Wookyoung Kim · February 16, 2026
Declarations d'independance
This piece is a lecture given by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in 1976, commemorating the bicentennial of American independence. Derrida had originally been invited to compare and analyze the United States Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, but because his preparation did not go as planned, he was unable to address the original topic. Instead, he begins by philosophically unpacking the very situation of failing to keep a promise.
Let me begin frankly. I will not keep my promise.
I am sorry, but I will not be able to speak, even indirectly, about the topic I was supposed to address this afternoon. I truly regret it.
Still, I do not want simply to pass over what I owe you, so let me offer just a word by way of excuse. I would like to speak briefly about what I will not say, what I wanted to say, and in fact what I should have said.
Let me make one thing clear. I do intend to speak with you about promises, contracts, oaths, signatures, and what is always strangely underlying all of them: the act of making an excuse. You will be able to confirm that much.
Derrida treats an 'excuse' not merely as words of apology for a fault, but as an act in which something actually happens at the moment it is spoken, much like a promise or a signature. Just as saying 'I am sorry' changes a relationship through the utterance itself, an excuse too is an act. This becomes the starting point for the discussion that follows.
When Roger Shattuck invited me, he proposed that, of all things, I perform here a 'textual analysis' of the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, an analysis spanning philosophy and literature. In other words, he asked me to treat, in the rather odd academic field called 'comparative literature,' objects that specialized departments would not easily take up.
At first I was unsettled. It was a daunting proposal. I was not prepared at all, and I had never attempted such an analysis before. Of course, anyone could see that the topic was interesting and necessary.
But after thinking it over, I wanted to try it if only I had the time and strength. I thought I might at least be able to test on these two declarations the conceptual frameworks I had used in other work: the critical problematic of the 'speech act,' the theory of 'performative' writing, theories of signature and contract, proper names, and political and academic institutions. These frameworks had already proved useful with other 'objects,' whether so-called 'philosophical' texts or 'literary' texts.
The performative is a concept proposed by the British philosopher J. L. Austin. Unlike a constative utterance, which describes a fact, it refers to speech that performs an act by being spoken. For example, saying 'I declare war' does not report a state of war; the utterance itself becomes the act of declaring war. Derrida asks how this distinction operates in the Declaration of Independence.
To be honest, a full legal and political study of the two declarations and the two historical events they contain is beyond my abilities. But I thought I could at least use these texts as examples to preliminarily refine several questions I had developed elsewhere with materials that appear less political.
And among all those questions, there is just one I intend to raise here this afternoon. This university in Virginia has commemorated the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence more meaningfully than almost any other place. The theme of this bicentennial already sets the atmosphere, and it also touches another anniversary, another birth, that I will mention shortly.
The other anniversary refers to Nietzsche's birthday.
The question I want to ask is this: Who signs a declarative act that founds an institution, and what exactly is the so-called proper name used in that signature?
A signature is not simply the act of writing down a name. It is the bodily inscription of a promise: 'I take responsibility for this.' Just as signing a contract creates legal force from that moment on, a signature is the decisive device that turns words into an act. Derrida sees this act as taking on an especially paradoxical structure in the Declaration of Independence. What does it mean for a nation that does not yet exist to sign the document of its own birth?
Such an act does not return to the realm of factual confirmation or description. It performs. It executes, accomplishes, and actually does what it says it does. At least, that is the intended structure of the act.
The relation such an act has to its presumed signer, whether an individual or a collective subject participating in producing the act, differs from what would be called a 'constative' type of text. Strictly speaking, it is already questionable whether a purely factual text exists, or whether one can be found in 'science,' 'philosophy,' or 'literature.'
A declaration that establishes an institution, a constitution, or a state requires the signer to put himself at stake. The signature is connected to the founding act and to that act as both a speech act and an act of writing, and there is nothing accidental about this connection. This joining cannot be easily detached, at least not as easily as in a scientific text. In a scientific text, the value of the utterance separates itself, or cuts itself loose, from the author's name, and it can do so without essential risk. Indeed, it must do so if it is to claim objectivity.
