Derrida's Secret and Symptom: A Certain Impossible Possibility of Writing the Event

Abstract

In this paper, I will attempt to conceptualize the event through Derrida’s late lecture “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” which he presented “spontaneously” at the Canadian Centre of Architecture in Montreal on April 1st 1997. Furthermore, I will analyze how a certain conception of the event emerges out of the conversations between Derrida, J.L. Austin, and John Searle, especially considering the essay that “started” the much-discussed debate between Derrida and the Anglo-American speech act theorists; namely, through a reading of Austin’s How to Do Things With Words. Derrida’s “concepts” of iterability and the perverformative will be mobilized to think through the ways the event, if it can be written that it exists, is undoubtedly beyond the categories of the performative and constative; however, recourse to the many impossible-possible aporias that populate Derrida’s late texts such as the decision, forgiveness, and invention will be necessary to understand this difficult position. The symptom and the secret, then, will be related to the event through an interrogation of “verticality” while analyzing the event’s capacity to disrupt established modalities of temporality.