both the difference between identities, our selfhood and that of the other to which "yes" is addressed: Derrida says it quite clearly – "yes" is explicitly non-monological. In this way "yes" reveals that in the very act of confirmation which should verify our/my right to say "yes" there is a gap, a difference which makes fun of me, which laughs at my self-confidence in the right to "yes", and which reminds me that it is not possible without an other, that identity does not exist without difference.
Also a feature of laughter is its eruptiveness which cuts through the speech order: laughter bursts out, as it is usually phrased, at a moment when speech breaks off and stands awaiting amid the silence which another's laughter is to inhabit. In Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, Freud observed that a witty story is told – to cite an interpretation of this study of Freud's which also comes from Ithaca5 – "with the help of a third person, not by the laughter of the teller or the person about whom the tale is told, but of the person to whom it is told and because of whose laughter it is told exclusively. That laughter cannot be controlled or explained, neither by the one who does the laughing, the third person, nor by the first, who does the telling." [italics – D.K.] Otherness occupies the space of laughter, difference and deferral, difference inhabit the house of laughter: the teller of the witty story has accepted to have his speech verified by another whose laughter will confirm the story, I make jokes, therefore I exist in the other, I laugh, therefore my laughter exists because of the speech which is not mine but which my laughter confirms, affirms, supports, identifies as a joke, to whom I say "yes": rideo, in altero ergo sum. Laughter is markedly non-metaphysical and non-philosophical. Both he who induces laughter and he who laughs cannot give explanations, nor can they control, as Freud says. Let us just remember how distant laughteris to a philosopher like Plato who feared it (" ... reason, for fear of the reputation of buffoonery, restrained in yourself ..." Republic, X, 606c) – but more of about that later, I promise.
Let us remember that Freud's analysis of laughter and laughing is also closely connected with its semantic and philosophical status. And that Freud himself discussed laughter – which I think has not been noticed up to now – in several places in eminently philosophical terms of presence and absence, and in relation to knowledge and reflection in general. However, both wit and laughter, just like Freud's other terms, are themselves constituted by a web of opposed assumptions and they undo a logic which would like to know what, in the final instance, laughter is. If we recall the situation with the laughing philosopher from the beginning of our story we will see that in the light of Freud's study it would reveal itself as the centre of unresolvable paradoxes. Wit, and then also Derrida's philosophical witty story, "tends to dress thought up in the garments of joking. In this distinction we are always fooled: sometimes we overestimate the quality of the joke because we admire the thought contained in it, and, soon afterwards, vice versa. We overestimate the value of the thought because of the pleasure which the witty garment affords us. We do not know what gives us pleasure and why we laugh."6 Laughter distracts reason, and makes the garment in which we have dressed it, bribe and confuse our criticism. Laughter is an act which disrupts the established order, something which bears in itself a certain power, but a power which does not know itself, which does not possess itself, but which fools reason, judgment and judging, which makes fun of criticism: "Laughter enables wit to trick criticism, enabling thoughts to pass the test of criticism".7 Laughter "bribes and confuses our criticism" and " reason, critical judgment, oppression, those are the powers against which it struggles". The power of wit, and afterwards of laughter as well, is in the creation of a void in which laughter will inscribe itself, a deferral of the effect of the power of reason and control on which logos bases its authority. Wit, however, does not intend to put itself in the place of that other authority which it has supplanted, it seems, so to say, to take pleasure in its own freedom, it is not a new repression which has taken the place of some other, but, rather, it gives up its own authority. Wit originates, as Freud says, out of absence, its origination is fostered by forces which, so to say, do not exist except in their absence. Wit originates from the void which fills the space uncontrolled by reason: when reason sleeps the unconscious creates laughter. Since it is dislocated (a-topoi), since it exists in absence, laughter shares the destiny of Barthes' imaginary: it is the unconscious of the unconscious. From absence which creates laughter, we again find ourselvesin the centre of a paradox, if there were something like the "centre of paradox" – from absence, therefore, originates the confirmation or our presence. Laughter is, to repeat, a confirmation, it is "yes". And Freud is quite explicit when he states: "The listener confirms his pleasure by his explosive laughter".8 I laugh, therefore I take pleasure, I take pleasure, therefore I exist. By laughing we find ourselves in the centre of deferral, difference, by which laughter puts off the coming of death, the death which is allotted to us. Laughter prepares for that death which, as human beings, is immanent to us: the pleasure principal, goes one of Freud's famous thoughts, serves the death drive. We are where our laughter is, but it is here to differ and so prepare the way for our own death.
