How to Do Philosophy with Words: Reflections on the Searle–Derrida Debate 902721896X, 9789027218964

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How to Do Philosophy with Words

Controversies (CVS) issn 1574-1583

Controversies includes studies in the theory of controversy or any of its salient aspects, studies of the history of controversy forms and their evolution, casestudies of particular historical or current controversies in any field or period, edited collections of documents of a given controversy or a family of related controversies, and other controversy-focused books. The series also acts as a forum for ‘agenda-setting’ debates, where prominent discussants of current controversial issues take part. Since controversy involves necessarily dialogue, manuscripts focusing exclusively on one position will not be considered. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/cvs

Editor Marcelo Dascal

Tel Aviv University

Advisory Board Harry Collins

University of Cardiff

Frans H. van Eemeren

University of Amsterdam

Gerd Fritz

University of Giessen

Fernando Gil †

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris

Thomas Gloning

University of Giessen

Alan G. Gross

University of Minnesota

Kuno Lorenz

University of Saarbrücken

Everett Mendelssohn Harvard University

Quintín Racionero UNED, Madrid

Yaron Senderowicz Tel Aviv University

Stephen Toulmin†

University of Southern California

Ruth Wodak

Lancaster University

Geoffrey Lloyd

Cambridge University

Volume 12 How to Do Philosophy with Words. Reflections on the Searle-Derrida debate by Jesús Navarro

How to Do Philosophy with Words Reflections on the Searle-Derrida debate

Jesús Navarro Universidad de Sevilla

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Originally published in Spanish by Fondo de Cultura Económica, Madrid, 2010. English translation by Erik Norvelle.

doi 10.1075/cvs.12 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2016047950 (print) / 2016050839 (e-book) isbn 978 90 272 1896 4 isbn 978 90 272 6604 0

(Hb) (e-book)

© 2017 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com

To Teresa Bejarano Fernández and José Luis López López, who helped me to enter into philosophy by such different ways

Table of contents

Foreword

xi

Preface

xv

Introduction1 Chronology  16 chapter 1 Austin: Language, truth and force The ideal of a descriptive language  17 The treasure of ordinary language  19 Performatives: A hard nut to crack  24 Illocutionary forces  26 Forms of infelicity  29 The completeness of the illocutionary act  30 Return to truth by way of context  33 chapter 2 Searle: The intentionality of the mental Austin according to Searle: Speech act theory  37 The principle of expressibility  38 Insincere promises  41 The turn to the mind  45 Intrinsic intentionality and the Background  48 The mystery of consciousness  53 Social realities  56 chapter 3 Derrida: Suspicion and deconstruction The temptation of impatience  59 Philosophy as an act of suspicion  60 From metaphysics to difference: Heidegger and Lévinas  63 Derrida’s disappointment with Husserl: The form of the present  66 The moderate charm of Saussure: Structure  70 Critique of phonocentrism  73 Writing and différance  74

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chapter 4 Deconstructing Austin Communication and meaning  79 Iterability: Writing as metaphor  82 The absence of intentionality  85 Austin according to Derrida: Expectations and deceptions  88 Parasitism: The forgetting of a necessary possibility  91 Citability and iteration  94 The event of the signature  95 chapter 5 The indignation of the rightful heir Derrida in the U.S.  99 An unexpected response  101 Derrida according to Searle: Writing and absence  103 Intention and the communicative act  106 Derrida’s Austin, according to Searle  108 Philosophical false friends: Writing  111 Philosophical false friends: Intentionality  113 chapter 6 Deconstructing S.A.R.L. Let’s get serious…  119 Searle according to Derrida: Recognizing himself in the enemy  118 Derrida’s “Sarl’s «Derrida’s Austin»”  121 The subject, Ltd. Co.  123 The intention in the utterance  126 Is the methodology harmless?  131 Theoretical fictions  134

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chapter 7 A flawed debate 139 The word turned upside-down  139 The frontiers of concepts  141 An apology for deconstruction  144 Towards an ethics of debate  149 The barbarian invasions  151 The discontents of literary theory  154 Where is meaning?  157 Ontology and epistemology: What the theoretician aims to accomplish  160



chapter 8 When philosophizing is doing Philosophy as a speech act  165 Philosophical training  169 Communication and reconstruction of meaning  173 “What if Sec were doing something else?”  175 The double game of the infiltrator  178 The doubling commentary  181 Intellectual agendas  184

Table of contents

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Conclusion189 The precarious unity of philosophy  189 Opposing positions  194 What remains over time?  196 The fungible intention  198 What has been said and what has been thought  202 Can know-how be present?  205 Arguments and motivations  209 References213 Author index

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Subject index

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ix

Foreword

How to Do Philosophy with Words is a title that alludes directly to the classic work of contemporary philosophy of language, How to Do Things with Words, published by the British philosopher John Austin in the mid-20th century. Since there remains a great deal to learn from Austin’s apparently simple work, Navarro’s choice couldn’t be better, given that a good part of his book refers, directly or indirectly, to that work. Nevertheless, not every allusion, however direct it might be, is necessarily transparent. What, exactly, does this allusion allude to? There is no doubt that the person who will have to answer this question, upon finishing her reading, is the reader, and in this foreword I don’t want to rob her of the pleasure of interpretation. I will content myself with making reference to other allusions present in the book, some in the title itself, that can guide the reader towards other manners of recognizing the book’s value and originality. Let’s move on now to our exercise of hermeneutics. With his obvious allusion to Austin’s text, is Jesús Navarro suggesting that philosophizing is nothing more than speaking or writing? Does the philosopher just play with words, building “systems” that, however grand and pretentious they may be, are nothing more than mere texts? Or would he be saying that philosophical creation, even when it doesn’t merely create texts, creates by means of these texts, containing utterances of the type that Austin has called – with great discernment – “performatives,” that is, utterances able to create new realities by a mere statement uttered in the proper conditions? That is to say, is Navarro suggesting that philosophical texts are permeated by affirmations analogous to those which a pastor, priest, rabbi or judge utters upon declaring a man and a woman united in marriage (religious or civil, it doesn’t matter), and which provoke the birth in the world of a new link, more or less permanent, between the bride and groom, thus constituting a new social reality that it will later be difficult to disentangle themselves from. But if it is this analogy he is alluding to, what will the “appropriate conditions” be under which, upon making the appropriate philosophical utterances, a properly philosophical performative force will be given them? Will those conditions consist in the tone with which the philosophical texts are spoken or written, in the form they are listened to or read, or will they perhaps consist in the authority of those who speak or write them, in contrast to the obedience of those who listen or read them? Is it perhaps in the clothing that those who speak the texts wear when

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speaking them, accompanied by the minimum and indispensable knowledge required so that those who listen to them might understand them? Or who knows what other mysterious conditions are responsible for the philosophical miracle that takes place by way of words? Therefore, what we will have to ask ourselves, implacably, is precisely what underlines the first word of the title, that impertinent how. What’s in question is: what is it that gives the philosophical text its supposed force at the moment of grasping, expressing, transmitting or creating reality? This force also gives it its capacity for convincing the reader or hearer that what the text says has in fact been created, and that the text responds to that reality. How does one do philosophy in order to obtain this result? we are asked. How is that possible? we ask ourselves. What is in question when we are dealing not with the common performatives that Austin investigated, but with their presumed analogues, the “philosophical performatives,” is, purely and simply, what it is to do philosophy. This is why we don’t find ourselves here faced with a normal, common philosophical text – like those that deal with one or another of the many particular problems faced by philosophers – that avoids the fundamental questions that bring us, if not to explain, then at least to ask ourselves about what makes philosophy philosophy. Like the multiple allusions that the book’s title suggests, its content also seeks to clarify that fundamental question in an indirect form, making use of the multiplicity of possible responses that are present in the uncounted modalities of philosophizing. In his book, Jesús Navarro analyzes a no-holds-barred confrontation that took place between two great thinkers of our epoch. One can disagree with the positions taken by one or the other, or by neither of the two; however, both are without a doubt worthy of attention on the part of those interested in philosophy. What Jesús Navarro shows clearly is that, in addition to their ideas, what is most worthy of attention is the confrontation between those ideas. Because it is in the moment of confrontation between the two that philosophical ideas acquire their fullest meaning: when they are criticized and defended, objected to and justified by skillful thinkers. It is in the moment of controversy, of the critique and defense of opposed ideas, that doing philosophy is revealed in the presence of the observer in all its magnitude, beauty and difficulty. At the same time, the products of this unlimited “doing” – which are ideas, theories and positions – are immensely enriched thanks to their capacity to criticize and to be criticized, to attack and defend themselves. Jesús Navarro has chosen for his analysis in this book a debate of great importance in contemporary thought. A debate that has brought representatives of the most important of today’s currents in philosophy face to face. A debate that has not only clarified the difference in postures between these currents, but has also cast light upon their methodological and argumentative differences. A debate that has shown how philosophical theories can and should be seen from different

Foreword xiii

perspectives in order to be better understood. A debate that has also demonstrated how that understanding is in fact attained through the rigorous analysis of the arguments and maneuvers of each of the adversaries as they seek to overcome their opponent. Jesús Navarro thus gives us, in his book, an important lesson on the practice of philosophy, which always goes further than the inevitable limits of solitary reflection. Perhaps the performativity, which the book not only alludes to but also demonstrates, resides in the fact that the reality that philosophising creates is the result of the necessarily dialectical process that constitutes philosophical activity. Marcelo Dascal Tel Aviv University

Preface

Venus huic erat utraque nota. Ovid, Metamorphoses, III, 323

In 1998, while I was writing my doctoral thesis, I had the opportunity to attend some of the classes taught by Jacques Derrida in the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales of Paris. That course, whose topic was “Pardon,” began with an analysis of the political discourse that followed upon Apartheid. There was an extraordinarily large audience attending, with students and professors, French people and foreigners, finding a place for themselves on the hard floor, disseminated densely throughout the passages and jamming the fire exits. On the lecturer’s table a whole mess of recording devices had been left to record the master’s words and make his voice last as though it were a text. Almost ashamed of the recorders, the discourse readied itself to hurriedly cross the terrain of orality, midway between the written text and the transcribed text, in a lecture that would have to be strictly read from beginning to end. When Derrida finally appeared in the classroom, the aura of his white mane spread throughout the entire auditorium in the form of a tomblike silence. To be honest, I now recall few of his enigmatic words, but I will be a long time in forgetting my first impression of those classes and the peaceful rhythm of our instructor’s penetrating rhetoric. In those days I wanted to get to know Derrida’s thought, because his influence on literary criticism over the preceding decades would be difficult to exaggerate. The Essays of Montaigne, which were the topic of my thesis, had been subjected to a new reading by certain authors who, in a more or less direct manner, said that they were influenced by Derrida’s deconstruction, an influence that gave rise to socalled textualism (“there is nothing outside the text,” meaning that an interpretation should not go beyond the text itself). I had thought that this posture was wrong ever since I first learned of it, long before my encounter with Derrida, and therefore I was somewhat prejudiced against that mysterious master. Nevertheless, as I matured as a reader of Derrida, I noted that what I didn’t like about textualism – at least in its cruder manifestations – was precisely that it didn’t correctly follow the posture taken by Derrida, confusing his concept of text with the limited realm of literary works. In contrast, Derrida himself became ever more stimulating, since I thought I had encountered in his works a lively and penetrating development of the

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Levinasian problem of alterity (specifically, in the way Derrida defends the dissemination of meaning). Nevertheless, I have to admit that that development continues to be, for me, at least sometimes, irritatingly cryptic and obscure. Six years later I was at the University of California-Berkeley as a visiting postdoctoral scholar, invited by Prof. Janet Broughton, with the intention of developing certain lines of my doctoral thesis. During that time I attended the excellent course on Philosophy of Mind taught by Paul Skokowski, having become interested in that discipline through the problem of personal identity. Within its diverse panorama, the position of John R. Searle regarding the intentionality of the mind was especially attractive to me, since he appeared to me as one of the few authors that have truly escaped the long shadow of behaviorism. Taking advantage of the fact that, in the following quarter, Searle himself was giving a class on social philosophy, I infiltrated once again into the classroom as an auditing student, with the same innocent curiosity that I had shown in Paris years prior. The classroom, of course, was also completely filled (although, thanks to efficient American organization, every student had her own desk). A video camera systematically recorded the speech acts of the professor, embalming them in their context. The result was no less dazzling, since Searle’s reputation as a charismatic teacher was totally justified: without even a notepad in sight, at more than 70 years old, his mental agility was marvelous. The ease with which the best examples came to his mind, the clarity with which he presented his arguments, the firm definition of his intellectual goals and the dynamism with which he transmitted them were truly enviable (moreover, his fame as a stubborn man was also merited, since, as is well known, he has a formidable ability to instantly dismiss those objections he considers obsolete). When I undertook those research stays I had no plans at all for writing this book, but I probably wouldn’t have ever written it had it not been for my time at Paris and Berkeley. And not just because of the incidental encounters that I was able to have with these two titans of present-day thought, but above all because those research stays allowed me to live for a few months in the social and human contexts where they carried out their respective academic activities, the places where they were admired and respected. I was able to immerse myself in the way of doing philosophy followed by each thinker. The comparative analysis of both philosophies and the effort to establish some degree of understanding between them is an imprudent, risky project that I later decided to undertake when I discovered that both of the fervent crowds of supporters – amongst whom these authors appeared like grand intellectual paradigms – were perfectly willing to despise the other from lofty heights. Searle, among the deconstructivists, is nothing more than a stale, outdated theoretician; Derrida, among the majority of analytic philosophers, is a dishonest trickster of an intellectual. How is it possible for this kind of admiration and this

Preface xvii

kind of scorn and contempt to be present simultaneously? Is it a situation that can never be remedied? Shouldn’t philosophy be the domain of open communication, dialog and respect? Aren’t there problems common to the works of both on which each can cast a bit of light from their own perspective? Upon approaching the texts of the explicit confrontation that the two authors had been enmeshed in, I found myself in a relatively favorable position for understanding the motives of their missed encounter, since I had learned something from both worlds. I saw the clash between their outlooks as both something inevitable and as a challenge, since at base I had the sense that the possibility of a certain understanding between the two was not to be entirely discarded. With the caveat that this understanding would imply taking into consideration philosophical activity from a perspective that is broader than what is strictly theoretical. As I will attempt to demonstrate with great care, the problematic confluence of the philosophies of Searle and Derrida – concerning questions like “iterability,” “intentionality” and the “parasitism” of language – cannot be resolved by paying attention only to what each author says but rather, as Austin stated regarding speech acts, the issue must be resolved in the terrain of what each one of them does with what he says. But this is a question that will have to be dealt with in the book. I would like to thank Owen Flanagan for for his hospitality at Duke University in summer of 2005, because during that research stay I was able to collect the majority of the bibliography I was in need of, and had some conversations, both with him as well as with his colleagues at the Department of Philosophy, conversations that have both helped me greatly. My thanks also go to the professors and colleagues that have read parts (or the entirety) of the manuscript, for their valuable commentaries: among others, Manuel Barrios Casares, César Moreno Márquez, Enrique Bocardo Crespo, Manuel Padilla Cruz, Luis Sáez-Rueda, Juan José Acero and Marcelo Dascal. I have had the occasion to discuss the argument of my book at length with Teresa Bejarano, Pedro J. Chamizo-Domínguez, Antonio Pineda Cachero, Federico Rodríguez Gómez, Margarita Planelles Almeida, Miguel Vidal Pérez and Gabriel Arnáiz; the result owes much to their attentive and painstaking observations. To Cristina San Juan, with whom I attended the classes given by Derrida: I want to thank her for her infinite hospitality during my time in Paris. Beyond the strictly academic, the support of my family has been as unconditional as ever; I want to especially thank Carla for her inexhaustible patience and understanding, and Nora for all of the time I have failed to dedicate to her. I presented sketches of this book in various doctoral courses at the University of Sevilla between 2006 and 2008, and I must also recognize my debt to the students of those courses for their insightful opinions and critiques. But above all I wish to especially thank my students in the course on Contemporary currents in philosophy

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at the University of Sevilla. It was when I faced them in lectures that I found myself complying with the obligation to offer a broad panorama of present-day thought, feeling the necessity and the difficulty of integrating the authors I discussed into a common history. That is the purpose of the present book, within the narrow limits that I have marked out for it, and I owe much to the debates that we held in class. Sanlúcar de Barrameda, summer of 2009

Note to the English edition This book was first published in Spanish by the Fondo de Cultura Económica (Madrid) in 2010. This translation has been made possible thanks to the University of Seville (VPPI) and the Consejería de Innovación, Ciencia y Empresa of the Junta de Andalucía, whose financial support I gratefully acknowledge. I would also like to recognize Erik Norvelle’s patience and professionalism during the long process of translation. My involvement in the supervision of his work has been intense, perhaps wearisome for him at times, but it has allowed me to qualify some of my positions in the book and to detect and avoid some of its errors, and I am very thankful to him for that. Edinburgh, autumn of 2015

Introduction

The great figures of the history of philosophy are usually not completely inept. Manuel Pavón Rodríguez

In Spring of 1996, the prestigious journal Social Text, edited by Duke University Press in North Carolina, published a monographic issue against scientism, in defense of a relativist and postmodern view of contemporary culture. Among its articles we find one with an intriguing title (“Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”), in which the author makes use of the latest advances in physics and mathematics in order to deny the possibility of referring to an objective reality. The idea that human knowledge advances through the progressive discovery of verifiable facts, through which we uncover the laws of nature, is firmly rejected and the products of modern science are considered as just one more cultural artifact of Western society. The article, written according to the canon of Social Studies, claims for instance that the π of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point that can no longer be defined by geometry alone. (Sokal 1996a: 11)

Despite its serious and stern semblance, the text turned out to be just a joke. Its author, Alain Sokal, a physicist at New York University, became quite famous thanks to that paper, whose dark and twisted style was a caricature of certain contemporary French philosophers, mostly from the poststructuralist milieu: authors such as Lacan, Deleuze and Baudrillard who, according to Sokal, systematically build their texts while hiding logically fallacious arguments behind pompous words, finally reaching completely untenable conclusions. Astonishingly, Sokal’s manuscript passed the allegedly strict selection process of the Journal, where it was read as a serious text until its author announced his satiric intentions (Sokal 1996b). From the mythical confrontation between Rudolph Carnap and Martin Heidegger to the ironic denunciation of the Sokal affair, insidious accusations have sporadically been made by so-called analytic thinkers, mostly from the Englishspeaking world, against continental thinkers, generally from the German or French

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traditions. Even if we don’t agree with these well-worn stereotypes, it is hard to deny that contemporary philosophy is divided. Its frontiers are unstable, and we can find many scholars that are not easily locatable, addressing concepts and problems that seem to exist globally, not tied to any particular context. However, the possibility of making a sharp accusation is still in the air: an accusation that isn’t made within the context of a dialogue, but which obstructs it instead, rejecting the opportunity for mutual understanding, or even reasonable disagreement. This accusation is: whatever it is that you are saying, it makes no sense. If that is the case, why should we continue talking? What obstructs mutual comprehension in this conflict and makes the disagreement particularly pernicious is not just some discrepancy in the definition of concepts, or some divergence in the understanding of problems, but the very idea of what a concept is, or the tacit assumption of what constitutes a real problem, in its formulation, subject and purpose. The breach is caused by strong differences in the values that underlie philosophical activity, and not just by the contrasting theories that are the outcome of this activity. We could appeal to the good old Kuhnian concept and describe the divide between analytics and continentals as an exemplary case of clash of paradigms; we must not, however, overlook the fact that paradigms change and develop within each of these spaces, colliding with each other with the kind of irrationality that Kuhn found in scientific revolutions. We would thus be facing a clash of meta-paradigms: broad, incommensurate traditions that generally run in parallel, with few exchanges having any effect. This fact prevents us from applying Kuhn’s evolutionary and diachronic methodology here, since there is no possibility in sight of bringing both traditions together within a common history. Neither one of them can be made to function as the precedent of the other: a kind of obsolete stage that would eventually be overcome by the other, and where the preceding paradigm could only expect an inexorable abandonment. On the contrary, it seems that both are here to stay. How long can we trace this divide back in history? Would it be foolish to think that it first occurred back in the Middle Ages, when the nominalists of Oxford confronted the realists of La Sorbonne? Maybe back in the seventeenth century, between English empiricists and French rationalists? Or is it quite the opposite? Perhaps the gap has never existed and is just a mirage of ghostly stereotypes, labels that don’t actually fit anybody, but which nevertheless constrain our understanding of contemporary philosophy? The alleged continental “faction,” for instance, would be formed by a jumble of different schools – phenomenology, hermeneutics, neo-Marxism, structuralism, post-structuralism and even neo-Thomism – that seem to have little in common, or nothing at all, besides the fact that philosophers from the allegedly contrary faction usually label them that way and treat them as

Introduction 3

examples of sophistry and shallowness.1 So-called analytic philosophy, for its part, seems to have already issued its own death certificate and today only maintains a certain affinity of style among the major thinkers that gave rise to the movement.2 Furthermore, in addition to this lack of inner unity and coherence within the two traditions, we see that precisely on those few occasions when the clash is made explicit, frontiers become unstable and blurred. For instance, in the notorious exchange between Rorty and Habermas we saw how the attitudes, influences and arguments that ought to be paradigmatic of each faction can in fact be found in the texts of both contenders, and this has led to the quite widespread opinion that the distinction between analytics and continentals does not even exist, or that the dichotomy ought to be abandoned in favor of other demarcations that would be theoretically more relevant. Authors like Putnam, Goodman, Dreyfus, Ricoeur, Føllesdal and Tugendhat have contributed to this idea, promoting from one side or the other a more constructive understanding of the “other.”3 1. Simon Glendinning has convincingly shown that there is really no such thing as a continental tradition in philosophy, and that this label simply joins together all of that which analytic philosophy fallaciously considers its “Other” (2006: 83–4). Similarly, Simon Critchley (1998) has shown that the notion of continental philosophy only has meaning as a projection of analytic philosophy. However, even if the label comes from abroad, it cannot be denied that it is beginning to give a certain feeling of unity to the continental milieu: nothing can be more binding than the appearance of a common enemy. 2. Hans-Johann Glock (2008: 1–2) confirms, to his regret, that there is a double trend towards loss of identity and vigor among practitioners of analytic philosophy. We have a good example in Spain, where an influential exponent of analytic philosophy, J. J. Acero (1994: 17), has declared that, after Quine, Sellars or even Austin, “analytic philosophy is a movement that has come to an end, and is thus water under the bridge”. Similarly, Hilary Putnam (1997: 203) has pleaded for an abandonment of the term “analytic” as a label for a movement or school. Nevertheless, there are also defenders of its preservation: some of them point out that, more than a matter of doctrines, what is at stake here is a matter of style (Recanati 1993); others, in turn, claim that analytic philosophy is grounded in a set of “cognitive norms” from which continental philosophy seems to consider itself more or less exempt (Engel 1999). 3. The truth is that bridges between these traditions have been built more frequently from the phenomenological, hermeneutic or Frankfurtian perspectives, than from deconstructive ones. On the problematic constitution of the analytic and continental communities, see the works of Christopher Norris (1986) and Marcelo Dascal (2001). From a sociological perspective, Randall Collins has claimed that the confrontation between these streams is probably nothing more than a surface effect beneath which parallel answers are hidden, answers that attempt to confront, in not very different ways, one same historical situation (1998: 751–3). Michael A. E. Dummett (1993: 26) has pointed out, in turn, how much was originally shared by these traditions at their historical beginnings.

