One of the great problems created by Coriolanus's resistance to the standard forms of meaning in his universe is that every speech-act becomes fraught with misunderstanding. Ultimately this is one of the greatest accomplishments of the play: the glowing impossibilities opened up by a line like "I banish you" (3.3.124), or "pray be content, Mother . . . I'll mountebank their loves" (3.2.132-3) are, to borrow Walter Benjamin's phrase, like the strait gate of redemption through which at any moment the messiah might enter.²⁴ However, just because these woundings of language are so strange, so jarring, we need to be extremely careful about declaring them, as Fish does, either "valid" or "invalid." The accomplishment of Coriolanus is precisely to shed a devastating light on the Roman banishment of Coriolanus without implying that Coriolanus himself is capable of fully reciprocating the act of banishment. The play depicts the banishment of Coriolanus by Rome as an ineffective attempt to get rid of a nagging anxiety about the nature of the public space, an anxiety that will linger in the "private selves" of the citizens of Rome even after the loud naysayer Coriolanus is gone. But the second banishment—Coriolanus banishing Rome—shows the "truly private" man's inability to comprehend the full meaning of social life. That social life creates—out of people, history, books, weapons, and whatever else it takes—a shared public space in which performatives work, whether they are justified or not. So in the end neither of these banishments makes much "sense," though the staging of the dual banishment does create sense within the frame of the play.

That is, once we have understood Coriolanus's belief that all of Rome has "mountebanked" its love, and "cogged" itself, it is entirely understandable that he will lash back at his expulsion with: "I banish you. And here remain with your uncertainty" (3.3.124-25). The latter sentence especially is vintage Coriolanus. He is trapped in a world where every speech is by his lights "uncertainty": since things are said prospectively, by considerating others' actions in the public world, rather than retrospectively, by consulting with one's own soul. Nothing could make more sense than for him to believe he retains all that is good and true about Rome in his breast.

But nothing could be more wrong for a future critic than to assume Coriolanus really does, in any meaningful way, turn the paradigmatic tide at this point, and establish a new realm of meaning. Cavell astutely senses this: he recognizes that Coriolanus has given up the world by giving up his Rome, site of all his disagreements and confrontations—though Cavell believes that Rome could have saved Coriolanus had he conformed to its rules.

Stanley Fish, however, who throughout his article downplays and disparages the validity of any individual's protest against the legitimacy of the interpretive community, does a sudden and inexplicable backflip when it comes to discussing "I banish you." Fish claims that Coriolanus's declaration, though misguided, has the effect of introducing a new authority claim into the world. "One can constitute a state simply by declaring it to exist. .. . A single man plants a flag on a barren shore and claims everything his eye can see in the name of a distant monarch or for himself .. . In the case of Coriolanus, the declaration of independence is more public, but has the same content."²⁵ But if Fish was wrong to call Coriolanus's original criticisms of the state invalid because they emanate from a bitter and maladjusted outcast, he's still wrong (or still wronger) to assert that Coriolanus's new unauthorized performative can craft a new world simply by rhetorical efficacy. "Life is lived over the head of the individual" writes Adorno: in Coriolanus the city is made up not just of enacted consent, but houses, weapons, the senate, wealth, and genealogical stability.²⁶ Against all that Coriolanus has only a theory about language which is exactly as wrong about the world as the model it bids to replace—exactly as wrong since it is nothing but the flip side of a delusionary split between an inherently false public sphere and a true inner self. Fish believes that, in order to work, a challenge to the status quo power must be constitutive of some new world order. But Coriolanus's challenge, which plays out the underside of the prevailing assumptions about language and power, is not newly constitutive, merely critical. To conflate the critical and the authoritative speech-act is both dangerously to underestimate the efficacy of a socioeconomic regime and dangerously to exaggerate, as well as misunderstand, what a critical voice can hope to say and do.

Even after one has realized that Coriolanus is justified in having some problems with how the world is ordered, one must also see that the too-close resemblance of his critique to the world it assaults is its fatal weakness. To hold, as it were, a mirror up to nature is a useful corrective to the life wrongly lived. If you get back a true mirror-image, however, you still have not found a solution. Coriolanus's response to the web of words aimed at futurity—to propose that words be grounded in one's past or one's body—is not itself a satisfactory substitute for the world he is surrounded by. Coriolanus does not suggest that we ought to abandon the fallacy of manipulative language only to adopt its complementary Coriolanian fallacy: that words and deeds can be judged solely by their truth to the motives of he who performed them. If we believe—and clearly this position is cribbed somewhat from Stoicism—that any deed bravely done is its own reward and its own proof of Tightness, we posit a solipsistic universe in which other human beings are mere accidents of cognizance, useful only as motives to our actions.

Fish's asseverations to the contrary, no new world is called into being by Coriolanus's hubristic dissent from the old: indeed this play is striking for its ability to reveal problems with one system of belief without gerrymandering into place a fully formed alternative. Coriolanus's self-consumption (as Cavell demonstrates) and his failed tyranny of one are vigorous enough evidence that the play recoils as much from Coriolanus's solution as it does from the unreliable, "interest"-obsessed mendacity of the other characters, against which Coriolanus imagines himself to be fighting.²⁷