Laughter is non-metaphysical : but this is only approximately correct and only an instrument by which I try to assent to laughter and explain it. As there is no phenomenological essence to laughter, laughter cannot be placed in parentheses, either phenomenological or any other. Laughter cannot be bracketed. It has no essence, no being since it cannot be captured, bridled, hierarchicized or codified in some ultimate structure or totality. Plato's being, what is of itself, cannot encompass laughter since laughter always belongs to an other, to itself and to another and it hovers in the space between these two poles. It is what Derrida terms a pharmakon – a medicine (and Freud has written on the therapeutic effect of laughter), but it is interesting to point out that in Serbocroatian and in English there is an idiom which links it with death: "I'll die with laughter" used for too much laughter. Too much laughter kills – like too much medicine.
But to proceed on yet not to leave the sea of speech acts, to remain in the circle of the siren's song, but sufficiently far away from it not to kill me (laughter will take care that this latter will not happen), laughter is always a unique, unrepeatable act to be created ever and anew. There is no guarantee that a once told witty story will cause laughter a second time, laughter is unbribable and never ceases to surprise us over and again – will it come or will it not. "It comes when it is its pleasure" as a verse from Laza Kostic's poem says. It happens, according to Rilke's words, just like life itself, "just once", "nur einmal" and there is no law, promise, rule, metaphysical gold bullion, that is, generality which could guarantee that laughter will be repeated. There is no force which can bring laughter to obedience, and in this lies the ontological anarchism of laughter; Derrida claims that there is something pre-ontological in laughter. And if this is so, it is due to the fact that the notion of being cannot stand up (without bursting into laughter!?) to laughter.
There is yet another medico-pharmacopoeial feature of laughter which Derrida calls yes-speech to life ("oui dire au vivre"). Where do say yes and laughter get strength to affirm life, to say "yes" to it?
When we say "yes" to life by laughter we try to put off, defer death. Laughter appears as a utopian project generated by a certain nucleus of hope that the deferral is possible, a hope which shares "the reality" surrounding us in which we exist. A basic dissatisfaction in this nucleus of hope, dissatisfaction because of death, drives laughter to inscribe itself into the void of time which is the sole "property" of life (a paradoxical property which enables life to last, but which wounds it each and every moment: "Every moment wounds but only the last one kills" says a medieval Latin inscription at the foot of a church belfry). This dissatisfaction tries to defer death and in this way to oppose the being-unto-death, to oppose the literalness of "reality" to which it responds ("yes" and laughter are always a form of response, claims Derrida), in the manner of the very figure of utopian desire: in this way laughter transforms each limited moment of our literal duration which reminds us, with every passing hour, that we are approaching the hour of judgment, into the figure of the ultimate presence of Utopia. (This italicised phrase is, of course, an oxymoron. Utopia is always absent.) The figurativeness or performativeness of speech which defers death reveals itself as the nucleus of utopian laughter. Laughter rings with the paradoxical utopian desire for presence which annuls itself at the very moment of its origination. Laughter, let us repeat, bursts, breaks out of the kingdom of literalness, constativeness which belong to our duration in the reality surrounding us, in favor of an order which is outside it, which is elsewhere (u-topos), an order which is anticipated by laughter but which will never come, although it is always coming and for which there is no guarantee that it will be realized: it is an order which inhabits the performative void of laughter. The laugher laughs, as Khlebnikov's unsurpassable lines on laughter say, at his transition from the kingdom of literal necessity to the kingdom of rhetorical freedom, to paraphrase the classics somewhat. The performativeness of yes-laughter is an element which over and again creates this Utopian dimension, this eternal deferral of death ("eternal" in fact: "eternity" appears only in the limited moments of laughter). Yes-laughter cannot abolish death but it tries, at the moment of its bursting, to differ its sting.