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However, it suffices to know in situ the ways of doing philosophy that are now dominant on each side of the English Channel – or the Atlantic Ocean – to realize that the gap does exist. Its theoretical justifications might be questioned, but it cannot be denied that the idea that there is such a gap is a crucial element in the scene of contemporary philosophy, and in its self-consciousness as a discipline.4 Nevertheless, what is most disconcerting about this divide is that there usually are no explicit confrontations: clashes are rare, because only when there is something in common can there be a clash, and generally there is nothing at all. In this way most philosophers, both analytic and continental, nowadays manage to ignore the very existence of the opposite faction most of the time. Contributions from the other sphere, even those strictly related to the subject of their own research, are not even explicitly discarded as irrelevant, misguided or confused, but are simply brushed aside as a kind of background noise that ought to be ignored, in order to focus on what really matters. Fortunately, there have been exceptions. Sometimes willingly and sometimes reluctantly, on some occasions philosophers from both meta-paradigms have had no alternative but to speak to and about each other – although, on most occasions, their respective contributions have been nothing but a prolonged gloss to justify saying that whatever it is that you are saying, it makes no sense. The present essay studies one of these missed encounters: that which took place between John R. Searle and Jacques Derrida beginning towards the end of the seventies, each commenting on the work of John Langshaw Austin. Before turning to the subject that will be our topic for the rest of the book, I would like to get back for a moment to the Sokal affair. What we find in his famous denunciation is the classic thesis – whatever it is that you are saying, it makes no sense – introduced with an original and effective rhetorical strategy. Sokal was making something like the following assertion: “when I say what you say, I know that what I am saying makes no sense, despite the fact that you believe you

4. As Glendinning (2006: 4–5) points out, even if it is arguable whether this is a correct description of the scene, it cannot be denied that this self-conception is an important part of it. We find proof of this in the considerable number of monographic issues on this question that specialized journals have published (see, e.g. Stanford French Review, 17:2–3, 1993; International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 9:3, 2001; or Philosophie, 35, 1992). General perspectives on contemporary philosophy that take the analytic-continental divide to be the fundamental distinction may be found in the works of Pascal Engel (1997), Franca D’Agostini (1997) or Luis Sáez Rueda (2001 and 2002), who has furthermore defended the existence of a serious theoretical breach based on the different ontological assumptions of the two sides, as I will discuss later.

Introduction 5

understand me; therefore, whatever it is that you are saying, it makes no sense.”5 Sokal’s ­intention is to refute the position of his contender by assuming it himself and showing, from within, that it is meaningless. He manages to sneak into the enemy’s territory as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, making use of a strategy that, as I will show later, shares its structure with the classic Chinese Room argument put forward by Searle in the eighties in opposition to the project of strong Artificial Intelligence. However, it was not my intention at all to appeal to yet another example of the classic clash between analytic and continental philosophy when I began these pages with the Sokal affair. In fact, that episode could hardly be considered a paradigmatic example of this confrontation, since Sokal cannot be taken to be a philosopher at all, neither based on his education, nor on his intentions in the Social Text article. On the contrary, it is the form of the Sokal affair that seems to be directly related to the content of the case I am targeting here, since the way Sokal offers his criticism is a good example of the kind of issue that Searle and Derrida were in disagreement about. Sokal presents his text as a serious work, an oratio recta, in which a particular thesis is allegedly defended with the help of a series of arguments. There was nothing in the context in which the article was published that would make any other interpretation likely: Social Text is a prestigious journal in its academic milieu, and Sokal’s postmodern and relativist paper fitted perfectly into the editor’s schema, both for its topic and for the way the author seemed to approach it. However, the enlargement of the context in which the text ought to be read, after its later unmasking, turned an apparently serious discourse into a mocking joke; what looked like a rigorous argument turned out to be a parody: what seemed to be the thesis became the antithesis of what had been said. Sokal’s language can be described as ‘abnormal’: it is conceived to feign normality, but is in fact something different. Whether it will be read as a normal discourse, or as an ironic, sarcastic or satiric one, will depend on the context in which it is received, and it might not be possible to exhaustively determine the context beforehand. In principle, no matter how convoluted that possibility is, it is perfectly conceivable that Sokal some day might publish a new paper denouncing his own denunciation as an even more intricate rhetorical strategy. Maybe Sokal is just another postmodern pretending to be a rationalist scientist who, for a moment, was hidden behind the deceitful slogan of “anything goes.” 5. In a later book, co-authored with Jean Bricmont, Sokal explicitly defends the position that if some of the fundamental texts of the post-modernist and post-structuralist movement “seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing” (Sokal and Bricmont 1998: 5). This kind of criticism has been proffered in a more attentive way by Jacques Bouveresse on various occasions (e.g, in 1999 or 2004).

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Even if we accept that it is always conceivable for any unmasking to be itself unmasked, we can still wonder whether there isn’t something that could be considered the fact of the matter: whether, in fact, Sokal was intending to say what he said, or whether he was meaning the opposite. We can still wonder whether, once the context of the discourse has been considered – if such an act is conceivable as an exhaustive achievement – it is sensible to assert that we are definitely facing a normal and serious speech act, which therefore ought to be understood in its literal sense. This formal aspect of the Sokal affair is the material content of the case we are facing here. • Searle and Derrida are coeval authors: they were born around the same time (the former in the state of Colorado, in 1932, and the latter in Algiers, in 1930) and both were 37 years old when they published their first books (Speech Acts in 1969 and De la Grammatologie in 1967), which became canonical works in their respective academic communities. At the moment when their confrontation took place they were both outstanding contributors to their fields, and were at a fully mature intellectual stage. The episode was marked by the absence of Austin, one of the most prominent philosophers from the previous generation who, in an unfinished but promising work, had intended to consider language from a broader perspective than the one that had been hegemonic until then – not starting from logical, abstract idealizations, but attempting to analyze all the pragmatic and contextual elements that make language work in its ordinary uses. Shortly after Searle left Oxford in 1959 – where he had obtained a D.Phil. with a thesis on “Sense and Reference” – and before turning his Harvard lectures on How to Do Things With Words into a book, Austin died prematurely, as a consequence of lung cancer. Searle then followed in the steps of his master, developing during the sixties one of the most fruitful interpretations of Austin’s work, which led to the now famous “speech act theory.” In the wake of other influential figures of analytic philosophy, such as Wittgenstein and Strawson, he decided to plow up the plot of land discovered by Austin in order to, as we will see later, integrate linguistic pragmatics within a wider philosophical and scientific context. It was at the beginning of the seventies that a daring imprudence gave rise to hostilities: Jacques Derrida, in an attempt to transgress boundaries, abandons for a while the purely ‘continental’ space in which his thought had matured – amongst Lévinas’ critique of phenomenology, Heidegger’s ontological hermeneutics and post-structuralism – and decides to apply his deconstructive methods to the work of Austin. Derrida claims to have seen in it an “almost Nietzschean” effort to bring language back to the realm of life, and to locate the question of truth under that of strength. However, in his opinion – and we will later see what all this means – Austin

Introduction 7

finally yields to a “metaphysics of presence,” turning his back on the revolutionary perspectives of his own work, and returning to a conventional phono-logo-centric perspective, through the idea of context. Derrida offered his reading of Austin at a congress in Canada in 1971, in a lecture in French entitled “Signature événement contexte” (Sec).6 However, the storm would not be unleashed until six years later, when the first issue of the journal Glyph, of Johns Hopkins University, published a translation of Sec into English, by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Derrida 1977a). The reason is that the same issue included a scathing and destructive criticism of Derrida’s text by John Searle, who denounced – this is how it had to be – the Frenchman, saying essentially that whatever it is that Derrida is saying, it just makes no sense. The title of Searle’s paper is “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida” (1977): Searle decides to reply to Derrida – although Derrida’s text was not directed to Searle at all, and did not even make any reference to him – taking on the mantle of Austin’s legitimate philosophical heir, presenting his own interpretation of the work of his master as the one Austin would himself have pursued, had death not arrived prematurely. It is thus Searle who responds to Derrida’s lecture on Austin, outraged at the way the Frenchman systematically falls into fallacies and confusions concerning extremely basic concepts that any undergraduate student from a good North American university ought to know and distinguish easily. The reply reflects the tension and disdain present in many American philosophy departments, as a reaction to the conquest of literature departments by poststructuralist critics. But Derrida, well known for not being daunted by critics, does not take long to strike back: the second issue of Glyph, published that same year, closes with a disproportionately huge paper, “Limited Inc. a b c…,” (1977b) in which Derrida intends to refute each idea, each argument, and each tiny little line of Searle’s reply. The Frenchman cannot resist the temptation to engage in polemics, accusing his opponent – who is parodied with the acronym S.A.R.L. (Société à Responsabilité Limitée) – of not having understood anything in his text, and repeatedly directing against him certain ideas that he had himself intended to defend. The polemic had considerable repercussions in the cultural milieus of France and the USA, and there has been an irregular but continuous drip of literature on the topic ever since its publication. Although Searle did not write any explicit rejoinder, we can follow the track of the debate in a review he published in the New

6. The lecture was published for the first time in French, in the proceedings of the Congrès International des Sociétés de Philosophie de Langue Française (Montreal, August, 1971), and then was included in Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy (1982 [1972]).

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How to Do Philosophy with Words

York Review of Books (1983),7 together with a few later articles.8 Derrida, in turn, reflects at length about the debate in an epistolary interview with Gerald Graff one decade later, under the title “Toward An Ethic of Discussion,” where he tries to focus on the question of academic politeness, and he confesses to have been partly responsible for the lack of that politeness in his confrontation with Searle.9 • We could describe this whole episode as a kind of missed encounter, but let’s think for a moment about whether such a thing is even possible, and how. Is a missed encounter a kind of encounter, or should we instead say that it is no encounter at all, something that never quite took place, since it was missed? Would it not be somehow contradictory to imagine two people sharing a common space, but not being able to meet each other in it? Sharing a language, but not being able to understand each other with it? In our case, the common space that they shared is obviously Austin’s work, and their common language is the one they both inherited from the British philosopher, including a number of classic terms – such as “speech,” “truth,” “strength” or “meaning” – and some neologisms – such as “performative,” “infelicity,” “illocutionary” or “perlocutionary.” But we could ask whether, behind the coincidence in their use of signifiers, there is something truly shared or common in the way Searle and Derrida understand those words, and how they resound in their respective philosophical spaces, in consonance with their own living pasts. Missed intellectual encounters, if such things are indeed possible, would be just one peculiar kind of human missed encounter, which is a phenomenon that has been well studied by novelists. Milan Kundera, for instance, wrote a “Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words” to show how Franz and Sabina, the lovers of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, assumed in disconcertingly different ways each one of the words and concepts that came into play in their love affair. What Kundera said about them could be easily applied to the authors of our missed encounter: 7. The review, whose target was Culler (1982), has been translated into French by Jean-Pierre Cometti, and published as an opuscule in Déconstruction: Le langage dans tous ses états (Combas, Éditions de l’ Éclat, 1992). 8. Mostly “Rationality and Realism: What Is at Stake?” (1993a) and “Literary Theory and Its Discontents” (1994). 9. “Signature évenement contexte”, “Limited Inc. a b c”, and Graff ’s interview were translated into English by Graff himself (Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 1988) and edited in French by Elisabeth Weber (Paris, Galilée, 1990), under the same title: Limited Inc. I will indicate the pages of the English version, and will only make references to the French text on a couple of occasions.

Introduction 9

While they had a clear understanding of the logical meaning of the words they exchanged, they failed to hear the semantic susurrus of the river flowing through them. […] While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs […], but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them. (1985: 88–9)

This is both the reason for the encounter and the reason why it was missed. This happens when, at the same time, two persons coincide in what Kundera calls the “logical meaning of words,” and diverge, whether consciously or not, about the “semantic river” that runs beneath them. Most of the studies written up to now about this confrontation make the same mistake that Searle and Derrida themselves made then: they systematically ignore the semantic rivers that flow beneath their discourses and act as if there were nothing beneath them but their “logical meanings.” I believe we will be dangerously deluded if we think that we could set aside those rivers just by ignoring them. However, it would be no less dangerous to believe that the real philosophical task can only commence after a systematic terminological filtration: a kind of linguistic purge that would allow us to separate the meaning of words from their differing echoes and reminiscences. A purification of this kind would not only be unfeasible, but probably disastrous in its effects, since words, devoid of those semantic rivers that feed them, would become dry and inert riverbeds. For this reason I am inclined to think that what we ought to do, if we really aspire to attain a better understanding of that missed encounter, is to not neglect its semantic rivers, but to navigate them and, most importantly, advance upstream. Once we are reminded of the paths followed by each of our authors prior to their encounter, I hope that we will be able to recognize the semantic susurrus behind their works, and understand the reasons why they clash, despite the meanings they apparently share. There are reasons, deeply rooted in the contemporary philosophical community, that have obstructed this project up through the present day. Deriving from a cheerful and self-complacent image of philosophy, it is usually claimed that its underlying attitudes are curiosity, astonishment and, most of all, respect for the difference of opinions – an indispensable condition for debate and reasoned discrepancies. Unfortunately, nothing seems to be further from the case when we pay attention to the way philosophers react to the corpus of their area, where the most generalized attitude is perhaps disdain: a manifest and persistent disdain towards any standpoint that differs significantly from one’s own position. And this is an attitude that not only affects the gap between analytic and continental philosophers; on the contrary, it is astonishingly widespread. As Randall Collins has pointed out:

10

How to Do Philosophy with Words

[E]ach of the several post-realignment movements of the early twentieth century became unprecedentedly vehement in their condemnation of any other mode of doing philosophy. This partisanship outlasted virtually every other substantive feature of their programs. (1998: 751)

If we consider any given current philosopher, the authors she disdains may well be higher in number than those she admires or respects. The problem is that, since we tend to enclose ourselves within our own school, we usually believe that admiration and respect constitute the core of our activity, when in fact they are worryingly limited. Those few authors whom we respect at least have names; in contrast, the huge number of those whom we disdain remain nameless behind labels we easily reject with contempt, not wasting on them even the time needed for serious refutation. If we ignore the semantic rivers that flow through the works of particular authors it is not just because we do not know them well enough, but because we do not think that they deserve to be known or understood.10 The first requirement for accomplishing our task will thus be a lesson in humility. Arrogance is usually a flaw of great thinkers – but it’s excusable only in them. It is not unusual to find them disdaining each other as being mere incompetents enjoying undeserved fame, and who fill thousands of pages with obsolete and/or fallacious ideas. This is obviously what happened in the missed encounter I will analyze – since both Searle and Derrida seemed to disdain each other as intellectual contenders – but we should not let that happen again here. Perhaps being a bit naïve would be more advisable, and we should uncritically accept at least the idea that opens these pages: that “the great figures of the history of philosophy” (and only time will tell whether it is exaggerated to apply this label to our two authors) “are usually not completely inept.” Needless to say, the mere fact that a particular author or work became notorious in a given tradition does not justify her or its arguments or give them greater philosophical weight or value. However, this fact, at the very least, would make any hasty disdain seem unjustified, since this kind of prejudice would prevent us from being receptive to their possible value and meaning. Since neither Searle nor Derrida were able to define a space where the debate could take place amidst the kind of peace and tranquility that philosophical issues require, I will try to establish that sort of space here. And in doing so I am aware that 10. The role played by this will to ignorance – and not just the will to knowledge – in the history of philosophy and, in particular, in the history of contemporary philosophy, is still in need of indepth study. The “epistemology of ignorance” would have much to contribute to this – and I am thankful to José Medina for his comments on this point. The persistent refusal to spend one’s own time in reading and understanding divergent positions – a reiterated omission of a very specific epistemic duty, postponed sine die in an active and conscious act of procrastination – has had an effect on the evolution of philosophy that should not be neglected.

Introduction 11

this is a risky and imprudent choice, for it will seem like I am crossing the battlefield, while not being a clear supporter of one side or the other. However, that is the choice I made. I have decided to delve into this controversy by paying due attention to its details, focusing even on things that may seem trifles in the argumentation. I refuse to hide behind highfalutin theses about Rationality, Truth, Realism, Modernity, or any other overblown principle the questioning of which could only add fuel to the fire, favor a radical confrontation, and predispose the participants to an embittered and sterile debate. I will thus recklessly remain most of the time on the seismic fault line itself, not making a definitive decision to settle down on one tectonic plate or another, trying to act more as an umpire than as a judge. Previous readings of this confrontation have mostly opted for one side or the other from the very beginning: there are a goodly number of post-structuralist readings that defend Derrida’s positions tooth and nail, and also a few – notoriously less numerous – with an analytic slant, doing the same with respect to Searle’s posture.11 Some authors have appealed to a third way, as Manfred Frank did in his outstanding reading of their struggle from the point of view of contemporary hermeneutics (1984), in which he tries to take up and overcome the purposes of both authors.12 However, none of these options is the one I will adopt here. I will not choose a third way, as Frank did, since instead of shedding light on the issue in an unbiased way I could end up making an apology for an alternative conception of philosophy, alien to both Derrida and Searle, which would lead us astray from the debate itself; neither, however, will I remain sheltered behind the views of one or another of our contenders, since this attitude would only lead us to a partial and slanted account of the story. On the contrary, my methodological option will be to point out the assumptions that both Searle and Derrida made about Austin’s work, trying to highlight the kind of richness that each one of them found in Austin’s thought. I will only take a position external to the debate at the end of my analysis, since, in principle, what I aspire to do is to see each author from the point of view of another: Austin according to Searle, Austin according to Derrida, Derrida according to Searle and Searle according to Derrida. This whole set of mirrors has a clear justification: I am convinced that it is impossible to have a pure vision, totally 11. Derrida’s advocates include Jonathan Culler, Stanley E. Fish, Christopher Norris and Simon Glendinning. Among the supporters of Searle, we find nothing less than Richard Rorty and Jürgen Habermas, but for diametrically opposed reasons. Kevin Halion’s PhD. dissertation is an extended defense of Searle’s position (1989). A different and very original defense can be found in Moati (2009). 12. The paper was later translated as a chapter of (1997: 122–89). Paul Ricoeur has also done a memorable hermeneutic reading of the theory of speech acts in Oneself as Another (1992: 40–55), but he makes no reference to our debate.

12

How to Do Philosophy with Words

unprejudiced, that would allow us to observe the confrontation coolly, without commitments. Instead of that, my reading is based on the possibility of understanding from within the different perspectives that flowed into this missed encounter, highlighting particular aspects that might not have been evident for the contenders, enriching some readings with others, overcoming in practice the congenital disdain that seems to accompany philosophical activity today. • The first chapter of the book sketches the main lines of early analytic philosophy, starting with the so called “inherited conception” of neo-positivism, through Wittgenstein’s crucial Tractatus, to the pragmatist turn that drew philosophers’ attention to the use of ordinary language. I will thus provide context and introduce Austin’s unfinished philosophical project, as he presented it in his William James Lectures. In the second chapter, I will analyze the way Searle pursued that project in Speech Acts, and later in the fields of philosophy of mind and society. This introduction will later help us understand his reticence not just to accept, but even to understand Derrida’s criticism, since the issue that was at stake – in contrast to what Searle himself thought – was not just a tangential aspect of his philosophy, as if the episode was merely a brief stop along the way to disavowing a fallacious reading of his master’s work. On the contrary, I will try to show that Derrida’s criticism was aimed at the very center of Searle’s theory of intentionality, and thus at his entire theoretical system. But, before focusing on this criticism, in the third chapter I will also try to contextualize the continental side of the story. I will start with the so-called “philosophers of suspicion,” who are the germ of Derrida’s anti-humanist and antimetaphysical attitude. I will then revisit the Heideggerian and structuralist roots of his thought, showing why Austin’s ideas were perceived by Derrida both as extraordinarily promising, and terribly disappointing. The first third of this essay will thus be devoted to giving an account of the historical background of our missed encounter, sailing up the semantic rivers that made the same terms resound in each context in deeply different ways. This initial step has been generally overlooked by the studies of this episode undertaken up to now, mostly because they assume that the concepts and moments of the history of philosophy that gave rise to Searle’s or Derrida’s conceptions were well-known by the philosophical community. However, what is at stake in this debate is the very existence of a single philosophical community that shares not just a corpus of basic knowledge, but even a canon of relevant authors and works, the knowledge of which could be taken for granted. I am aware that this strategy might give the reader the impression that, at particular moments of my brief and schematic historical review, my account is too basic, or even trivial. Nevertheless, triviality is a property that

Introduction 13

does not apply to the contents themselves, but to the way they are related to the prior knowledge of a particular reader. I have no doubt that, for those who have a substantial acquaintance with the works of Derrida, my laconic allusion to their Nietzschean or Heideggerian roots will seem to be a platitude. The same thing, however, will happen to those who are familiar with the main streams of recent philosophy of mind when I talk, for instance, about Searle’s criticism of functionalist accounts of mental states. Since my book seeks to find its place between both traditions, I have decided to give explicit allusions even to points that are commonplaces within each of them. Books do not just have one reader, but a wide range of target readers; and I am willing to pay the price of an occasional triviality if, by so doing, I can make the book accessible to defendants of both modes of doing philosophy. I would thus sincerely encourage each particular reader to skip those chapters whose content she thinks she is already well familiar with. Once the precedents of our episode have been described in the first three chapters, the next four will specifically analyze the texts of that missed encounter: the fourth chapter, on Derrida’s deconstruction of Austin’s work in his paper “Signature, event, context”; the fifth, on the answer that Searle blurted out in “Reiterating the differences”; the sixth, on Derrida’s lengthy rejoinder in “Limited Inc. a b c”; and the seventh, on the texts that each of them directed to the other, always by means of mediators, over the following years. In these chapters I will directly focus on the fundamental theoretical problems that both authors were facing: problems that affect the relationship between language and mental states, such as beliefs, desires and intentions. In particular, I will show the reason why an apparently uncontroversial methodological choice made by Austin was, in Derrida’s opinion, unacceptable: the decision to leave aside, for the sake of the theory, “abnormal” uses of language (e.g.: quotes, soliloquies, ironies, metaphors, jokes or absentminded utterances). Searle, following Austin, is happy to exclude them provisionally, and leave them for further specific investigation. Derrida, on the contrary, defends the necessity of taking them into consideration right from the very beginning of any inquiry, since these cases show that language in general – and not just written texts – is the effect of “chains of differences” that must be able to work independently of the intentions of the speaker. This problem would not just affect the possibility of expressing thoughts, but even the very nature of thought itself, which would somehow be affected by the structure of signs, and would thus never be susceptible of being fully present to the thinker, as a sort of conscious mental object. The debate would thus not only affect certain very specific issues of philosophical pragmatics, but also some basic assumptions that underlie current discussions in the philosophy of mind, like the use of folk psychology in behavioral explanations, the scope of self-knowledge, and the possibility of extending the notion of agency into thought.