In principle, an institution, within its history and tradition, within its permanent system of offices, and thus within its very institutionality, must become independent of the empirical individuals who participated in its production. In a certain sense, the institution must mourn them or accept their absence [faire son deuil], even when it commemorates them; indeed, especially when it commemorates them.
'Faire son deuil' is French for 'to complete one's mourning,' referring to the whole process of accepting a loss and becoming independent of it. In Derrida's philosophy, the phrase carries particular weight. To say that an institution must 'mourn' its founders compresses the paradox that, in order to survive, an institution must free itself from the individuals who founded it. Just as the United States must endure without Jefferson or Washington, an institution must commemorate its founders while also functioning without them.
Yet precisely because of the structure of founding language, the act that founds an institution, the act as record and at the same time as performance, must preserve the signature within itself.
But whose signature, exactly? Who actually signs such an act, and what does the word 'actual' [effectif] mean here? As the same question spreads like a chain reaction, it shakes every concept affected by the same vibration: act, performativity, signature, the 'present' 'I' and 'we,' and so on.
Here we must be careful and attend to the details. Let us distinguish the several layers that exist within your Declaration of Independence.
Let us take Jefferson as an example: Jefferson as the drafter [rédacteur] of the draft [projet], the 'first version,' of the Declaration. I have a copy of it before my eyes. No one would consider him the true signer of the Declaration. Legally speaking, he wrote it, but he did not sign it. Jefferson represented the representatives, who entrusted him with the task of putting into writing what they wanted to say. He did not 'write' it in a productive or founding sense; he merely 'drafted' it. It is like a secretary composing a letter when someone else supplies the spirit, or even dictates the content.
Jefferson was the third president of the United States and the drafter of the Declaration of Independence.
Moreover, after drafting it, Jefferson had to submit it to those he had represented for a time. Those people, too, were representatives: the 'Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled.' These 'representatives,' for whom Jefferson served as a kind of selected scribe, had the authority to amend, correct, and ratify the draft of the Declaration.
Can we then call them the final signers?
You know well how carefully this letter, this literal declaration, was reviewed and examined in draft form, how long it remained suspended and undelivered among all those representative bodies, and how anxiously and painfully Jefferson endured that process. It was almost as if Jefferson secretly dreamed of signing everything alone.
What about the 'representatives' themselves? They do not sign either, at least in principle, because here the right is divided. In fact, they do sign. But legally speaking, they sign for themselves while also signing 'on behalf of' others. They have been granted the delegation, the power of attorney, for signature [ils sont délégation ou procuration de signature]. They speak, 'declare,' declare themselves, and sign 'in the name of': 'We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these [...] free and independent States...'
Legally speaking, the true signer is the people, the 'good' people. This adjective 'good' is a decisive detail because it guarantees the value of the intention and the signature. But what, or whom, that guarantee is grounded upon, or whether it grounds itself, is something we will examine later. It is this 'good people' who declare themselves free and independent, and this is done through the mediation of the representatives, and of the representative of the representatives.
In this declarative act, it is undecidable whether independence is being confirmed or produced. That undecidability is precisely what is interesting, and it is the force, the coup, of this declarative act.
'Coup' has been carried over as 'coup' from the original. The word has many meanings, including 'blow,' 'cut,' and 'strike,' and as expressions like 'coup d'état' or 'après coup' show, it is difficult to translate fully into another language. Throughout this text Derrida repeats the expression 'coup de force,' which points to the paradoxical moment when a force outside the law founds the law. Law is established by force, but once established, it retroactively recognizes that force as legal.
I have not followed this chain leading to the representative of the representatives all the way to the end. If we followed it further, this necessary undecidability would become still more complex. Were the good people already liberated in fact, and does the Declaration state the fact of that liberation through [par] the Declaration? Or are they, rather, liberated only at the very moment they sign this Declaration, through [par] the act of signing?
This is not a matter of interpretive ambiguity or difficulty. It is not a problem on its way to resolution. Nor is it a case where analysis runs into difficulty before the structure of the acts involved and the layered temporality of events. This ambiguity, this undecidability between the performative and the constative structure, is necessary in order to produce the desired effect. Whether one calls it hypocrisy, equivocation, undecidability, or fiction, it is essential to the very institution or positioning of right itself. I will go one step further: every signature is subject to this effect.