The reader of Ulysses-gramophone will notice for himself the manner in which Derrida opposes the eruptive force of yes-laughter in Joyce to possible speech or writing about Ulysses, that lucid navigational strategy by which the competence of an expert on Joyce's work is led onto the rocks of laughter about which nothing can be said, points a finger at the explosion which occurs in the confrontation between logos, knowledge possessed by the Joycean scholar and the destructive energy developed by Joyce's laughter, without permitting the possibility for laughter to be ultimately bridled, locked up, since it continues to transpose itself, to echo, to scandalize the knowledge which wants to speak about it. Knowledge, the episteme, is always something which ties a discursive order (just like a ship is tied, this is not metaphorical but quite literal) to a subject since to know means to hierarchize a certain discursive series, to fix the signifying sliding into some ultimate structure, to stop it, to gramophonize it, to congeal it, to enable it to be identical with itself: "Let us revert to epidtuh (knowledge) and observe how ambiguous this word is, seeming rather to signify stopping the soul at things than going round with them". (Plato, Cratylus, 437a.) Knowledge cannot stop at laughter without annulling it, if it wants to be knowledge, an episteme, it has to stop at its subject, which is not possible with laughter, for if it goes round (circumnavigation) it is not knowledge, or, at least Plato would not consider it to be such.
What is a philosopher to do when his voyage runs him aground on such an insight, when he is confronted by yes-laughter/speech: he breaks off the monologue of reading what is written down and together with his listeners he laughs at his Yes. He laughs at the impossibility of speaking about it and the "only" thing left is to invoke it together with his listeners, to agree to laughter, to laugh together with his "yes", with his own laughter. The philosopher who has founded his "system" on a so-called criticism of logocentricity and supplementariness, himself resorts to logos, to a subsequent supplementary intervention on his writing, using the privilege of immediate authorial presence, in order to annul such a logocentric intervention by laughter which constitutes or quotes the subject in question (yes-laughter) but which denies the possibility that logos can say anything more about this laughter (laughter cannot be explained either by the person who induces laughter or by the person laughing). Logos brings the philosopher to a paradox: he laughs at the insight that "science cannot put anything in order", he laughs fully aware that by laughter he is putting himself in its service. By laughing at the performative (at the Yes from the yogurt top which introduced him to laughter once in Ithaca), he is in fact serving it: Was du verlachts wirst Du noch dienen. Truly, as the advertisement says, he cannot resist that Yes. The philosopher, just like Ulysses when he finally reaches Ithaca, the goal of his voyage (hear say yes/laughter, Ithaca), relinquishes his identity, denies himself, puts on a mask, acts, dethrones himself (the king becomes a beggar, the philosopher a sophist: "He is not willing to demonstrate his wisdom in earnest: he is doing conjuring tricks with us, like Proteus, the Egyptian Sophist" – Plato, Euthydemus 288b, "The sophist takes refuge in the darkness of not being" – Sophist 254a; "yes" is pre-ontological, Derrida), he gives a performance ("Serious behavior is a special case of role playing" – Culler), he stops being a philosopher in order to confirm the subject of his study. In order to confirm the presuppositions which make it possible for him to write about laughter, he resorts to rhetoric which annuls and deconstructs them. Speech breaks off when laughter is reached just as the story of Ulysses ends when he finally reaches Ithaca. Both Derrida who laughed in Ithaca with his eyes on Yes, and Ulysses who made a truce in Ithaca (a truce – a social act which implies a contract and signature), are two characters who no longer need speech – before the performative the philosopher can laugh/act, but he cannot speak and thus he cancels his identity as philosopher, as someone who possesses true knowledge about the essence of things (as Plato claims of philosophers: Republic VI, 484c, 500c, Phaedo 82a, etc.), just as Ulysses without the odyssey, without the voyage, the circumnavigation has nothing to say. In both cases the performative (laughter, truce – contract, signature) terminates the narrative metonymic series. I cannot resist saying about Derrida who is making others laugh and laughing himself the same thing he writes about Joyce's laughter: "This laughter, merry and victorious, but at the same time, merriment always reflects some pain, so it is the laughter of resigned lucidity", a lucidity which perceives its discursive incapacity ("laughter at knowledge and from out of knowledge", Derrida would say), which looks towards its own end.