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I have reserved for the last chapter a number of reflections about the way Derrida and Searle’s confrontation can be seen as an example to understand the precise nature of philosophy – considered as a kind of activity rather than a set of theories or opinions. In this sense, I will emphasize that both thinkers – albeit in different ways – seemed to be unaware of the fractal richness of their confrontation: the way in which it seemed to twist over itself and constitute both the matter and the manner of the debate: what was being discussed, and the discussion itself. Austin’s work shows – as I will later discuss – that we can do many different things with human languages, in addition to adequately describing reality by making true assertions. Besides the locutionary aspect of discourse (i.e. the content of what is said), there are illocutionary and perlocutionary aspects by which speakers do things in the world. Their words have a kind of strength that is somehow able to transform reality – for instance, when they make promises, inaugurate courses, promulgate laws or give orders. In fact, as Searle himself showed by elaborating upon Austin’s ideas, the locutionary aspect of speech acts can never take place by itself. Pure predication about reality is impossible, since predication necessarily has to come on stage through an illocutionary act, which must be performed by someone – an idea that will prove to have important implications. By saying that the debate has a fractal aspect I mean that, like those mathematical objects, it repeats its structure recursively at different levels. This is so because, when Derrida writes “Signature, event, context,” or Searle aims “Reply” at him, their actions must somehow have more aspects than just locutionary ones. Are we merely facing a pure confrontation between the contents of two theories? Or is philosophy somehow constituted by social speech acts, and thus charged with illocutionary effects and perlocutionary results that are inescapably bound to its theoretical content? We also do things with words when we do philosophy with them, and perhaps the clue to understanding the confrontation lies precisely in those illocutionary and perlocutionary aspects that both authors seemed somehow to ignore. The two thinkers were obsessed with debating whatever the other one was saying, sometimes not realizing that the real confrontation was taking place between what each one of them was trying to do in saying it. Insofar as both of them seemed to occasionally ignore this idea, Derrida misunderstood Searle as much as Searle misunderstood Derrida.13 If we aspire to understand their misunderstanding, we will need to bring Searle’s discourse back to whatever he was trying to do with it, which was nothing other than building a systematic theory about saying. We will have to confront 13. I will later show – while analyzing the details of the episode – that Derrida seemed to be more aware of this aspect of the debate than his opponent. However, with a kind of malice that is somehow consubstantial with his deconstructive method, he decided to evade the responsibility for having explicitly followed this path.

Introduction 15

this constructive goal with Derrida’s attempt at deconstruction, investigating the reasons that underlie it, and realizing that the only arguments that could tilt the balance are those about the values of their respective projects, and not just those about the alleged truths of their respective theories – since the very notion of truth is under debate here. This plan will inevitably lead us to question the unity of philosophy, as a human intellectual activity. If what Searle and Derrida do – not just what they say, but what they do in saying it – is, in the last resort, something so deeply different, how can we still claim that there is a common essence that corresponds to philosophy in general? Are they united by something else than the homophony of a name? Can we really say that they are somehow immersed in a common, shared task that we ourselves are still persevering in? I firmly believe that this is the case: either philosophy is one, or else it simply does not exist. Because as soon as our differences become enclosed in spaces not open to confrontation, the conviction that defines philosophy as a discipline will have been definitively lost, i.e. the confidence that it is possible to discuss and argue about everything. This book is a bet on an attempt to put this conviction into practice, by clearing the weeds from the space that lies between both ways of doing philosophy, and thus turning the dispute into a fruitful controversy. And this is an indispensable bet, if we still want to consider philosophy, at least by analogy, as one and the same thing.

Chronology

Frege: Begriffschrift. Russell: Principia Mathematica. Wittgenstein: Tractatus. Moore: “In defense of common sense”. Carnap: “The Elimination of Meta.”. Ryle: The Concept of Mind. Turing: “Can a Machine Think?” Wittgenstein: Phil. Inv. (post.). Austin: Lectures at Harvard. Searle defends his thesis in Oxford.

1873 1879 1900 1910 1916 1921 1925 1927 1931 1946 1949 1950 1953 1955 1957 1959

Nietzsche: On Truth and Lies… Husserl: Logical Investigations. Saussure: Course in General Linguistics.

Heidegger: Being and Time. Husserl: Cartesian Meditations. Heidegger: Letter on Humanism.

Blanchot: The Space of Literature. Heidegger: Identity and Difference.

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How to Do Philosophy with Words

Austin dies. Austin: How to do T. w. Words (post).

Searle: Speech Acts.

1960 1961 1962 1967

Searle: “The L. Status of Fict.Disc.”.

1969 1971 1972 1974 1975

Searle: Reply (Glyph, I).

1977

Searle: “Literal Meaning”. Searle: Expression and Meaning. Searle: Chinese Room argument

1978 1979 1980 1982 1983

Searle: “The Word Turned U.D.”. Searle: Intentionality. Marcus: letter to the French Gov.

Smith et al: letter against Derrida. Searle: “Rationality and Realism…”. Searle: “Literary Theory…”. Searle: The Construction of S.Reality. Sokal: “Transgressing the B.”. Searle: Mind, a Brief Introduction.

1984 1985 1987 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1998 2004

Lévinas: Totality and Infinity. Derrida: Husserl’s Origin of Geometry. Derrida: Of Grammatology. Derrida: Voice and Phenomenon. Derrida: Writing and Difference. Derrida: Lectures Sec (Montreal). Derrida: Margins of Philosophy. Derrida: Glas. Derrida: Sec (Glyph, I). Derrida: Limited (Glyph, II).

Derrida Honoris Causa (Columbia). Culler: On Deconstruction.

Habermas: The Phil. Disc. of Mod. Graff interviews Derrida: Afterword. Derrida Honoris Causa (Cambridge).

Derrida: Monolingualism of the Other. Derrida: The University w. Condition. Derrida dies in Paris.

chapter 1

Austin Language, truth and force The ideal of a descriptive language There was a moment at the beginning of the last century in which the enthusiasm raised by the advances of science was, if only for an instant, absolute and overflowing. Philosophy, finally, seemed to have left behind the obscurantism of metaphysics, and a new road beckoned: the road of self-dissolution, which arose out of seeing all knowledge as being identified with scientific knowledge. For the philosophers of the so-called Vienna Circle, the method to follow was clear: it was necessary to determine what the positive facts are, that is, what is the case and what is not, via systematic and controlled experimentation. On the basis of the data obtained, according to a rigorous logical procedure of induction, nothing is left to do other than to progressively verify the truth of our theories. This gradual and irreversible process would lead from the ignorance of the ancients to the science of the future, with the latter understood as a language able to adequately represent the world. There is a delightful text, the result of another of the many failures to connect between philosophers of the analytic and continental “schools” – although at that time its author was, properly speaking, continental thanks to his location. In it Rudolf Carnap (1959), standard-bearer of this logical positivism, dared to denounce the emptiness and lack of meaning in the work of Martin Heidegger, labeling him an obsolete metaphysician, a virtuoso in the use of an empty language, who seeks nothing more than the admiration of his readers by way of bewilderment. In order to demonstrate that Heidegger filled entire pages, books even, without properly speaking having said anything, Carnap employs the so-called “empiricist criterion of meaning,” according to which any proposition whose truth or falsehood is not testable – either by way of observation, or else by logical demonstration – must be discarded as pure meaninglessness: to hold, as does Heidegger, that “the nothing nothings” – Das Nichts nichtet – or that it is necessary to “think the difference between Being and beings”, would be perfectly equivalent to saying “Blah, blah, blah”. Even worse: it would be a cloaked method of using poetic language, an expression of subjective emotions, masked as a language with an epistemic value. Heidegger would be thus be writing bad poetry, while disguising it as terrible science. Not even the most stubborn of the neopositivists could deny that certain problems carry us into places where the scientific method seems to be of little help. But

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How to Do Philosophy with Words

they were convinced that a Stoic self-control would permit them to discard these problems as pseudo-problems: apparently unsolvable questions, which we can be freed from by a good logical analysis. This is why they did not believe that a new metaphysics was needed, positivist and scientific, but rather only a method of disassembling metaphysical arguments. They wanted a philosophy whose only function was to establish the logical bases on which to construct the language of science, so that all the pseudoproblems that the metaphysicians (as the positivists called them) find themselves trapped in would be clearly signaled as being dead ends. The neopositivists thought they had discovered a sublime example of that philosophy in an enigmatic, austere and concise treatise – the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus – which a certain Ludwig Wittgenstein had bequeathed to humanity prior to disappearing mysteriously, at least for a time, from the face of the earth. The Tractatus (Wittgenstein 1990), according to one of its possible readings – more than a few of which exist because of the laconic character of the text, which has given rise to numerous controversies – basically presented a series of interlinked, a priori ideas that would make all metaphysical speculation impossible: in the first place, the world would be nothing more that the set of facts (proposition 1.1), which in turn would be nothing but configurations of objects (2.01). Second, language would be nothing other than propositions (4.001), which in their turn would establish relations between names (3.2). Thirdly, thought would be nothing other than a set of figures (2.1 and 3) with which we would represent the relations between distinct elements (2.13). World

Language

Thought

Fact

Proposition

Figure

Object

Name

Element

The temptation that would have to be systematically avoided, in order to not fall back into metaphysics, is that of unlinking these three areas – world, language and thought – since they would have to share the structure that was given them by the form of logic. This sketch of the Tractatus simplifies it more than is reasonable, but it can still serve to provide us with an idea, in the view of the young Wittgenstein, of what the condition of possibility of scientific knowledge is, as well as that of human rationality. The form of reality, which constitutes the world, must coincide with the figurative form that defines thought (2.151), and both must mesh in the logical form that determines language (1.13). The reason why this project had never before been undertaken is that propositional logic had not reached the necessary level of development until then. Once the paradoxes were solved that had so perturbed Frege and Russell – and provided that we denied the importance of the aporias discovered by Gödel, as Wittgenstein himself would later do – the Tractatus appears to offer



Chapter 1.  Austin: Language, truth and force

an effective mode of delimiting the world and thought from the point of view of language: a language that would not leave any place for ambiguities, obscurantism and mystifications, and which would have the function of determining an a priori order where world and thought could be interconnected. It would be that which is expressible from a logical and rigorous point of view that would determine what is susceptible to occurring and to being thought (5.6). Of course, there are aspects of our existence that do not fit into this rigid frame; they are the mystical, those things which we can, so to speak, point to with our finger, but about which we cannot speak with clarity (6.44). In discussing this point Wittgenstein is extremely direct: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (7). Science, according to this outlook, would basically be language: a descriptive language, which would coincide in its logical form with the form of reality. It is the logical syntax of language which, in some form, must be reflected in the ontological syntax of the world and in the conceptual syntax of thought. This syntactic unity would thus be the condition of possibility of knowing, since thanks to it there is a possibility of a semantic connection – to be empirically verified – between certain propositions and certain states of things, or facts. The Tractatus had offered the framework: it would only be necessary to fill it with experience and empirical observation. Once this task had been performed, it would be possible to affirm that we know the truth, i.e. that we are capable of using a language that is adequate to the world.

The treasure of ordinary language The epistemology of the 20th century has likely been nothing more than a constant and intrepid struggle to refute this inherited conception and provide alternatives to logical positivism. The original optimism of the Vienna Circle was only possible at the cost of leaving aside – provisionally – complications that would later turn out to be lethal: the lack of a principle of induction, noted by Popper from the very beginning, although he was not listened to for a long time after; the difficulty of defining a pure observational language, without it being contaminated by the subjectivity of individual perception; different problems underlying the notion of fact, resulting from the denial of what Sellars called “the myth of the given”; the weak and blurry frontier between analytic judgments and synthetic ones, highlighted by Quine; the indissoluble mixture between the context of justification and the context of discovery, which meant that epistemology, with Kuhn, had to leave behind its logical limbo in order to confront the mud-spattered history of science. For all these motives and some others, the initial proposal of Neopositivism had to be reworked until it was nearly unrecognizable. Epistemology, without a doubt, lost its optimism but gained in common sense as it left behind its original naïveté.

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In addition, in a more or less brusque fashion, there was a growing consciousness in the ’30s and ’40s that the conception of language that the hard core of logical positivism had developed was excessively restricted: by limiting their analysis to strictly logical language – a kind of laboratory language, created expressly in order to ground the rigor of science – they had left aside language in its habitual, ordinary use, whose structure and functioning is the fruit of unpremeditated, collective and acritical action over the course of uncountable generations. For a Neopositivist, to base philosophy on the study of this kind of material would have been like seeking to do physics on the basis of the naive and spontaneous explanations that a child might give about how birds fly and boats float. Lacking rigor and grounding, day-to-day language had not even been rejected as the focus of philosophical reflection since, in order to be rejected in this way, it would first have to have been seriously considered as such; it was simply unthinkable that ordinary language could have any philosophical interest at all, other than the need to get rid of its inherent confusions. As is habitual in the history of philosophy, what in the beginning was unthinkable ends up being not just thinkable, but even self-evident. Those responsible for this change of attitude were primarily Wittgenstein himself and John Langshaw Austin, the former from Cambridge and the latter from Oxford. The young Wittgenstein had held, with an arrogance nearly without precedent, that all the problems of philosophy had been resolved or, rather, dissolved in his brief and concise Tractatus. Consequently, he decided to abandon philosophy, disappearing for a decade from the intellectual scene, and dedicating himself to activities as varied as primary school education, gardening and architecture. Nonetheless, in 1929 he returned to Cambridge in order to develop a kind of thought that could hardly have been more distinct from his first era. Compared with the systematicity of the Tractatus, after his return he only wrote disordered fragments, examples without development and suggestive but unconnected aphorisms. And compared with his former obsession with a perfectly logical language, free of paradoxes and contradictions, in his second era he never ceased to think and rethink the implications of the day-to-day uses of ordinary language. What was the reason for this change in attitude and in his object of reflection? Had Wittgenstein reconsidered his juvenile arrogance, accepting that philosophy is a discipline that is more vast and profound than what his vision could discern? Not at all, since his posture on this issue had changed very little: he continued to hold that constructive philosophy was nothing but a pseudo-technical jargon lacking real content, unable to provide any knowledge in addition to that attained by the empirical sciences. Philosophical problems continued to be, for him, mere pseudoproblems, linguistic tangles that we do not know how to escape from and which, like a mirage, make us believe that we are thinking about a mysterious and transcendental object, unreachable



Chapter 1.  Austin: Language, truth and force

by empirical science; an object that, in reality, had not ever existed. Philosophical theses are only the “bumps” that we give ourselves when we bang up against the limits of our language, asking questions that we cannot solve. It is only within our capacity, on the contrary, to cure ourselves of these questions via a careful linguistic analysis (Wittgenstein 2009: § 119). The difference with his first stage resides in the fact that now his analysis no longer seeks the abstract formalization of a logically perfect language, but rather it assumes the apparent imperfection of our manner of using language as something worthy of study.14 The young Wittgenstein, as with the majority of his generation, suffered from a certain narrowness of vision, since he held that the only worthy and philosophically interesting use of language is descriptive language: that which says how things are. But language, as Wittgenstein would discover during the 1930s, is used in many distinct manners, and each one of those uses has its own meaning, insofar as it is integrated into a form of life, which is a way we have of relating to one another and to the world that surrounds us. The problem appears when, distancing ourselves from these forms of life, we postulate entities and realities that lack reference and we sink in the mud of metaphysical presuppositions that we can’t escape from. For example, there is the Platonic idea according to which, apart from observable facts and objects, there exist the ideas, which, eternal and immutable, provide the objective meaning of our language; or the Cartesian notion of the soul as a kind of internal theater, apart from the physical world, in which mental events take place. Wittgenstein seeks to liberate us from all that unnecessary baggage when he holds that the meaning of language resides in the use we make of it, giving a strong impulse to a project that will turn out to be essential for analytic thought: the naturalization of meaning.15 At this same time John L. Austin was one of the main contributors of the socalled School of Oxford, along with Peter Strawson and Gilbert Ryle. Austin was developing a similar interest in ordinary language, although with a more relaxed style than Wittgenstein, and pursued a project of systematization that was alien to the Austrian. The mutual antipathy that both authors displayed, a result of their strong differences in character, meant that direct influences of one upon the other would be scarce. Nonetheless, under the influence of both thinkers the English philosophical community turned its attention to the philosophy of ordinary language, 14. As J. J. Acero holds, and as opposed to the interpretation that Adorno would make canonical, it is not strictly an issue of an abandonment of logical problems in favor of pragmatic ones, since logical problems had continued to be an object of study and attention: “nobody who works in this field [the pragmatics of ordinary languages] doubts the necessity of the use of formal methods in order to better know very central aspects of natural languages” (1991: 22) 15. See Prades Celma and Sanfelix Vidarte (1992) and Sáez Rueda (2002).

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which would eventually give rise to linguistic pragmatics. Despite their differences concerning the method of framing the question, what both authors had in common was a recognition that the original outlook of the prior generation had been narrow and limiting, since it only had interest in the use of language as descriptive of reality. However, we evidently do many things with languages other than describing the world: language is an instrument that is fundamental for our existence, the basis of life in society, useful to an incalculable degree in our daily lives. Aspiring to be true is not at all its only purpose; rather it is only one of many uses or language games we participate in – such as giving orders, making jokes, translating or telling stories – games which, in Wittgenstein’s opinion, were innumerable. Nonetheless, for Austin – and this is a good example of the differing attitudes of both authors – even if these uses appeared to be uncountable, it would still be worth the effort to try to count them. He would laugh condescendingly at the impatience with which the Austrian rushed to state that there are infinite uses of language: “Philosophers will do this when they have listed as many, let us say, as seventeen; but even if there were something like ten thousand uses of language, surely we could list them all in time.” (Austin 1970: 234). The parsimony and laboriousness of Austin contrasted with the impatience and brilliant eccentricity of Wittgenstein, meaning that their respective methods of approach to the problem were completely divergent.16 Austin’s interest in the philosophical analysis of ordinary language is in part negative and in part positive. On the one hand, ordinary language is the enemy to be combated or, even better, the beast that we must domesticate in order to have well-cleaned tools as philosophers, since we habitually express our reasoning in an ordinary language whose traps and pitfalls we must always be aware of. Language hides the true reality of things, and a careful purification will permit us, as Austin claims in “A Plea for Excuses”, to “re-look at the world without blinkers” (1970: 182). But, on the other hand, ordinary language provides us with a positive benefit when it is time to ask ourselves philosophical questions, since “our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations: (1970: 182). That is to say, language is not merely a dangerous instrument that must be controlled, but rather it is a source of knowledge that we have the capacity to exploit if we are careful. Towards this end, Austin sketches the possibility of a linguistic phenomenology that permits us to describe this unconscious wisdom that we have inherited 16. Incidentally, Austin’s accusation was not completely correct in this regard: Wittgenstein (2009: §23) would eventually enumerate nineteen linguistic uses in his Philosophical Investigations, prior to stating that they were innumerable. Searle’s memories of Austin’s antipathy for Wittgenstein may be found in (Faigenbaum 2005).



Chapter 1.  Austin: Language, truth and force

from our ancestors together with their language. The analysis of ordinary language thus offers the philosopher something that we frequently find ourselves needing: the possibility of performing field work, coming down from the clouds of rational speculation and putting one’s feet on the ground of something real; in his case, ordinary language, the basis of common sense. Austin in no way believes that the analysis of ordinary language could say the last word about philosophical questions, at least “if our interests are more extensive or intellectual than the ordinary” (1970: 185); but he does hold that this analysis can well perform the function of being the first word: the point of departure of philosophical reflection. Austin is quite conscious of the limitations that we suffer in the development of this linguistic phenomenology: when it comes time to describe the uses of language, we may not be in agreement amongst ourselves about essential questions, since modes of speaking are never perfectly systematized, nor completely coherent. However, even if this sort of disagreement is possible, it should not make us lose hope; rather, we should consider it a stimulus for our continuing the conversation: But why should this daunt us? All that is happening is entirely explicable. If our usages disagree, then you use “X” where I use “Y”, or more probably (and more intriguingly) your conceptual system is different from mine, though very likely it is at least equally consistent and serviceable: in short, we can find wly we disagree-you choose to classify in one way, I in another. If the usage is loose, we can understand the temptation that leads to it, and the distinctions that it blurs: if there are “alternative” descriptions, then the situation can be described or can be “structured” in two ways […] A disagreement as to what we should say is not to be shied off, but to be pounced upon: for the explanation of it can hardly fail to be illuminating.  (Austin 1970: 184)

With this attitude, even if we actually disagree, we will be able by way of dialogue to understand why we are in disagreement, which is the best way to understand the motives for which we use language – each person in her own way – in the way that we in fact do. The phenomenology that Austin points to seems to be therefore constituted by an intersubjective conversation, rather than being the fruit of some solitary act by which one subject becomes conscious of the manner in which language ought to be used.17 And this is an especially attractive aspect of his philosophy, which has not always been respected by the later developments of the philosophy of ordinary language, as we will see further along.

17. Thanks to this attitude of modesty and caution, Austin was left out of the generalized critique that C. W. K. Mundle (1979: 22) directed towards the philosophers of ordinary language, for having sought to create a kind of “a priori linguistics”.

