Michaela Fiserova

Event of Signature formulates a new philosophical problem which focuses on the handwritten signature as sign of legal identification. Author Michaela Fišerová works with three metaphysical expectations, which are shared in discourses of graphology and forensic analysis. The first expectation tends to reveal the signer's soul: a handwritten signature "naturally" mirrors the unique psychological qualities of the signer. The second expectation tends to guarantee the originality of the signer's trace: a handwritten signature proves physical contact between the signed document and the writing tool "authentically" moved by the signer's hand. The third expectation tends to recognize the signer's legal identity: a handwritten signature is expected to reproduce the signer's personal style, which enables identification by legal authorities. In a methodologically inventive and semiotically-based dialogue with Derrida's deconstruction, Fišerová situates this triple expectation in the interval between life and law. Challenging coverage of this topic finally shows that none of the metaphysical expectations will ever be fulfilled in the event of manual signing. Legal uses of handwritten signature are characterized by the complex aporia of repeating the unrepeatable.

The paper proposes to grasp handwritten signature as a metaphysical invention of the so-called “Western” civilization, where the signature is supposed to make possible juridical identification of the person who wrote it. However, despite this expectation of reliability, the Western handwritten signature is an aporetic sign, which is considered to be authentic (unrepeatable) and conventional (repeatable) at the same time. Because the signature is a sign of juridical identification and its authenticity can always be forged, Jacques Derrida tries to deconstruct the contradictory functioning of Western metaphysics, which leads to confusion in our expectations of authenticity and identity in our uses of signatures. By proposing a new reading of Derridean texts concerning writing, the paper focuses on the pragmatical paradox that grounds our contradictory legal politics of signing: because the exact manual reproduction of a line is impossible, no one can satisfy the legislative obligation to sign conformably to the model signature. That’s the aporia of trace’s recognition, which establishes the signature as a sign: on the one hand, the signature is supposed to represent the juridical identity of the person who traced it; on the other hand, the signature, which constantly changes its graphical form, makes every certain identification impossible. In order to question the juridical identity traditionally guaranteed by the signature, this paper invites to grasp the legal practice of signing as a subversive performativity, which is produced during the passage between recognition of juridical identity requested by the law and its simultaneous and inevitable transgression. Finally, the paper proposes a new approach to the signature as a visual performance of the self, based on a reevaluation of the altercation between Jacques Derrida and John Searle concerning the iterative character of traces and performatives.

The paper invites a rethink of the political conception of Jacques Rancière, a philosopher who devoted considerable reflexion to the problem of the sharing of the sensible. Rancière proposes considering the aesthetic regime without the concept of representation. According to the author, this leads him to a paradox: on the one hand, he states that the aesthetic regime takes images for art; on the other hand, he doesn’t pay attention to the fact that it shouldn’t be possible to conceive of any regime of sharing without the concept of representation. Therefore, the author proposes a deconstructive reading of Rancière’s critique of representation, demonstrating that if the contemporary image is conceived and produced in order to be shared, it can’t be freed from representation. Finally, the author puts forth the notion of meta-representation as a solution avoiding Rancière’s antinomies.

Through Deleuze’s conception of truth as becoming the paper discusses his relationship to Platonism. In his analysis Deleuze focuses on Plato’s Sophistes, in which Plato unwillingly subverts the very hierarchy of the world order, which he himself created. Deleuze sees the Platonic search for truth as taking place in the sphere of immanence. In the person of a sophist he goes after the simulacrum, i.e. an appearance, which subverts the rigorous hierarchy of the Platonic world. In his Logique du sens Deleuze suggests that following Plato the other searchers for truth are also traveling in the sphere of immanence. Thus the truth found in the “logic of surface” is their becoming others. The paper examines the reasons, why Deleuze attaches importance to this becoming, which subverts the hierarchy of the “logic of depth” inaugurated by Platonism

The article focuses on the crisis of representation in contemporary political philosophy and semiotics. Its basis is the current dispute between Jacques Rancière and Georges Didi-Huberman over the possibilities and conditions of the representation via the photographic image. Both strong and weak points of the dispute are shown and both solutions are compared with another approach: with the theory of interpretation of Umberto Eco. The latter is an enrichment of the conception of representation in adding to it the differentiation between discursive expectations and signs. The author’s suggestion is to resolve the crisis of representation by joining the three above mentioned conceptions: to show that joining Rancière’s political theory of perceiving the image as sharing the perceptible with Didi-Huberman’s philosophical theory of the surviving image, and with Eco’s semiotic conception of understanding an image taking into account its sign functions, is possible

The paper deals with the problem of representation on the background of J. Rancière’s political philosophy, in which he rejects the concept of the unrepresentable. The resolution of the problem follows from the confronting of two conceptions of the unrepresentable: that of the esthetics of the sublime in Kant and Lyotard and of the politics of prohibition in Foucault on one hand and Rancière’s understanding of sharing the perceptible on the other hand. This discussion leads the author to the problem of visuality conceived as a set of visual representations, which in a historically given period are legitimately visible. This definition of visuality returns the representation and the unrepresentable back into the political conception of image