SKC Project Seminar: Juan Evaristo Valls Boix

(University of Barcelona, Spain)

The Oblique Offering: Kierkegaard, Indirect Communication, and the Diversions of Performativity

The aim of this presentation is to consider Kierkegaard’s indirect communication as a prefiguration of performativity in order to decipher its particularities and to think about its political dimension. According to authors such as Senatore, Nietzsche and Fichte could be seen as the main predecessors of Austin’s speech act theory: in their works, language is not a representation of reality, but rather a way to express power and to “pose” (setzen) subjectivity.

In this presentation, I would like to defend the thesis that Kierkegaard’s “indirect communication” could be seen as another prefiguration of performativity, since language is detached from its usual economy of communication, based in the circulation of messages, and becomes a space of reduplication of reality.

Comparing Kierkegaard’s ways of defining “indirect communication”, we could appreciate that in any communicative scene there is, beyond an exchange of information, a supplement of reality, an oblique offering that both accompanies and transforms what is been said through words. This supplement of communication could disrupt the univocity of language that is presupposed in the logics of communication, and reveals a crisis in the modern conception of subjectivity as the master of language.

Thus, the performativity of indirect communication shows the vulnerability of a subject who is not in possession of words, but dispossessed by them; not authorized by words, but dis-authorized through them. Here resides both the ethical and the political dimension of language, which is not only a productive affirmation of subjectivity, but also the embodiment of his/her relation with the others.