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Performatives: A hard nut to crack Austin’s first effort consisted in seeking to delimit a new area for those modes of using language in which it appears to not fulfill a descriptive function. On occasions, Austin tells us, language is not used in order to say how things are, but rather to do something by way of words: promising, inaugurating a new academic year, threatening, declaring persons united in marriage, expelling someone from the room, inviting to dinner, etc. These cases can be interpreted as moments in which the speaker expresses externally an action that he performs mentally, as though his words were making a certain spiritual attitude public. For example, in the case of promising and swearing, But we are apt to have a feeling that their being serious consists in their being uttered as (merely) the outward and visible sign, for convenience or other record or for information, of an inward and spiritual act: from which it is but a short step to go on to believe or to assume without realizing that for many purposes the outward utterance is a description, true or fake, of the occurrence of the inward performance. The classic expression of this idea is to be found in the Hippolytus (1. 612), where Hippolytus says i.e. ‘my tongue swore to, but my heart (or mind or other backstage artiste) did not’. Thus ‘I promise to …’ obliges me – puts on record my spiritual assumption of a spiritual shackle. (1962a: 9)

According to this interpretation, which Austin immediately discarded, the act, properly speaking, is not realized in words, but apart from them, hidden in the mind, so that language only bears witness to what has already happened: the promise, the inauguration, the threat… The promise would be true or false as a function of whether it correctly or incorrectly describes the happening or occurrence of a mental event.18 To Austin this interpretation does not appear to be correct in any way, because it “provides Hippolytus with a let-out, the bigamist with an excuse for his ‘I do’ and the welsher with a defence for his ‘I bet’.” (1962a: 10). The reason is evident: if the locus where the performance effectively takes place is hidden somewhere in the mind of the speaker, she could always simply deny that she actually did what her listener thought she was doing. Nobody would, properly speaking, fail to honor their word, because it would be sufficient to affirm that there had been no intention of making a promise in order to be exempt from the obligation to fulfill it, 18. Of particular interest regarding this question is the discourse given by Austin in France in 1958, with the title “Performatif/constatif,” regarding which Chaim Perelman notes the necessity of some kind of meta or extralinguistic criterion for performatives (Austin 1962b). Although Austin denied that it had to do with an “interior sentiment,” with a psychological or ontological status, his audience didn’t seem convinced on this point, since it was thought that a logic of performative propositions would previously imply a logic of performative thoughts. Cited in Maclean (2004: 52).



Chapter 1.  Austin: Language, truth and force

and any listener would have no way of demonstrating the contrary. For this reason, Austin holds that “Accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond” (1962a: 10). Thus, in the moments in which we perform something with language, our words are not bearing witness to an act that is occurring apart from them, instead, they do what they say: it is the word, not the mental act, that obligates. The thing said does not describe what happened: it is itself what happened, and only by making an anti-natural comparison lacking in justification could we say that these expressions are true or false. Its degree of completion is in function of whether the speaker performed the act in question – that is, of whether the words in fact constituted a promise, an inauguration, a threat, etc. – and not of whether they correctly describe a hidden occurrence. In order to suitably study these forms of language, it will be necessary that we forget “for once and for a while, that other curious question ‘Is it true?’. May we?” (Austin 1970: 185, footnote). The question of truth, which in that tradition had dominated the philosophical study of language up until then, had to be provisionally set aside. The moment had come to delimit the frontiers of that language that Aristotle had termed apophantic or declarative, since it does not come close to covering all its possible uses. On the other hand, a language that Austin terms performative must be clearly distinguished from non-performative utterances, which properly speaking do not bring about anything in the world, but rather are limited to stating how things are. What is it that distinguishes statements from performatives? How might we establish a criterion in order to recognize the latter and study them? These questions are as easy to formulate as they are difficult to respond to. In the beginning Austin looked for a semantic criterion, delimiting a series of verbs that, because of their meanings, would have explicit performative implications – such as “swear,” “order” or “remind,” and he came classified them as verdictives, exercitives, commissives, behabitives and expositives. Nevertheless, it is immediately clear that these verbs, on numerous occasions, can be utilized without their implying any performativity at all (for example, if I say that “Frederick orders that we go down to eat,” my utterance is not performative, but merely descriptive), with the result that it would be necessary to add at least certain syntactic criteria, such as that the verb be in first person singular and in the active voice. Upon saying “I order” it seems that I would necessarily be realizing a performative… or perhaps not: there could be circumstances in which saying “I order…” does not imply any order at all, such as, for example, when we recite the words of another person or we pronounce them with a clearly ironic intention. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to use language to order something without using the verb “order” or any explicit synonym, not even an imperative (as with “Hands up!”). The semantic and syntactic criteria showed themselves to be ineffective when it came time to distinguish between performative and descriptive utterances. What initially seemed like a doable task in the short term gave way to

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the development of an entire linguistic discipline, pragmatics, which focused its attention not just on the grammatical or semantic aspects of language, but also on the context in which it is used, which is what – in the final analysis – will determine the value and the degree of realization of the linguistic acts. Nonetheless, with the terms posed in this way, Austin’s investigations did not appear to have borne the fruit expected: the distinction between descriptives and performatives, in his own words, “is not as clear as it might be” (1970: 246), since “Perhaps indeed there is no great distinction between statements and performative utterances” (1962a: 52). This didn’t make him give up his attempt: it was simply necessary to change the formulation of the problem, since perhaps the search for a distinction between descriptive and performative language was on the wrong track from the beginning.

Illocutionary forces The work of Austin, perhaps because of his premature death, offers us no complete and perfect philosophical theory; on the contrary, what we find in it is the very process of philosophizing, the road traversed by its author, a road whose interest does not reside in having gotten to a certain place, but rather in the journey itself. A road that can be traveled over the course of How to Do Things with Words, a posthumous recompilation of the lectures he gave in Harvard in 1955. In them Austin begins with the problem of the impossibility of distinguishing a performative with clarity and he ends by pointing to what he calls a theory of locutionary forces, which would help to distinguish in every utterance a series of acts that would constitute it in a solidary way: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts (1962a: 101 and ff.). Austin understands the locutionary act as the action of saying something, that is, the mere fact of speaking, which in turn has phonetic aspects (the pronunciation of sounds), phatic (when those sounds are furnished with a lexicon and a grammar) and rhetic (sounds that have sense and reference). Utterances carry an illocutionary force by which the speaker performs something upon saying what he says: by stating “I promise…” he makes a promise; on saying “I inaugurate the academic year…,” the academic year thereby has been inaugurated. This force, on occasions, is not indicated in an explicit way, which does not mean that it does not exist, or that it lacks effects. The effects of illocutionary force are determined by social conventions, such that if the conventions of justice did not exist, for example, a judge could not declare an accused person guilty: her uttering the words would not imply any illocutionary act at all. On the other hand, there is another type of effect that does not necessarily depend on social conventions in order to be real (although they can support themselves on conventions in order to bring them about): these are the perlocutionary effects, a concept that unites the other consequences



Chapter 1.  Austin: Language, truth and force

that uttering can lead to. Upon promising something I can persuade someone to believe in me and undertake a determined act; upon ordering that person to do something I can attain the result that my order be complied with, in which case it would also have perlocutionary effects, or else I can be disobeyed. Whether or not there exist conventions that justify them, the acts and the events that result from my words are effectively real of themselves. The main novelty of this approach resides in the fact that it is no longer a matter of distinguishing utterances that are merely descriptive from those which are performative; rather, every utterance can be described in function of these forces, whose existence and effects will have to be determined by the pragmatic context in which the language is utilized. It will be the conditions of the context that mark at which moment a promise can be considered to have been made, or under which conditions an inauguration is official and effective: conditions that have to do with the moment and place in which the act is performed, as well as the state the utterer and the receiver of the words are in. There are two questions of great importance that emerge from this proposal. On the one hand, it seemed initially that Austin’s task consisted in delimiting within the frontiers of descriptive language – seen up to then as the only philosophically relevant language – a distinct language, with performative implications. Now it seems instead that that formerly marginal language, the performative, has completely swallowed that which, in principle, lay outside of it, i.e. the descriptive or apophantic. The idea that there could be utterances that are purely descriptive, such that they completely lack illocutionary force and pragmatic conditions of realization, becomes inconceivable. Even when we describe reality, there is something that we do with the words: describe the world. What we need to do for the case of stating, and by the same token describing and reporting, is to take them a bit off their pedestal, to realize that they are speech-acts no less than all these other speech-acts that we have been mentioning and talking about as performative. […] ‘True’ and ‘false’ are just general labels for a whole dimension of different appraisals which have something or other to do with the relation between what we say and the facts. If, then, we loosen up our ideas of truth and falsity we shall see that statements, when assessed in relation to the facts, are not so very different after all from pieces of advice, warnings, verdicts, and so on.  (“Performative Utterances”, in 1970: 250–1)

What Austin points out here is that it is also necessary to comply with certain conditions of context in order for description to be taken as such in a discursive context. This is so because sentences may only be affirmed to be true or false when they take place in acts of uttering, and not in the abstract. And this is an idea that has incalculable consequences, since many philosophers of language began to believe

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that the pragmatic conditions of the utterance – ethical and social conditions included – constitutively affect the descriptive aspect of language, which until then had been thought to be free of such influences. It doesn’t seem as though there is a place, as the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus sought, for a language that, by itself, and due to its logical syntax, is able to represent the world: “The picture agrees with reality or not; it is right or wrong, true or false.” (2.21) “The proposition shows how things stand, if it is true. And it says, that they do so stand.” (4.022)

Propositions by themselves neither show nor say anything: it is persons, in concrete speech contexts, who show or say something. In this way, all representation, every figure, every proposition, even those which are supposedly the most aseptic and objective, are unavoidably affected by the contextual conditions, since their meaning can only refer to the world by way of the illocutionary force of the utterance in which it occurs. If knowledge is language – an idea that is a holdover from logical positivism – and language cannot be exhaustively analyzed through its syntax and its semantics, it seems inevitable that pragmatics will contaminate the very root of epistemology. In this way the road was opened both for some sort of cultural relativism – in which every context determines a world – as well as for a consensual theory of truth that aspires to universalism – where the pragmatic conditions of agreement determine the concept of objectivity itself.19 Austin himself shows that he was aware – despite his perseverance in humility and modesty – of the revolutionary force of his proposal: We have discussed the performative utterance and its infelicities. That equips us, we may suppose, with two shining new tools to crack the crib of reality maybe. It also equips us – it always does – with two shining new skids under our metaphysical feet. The question is how we use them.(“Performative Utterances”, in 1970: 241)20

The reality described by words ceases to be an objective representation of facts, and is instead the effect of linguistic utterances that cannot be understood independently of their pragmatic context. Nonetheless, this very notion of context – that 19. A good example of how Austin’s outlook can result in socio-cultural relativism – according to which, even if the gate is not opened to completely free play, the truth of facts resides in “nothing firmer than an agreement” – is found in Stanley E. Fish (1976: 1001–1025, collected and extended in his 1980). In contrast to this, Jürgen Habermas (1984) has developed a consensualist theory of truth, also as an explicit development of linguistic pragmatics. 20. Concerning the revolutionary force of Austin’s proposal, see the fascinating book by Shoshana Felman Le Scandale du corps parlant (1980), particularly pp. 23–27 and 83–95, where Felman opposes her posture to that of Émile Benveniste (1971), who seeks to maintain the strong division between constative and performative.



Chapter 1.  Austin: Language, truth and force

“total situation” in which the expression is uttered (1962a: 52) – will certainly turn out to be controversial, as we will see shortly.

Forms of infelicity Like some kind of negative theology, Austin’s method consists more in indicating what is not a full performative utterance than in pointing out positively what such emissions consist in. His obsession is to delimit and catalog the forms of infelicity, that is, the manners in which the linguistic act can be infelicitous. In the first place, he speaks about so-called “misfires,” in which the act is willed, but null. This could be due to a bad appeal to the procedure, because of which the act would be invalidated. This would either be because the procedure that the speaker seeks to perform does not exist (if, for instance, the speaker seeks to get divorced merely by pronouncing the words “I divorce you”), or because the circumstances in which the speaker seeks to realize the act are not in agreement with the commonly accepted convention (e.g. when a person seeks to designate someone for a determined position, without having the authority to do so). Or else it may be due to a poor execution of the act, which in this case would result in being a “flaw” (if, for example, I pronounce the words “I give you my house” without indicating which of the two houses that I own I am referring to); or, finally, to an incomplete execution of the procedure, which would be what Austin calls a “hitch” (such as when a person bets something, without the hearer having accepted the bet). The types of misfires are, therefore, the following: Misfires (act purported but void)

A Misinvocations (act disallowed)

A.1 No procedure

A.2 Wrong circumstances

B Misexecutions (act vitiated)

B.1 Flaws

B.2 Hitches

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In addition to misfires, Austin holds that there is another type of infelicity, which he terms abuses, in which, although the act is undertaken, it remains incomplete in some manner. There are cases of insincere acts – such as when I thank someone without really appreciating what she did at all – and there are other kinds of infractions and breaches where the agent’s behavior is not coherent with the speech act previously performed – such as when I welcome someone to my house but later cease to pay attention to her, treating her with discourtesy: C Abuses Act professed but hollow

C.1 Insincerities

C.2 Infractions or breaches

Regarding abuses, Austin is inclined to think that speech acts in those cases are in fact performed: a promise without the intention of fulfilling it, or a giving of thanks without real gratitude, are without a doubt performatives, since their illocutionary force is transmitted. However, in Austin’s opinion, using a metaphor that would provide a lot to talk about, these acts are void, empty; they are not fully realized because the intention, desire or belief is lacking that would have made them fully realized.

The completeness of the illocutionary act Now that I have described the general outline of Austin’s account, we are in a position to focus on the problem that Derrida would denounce later, giving rise to his disagreement with Searle: the full and complete realization of an illocutionary act appears to appeal to the truth of certain facts as an indispensable condition for its occurrence, without it being clear what position the states of consciousness of the speakers occupy among those given facts. It is in the fourth of his lectures at Harvard that Austin focused on the realization conditions of full acts – once again following that negative methodology, which begins with discarding void or empty acts. In the first place, regarding insincere acts (C.1), Austin notes that at least certain illocutionary acts demand as a condition of their realization that the speaker have certain sentiments (such as being happy



Chapter 1.  Austin: Language, truth and force

upon congratulating someone, or being sad upon communicating condolences), thoughts (such as believing that something is beneficial when recommending it to someone, or believing that someone is guilty when declaring her as such), and intentions (with regard to future actions such as promising, betting or declaring war). It is necessary to clearly distinguish those cases in which the speaker is mistaken from those in which she acts in an insincere manner, i.e. lying. This difference makes it possible that on saying something we can be in error without lying (as with another odd implication which Austin does not mention: we can lie while stating the truth; the speaker can be maintaining something that she considers false – and therefore she is lying – even when, unbeknownst to her, that which she considers false turns out to be true). As we have seen, the conditions of realization of an illocutionary act do not exclusively have to do with the present moment in which the act appears to be performed: in order to exclude cases of infractions (C.2), it is necessary that certain future acts be carried out, since otherwise the present act would be void or empty. For example, it is not clear what the “degree or type of infelicity” is that occurs when I do not fulfill a promise I have made; when I bid welcome to somebody and later behave rudely; when I attack a friend for doing something that I myself had counseled her to do; or when, after begging my interlocutor to undertake a certain action and, when she has become willing to do so, I later get angry when she does it. In the same way, one can identify the past conditions for the realization of certain acts, such as the awarding of a prize in order that I may congratulate the winner; or the death of a family member so that I can offer condolences. Austin, therefore, finds himself committed to something which seems so trivial that it would be hard even to discuss it: “for a certain performative utterance to be happy, certain statements have to be true” (1962a: 45), utterances that may refer to the present, past or future. Specifically, the conditions of context include subjective mental states, such as desires, beliefs or intentions, which must be true in order that the act may occur in its completeness. In this way, as Jonathan Culler pointed out, “Austin is led to reintroduce the notion, previously rejected, that the meaning of an utterance depends on the presence of a signifying intention in the consciousness of the speaker” (1982: 122).21 21. Stanley Cavell has criticized this reading of Austin, which gives intentionality a decisive role in the realization of the speech act (see 1994: 125). Raoul Moati, in contrast, has developed this idea, following Jocelyn Benoist. Despite having a certain sympathy with his reading, I cannot agree totally with Moati when he attributes to Austin a radical elimination of mental states as conditions of context of speech acts, in favor of external and conventional features (2009: 50–51). There is, without a doubt, a certain lack of confidence on Austin’s part at the moment of admitting the necessary and determining character of mental states for the effective realization of the act, as he made clear in his reading of Hippolytus; but it appears that these states continue to

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Austin makes certain interesting comments about the type of implication that exists between the illocutionary act and these conditions of context, an implication that is not merely tautological, nor of the type of presuppositions noted by Russell in his own theory of definite descriptions. On the contrary, it is principally a matter of pragmatic implications, like those that had already been pointed out by G. E. Moore when he held, for example, that there is some kind of contradiction in the utterance “the cat is on the mat, but I don’t believe it.” The facts described in this situation are perfectly compatible from a logical point of view: it is imaginable, for example, that there is a situation in which the cat is on the mat, but where I think it is on the windowsill. The contradiction appears when I affirm, in an inconsistent manner, that, although the cat is on the map, I believe the contrary. Were this the case, I ought not affirm it (just as I ought not say something like the following: “I promise that I will come tomorrow, but I have no intention of coming”). The conditions of sincerity affect both the act of promising and the act of describing: the situation when I promise something but do not have the intention of fulfilling it is very similar to the one where I state that something is true, but I do not believe it. In this way, as I noted earlier, the descriptive use of language acquires connotations of moral responsibility – since sincerity is a strictly moral concept – proper to illocutionary acts. The requirement that certain conditions of context (past, present or future, internal or external) concur in order that illocutionary acts may be realized is the general question, a specific aspect of which will turn out to be problematic for Derrida: the question of the type of language called “parasitic” by Austin, such as that used in a play, when one cites the words of others, or when speaking with irony. In these cases, which Austin considers not to be normal, there are conditions of external context and, above all, of internal context which are not fulfilled in the habitual sense, so that the intentions made manifest in the utterance can be different from those usually expected, opposed, or may even be completely absent. In order to simplify his analysis, Austin had decided to exclude these possibilities from the outset, and he did so in a passage that will be transcendental for our study; for that reason, I would like to cite it at length:

be necessary for the act’s full realization, since Austin, despite himself, is in need of an extralinguistic criterion in order to distinguish sincere acts from the insincere. An act carried out in conformity with the established conventions, but in the absence of appropriate desires, beliefs and intentions, could be effectively realized, but it would constitute an abuse, and would remain void. Nonetheless, it is certain that the ambiguity of Austin’s position provides cause for the development of more conventionalist or more intentionalist readings. That which Searle develops, as we will see further along, unites both tendencies via the so-called principle of expressibility.



Chapter 1.  Austin: Language, truth and force

[A]s utterances our performatives are also heir to certain other kinds of ill which infect all utterances. And these likewise, though again they might be brought into a more general account, we are deliberately at present excluding. I mean, for example, the following: a performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. This applies in a similar manner to any and every utterance – a sea-change in special circumstances. Language in such circumstances is in special ways – intelligibly – used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use – ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language. All this we are excluding from consideration. Our performative utterances, felicitous or not, are to be understood as issued in ordinary circumstances. (1962a: 22)

This exclusion, even though it is methodical and transitory, may be disconcerting: if, as Austin says, this type of deficiencies may affect all utterances, how can he direct his analysis towards supposedly “normal” utterances, those in which these deficiencies or etiolations supposedly have no place? Austin’s strategy of negative definition, by which he moves towards that which he seeks – the complete act – by defining it against the background of what it is not – the infelicities, abuses and other empty places in language – seems arguable, given that we have no clear-cut concept of what the perfectly realized act is. What does it consist in? If the context is extended in time and space until it becomes unmanageable, if it implies both that which is subjective and mental as well as the physical and behavioral, would it be possible that a complete illocutionary act ever occurs? Would it be possible, therefore, to really distinguish it from those cases that Austin seeks to exclude from the beginning – quotations, performances, recitations, soliloquies or jokes? Or would the exclusion have been an unhappy error, a trap that Austin fell into, having been unable to escape from his first approach?

Return to truth by way of context It is worth asking, finally, whether Austin truly established a terrain for language in which, as he himself points out, it would be possible to forget, “for once and for a while, that other curious question ‘Is it true?’ ”. His goal was to describe certain uses of language that were on the margin of its descriptive and truth-bearing uses – uses which had taken a central position in the Tractatus – calling upon a kind of validity that does not reside in its fit with a state of things. Confronting the question of the truth of language, insofar as it supposedly fits an objective reality, Austin pointed to the question of “force,” in principle like an alternative mode of the functioning of speech and, in the final analysis, like a constitutive aspect of it. “Can we?” asked Austin: can we really stay at the margin of the truth-bearing aspect of language

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in order to explore its dynamic and energetic aspect? Is it possible to study force, avoiding the question of the truth? After a careful analysis of the pragmatic implications of the illocutionary act, it seems to me that the question of force has ended up collapsing back into the question of truth: in order that the area of illocutionary force function, Austin said, it is necessary that certain utterances be true. We could even say that it is sufficient that certain utterances be true, meaning that pragmatics would end up falling back into semantics: the question of force would become a derived aspect, gobbled up by the area of truth, and the realization of a promise would be something identical to the abbreviated description of a complex state of affairs. Were this true, it would be the performative that would fall to the side of the descriptive, making Austin’s initial move impossible, since in the end, the truth – a pure description of reality just as it is – would impose its own norm upon the force of the performative. In that case, it could be said that the efforts of Austin did not result in his proposal escaping the system of the Tractatus, but rather that it remained in its interior, like an immense corollary. In turn, performability would have remained a derived modality, essentially superfluous and redundant, of describing the truth of the world, considered as the totality of facts that are the case. Now, in order that a complete description of the complete speech act may be carried out, all its conditions of realization will have to be, at least ideally, fully existing as tangible facts. This is already difficult for external conditions, despite being observable intersubjectively and accessible from an impersonal perspective, because these conditions, as we have seen, extend themselves indefinitely in time and space. But it is the internal mental conditions – those beliefs, desires and intentions that only one’s own conscience seems to be a spectator to – that lead to an intractable problem: at the moment of definitively saturating the notion of context, defining it with clear-cut boundaries, one gets the impression that Hippolytus has finally gotten away with his trickery – since it would be strictly in his hands to verify the complete occurrence of the act. It is that allegedly closed character of the context – and the methodical exclusion of those situations which could leave it definitively open – which will be an object of debate in the confrontation between Derrida and Austin. At this point, it seems that we have reached an impasse in our approach to Austin’s thought, since there is no unanimity among the commentators about what his position on this issue was. On the one hand, building on the criticisms of Derrida, we find Stanley Fish, who holds that the Austinian tendency to exhaustively analyze the necessary and sufficient conditions of the context of the speech act has the ultimate effect of disassembling the original ground-breaking character of his proposal, making it fall back into a traditional factualist metaphysics:



Chapter 1.  Austin: Language, truth and force

[A]ll that will have happened is that one self-interpreting entity will have been replaced by another; rather than sentences that declare their own meaning, we will now have contexts that declare their own meaning. (1982, p. 708)22

But, on the other hand, there is the reading that José Medina, following Cavell, Felman and Buttler, has called “The New Austin,” (2006: 144–59) which interprets the idea of context as being something essentially open and indefinite, always susceptible to being revised and, therefore, not identifiable with a closed enumeration of happenings which, à la the Tractatus, could definitely be the case. The issue is that there are passages of Austin that permit interpreting him in one sense or the other, so that it becomes easy to let oneself be carried off by personal inclination at the moment of determining which of the two Austins is the authentic one. Is this New Austin anything more than a recent creation by these interpreters; or, at least, does it reflect a facet of his thought that would have never come into the light, had the Derridean critique not been made? These are, without a doubt, difficult questions to respond to, above all because of the premature death of the author, which prevented him from responding in a more explicit fashion to the problem of the saturability of context. Others, however, would do it for him.

