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							   1. What is the paradox involved in asking what “communication” means? Can you find
       the same paradox in Derrida’s 2d point on p. 2?
   2. How does the meaning of the word communication depend on the context? What do
       you think, why writing cannot be included in the category of communication?
Writing and Telecommunication
   1. What is the difference Derrida initially establishes between written and oral
       communication?
   2. Draw a scheme (with arrows) that would represent Condillac’s conception of the
       relationship between thoughts, speech and writing. (3-4)
   3. Paraphrase the two most important features of writing that Condillac, according to
       Derrida, leaves out of consideration.
   4. What does Condillac have to do with the French “ideologues”?
   5. What is the relationship between the absence of the addressee (and of the sender, for
       that matter), and the iterability (reapeatability) of the sign? Why does Derrida link
       iterability to alterity (otherness)?
   6. What are the consequences of what Derrida calls “writing orphaned”? (7)
   7. What are the characteristics of the written sign, and how do these subvert the
       determination of the sign by the context?
   8. Why do the characteristics of writing can be applied to speech as well? What does
       Derrida mean by the “absence of the referent”? (8-9)
   9. What can Derrida, via Husserl, mean by the crisis of mathematical symbolism?
   10. What is the difference between signified and referent in the chain
       “signifier/signified/referent”? (10)
   11. What does the example of agrammaticality prove and how?
The Parasites
  1. What are the differences, established by Austin, between performative and constative
      utterances?
  2. What is “infelicity?”
  3. What are the conditions of possibility, according to Austin, of a successful
      performative? (apart from Derrida’s summary, you can also rely on his quotation of
      Austin)
  4. What is the importance, according to Derrida, of the structural possibility of the failure
      of the performatives?
  5. Why does “citation” inevitably yield, according to Austin (!), the failure of the
      performative?
  6. Comment on the terms: “non-serious”, “parasitic”. What does Austin mean by these
      terms, and how does Derrida relocate or subvert their meaning?
  7. What is the relationship between citationality and iterability (repeatability)?
  8. How does the conditions that, according to Austin, yield the failure of the
      performatives, turn out, in Derrida’s analysis, their very conditions of possibility?
      (comment on Derrida’s previous analysis of context and iterability)

   Signatures
   1. Draw parallels between Condillac’s and Austin’s conception of language.
   2. Comment on the irony involved in Derrida’s signature at the very end of his paper.
   3. Try to think over the way in which Derrida arrived at his three conclusions.
   4. With the help of the issues discussed last time, paraphrase Derrida’s approach to the
      binary oppositions that are constitutive of our culture (p. 18)