Then the subject that puts itself at stake here, that signs by committing only itself and has its declaration signed, is the 'good people.' The 'we' of the Declaration speaks 'in the name of the people.' But this people does not exist. Before this declaration, it does not exist as a single entity. It does not exist in itself. If the people gives birth to itself as a free and independent subject, as one capable of signing, it does so only within the act of signing. The signature invents the signer. Only after the signer has reached the end [parvenu au bout] of its own signature, if one can put it that way, can it authorize itself to sign through a kind of astonishing retroactive effect. The first signature gives the signer the authority to sign. This happens every day, but it is astonishing. Whenever I think of this kind of event, I think of Francis Ponge's 'Fable.'
'With the word with [par] this text begins / Whose first line tells the truth... [Par le mot par commence donc ce texte / Dont la première ligne dit la vérité...]'
Francis Ponge (1899-1988) was a French poet, a distinctive writer who tried to capture the essence of things in language. Derrida also wrote a long essay on Ponge, 'Signéponge.' 'Fable' is a self-referential poem that begins with the word 'par' ('by' or 'with') while at the same time declaring, 'this text begins with the word par.' The structure in which the first line speaks about its own beginning, a structure in which 'language gives birth to itself,' overlaps exactly with Derrida's point that in the Declaration of Independence 'the signature invents the signer.'
By signing, the people says this. And it does what it says. But it does so by differing and deferring through [différant par] the intervention of its representatives, whose representativeness is fully justified only by the signature, and therefore only after the fact [après coup].
'Différant' is the present participle form of Derrida's key concept 'différance.' The concept contains two meanings at once: 'to make a difference' [différer] and 'to defer' [différer]. By signing through representatives, the people both differentiates itself from itself by putting someone else forward, and delays its own appearance, since it comes to exist as 'the people' only after the signature is completed.
'From now on, I have the right to sign. In fact, I already had it from the moment I was able to grant that right to myself. I have given myself a name and a 'capacity' or 'authority.' Here authority means the capacity to sign through the delegation of signature.' But this future perfect tense, the tense exactly suited to this coup of right, as one speaks of a coup de force, must not be declared, mentioned, or taken into account. It must be as though it did not exist.
Legally, before the text of the Declaration there was no signer. And the text of the Declaration itself remains the producer and guarantor of its signature. Through this astonishing event, through this fable that implies the structure of the trace and is made possible only by [par] a discordance with the present itself, the signature gives itself a name. The signature opens a line of credit for itself, from itself to itself. At the moment when the signature grants or extends credit to itself in a single coup de force, the self rises here in every case: nominative, dative, and accusative.
Here Derrida uses the word 'credit' in both an economic sense, as credit or a loan, and a philosophical sense, as belief or trust. For a signature to 'open credit' for itself means that a subject that does not yet exist gives itself the advance payment of future legitimacy.
This coup de force is at the same time a coup of writing and a right to writing. The coup de force creates right, establishes right or law, grants right, brings light to the law, and gives birth to the law [donne le jour à la loi]. I said it brings light to the law and gives birth to the law; please read Maurice Blanchot's The Madness of the Day.
'Donne le jour à la loi' literally means both 'gives day/light to the law' and 'gives birth to the law.' Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was a French writer and literary theorist who had a deep intellectual exchange with Derrida. The Madness of the Day (La Folie du jour, 1973) depicts a structure in which a subject before the law is asked to testify to his experience, but the testimony itself is impossible. Derrida invokes this work because the structure in which the birth of law (le jour de la loi) and madness (la folie) are intertwined resonates with the paradox of the Declaration of Independence: an act that establishes law before the law exists.
Because this unprecedented thing is also an everyday thing, we must not forget the particular context of this act. In this case, while 'dissolving' the bond of colonial paternity or maternity, another national signature had to be erased. If you read it, you will see that this 'dissolution' too takes place in an inseparable mixture of constative and performative. The signature of every American citizen today depends, both in fact and in law, on this indispensable confusion. The constitution and laws of your country guarantee signatures, and so do your passports, the circulation of seals and subjects foreign to this country, letters, promises, marriages, and checks. All of these may be given opportunity, shelter, or rights.