22. This would make clear Austin’s membership in the analytical tradition, with which he would share its most fundamental ontological schemas. As Sáez Rueda has shown (2002), these always point towards an ontology of factuality which sees the totality of the real as being a set of empirical facts, susceptible of being collected together in laws.

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chapter 2

Searle The intentionality of the mental Austin according to Searle: Speech act theory Thanks to a Rhodes scholarship, the American John Rogers Searle had the opportunity to do his doctoral thesis in Oxford, on the topic of “sense and reference.” The premature death of Austin, one of the most charismatic professors in Oxford in those years, deprived Searle of his most stimulating influence. Having decided to develop Austin’s incipient intuitions – as suggestive as they were disorganized – into a systematic theory, Searle resolved to write Speech Acts. This book, published in 1969, presents a complete theory that articulates and systematizes the Austinian notion of illocutionary act. This systematic approach is what best characterizes the work of Searle, an author with an admirable capacity to not get lost in the diversity of cases and situations and to pursue, above all, conceptual coherence. With respect to his manner of approaching the problem of language, Searle says that he “places a heavy reliance on the intuitions of the native speaker,” (1969: 15) an attitude very different from Austin’s, who, as we have seen, developed a method that was more based on the cautious advance of dialogue than on the subjective intuition of a single individual.23 The aims of each of these methods are also, in spite of appearances, different in important ways: Austin’s way of approaching ordinary language was, as I noted earlier, a way of looking for philosophy’s “first word.” Analyzing ordinary language was for him a kind of fieldwork in which the thinker could gather together – in a quasi-empirical way – a kind of hidden wisdom transmitted from generation to 23. Searle even gives preference to the intuitions of individual native speakers over the statistical collection of empirical data about the use of a given language. He holds, for example, that upon analyzing the logical structure of conversations, “where theory is concerned the native speaker takes priority over the historical record. We are only willing to accept and use the transcriptions of conversations in our native culture to the extent that we find them acceptable or at least possible conversations (…). To be of theoretical interest, the ‘empirical’ facts have to accord with our own inner abilities and not conversely.” (“Conversation,” in J. R. Searle et al. 1992: 19–20). In a broadly similar vein, Stanley Cavell holds that native speakers “do not, in general, need evidence for what is said in the language; they are the source of such evidence. It is from them that the descriptive linguist takes the corpus of utterances on the basis of which he will construct a grammar of that language” (1976: 4).

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generation. In contrast, Searle’s aim is to establish an a priori conceptual framework which would reveal the conditions of possibility of speech acts. He is not particularly interested in the way we ordinarily use language, but rather on the ideal, theoretical structure that makes its utilization possible. In order to achieve this, defending the maxim “without abstraction and idealization there is no systematization” (1969, p. 56), Searle decided to follow Austin in leaving aside the marginal cases, always defective and imperfect, in search of a positive definition of the complete speech act. The point of departure of Searle’s theory is the definition of language as a particular mode of behavior governed by rules (1969, p. 31). As a result, the theory of speech acts turns out to be a part of the theory of action. What is peculiar about linguistic action is that it permits the transmission of a certain content that at the same time has an intentional character, that is, it refers to something in the world (although not all intentionality is linguistic, as we will see later). The procedure to follow in order to understand speech acts will therefore consist in making the rules of the game that constitute linguistic action explicit, i.e. the norms that are followed – or rather should be followed – by the speaker in standard cases, when she uses the language in her daily life.

The principle of expressibility In contrast to Austin, who followed a strictly negative procedure when approaching the question of speech acts (describing their possibilities of infelicity or lack of fulfillment, but never defining what in fact constitutes, properly speaking, the felicitous speech act), in Searle we do encounter, from the very beginning, a positive formulation of the felicitous speech act: It is in principle possible for every speech act one performs or could perform to be uniquely determined by a given sentence (or set of sentences), given the assumptions that the speaker is speaking literally and that the context is appropriate.  (1969: 18)

In order that the existence of this kind of sentence be conceivable, Searle postulates that it is “an analytic truth about language that whatever can be meant can be said” (1969: 17). He is not referring to its being sayable thanks to the genius of a poet who turns to unusual metaphors in order to break the rules of language. Rather, in the opinion of Searle, any content whatsoever can be said in a literal and direct manner. When literality and correctness of context co-occur, the utterance of a given sentence would itself be the full and complete realization of the speech act in question. Searle gives shape to this idea through what he calls the “principle of



Chapter 2.  Searle: The intentionality of the mental

expressibility,” according to which, for all speakers and every possible meaning, there exists an exact verbal expression of this meaning which the speaker can use (or, more succinctly, “whatever can be meant, can be said”). The speaker might employ that expression, or it might be the case that the expression has not yet been invented. Or it could also be the case that, although the speaker possesses that linguistic instrument, she won’t be able to make herself understood to the hearer, or to produce in him the perlocutionary effects that she desires – such as moving or touching her emotionally, or convincing her of something. Just as Wittgenstein held at the end of his Tractatus that whatever can be said can be said with clarity, Searle holds in Speech Acts that whatever can be meant can be said literally.24 There are no limits that would make a particular content inexpressible, or that would oblige us to express it in an indirect or metaphoric manner: such limits could only be transitory and open to being overcome. The notion of literality is linked, in Searle’s work, to that of convention. His views on this point are the fruit of the discussion and re-elaboration of the analysis that Grice (1957) proposed for communicative acts. The idea that Searle (1969: 42) defends in this context is that, independently of what a concrete speaker might want to say through his utterance, the words uttered mean what they mean because of the semantic conventions of the language to which they belong. His example is especially clarifying: an American soldier is captured by Italian soldiers during the Second World War. The American seeks to convince his captors that he is a German soldier, and that therefore they are on the same side. However, he only knows a few phrases in German, verses from a poem that he had studied in high school. Hoping his captors know even less German than he, he utters with conviction the verse of Goethe: “Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühen?” His intention is to make the Italians believe that he is saying something similar to “I am a German soldier, I’m on your side”; however, even if he achieved his aim, that would still not make his sentence mean anything other than “Do you know the land where the lemon trees

24. Despite the strong similarity between Searle’s principle of expressibility and proposition 7 of the Tractatus, there are important differences between the two claims. To start with, the Wittgensteinian idea of “clarity” need not coincide with the Searlean idea of “literality.” Second, and most importantly, Searle’s thesis is, in a sense, much stronger than Wittgenstein’s, since the former assumes that whatever the speaker may mean can be said, while the latter only holds that what can be said, can be said in a particular manner. The author of the Tractatus would probably reject the principle of expressibility, since it would abolish the distinction between saying (sagen) and showing (zeigen) (4.1212). In his opinion, there is something we cannot say, even if we mean to say it: something which we can only show, the mystical, “whereof one cannot speak” (7). And it is clear that, in Wittgenstein’s opinion, it is possible to try to say that which cannot be said, since he recommends vigorously that we not do so.

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bloom?” In other words: the literal meaning of the phrase does not depend on the individual intentions of the speaker, but rather on the semantic conventions of the language used.25 According to Searle, the existence of literal meaning, understood as a settled convention, allows us to distinguish the meaning of the phrase from the meaning of the utterance. Let’s look at another example: at a theater, a speaker may say “What a fascinating play!” with an ironic intention, meaning to say that the play is tedious and boring; in that case, the meaning of the utterance, for any hearer that grasps its ironic intention, would be opposed to the meaning that the phrase would have by itself. It is not the phrase that is ironic in itself, but rather the utterance in which it occurs. There is no way for the word “fascinating” to mean “tedious” or “boring,” no matter how much it is possible to use it to communicate that meaning. Equally, an utterance cannot, of itself, have any metaphorical meaning: the meaning of the expression is determined by the conventions that grant it literal meaning. If we find a metaphorical value for it apart from that meaning, it will belong to a concrete utterance, not to the sentence or expression itself, and not to the language as an institutionalized code. It is the conditions of context which permit us to determine whether or not the sentence and the utterance coincide in their meaning. But, in case they differ, what the principle of expressibility points out is that it is always possible to imagine a situation where they do coincide. That is, whatever has been expressed with irony or metaphorically could have been said in a literal manner too. Thanks to the acceptance of this principle it is possible to hold that cases where the speaker does not say exactly what he means – the principal kinds of cases of which are nonliteralness, vagueness, ambiguity, and incompleteness – are not theoretically essential to linguistic communication. (1969: 20)

These cases are methodologically excluded because, once the existence of that exact sentence is secured, we can claim that the rules for uttering that sentence in a literal manner are equivalent to the rules for the performance of the speech act in question. What the principle of expressibility holds is that the vague, ambiguous or metaphorical character of an expression – at least when we are pursuing a theoretical study of the structure of the speech acts – is an optional feature, which can provisionally can be left aside. Standard cases are by themselves complex enough, and there is no need to make them even harder to account for by trying to understand abnormal cases at the same time. This makes it a good strategy to begin research 25. The centrality that convention has in Searle’s theory of speech acts was famously criticized by P. F. Strawson (1964). The tradition that is probably dominant in contemporary pragmatics concedes, following Grice, a lesser importance to the notion of convention, as can be seen in the influential work by Sperber and Wilson (1986). See also Avramides (2005).



Chapter 2.  Searle: The intentionality of the mental

with the central or core cases, leaving for later the study of the non-literal usages. In reality, these usages are parasitic on the standard cases, since in theory they can be reduced to those cases, thanks to the principle of expressibility. In this way we also avoid a second problem: on many occasions the beliefs, desires or intentions of speakers are not directly and literally represented in their words. However, this intangible character of mental states is, in principle, analyzable from a rigorous and logical point of view, if we consider them as being literally expressed by the corresponding speech act. For example, instead of attempting to define what the intention of going to work tomorrow consists in, we can study this intention as being the exact sense of the expression “I think I will go to work tomorrow,” used in a literal manner and in the appropriate context.26 Searle is able thereby to close the notion of context, firming up the idea of mental states. The beliefs, desires or intentions that accompany the speech act, which in Austin were already an essential aspect of its complete performance, cease to seem vague and intangible, having been fixed by the literal meaning of the linguistic expressions.27

Insincere promises In Speech Acts Searle focuses on the case of the promise as a privileged example to apply his methodology to – a methodology which consists on openly idealizing the issue in order to analyze its essential features:

26. Certain commentators claim that this proposal makes the theory of speech acts depend on semantic conventions, giving the impression that in the end these semantic conventions govern the theory of speech acts itself (see Burkhardt 1990 or Recanati 1987: 26). In that same sense, Eduardo Rabossi notes that “[t]he illocutionary force is, definitely, a part of the semantic meaning. Searle claims to have attained the confluence of the semantic perspective and the doctrine of speech acts. In reality, he has subsumed the former to the latter.” (1999: 65). But the problem can be turned around, if we ask ourselves about the origin of the semantic conventions themselves: for Searle is semantics independent of pragmatics? Although the literal meaning of the phrase may be independent of the use that is made of it by a concrete speaker, what would define this literal meaning, if not the use that the speakers of a language make of it? 27. Searle’s proposal seeks in this way to discard a priori the problem that breathes life into contemporary hermeneutics: the intangible character of meaning. In this sense, says Manfred Frank in a pertinent comment, Searle cannot “exclude the structural possibility (cannot exclude it from his theory) that the ‘pre-expressive intention’ and the utterance made are not congruent with one another,” which does not, nevertheless, prevent Searle from insisting “on this sameness if he does not want to give up the claim that the intention can be mastered by the linguistic (and institutional) convention” (Frank 1997: 132–133).

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certain forms of analysis, especially analysis into necessary and sufficient conditions, are likely to involve (in varying degrees) idealization of the concept analyzed. In the present case, our analysis will be directed at the center of the concept of promising. I am ignoring marginal, fringe, and partially defective promises.  (1969, p. 55)

His formalization of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the realization of a promise is as follows: Given that a speaker S utters a sentence T in the presence of a hearer H, then, in the literal utterance of T, S sincerely and non-defectively promises that p to H if and only if the following conditions 1–9 obtain (Speech Acts, pp. 94 and ff.): (1) Normal input and output conditions obtain. In this condition Searle includes aspects of the context that are quite heterogeneous: for example, he refers to the absence of physical impediments that make the transmission of sound difficult – such as excessive ambient noise, or deafness in the hearer – together with the requirement that the language in question be serious and literal – excluding language as used in theater, teaching, recitation, metaphor or sarcasm. The truth is that these two types of conditions appear to have little in common, beyond being grouped under the ambiguous label of “normal conditions of input and output.” (2) S expresses the proposition that p in the utterance of T. There is no speech act unless a proposition is expressed by someone in an utterance. (3) In expressing that p, S predicates a future act A of S. There is no promising about past actions, since it is no longer possible to change what happened. Similarly, it is impossible to promise that another person will do something (at most it would be possible to promise that one will do what is in one’s hands to get the other person to perform an action, but it is not possible to promise somebody else’s action). (4)  H would prefer S’s doing A to his not doing A, and S believes H would prefer his doing A to his not doing A. The difference between a promise and a threat is that with the former the action indicated is desired by the hearer, while with the latter she fears the outcome. The disposition of the hearer is not the only thing that has influence: what the speaker believes about that disposition is also crucially important. (5) It is not obvious to both S and H that S will do A in the normal course of events. If this condition is not met, the promise might produce an unusual perlocutionary effect: a certain anxiety in the hearer upon realizing that a particular act, which was taken for granted, may in reality not take place (for example, it is probable that an utterance such as “I’m just going out to get cigarettes, but I promise I’ll come back” might cause more worry than tranquility in the hearer).



Chapter 2.  Searle: The intentionality of the mental

(6) S intends to do A. This is the important condition of sincerity: the speaker must believe that it is possible to perform A and must have the intention of doing so in the future. It should be immediately obvious that this is a problematic condition, and I will return to it soon. (7) S intends that the utterance of T will place her under an obligation to do A. This is the essential condition, which defines what the realization of the promise consists in. The agent is morally constrained to perform the deed as a consequence of her utterance, which is the reason for her being under obligation: the utterance is no mere concurrent factor. (8)  S seeks to produce in H the knowledge (K) that the utterance of T counts as placing S under the obligation to perform A (by way of the knowledge that H has of the meaning of T). This condition is the fruit of Searle’s reworking of the Gricean concept of meaning (which I will not discuss here, since it is not fundamental to my argument). The speech act not only seeks to establish an obligation for the future, but also seeks recognition on the part of the hearer of the intentions of the speaker, via the use of language (that is, by her knowledge of the semantics of the language, and not by inferences of some other type). (9)  The semantic rules of the dialect spoken by S and H are such that T is correctly and sincerely uttered if and only if conditions 1–8 obtain. Here Searle closes off the possibility that idiosyncratic aspects unique to the dialect of the speaker might convert an apparent promise into another type of linguistic act.

The conditions Searle describes are of a highly heterogeneous character, referring to aspects as diverse as the physical environment, the mental situation of the speakers and the linguistic code they share. The objective of the analysis is to enumerate the necessary and sufficient conditions for a promise to occur as a fully-realized speech act. As a result, Searle finds himself forced to reformulate condition 6, in order to include as effective promises those in which the speaker does not have the intention to comply with what has been promised. This brings us back to Austin’s initial concern that when someone gives their word, it is the word itself that obligates. Despite the fact that Searle still believes, as Austin did, that there is a certain emptiness in insincere promises, he accepts them equally as speech acts that produce obligation. The condition of sincerity must thus be reformulated: (6b) S intends that the utterance of T make her responsible to have the intention to do A.

The question is no longer whether S in fact has the intention to fulfill her promise, but rather that she make herself responsible for having this intention. The condition of sincerity is thereby substituted: it is no longer the case that the speaker must

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sincerely express her own mental state; rather, she makes herself responsible, in the presence of the other person, for being in that state – in the case of the promise, having the intention to perform the promised action. In this way Searle seeks to leave Hippolytus with no escape: if in fact his tongue swore it, then he also obligates himself to swear it with his heart.28 This conclusion, which Searle comes to by way of an analysis of the case of promises, can equally be applied to other types of speech acts. For example, in the case of congratulating someone for winning a prize, the speaker obligates herself to feel good wishes and to consider the hearer worthy of the prize. In the case of an order, the speaker makes herself responsible for having the desire to see that order fulfilled. And in the case of an affirmation, the speaker makes herself responsible for having the belief that what has been affirmed is true. In this way, via the condition of sincerity, every speech act is represented as being the expression of a certain intentional mental state. In the performance of each illocutionary act with a propositional content, we express a certain Intentional state with that propositional content, and that Intentional state is the sincerity condition of that type of speech act. […] All of these connections, between illocutionary acts and expressed Intentional sincerity condition of the speech act are internal; that is, the expressed intentional state is not just an accompaniment of this performance of the speech act. The performance of the speech act is necessarily an expression of the corresponding intentional state.  (Searle 1979b: 78)

Without a doubt, the utterance can be sincere or insincere, but that is not an obstacle for the speech act expressing the intentional state in question: It is always possible to lie, or otherwise perform an insincere speech act. But a lie or other insincere speech act consists in performing a speech act, and thereby expressing an intentional state, where one does not have the intentional state that one expresses. (Searle 1983: 9–10)29

So, the difference introduced in condition 6b implies an apparently trivial transformation, from which Searle does not appear to extract any greater consequences, but which is not lacking in controversy. In order that somebody be able to take responsibility for something, it must be in her power to realize the act, and her responsibility may not be extended beyond the limits of that capacity. In particular, if a speech act implies taking on the responsibility for having a particular intention, 28. Furthermore, Searle also eliminates the reference to sincerity in condition 9 (1969: 61). 29. Concerning the distinction between “being committed to having an intention” and “actually having the intention,” see (Searle 1989).



Chapter 2.  Searle: The intentionality of the mental

a particular desire, or a particular belief, the speaker must be in the condition of knowing whether she is in the given mental state, and even to alter her mental state voluntarily so that she be so. That is to say, Searle’s speech act theory rests on the authority of the first person perspective, according to which every subject has a certain privileged access to her own mental states, and is a rational agent with the capacity to change those states. As a result, in order to find the grounds for his theory of speech acts, Searle had to take a journey towards the philosophy of mind.

The turn to the mind During the ’30s and ’40s a pragmatic turn developed in Anglo-American philosophy – a turn I have already analyzed – when the center of attention moved from logically perfect language to ordinary, day to day language. Searle holds that in the ’70s and ’80s another sort of turn came about, which directed the attention of analytic philosophers towards the philosophy of mind. Right from its origins the pragmatic turn had paid special attention to questions of the mind, a focus which is much more marked in the “second” Wittgenstein than in Austin. Wittgenstein took a position that is sometimes called antimentalist: he avoided identifying mental states with internal events. Such an identification would imply that there were, apart from the facts describable in an impersonal and objective way, another series of mysterious events observable only from the perspective of the first person. In the wake of Wittgenstein, although in a more explicit and systematic way, Gilbert Ryle held that the mind is not a kind of substance or res cogitans, as Descartes defined it; instead, mental vocabulary constitutes a way of describing observable behavior in human beings (Ryle 2002).30 When talking in terms of beliefs, desires and intentions, we need not believe that these are facts that occur in the inner theater of the mind of a subject. On the contrary, saying that someone has, for example, a particular desire, would consist, according to Ryle, in assigning that subject a certain predisposition to act in a determined way. In an extremely imprecise association, we tend to identify the antimentalist attitude of Wittgenstein and Ryle with the behaviorist current in psychology. Both postures share the same reticence to consider the first-person perspective – that is, the intimate knowledge that every subject allegedly has of her own mental life – as being a solid epistemic source for understanding the mind. Nonetheless, 30. The posture may perhaps be understood better by a rough analogy with Aristotelian hylemorphism: just as, according to Aristotle, the soul is not a substance independent from the body, but rather is its form, for Ryle discourse about the mental doesn’t refer to anything distinct from behavior.

