The Reign of Anti-logos Performance in Postmodernity

The concept of ‘performativity’ has risen to prominence throughout the humanities.  The rise of financial derivatives reflects the power of the performative sign in the economic sphere.  As recent debates about gender identity show, the concept of performativity is also profoundly influential on people’s personal lives.  Although the autonomous power of representation has been studied in disciplines ranging from economics to poetics, however, it has not yet been evaluated in ethical terms. This book supplies that deficiency, providing an ethical critique of performative representation as it is manifested in semiotics, linguistics, philosophy, poetics, theology and economics.  It constructs a moral criticism of the performative sign in two ways: first, by identifying its rise to power as a single phenomenon manifested in various different areas; and second, by locating efficacious representation in its historical context, thus connecting it to idolatry, magic, usury and similar performative signs.  The book concludes by suggesting that earlier ethical critiques of efficacious representation might be revived in our own postmodern era.

David Hawkes is a Professor in the Department of English, Arizona State University, Tempe, USA.  He is the author of seven books and has published more than 100 articles and reviews.  He reviews books regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and he has appeared on National Public Radio. Professor Hawkes has held visiting appointments in Turkey, India, Japan and China. He has received such awards as a year-long fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities at the Folger Shakespeare Library (2002-03), and the William Ringler Fellowship at the Huntington Library (2006).