Rrrrrright…. the rrrrrreferent

I thought I had lost my notes on Shoshana Felman’s book, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, but luckily I found them in a folder full of files that I produced in the pursuit of a project that never came to pass, a project on Plato, funny enuff.

Anyway: Rotman dumps the referent and he never gets into the performative. This makes perrrrrrrfect sense, since, according to Felman, it is the (question of the) performative that “brings back”–if it ever left–the problem of the referent. But the post-Austin performative also changes the status of the referent (this is the iteration of différance): 1) the referent is approached through language only and is an (after)effect of language–it is neither opposed to nor identified with language–”The referent is no longer simply a pre-existing substance, but an act, a dynamic movement of modification of reality” (77); 2) “referentiality–analytic or perfomative–can be reached and defined only through the dimension of failure: on the basis of the act of failing” (82).