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the motives that prompt them to reject this perspective are profoundly different. Wittgenstein’s and Ryle’s reticence to accept a “Cartesian theater” is influenced by philosophical and linguistic considerations: they hold that it is an error to establish the ontology of the mental in a Cartesian manner, and that we must reinterpret the linguistic expressions that lead to such nonsense. In contrast, the reasons alleged for behaviorism in psychology are generally of an epistemological character: the fear of accepting as a datum something that is only observable by an individual. Authors like Wittgenstein and Ryle, on the one hand, are commonly called logical behaviorists, since their effort takes place in the area of linguistic analysis (although it would probably be more appropriate to call them ontological behaviorists); the behavioral trend in psychology, on the other hand, is usually labeled as methodological behaviorism (their denial of the inner space of the mind is an effect of their epistemic methodological position). It was under the influence of this latter proposal that it was argued for many years that the mind is a kind of opaque black box: we can only scientifically study the inputs that we feed into it and the outputs that it returns to us, i.e. the stimuli and its responses. Internal events were thus considered to be a mystery – or even a mere chimera invented by popular psychology – whose nature and functioning are inaccessible to the scientific method. The explosion of studies about Artificial Intelligence – fundamentally based on the impulse that Alan Turing gave to the discipline in the late forties and early fifties – presented a new possibility of triumphing over blackbox-ism and gaining access to the mystery of the mind. First, Turing demonstrated the possibility of designing a machine that is able to compute – using the data it is given – through a program that determines the possible internal states of the apparatus, in order to obtain certain desired results. These internal states, definable in computational terms, would be the equivalent, for the machine, of the unobservable mental states that were exorcised by the behaviorists. Between the input and the output there would be something that we can speak about, something analyzable from an aseptic and objective point of view: the program of the machine. Upon considering that this program fulfills a function similar to that of mental states – that is, to mediate between the stimulus and the response – the possibility came about of extrapolating computational analysis to the area of psychology, a change that gave rise to the so-called cognitive revolution. The “Turing machine,” the ancestor to today’s computers, can not only perform mathematical calculations: it can also reproduce any computable process, whether it be a game of chess or an everyday conversation. The fact that the speech act is definable – as Searle himself proposed – in terms of behavior governed by rules made it seem feasible that – just as computers can participate in certain games – it would be possible to program a complete simulation of the use of language. This idea led to one of Alan Turing’s fundamental contributions: his idea that a test of



Chapter 2.  Searle: The intentionality of the mental

imitation – later known as the “Turing test” – would be sufficient to know whether a machine is in fact able to think. In the face of the difficulty of defining the concept of thought and the doubts that arose about how to evaluate the achievements of Artificial Intelligence, Turing (1950) proposed that we establish an observable criterion for deciding whether or not a mind is present. This criterion should not be influenced by aspects that cannot be sensibly postulated as being mandatory conditions of thought, such as facial gestures, the intonation of the language or gesticulation. Accepting that a machine does not have to be able to develop these latter capacities in order that thoughts be attributed to it, the Turing test focuses on what is essential: conversation. Basically, what Turing held is that at the moment in which a machine can maintain a conversation with a person without her being able to discern whether her interlocutor is a human being or a computer, we will have sufficient grounds for saying that the machine is, in fact, thinking. If the machine attains the ability to imitate the verbal behavior of a human being, there will be no other option, according to Turing, than to admit that one is dealing with an intelligent being that is able, in fact, to think like a human. The analogy is as simple as it is effective: we would not say that a computer appears to defeat a champion of chess acting as though it plays chess; it seems much more natural to say that the machine, in fact, plays and wins. In the same way, we would not say that, if it were feasible to build a simulator of conversation that cannot be distinguished from a human being, that this machine would be acting as though it were speaking: on the contrary, it would in fact be performing speech acts. And these, as we have just seen, imply the concurrence of certain internal mental states as the condition of performance (or something even more complex: the capacity to take on the responsibility for being in these mental states). The seminal ideas of the Turing machine and the Turing test gave rise, several years later, to the development of Functionalism in the philosophy of mind. This was a heterogeneous school that assumed as a model for understanding the relationship between mind and brain the simile of the software and hardware of a computer.31 The particularity of the Turing machine resides in the fact that its physical realization in one or another kind of material is completely indifferent, a characteristic termed “multiple realizability”: a single design for a Turing machine can be realized in silicon chips, air valves, balls of metal or any other material that we might think of. What is fundamental is that, given determined inputs, we can, as a function of the internal states of the machine, obtain certain determined outputs. It would not therefore be the hardware, the physical realization of the machine, 31. The paper by Hilary Putnam “Minds and machines” (1960) is frequently considered to be a key text in the genesis of functionalism – although its author would later become a prominent critic of this movement.

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that would determine its mental character, but rather the software or programming that the machine implements. It would be indifferent whether the hardware that realizes the thinking is composed of silica chips or by a network of neurons: the mind would not be identified with the matter, but rather with the computational function carried out by the system in a process of interchange of information with the environment. In this way it would be possible, according to functionalism, to maintain the difference between body and mind without following into a mysterious Cartesian dualism that would see them as irreconcilable substances. There is nothing mysterious in the difference between the hardware of a computer and its software, just as there should not be any mysterious relation between the brain and the mental states it is in. And, for the same motives, if the functionalist hypothesis were true, nothing would stand in the way of minds being implemented by artificial computation systems in the future, just as they are implemented today by biological brains.

Intrinsic intentionality and the Background Despite Turing’s optimism, the hopes that computers would be able to think as we do were dashed nearly 30 years ago, when John Searle had the idea of designing his somewhat peculiar “Chinese Room.”32 The goal of this well-known thought experiment was to demonstrate that the mere manipulation of symbols in accordance with pre-established formal rules is not sufficient for developing an artificial intelligence in a strong sense, i.e. to create a mind that is similar to the human mind. The experiment consists in the following: a. We take a subject that does not understand the Chinese language, for example, Searle himself. b. We put the experimental subject in a room that has two openings: one for input and another for output, through which texts written in Chinese are passed. c. We furnish the room with an instruction manual, written in English (a language that the subject knows), which provides purely syntactic rules for manipulating chains of Chinese characters (i.e. based exclusively on the form of the characters and their relative positions). Following the instructions permits offering a perfectly coherent response to any well-formed input, similar to what one might expect from any randomly chosen native Chinese speaker.

32. The first time this argument appeared in writing was in (Searle 1980). There are also other versions by Searle himself in (1984), (1992) and (Preston and Mark Bishop, eds. 2002: 51–69).



Chapter 2.  Searle: The intentionality of the mental

It is difficult to imagine that the rules of the instruction manual could be purely formal and syntactic, but this is where the force of the argument lies: Searle, inside the room, only manipulates signs, without having any knowledge whatsoever about what they signify, that is to say, without knowing what the external referent is of the characters that he uses. He receives texts whose meaning he doesn’t know, treats them as mere scribbles to which, thanks to the manual, he makes other scribbles correspond, which he then returns via the “out” slot. If the book of instructions is sufficiently good, and Searle sufficiently skilled, any Chinese interlocutor outside of the room will become convinced that the test subject inside the room has understood the text he was given through the slot, and that he is maintaining a genuine conversation, grasping the meaning of what is said to him. But, no matter how convinced that the Chinese interlocutor may be, Searle can assure her that the subject inside the box has no idea what the characters he uses refer to. He understands absolutely nothing: he only manipulates signs. This thought experiment is of interest for the discussion about artificial intelligence because computers, in principle, are only able to manipulate signs with syntactic criteria. But semantics, says Searle, cannot be reproduced in a computational system based on exclusively syntactic principles. Without a semantics, the signs lack referents and, in a strict sense, cannot even be said to truly be signs. Computers, no matter how powerful and fast they may come to be, will never be able to leave their own particular Chinese rooms, since they will not be able to grasp that the signs they use point to something distinct from themselves, that is, that they are intentional. The notion of intentionality (which will appear repeatedly over the course of this book in distinct contexts) is assumed by Searle to be a defining characteristic of the human mind. Intentionality is transferred in a deferred manner to certain objects in the world which, starting from that moment, acquire a kind of “derived intentionality.” Consider the following example:

The arrow, of itself, does not point towards the circle that is positioned to its right. Properly speaking, the arrow is nothing more than an ink mark on the paper; it is only by convention that we assume it to be a signal that refers to whatever is on its right side. Of itself, the arrow is not intentional; rather its intentionality is loaned to it by our minds, which interpret this line of ink as being a minimum unit of meaning. In contrast to marks of ink, mental states are, according to Searle, intrinsically intentional, i.e. they do not depend upon anything other than themselves in order to point towards something outside of themselves. My belief that America was

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discovered in the 15th century is something intrinsically intentional, since it refers to a time and place distinct from those in which this belief comes about – in the Europe of the 21st century. My desire to eat the steak that I ordered, although it is something that occurs in my brain, intrinsically points to something that – at least for the moment – is not physically inside my brain: the steak itself. Books, maps, names, shopping lists, etc.: all of these have intentionality, but only in a derived manner, since these entities of themselves do not refer to anything. It is the intentionality of our minds that makes them be intentional: our language can only represent the world if we use it. An entire language, with all of its semantic conventions, cannot signify anything, properly speaking, unless there are speakers that use it. This is a definitive rejection of the posture of the Tractatus, which sought to justify the referential character of language by its isomorphism with the world. In fact, no matter how much language appears structurally to be like the facts of the world, it does not refer to them intrinsically, unless this language is being used by someone. Taking up again the distinction established earlier between the meaning of a sentence and the meaning of the utterance, we can say that, in reality, no sentence in and of itself, intrinsically, has any meaning at all. The convention that permits it to be meaningful rests, in the final analysis, on the intentionality of the utterances in which it occurs (it does not derive, however, from the individual utterance of a specific speaker; rather, it depends on the common patterns of usage shared by a community of speakers). The meaning of the sentence derives from that of the utterance, and the meaning of the utterance in turn derives from the intentionality of the mental state, whose meaning does not derive from anything other than itself. The intrinsic intentionality of mental states is what, in Searle’s system, supports the entire edifice of meaning: a kind of unmoved mover that has been harshly criticized by those who hold “externalist” positions in semantics.33 Once he had proposed his theory of speech acts, Searle realized the necessity to find a ground for the notion of intentionality, which is not, as I noted earlier, a feature exclusive to language. There need not be anything linguistic, for example, in the action of pushing a car, even though that action may be explained by the participants’ intentions, beliefs and desires, which are indeed intrinsically intentional. The use of examples based on language may be pedagogically helpful to understand what intentionality is, but we must be aware that, from a logical point of view, intentionality is prior to language, and constitutes a much broader phenomenon. In his analysis of intentionality, Searle describes several characteristics that every intentional mental state – and, in a derived manner, every speech act – must have: propositional content, psychological mode, direction of fit, conditions of satisfaction… characteristics that I won’t analyse in order to not extend the present 33. A good example is Putnam’s “Brains in a Vat,” in (1981: 1–21).



Chapter 2.  Searle: The intentionality of the mental

chapter more than necessary.34 Nonetheless, there is an aspect that it is necessary to pause at, just for a moment, because of the importance that it will have in our reading of the confrontation with Derrida: intentional mental states, according to Searle, do not occur independently one from another, but rather are found embedded in what Searle calls “Networks.” According to the example he proposes in Intentionality (pp. 150 ff.), having the desire to run for President in the USA normally implies having many other beliefs (that the US is a republic, that in a democracy there are periodic elections …) and desires (to be nominated by her party, that her collaborators work in favor of her candidacy …). Probably the majority of the beliefs and desires implied are unconscious, or have never been formulated in an explicit manner, but that does not make them less necessary for making the intentionality of the mental state in question function. Furthermore, apart from the Network of other intentional states that is implied in having a given intentional state, it is also necessary to take in consideration what Searle calls the “Background”: I believe that anyone who tries seriously to follow out the threads in the Network will eventually reach a bedrock of mental capacities that do not themselves consist in Intentional states (representations), but nonetheless form the preconditions for the functioning of Intentional states. The Background is “preintentional” in the sense that though not a form or forms of Intentionality, it is nonetheless a precondition or set of preconditions of Intentionality.  (1983, p. 143)

In order to understand the meaning of a sentence – and thus give it intentionality – it is not sufficient to have a set of beliefs rooted in the mind, or to know its definition in the abstract. In addition, one must know how to relate with reality in such a way that this intentionality can be effectively carried out. This idea is a development of the later Wittgenstein’s desire to anchor the meaning of words in the use that their speakers give them. In order to understand, for example, what “I am going to cut the pie” means, it is not enough to know the meaning of the words in question, since the verb “cut,” in its literal use, may mean something very different depending on the context – just as in “I am going to cut the lawn” or “I am going to get a haircut.” The understanding of the terms and, ultimately, the use of language in an intentional manner demands training in the practices and abilities that give those terms meaning. If the speaker cut the pie by passing a lawnmower across it we would have to admit either that she did not understand the literal meaning of the sentence, or else that she did not use it in the literal sense, but was instead playing an unpleasant practical joke. In any case, the meaning of the sentence demands – for its correct understanding – something that did not appear in the semantic conventions that define its meaning in an abstract manner. And, in Searle’s 34. The interested reader can follow its development in Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983: chap. I), or summarized by Searle in a more recent version: (2004: chap. VI).

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opinion, it would not be sufficient to add new semantic determinations to these conventions, since misunderstandings are legion. No merely semantic specification will ever allow us to secure the intentionality of a sentence: no dictionary, no matter how complete, will ever be really able to tell us the way its words, literally defined, relate to the world. And this is so because the act of understanding is not a part of language: rather, it takes place in the heads of the speakers. The intentionality of their mental states exists because those speakers know what to do with their words: they not only know what they signify, but also how to use them. This know how, which properly speaking is not a conscious content, cannot be objectively fixed in the form of a rule, nor is it susceptible of being exhausted by a set of propositions.35 Rather, it is what constitutes the Background: the non-intentional foundation that makes intentionality itself possible (see critical discussion in Lepore and Gulick 1991, sections I and V). According to Searle, the notion of the Background is the starting point for understanding the difference noted earlier between the literal meaning of a sentence and the alternative uses that the speaker could make of it in concrete utterances. An example: the sentence “Today is a nice day” is literally true when the weather is good (this is, in Searle’s terminology, part of its “conditions of satisfaction”). Nevertheless, this sentence can be uttered by a speaker with an ironic intention, in which case the meaning of this utterance will be precisely the opposite: today it’s raining cats and dogs. Evidently, it is the context that allows us to identify the sense with which the speaker has used the sentence, i.e. what the meaning – not necessarily literal – of her utterance has been. But what do we say regarding the literal meaning of the sentence itself? Some scholars hold that the sentence has a meaning by itself that is independent of all context. If that were the case, we would be in a situation very close to that of the Tractatus: language, independently of the use that speakers make of it, would have the capacity to represent reality. But Searle would disagree strongly with this idea: the meaning of a sentence must also depend upon a context. To the contrary, if it is not being used, language would not be able to refer intrinsically to anything. Words by themselves are empty, since they only have a derived kind of intentionality. Searle’s point in this respect is that, in order to identify the meaning of the sentence, we still have to take context into consideration, but a context reduced to its minimal expression, comprising whatever Background assumptions ought to be made by speakers in their social environment.36 All of this implies that the literal meaning would not be understandable if we take just the semantic conventions

35. Searle’s ideas here are also in accordance with Gilbert Ryle’s (2002: chap. II) famous defense of the distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that. 36. See “Literal Meaning,” in (Searle 1979a: 117–136).



Chapter 2.  Searle: The intentionality of the mental

in force into consideration. Searle, however, holds that the literal meaning is that which the sentence has when the context is limited exclusively to the Background.37 For Searle, the idea of the Background is merely a hypothesis, and he is conscious of its debatable character; nevertheless the concept ends up being central to his conception of language and of human knowledge. His thesis includes a differentiation between a “deep Background” (which would only include the capacities common to all normal human beings, in virtue of their biological structure) and a “local Background” (which would be socio-historically constituted by the practices in which the language user is embedded). While the notion of the Background seems to lead us into some form of cultural relativism, Searle’s use of the notion seeks to exclude any possible derivation along those lines: The Background, therefore, is not a set of things nor a set of mysterious relations between ourselves and things, rather it is simply a set of skills, stances, preintentional assumptions and presuppositions, practices, and habits. And all of these, as far as we know, are realized in human brains and bodies. There is nothing whatever that is “transcendental” or “metaphysical” about the Background, as I am using that term. (1983, p. 154)

Searle is not seeking to extract from the hypothesis of the Background any deep conclusions about the ontological constitution of the world. Still, it is significant that an author such as Habermas (1987: 197), who does not normally speak lightly, treats as a given the identification of the Background in Searle with the Lifeworld (Lebenswelt) in Husserl and the idea of the pre-understanding in Heidegger. All three are conditions of possibility of knowledge and rationality that undermine any naive conception of an objective world. The fact that Searle does not seek to go that far with his own thesis, as we will see further along, does not mean that it is not possible to do so.

The mystery of consciousness It is hard to deny that functionalism still preserves at its core a certain commitment to behaviorism, given that it only permits us to analyze the mental to the degree that it has causal effects on behavior – effects that must be empirically observable from a third-person perspective. The black box would only be accessible, properly speaking, by constructing a computational model outside the box that would function 37. In this way, Searle avoids subscribing to what François Recanati has called “the determination view” (2003: 189), the idea that meaning is completely determined on the basis of semantic conventions.

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as the mind does. Searle’s reaction was that this model only appears to function as a mind, but in reality it lacks, among other things, the intrinsic intentionality that characterizes mind. The computer is not conscious of the meaning of its own words nor of its own acts, no matter how well it imitates subjects that are conscious in this manner. The implication is that it cannot perform speech acts at all, since their constitutive rules imply the capacity to experience a determined mental state, to be aware of this experiential awareness, and even to take responsibility for it. In order to assume the existence of that intentional consciousness, we must admit – apart from the perspective of external observers – that the agent has some kind of access to her own mental states. That is, we must admit the epistemic value of the firstperson perspective – something the machine was not intended to reproduce at all. A set of arguments, ever more ingenious, have convinced a good part of the analytic philosophical community of the necessity to admit the validity of that firstperson perspective. In the ’80s Frank Jackson (1982, 1986), for example, proposed his well-known knowledge argument to demonstrate that the knowledge provided by the empirical sciences, based on the third-person perspective, is insufficient for understanding the specificity of mental states, since the richness of experiences from the first person point of view cannot be reduced to data observable from an external point of view. Jackson asks us to imagine a situation in which the neurosciences had advanced sufficiently in order to completely explain the functioning of vision. If a person were able to acquire all this knowledge, it could be said of her that she knows everything that, from a physical, chemical and physiological point of view, it is possible to know about human vision. Now, it is conceivable that this person could have acquired all that knowledge without having ever perceived any color, apart from black and white. Jackson continues his argument by imagining the situation of Mary, a neurophysiologist that is in the situation just described, having in her mind all the scientific knowledge imaginable about vision. The unfortunate Mary, for whatever reason, has spent all her life in a monochromatic room: even her own skin is painted in black and white, and she has acquired all her scientific knowledge from books and through monitors that are black and white. One day, however, a red rose appears in her room and Mary perceives its colour for the first time in her life. We can say without a doubt that she learned something: the qualitative aspect – the quale – of the experience of red. If Mary had all the scientific knowledge that it is possible to imagine and, nonetheless, she learned something new, we can conclude that the knowledge of the subjective aspect of human experience exceeds the limits of what is accessible in the third person. Thomas Nagel, for his part, has held that it is impossible to comprehend what subjective qualities would consist in for the experiences of an organism that has a radically different sensing structure from us, such as a bat (1974). No matter how much we know from an objective perspective about the configuration of the organs



Chapter 2.  Searle: The intentionality of the mental

of that animal, we will never know in a subjective way what it feels like being a bat – nor even, taking the argument to the extreme, what it feels like to be another human being. This phenomenological aspect of conscious beings has even come to receive a name (what-is-it-likeness), and points, just as the argument of Jackson did, towards a mystery that is inaccessible to objective scientific knowledge, a mystery having to do with consciousness, with its qualia or lived subjective qualities, which in a fundamental way cannot be accessed from a third-person perspective. Arguments such as those of Jackson and Nagel invite us to abandon the remains of behaviorism that still exist in the functionalist project: it is clear that there is something in the mind – a mystery if you like, but still something – apart from externally observable and computationally reproducible behavior. These qualia and that what-is-it-likeness are there, and it makes no sense to negate their existence. In the face of these arguments, even if the functionalist project still retains its attractiveness for many, more than a few authors are taking a posture that is – while somewhat disconcerting – at least coherent: epiphenomenalism. On the one hand, the functionalist posture is maintained, with mental states conceived of as functional states that are defined by their direct or indirect effect on conduct. On the other hand, the existence of subjective experience is accepted, but it is denied that it has any causal effect on observable behavior. The qualia, the what-is-it-likeness and subjective consciousness in general would be mere epiphenomena: something produced by the brain, but which does not have any effect at all on observable behavior. Thus, the existence of the subjective and the mental is admitted, although it is kept apart from the explanation of human conduct. Searle is a defender of the first-person perspective, since he believes it is contrary to common sense to negate the existence of mental states or to question in any generalized way the authority of the subject that informs about them. Nonetheless, he has on multiple occasions showed his opposition to the skeptical conclusions of the authors alluded to earlier, sometimes disqualified as “mysterians.” Even though there is a considerable problem when we seek to merge the experiences of first and third person, in Searle’s opinion this problem is merely transitory, an empirical question for which a solution is underway. It couldn’t be any other way, if we are really intent on escaping Cartesian dualism, which is the true bête noir of the entire discipline of the philosophy of mind.38 In contrast to this mysterianism, Searle labels himself as a “biological naturalist” (2004: 113 ff). All these mental states in the 38. A good sample of this aversion to Cartesianism can be found in the multiple reference works about the discipline that consider Descartes’ dualism to be the principal enemy to be refuted. See a number of examples in Gilbert Ryle (2002: chap. I); Antonio Damasio (1994); John R. Searle (2004); Owen Flanagan (2003); David J. Chalmers (ed) (2002: 10–21); and Anthony Kenny (1989).

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subject are nothing but effects of the complex activity of the human brain – effects that are explainable, in the final analysis, by the evolutionary origin of the organism in the struggle for survival. From this position, even though intentional mental states are subjective, this does not impede them from being objective facts in the world with full causal efficacy, which means that epiphenomenalism is discarded. Our access to these facts is subjective, first-person, but their very existence is an objective and palpable fact, which must receive an explanation that is coherent with the rest of the objective facts that we know, just as they are explained by the empirical sciences. It is necessary, therefore, to discover how the brain produces – or rather finds itself in – intentional mental states, and how the type of causality that is proper to them functions. The first step on this road will be the search for the brain correlate of consciousness, that is, to identify univocally which neuronal configuration corresponds to the mental state that we call being conscious, either as a general state of the mind, or else as a specific state in which we are conscious of something in particular. Once this correlate has been found – a correlate which, in Searle’s opinion, is an empirical issue that will be resolved sooner or later – we will be ready to discover how intentional consciousness is produced. We may even, perhaps, be able to develop a model of Artificial Intelligence that does not involve building a mere simulator, but rather a true artificial replica of the human mind (Searle 2004: chap. V).

