Derrida published a doctoral thesis on Husserl and geometry. In the same
year there was posthumously published a set of lectures by the Oxford
philosopher J. L. Austin (1911–60), entitled How to Do Things with Words, which
contained a theory of the different kinds of speech acts. In 1967 Derrida
published three highly original works (Writing and Difference, Speech and
Phenomena, and Of Grammatology) which bore clear marks of Austin’s influence.
The two philosophers, however, treated the same topic in very different
ways. Austin started, as early as 1946, from a distinction between two kinds of
speech, constative and performative. A constative sentence is used to state
how things are as a matter of fact: ‘It is raining’, ‘The train is approaching’.
Performative utterances, however, were not statements that could be
judged and found true or false by comparison wit h the facts; they were
speech acts that changed things rather than reported on them. Examples are
‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’, ‘I promise to meet you at ten o’clock’,
‘I bequeath my watch to my brother’.
Austin went on to classify many different kinds of performative utter-
ances, such as bets, appointments, vetoes, apologies, and curses, and to
identify concealed performative elements in apparently straightforward
statements. In its developed stage his theory made room, in speech acts,
for three elements: the locutionary, the illocutionary, and the perlocu-
tionary force. Suppose someone says to me ‘Shoot her!’ The locutionary act
is defined by specifying the sense of ‘shoot’ and the reference of ‘her’. The
illocutionary act is one of ordering, or urging, etc. The perlocutionary act
(which takes place only if the illocutionary act achieves its goal) would be
described by, for example, ‘He made me shoot her’.
Austin introduced many new technical terms to bring out distinctions
between different kinds of speech acts and elements within them. Each
term, as introduced, is defined in lucid terms and is illuminated by
examples. The overall effect is to bring clarity, at a microscopic level,
into a vast and important field of the philosophy of language.
Derrida’s method is quite different. He, too, introduces technical terms
in great profusion: for instance, ‘gram’, ‘reserve’, ‘incision’, ‘trace’, ‘spacing’,
‘blank’, ‘supplement’, ‘pharmakon’, and many others. But he is much less
willing to offer definitions of them, and often seems to reject the very
request for a definition as somehow improper. The relevance of his illus -
trative examples is rarely clear, so that even banal features of language take
on an air of mystery.
FREUDTODERRIDA
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