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Conclusion: The Frailties of Guarantee In the preceding chapters I have considered how conscience is characterized as binding within texts of Hobbes, Hegel, and Heidegger, and I have also examined those characterizations as paradigmatic for a consideration of how texts may be binding upon their readers and the world. Given the emphasis placed in the preceding readings on the nonconstative, “not-about,” and binding aspects of texts, it is a discomfiting task to formulate a conclusion or finding. For to advance in a constative mode a finding concerning bindingness is to risk a gesture of hypostasis and substantivization , and thus to risk flattening the scope of the question of how texts may be binding upon their readers. Let me attempt to reformulate the issue. Each of these accounts of conscience provides a claim for what conscience truly is. The persuasiveness of these claims, however, does not subsist only at the level of argumentative strength but also at the level of encounter. It originates, that is, at the level of one’s encounter with the text—for example, with Hobbes’s exquisitely figured rejections of figurative language; with Hegel’s text that claims to unfold what it describes; and with Heidegger’s Being and Time that performs for us what conscience is said to perform for Dasein. Such encounters exceed the intratextual components of style and argumentation. This excess belongs to what I have called the “bindingness” of words, by means of which they reach out of the dimension of constatation and aboutness in order to effect or even compel. In the case of Hobbes, I have shown that his account of conscience as a metaphor purports to explain how private conscience comes into being and turns out to be less binding, more corruptible, and more unreliable than shared, witnessed knowledge. In Leviathan, conscience can be seen as not merely an example of the dangers of metaphor but instead as the most dangerous metaphor, the metaphor that institutes the realm of private opinion, making error, deception, and the corruption of knowledge possible. Hobbes’s account of the metaphoric transformation of the word “conscience” operates as a model of the performative positing of subjectivity and of the internalization by which a subjective “inside” is fabricated rather than simply represented. The dangers of metaphor that 104 Hobbes recounts in the story of conscience, however, turn out to be profoundly ineluctable because we may in every case position words in sentences against their conventional meanings and thus may at every moment perform a corruption of the truth that is defined by Hobbes as the correct ordering of words. The corruption of names that Hobbes so fears in metaphor is a function of the inherent corruptibility of the verb “to be,” which may connect in an utterly labile fashion words that, in Hobbes’s nominalist model of truth, do not belong together. Hence Hobbes’s question “Why may we not say . . . ?” is indeed no merely rhetorical question but is rather precisely the question that points to the binding force of figuration . Hobbes’s own figures exemplify and thus demonstrate the possibility and danger that metaphor performatively inaugurates a shift in the order of names and thus in truth. Hobbes’s account of conscience exemplifies performative positing by a rhetorical figure, but in addition his understanding of speech as predication and of truth as the order of names opens the way to limitless performative effects. What we are able to say determines the range of possible usages and of possible corruptions of truth. The order of names is in its very nature open to corruption by the simple performance of figurative speech. The component of rhetoric that pertains sheerly to figuration is thus performative with regard to its shaping of truth, that is, of the usages which define the order of names. The Hobbesian account of the instability of the order of names both explains and exemplifies the difficulties of achieving incontrovertible bindingness through words, and yet we do nonetheless promise, write, and rely on this very bindingness that cannot be guaranteed. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit raises the question of the performative possibilities of a philosophical text, for the Darstellung (representation ) of Spirit in that text, as Hegel explains it in the introduction, is not a mere description but enacts Spirit’s very unfolding and becoming, in all its contradictions. The text of Hegel is also supposed to be performative, in that it is itself to accomplish the very unfolding which it narrates. The book...

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