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Sophistics, Rhetorics and Performance, or

How To Really Do Things With Words.

Barbara CASSIN

"How to do things with words?” How can you really do things with nothing but words? It seems to me that sophistics is in a way the paradigm of discourse that does things with words. Doubtless it is not a “performative” in Austin’s sense of the word, although Austin's sense varies considerably in extension and intension. But it is for real a discourse that operates, that transforms or creates the world, and has what I call a “world-effect.”

Making the relation with performativity is all the more tempting as epideixis, the word that serves in Plato to designate sophist discourse, cannot be rendered better than by “performance,” on condition that “performance” is also understood in the sense of contemporary aesthetics as a happening, an event, an improvisation that requires engagement (Gorgias is the inventor of discourse ex tempore, according to Philostratus) —something like an “exploit.”

Performative is Austin’s own invention, acclimated to French by Austin himself at a colloquium held at Royaumont (Austin 1962); thereafter it was immediately adopted and popularised by Émile Benveniste (Benveniste 1966). “Performance” is a much older term, which after ceaseless borrowings to and fro between English and French has seen its meaning shifted and extended accordingly. Klein's Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of English Language (Klein 1971) maintains that in English “performer” was coined from Old French “parfournir“ (from Mediaeval Latin perfurnire) and/or “parformer;” in addition French borrowed the term at least three times, if the Dictionnaire Culturel de la Langue francaise (Rey 2005) is to be believed: in 1869, by analogy with the vocabulary of horse races, to mean the “manner of developing a subject, of executing a work in public;” in 1953, to denote “individual result in the accomplishment of a task;” and in 1963, in the wake of Chomsky, it enters into opposition with “competence.” In sum, the word is a fluid, bilingual term which bridges sport (performance – record), technique (performance – the output of a machine), psychology (performance of a test), linguistics (performance/competence) and modern art (performance – happening).

Let us start with the relationship between performance and performative. It is a way to interrogate the status of rhetorics, for which Austin, without naming it, reserves a somewhat unstable place between the “locutionary” on the one hand and the “illocutionary” or performative on the other: the “perlocutionary,” per precisely as in “performative.”1

But it is not of Austin that I will speak. Austin is simply the contemporary frame of reference that informs us today: he “invented” the performative as such for us, by trying to isolate it. And he never hides the difficulty, the permeability of his taxonomy. Just one citation is enough to show the difficulty. In the seventh lecture of the twelve that make up How to Do Things with Words (quite late then) he writes: “It is time to make a fresh start on the problem. We want to reconsider more generally the senses in which to say something may be to do something, or in saying something we do something (and also perhaps to consider the different case in which by saying something we do something).

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Perhaps some clarification and definition may help us out of our tangle. For after all, “doing something” is a very vague expression. When we issue any utterance whatsoever, are we not “doing something?" (Austin 1975, 91-2).

In the framework of the generalized theory of speech acts, the difference between the locutionary, the illocutionary and the perlocutionary has for a long time been in a “tangle”. It is not so easy to differentiate between the three. All three are, precisely, “acts” of language, and without doubt the categories are at once, abstract, slippery and overlapping. The “locutionary” or “constative,” a normal statement, is an utterance that says something, it works of saying: “the cat is on the mat has a meaning (both a “sense” and a “reference”) and is susceptible of being either true or false. For its part, the “illocutionary” or performative stricto sensu does something in saying it: “excuse me” or “the session is open,” has a “force” and is susceptible of “success” or “failure” (felicity / infelicity). Finally, the perlocutionary does something by saying: to convince, persuade or mislead has an effect and produces consequences.3 The difference between the performative-illocutionary and the perlocutionary, between force and effect, is all the more labile as the illocutionary, to be felicitous, is itself “linked with effects”: in particular, “an effect must be achieved on the audience if the illocutionary act is to be carried out.”4

It is the difficulty of stabilizing this difference between “force” and “effect” which leads me to reflect on what I call “performance before the performative,” as an invitation to shake up the status of rhetorics.

In truth it is a matter here of three types of objects on which I have been working in recent years, wondering what unites them. The answer is something like: discursive performance. Trying to explain this to myself, I would like to set out a route which has no regard for either epochs or places, or for literary genres and disciplines.

1. We will begin with Ancient Greece: the primal scene Parmenides / Gorgias, where we understand the distinction between “faithful-discourse” (truly reporting things), and “efficacious discourse” (doing things for real): ontology-phenomenology on the one hand, logology on the other. One understands the distinction and at the same time acquires the means to call it into question, to the profit of a generalized logology. That is to say, one re-evaluates ontology as a discourse that acts, an absolutely successful performance, even.

The model for the sophist performance is epideixis, in the rhetorical sense of the term, and the model for rhetorical epideixis is the Encomium of Helen. An epideictic performance that produces not only persuasion, but a “world-effect,” because we are now in a world in which the innocence of Helen – from Euripides to Offenbach and Hoffmansthal – is thinkable and even plausible.

2. We will then pass via the South Africa of the end of the last century: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which aimed at and thematized the effect of a doing with words. Of course, it did not operate with words alone, because it was a concrete apparatus (Foucault would have said: “dispositif”); but in order to make a rainbow people, to construct a common past and produce reconciliation, it is essentially words, statements and stories that are caught up in this apparatus.

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3. We will arrive in the here and now, with the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Cassin 2004), whose Humboldtian foundation is the difference between the worlds that different languages produce, the impact of the plurality of languages on discursive performance.

Logology, Epideixis, Rhetoric Ontology/logology, or how Gorgias reads Parmenides' On Nature as a speech-act.

