Jokes and the Performative in Austin And Derrida; or, The Truth is a Joke?

There are disadvantages in being excessively solemn.

— J. L. Austin, "Performative Utterances"

Through comedy then.

— Jacques Derrida, Glas

The genealogy of this essay on jokes comes not so much out of a happy, laughter-filled context, but in the context of a death—most specifically, Jacques Derrida's death. I was asked to write something about Derrida's legacy on the tenth anniversary of his death in 2014, and the initial impetus on such an occasion is to follow out a trajectory that one learns from Derrida himself: when asked to mourn someone in print, immediately double down on the question by looking at how the topic of mourning is treated in his or her texts. And that could indeed present a rich itinerary: few people have engaged the work of mourning as centrally as Derrida.¹

But I have to say, thinking back on Derrida's work, on what I found most admirable and useful within his texts (and given the few dozen times I had interacted with him over the years, what I took away from his personality), it was not mourning that I wanted to recall—not the Derrida of lack and loss, prayers and tears,² but the Derrida of a certain kind of malicious performative joy. The Derrida of Glas, for example, who gleefully links G. W. F Hegel, that great thinker of normativity and dialectical progress, with the saint of queer transgression Jean Genet. Whatever else it is, a text like Glas is a tour de force comedy routine (and the genre is literally comic, a circle—the beginning is the end, Finnegans Wake style).³ And the joke is aimed squarely at that most serious and tragic of philosophical projects, Hegel's. Indeed, to what two specific episodes does Derrida very economically reduce Hegel's entire corpus in the opening pages of Glas? (1) Hegel's discussion of the phallic columns of India; and (2) the status of flower-religion (2–3). These two seemingly frivolous throwaways in Hegel are, like so many other bits of marginalia (recall what Derrida does with Friedrich Nietzsche's "I have forgotten my umbrella"),⁴ going to be shown to be the heart and soul of a very serious project, and Derrida will perform this analysis in a magisterial and singular way … with numerous lowbrow jokes thrown in as well, musings for example on the chiasmic crossings between Derrida and derrière. In any case, to close this opening parenthesis, it's the joyful way Derrida does his work—its performative aspects, the illocutionary force of his work—that has really stayed with me over the years.

And of course 1974's Glas is just the warm-up for Derrida's real comic tour de force—"Limited Inc abc" (hereafter simply "Limited Inc"), his late-70s back-and-forth with John Searle, over Derrida's essay on J. L. Austin and performative utterances. I'll get to all that soon enough, but I can't help but note right off the bat that Searle, if he had taken time to look twice at Derrida's work, should have seen it coming: the great comics really know how to take down hecklers.

In any case, it's this underappreciated, comic, performative Derrida that I want to think about in this essay, and while this Derrida certainly doesn't get as much methodological play as the "prayers and tears" Derrida, I'm going to try to make some larger claims about the joke being crucial to Derrida's itinerary, especially surrounding his attraction to the performative. (I'll likewise suggest that even as Austin tries to keep the joke under control, its logic remains central to his work as well.) To anticipate some things I'll repeat and expand on later, the joke allows us to think in a very economical way about the performative deployment of force and provocation; the necessity and nonsaturability of context; the signature style of delivery; the idiomatics of timing; and the success or failure of a speech act being largely delinked from...