I'll answer: "Perhaps."

So, here's Derrida doing what he does best: defining a specific concept and then suddenly revealing its universal application. What most interests me in "Signature Event Context" is how it bears upon the communities of rational consensus that people like Habermas hold so dear. What Derrida does is to pierce into these communities and introduce a third (supplemental) term between sender and receiver that alters the game--or, rather, he exposes this third term as the infected heart of the language community itself. This notion of "infection," of "illness," "parasitism," and "abnormality" within communication, bothers Derrida. These moments of "infelicity" reproduce and mutate, spread their iterations through the weave; Austin and Habermas seem threatened by this viral activity and so attempt to quarantine it in the outskirts of language. The dissemination of language beyond the contextual and intentioned community become outbreaks of contagion that threaten to infect the heart of rationality that, supposedly, drives consensus forward. Here I think back to Patrick's account of the "terror" implicit in Habermas' utopian, rational communities.

Derrida does not wish to negate, to sew confusion and undermine meaning. Rather, he wishes to make room for the deferred, the multiplicitous, the other, within the previously closed system. He makes room at the very heart of it, founding rationality and consensus upon those very substitutions and mutations that once terrified: the supplemental. In so doing, he avoids the trap of reifying an "absence" that merely buttresses a "present." Derrida's is the absence of differance, of endless but productive difference and deferral.

Derrida does not deny performativity or the specificity of communicative acts. I think he is simply reacting to the danger inherent in a community that believes in the transparency of its intentions, the unity of its goals, the cleanness of its contact. The notion of writing/signature offers an escape route between the constraining walls of author and reader, though the third term is never clear. Perhaps this third must always be blurry, in motion, potential. I still find it difficult to wrap my mind around the "legibility" of a coded piece of writing whose coders no longer exist (or have never existed). But it feels necessary.

Signing off. Eli.