Перформативът: суверенна власт вместо съпротива
The performative: Sovereign power instead of resistance (Butler, Austin, Derrida)

Summary/Abstract: What is proposed here is a search for a basic concept of power on the micro level of our speech acts. Before being codifi ed in some stable power relations or contexts, before being objectifi ed in different forms of domination and/or violence, power has to be analysed on the level of our immediate performatives, where the struggle for powercodifi cation could be followed in vivo. A task like this requires a conceptual shift: the illocutionary force of our speech acts has to be re-interpreted as their immediate evaluative force, i.e. as illocutionary power. Taking into account Derrida’s critique of Austin’s theory of speech acts, we should recognize that the performatives are not singular or atomistic speech acts. Nor are they pre-determined by some already given contexts or procedures. They are embedded into a citation, tracing signs, without any fi nal or autonomous signifi cation. And yet, the performatives have their specifi c kind of sovereignty. It is not the sovereignty of the ‘act’ itself but of the act’s performance. The actual (in the sense of ‘on-going’) performance has its immediate force that is irreversible and in addition is not citable. Even in the case of a direct citation, the citing performance sediments into an irreversible arrow, immediately re-ordering and re-evaluating all the points in its trajectory. The performance does not fulfi ll a perspective, but irreversibly sediments into a perspective. This effect of virtuosity of the immediate performance could be called a power effect. Because it demonstrates not only how we make things with words, but also how we re-evaluate the value of the things made through words. If the on-going performance is such an immediate source of micro power, then its role is not only to be resistant and ironically subversive to the already existing macro codifi cations of power and domination. The performatives have their own sovereign power capable of direct affi rmation and re-affi rmation of the intersubjective frames of our experience.

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