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The performativity of art

For a roundtable discussion at the launch of the London Graduate School (available on youtube), comprising the Director of the LGS and two participants who had been made Permanent Fellows of it, Dronsfield introduced an anomaly in the work of Jacques Derrida which he subsequently developed into a paper for the inaugural LGS ‘Reading Derrida’ Symposium, and finally for this book chapter. After the presentation of his seminal paper ‘Signature événement contexte’ (1971), in which the deconstruction of performativity is first set forth, Derrida is challenged by his interlocutors, including Paul Ricoeur, to explain how the concept of iterability, so central to performativity, takes account of art. In Dronsfield’s view Derrida struggles to do so in the ensuing discussion, and despite his paper having proved so hugely influential for the development of theories of performativity, the exchange following it has not been discussed anywhere in the secondary literature. Nor is there any sustained attempt to come to grips with the problem. This paper makes good that lacuna. It is Dronsfield’s contention that Derrida spent much of the next few years addressing the question, but to little avail because he privileges philosophy over art in general, and the word over the image in particular, something Dronsfield first contended in his entry on Derrida for ‘Fifty Key Thinkers on Art’ (Berg 2009). For Derrida there is no performativity of art without the ‘countersignature’ of the viewer or the institution, but at the same time he argues that the signature in visual art does not function in the same performative way that it does in literature, something Dronsfield shows to be false by examining Derrida’s own collaborations with artists, which again is something yet to be discussed in the literature. The essay has been abstracted in ‘Philosopher’s Index’, Winter 2013.