Social realities To summarize, Searle’s intellectual trajectory began with the theory of speech acts, as an idealized and systematic description of the kind of rule-governed behavior that language is. As an integrated part of those rules, he noted, we need the involvement of certain subjective mental states – beliefs, desires and intentions – which must coincide in the speech act as facts that the speaker is subjectively conscious of and, therefore, responsible for their sincere presentation in the presence of the hearer. In search of a grounding for these contextual conditions of the performance of speech acts, Searle immersed himself in the philosophy of the mind, holding to a biological naturalism that attempts to combat, on the one hand, the behaviorist itch that still remains in functionalist postures and, on the other, the epistemic pessimism that has seduced the so-called “mysterians.” We would be leaving to one side a fundamental aspect of Searle’s work if we didn’t consider the prolonged interest that he has shown in the implications of his posture in the realm of social philosophy. Thanks to the intentionality of our mental states we are able to create certain realities in which we then live. We are referring to realities such as money, marriage, honorific titles or any other type of social



Chapter 2.  Searle: The intentionality of the mental

institution that would not exist of its own accord were it not for that intentional character that we grant them, i.e. were it not for our believing in their reality. In order to explain this type of social reality, Searle introduces a concept that has been the object of much controversy: the idea of “collective intentionality.” In Searle’s opinion, the complexity of social interaction cannot be explained if we appeal only to individual intentionality, i.e. that which is realized in each of our minds in an individualized manner. On the contrary, we must perform intentional actions in common, in an intrinsically cooperative manner. In order to do so, we do not have to fall into vague and debatable conceptions, like those of the social mind or the collective unconscious: for Searle there is no more mind than the individual minds of persons. However, in looking at their capacity for action we can clearly distinguish two types of intentionality, according to whether the agents act in an individual manner or a collective one. The recognition of rules for intentional action – which sometimes regulate and at other times constitute social realities – is the first step in giving a solid grounding to the political sciences, sociology and anthropology. The theory of intentionality is thus postulated as a possible axis of interconnection for the human sciences and the natural sciences, re-establishing the link between two epistemic areas that are difficult to reconcile. Nonetheless, it will be the natural sciences which, in the final analysis, provide the foundation for the whole. As Searle states emphatically (1995), there is no social construction of reality, but rather a construction of social reality, on the basis of the physical and biological world. Reality is external to our perception and independent of our particular socialized manner of accessing it: it is something objective, and not a cultural construct. In this objective world there are certain complex living organisms, such as human beings and some other animals, that have subjective intentional experiences; these experiences are only directly observable by the subject that has them, but their happening is an objective and biological fact. Specifically, the human being is able to inter-act through the performance of tasks that imply collective intentionality and that establish social realities, which are in turn just as objective as the mental states that generate them. In this way, the progress of scientific knowledge need not detain itself at the gates of the human sciences, and the development of a universal knowledge may be within our reach. The degree to which Searle’s proposal can be qualified as reductionist is a debatable issue. It would be a lax kind of reductionism: one which seeks to integrate the specific aspects that characterize human realities, while respecting their domains of explanation. In this sense, Searle is willing to recognize the limits of this theoretical explanation of the human: for example, the project of establishing norms and rules that would govern conversations does not seem attainable to him. Instead, these rules are limited to the utterance of concrete speech acts, and it is not possible to formalize the entire domain of a conversation in a normative fashion (see

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Searle “Conversation”, in Searle et al. 1992). Finally, regarding human actions, he notes that there are barriers or gaps in the order of events that protect the domain of freedom and human rationality from any logical and theoretical reconstruction (Searle 2001). In any case, whether Searle is reductionist or not, it is undeniable that his search for a systematic interconnection between philosophy – of language, of mind, of society – and science has as its aim the integration of all these parts in a coherent, closed whole. In the end, perhaps this is the objective of all theory, since understanding and explaining might consist in nothing more than attaining, or at least pursuing, such coherence.

chapter 3

Derrida Suspicion and deconstruction The temptation of impatience Now that we’ve reached this point in the discussion, we must resist the temptation to directly analyze Derrida’s critique of Austin and Searle’s concept of context. Recall that an unavoidable step for our reading consists in tracing to their sources the semantic rivers that give meaning to Searle and Derrida’s contributions to the debate. We have made a hasty journey, starting with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, continuing with Austin’s original proposal and finishing with Searle’s developments regarding language, mind and society. Nonetheless, we would still only be prepared to assume Derrida’s contribution as a series of confused and wayward ideas, completely irrelevant for the development of the discipline – which is, without a doubt, what Searle thought. And a reason for this, I will claim, is that he only paid attention in his “debate” with Derrida to what the French philosopher apparently wanted to say in his text, while he remained blind to what Derrida sought to do in it. Searle ignored how that activity was rooted in a tradition that is different from his own – or, rather, how Derrida was confronting his own tradition, attempting to break it completely apart. In order to avoid the temptation of impatience, this book will have to be a little schizophrenic, since the next step will be to recount a philosophical journey that, although simultaneous to the one we have just traced, is, at least in appearance, completely different. It would even be necessary to change linguistic register, changing over to writing in a distinct manner, interweaving the arguments in a completely different way in order to do justice to the diversity of their approaches. Nevertheless, I will try to avoid having to do so, partly out of subjective preference, and in part due to a clear methodological necessity, since what I would like to do is to place the proposals of both authors into a fruitful encounter, and not to reenact the dialog of the deaf that was the unfortunate outcome of Derrida’s and Searle’s “encounter”. Clearly, I cannot here do justice to all the aspects of the prolix and dense work of Derrida (and the same goes for Searle’s work); instead, I will limit myself to noting certain facets of the tradition in which Derrida works, and will briefly describe certain moments of his thought, chosen because of their relevance to the question now at hand. Other paths would surely have been possible, but I hope that the one I present here will be at least sufficient for making sense of what Derrida tries to do with Austin’s work.

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Philosophy as an act of suspicion Jacques Derrida, as with the entire amalgam of thinkers included in the post-­ structuralist camp, is profoundly influenced by what Paul Ricoeur called “the school of suspicion”, whose masters would be Marx, Freud and Nietzsche. Despite the enormous differences in their theoretical proposals, these three authors share a similar attitude of mistrust towards the supposedly more elevated and sublime products of Western culture. For Marx, the metaphysical systems with which the great thinkers have thought to describe the very structure of the real are nothing other than ideologies produced by the underlying economic structure, by means of which they seek to justify their own privileged position. The infrastructure of material relations determines the products of the ideological superstructure, so that every particular philosophical system, if it does not develop a critical consciousness of itself, does nothing more than give a self-satisfied image of reality back to society, an image which perpetuates the injustice of the established order. Freud, for his part, showed us how the repressed instincts of the libido are, at core, the only energy that our actions proceed from. The greatest products of art and science, which we admire so much, are in reality the effect of the sublimation of those low and unconfessable urges that we despise so much. Running with this idea, the Freudian gaze is systematically suspicious of the meaning of words, seeking a force underlying them – a force expressed as an impulse or drive –, while side-stepping the deceitful conscious meaning that the speaker gave them. The subject ceases to be self-sufficient in its reflection about itself, and the intervention of another becomes necessary, since only another person will be capable of breaking down the barriers of one’s own unconscious. And, even if she does so, a good part of the mental life of the subject will forever remain obscure and inaccessible. The frontier of the unconscious is not a provisional limit, transitory and possible to overcome. Rather, it is a constitutive, structural obscurity, which in its tenacious perseverance internally constitutes every possible self-conception of the subject. Nietzsche, finally, came to overturn the order of thought itself; he was the first to openly confront the tradition of Western metaphysics, denouncing it as a concealed project of moralization. The Socratic sophistry that gave rise to this delusion consisted in disguising a great lie with captivating words: that one true world exists, which the wise person can attain access to via the use of reason, and that this privileged access confers on the philosopher an authority over the rest of the human race. Nietzsche dennounced that the metaphysical fable of the true world, later united to the Christian morality of humility and humiliation, existed to justify a strategy of domination woven by the weak in order to subjugate the strong. Both taught the vision of a world that is more true that the merely visible world, a Truth more permanent than human truths, and they appealed to a reality that



Chapter 3.  Derrida: Suspicion and deconstruction

goes beyond the senses that is never actually present, but always is still to come. And the desire for this other world nihilizes the only world in which we in fact live, which ends up falling away like an empty skin, giving way to the Idea, to Paradise, to a Presence… swindler ideas that in fact never manifest themselves. Behind the apparently innocent desire to know, Nietzsche’s genealogical project denounced the obscure face of a will to power, that of the weakest, who have succeeded in imposing their law on the strongest, causing Western society to sink into a process of decadence that should be turned on its head. Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, rather than forming a tradition, seem only to share a desire to confront the established traditions; what unites them is not so much what they offer, but rather what they attack and criticize: the rupturing force that their proposals exercise on conscience and subjectivity. The confluence of these three authors in the generations that followed had a synergistic effect, which strengthened this attitude of rejection and suspicion in the face of the productions of the modern conscience. In the case of Derrida, the inheritance he has received from the philosophers of suspicion, in particular Freud and Nietzsche, but also Marx, is undeniable and definitive. It is not the case, however, that Derrida was Marxist, Freudian or Nietzschean, if we mean that he claimed aspects of their respective cosmovisions as his own, i.e. aspects of their respective doctrines. On the contrary, what he inherited was a mode of doing philosophy, a way which does not involve building a theoretical system capable of bringing the meaning of the real itself to consciousness. Derrida takes up their attitude of suspicion, sidestepping the fact that the philosophers of suspicion themselves – Marx above all, Freud a great deal, and Nietzsche perhaps not at all – attempted to offer their own alternative systems, theories that seek to give access to the truth. In the case of Nietzsche, a famous opuscule is especially helpful for understanding the position of Derrida in the debate. In “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” Nietzsche presents in the form of a fable – not a theory, in the conventional sense – a genealogy of intelligence and language. In this fable he claims that these abilities did not originally fulfill the function of intellection of the truth of the world and were not oriented towards the establishment of a sincere cooperation between human beings. Rather, the intellect originally had survival as its function, while language was initially produced in order to deceive our fellow men and women. It was only in a derived and secondary manner that intellection acquired the supposed function of grasping the truth about the world, and language was charged with representing this truth so that it might be communicated to others. Only when people think that it is useful to avoid the war of all against all does the idea of truth appear on the scene as the final aim of intellection and of language, a truth that in reality is nothing but the fruit of a long-accepted convention, intimately constituted by the play of forces that makes it possible.

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At the origin of the act of naming, states Nietzsche, there is no foundational intention of responding to whatever there truly is there, in the world, but just an arbitrary process by which, deprived of grounds, we establish similarities and differences among things, always with distorted and anthropomorphic criteria. We group phenomena using terms that are only connected to what occurs in a metaphorical manner. If we see many leaves that look alike, we gather their diversity using the term leaf, and we attribute to it the representation of a concept. But this concept, claims Nietzsche in an echo of medieval nominalism, is not, properly speaking, anything more than a metaphorical grouping, invented by us, tainted by the will to power that constitutes us. Nietzsche gives us an example: we see a person who is honest and we ask why. A philosopher can tell us that the motive of his behavior is the honesty that there is in him; nevertheless, in so doing the philosopher is incurring in a fallacy, since she would be taking as a cause the metaphor which we, a posteriori, have used to unify the diversity of the actions we consider honest under a common label. As Nietzsche proclaims in this opuscule, concepts are nothing but worn out metaphors, indelibly marked by ambiguity and vagueness, servants of the interests of survival, control and domination. However, it would be futile to seek to free ourselves from those interests in order to attain more objective concepts, since those interests define us in our essence. Instead, we need to seek freedom from the notion of the concept qua instrument able to learn the essence of reality. What we must to free ourselves from is the deceptive idea that language could at some point capture the truth of the world, once deprived of such interests: What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. (Nietzsche 1986: 42–6)

It is therefore a useless effort, or even hypocritical and insincere, to build theories via concepts that seek to grasp the objectivity of the real. Once the vacuity of the concept of truth has been denounced, the distinction between the objective and the merely subjective becomes something that must be overcome, just like the frontier between the real and the merely apparent. It was from Nietzsche that Derrida received this attitude of suspicion in the face of every given concept, which prompts him to seek in their hidden origins the unjustified and partial metaphor that gives rise to it – the force underneath its meaning.



Chapter 3.  Derrida: Suspicion and deconstruction

From metaphysics to difference: Heidegger and Lévinas The influence of Martin Heidegger on the philosophy of the 20th century would be hard to exaggerate. Specifically, the work of Derrida would not have been possible had Heidegger not developed his devastating critique of the metaphysical tradition. In Heidegger’s opinion, Nietzsche’s effort had constituted the final manifestation of metaphysics prior to its inevitable dissolution – its final chapter perhaps, but still a chapter of it. Nietzsche created an inverted metaphysics, a transmutation of the values consecrated by the tradition, but he fundamentally maintained its purpose and, therefore, shared in its destiny. However, as Derrida would later claim (1979), this Heideggerian reading of Nietzsche didn’t seem to take sufficiently into consideration the Nietzschean strategy for bringing nihilism to its climax, precisely by subverting the distinction between truth and appearance.39 But what does that destiny consist in, that step of Western metaphysics by which it got astray, requiring this careful and persistent labor of criticism and dismantling? Fundamentally, in having forgotten a difference, the so-called ontological difference, which is situated between beings and Being, i.e. between that which exists and the act of existing itself – something that is common to all beings insofar as they, beyond their differing characters, can be said to be or exist at all. Asking the question about Being, metaphysics starting with Plato has only been capable of answering by appealing to beings: to the eternal being of the Idea; to God as the maximally perfect and maximally real being; to the infinite being of the World as a whole, which embraces everything; to the being whose Reason is able to apprehend the truth of every other being… In the end, behind its multiple faces, metaphysics has always confused Being with a determined type of being. It thus constitutes an onto-theo-logic that perseveres in the forgetfulness of the ontological difference, turning every reality into a mere thing, and not being capable of responding to – or even correctly formulating – the question about Being (Heidegger 1969). The Heidegger of Being and Time made a great effort to formulate this question correctly, avoiding to forget the ontological difference (1996: 1–37). For this purpose – and taking up the method of his master Husserl, about whom we will read in the next section – he began with the phenomenological description of that being which is able to ask about Being, that is, the human being herself. In order to ask for Being he initiates a phenomenological description of human existence – thus 39. As Manuel Barrios Casares has written, “When the critique of metaphysics spills out into this critique of language, of knowledge and of truth, which unveils the fictional components of reason, one understands why Nietzsche cannot, on the basis of the presuppositions of his own argumentation, come to a mere inversion of Platonism. Rather, he must come to a much more dense and enriching proposal about the nexus between dóxa and epistéme” (1999: 138).

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contributing, malgré lui, to an existentialist development of his own thought. Another way of stating this is by saying that, as a prolegomena to the question about Being, Heidegger attempted to formulate the question about the meaning of Being, i.e. what it means to be for me, insofar as I am an existent. Augustine of Hippo had already said it: “Do not look outside; return to yourself. In our interior the truth resides” (The True Religion 39,72). Instead of asking about Being in the abstract, it is necessary to figure out, as a first step, what it concretely consists in to be the kind of being that I am. And being an existent – a Dasein – means to be written necessarily in time, to find oneself thrown out into the world, condemned to create a life project for oneself. A project that, whatever one does, will nonetheless culminate in death, in non-Being, because time, for me, is the only place where Being may appear. Just as with that of Wittgenstein – with whom highly interesting parallelisms and divergences have been established – the work of Heidegger has an inflection point that separates two well-defined stages. Fearing that his starting point in Being and Time would lead to a new form of metaphysics that would give priority to the human being, Heidegger left that great work unfinished, turning his attention toward the problem of language. This is usually called Heigegger’s Kehre, or turn, as a result of which he began to focus on the issue of language, as the only possible place where Being can reveal itself or, rather, un-hide itself. His is an approach to language that seeks, above everything else, to prevent Being from being thinged once again. Perhaps the language of metaphysics itself – to which he was still in debt even in Being and Time – is responsible for, or at least is one of the causes of, the forgetting of the ontological difference. The efforts of Heidegger, in his final period, were channeled on the one hand towards a dismantling of that metaphysical language and, on the other, towards the possibility of another kind of expression, poetic rather than theoretical, capable of giving its ear to Being without imprisoning it as a thing, without seeking to limit it to the modes of Being that are proper to a concrete being. This is a language that is no longer conceived of as a faculty of the human being, as an instrument at her disposal, a discourse whose “conditions of possibility” could be spelled out, but rather as that at whose service the human being must place herself, in her effort to respond to Being: Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of being insofar as they bring this manifestation to language and preserve it in language through their saying.  (Heidegger 1993: 239)

The influence of Heidegger on Derrida is mediated by the critical reading of one thinker who was a disciple of the former and teacher of the latter: Emmanuel Lévinas. For Lévinas, the concept of difference ought be our focus, even more so



Chapter 3.  Derrida: Suspicion and deconstruction

than Being, because it is difference that preserves the otherness of things, of persons and, in the final analysis, of God – his thought is intimately connected to the Jewish religion. In the opinion of Lévinas, the great problem of the Western tradition is not a forgetting of Being, but rather a denial of the Other: the negation of its alterity and of its intrinsic difference with regards to the Self (Lévinas 1979: 38 and passim). The fate that we have to struggle against is that of the Self gobbling everything down, leaving the world bereft of meaning and value.40 The Levinasian intellectual project is, due to its origin and purpose, of an ethical character: it is the drama of the 20th century, in particular starting with the Holocaust, that obliges us to reiterate the unconditional value of the Other, of that Other that was systematically negated in a massive effort of self-destruction by the human race. And its value as an other must be reinstated and preserved, beyond any apparently reconciliative synthesis that fallaciously unites the Self and the Other: reality, the world, humanity, or even Being… all of these concepts, supposedly common spaces where the Self and the Other could meet in concord and harmony (since both are real, both are in the world, both are human, both exist…) have led in practice to the negation of a distance that should have been preserved as such. Lévinas dennounces that respect for the Other was only conceivable by means of these concepts, that in fact denied their difference, locating them in an allegued space of equality, but in fact turning the Other, in one way or another, into a mere manifestation of the Self. In this way, Lévinas challenges the ontological proposal of Heidegger, who would have done nothing but offering a new unifying pole, Being, that would inevitably negate such original alterity. Alterity, for Lévinas, would no longer be established between Being and beings, but rather between the Self and the Other, marking a difference that would not just be discovered in philosophy, but that, above all, would have to be preserved by it, laboriously maintained and respected in its intrinsic weakness – the same weakness that constitutes us as human beings. As a result, mediated by Lévinas, what Derrida receives from Heidegger is more than the idea that Being ought to be preserved: he receives the mission to make difference itself endure, and to preserve the Other from any conceptualization that seeks to negate it. He accepts the mission to defend the Other from any unity that allegedly gives it a meaning, any concept that would account for its difference, and thus make its otherness superfluous and unnecessary. This explains why, for Derrida, the attempt to account for reality in one theory, searching for the correct philosophical or scientific system, would be radically misguided. Not because such a system or theory would be unreachable, or necessarily false, but because pursuing these things is just one more attempt to say that “the world is nothing but this”, or 40. The relevance of the problem of the Other in contemporary French philosophy is the focus of Vincent Descombes’ book Le Même et l’Autre (1979). See also Derrida (1998).

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that “things work in this way, and not in any other way”. The point is not that such theories would be wrong, but that pursuing them would be misguided: steps in a direction that we ought not to be pursuing anymore. And Derrida’s Levinasean mission becomes even more pressing when we human beings ourselves are trapped in theories about that thing which is “nothing but this”, or that thing which “works in this way, and not in any other way”. Any such theory would thus deny our difference, contributing once again to the colossal and unforgivable oblivion that constitutes metaphysics itself.

Derrida’s disappointment with Husserl: The form of the present One of the most clearly differentiating aspects between the analytic and continental traditions, which the reader will surely have noticed, is that while the former tends to organize its own history around the development of theoretical problems, the latter tends to do so around authors who, serving as great landmarks, mark the rhythm and the development of philosophy as a discipline. One could conceive of an effort to sketch out the history of analytical philosophy focused on the figures that participated in its development, as well as a narration of continental philosophy that is based on the impersonal development of problems. But such efforts are perhaps misconceived, since each tradition has its own unique way of becoming conscious of its own past and of its tasks for the future. Tracing out these histories in one or another manner would require a change in the gestaltic organization of our perception of the discipline, an alteration that would not be neutral nor lacking in consequences. On the contrary, the choice – if in fact it is made in a conscious and premeditated manner – of narrating the history in one manner or another, up to a certain point, already predetermines the way in which we confront issues. So, there are at least another two figures that we cannot ignore if we aspire to clarify the weaving of influences that make Derrida’s way of doing philosophy understandable: Edmund Husserl and Ferdinand de Saussure. I will bring Husserl into focus – Heidegger’s master, who was in turn the master of Lévinas, who in turn was Derrida’s master – in order to introduce the concept of presence, which plays a fundamental part in the Derridean critique of the work of Austin. In Husserl’s opinion, contemporary European culture is in a crisis, and philosophy will only contribute to overcome it if it decidedly becomes strictly rigorous – that is, if it becomes even more scientific than empirical sciences themselves are. In order to do so, philosophy has to go beyond the “natural” and “naive” attitude of the scientist who describes things as though they existed “out there”, independently of their being-seen by someone. His reply to this naive position is pure phenomenology, which starts with the idea that, prior to beginning to speak about the world



Chapter 3.  Derrida: Suspicion and deconstruction

as an objective reality that is outside our minds, it is both possible and desirable to develop a description of reality just as it presents itself in experience, that is, in its purely phenomenal character. Only based on this phenomenological philosophy will we be able to reconstruct a science that is truly valuable for the human being, rooting our objective conception of the world in the subjective experiences that we have of it. The problem of modern science – and, according to Husserl, the motive of the crisis it has suffered in the 20th – resides in the fact that it has been constructed with a language and on the basis of a model of experience which have lost that rootedness in subjective experience. It has thereby converted the world into an immense and abstract theoretical construction that says nothing to the contemporary person about her own place in the world, and about the value and meaning that things may have for her. The recovery of meaning is the task that Husserl proposes in his work: a phenomenological description, prior to all empirical science, of what things are for us in an immediate manner, prior to the abstraction of the positive sciences that results in the elimination of their ethical, aesthetic and fully human values. This phenomenology of meaning, as we have already seen, would become fundamental in the methodological proposal of the first Heidegger who, instead of focussing directly on the question for Being, decides to start by formulating the question for the meaning of Being, that is, for what it is for me to be, or exist. In his Cartesian Meditations (1977 [1931]), Husserl describes his own method, noting its similarities to and differences from the methodological doubt of Descartes. Descartes famously claimed that, at least once in one’s life, one should place into doubt absolutely everything that can be questioned, in order to have the certainty that our knowledge is well-grounded on true knowledge. In this hyperbolic doubt, the inherited tradition – in the case of Descartes, this would be medieval scholasticism – remains provisionally between parentheses, and even the very existence of the world seems uncertain, since my senses might be deceiving me; I could be confusing dreams with the waking state, or I might even be being tricked by some evil demon who would be systematically confusing even my most undeniable intuitions. But even if this were so, Descartes had concluded, my own existence is evident and necessary, since doubt would not be possible if I myself were not engaged in it. On the basis of this certainty of the existence of the “thinking ego”, Descartes regains knowledge about the world via the idea of a God who, through the mere fact of being present in my mind as an idea, demands to exist outside myself. Given, then, that God exists outside my self, He would not permit a total deception, with the result that the doors remain open for the recuperation of the world by way of clear and distinct thoughts. This final step, a variation of the ontological argument of St. Anselm, would later be denounced as a fallacy by Kant, opening the way for transcendental idealism and for solipsism.