Derrida's laughter at his own knowledge, as has been said, is identical with the intervention of logos upon the text. In this way we sail up to the next insight: the knowledge our laughing philosopher possesses about laughter is rhetorical, "literary" at the very moment when the logos is engaged in supplementing and explaining the text of Ulysses-gramophone: "We are ... calling 'literary' – says Paul de Man in Blindness and Insight – in the full sense of the term any text that implicitly or explicitly signifies its own rhetorical mode [laughter about laughter – D.K.] and prefigures its own misunderstanding as the correlative of its own rhetorical nature, that is, of its 'rhetoricity'." The story itself about the "yes" that it does not understand, rhetoricizes and prefigures insights it wants to reveal and present, that is to say, it reveals that in movement toward a knowledge of yes-laughter, the rhetoricity of language is something which always precedes it, which is to be found before knowledge and which scandalizes it. "Yes" implies an implicit believer, says Derrida quoting Ulysses, making his definition literary by quoting from a literary text. Derrida who is making a joke and playing with "yes" rhetoricizes the Derrida who is not making a joke (who is as serious as a real philosopher) when he writes that there can be no "truth or an origin escaping the play – pay attention to the play, D.K. – and the order of signs". Knowledge itself does not exist before the text in which it is subject to the play of signs, in fact, there is "nothing before the text ... there is no pretext which is not already a text."10 The philosophical speech of Ulysses-gramophone is made literary and deconstructed by ironic self-reflexive episodes (which, according to Jakobson, represent a feature of the "poetic function of language" the so-called "orientedness toward expression", that is to say, it "signifies its own rhetorical mode, which is for de Man a feature of "literariness") which reveal themselves at that moment of self-reflexive intervention in which they prefigure their own misunderstanding of the phenomenon of yes-laughter as the correlative of their own rhetorical nature as a play of signs, as textuality, as an uncontrollable dissemination of textual energy as an act of a textual comedy whose effects cannot be controlled and which they cannot explain: the witty story which Derrida tells before us and performs it has previously been inscribed in the textuality or rhetoricity of his and Joyce's writing – Derrida performs, theatralizes its final (speech) act before us.
Derrida's laughter at his own philosophy is a transposing, a deferring, a circling, a retreat before the impossibility of speaking about "yes", about laughter, and also about their performativeness. His knowledge, logos, are continually being deferred, they desire bounds, but that is a boundary which moves away, they are possible only as "a difference, as the principle of reflexivity, which cannot be reflexively grasped", this knowledge is an ac(t)-knowledgement, that is, a performative, that, as Lyotard phrases it, "There is always a pre-reflexive, an unrflected, pre-predicated, upon which reflection science must lean and which it conjures away every time it wishes to give an account of itself."11 Derrida himself says clearly that his knowledge about "yes" and about laughter is pre-ontological. the performative demands "an implicit believer" while in the continuation of this quotation this believer is placed in "the lurid story being narrated". In order to speak about yes-laughter we need a literary speech, the speech of a story: an implicit believer in the lurid story being narrated. Please note, I am not improvising: I am quoting Derrida who requires an "implicit believer" as a presupposition for the speech about "yes" (he himself takes the phrase from Joyce but is also passing over the rest of the sentence he is quoting. I would say that this silence is philosophical, it is something which Derrida the philosopher must not say, that is, quote). "When someone else seeks an explanation about 'yes' then the response implies 'an implicit believer' in the lurid story being narrated". In order to speak about yes-laughter/speech we have to be participants in a story or performance. Derrida uses a quotation, an excerpt from one textual series and transposes it into another – and this defining obligates no one, for -- as Derrida himself says –- "everything is according to the codex and nothing is according to the codex when several segments are taken out in the form of narrative metonymy". Resorting to a quotation (particularly in our situation when laughing he quotes laughter), Derrida creates a discursive connection which hides in itself a fissure, a gap which radiates with an energy which makes the codex, that is, the order of literal philosophical speech decodified and deconstructed (Derrida says that the "motive of difference is in fact noticed, as always, in the fissure").
