Event of Signature

Michaela Fišerová is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Metropolitan University Prague in the Czech Republic.

"By bringing Derrida's work on the signature to bear upon jurisprudence and civic identity, Fišerová not only exposes a series of problems underpinning the legality of signing. This overdue undertaking also concretizes the stakes of a key concept in deconstruction. Bank accounts, contracts, petitions—a few of the signatures in Event of the Signature—are no longer expendable examples offered merely to illustrate an otherwise abstract argument. They become the very object of inquiry." — D. J. S. Cross, University at Buffalo, State University of New York"Fišerová delivers a probing work on legal and civic identity that takes off from our continued investment in the personal idiom of the signature. Despite epochal shifts in technologies of marking, the status of the handwritten signature remains a stable value in forensic analysis and graphology, meshing the signer and signature to juridical effect. A critical detective's delight, Fišerová's account of legal mediation politics breaks down the metaphysical expectations of tracing and identification that nail the fate of the penalized subject and lock in fictions of personhood. The ensuing analysis is incisive and adventurous in the way it reads our historical thumbprint and social capture, handling aporias of resemblance and repetition with breathtaking acuity." — Avital Ronell, the European Graduate School

• AcknowledgmentsPrefaceIntroduction1. Handwritten Signature's Interval Between Life and LawWhat Can Be Expected of Handwritten Signature?What Are Metaphysical and Discursive Expectations?2. The Discursive Expectations of Handwritten SignatureDiscourse of Graphology: The Transparent ExpressionDiscourse of Forensic Analysis: The Original Style3. The Metaphysical Expectations of Handwritten Signature"Natural" Resemblance"Authentic" Tracing"Identical" Repetition4. Deconstructing Handwritten Signature IAporia of Natural ResemblanceSpectral Resemblance5. Deconstructing Handwritten Signature IIAporia of Authentic TracingDisseminated Tracing6. Deconstructing Handwritten Signature IIIAporia of Identical RepetitionIterated Repetition7. Event of Manual Signing: On Repeating of the UnrepeatableEvent Trapped in InterpretationEvent Trapped in RepresentationThe Event of IterationPostscriptNotesBibliographyName IndexSubject Index