Afformative, afformance, afformativity: The critique of performativity in Werner Hamacher’s work

48 AFFORMATIVE, AFFORMANCE, AFFORMATIVITY: THE CRITIQUE OF PERFORMATIVITY IN WERNER 1 Werner Hamacher attempted to explore a dimension of language which he called the afformative. He defined it in opposition to performativity as well as to representational domain. His concept of afformativity enables a critical view of the self-grounding power of language utterance by pointing out an abyss that always separates language from action and representation. These considerations are opening up a path for deconstructive thought opening a possibility to reflect on language, literature, politics and justice in a different way than that typical of the economics of performativity. This article aims to demonstrate how the concept . The . Positing the thought on the pre-structure of language. However, the fact that language precedes utterance or inscription, oral or written communication, and that the users of language cannot be imagined as sovereign agents, since they are (at least partly) subjected to the operations of language in almost every utterance, is far from being able to function for Hamacher as an epistemologically reliable, stable foundation. This also means 1 The first version of this article was published in Hungarian in the journal , 6 (2019): 72-89. Afformative, Afformance, Afformativity 49 that, in contrast to philosophical hermeneutics,2 language, according to Hamacher, can never posit anything absolutely by means of self-positing and the superor autoperformative, understood as prerequisites for potential performative actions.3 For Hamacher, the pre-structure of language reveals the groundlessness, or, at the very least, the ungroundability, of a statement and performativity. Exposing the deactivation - referentiality), it opens up the aporia of the impossibility of functional language. From the beginning of the 1980s, this notion, as well as the range of operations which characterize positing (Setzung), are regularly approached by Hamacher from the act of promise. The structure of the promise does not only make it visible when the autoperformative operation of positing comes into action, but also when this positing activity leads to the abandonment of the promise. In several works Hamacher links the basic model of positi oeuvre can be described as a steadfast and exceptionally consistent attempt to account for transcendental philosophy. Hamacher cannot stress enough that when Kant defined being as 4 he implied a context in which the fundamental act of absolute positing became responsible for all further possibilities of being and with them, for all further positing. In particular, Hamacher refers to two of appears in the Critique of Pure Reason obviously not a real predicate, i.e., a concept of something that could be added to the concept of a thing. It is merely the positing 5 The other is found in a 1763 2 Hamacher strongly criticises Hans- (Premises), Entferntes Verstehen: Studien zu Philosophie und Literatur von Kant bis Celan (Distanced Understanding: Studies in Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2011) 42. See also Werner Hamach trans. Jason Groves, Minima Philologica (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015) 117-18. 3 Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller and Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) 26. 4 Imperat Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, trans. Peter Fenves (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) 98; Werner un rmeneutic Imperative in Kant and Nietzsche), Entferntes Verstehen 67. 5 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 567 (A598/B626). 50 text entitled The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God with 6 being creates, as we shall see later, an obvious link between his and Walter pe is used by Hamacher to interpret both of 7 Tracing the course of mplation of being, Heidegger ties it to an act which determines everything else, to a synthesis that stands as the performance of transcendental apperception: 8 Since being for Kant is always posited as a relation, it signifies the relationship between subjectivity the cognitive self and the object. In this context, the object always appears as an already posited object, an object which is established in the structure of subjectivity. For this reas transcendental apperception, which underlies every sort of logical judgment and every act of positing and thus ultimately affirms the subjectivity of the perceiving Kant, the primal act of cognitive the being of a thing as the act of positioning9 or original ( ).10 Being can thus be interpreted in relation to this operation. When Hamacher makes a contrast between afformativity and this conception of positing, he puts the original founding act of being and its innate connection to a subject into a critical perspective, but above all, he investigates the philosophical concept of being and existence derived from the operativity of the act or the activity. The model of performative language becomes an object of criticism for Hamacher exactly because for J.L. Austin 6 t in Support of a Demonstration of the Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770, ed. and trans. David Wallford and Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 119. 