AbstractThis essay draws on Jacques Derrida’s theories of performativity to explore how a performance by Lenny Bruce dramatizes the positive productive potentials of language’s breaking force. Because this performance dramatizes how Bruce’s comedy act gets reinscribed and reinvented in multiple contexts that produce a wide array of effects, it provides a way to look at how language, in this case, humorous appeals in the form of jokes, is always already interrupted by its future instantiations and can never fully be contained in a given context, not even the context of the intentions of the human consciousness. This performance shows us that persuasive appeals do not emerge from a fully realized self-present subject and, therefore, gives us reason to question who or what is at the center of the rhetorical situation if it is no longer a stable human subject. Notes1 The First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”2 Derrida’s intervention intends to demonstrate that, in fact, the same risks that have been long associated with writing also apply to speech/gesture and all other forms of communication. Derrida’s claim is that all language—speech, gesture, writing—along with all experience, including the experience of being itself, is structured like writing. Writing is not a subservient tool to speech/gesture that carries “a continuous and homogenous reparation and modification of presence in the representation,” but is rather a “break in presence” (“Signature” 5). This breaking force occurs at the moment of inscription of any form of communication, suggesting that all language forms are structurally susceptible to the same risks Plato wanted to only apply to writing.3 Similarly, contemporary rhetoricians Diane Davis and Bradford J. Vivian have written on various aspects of language’s asignifying force. Davis calls attention to the importance of the often overlooked “non-hermeneutical dimension” of rhetoric, a dimension “that has nothing to do with meaning-making, with offering up signification to comprehension” (“Addressing Alterity” 192). For Davis, this dimension deals not in the aspect of language that “opens itself up to interpretation,” a position she equates with J.L. Austin’s constative speech act and Levinas’s concept of the “said,” but rather in the “saying,” the dimension of language that “necessarily unsettles what is congealed in the already-said” and, in Austin’s terms, “indicates a performative” (192–193). Vivian likewise moves away essentialist notions of the human subject in asking whether it would be possible to conceive of rhetoric without first appealing to an essential subject. Vivian does not intend to replace one ontology of the subject with another, as a mere inversion of the system would again do nothing to disrupt the organizing principles of the system itself. He intends to move towards a conception of the subject in such a way that it no longer governs the entire scene and system of the rhetorical process, but rather becomes a “rhetoric beyond representation—one no longer organized, that is, by the representation of moral truth or transcendental reason nor representative of an ideal conception of human being, however explicit or implicit it may be” (13–14).4 Even as Austin undertakes rigorous efforts to define a clear distinction between serious and non-serious contexts, his text itself works against the limitations he wishes to define. For example, when he uses slang expressions like “cock a snook” (119) and self-deprecating humor like, “Of course, this is bound to be a little boring and dry to listen to and digest; not nearly so much so as to think and write” (164) to make his points about the need to sequester jokes, poetry, and plays from serious communication, he is in effect using performative utterances to make constative claims. Considering How To Do Things With Words was originally delivered as a series of lectures, Austin’s text ultimately performs its very purpose; it becomes about what it does and not necessarily about what it says (119). Ultimately, Austin’s openness toward his own methodology leads him to accept that there is a little bit of the constative and a little bit of the performative in any utterance: “we found sufficient indications that unhappiness nevertheless seems to characterize both kinds of utterance, not merely the performative; and that the requirement of conforming or bearing some relation to the facts … seems to characterize performatives” (91).5 Bruce appears to take particular offense to this part of the transcript, because such accusations, if true, would harm his standing in the eyes of his more sophisticated female audience members: “I would never make gestures of masturbation, cause, I like … I, I’m concerned with my, image, in that, I, I know it offends chicks. And I, you know, it frightens them, it’s ugly to them, and, Dorothy Killgallen is not going to see some crotch grabbing hooligan. I would just never do anything like that. It’s offensive.”6 Before Bruce exits the club to the street outside in the final seconds of The Lenny Bruce Performance Film—the second to last performance he would make before his death—his last words spoken on camera were vintage Lenny Bruce—irreverent, odd, sincere, funny: “I really dug working with you, and good night, and as Will Rogers said, I never met a dyke I didn’t like, and, good night.”7 Lenny Bruce died on August 3, 1966, a victim of an accidental overdose of morphine. His efforts to perform his act before the courts were never realized. Bruce was found guilty of obscenity in the New York case he defends in this film, and the Supreme Court rejected his appeal for review. However, on December 23, 2003, Governor George Pataki posthumously pardoned him, the first such pardon in the history of the state (Kifner). The last lines of journalist Dick Schaap’s eulogy to Lenny Bruce in Playboy magazine were as follows: “One last four-letter word for Lenny. Dead. At 40. That’s obscene” (qtd. in Collins and Skover 370).Additional informationNotes on contributorsKevin CasperKevin Casper is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at the University of West Georgia, 1601 Maple Street, Carrollton, GA 30118, USA. kcasper@westga.edu