In the reading that Gorgias’ treatise On Non-being or nature proposes of Parmenides’ poem On Nature or being, everything manifestly turns around the way in which being and saying are knotted together. To make things brutally plain, it is one of two things: either there is being, esti, es gibt sein, and the task of man, the shepherd of being, is to speak it faithfully, in the co-belonging of being, thinking and saying: onto-logy, from Parmenides to Heidegger. Or: being is and is only there in and by the poem, as an effect of saying, a discursive production, what I propose to call a performance: “logo-logy,” to use Novalis’s term.5

Gorgias’ procedure, treatise against poem, consists simply in drawing attention - an insolent attention - to all the maneuvers, whether of the Greek language or discursivity itself, which allow the unveiling between being and saying to be put in place. In particular, the manner in which On Nature passes from esti to to on, from the verb to the subject-substantive participle (by a sort of linguistic “secretion,”) by playing on the ensemble of meanings of esti: it is possible, it is true that (as one says “it is the case that,”) “is” in the sense of the copula and of identity, “is” in the sense of existence. To put it in post-Aristotelian terms, by playing on homonymy or pollakhôs at least, and on amphiboly. To put it in slightly more Austinian terms, it is a way of making On Nature understood as a situated utterance at least as much as a series of propositions, and to make the illocutionary force of each constative phrase felt. On Nature, then, as a speech-act.

The limit effect or catastrophe thus produced consists in showing that, if the text of ontology is rigourous, that is to say, if it does not constitute an exception in relation to the legislation that it sets up, then it is a sophist masterpiece. The presence of Being, the immediacy of Nature, the evidence of a speech that is charged with saying them adequately, vanish together: the physics that speech uncovers gives way to the politics that discourse creates. Thanks to the sophists - the “masters of Greece,” as Hegel put it - one effectively attains here the dimension of politics, as an agora for an agôn: the city is a continual creation of language. It is even, as Jacob Burkhardt and Hannah Arendt say, “the most talkative world of all.”

The status of epideictic “performance:” rhetorical effect and world-effect The status of epideixis is central in this perspective.

Epideixis is the very name that tradition attributes, par excellence, to

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sophistic discursivity. The term is consecrated by Plato (in, for example Hippias Major 282c, 286a, Hippias Minor 363c, Gorgias 447c) (Plato 1997) and designates the speech delivered by Prodicos, Hippias, and Gorgias, in opposition to the dialogue through questions and answers that Socrates is fond of. Something like a “lecture,” or, indeed, a “performance,” so much does the orator give of himself: “The Thessalonians try to Gorgianise, they would have Critiasised if Critias had gone to give them an epideixis heautou sophias,” that is to say, with the same words as Aristotle for Thales, “a demonstration of his know-how.”5

The term itself can only be understood by contrast with apodeixis. Deixis is the act, and the art, of showing without speech, with one’s index

finger extended, the disappearing phenomenon. Or, with a sovereign gesture, the route of being, like Justice in Parmenides’ poem.

Apodeixis, which refers to all the apo (apophainesthai, apophansis) characteristic of phenomenology,6 is the art of showing “starting from” what is shown, using it as a basis to “de-monstrate.” With apodeixis, the phenomenon becomes an object of science, passing from the singular to the general, Socrates the man becomes visible in Socrates, and in such a way that one adheres to it (let’s not forget that apodeixis, “proof,” is the name for the technique of adhesion that constitutes the heart of Aristotelian rhetoric).

Epideixis is the art of showing “before” and of showing “as well,” according to the two main senses of the prefix. In this epi, performance and eulogy are linked together. To show, publicly, “before,” in everyone’s eyes: an epideixis may thus be a demonstration of force (the deployment of an army, in Thucydides, for example, or the demonstration of a crowd), an exhibition. But also showing “more” on the occasion of this publicity: by putting an object on display, one makes use of it as an example or a paradigm, one “over-does” it – “making of a fly an elephant,” Lucian says. And one thus shows oneself “as well,” as a talented orator, capable of contraries, or as a real “poet,” a fabricator. It is a matter then, in the broad sense, of a performance, whether improvised or not, written or spoken, but always related to the show, the public. In the restricted sense, precisely codified by Aristotle’s rhetoric, it means epidictic eloquence, praise or blame, which speaks the good or the shameful and aims at pleasure.

With sophistry, the two senses of performance and of eulogy are conjugated and amplify one and other: the most memorable epideixis (the one man show that made him a celebrity in Athens, that is to say, for always throughout the world), is an epideixis, the Encomium of Helen, where “praising the praiseworthy and blaming the blameworthy” he nonetheless succeeded in clearing the infidel that everyone since Homer has accused. The paradoxical nature of the eulogy reveals itself clearly here: Helen is the guiltiest of women since she brought blood and fire to the whole of Greece, yet Gorgias convinces us that Helen is innocence itself. The supplement of deixis that is epideixis succeeds in turning the phenomenon into its contrary: the phenomenon becomes the effect of the all-powerful logos. In any case that is why every eulogy is also or above all a eulogy to the logos:

<ext>"Discourse is a great master, which with the smallest and least perceptible of bodies accomplishes the most divine of acts [theiotota erga apotelei]” (Gorgias 1982) (Encomium of Helen 1982, §8)[ ext>

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I render apotelei with “accomplishes,” I could say “performs”: discourse

acts and performs acts and oeuvres (erga) to the end (apo). In his “game” of re-creating Helen as henceforth – from Euripides and Isocrates to Goethe, Hoffmanstahl, Offenbach, Claudel and Giraudoux – innocent, Gorgias makes it manifest that the stake of epideixis is not, as it is in phenomenology, that of passing from the phenomenon to its saying, but much rather, in a logological mode, that of passing from the saying to its effect.

