TW ^ rE LIVE IN A CULTURE of the spectacular and of the specular: a culture which theatricalizes everything, turns life into mirror effects and performance situations where attention and significance are timed and framed so that what seems to matter most one moment has become trivial the next, expendable; a culture which would seem to value surfaces and appearances yet pursues hysterically a quest for the real. The performative mode is a symptom of such contradictions. It has become prevalent not only in our world but in the different types of discourse which attempt to analyze it, thereby creating the illusion of an adequation and a continuity (if not identity) between experience and theory, between the real and the symbolic.1 It is this particular point of suture/fracture which I attempt to address in the following observations.