7 Entferntes Verstehen 67; Werner Transposition of F Entferntes Verstehen 204. 8 Ma Gesamtausgabe, I.9: Wegmarken (Complete Works, I.9: Pathmarks), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1976) 469. 9 450. 10 Afformative, Afformance, Afformativity 51 as the successor of a tradition represented by Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte11 this kind of language presupposes, first and foremost, a conscious self, and more importantly, an absolute act or pure doing 12 The performative act is an act in which the transcendental primordiality of positing may manifest itself. How to Do Things with Words can be doubtlessly criticized, especially when one recalls the dominant role that conventions, and the ritual and ceremonial uses of language conditioned by the erasure of the singularity of the act and the self, play in the constitution of speech acts as described by Austin. On the other hand, it seems unquestionable that lves also refer to performative acts, namely those of installation and verification. Following this logic, it is most reasonable that performatives, though they have to comply with conventions, are eventually enabled again by performatives. In this infinite chain of acts collapsing into one another, any kind of action can be executed on condition that there is a real or at least thinkable act that enables all the others by its absolute or pure, non-preceded performativity.13 From this perspective, theories of performativity necessarily allocate the structural point of Setzung or , first published in 1983, which is a great example of exposing the simultaneously philosophical and linguistic theoretical connection between the positing/positioning and performative acts, it together the above context and turns it into an object of criticism. 11 Language: The Messianism of Commodity Language), Incisions, 1 (November 2000): ,CR: The New Centennial Review, 4.3 (2004): 235. 12 The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1998) Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Miami, FL: The University of Miami Press, 1971) 236. 13 - -performative), Performa, 6 (2017), http://performativitas.hu/res/ austinkonvencio_kulcsar-szabo_kl_kj_v2_imp.pdf heatricality), 6.1 (2010), http://uj.apertura.hu/2010/osz/fogarasi-perfomativitas-teatralitas/ (accessed 12 April 2020). 52 When Hamacher discusses the self-grounding operativity of Kantian will foregrounding the matter of interpretation and understanding he introduces the promise as an essential case of self-grounding. As such, the promise is the speech act which lets the existence and autonomy by doing so.14 In this structure, which belongs to the selfgrounding operativity of practical reason, the promise is nothing but the basis of subjectivity folding onto itself and its universalization. If in the promise the will makes a contract with itself, this contract can only be possible because they who make a promise necessarily certify that their promise coincides with what they want. In other words, they at the same time express loyalty to what they want and to the universal law of the promise. This latter operation is most formal, for it articulates nothing else than that a promise must be a promise: n every promise, the promise makes a promise to itself to be a prom 15 a dual structure. While we can make promises that align with our will and the law of subjectivity, every promise must also correspond to the formal or universal law of the promise, which establishes the act of promise itself. Since the promise and Austin seems to agree with this despite his doubts16 not only provides its own law (one has to promise something that corresponds to their will), but also becomes a law itself (a promise has to be a promise) creating a universal ground and subjectivity, it can be considered a 17 From this point of view, law is the rallying point of positing acts, and since for Kant being is is the original collection of all Being. 18 As a transcendental speech act, the promise is an exemplary manifestation of -grounding operations and the original division of being into subjects and objects. No speech act can be imagined without it.19 Furthermore, the promise exceeds the world of speech acts due to its dual structure along the axes 14 Premises Entferntes Verstehen 65. 15 Premises Entferntes Verstehen 65. 16 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbis (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1975) 9-11. 17 Premises Entferntes Verstehen 65. 18 Premises 98Entferntes Verstehen 67. 19 Premises 98Entferntes Verstehen 67. Afformative, Afformance, Afformativity 53 of language and of being. However, Hamacher leaves no room for doubt that the agined on the basis of performativity theories. The operation of promising a promise enables every subjective act of promise creating thus a peculiar case of selfaffection: if language has to come into being and become functional, it has at first to make 20 This, however, also means that the operation of the promise, strictly speaking, no longer exists in the dimension of performativity as a foundation of performative language. Although it is the self-grounding of language that opens up the possibility of speech acts, the operation of self-grounding cannot be viewed as identical with them. The power of the promise lie exactly there. The promise simultaneously posits the dimension of linguistic action, where speech acts are