The model, which De Interpretatione will invert, finds itself in place: it is not phenomena but discourse that makes the soul suffer. Once again, as Gorgias puts it:

<ext>“Into those who hear it comes the shiver of fear, pity full of tears, mourning and faced with successes and failures belonging to foreign actions and bodies, by the intermediary of discourses, the soul experiences a passion of its own [ep’allotriôn te pragmatôn kai sômatôn idion ti patêma dia tôn logôn epathen hê psukhê ]” (ibid §9) </ext>

With this praise of poetry as a “measured discourse,” we are not simply

within rhetoric, in the classical sense of the term. Tyranny, demiurgy, discursive performance, is double: it is an effect on the soul, which passes from the strange or foreign to the proper with nothing but words. At the same time though it is a world-effect, where the object of discourse, the “fiction”8 takes on consistency and becomes reality. As Jean-François Lyotard underlines, in The Differend: “it is not the addressee who is seduced by the addressor. The addressor, the referent, the sense are no less subject than the addressee to the seduction exerted” (Lyotard 1983, 84).

In fact, the world is transformed: with sophistry, we said, one goes from physics to politics. The eulogy shows itself to be a moment of political invention, which serves to make a passage from the communion in the values of the community (including the communion in the values of language, via the meaning of words and metaphors, as Nietzsche emphasized) to the creation of new values.

The first two paragraphs of the Encomium of Helen (ibid) testifies to this passage and begins to produce it. I don’t wish to resume the entire analysis, just sketch it out by citing the paragraphs:

<ext> “Order, for a city, is the excellence of its men, for a body, beauty, for a soul, wisdom, for an action, value, for a speech truth. Their opposite is disorder. Man, woman, speech, deed, city, thing, should be honored with praise if praiseworthy, and incur blame if blameworthy; for to blame the praisable or to praise the blamable is of equal error and ignorance. “It is to the same man that it befalls to say with rectitude what must be said, and to contradict those who blame Helen, a woman which brought together, in one voice and one soul, the poets’ [songs], the auditors’ credence and the noise of a name which bears the memory of misfortunes. I want, giving logic to discourse, to have brought to an end the accusation against she of whom we hear so much abuse, demonstrate that those who blame her are wrong, show the truth and put an end to ignorance.” (ibid §1

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-2) It is in this way that, via the way in which a “self” gives logismon to the

logos – “come and pass from the one to the other in my discourse”8 – the liturgy (kosmos, kallos, sophia, aretê, alêtheia) opens onto a happening that performs another world.

It seems to me that here we are closest to the labile frontier between the “perlocutionary” and the “illocutionary.” The perlocutionary, with its rhetorical effect on the other by saying — subjective, one might say — (Austin talks here, it will be recalled, of “what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading” (Austin, How to do things, 109); and the illocutionary, the most active of speech acts, capable of directly changing the state of the world in saying and exceeding the perlocutionary with something like an immediate and objective world-effect (even if often “disappointing”: “I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow.”)

From Gorgias to Desmond Tutu

Let us open another scene, one which to my eyes represents a passionate contemporary application of sophist performance. As an epigraph one might picture the magnificent tag, in black and white, that adorned the wall of the house Desmond Tutu lived in when in Cape Town: how to turn human wrongs into human rights - how to turn a phenomenon into its contrary by the force of discourse?9

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission To begin with it is doubtless necessary to sketch out the landscape. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is the key-apparatus invented to avoid the predictable bloodbath at the end of Apartheid and to promote what Tutu calls the “miracle of the negotiated solution.” It should contribute to the production of a new nation, a rainbow people.

Three conditions appear necessary, even if they are never sufficient, in order to to deal with hatred: a politics of justice, a politics of memory, a politics of speech. It is evidently the third which matters to us, via the other two.

Justice: it is not a punitive justice (Apartheid belongs to those acts which, along with Hannah Arendt, we can say “one can neither punish nor pardon,”) it is a restorative justice (“reconciliation”) and even a founding justice (it founds the rainbow people), or even “transitional” (this time to say, with Protagoras in the apology of, “it makes us pass from a less good to a better state,” (Plato 1997, 167a ). It is possible only because one is engulfed in the kairos, “at this instant” where, unlike at Nuremberg, there are “neither winners nor losers.” From this the Commission drew its singularity: it was a commission, not a tribunal, it was not presided over by a judge but by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, it didn't set out penalties but recommended amnesties, and in what concerns us here, it didn't examine court cases but listened to depositions, declarations,

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stories. Memory: unlike the first historical amnesty, that of the Athenian decree

of 403 BC, after the tyranny of the Thirty and the civil war, it is not an amnesia (“amnesty” and “amnesia” are one and the same word, a doublet, in Ancient Greek10). On the contrary, it is a politics of memory: to construct a common past so as to constitute a new community, this rainbow people, with its archives consultable online and its publicity (the sessions of the grand theatre of the itinerant Commission moving from town to town were broadcast on television on Sunday evenings – one could never say “I didn't know”). But still there is no “overmemorisation” and infinite memory: “enough of the truth for” (TRC 1998), in the words of the Commission’s Report itself, had to be obtained – enough of the truth for sharing a common past and living together. The truth that is obtained, carefully distinguished from historical truth, is an explicit production, a construction out of discourse.

Speech: speech is the key to the apparatus and is legible in the conditions of the amnesty. These conditions are defined by the Law of July of 1995 which organized the Commission as such, two years after its “invention” in Sunset Clauses. The three legal conditions for an act to be susceptible of amnesty, therefore amnestied, are the following (I mention the first two so as not to mutilate the apparatus):

1. It must have been committed during the so-called period of Apartheid (between March 1st 1960 and the firm cut-off date of 10th May 1994).

