Nicoline van Harskamp - DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and ...

speech is understood as action.
Of speech and action / Of telling and “our” tales
Analysing the relationship between speech and action, J. L. Austin states some criteria
that have to be met: there must be a clear conventional procedure, an appropriate relation
between an individual and circumstances; all those involved have to adhere to the
set procedure and, not less important, all parties included must have certain “opinions
and feelings” and act accordingly. What however happens when there is no correlation
and when not all the criteria are met? It is interesting that speech and the success of
speech and negotiation are actually mostly evaluated by speech again. For example, for
the independence of some state to be proclaimed, it is not enough for someone simply to
announce it, rather, it will have to be renegotiated; if, however, the right words are spoken
at the right place, at the right moment, by the right person and in front of the right
people - the political ideal or the social structure can be radically transformed.
What tools should be used in order for there to be speech about what on the one hand
one should be silent about in order to go on living everyday life but at the same time
actually to prompt speech so that at last it might be possible to do away with the stories
of the past and the deceits of the present, as a permanent interim state where the suppressed,
the collective “abject”, holds the same provisional community in a state of constant
“war without arms”? In the perpetuation of the cacophony of the “telling” speech
is reduced just to a means for short-lived particular interests of ethnic and other groups
- speech in which the subjects reveal themselves does not take place. The truth is clear,
and yet again completely hidden. How then to start, at last, to think the future?
H. Arendt starts the fifth chapter of the The Human Condition with an analysis of the relation
between speech and action. Life without speech and actions for the world is literally
dead, it has ceased to be human life, because there is no life among people any more. 5
According to Arendt, it is by word and act that we classify ourselves into the human
world. The decision for speech always means a decision to act, and if action as beginning
responds to the fact of birth, if it is then the conditio humana, then it is actually speech
that corresponds to the fact of diversity and to the real effectuation of the conditio humana.
Akhmatova only by acquiescing in silence would accept not-being, the not-living
of man as different and unique being among equals. Arendt recalls Platon’s thesis that
lexis (speech) is closer to truth than praxis. Speech and action reveal us - however, this
kind of revelation happens only within the horizon of human community, in being-with,
whenever we are neither for nor against, when we are simply “with” others 6 . Without
this kind of revelation action becomes just a means, as in a state of war. Speech then
becomes mere telling tales, just another means directed towards an end.
In war, and after a war, however, it is just telling that is reinforced to the point of perversion;
it glorifies that truth that is identified with the correct, our, story, while speech
as doing (as political) ceases. The story of the war is what ensures, as Ugo Vlaisavljević
suggests in the psychoanalytic key, the basic interpretation: all those who share it at
GDJE SE SVE TEK TREBA DOGODITI / WHERE EVERYTHING IS YET TO HAPPEN