Derrida’s play on Searle’s name figures authorial intention as corporate limited liability

Evidence

One of the marks of Derrida’s programmatic lack of rigor in “Limited Inc.” is his elaborate and uneasy-making jokes. I shall speak at greater length about this strategy later. Here I will comment on the title of the piece and Derrida’s use of the question of the copyright. … To keep this possibility even in our minds, Derrida refers to the author of “A Reply to Derrida” as “Sari” (S. a. r. I.—Societeaux responsabilites limites— limited liability in English, incorporated in American) and entitled his own piece “Limited Inc.” The recuperating of a plural, divided, heterogeneous, different, differing intentionality under the rubric of a single self-present sovereign and generative intention has something in common with these (in Derrida’s case ironic) procedures: “That Searle’s Seal should become, at once and without waiting for me, SarVs seal, is not an accident. A little like the multiplicity of stockholders and managers in a company or corporation with limited liability, or in a limited, incorporated system; or, like that limit which is supposed to distinguish stockholders from managers” (pp. 28-29, 194). — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 685

Categorization

• XREF: The corporate limited-liability figure for split authorship echoes the earlier Milgrom work on institutions and extralegal contracting — ownership/intention contested within a collectivity. — connects to: Corporate ideologies can make harming others seem appropriate
• SEED: Derrida’s Searle→Sarl joke is a superb fossil of what ironic/strategic positioning looks like in philosophical polemic — could anchor the essay on whether irony can be sustained collectively rather than individually.

Broader Connections

• Corporate ideologies can make harming others seem appropriate #expands (0.78)