Bodily action can be a speech act that still fails without a listener

Evidence

By “speaking” I was obviously talking about a transaction between the speaker and the listener. That is what did not happen in the case of a woman who took her own body at the moment of death to inscribe a certain kind of undermining—too weak a word—a certain kind of annulment of all the presuppositions that underlie the regulative psychobiography that writes sati. When we act we don’t act out of thinking through details; we act in something that Derrida calls, following Kierkegaard, the “night of nonknowledge.” Even the just decision thinks itself in the night of nonknowledge. We act out of certain kinds of reflexes that come through, by layering something through learning habits of mind, rather than by merely knowing something. That is the way in which her action was inscribed in her body. And even that incredible effort to speak did not fulfill itself in a speech act. And therefore, in a certain kind of rhetorical anguish after the accounting of this, I said, “the subaltern cannot speak!” This is always read as a rational remark about subalterns as such— Meaghan Morris has made the witty comment that my critics rewrite the sentence as: “the subaltern cannot talk.” — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2296

Categorization

• XREF: Directly destabilizes the ‘subaltern cannot speak’ slogan in its most quoted form, which the reader is already examining via Spivak’s own later qualification. — connects to: Speech acts require being heard, not merely uttering — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2309; A performative’s force depends on external felicity conditions, not the utterance itself; Performative utterances create states of affairs rather than merely describing them. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 83 (+1 more)
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the gap between ‘cannot speak’ as failed transaction versus ‘cannot talk’ as silence, and how slogan-circuits erase the transaction itself.

Broader Connections

• Speech acts require being heard, not merely uttering #corroborates (0.90) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2309
• Human action requires witnessing by other free consciousnesses to retain meaning #corroborates (0.85) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 620
• A performative’s force depends on external felicity conditions, not the utterance itself #corroborates (0.82)
• Performative utterances create states of affairs rather than merely describing them. #expands (0.75) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 83