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13 Cardozo L. Rev. 1303 (1991 - 1992)
A Note of Performative Acts of Violence

handle is hein.journals/cdozo13 and id is 1325 raw text is: A NOTE ON PERFORMATIVE ACTS OF VIOLENCE Judith Butler* What is it that gives this inquiry into violence the quality of a fundamental inquiry even as it seeks to show the constitutive impossi- bility of foundational inquiries? How is it that this inquiry begins, or, rather, what stakes out the terms of its beginning, and what is thereby produced as its own constitutive exclusions? This is a question that I offer as a deconstructive operation, or, rather, what I have understood Deconstruction to be. This inquiry has taken as its object a set of acts which are said to be founding or positing, on the one hand, and un- founding or deforming, on the other, the performative act of a found- ing installed by and through a violence, and the aformative act, to use Hamacher's words,1 which turns back upon this prior act or, rather, is that prior act's own possibility of turning against itself (as Gasch6 has proposed2). In either case, it is a set of acts that begins this in- quiry, which stakes out the terms which authorize its beginning, and which of necessity deauthorize other points of departure. Where are these acts? What are they? Is it not the case that there is, prior to any question of the act, an investment, perhaps another act, which invests potency and power in that second act which will then be heralded as a beginning which authorizes and/or deauthorizes foundations (a metaleptic reversal)? In this case there is a positing, as it were, prior to the act, whether performative or aformative. This presumption, this positing, is, however, not subjected to a critique, but tacitly con- stitutes the principle of identity that joins the very acts which are for- mulated on the model of self-difference. If the performative as an act of originating intention is to be un- derstood as always already derived, then it becomes operative only on the basis of a prior and concealed iterability.3 The question then be- comes- through what repetition of the same does the act-like charac- ter of the performative as violence or the aformative as violence become installed? Can we begin with such acts, with Setzungen, or does this beginning signify a prior investment in those acts which then Associate Professor of Humanities, Johns Hopkins University. I Hamacher, Afformative Strike, 13 CARDOZO L. REV. 1133 (1991). 2 Gasch6, On Critique, Hypercriticism, and Deconstruction: The Case of Benjamin, 13 CARDOZO L. REV. 1115 (1991). 3 See J. DERRIDA, Signature, Event, Context, in LIMITED INC. 1 (1988). 1303

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