Derrida who makes his listeners laugh in Urbino is a philosopher whose modus of being -- being in laughter, being in "yes" and in laughter: we finally come to the spot of limits, the delimitation between "d" and "r", laughter and "yes". a limit which recedes and annuls itself and moves itself into Derrida's surname. Our philosopher exists in the signature, in the absence of philosophical control and discursiveness, in the scandal of his own philosophy which always implies a "yes", his being is a paradoxical being-for-yes, Jasein (which is again an oxymoron since the properties of laughter are always in a continual transposition into an other. The being "yes", the being laughter has no essence of being which is necessary for being to be truthful according to, for instance, a Heidegger). The being of laughter is always "being" itself. Derrida's Jasein responds to the call of his inner being by a signature, by yes, by laughter, by Ja, by oui, by da. (In Serbocroation this "da" is even inscribed in the last syllable of Derrida's surname. Our philosopher would certainly be glad to hear this, he would probably laugh at it!) Derrida's yes is hypermnetic, it promises a memory of itself, it gramophonizes itself, it preserves the moment of truth (Heidegger) but this truth, this knowledge is scandalized by iterability, by its own gramophony, self-parody: the eternal parody of signature, says Derrida, the parody of "yes": the parody of truth which the very signature (which is always at the base of laughter and "yes", as Derrida claims) constitutes and annuls at one and the same time.
Derrida who makes the participants of a conference laugh is a joker, the one who makes jokes and laughs in a play of signs, and also as in rummy, when he stands for every card with the aid of laughter, the laughter of this joker is a substitution – and here is the logic of supplementariness at work – the philosopheme, episteme which his philosophical discourse is not able to create. Like a joker in rummy, laughter has no identity, it is pure acting, a mask offered to anyone who wants to put it on, his identity is a divided one, it is the identity of supplementing another sign, speech or card, and it exists only in a play in which it is a supplementation. Laughter supplements speech in whose favour it speaks, which it confirms, while itself it lacks identity, except the identity of supplementation which is annulled and deconstructed. Derrida's science is a merry science, una gaia scientia, fröhliche Wissenschaft, as I have already written elsewhere (in the introduction to the issue of Letopis Matice srpske, February 1985 devoted to deconstruction) and the act we witnessed in Urbino represents a characteristic remove for Derrida from episteme, knowledge which is codified and established, toward something we could call a derrideme, toward knowledge whose consciousness, logos reach the walls of their own annulment and deconstruction. The Derrida who laughs tells us: derrideo, ergo sum.
For this reason in Ulysses-gramophone there is so much story telling, narrative fissures and digressions, through which flows Derrida's memory of past events, trips, encounters and even of purchases ("Eolian harp ... dental floss") which are a stimulus to his narrative ambitions. what happened to him reveals itself to him as previously already textualized in Joyce's Ulysses, and, the events repeat what the text already knows. His writing of a story is, therefore, a continual search for literariness, for events in his own life which are already part of a text, the text of Ulysses, and, as such, his writing is continually in search of a lost performative, of a confirmation in another text, of "yes", of an intertextual web which reperformatizes the affirmations, performatives of Joyce's Ulysses in itself, quotes them and constitutes them over and over again, by acting, by narration, by laughter. But, since he is writing a tale, narrating a story as Joyce would phrase it (for only in this way can he talk about a performative), in this story some other reader can also find a confirmation of his own events which are miraculously written down in Derrida's text. "We are caught in a trap – says Derrida – each improvised gesture, each movement we make, is already anticipated in the all-embracing text which will remind us at a given moment that we are caught in the web of language, writing, knowledge and even of narration." [italics – D.K.] We are all already telephoned, Derrida claims.