2. It must have been an “act” or an “omission” (once more no “negationism” will have been possible) or an “infraction” “associated with a political objective committed in the course of past conflicts.”11

3. Finally applicants for amnesty had to make “a full disclosure of all the relevant facts,” so that amnesty is defined as “freedom in exchange for the truth.” (TRC Vol.1 Foreword, 29). The revelation is not an “admission”: no-one is obliged or is in the position of obliging the perpetrator to talk. That is even the key to the apparatus. This major condition for the amnesty is “ironic,” in the Socratic sense of the word, and Tutu uses the term repeatedly: it makes the criminal, the malicious, play the role of the public servant, the good. In effect those criminals given an amnesty, civil or moral entities (firms, universities, journals, political parties), are not accused persons one brings before a tribunal and from which one extracts admissions, but petitioners, “claimants” who present themselves and whose interest, all morality to one side, is to say everything, to disclose the true. Since the amnesty is not a blanket amnesty but is pronounced act by act, only what is said can be given an amnesty: claimants can only be condemned for what they do not say, which one risks learning by cross-checking, to the extent that everyone has an interest in talking. It is a question then of a very particular discursive act: a “statement,” a declaration as proper name, operating by itself and as such.

In other words, such a new politics of justice is built on a politics of speech, of the attention given to language as act and as performance.

“Language, discourse and rhetoric, does things”

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From Gorgias to Tutu via Austin This performance can be described in four components.

The first, the most decisive, relates to the construction of the world, to the “world-effect” of the performance. Allow me to take a short cut and make a rapprochement between this major phrase of the Encomium of Helen that we have already cited:

<ext>“Discourse is a great master, which with the smallest and least perceptible of bodies accomplishes the most divine of acts” (Gorgias 1982, §8).<ext>

and this no less sovereign phrase from the Report of the Commission:

<ext> “It is a commonplace to treat language as mere words, not deeds, therefore language is taken to play a minimal role against violence. The Commission wishes to take a different view here. Language, discourse and rhetoric, does things: it constructs social categories, it gives orders, it persuades us, it justifies, explains, gives reason, excuses. It constructs reality. It moves certain people against other people...” (TRC 1998, III (Perpetrators), §124).

One sees here that as with sophistry, language operates to “do things,” to

“construct reality” whilst acting on those who listen and those who speak.

From Gorgias to Tutu via Arendt The second component leads from the sophists and from Aristotle to Tutu via Hannah Arendt. It is linked to the construction of human being in his very humanity, that is to say, in his political being, his politcalness, engaged with what Aristotle takes from the sophists in order to counter Plato’s philosopher-king, to wit the construction of politics in language.

The Commission is sophistico-Aristotelian-Arendtian in that it rehumanises all those who appear before it by allowing them to speak. It makes all of them, victims as well as perpetrators, animals endowed with logos, discourse-reason, and hence political animals, “more political than the others” as Aristotle specifies. They can once again appropriate what is proper to man. No longer are they “monkeys” nor passers-by stuck in silence, nor even executioners rendered mute by the horror of the crimes that they have to deny so as to continue existing. From Gorgias to Tutu via Freud The third component is cathartic and therapeutic: it leads from Protagoras (“to

pass from a less good to a better state”) or Gorgias to Tutu via Freud. I would like simply to underline the importance of this thematic of the logos-pharmakon across Antiquity and relate the therapy of discourse to the matrix of its expression that one finds, yet again, in Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen:

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<ext>“There is the same relation [logos] between the power of discourse [hê tou logou dunamis] and the disposition of the soul [tên tês psukhês taxin], the disposition of drugs [hê tôn pharmakôn taxis] and the nature of bodies [tên tôn somatôn phusin]: just as one drug expels a humour from the body, and some stop illness, and others life, so amongst discourses, some distress, some charm, cause fear, make the hearers bold, and some, by some wicked persuasion, drug the soul and bewitch it” (Gorgias §14).</ext>  It is not difficult to make the rapprochement between the logical

pharmacy of Gorgias and the order-words of the Commission. “Revealing is healing” on the cover of the dossiers that it examines, “healing our land” on the banners of the public sessions. The therapy develops in the slightly obsessional metaphorics of Apartheid as a sickness of the social body, with its syndromes, symptoms, wounds, antiseptics and medication. To talk, to speak, tell the story, tell your story, full disclosure marks an individual and collective undertaking to heal (“personal and national healing,” “healing through truth telling,”) where the truth becomes the “essential ingredient of the social antiseptic.”12 But as it is a question of a sickness of the soul, a sickness one treats by speaking, it is finally a matter of a countrywide psychoanalysis, for which, moreover, the country pays. While it might merit more detailed study, psychoanalysis as a discursive performance is something that can hardly be doubted.

Semantic responsibility: How do we talk?

The last component is apparently less connected to what we have conserved of sophistry, although Prodicus is caricatured by Plato for his scruples over synonyms, and Protagoras gets irritated by the discordance between the feminine hê mênis, Achille’s anger, and the eminently virile character of the hero and of the epic itself that this anger sets off (Plato 1997, Protagoras 337ac), (Aristotle 2004, I, 14, 173b, 17-22; Aristotle 1926, Rhetoric III, 5, 1407b 6). 

It is a question of a politics of responsibility with regard to the words that one employs: what world do we contribute to producing by speaking as we speak, and how is language articulated with our speech acts? Thucydides already remarked that stasis, the civil war in Athens, was also a war of words: “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them” (Thucydides 1954, 3, 82). Twenty-five centuries later, Victor Klemperer sensed, as a philologist, the rise of Nazism in the German language: “Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all” (Klemperer 2000, 14). And once again this resonates with the distressing, sober testimonies collected by Jean Hatzfeld in Into the Quick of Life: the Rwandan Genocide. The Survivors Speak (Hatzfeld 2005): “There is something important I must point out: the genocide changed the meaning of certain words in the survivor’s language; and it completely lifted the meaning out of other words, and so the person listening must

be alert to such changes in meaning” (Hatzfeld 2005, 159).

