Ex-Communication

by Geoffrey Bennington

First published in Studies in Social and Political Thought 5, 2001.

Last night I had a dream about Jürgen Habermas. In the dream I was sitting
reading Kafka and waiting for a phone-call when he came in with a friendly
smile, hand outstretched for a greeting. Somewhere in the background, Peter
Dews and William Outhwaite were smiling too. The handshake was firm
and warm, but modest and not overbearing, polite but not over-polite,
reserved but perhaps promising something more open, an invitation to
dialogue. The handshake was saying something: we can talk, let’s talk, it’s
good to talk. ‘Habermas!’ he said exclamatively, following a formal code of
German politesse. ‘Bennington!’ I shouted back, wondering how polite it
really was to ape the other’s manners like this, and what would have
happened if I’d shouted ‘Habermas!!’ back at him even more exclamatively,
or said ‘That’s not how we do it in England.’ Peter and William smiled more
broadly, encouragingly. It’s good to talk. I was keen to talk. I like talking. It
is good to talk. I love it. But maybe I like talking too much? Like the sound
of my own voice? Don’t listen enough to the other? It’s good to talk, but it’s
especially good to listen. Guilt hung around the room, already tainting the
friendly atmosphere Jürgen and Peter and William were creating, or working
to create, or trying to create. Or were they just pretending to create it? Guilt
and suspicion. What did they want from me? What were they after? Why
bother talking to me? They must know I know next to nothing about his
work. Who had set this up? Their warmth and openness suddenly seemed
unwarranted to me, a bit phoney, a show, maybe a front. What more or less
ritual humiliation was being prepared here? What had been planned
between them?
Habermas spoke first. His voice sounded clear enough, there was no
doubt that he had spoken, but somehow in the dream I didn’t quite catch
what he said, nor even in what language he had said it. I hadn’t needed to
know what language he was speaking when he had said ‘Habermas,’ of
course. I was nervous they might assume I could manage in German. Peter
and William were nodding in the background. ‘Yes,’ I said uncertainly but
encouragingly, trying to suspend the sense of my reply between affirmation
and interrogation. Habermas was beaming now, more friendly than ever.
78 Bennington: Ex-Communication

‘What’s so funny?’ I asked, too quickly, hearing my voice sounding strained

and brittle. ‘Funny?’ he said, clearly enough in English now, his smile fading
a little, ‘Why do you think it’s funny?’ ‘I don’t,’ I said, ‘I thought you did.’
‘You thought I did what?’ he asked. ‘I thought you thought something was
funny,’ I said unhappily. ‘What made you think that?’ he asked. ‘I don’t
know,’ I said, ‘just the way you were smiling. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean ….’
‘That’s no problem,’ said Habermas quickly, ‘forget it. I was just trying ….’
‘No, no,’ I said, ‘I really am sorry. I really didn’t want to cause trouble.’ ‘OK,
OK,’ he said, ‘let’s just pretend it didn’t happen.’ ‘What?’ I said. ‘Let’s just
pretend it didn’t happen,’ he said. ‘Pretend that what didn’t happen?’ I said.
‘What just happened,’ he said. ‘What did happen?’ I said, ‘I don’t really know
what happened.’ ‘There was a misunderstanding,’ he said. ‘Oh,’ I said. There
was an uncomfortable pause. I thought I could hear William whistling softly
in the background. The faint, cosh-like thudding I could hear was the sound
of my own heart beating. I was wishing I was somewhere else.
‘Maybe we could … talk sometime,’ I said cautiously. ‘Sure,’ he said.
‘Sure.’ There was a slight pause. ‘Right now if you like. We can talk now.
Why not?’ My mouth was dry with doubt and anxiety. ‘Now?’ I said, ‘Right
now?’ ‘OK,’ I croaked, ‘why not? That’s what we’re for, after all, isn’t it?’
‘What is?’ he said. ‘Talking,’ I said, ‘That’s what we’re for — talking. Let’s
talk.’ ‘Great,’ he said. ‘Seems a really ideal situation,’ I said meaningfully,
trying not to smirk. I didn’t want to start impolitely by blurting out obvious
things like, ‘Why do you base your discussion of Derrida almost exclusively
on secondary sources? Or, more importantly, how come you manage to put
up a reading of Bataille without even mentioning the fact that he has an
explicit theory of communication rather different from yours?’ Be polite.
Maybe we could get into that later.
There was a pause. ‘You shoot first,’ I said. ‘Shoot?’ he said. ‘Yes, you
shoot first,’ I said. ‘You really mean that?’ he asked, looking at me
searchingly. ‘Well, only metaphorically speaking, of course,’ I laughed a bit
too loudly, suddenly aware of what looked like a bulge under the armpit of
Peter’s jacket. ‘But I thought you lot didn’t believe in the distinction between
literal and metaphorical meaning,’ he said. ‘We don’t,’ I said, ‘Or only sort
of, unlike you: you think it’s dead simple to distinguish between a literal and
a merely figurative sense of rationality, for example, don’t you?’ ‘So what
do you mean, ‘shoot first’?’ he said, ignoring my reference to his magnum
opus.1 I was a little hurt. ‘We don’t really believe in meaning either,’ I said,
sulkily. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I expect you’re going to say something about
performative contradiction,’ I said. ‘Uh-huh,’ he said. I found it hard to tell
whether the intonation had risen to mean ‘yes,’ or fallen, to mean ‘no.’ ‘I’ve
heard it before,’ I said. ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Oh, I’m all for it. The more
performative contradiction the merrier,’ I said, trying to sound cheerful. ‘You
Bennington: Ex-Communication 79