Let us go back once again to the situation of the philosopher making his listeners laugh, let us find ourselves once again under the pleasant cape of laughter. The situation to which I keep returning allegorizes a certain philosophical attitude which cannot be expressed but which can be circled: the situation is a performative directed against the repressive mechanisms of philosophical speech which are, at least as far as laughter is concerned, codified in an exemplary manner in Plato's writings. (Syracuse is not all that far from Ithaca, at least not in New York.) Plato's Republic is a state in which, as Kundera would put it, No one will laugh. (This is the title of one of Kundera's stories which deals with the repressive, Kafkian political mechanisms of Stalinist and post-Dubchek, Jan-Palach Czechoslovakia. Let us remind ourselves, since we have already set out on an excursion to Prague that the greatest critic of a previous totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia, the Austro-Hungarian regime of Franz Josef, was a jester and clown: Josef Sveik. The greatest insult which lieutenant Dub is able to level at him, Dub the picture of the folly of the hierarchy he represents and Sveik's eternal enemy, is "Sveik, you are a comedian". Today's Czechoslovakia, as Kundera tells us, is a country in which no one laughs.) Plato writes: "if anyone represents men of worth as overpowered by laughter we must not accept it, much less if gods" (Republic III, 388e), laughter is opposite to logos, self-knowledge (Philebus 48c and further on), what is comical reason restrains for fear (Republic X, 606c) and also "No composer of comedy iambic or lyric verse shall be permitted to hold any citizen up to laughter. (He is) a bad citizen and a law breaker" (Laws, XI, 435e). Comical objects cannot participate in the idea, they have no access to being, states Plato: "Are you also puzzled, Socrates, about cases that might be thought ridiculous, such as hair, or mud or dirt or any other trivial and undignified objects? Are you doubtful whether or not to assert that each of these has a separate form distinct from things like those we handle? -- Not at all, said Socrates. In these cases, the things are just the things we see; it would surely be too absurd to suppose that they have a form (idea) ... Then, when I have reached that point, I am driven to retreat, for fear [italics – D.K.] of tumbling into a bottomless pit of nonsense" (Parmenides, 130c and further on). In Plato laughter is, quite literally, imprisoned, his republic is a project whose dream is to control laughter and whose desire is to place the effect of laughter (and other types of dissemination as well) under the watchful eye of reason. From the standpoint of metaphysics laughter has no sense nor access to being, metaphysics is afraid of it since laughter is the Being (more precisely: "a being") of which Gilles Deleuze says, repeating Artaud, "with teeth".12 Laughing from ear to ear, laughter shows metaphysics its teeth.
By his buffonade in Urbino, Derrida sides with that tradition in writing which evades this control and makes fun of it. I am referring to the tradition which Bakhtin calls "low, lowly, carnival", the tradition of Aristophanes, Villon, Rabelais, and, finally, of Hasek, but also, with a theoretical tradition which denies the possibility of controlling laughter, as is the case with Nietzsche, Freud and Bakhtin.
In our situation, the most interesting to me are its Rabelaisian elements – let us remember that Rabelais' uproarious novel makes fun of scholastics, and that its motto is: "laugh ... laughter is truly unique to man!" Derrida's Ulysses-gramophone originated in the manner which, as Pantagruel says, the name of Paris originated: from laughter – Pa-ris! in the manner in which was originated the name of the city in which Derrida is a philosopher. That is, in fact, the oxymoronic situation in which the philosopher "laughs at knowledge and from knowledge", a philosopher who speaks of knowledge with laughter: par ris. I would like the reader to take this excursion to Paris quite seriously since I want to show him a philosopher who uses the energy of philosophical tradition on which he relies and which he should defend institutionally, in order to annul this tradition, to abolish the very institution of which he is director: "yes" that occupies him is capable of destroying the very root of this scholarship, can tear down the institution of the university, its inner walls, as well as annul its contract with the extra-university world." Derrida's laughter from Urbino/Ithaca annuls the presuppositions, conventions, the institution which enable it to realize itself. In order to give this a more serious turn, let us confront Plato and Derrida in the discursive incapacity of the philosopher before laughter. "Yes laughter, yes speech are pre-ontological", "the very assumption of yes (laughter) is laughable", "metalanguage is impossible about it" (Derrida). "The absence of logos is ridiculous" (Plato), "this is what causes laughter – the totalization of experience about 'yes' which reveals itself as impossible" (Derrida).