Antjie Krog, the remarkable journalist and Boer, afrikaans, writer who

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followed the work of the Commission, quotes a letter from January 1986 addressed by the magnate Anthon Rupert to President Botha: “I am appealing to you in person. Reaffirm your rejection of Apartheid. It is crucifying us; it is destroying our language” with this, in the guise of a reply from the President: “I am sick and tired of the hollow parrot’s cry: apartheid. I have said many times that the word “apartheid” means good neighbourliness” (Krog 1998, 266, 270). And for her part, Krog begins with the question: “how easily and naturally the story shifts from politics to language…. What do we do with the language of the Boere” (ibid 99). The Commission also vigourously collared the civil war of words. Thus, the security forces “failed to take exercise proper care in the words they

used.”(TRC Vol.6, paragraph 99), those who were guilty of terrorist acts and those who struggled by legal and peaceful means were called “terrorists” without distinction, confusing them all in the single category of “persons to be killed” (TRC Vol.6, paragraph 90). That is why the young military recruits complained to the psychologist that “the present has destroyed the foundations of meaning that would allow them to recover from their traumatic experience” (TRC Vol.6). The discourse of apartheid was therefore a bad medicine, exploiting the poisonous side of the pharmakon: “in the opinion of the Commission, the kind of rhetoric used by politicians and SSC functionaries was reckless, inflammatory and an incitement to unlawful acts” (TRC Vol.6, paragraph 90). Like the euphemism of the “final solution” it is what allowed certain of those in charge to claim that they never gave the order to kill: take out, wipe out, eradicate, that doesn’t mean kill, there would supposedly have been a misunderstanding, an excessive zeal, a mistake, bad will on the part of the subordinates. To which the Commission replies: “one has to conclude that these words were

intended to say exactly what they said” (TRC Vol.6, paragraph 97). “Exactly what they said”: taking words at their word. Not only that one’s speaking is an act, but what a word says is an act. Signifier, signified and referent, or phonic matter, meaning and denotation form a bloc. Without wanting to project more distinctions loaded with history and doctrines onto this, I would simply like to underline how close this injunction is to what Aristotle considered as the intractability of sophistry. What the demonstration of the principle of non-contradiction comes up against is that the sophist pretends to stop at “the logos that there is in the sounds of the voice and in words.”13 This requirement, which obliges Aristotle to use constraint (bia) and not persuasion, underlies discursive performance: the characteristic of the act is to say what is said, without regard for the intention; and even to say the whole of what is said, including homonyms and amphibolies, since what is said, is said. It provides the ground for “Sophistical” Refutations that Aristotle analyses: sophists take the adversary at his word because they take the word, and even the phrase, at its word. They consider that for reasons of discursive propriety one cannot escape from the fact of saying what one says and of hearing what one hears.

Performance is thus put to work in a multiple fashion within this very particular political attempt, but it is always a matter of pausing on the act that discourse constitutes at all levels – let words do things.

The Difference of Languages as Plurality of Performances  

The universal/singular tension

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As a third step I would like to start from the recent Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Cassin 2004). An impossible book: over twelve years, 150 collaborators worked on philosophical texts written in fifteen European languages, or languages constitutive of Europe. We started from “untranslatables,” that’s to say symptoms of the difference between languages - not what one doesn’t translate, but what one doesn’t stop (not) translating: after Babel with happiness. But it is well-known that the Greeks were, to borrow Momigliano’s expression “proudly monolinguistic” – so much so that hellenizein signifies “to speak Greek” as well as “to speak properly” and “to think and act as a civilised man,” by contrast with barbarizein which crushes and confuses the foreign, the unintelligible and the inhuman. How then can working on the Greeks furnish the slightest grasp of the difference of languages?

It is very simple – in any case I believe that I can simplify with the ontology / logology key. Either one begins with things. Or one begins with words.

The “onto-logy” of Parmenidean unveiling opens onto a metaphysics of adequation. With Plato and Aristotle, things can be described like this: language is an organon, a “tool,” a means of communication, and languages, as Socrates says in the Cratylus, are simply the different materials that serve to fabricate this tool,14 sort of habits of the idea. That is why one must start from things, from what is, and not from words (Plato 1997, 439b [once again I do not understand this number/digit] ). From this perspective, it is a matter of communicating to the things under words as quickly as possible, of producing the unity of being under the difference of languages, of reducing the multiple to the one: translation is then what Schleiermacher calls dolmetschen, interpretariat, a go-between.15

The world that starts from words is a completely different world; language is no longer considered, firstly or solely, as a means, but as an end and as a force: “Whoever finds language interesting in itself is different to whoever only recognizes in it the means for interesting thoughts” (Nietzsche 1971, 134). Hence the only “there is” is the Humboldtian plurality of languages: “language is manifest in reality solely as multiplicity” (von Humboldt 1903, 240), language is and is only the difference of languages. From this perspective, to translate is no longer dolmetschen but ubersetzen, understanding how different languages produce different worlds, making these worlds communicate and disquieting them the one with the other, in such a way that the reader’s tongue goes to meet that of the writer.16 The common world becomes a regulating (or guiding) principle, a goal, and not a point of departure. This regime is that of the Dictionnaire des intraduisibles(): at bottom it is sophist logology immersed in the plurality of languages. It then becomes pertinent to ask oneself about philosophies as they as they are expressed or said, about what it is to philosophize in languages.

From this point of view, Philosophy (with a capital P) is a tension between the universal and a multiplicity of singulars. Schleiermacher describes it perfectly, on condition that we underline his and still: “Here [in authentic philosophy], more than in any other domain, each language contains, despite the diversity of contemporary or successive opinions, a system of concepts, which, precisely because they touch each other, are united

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and complete each other in the same language, form a whole whose different parts do not correspond to any of those of the systems of other languages, with the exception, and still, of God and of Being, the first substantive and the first verb. Because even the absolutely universal, although it finds itself outside of the domain of particularity, is illuminated and coloured by language” (Schleiermacher 1999, 84-5).