can’t mean that,’ he said. ‘I don’t,’ I said, ‘Only joking … I think.’ ‘Oh,’ he
said. ‘Ha ha ha,’ I said. ‘Ha ha ha,’ he said. ‘Not very funny, is it?’ I said. ‘No,
not really,’ he said. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘That’s OK,’ he said. ‘But what do you
really think about it?’ ‘I really think,’ I heard myself say, ‘I really and sincerely
— no, I do, I really do, this is the truth, I swear it— I really and sincerely
think that there’s an originary and irreducible quasi-transcendental
dehiscence constitutive of anything like meaning such that any speech-act
at all is caught up in something that looks like performative contradiction
when seen from a metaphysical vantage-point such as yours.’2
I’d gone and said it now.
‘Let’s examine the validity-claims in what you’ve just said, shall we?’
he said briskly. Businesslike chap, I thought.
‘Must we?’ I asked ungraciously. ‘It’s not that we must,’ he said, ‘but
you can’t deny that there are various validity-claims implicit in what you’ve
just said, and that part of the sense of your saying what you said is that those
claims can be taken up and discussed.’ ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But let’s not.’ ‘Why
not?’ he said, ‘You must be committed to examining the claims of what
you’ve said — it’s implied in your saying it.’ ‘Before we do that, then,’ I
pleaded. ‘What?’ he said, I thought a touch impatiently. ‘The claims are only
in what I said in the sense that meaning is in a text to be read, so any attempt
to discuss them or establish their validity presupposes reading. Reading
makes the issue of validity-claims possible. But because reading is always
more than just decoding, it can never be finally established. So in principle
we can never be sure what exactly the claims are, even assuming that what
is said in what I say can exhaustively be thought of in terms of validity-
claims.’
‘But that’s exactly why we have to be able to discuss it,’ he said. ‘We
might not ever agree in fact, but you can’t deny that the possibility of our
reaching non-coercive agreement in principle is built in to your saying
anything at all. Reaching agreement without being driven by anything other
than the force of the better argument is still the regulative Idea of discussion,
however far we may be from achieving it in fact.’ ‘But there’s only
communication to the extent that we do not in fact agree,’ I said. ‘The end of
communication as you formulate it would be the end of communication
itself. So if we want to communicate, we also have to want not quite to
understand each other.’ ‘But you want me to understand and agree with
that,’ he said. ‘Only sort of,’ I said. ‘What do you mean, only sort of?’ he
asked. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t think you can quite understand and agree with
it, any more than I can.’ ‘But that’s just irrational,’ he said, ‘That’s my whole
point.’ ‘It’s not just irrational,’ I said, ‘though it’s not just rational either. It’s
as rational as it’s irrational, and its rationality is the same thing as its
80 Bennington: Ex-Communication