performed, and the domain serving as the basis of that dimension, where the pure self-referentiality of language predominates. What it does in this sense is connecting words and actions, the world of language and acts, covering up their originally separate nature.21 For Hamacher, this structure of the promise is a model of the original positing, of the absolute, auto-performative act. Deactivation This explains why Hamacher returns to the trope of the promise again and again in his articles collected in the volume Entferntes Verstehen as well as in his later works. As a model of the original, transcendental positing, the promise not only determines the conceptualization of language and being, but as the basic foundation of both also the conventional structures of thinking about historical, ident. Whereas Heidegger talks about the abstract foundation of the structure of being (in transcendental apperception), Hamacher emphasizes a linguistic one (in a transcendental speech act). Unlike Heidegger, Hamacher believes that from Heraclitus to Wittgenstein, philosophy is always the philosophy of language.22 20 Premises Entferntes Verstehen 65-66. 21 Premises Entferntes Verstehen 66. 22 - harc (Literature is the Activist of the Fight for Justice: An Interview with Werner Hamacher), Prae, 2 (2012): 78. 54 outlines, necessarily falls into its own suspension. Having analyzed at length tive, as well as expressions of demand in Paul de thinking about language consists in the fact that although language itself is originally imperative in nature, it is unable to relate to itself. As a consequence, language has two simultaneously present and intersecting laws of the referential and the figural function. While the former prescribes the existence of meaning and cognition, the latter keeps suspending or voiding their possibilities. No matter how much it would ease the situation, one cannot reliably distinguish between referentiality and figurality. The imperative of meaning strives for its own totalization which at the same time suffers from fragmentation. Thus language may create a possibility for a certain programme, but it also remains exposed to an ever-imminent contingent event, ready to suspend or 23 Of course, this does not mean that language cannot function at all, even though the price o epistemological unreliability. A meaningful and understandable language must exist due to its imperative character, which calls for meaning and cognition even referentiality continuously puts language into this perspective. But since language does not exist before the imperative of meaning, being only demanded and promised, and thus belonging to the future, it cannot perform any operation at present. Therefore the act of promise and through it language and cognition misses itself. It does not coincide with itself, but postpones, suspends itself.24 Nonetheless, for language to be functional, falling for the trick produced by this act is necessary. As de Man accentuates,25 if it is about language, we always fall f metaleptic structure, which is groundless since it originates from the future.26 When Hamacher makes a connection between Heidegg and a 23 : Entferntes Verstehen 175-77. 24 Lectio, Entferntes Verstehen 189-90. 25 The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) 117-18. See also: J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002) 147-49. 26 Lectio, Entferntes Verstehen 191. Afformative, Afformance, Afformativity 55 [d] (language speaks),27 because the formula presupposes a language that always already exists, and directly by fitting into the Kantian tradition answers itself in full.28 This criticism stems from de Man ironic paraphrase of Heidegger, [d]ie Sprache verspricht (sich) (language promises/slips [itself]). 29 ion is no longer the question whether for Kant being is posited in an abstract or linguistic manner. De as discussed in that the statement [d] es the core of de Freudian slip) is nothing less than the essence of language. This means that there is no originally given language, a language that, strictly speaking, would not permanently exist in the process of its constitution. Hamacher stresses that there is no language that would not misspeak, betray itself and become distorted (all this is implied in the connotations of the German prefix ver-). There is no activity in language that does not turn and drift towards the future. None that could predictable nature, none that is liberated by the irony of language. Consequently, if one is to take the Heideggerian formula truly and seriously, no language can be imagined that would anticipate the promise, the promise of language.30 Nonetheless, one cannot claim that this structure of the act, since it exposes the very lack of grounding in the realm of subjectivity and cognition, and highlights, in terms 31 nature: its imperative but epistemologically illegitimate being. For Ham its own deactivation. The earliest systematic exposition of this idea although the before can be found in an excep 27 e), Unterwegs zur Sprache (On the Way to Language) (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959) 10. 28 Lectio, Entferntes Verstehen 190-91. 29 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Proust (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1979) 277. 30 Jacques Derrida, , rev. edn, ed. and trans. Avital Ronell and Edoardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) 97. 