Neither globish nor ontological nationalism

Now this philosophical gesture is also, and today perhaps above all, a political gesture. Which linguistico-philosophical Europe do we want? Answer: there are two that we don’t want, that I propose to characterize as “everything in globish” and “ontological nationalism.”

The first catastrophe-scenario only allows one language to remain, without oeuvre or author: globish (for global English): globish and dialects, that’s all. Every European language, French, German, etc, would only be for speaking domestically and would be preserved as an endangered species via a politics of the patrimony. English itself, that of Shakespeare and of Joyce, would become one of those dialects that no-one understands any longer. Globish meanwhile, the language of communication par excellence, would allow for submissions to Brussels, by proposing issues and deliverables in a knowledge-based economy. The difficulty evidently bears on the relationship between globish and the English language. That is even the thing that makes the menace so intense: the risk of collusion between a pragmatic esperanto and the language of a culture. I would like to develop things in the following way. English is evidently the language of an Empire, as koinê, Latin, and to a lesser extent, French were before it. It is the language of American economics and diplomacy, become an “auxiliary international language," ( AIL) to borrow Umberto Eco’s expression, before it gets deposed by another, no doubt. However, there are philosophical reasons for globish being English: in my opinion, the link between the language of an Empire and analytic philosophy constitutes the cultural foundation of such AIL. On the one hand, a certain analytic philosophy effectively advocates the angelic innocence of the universal. What counts is the concept, not the word – Aristotle is my colleague at Oxford. Wherein one rediscovers Plato: languages are the habits of the concept and the habit matters little; Leibniz and his universal characteristic: “When disagreements arise, there will be no more need for discussion between two philosophers than there is between two calculators. In truth it will be enough for them to take their pens, to sit down at a table and to say to each other (after having called a friend, if they wish): calculemus, let us calculate;” (Leibniz 1980); the project of the Lumières: “Before the end of the eighteenth century, a philosopher who would like to educate himself thoroughly concerning the discoveries of his predecessors will be required to burden his memory with seven or eight different languages. And after having consumed the most precious time of his life to learning them, he will die before beginning to educate himself. The use of the Latin language, which we have shown to be ridiculous in matters of taste, is of the greatest service in works of philosophy, whose merit is entirely determined by clarity and precision, and which urgently requires a universal and conventional language”(Le Rond d'Alembert 1963, 92 – 93).

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Good philosophical company, in truth, encouraging us to find in the English language a contemporary version of Latin and a plausible ersatz of a universal language. So why not English?

Especially given that the angelic innocence of the universal is accompanied by the militancy of the ordinary. Taken this time as an idiom, in the singularity of the oeuvres and authors who have expressed themselves in English in the philosophical tradition, English is the language of fact par excellence, the language of everyday conversation attentive to itself. Whether it is a matter of empiricism or of the ordinary language philosophy resulting from the linguistic turn, one deflates the pretentions of metaphysics by being matter of fact regarding the fact of the matter; attentive to what we say when we speak everyday English. No longer “why English.” But “because of English.”

Hence the exceptional force of a globish supported by, or reliant on,“analytic English” that makes a continental philosophy stuck in the history and thickness of languages appear amphigoric, that would have Jacques Derrida taught in comparative literature departments only. From this perspective, the very idea of untranslatability is null and void. Worse, it has no usefulness.

The other catastrophe scenario is a hermeneutic and continental, rather than

analytic, failing whose modern point of departure, linked to the inconvenient problem of the “genius” of languages, is German Romanticism. (Herder, for example, writes “whilst the muse in Italy converses by singing, in France, it recounts and ratiocinates with preciosity, in Spain it has knightly imagination, in England it thinks with acuity and depth, what does it do in Germany? It imitates”17). I always come back to this phrase of Heidegger’s, which renders [the problem] legible in a caricatural manner:

<ext>“The Greek language is philosophical i.e. not that Greek is loaded with philosophical terminology, but that it philosophises in its basic structure and formation [Sprachgestaltung]. The same applies to every genuine language, in different degrees to be sure. The extent to which this is so depends on both the depth and power of the people who speak the language and exist within it [Der Grad bemisst sich nach der Tiefe und Gewalt der Eixstenz des Volkes und Stammes, der die Sprache spricht und in ihr existiert]. Only the German language has a depth and a creative philosophical character to compare with the Greek” (Heidegger 2002, 36). </ext>

The Greek language then, and the German, more Greek than the Greek. I have proposed calling the second catastrophe-scenario “ontological nationalism,” taking up the diagnosis of Jean-Pierre Lefebvre (Lefebvre 1990). All the work of the Dictionnaire (Cassin 2004) [my guess] runs counter to this tendency to sacralise the untranslatable, the symmetrical failing of the Universalist contempt. But if this tendency insists, it is because on the one hand, Greek and German are two idioms pregnant with philosophical oeuvres that are determining for philosophy and its history. On the other hand it is because Heidegger is the contemporary who has taught us or reminded us that “to speak language is totally different

from employing language” and that translating is a “deployment of one’s own language as an aid to an inderstanding of a foreign language” (Heidegger 1968 128, 1993, 79 – 80).

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“To Deterritorialise”: Synonymy and Homonymy

The heading to take between these two stumbling blocks may be named in Deleuzian terms: “to deterritorialise.” The two points of impact of the notion of performance on a work like that of the Vocabulaire may be grouped together under this heading.

