Idle thoughts, not arguments.
Think of the situation of the beloved who dislikes being addressed as a particular – as a woman (let’s say it is a woman) who does not want to be merely one of a series whom her would-be lover has loved. Uniqueness is all; the singular is all – whence the impossible attempt, for the lover, her seducer to find the words with which to sing of what she is.
The lover’s speech is bent towards the singular. No coincidence that the beloved (this is a cliche, I know) wants the lover’s speech tends towards a pledge – that the stages of romantic love rise to a decision in which each party is joined by the perfomative of what they say (‘Do you take this woman …’ – ‘I do.’) In this way, the particular (words, which the lover can always use as tools of seduction) are bound to the singularity of the performance. Marriage is only supposed to happen once.
Think now of the lover who will not commit. No pledge – just unctious words, words that seem to promise nothing at all, and for which nothing is ever at stake. The lover is unserious – that is to say, his speech assumes no responsibility. He is a rogue, a cad (what a cliche!).
I want to make another turn: to think not of the attitude of one who would use speech, but of man who is used by it – or rather, of a kind of speech that lets itself reverberate in ordinary speech and perhaps as the ordinary in speech. Here, it is neither the content of what is said nor the perfomance it accomplishes that is important. Unless it is possible to think this speech act in another sense, setting it back from human agency, until it names only a pledge that belongs to speech, that speaks with it …
A pledge? But to what? And for what? A pledge of language to itself. To withdraw into itself. Of language disappearing into itself, and forgetting to refer.
I want only to invoke a speech without commitment, without seriousness; not the speech of the vacillator, for whom speech is nothing, but the vacillation of speech, that never settles, never commits.
Lars Iyer's Blog 