31 de Man, Allegories of Reading 277. 56 But if one assumes that language as such is not the executive organ of nonlinguistically posited institutions, while at the same time insisting it is essentially performative, then one must also assume that it posits itself in an act of absolute autothesis: that in order to be a language, it must always presuppose itself. Thus, language, understood as absolute autothetic and autotelic performance would, rather than simply positing itself, permanently and this is the sign of its finitude announce itself, speak before itself, speak itself as a language which is always arriving and always yet to come, one which, having never yet arrived, would never yet be language itself This prestructure of language (Sprache) would make language as such into a promise (Versprechen) of itself. The absolute performative of language would be the promise of language. Language does not speak; or rather, language speaks precisely in that it pr performativity always promises itself, then it does not, strictly speaking, promise itself, but promises its promise [verspricht ihr Versprechen]: the fact that it is infinitely yet-to-come coincides with its infinite nonarrival t] so it always does not yet promise. It does not perform and performs the not, and the always-not-yet, of its performation. The absolute performativity of language, its unconditional being-ahead-of-itself, accordingly implies constitutively for language, deconstitutively for language as act a dimension in which language itself does not correspond to itself as act [sich selber als Handlung nicht entspricht] and in which, instead of acting, language abstains from any action. This abstention from action is that 32 -structure manifests itself in the dual referentiality of the promise. The language of the promise, on the one hand, makes a promise, but, on the other hand, this promise can only be realized if language promises itself in the first place. In view of the above interpretation of Kant, the transcendental act initiates instability in language, establishing thus the ungrounded trait of this grounding 32 Cardozo Law Review, 13 (1991): 1142Was hei ?), ed. Christiaan L. Hart Nibrig (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994) 363. Afformative, Afformance, Afformativity 63 nicative, representation-based approaches in linguistic theory. This language structured by afformativity runs out in the possibility of mediacy.54 Nonetheless, is not structured as the promise of a promise: the linguistic nature of language, in this sense, appears as a simple chance of imparting, as a sort of pure mediality, because it just 55 As such, it does not promise its own truth, the transcendental establishment of subjectivity, and does not offer a gift either, but revokes itself allows its own alteration to happen from functions.56 imagined as an asymmetrical correlation between the instrumental, performative language and the afformative, sheer linguisticality understood as pure means. The former communicates, while the latter allows communication, which can never be independent from the afformative realm. Although the afformative offers a mere possibility of mediacy, it can be understood as the condition of the possibility of communication.57 Here lies the Hamacherian aporia of language.58 According to Hamacher, it is possible to posit, to open up the world of subjectivity, cognition and knowledge, if the operation of positing also includes its own deposing, which it is always 59 As a result, the otes.60 The space of performance can only unclose through involving the notion of its own suspension, which means that it is subjected to its own deactivation and structured in a fundamentally afformative manner.61 From this perspective, the possibility of performativity, the 54 55 Was hei t 348. 56 Was hei t 359. 57 58 Performatives after Deconstruction, ed. Mauro Senatore (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) 31. 59 Was hei t 349. 60 61 64 autoperformative exposure of being, is comprised in its own inherent impossibility, its afformativity.62 The comparison of afformati 63 elaborates 1. The afformative is not a priori independent from performativity and the world of action. More importantly, however, it opens up as a domain that does not have a common ground with the operation of positing, since the afformative precedes and exceeds it. In this sense, we cannot claim that the afformativity. In view of the Kantian definition of being discussed above, not in the mann 64 2. The afformative cannot be integrated into the paradigm of action, since it is not the order of positing that imposes its limits. That which operates in an afformative fashion, does not do, but allows, lets happen, thus preceding all action. The afformative introduces a possibility of the linguistic act of positing, but at the same time it is pre-positional and due to this it can suspend this possibility at any time. This is the reason why performative language can present afformative events only through negative means, with omissions, pauses and interruptions. These rhetorical phenomena, however, are not identical with the event, the effects of which they represent. 3. It follows from the above that the concept of afformativity cannot be linked philosophy is an 65 the afformative event has no phenomenal dimension that could expose this event as such (the afformative is originally 66 62 Was hei t 355. 