Faust Among the Witches: Towards an Ethics of Representation
Hawkes, David
Early Modern Culture, No. 4 (2004)
Abstract
Money rules the postmodern world, and money is an efficacious, or “performative,” sign: a medium of representation that attains practical power. As we might expect, therefore, the concept of the performative sign is theoretically central to the postmodern era’ s philosophy, politics, psychology, linguistics and — a forteriori — its economics. All of these disciplines, in their postmodern forms, privilege the performative, rather than the denotative, aspect of signs. They all assume that signs do things, and that the objective world is constructed for us via the realm of signification. In the work of such philosophers as Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, the performative sign even acquires a vague association with political radicalism, since its power can be used to deconstruct such allegedly repressive chimeras as essence and self-identity.
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