The cri­tique of lin­guis­tic pres­ence that Jacques Der­rida devel­ops in “Sig­na­ture Event Con­text” (1971) has become a com­mon place in con­tem­po­rary phi­los­o­phy and lit­er­ary the­ory. Often for­got­ten, how­ever – not in the last place by the French philoso­pher him­self – is the fact that this essay does not just pro­claim the ‘death of meta­physics’ but also sketches a path for future philo­soph­i­cal research. “Sig­na­ture Event Con­text” ini­ti­ates a shift from mean­ing­ful signs to the acts, pro­ce­dures, and oper­a­tions that invoke them.

In ”Sig­na­ture Event Con­text”, Der­rida unfolds the rad­i­cal con­se­quences of Fer­di­nand de Saus­sure’s argu­ment that spac­ing – on a mate­r­ial level – is a pre­con­di­tion for any kind of lin­guis­tic structure:

“This force of rup­ture is due to the spac­ing with con­sti­tutes the writ­ten sign: the spac­ing which sep­a­rates it from other ele­ments of the inter­nal con­tex­tual chain (the always open pos­si­bil­ity of its extrac­tion and graft­ing), but also from all the forms of a present ref­er­ent (past or to come in the mod­i­fied form of the present or to come) that is objec­tive or sub­jec­tive. The spac­ing is not the sim­ple neg­a­tiv­ity of a lack, but the emer­gence of the mark.” (Der­rida 317)

As opposed to the aspi­ra­tions of the Swiss linguist’s, “Sig­na­ture Event Con­text” demon­strates that these con­sti­tu­tional gaps and breaches can never be bridged. Break­ing with a con­text, any con­text, is both cause and effect of all writ­ing and speak­ing. Since the emer­gence of these meaning-​producing rup­tures can impos­si­bly be explained from the con­text with which they break, Der­rida refers to them as events.

Due to these rup­tures, state­ments and utter­ances can­not be used in an inap­pro­pri­ate man­ner. Or at least, there is no false use in respect to an orig­i­nal con­text or addressee. The inten­tions of an author, or the norms, val­ues, and cus­toms of a his­tor­i­cal dis­course, can never – not even par­tially – deter­mine the proper use of an utter­ance. A state­ment has to be iter­able (repeat­able, citable) in any pos­si­ble con­text in order to be leg­i­ble at all.

“The pos­si­bil­ity of repeat­ing, and there­fore iden­ti­fy­ing, marks is implied in every code, mak­ing of it a com­mu­ni­ca­ble, trans­mit­table, deci­pher­able grid that is iter­able for a third party, and thus for any pos­si­ble user in gen­eral” (315)

Accord­ing to Der­rida, every lin­guis­tic sys­tem has to con­sists solely of quotable marks. A sys­tem of dif­fer­ences – spac­ing – is a pre­con­di­tion for this rad­i­cal iter­abil­ity. Even speak­ing is there­fore a form of writ­ing. The fact, how­ever, that these poten­tial cita­tions nei­ther have an orig­i­nal nor an ulti­mate mean­ing, does not imply that they are com­pletely devoid of sense. On the con­trary, each utter­ance or state­ment – more pre­cisely, each instan­ti­a­tion of an utter­ance or a state­ment – by def­i­n­i­tion pro­duces its own con­text. Its proper use and mean­ing coin­cide with an act of writ­ing, and it is in that very broad sense that lan­guage is performative.

To a stu­dent of Friedrich Niet­zsche like Jacques Der­rida, this uni­ver­sal­iz­ing con­clu­sion — every state­ment is iter­able; lan­guage is always per­for­ma­tive — would not make sense, if it were not imme­di­ately fol­lowed by a plu­ral­iz­ing ges­ture: there are dif­fer­ent modes of iter­a­tion. It is exactly in plu­ral­iz­ing and spec­i­fy­ing these broad, abstract cat­e­gories that Der­rida sees oppor­tu­ni­ties for future philo­soph­i­cal research. Towards the end of “Sig­na­ture Event Con­text”, he states:

“Thus, one must less oppose cita­tion or iter­a­tion to the non­it­er­a­tion of the event, than con­struct a dif­fer­en­tial typol­ogy of forms of iter­a­tion, sup­pos­ing that this is a ten­able project that can give rise to an exhaus­tive pro­gram, a ques­tion I am hold­ing off on here. In this typol­ogy, the cat­e­gory of inten­tion will not dis­ap­pear; it have its place, but from this place it will no longer be able to gov­ern the entire scene and the entire sys­tem of utter­ances. Above all, one then would be con­cerned with dif­fer­ent type of marks or chains of iter­able marks, and not with an oppo­si­tion between cita­tional state­ments on the one hand, and sin­gu­lar and orig­i­nal statement-​events on the other.” (326)

Rather than find­ing or con­struct­ing an ori­gin, truth, pres­ence, or con­scious­ness, Der­rida pro­poses to cap­i­tal­ize on the pos­si­bil­i­ties that emerge from the lack of such a foun­da­tion for knowl­edge. Hence, a typol­ogy of iter­a­tions. To cover this pro­gram­matic aspect of “Sig­na­ture Event Con­text”, how­ever, I find the terms iter­a­tion and cita­tion an unfor­tu­nate choice. These two words sug­gest that Derrida’s argu­ment is lim­ited to lin­guis­tics, while it actu­ally applies to all forms of writ­ing. Each mark that emerges nec­es­sar­ily breaks with its con­text; every inscrip­tion is an event.

I would argue that Derrida’s usage of the terms iter­a­tion and cita­tion in “Sig­na­ture Event Con­text” is strate­gic. He needs them to empha­size the impos­si­bil­ity of sin­gu­lar­ity in lan­guage; To show that every utter­ance is defined by it iter­abil­ity. When Der­rida calls for a typol­ogy of forms iter­a­tions, how­ever, these con­cepts actu­ally obscure rather than clar­ify his point. Der­rida does not lit­er­ally wants to clas­sify dif­fer­ent forms of cita­tion, he wants to explore the het­ero­ge­neous acts that invoke events. There are many ways to break with a con­text. In order to empha­size this broader rel­e­vance of Derrida’s cri­tique, I pro­pose to replace the term iter­a­tion with (medial) operation.