The first relates to what Humboldt designates as the “synonymy of principal languages”: the way in which different languages produce different worlds, that are neither exactly the same nor completely different. With the Humboldt of the “Fragment of a Monograph on the Basque” [see below] it must be maintained that “the plurality of languages is far from reducible to a plurality of designations of a thing, they are different perspectives on the same thing, and when the thing is not the object of the external senses, one is often dealing with as many different things fashioned differently by each language”: being is an effect of saying, not only are we perspectivists, relativists, but logologists. Humboldt adds: “the diversity of languages is the immediate condition for us of a growth in the richness of the world and the diversity of what we know about it. At the same time, this is how the region of human existence expands, and new ways of thinking and feeling are offered to us with determinate and real characteristics” (von Humboldt 1996, 433).   

Such is precisely the ambition of a work like the Dictionary, for which Humboldt, endeavouring to translate Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (Aeschylus 2004) despairing of ever succeeding, prefigures the design (and the sketch, disegno). “A synonymy of principal languages of this sort... has never yet been attempted, although it may be found in fragments of many writers, but if it was treated with intelligence it would become one of the most seductive works.” The “synonymy of principal languages” relates to the fact that corresponding words in each of these languages passes for an expression of the same concept. But they only do so with a “difference.” a “connotation,” a “degree in the scale of sentiments” which is divided up between words and concepts: “so little is a word the sign of a concept that the concept cannot be born without it, still less be fixed; the indeterminate action of the force of thought is condensed in a word the way that faint clouds appear in a pure sky. It is, then, an individual being, of a determinate character and figure, of a force acting on the spirit, and capable of transplanting itself” (von Humboldt 2000, 33). It is also by the movement of deterritorialisation, thus, from the outside of another language that one succeeds in perceiving how “equivocally” one's own language is fabricated. It is on Lacan, as a good logologist, that I will rely to make this heard. One can apply to the languages of philosophy what he writes in L'Etourdit regarding the “lalangues” of every unconscious: “one language amongst others is nothing more than the integral of equivocations that its history has left in it” (Lacan1973, 47). Instead of being the radical evil of language, as it is in Aristotle, homonymy,

equivocation is not only the condition for wit and for jokes, but the condition for what is proper to one language, among others. The choice of symptoms that

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untranslatables are arises from attention to homonymy. It is not difficult to make it heard with some examples. Thus in Russian: pravda, which customarily one renders by “truth,” signifies “justice” primarily (it is the agreed translation of the Greek dikaiosunê) and is thus a homonym from the French point of view; inversely, our “truth” is a homonym from the Slavic point of view, as the term crushes together pravda, which arises from justice, and istina, which arises from being and from exactness. It is the same with the ambiguity “for us” of the root svet light/world, as too the problematic homonymy of mir, peace, world and peasant commune, on which Tolstoy doesn't stop playing in War and Peace. One could empty a good part of the dictionary by pulling on this thread. Because it is not only a question of isolated terms, but of networks of terms: what German designates as Geist is sometimes Mind and sometimes Spirit, and the Phänomenologie des Geistes is sometimes of the Spirit and sometimes of the Mind, making Hegel a religious spiritualist or the ancestor of the philosophy of mind. But it is also valid for syntax and grammar, the skeleton of languages, with the amphibologies and syntactic homonyms created by the order of words; diglossia (a high language and a low language in Russian, that one doesn't know how to translate); the nuances of tense and of aspect that some languages crush and others don't, down to the Spanish doublet ser / estar which makes our “being” even more equivocal. In short, at least two languages are required in order to know that one is spoken, so that one is spoken? Basically it is the homonyms of a language that give the best access to the synonymy of languages.

Hannah Arendt, who wrote her Denktagebuch in several languages, both

as a way of dealing with her exile – “all the same it is not the German language which has gone mad” she said in her interview with Gunther Gauss – and her practice of philosophical texts, thematises this very precisely as a philosophical gesture.

<ext>“Plurality of languages: if there was only one language, we would perhaps be more assured about the essence of things. What is determining is that one, there are many languages and they are distinguished not only by their vocabulary but equally by their grammar, that is to say, essentially by their manner of thinking, and that two, all languages can be learned. Given that the object, which is there to support the presentation of things can be called “Tisch” as well as “table” indicates that something of the genuine essence of things that we make and name escapes us. It is not the senses and the possibilities for illusion that they contain that renders the world uncertain, any more than the imaginable possibility or lived fear that everything is a dream. It is much rather the equivocity of meaning given within language and, above all, with languages. At the heart of a homogeneous human community, the essence of the table is unequivocally indicated by the word “table,” and yet from the moment that it arrives at the frontier of the community, it falters.

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This faltering equivocity of the world and the insecurity of the human that inhabits it would naturally not exist if it wasn’t possible to learn foreign languages, a possibility that demonstrates that there exist still other “correspondences” than ours in view of a common and identical world, or even when only one language were to exist. Hence the absurdity of the universal language – against the “human condition,” the artificial and all-powerful uniformisation of equivocity.”18</ext> So even an “object of the external senses,” contrary to what Humboldt

says, is diffracted according to its name: trapeza, on four feet like the counter of a money-changer, or rather tabula, like a wax tablet for writing on, or mesa as a plateau at the foot of the mountains. This “faltering equivocity of the world” means that we are not sure about the essence of things: logology as the calling into question of ontological certainty.

Under the loose notion of performance, I have so far brought together at least two types of language act (in French, “actes de langage”): on one hand, speech acts (“actes de parole”) like Parmenides’ On Nature as read by Gorgias, or the statements from the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; and on the other hand, what I would like to call “tongue acts” (“actes de langue”), with the semantic responsibility, or world-effect, of the difference of languages. It leaves open the question of the relationship between performative and performance, a much vaster category, for which the performative constitutes something like the tip. But to my eyes, thinking in terms of performance is linked with the general transformation of the landscape that Austin seeks to accomplish with the performative. He insists on it in his last lecture when explaining the five most general classes of performatives, which, even if he is “far from equally happy about all of them” nevertheless allow him: “...to play Old Harry with two fetishes which I admit to an inclination to play Old Harry with, viz. One the true/false fetish, two, the value/fact fetish” (Austin 1975, 151).  

