“to seduce is to produce felicitous language”
“…the promise is symptomatic of the noncoincidence of desire with the present”
“both psychoanalysis and performative theory have in fact as their object the rethinking of the human act.”
“if the problem of the human act thus consists in the relation between language and body, it is because the act is conceived…as that which problematizes at one and the same time the separation and opposition between the two. the act, an enigmatic and problematic production of the speaking body, destroys from its inception the metaphysical dichotomy between the domain of the ‘mental’ and the domain of the ‘physical’….”
“the scandal consists in the fact that the act cannot know what it is doing…”
“failure, to be sure, pervades every performance, including even that of theory, which in turn becomes erotic for becoming nothing but a failed act, or an act of failing.”
“ …a pleasure in scandal, a performative pleasure if there ever was one…”
“the scandal…is always in a certain way the scandal of the promise of love, the scandal of the untenable, that is, still and always, the scandal—Donjuanian in the extreme—of the promising animal, incapable of keeping his promise, incapable of not making it, powerless both to fulfill the commitment and to avoid committing himself—to avoid playing beyond his means, playing, indeed, the devil; the scandal of the speaking body, which in failing itself and others makes an act of that failure, and makes history.”
“…truth is only an act…”
—shoshana felman
“If reading has historically been a tool of revolutions and of liberation, is it not rather because, constitutively, reading is a rather risky business whose outcome and full consequences can never be known in advance? Does not reading involve one risk, that, precisely cannot be resisted: that of finding in the text something one does not expect? The danger with becoming a ‘resisting reader’ is that we end up, in effect, resisting reading…This is why my effort…is to train myself to tune into the forms of resistance present in the text, those forms that make up the textual dynamic as a field of clashing and heterogeneous forces and as a never quite predictable potential of surprise. My effort is…to trace within each text its own resistance to itself, its own specific literary, inadvertent textual transgression of its male assumptions and prescriptions.”
“In insisting on the origin of the present volume not in theory per se but in the production of a practice, this book encounters feminism as an enabling inspiration, not as a theoretical orthodoxy or an authorizing new institutionalization…Practice is not censoring but merely showing what can be done, and done otherwise…. “
Shoshana Felman in What Does a Woman Want?