63 - Was hei 361. 64 - Was hei Justice in Language), Sprachgerechtigkeit 8. 65 Modern Language Notes, 127.3 (2012): 539. 66 - Minima Philologica 59; Hamacher, 95 Thesen zur Philologie 57. Afformative, Afformance, Afformativity 65 Whereas representation (Darstellung) can always be traced back to positing operations and is 67 the afformative can never be integrated into the systems of representation. This entails an extraordinary hardship especially in the practical application of this language model, for example in literary analyses. Nevertheless, the fact that Hamacher talks about the Kantian sublime as e may provide some footing to this question.68 In an earlier essay, Hamacher directly identifies Heinrich the 69 The relationship between afformativity and the sublime, the nature of Hamache 1936).70 4. The afformative necessarily differs from itself, turns into something else, and opens up a possibility for its own alteration. The transition from afformative to performative language emerges as the transition from the sheer possibility of lang afformativity does not manifest the order of positing, but functions as a principle which allows being, it allows itself not to become itself (and therefore in a sense not to function at all). However, this does not mean that the performativity of language is able to eliminate afformativity. If the existence of functional language relies on the afformative as a sheer possibility of language, then the order of positing (and being imagined as its correlation) will forever stay indebted to the domain of afformativity. Such is the debt of the communicative language. It is unable to reveal itself in any other way than the repetition of this debt the mark of its own structural impossibility. Yet, even if performativity relies on afformativity, and the linguistic nature of language can be identified in the afformative, this domain, as Hamacher emphasizes, cannot be considered as the essence of language (as a category of being, essence is still the product of 67 Was hei t 361. 68 i Was hei t 361. 69 Kleists Erdbeben in Chili Entferntes Verstehen 258. 70 Ungerufen: Kommentar zu Kafkas Neue Rundschau, 118.2 (2007): 132-53. 66 positing).71 The concept of the afformative exposes the groundlessness of functional language, and, what is more, the impossibility of its grounding. Therefore it can be interpreted as a signifier of the 72 The domain of afformativity extends beyond the realm of speech acts. As illustrated by the example of the promise, it cannot be a speech act, since the deactivation of the act, the suspension of carrying it out, the deposing of positing can be named as its most important operation. From this perspective, afformance, positing. The afformative language is untouched by subjectivity, being, or act, which means that if understood as speech, it is a pure language or pure mediality. a language which is not compromised by pure, positing acts. A language, whose operation is certified only by the positing/positioning which manifests its own practical impossibility. However, this assertion can be a mere testimony of silence and must therefore end in silence.73 As it is unable to manifest itself, it reveals the irony of afformance.74 The silence surrounding afformativity is an inherent threat of semiological models of language. There is no available immunizing process that could negate be transformed into the realm raised by the afformative is analogous with the philosophical questioning of the relationship between being and nothingness,75 and even if it is not necessarily identical with it, it can be certainly considered as a variant. From this perspective, Phenomenology of Spirit (discussed by Hamacher), which place nothingness outside the realm of being, and thus immunize being against non-being by mobilizing the law of 71 Ferber (1008) misunderstands the afformative as the essence of language. 72 Hamache Was hei t 363. 73 74 , Entferntes Verstehen 75 This is highlighted by the asymmetrical duplication of thesis 48 or thesis 91 in - -sentence. In these cases it is impossible to decide whether a performative or an afformative event was realized. -Minima Philologica 51, 94; Hamacher, 95 Thesen zur Philologie 50-51, 98. Afformative, Afformance, Afformativity 67 76 cannot work in the case of the afformative. Or, better put, it misses what makes afformativity what it is. As shown, afformance cannot be restrained, it cannot be integrated into the structure of being. As a result, the ontic radicalism Encyclopaedia, which represents Dasein nothingness,77 Afformance as a structural basis or insubstantiality of language cannot be linguistic in the same sense as a language that keeps repeating the operations of positing. Neither can the two be reduced to the same category. Afformativity is the name for the nonviolent domain that subverts, suspends, and thus threatens from inside not only the linguistic order of positing, but also being as its other. As Hamacher writes, [t]he proletarian general strike, whose method is the unconditional suspension of state power (Staatsgewalt) and whose form is justice, would be, in the political sphere, the violence of the political itself. It would thus be what language itself is in the sphere of language: afformative mediacy.78 cal general strike and means.79 Indeed, the proletarian general strike appears as pure means in de the potential of blackmailing. It does not aim at a political-legal rearrangement. While the political general strike reaches its purpose by successful blackmailing of the state and leaves the government untouched after it has granted the advantages or rights demanded by the strikers, the proletarian general strike does not aim at any similar rearrangements. Moreover, it has nothing to do with lawmaking. It aims 76 Bewegungen einer Figur durch Celans Entferntes Verstehen 326-28, 333. 