irrationality.’ ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he said. ‘That the more you
approach the regulative Idea or Ideal of communication, the further you get
from communication. In total transparency, nothing is visible at all. In total
communication, nothing is communicable at all. Consensus is the end of the
promise of consensus. If we were in an ideal speech situation, or if we had
reached consensus purely by the force of the better argument, we could
never be sure of that fact, and even if we felt sure of it, we could never
communicate that feeling to the other, with a view to agreeing about it,
without ipso facto proving that the situation was not in fact ideal after all. No
one speaks in the ideal speech-situation. Nothing gets said. Silent as the
grave. If we must talk of what our speech-acts ‘commit’ us to, then we’d
better recognise that they commit us in a strange way to wanting to disagree.
To dissensus, as Lyotard put it, perhaps rather clumsily, at the end of The
Postmodern Condition. If the end of communication is the end of
communication, then the closer you get to the end, the nearer you are to its
end. The fact of communication means that communication is not perfect.
Perfect communication would always be ex-communication. Reason cannot,
rationally, prescribe its own demise in consensus, and so, to the extent that
it does prescribe consensus, it is complicit with the coercion that forever
prevents that consensus being rational. Your appeals to reason and
consensus in fact function coercively by trying to deny the non-rational
‘origin’ of rationality or the non-consensual ground of consensus. And this
is in fact already implied by your letting an Aristotelian notion of rhetoric
occupy an important place, alongside dialectic and logic, in your analysis of
argumentation. Another consequence of this is that the more perfect, the
more performative a system of communication becomes, the more open it
is, by the very fact of its increasing perfection, to contamination and
breakdown, and the more of its resources have to be devoted to protecting
itself from the necessary possibility of infiltration and infection.’ (‘You’ve
been reading too much William Gibson,’ he was muttering.) ‘This doesn’t
mean simply that communication is at its best the further you are from
realising its end, just that it happens each time singularly in the uneasy
negotiation of that tense singularity, each time differently suspended
between understanding and bewilderment, agreement and refusal,
consensus and coercion — and that this each-time singularity cannot be
teleologically organised by an Idea of rational consensus, however important
that Idea might still be, singularly, here and there, in negotiating and
resisting coercion and injustice. The dispersion of singularities-in-imperfect-
communication quite logically and rationally precedes and ungrounds what
you call, still teleologically, intersubjectivity,3 consensus, rationality and so
on. And don’t say that this is just philosophy, and that things are different
Bennington: Ex-Communication 81

in everyday life: this is everyday life, and why it’s there every day.’4
I’d been talking too much. Again. I hadn’t been listening. Carried
away. Own voice. Suddenly the scene was different and lonely. The dream
was fading into daylight. ‘Hello?’ I woke up saying. ‘Hello … Did you get
that? … Anybody there? … Hello … Do you read me? … Do you read me?
… Over ....’ But here I was awake, the dream fast receding down the plughole
to the unconscious, a few drops remaining for last-minute secondary
revision and concern for the conditions of presentability. Had I really heard
him saying ‘I absolutely agree’ just then, before the end, just to be annoying?
The phone was ringing, and, on the floor beside the bed, the volume of Kafka
open at a story called ‘The Neighbour.’ William on the phone, reminding me
of arrangements for this afternoon. Was I really going to go on fabulating
like this in serious academic company?

The foregoing is based on a talk given at a roundtable discussion with Peter Dews
and William Outhwaite organised by the Social and Political Thought Graduate
Programme at the University of Sussex, 4th March 1996.

Geoffrey Bennington taught at the University of Sussex from 1983 to

2001. He is currently Asa G. Candler Professor of Modern French Thought
at Emory University. His most recent books are Géographies et autres
lectures (Paris: Hermann, 2011) and Scatter I: The Politics of Politics
in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida (Fordham UP, 2016). He is on the
French editorial team responsible for publishing the seminars of Jacques
Derrida, and co-director with Peggy Kamuf of the English translations of the
seminars.

Endnotes

1
‘Behavioural reactions of an externally or internally stimulated organism,
and environmentally induced changes of state in a self-regulated system
can indeed be understood as quasi-actions, that is, as if they were
expressions of a subject ‘s capacity for action. But this is to speak of
rationality only in a figurative sense, for the susceptibility to criticism and
grounding that we require of rational expressions means that the subject to
whom they are attributed should, under suitable conditions, himself be able
to provide reasons or grounds.’ J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative
Action Vol. l, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston Beacon Press, 1984), p. 12. Note
82 Bennington: Ex-Communication

the prescription demanding that the subject defend himself.

2
[Editor’s note] For the use of the term ‘dehiscence’ in the work of J.
Derrida, see Dissemination, translated by B. Johnson (London: The Athlone
Press, 1981), p. 215.

3
Habermas’s intersubjectivity is still a subjectivist concept. E.g., ‘An
assertion can be called rational only if the speaker satisfies the conditions
necessary to achieve the illocutionary goal of reaching an understanding
about something in the world with at least one other participant in
communication.’ Ibid. p. 11.

4
For the distinction between philosophy and everyday life, cf. the
immensely problematic assertion from Theory, Vol. 1, p. 19, ‘In
philosophical ethics, it is by no means agreed that the validity claims
connected with norms of action, upon which command or “ought”
sentences are based, can, analogously to truth claims, be redeemed
discursively. In everyday life, however, no one would enter into moral
argumentation if he did not start from the strong presupposition that a
grounded consensus could in principle be achieved among those
involved.’