Without forgetting this last phrase, at the very end of his final lecture: “I leave to my readers the real fun of applying it in philosophy” (Ibid.164). 

 (Translated by Andrew Goffey)

  Centre National de la Recherche scientifique, Paris.

END NOTES

1. But per doubtless doesn't have the same meaning in both cases, even if this isn't something Austin makes explicit. The per of “performance” denotes the accomplishment of a “to the end” whereas the per of “perlocution” denotes the means, that is, the “by” of “by saying”: it is “by means’ of saying,

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and not “in” the saying itself (“in saying” as characteristic of the illocutionary or performative) that the perlocutionary acts. In (Austin 1975, 108) see the quote that follows, where the perlocutionary figures in parentheses.  

 2. It will be noted that Austin does not then give an example, in quotes, of perlocutionary utterance. This difficulty is doubtless linked to the complex definition of perlocutionary acts “what we bring about or achieve by saying something” (Austin 1975, 109). This “or” which, for better or for worse, manages the difference between the speaker and the listener, recurs on page 118: “The perlocutionary act maybe either the achievement of a perlocutionary object (convince, persuade) or the production of a perlocutionary sequel”. The illocutionary act is distinguished from the illocutionary act as “I ordered him and he obeyed” is distinguished from “I got him to obey” (117). The subtle difference doesn’t relate necessarily or directly to distinct utterances. It is as if the perlocutionary, the utterance of the third kind, appeared and disappeared between the seventh and the tenth lectures. 

 3. “So here are three ways, securing uptake, taking effect, and inviting a response, in which illocutionary acts are bound up with effects; and these are all distinct from the producing of effects which is characteristic of the perlocutionary act” (Austin.118).  4. Here is how Novalis describes logological reduplication: “everyone ignores what is characteristic of language, that is that it is quite simply only concerned with itself. That is why language is such a marvelous and fruitful mystery: that someone can speak just for the sake of speaking is precisely when it expresses the most magnificent truths”. Allow me to refer here also to Barbara Cassin (Cassin 1995, 113-7). This “speaking for the sake of speaking” cannot not be compared with the legein logou kharin by which Aristotle expels the sophists from the community of speaking beings who, obeying the principle of non-contradiction, always speak in order to signify something (Aristotle 1979, IV, 4, 1006a 11-26 and 5, 1009a 20-21). I refer here to Barbara Cassin and Michel Narcy La Décision du sens (Cassin 1989).  5. (Plato 1997) Philostratus in The Life of the Sophists. On epideixis heautou sophias see endnote 10 below.   6. One need only consult §7 of Being and Time (Heidegger 2008).  7. I am deliberately using the risky word “fiction” in the sense of discursive “fabrication”, which should be spelled “fixion” as it is in Lacan, to make us sensitive to two questions. The first is the “etiolated” or “parasitical” status of literary or poetic creation in Austin (see for example Austin op. cit. p. 104). The second is the calling into question of the distinction between genres of discourse (including the difference “philosophy” / “literature,” with the oh-how ambiguous status of Greek poetry) when one takes the logological point of view (here I can only refer the reader to my L’Effet

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sophistique (Cassin 1995), cited earlier).  8. Phere dê pros allon ap’allou metastô logon On Melissus Xenophanes, (Gorgias 1982, §9) (82 B 11 DK, II, 290, 1. 25).This is how Gorgias punctuates his eulogy to poetry, by drawing attention to the act of language that is operating and in the process of being accomplished.  9. I rely here on the work by Philippe-Joseph Salazar (Salazar 2004a and 2004b).  10. The decree stipulates mê mnêsikakein “you will not recall the evils of events past” and punishes those who do with death. See Aristotle (1996) The Constitution of Athens 39.  11. I don’t wish to make a point here of the evident difficulties of this, which coincide with those of the “Law of Due Obedience” in Argentina, because it is not appropriate to the matter at hand.   

12. [These phrases do not appear in the final published summary of findings].  

13. For Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Aristotle 1979, IV, 5, 1009a 20-22) the context is apparent in the following: “One doesn't discuss with everyone in the same way: some require persuasion, others constraint. One the one hand, for all those who have maintained this position [the refusal of the principle], having found themselves in an aporia, their scorn is easy to cure: it is not with what they say but with what they think that one confronts them. But all those who discourse for the love of discourse, their cure is a refutation of what is said in the sounds of the voice and in the words [tou en têi phônêi logou kai en tois onomasin].”  

 14. “if all legislators [who name] don't work on the same syllables, this should not be forgotten: that all blacksmiths do not work on the same iron, whilst making the same tool for the same purpose; yet, as long as they give it the same form, even if it is from a different iron, the tool remains correct, whether one makes it here or with Barbarians” (Plato 1997, Cratylus 389e 1 – 390a 2)  15. Schleiermacher 1999, § 209-210, 34-5 and see also C Bernier’s glossary (135 – 8).  16. I am paraphrasing the celebrated bifurcation: “either the translator leaves the writer alone as much as possible and makes the reader go to meet him or he leaves the reader alone as much as possible and makes the writer go to meet him” (Schleiermacher 1999, 49). And, with Schleiermacher, choosing the lack of tranquility of the first way.[I am not sure what she means here?] 

 17. Herder (1996, 105) Imitation becomes the genial characteristic of a language that would be lacking in genius, exactly as the hand in Aristotle is

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the “tool of tools,” capable of using, and thus standing for, them all.  

18. See November 1950 [15] (Arendt 2003, I, 42-43), November 1965 [58] and [59] ( Arendt 2003, II, 642 – 644) and July 1968 [76] and [77] (Arendt 2003, II, 690)   WORKS CITED   

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