77 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werk im Grundrisse I (Works 8: An Outline of an Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Disciplines I) , ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986) 193-95. 78 Was hei t 353. 79 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, ed. and trans. Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 143-73. 68 to overthrow and abolish the established government and legal order. It is a means of the annihilation of law, 80 Accordingly, it stays out of the range of positing, lawmaking and law-preserving, violence and the dialectic of performance. It is a pure, nonviolent means with no intentions, belonging to the sphere of pure violence and afformativity.81 Afformative, strike, which Hamacher imagines as pure means without purpose, in other words, 82 In Hama deposing of the law promotes a structure of language as a model of interpersonal relationships. Strike subsequently manifests the pure mediality of language in the field of politics. As long as it disrupts history, as well as political and legal terms established and governed by the operations of language, the possibility of this event can be connected to the pure mediality of language. In this sense, language is responsible not only for operating the positing/positioning domain of social being, but also for exposing its historical and political sphere which is not controlled by the laws of positing/positioning acts.83 proletarian general strike offers crucial perspectives for understanding the afformative, since, to reverse what has been said, it provides, in the world of political phenomena, a model of the aphenomenal operativity of the afformative, which has been discussed as linguistic operativity in the case of the promise. Following Judith Butler,84 the annihilation of mythical violence by the pure violence of the proletarian general strike can be imagined with the help of an alternative version of a Greek myth. Niobe, the Queen of Thebes, was punished by Leto for offending her. She also lost her children by the hands of Apollo and Artemis. Although she herself was spared, she turned to stone due to grief. Her offence did not consist in a mere refusal to offer sacrifices, she had also claimed for herself what had been sacrificed to Leto and had boasted of having more children than the goddess. The motivation behind her actions has been explained 80 Selected Writings 1 Gesammelte Schriften II/1 184. 81 - Was hei t 351-53. 82 Was hei t 353. 83 Was hei t 353. 84 , Political Theologies 201-19. Afformative, Afformance, Afformativity 69 by the absence of the distinction between gods and humans in her time.85 In Niobe guilty exactly by sparing her. Although she has not directly caused her from which she cannot be freed even in the petrified form is a mute beare between gods and humans, which, according to the mythical power system, cannot be crossed.86 For Benjamin, the mythical violence that befalls Niobe possesses lawmaking power. It establishes and places its subject, the subject of writes Butler referring to s reading of Benjamin 87 If Apollo and Artemis went on strike and committed themselves to the paradigm of non-action instead of action, mythical violence would never be enforced. Although the act of lawmaking might have happened also in this case, enforcing the law as the means of violence and the task of Apollo and Artemis would not be possible. As a consequence, the mythical power system would not be able to establish a law. The mythical, lawmaking violence would be suspended, abandoned and deactivated due to the purity of means and their strike leading to a nonviolent annulment of violence. Just like the afformative, strike disconnects the world of language and acts, means and ends, judgment and execution.88 The afformative is the strike of language, the Ausstand) of its communicative divine violence, one could say that as such, it does not work against but for language, as opposed to the performative domain that destroys language, pushing it into the cycle of violence.89 85 (The Mythology of the Greeks: Gods, Humans, Heroes) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2013) 164. 86 Selected Writings 1 Ge Gesammelte Schriften II/1 197. 87 Butler 219. 88 ,Diacritics 32.3-4 (2002): 102-103. 89 Cf. Benjamin Selected Writings 1 249Gesammelte Schriften II/1 200. 