Let us remind ourselves, finally, that laughter was directly connected with the problem of metaphysics also by the philosopher whose words are a motto to this text: "If I laugh at the impossible which affects me personally, if I laugh because I know I am perishing, I am a god mocking the possible such as I am" says Bataille in a text on Nietzsche's laughter: "Nietzsche has left many things partially said: he was only a little more specific in his letters. But what does this divine achieved through laughter mean, if not the absence of God?" Through laughter the god in man mocks God, god mocks his own absence, in a strange way laughter has here become identical with suicide such as it has been seen by Kirilov, Dostoyevsky and Blanchot.
By laughing, by erasing the difference between no and yes, Derrida reveals himself to be a follower of Nietzschianism and a prisoner of his future. Nietzsche, as Bataille tells us, the great philosopher of laughter, heterology, "says 'no' to life while it is easy: but says 'yes' to it when it takes the form of the impossible". Nietzsche affirms life when life takes on the form of death, while Derrida "pronounces invalid the separation between yes and no", as Levinas says of Derrida, and brings Derrida's philosophy back to a space where is and is not, yes and no change roles in the continual play of thematization and textuality in which Derrida participates by his writing and which he himself constitutes by his writing. Instead of confirmation, speech about presence, "this is the way deferral is expressed, in which presence is deconstructed, a putting off of deadlines which should be respected -- a putting off which is time or, to be more precise, which is fun itself. A play in the inter-spaces of being where the centres of gravity are not the same as in the world. But do centres exist? Is there gravity? Is there? Everything is different if one can still speak of essence of being." (Quite different)
Derrida's achievement reveals itself as smiling, as the edifice of a logos which is caving in under its own laughter, in which philosophical discourse constitutes and thematizes its own negation, (no!), by affirming (yes!) what brings it into question, just as it seems Freud, only negation (Verneinung) makes possible an awareness of the presence of the unconscious as wells as knowledge about it.
Derrida's philosophy constitutes a paradoxical presence, a logocentrism of laughter which defers the only certain future, the one which is unavoidable in the form of death, by spatializing and thereby depriving of centre and presence this now, by laughter which is neither here, nor present, which is always elsewhere, which is always in deferral.
"Let us beware – says Nietzsche. There is a foreboding of something bad and evil: inscript parodia, there is no doubt ..." (A Merry Science)
Laughter interrupts the literalness of philosophical discourse, explodes it, exposes it , exposes the inadequacy of its literalness, "defies philosophical speculation" (Bergson) and records the utopia of such writing, but for this very reason it is impossible to speak about this experience in general, it is impossible to totalize this experience – what remains for us is to laugh together with Derrida at the yogurt called Yes – "How can we resist it, how can we say 'No' to 'Yes'?". Or we can narrate stories.
Yes, yes, let us also say this: laughter is the difference of all things, between those which are that are and those which are not that are not.
Notes
* This essay was written in Tolmin, Slovenia, in October/November of 1985. This is its first publication in English.
1 All unmarked quotes from the text Ulysses-gramophone: l 'ouidire de Joyce which Derrida read at the conference Deconstruction: theory and practice, held in Urbino in July 1984.
2 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1975.
3 Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1983.
4 In my review of Austin's theory I use extensively the analysis made by Jonathan Culler in his book On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism, Ithaca and New York, Cornell University Press, 1982. In several places I have paraphrased his analysis, but here I am quoting it in full, p. 113.
5 Cf. Cynthia Chase, "Oedipal Textuality: Reading Freud's Reading of Oedipus," Diacritics, 9:1 (1979), pp. 54-68.
6 Sigmund Frojd, Dosetka I njen odnos prema nesvesnom (Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious), Matica srpska, Novi Sad, 1968, p. 136.
7 Ibid., p. 142.
8 Ibid., p. 173.
9 Jacques Derrida, L'ecriture et la difference, Paris, Seuil, 1967, p. 427.
10 Jacques Derrida, La Dissemination, Paris, Seuil, 1972, p. 328.
11 Jean François Lyotard, Discours, Figure, Paris, Klincksieck, 1971.
12 Gilles Deleuze, The Schizophrenic and Language, Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, Josue V. Harari, ed., Ithaca and New York, Cornell University Press, 1979, p. 292.