70 The For Hamacher, the possibility of justice, central to his late period, is based on the disruption of the self-referential structure of law and the suspension of judgment, on their postponement, delay and deposing as deactivation. Moreover, it coincides with all these aspects. This thought certainly opposes the Western ontotheological tradition, which remind us favours intervention with respect to justice, as well as action, decision, sovereign actors and the world of performativity. It is not by chance that Hamacher sharply criticizes human rights, proposing their modifications,90 as well as law and order in general as the means of establishing social justice.91 In so far as the establishment and maintenance of law and order belong to mythical violence (or as in Kant, to the positing/positioning acts that bring about -foundation92), the language of performativity, the constitution of human rights (by means of series of lawmaking acts) and the modern Euro-Atlantic culture, as well as individual subjects rooted in it, no matter how good-intentioned they are, miss the essence of justice.93 In this context, law is introduced as the most peculiar field of performativity, because, as Hamacher points out, the Kantian definition of law served as a model for Austin when he elaborated on the concept of performative language. From this perspective, the language of performativity is aw.94 The act of lawmaking is a performative, performatives are law-positing by nature, the nicht 95). 90 Sprachgerechtigkeit 115-16. 91 The fact that human rights try to make human beings imaginable as essentially legal Sprachgerechtigkeit 98), since a sort of pertains to the realm of rights and its forms manifest in political history like ethnicism, communism, liberalism, socialism or Sprachgerechtigkeit 358. 92 Werner Hamacher, Is a Form: Mere Talking Is N Sprachgerechtigkeit 256. 93 Sprachgerechtigkeit -104; -Was hei t 349-50. 94 Sprachgerechtigkeit 264. 95 Sprachgerechtigkeit 265. Afformative, Afformance, Afformativity 71 uage and justice becomes possible if it is imagined not in the domain of a positing or a performative language, but instead in a language without a predicative structure, a language which is not intentional, not signifying, and thus in no way determined. Such a language is afformative: it manifests its own aporetic character. For Hamacher, only such a language that fulfils these conditions may possess the plurality and openness offering an alternative to the inherently exclusive and anti-historical legal order:96 the possibility of the arrival of a truly singular afformative event.97 subversive perspective for reflections on philology, one that directly references as also indicated by a seminal -five 98 This is the very reason why man, through the definition of this practice, appears as a . If 99 and human existence can be imagined as constantly drawn towards language, human beings can never be anything but the afformative domain of language, a yet to become a language. Therefore, they are defined by the domain that manifests the sheer possibility of language. Orpheus is afformed and afforms when he sings. According to Hamacher, the possibility of justice lies precisely in the above described ope 100 different 101) is a front-line fighter. Justice in this sense can only be imagined as that it must not fall into conclusions or judgments.102 This is why Hamacher identifies industrialism, and journalism as its eminent form, as an arch-enemy in the fight for justice.103 In this 96 Sprachgerechtigkeit 98. 97 Sprachgerechtigkeit 124-25. 98 -five Theses on Philology Minima Philologica 79; Hamacher, 95 Thesen zur Philologie 77. 99 Was hei t 349. 100 - 77. 101 - Minima Philologica 89; Hamacher, 95 Thesen zur Philologie 93. 102 Sprachgerechtigkeit 123. 103 Hamacher, - Minima Philologica 93; Hamacher, 95 Thesen zur Philologie 97. 72 (not independently from Derrida104) when the decision over justice is kept open. Consequently, what is just must not or cannot make a decision or judgment on something, for example, on its own rightfulness. Along these lines, language can only be just if it corresponds to what is linguistic afformative in itself. When understood as the language of decision, judgment and law, justice misses le. As such, it about others, not with Andere, sie spricht nicht mit 105 106 in contrast, deactivates and suspends the possibility of action instead of carrying out a decision or judgment. Hamacher names prayer, wish and poetry as the exemplary spheres that conform to the linguistic aspect of language, and consequently, to justice.107 However, poetry, as the absolute openness and is prima philologia. 108 a language that incessantly clashes against its own borders, at times transgressing them, manifesting the impossibility of representation and transgressing the terms of representation109 , as soon as judgment is made (as the act of foreshadowing and stabilizing an order), we find ourselves in the realm of positing and performativity. In this regard, being just equals to a withdrawal into the afformative realm of deposing and poetry. Thus it can preserve the purely ethical nature of justice, language as language, against its representative and performative dimension to preserve la aporia and allow it to exist. s of knowledge, government apparatuses, decisionand judgment-based legalpolitical and ethical systems can grant the possibility of justice. As evident from the above argument, language has been implicitly and inevitably carrying out this task, although its absolute afformativity, just like pure violence, has never been 104 Jacques Derrida, trans. Alexander Ga , 1991) 46-53. 105 Sprachgerechtigkeit 48-49. 106 Was hei t 353. 107 Hamacher, -five Minima Philologica 11; Hamacher, 95 Thesen zur Philologie 8. 108 - Minima Philologica 17; Hamacher, 95 Thesen zur Philologie 124, 139-40. 109 Ferber 1007 1008.