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However, according to Husserl the Cartesian error occurred beforehand: at the moment when Descartes thought he had shown that subjective consciousness implied the existence of the ego as a first tiny fact, the fact that I do exist: a thin string I could start to tug on in order to bring the whole world back into existence. On the contrary, says Husserl, that “I” is not properly a being in the world, since existence itself would have been placed in parentheses by methodological doubt. That “I” is a question rather of what specifically makes the world be: a transcendental subject – that is, something that does not properly belong to the world – qua the focus of all possible experience and, therefore, origin of every possible description of reality, and of the individual existing self, as part of that reality. Descartes’s discovery turned out to be much more decisive than he himself had thought, since it pointed to an entire region of knowledge, that of transcendental subjectivity. His problem, according to Husserl, was that he abandoned that region hastily, impatient in his desire to recover the objectivity of the world. If we could have the patience that Descartes lacked, Husserl tells us, we would be able to remain in that methodological doubt, at the moment in which the whole world – and myself in it, as an individual subject – is placed between parentheses. Just as Descartes said that he had encountered the idea of God in his mind, one may discover in this same place all the other ideas that characterize the world, just as it presents itself to consciousness. Even if the world did not exist, I would know what it means to be beautiful, be human, be terrible or be a friend. Even if those beings and situations that produce those effects in me were mere deceptions, nobody could take from me what they mean for me. Once he placed the objective existence of the world between parentheses, Descartes disdained the treasure that he had there encountered: the manifest presence of experiences before the mind, with all of their intentional content, a presence that remains impolute even if we refrain from acknowledging the existence of their objects.41 Whether or not the world exists as noumenon or thing in itself, the contents of consciousness, fully present before the mind, can be described qua contents of thought with an apodictic certainty, that is to say, beyond any possible doubt. And in the final analysis, the idea that the real world could be something radically different from the intentional correlate of consciousness is shown as a dangerous illusion. If the subject whose experience we are describing is not a concrete empirical subject, existing there in the natural world, but is instead a transcendental subject, then the intentional extreme of its experience would be the world itself. I would not be describing the world from

41. Here we encounter another of those terms that are apparently shared by the analytical tradition and the continental: the idea of “intentionality”, which is fundamental both in Husserl’s proposal as well as – as we saw before – in that of Searle. Similarities and differences in the distinct uses of this term will be later discussed in Chapter 5.



Chapter 3.  Derrida: Suspicion and deconstruction

the limited point of view which is accessible to me as an existing self, but from a reduced trascendental self who is, in fact, what makes any individual experience possible. If this were so, the world itself would be the intentional correlate of such experience, and not a mysterious and inaccessible thing in itself. Describing the intentional phenomenon – qua present before consciousness – would be, from this perspective, to go to the things themselves. In Husserl one encounters an attitude that is, in good part, shared by most continental philosophy: reflection aspires to focus on a problem that is prior to the description of the world as the set of empirically observable facts susceptible to being brought together in the form of scientific laws.42 It is precisely what the Tractatus could not say, but only show, that directly occupies the attention of continental philosophy, with Husserl as a paradigmatic example. His reflection starts in a place that is prior to the constitution of the world as a set of facts – that is, in the realm of consciousness, where takes place the activity that may eventually turn the contents of experiences into facticities. That need to start with consciousness and the contents that it holds before itself gives presence a protagonist’s role in the construction of the objective world and in the determination of the truth. It should not surprise us to see that this starting point is, in Derrida’s view, highly suspicious. First, it is suspicious from a Marxist point of view for being the starting point for all ideology qua obfuscation of reality that benefits hidden interests that are not themselves present before anybody. Secondly, it is suspicious from a Freudian perspective for being the fruit of unconscious urges, characterized in an indelible way by never coming into full consciousness. Finally, it is suspicious from a Nietzschean perspective for being the first stone of the hypocritical construction of the “real world”, a correlate of a kind of reference that is supposedly not metaphorical, nor arbitrary: The thing itself always escapes, contrary to what phenomenology – which is always phenomenology of perception – has tried to make us believe, and contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing. (Derrida 1973: 104)43

Giving free rein to these suspicions, Derrida asks whether the presence of the phenomena before consciousness is not already marked from its very origin by its Other, that is, by what is absent: whether the identity of what is thought is not, right from the first moment, fruit of the difference from what remains hidden 42. I follow here Sáez Rueda (2002), who has convincingly defended the thesis that not only Husserl, but also a good part of the continental tradition, are engaged in the project of attaining an event ontology, whose aim is to understand the constitution of the objective world on the basis of meaning. This aim would contrast with the ontology of factuality proper to the analytical tradition, whose purpose would be to attain a description of the world as a set of facts. 43. See Patricio Peñalver Gómez (1979) and, for a critical view, Boly (1985).

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to consciousness. And he does so precisely by following the trail of language, an allegedly secondary condition for Husserl, in the sense that it supposedly comes after experience – both in the logical order as well as in the chronological –, when we try to describe what is silently present before consciousness. That is to say: supposedly, we first see and then we describe. The phenomenon appears first, and only afterwards comes the voice of phenomenological description. Nevertheless, notes Derrida, in order that what is present before the mind be susceptible of being described, it must itself also be structured: its elements must be distinguishable in function of their forms, just as the signs of a language are structured by the forms of its signifiers. The phenomenon, even prior to being expressed, must already have something of a voice. The structure of the language, from this perspective, is not a secondary factor; rather, it has to do with the phenomenon itself. Consciousness is itself being a kind of language would then be an unavoidable condition for our access to its truth in the phenomenological description.44 And it was Saussure who, at the same time that Husserl was seeking the path of presence, showed from the point of view of linguistics that the elements of language are not conceivable as tokens that may be present to consciousness, basis for an allegedly apodictic description, but rather only in function of a structure of oppositions through which they are linked to other elements. And, as we will now see, this structure may itself not be present to consciousness, given that, in the end, it is what makes conscisousness possible at all.

The moderate charm of Saussure: Structure Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1959), the foundational work for what would later become the structuralist movement, has as its starting goal the demarcation of a field of study that is specific to linguistics. From the outset Saussure distinguishes two aspects of speech: on the one hand, there is “speaking” (parole), which is the set of complex actions by which people put the language into motion in concrete circumstances (performing what would later come to be cataloged as speech acts); on the other hand, there is “language” (langue), which is constituted by the system of signs that speakers share and use in their particular speech acts. Each of those signs that constitute a language are, in turn, the fruit of the arbitrary combination of a signifier and a meaning: some material – phonetic or written – and some meaning – intentional – that the speakers give it. It is this system or structure of socially shared signs, language, which will be studied by linguistics. 44. See Derrida’s essay “Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language”, in (1982: 155–74).



Chapter 3.  Derrida: Suspicion and deconstruction

But how ought that science study what is defined as an arbitrary series of associations? If there is no reason or justification for why each signifier is associated with some particular meaning, how can linguistics really be an explanatory science, and not a mere cataloging of signs, an immense dictionary? Faced with this problem, Saussure offers an idea that would turn out to be enormously fecund for later generations: the linguistic value of each signifier, that is, its possibility of being associated with a meaning, does not reside in any trait that could be attributed to that signifier itself, but rather in its differential relations with other signifiers within the system of the language. That is, what is important is not what each signifier is in itself – how it sounds or what form it takes – but rather the way it may be differenciated from the rest of possible signifiers. With this idea, as simple as it was brilliant, Saussure casted aside the diachronic outlook that up to then had been habitual in his discipline: the search, within the etymology of the term, for the motive that makes the linguistic association necessary and not merely arbitrary. In contrast to this tradition, Saussure’s methodology is openly synchronic: the system of the language taken in an instant, as a whole, receives its explanation from the differential relations that are established here and now among its terms. The question of time and mutation can only be understood – with great difficulty, it must be admitted – as a change resulting from a certain gap in the structure: a deficiency in that structure that seeks to close itself in order to perfect the system. This proposal permitted the human sciences to develop – from anthropology and history to psychoanalysis and the economy – in a sense unknown up to then: in the face of historicist explanations, which seek the justification of cultural projects in the historical development of a consciousness – personal or social –, the structuralist proposal has the purpose of explaining this very consciousness as a function of that which, without appearing in it, makes it possible. Nobody, properly speaking, is conscious of the structure: rather, it is our consciousness which is an effect of it. Although in certain versions structuralism would come to constitute a new metaphysics, where the Structure would supplant the role of the Platonic intelligible world, it is nevertheless understandable that it would be of special interest for Derrida in his search for a model that would escape the metaphysics of presence. If the value of each sign is only understandable through what is not itself, what is present turns out to be intimately constituted by its difference from what is absent – some Other, which is not immediately present to the consciousness. Saussure’s intuition about the constitution of the linguistic sign opens a path of development that Derrida could not let escape. On the one hand, it offers a highly useful instrument for developing suspicion, since consciousness ceases to be self-sufficient in its unfolding of what is individually present. On the other hand, it dissolves the mirage of identity in the play of differences, responding to the Heideggerian demand to

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respect ontological difference and not detain ourselves in the identity of beings qua limit of reflection. In addition, the idea that the identity of the element is only conceivable in its difference with what is not itself points to the Levinasian demand of maintaining the distance between Self and Other. Finally, the idea that language is constitutively a differential relation, in which no element has any value by itself, gives him the perfect instrument for dismantling the Husserlian pretension of achieving a pure phenomenological description. Nothing, not even the presence of an idea before the mind, can serve as a place of departure whose understanding does not need to be related to something else. The Nietzschean idea of force would be reinterpreted by Derrida as being a differential notion45: nothing, properly speaking, has force of itself, but there must be a relationship with something whose difference makes it weak or strong. Almost anything can be reinterpreted in this way: as something that does not have meaning or value in itself, nor self-sufficient identity, but only in relationship with the Other. The idea of “structural difference” thus offers Derrida a suggestive way to overcome the classical conception of Being as a substance that is identical to itself, and of the idea as that which is present before consciousness. Now, in order that the Saussurian intuition of the differential value of the linguistic sign might fulfill the functions that Derrida wanted to give to it, it would have to be taken to a radicality that its discoverer did not even intuit. That is so because the dissolution of the identities of language in games of differences was understood by Saussure only in a partial and limited manner. For him, each signifier had a form, whose value did not reside in itself, but rather in its potential differentiation from other forms; nonetheless, he did appear to believe that the meanings themselves can be thought, one at a time, as independent elements. Without a doubt (and Saussure is quite conscious of this idea), the differentiation of the phonic matter of the signifiers fosters the capacity for distinction of meanings, since we are able to think the concepts with greater clarity when we know how to name them distinctly. In this way, language is undoubtedly an instrument of great utility for the development of thought. But, beyond this fact, Derrida thinks that Saussure fails to grasp the subversive trength of his own proposal when he claims that it is possible to conceive the existence of transcendental meanings, that is, of ideas or concepts that can be thought in themselves, prior and independently of the associations between them and the signifiers that represent them.46 Concepts could be thought in their pure identity by the mere fact of being present – phenomenally – before the consciousness of the subject. 45. See “Différance”, in (1982: 52). 46. For more on the Derridean reading of Saussure see “Différance”, in (Derrida 1982: 10ff); and “Semiology and Grammatology: Interview with Julia Kristeva” in (Derrida 1981a: 15–36).



Chapter 3.  Derrida: Suspicion and deconstruction

Were it possible to maintain this position, the defense of difference that seemed to stand out in the linguistics of Saussure would lose all its force. In order to avoid this, Derrida proposes to apply the structural strategy not just to signifiers, but even to meanings themselves. Once this step is taken, we will realise that concepts and ideas only have an identity of their own if they have a form, which is something they acquire in so far as they are different from other concepts and ideas. The value of each concept is not in the content of what is present before the mind; instead, its meaning and identity will perpetually reside outside of itself, in the intangibility of the absent, of what is not being thought. If the methodology of linguistics were appliable to the very structure of thought, as Derrida claims that it is, Husserl’s effort to locate the essence of the phenomenon in the present of consciousness would be unfruitful. Not just because the phenomenological description would be obliged to translate the truth that is ineffably present before consciousness to the terrain of language, but because the contents of conscious experiences would themselves be deferred. That is: the intentional content of consciousness would refer always to that which is not conscious, to the absent, to the Other, to that which is always to come.

Critique of phonocentrism Although Derrida makes use of Saussure’s strategies in order to attack Husserl, he later denounced them both as good examples of an obsession that has dominated Western philosophy – and to an important degree, our entire culture – beginning at least with the Greeks: the subordination of writing to oral language, of text to the phoné. Plato was an early manifestation of this, when he narrated the myth of Thamus and Theuth in the Phaedrus, and described writing as a dangerous drug.47 On the one hand, Plato had to admit that writing is a useful instrument, since it allows our memory to expand, permits us to think with greater care about the words that we employ and gives them an enduring medium. On the other hand, that same art has a sinister side: it weakens our natural abilities and, above all, lends itself to all kinds of distortions of the original meaning. Plato’s motives are clear: when we have in front of us an interlocutor that speaks to us, if she speaks vaguely or without clear definition we can ask her directly to tell us what she wanted to say, thus avoiding an incorrect interpretation of her discourse. Nevertheless, when what we have before us is a written text, the absence of the writer means that the interpretation runs the risk of going off the rails, making the text say something different than what its author intended to say. 47. See “Plato’s Pharmacy”, in (1981b: 67–186).

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Philosophy itself only began to trust in the written word after a slow and gradual process: if Socrates did not write a single line and Plato only used writing in order to transcribe a living dialog, it was because both were conscious that written language distances itself dangerously from the source of the utterance, permitting simultaneously the transmission of meaning and its irremediable deviation. According to Derrida, this obsession to maintain the logos in the realm of the phoné has been a constant in all of the philosophies that have aspired to the ideal of presence: Plato, Rousseau, Condillac, Husserl and even Saussure… In all of these thinkers writing appears as subordinate to voice, like a trace whose original instance could be found. If we could orally ask the writer for the meaning of her text, and she could explain it to us in her own voice, the written word would then be erased, leaving a pure meaning almost deprived of signifier, pure transparency. Language could then finally erase itself, allowing the unperturbed passage to the hearer of the meaning that the speaker had present before her consciousness. Every metaphysical text thus implies an effort to erase itself qua written text, qua trace: an effort to eliminate the possibility of distortion, bequeathing to posterity a single possible interpretation of the work, identical to the intention with which it was written, and additionally identical to the truth of the concept that the thinker had before her.

Writing and différance What Derrida shows is that this phonocentrism must be reconsidered in the light of the critique of presence, in order to demonstrate that in reality spoken language is not so distinct from writing, just as the very act of being conscious is not radically distinct from the act of speech or writing: If “writing” signifies inscription and especially the durable institution of a sign (and this is the only irreducible kernel of the concept of writing), writing in general covers the entire field of linguistic signs. In that field a certain sort of instituted signifiers may then appear, “graphic” in the narrow and derivative sense of the word, regulated by a certain relationship with other instituted signifiers; hence “written,” even if they are “phonic” signifiers. (Derrida 1997: 44)

All language, and even all thought, is impregnated by that dangerous character that metaphysics sees in writing: everything is, in reality, the fruit of a single differential game that gives it meaning, a meaning which constantly seeks to escape without ever coming to be as full, absolute presence. But perhaps this very danger is where our salvation resides, the only way to radicalize suspicion in a way that would prevent identity from swallowing up difference, and keep the Levinasean Other from falling prisoner to the empire of the



Chapter 3.  Derrida: Suspicion and deconstruction

Self. Thus, one must take on – even to its ultimate consequences – what Derrida calls a displacement of writing. This means accepting that both spoken language and one’s own consciousness are, in some sense, writing; or that, as the oft-repeated – and misinterpreted – Derridean adage has it, “there is nothing outside the text” (Il n’y a pas d’hors texte). That there is nothing outside the text means that, properly speaking, there is nothing that fully is. There is no idea nor any substance, no essence nor any cause in which reflection can at last find repose, in order to bring to its fullness that most metaphysical of pretensions, i.e. being able to say that, despite the multiplicity of appearances, Being itself is in reality this. A this which is identical to itself; this which I have present before me; this which, in an immediate manner, I can say orally, this which, secondarily, I can write down. Behind the traces one will not encounter the presence of any original identity, but not because that identity had disappeared upon the utterance’s moving away from the source of consciousness. Rather, in reality it was never there, fully present, giving meaning to the primitive use of language. As a result, the logic of presence must be inverted in order to indicate that at the origin of the trace there is nothing other than archetrace, an absence at the very origin that is charged with preserving the difference: The concept of the arche-trace must comply with both that necessity and that erasure. It is in fact contradictory and not acceptable within the logic of identity. The trace is not only the disappearance of origin … it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin. From then on, to wrench the concept of the trace from the classical scheme which would derive it from a presence or from an originary non-trace and which would make of it an empirical mark, one must indeed speak of an originary trace or arche-trace. (1997: 61)

And this development of the concept of trace, already present in Nietzsche, Freud and Lévinas, is explicitly taken up by Derrida as a re-reading of the ontology of Heidegger: Reconciled here to a Heideggerian intention – as it is not in Levinas’s thought – this notion signifies, sometimes beyond Heideggerian discourse, the undermining of an ontology which, in its innermost course, has determined the meaning of being as presence and the meaning of language as the full continuity of speech. To make enigmatic what one thinks one understands by the words “proximity,” “immediacy,” “presence” (the proximate [proche], the own [propre], and the pre- of presence), is my final intention in this book. This deconstruction of presence accomplishes itself through the deconstruction of consciousness, and therefore through the irreducible notion of the trace (Spur), as it appears in both Nietzschean and Freudian discourse. (1997: 91)

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Therefore, Derrida’s intention in making an apology for the trace and for writing – against the original and against the meaning of what has been said – is nothing other than showing the impossibility of all metaphysics, because this ungraspable Being ultimately lacks identity, since it is, at its origin, difference. Or, rather, différance, famous neologism whose change in vowels is not – at least not solely – the result of a mere caprice. With the term différance (whose pronontiation is identical to the one of the “correct” différence and can only be distinguished in French by its different spelling) Derrida seeks to integrate equally the passive aspect of the term “differ” (the fact of being different) and its active aspect (the action of differing), its qualitative meaning (to have differences) and its temporal meaning (to be defered). Meaning never properly occurs as an event, it never fully attends an act of consciousness; instead it is always deferring itself, delaying, prolonging its own absence. There is nothing authentic, original and non-substitutable that must be scrutinized based on its traces: the only thing we can aspire to is to show that the trace is itself original – arche-trace, not having more grounding than the emptiness of the differences. It is important to emphasize that différance is not, properly speaking, a philosophical concept (unlike the concepts of being, substance, essence, idea or subject); rather, it is precisely what internally delimits every concept, making its definitive establishment impossible, beyond that writing in which it is inscribed. Différance indicates, on the one hand, an epistemic limitation, a rest, an inaccessible aspect of that which is thought, whose identity is always waiting to appear. It thus makes it impossible to aspire to an ideal of pure presence. However, on the other hand, and perhaps in a more determining way, the différance constitutes, positively, every act by means of which something is given, every phenomenon. There is no presence without dis-presence, no appearance of meaning without a certain necessary concealing of that same meaning. In this way, the différance is, at the very same time, the condition of possibility of all thought, all phenomena and all signification, and their condition of impossibility, since none of them may simply, purely and fully occur.48 Reclaiming the primacy of writing is a task that Derrida inherited from Maurice Blanchot (1982), and it demanded of him both to recover Saussure and to overcome him. In contrast with Saussure’s priority of interest in the phoneme as the atomic constituent of oral language, Derrida reclaims the graphematic character of all language. The grapheme, the basic unit of writing, is essentially capable of functioning in the absence of the sender, as pure signifier, legible and understandable only because of its differential character. Derrida seeks to show that, at base, 48. From this perspective, the différance not only constitutes a limit, but also a positive potency that establishes the possibility of being given. I wish to thank Luis Sáez-Rueda who pointed this aspect of Derrida’s thought out to me.



Chapter 3.  Derrida: Suspicion and deconstruction

every phoneme is a grapheme: every act of speech is as separated from its source as any written text is. And, if that is the case, orality has no privilege that would allow us to save the meaning of texts from the game of differences. How do we do philosophy, then, once we have discarded the metaphysical aspiration to locate ourselves once and for all in the truth of the present? In the first place, dedicating oneself to the task of deconstructing the fallacious efforts of the metaphysicians to capture what cannot be captured. And secondly, making the effort to show that those texts which aspired to be owners and lords of their own meaning cannot avoid, in reality, the multiplication ad infinitum of their possible significations. It is not just a matter of noting a certain polysemy in its words, which can mean this or that, as though it were a question of some kind of ambiguous or fragmented presence. Instead, Derrida seeks to show – through a tenacious process of deconstruction – that every text is a limitless source of dissemination, which is the central concept of his (1981b). Whether its author likes it or not, it will indefinitely disseminate multiple meanings. As a result, it will clearly be a mistake to attempt to rigidly delimit the margins of validity of future interpretations, either in theory or in practice. Only within transitory contexts will it be possible to fix these margins, allowing for stable interpretations. But even then, the result will be ephemeral. Fortunately meanings will eventually disseminate, erasing those frontiers sooner or later, giving way to new readings and new meanings. The task of deconstruction, far from being savage and destructive, is thus presented as carefully preserving the unlimited wealth of the Other from being gobbled up by the stable presence of the identical.

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Deconstructing Austin Communication and meaning I have made it my goal to maintain a certain unity of style throughout this book – seeking to make the clarity of the analytical tradition a constant, even if the historical focus is primarily continental. Nevertheless there is no escaping the fact that the material I covered in the previous chapter has caused gradual changes in my own writing style. The vagueness in the structuring of arguments, the personalization of ideas over the course of the narration, the appeal to lengthy historical periods via abstract characteristics, the tendency to engage in word play as a mode of expression which is consubstantial with the content… little by little my own discourse has had to mimic the style of Derrida in order to make room for the unfolding of his thought. To express such different philosophical proposals in a single register would have demanded a violent mistreatment of the ideas being analyzed, since those ideas are not completely separable from the words. This forms part of what Derrida seeks to demonstrate: that meaning and signifier mutually constitute one other and thus it is not possible to extract anything like “pure meaning”. Still, I won’t give up on the attempt: with a tenacity that may be doomed to failure, my commitment to dialog demands of me that I stretch my writing style in order to create that shared space required to make sense of this confrontation between two traditions. For that reason, it is worth asking here, with the best of intentions, what it is that Derrida seeks to accomplish, beyond working to develop the tradition I have been discussing. What could this set of self-imposed labors contribute to a tradition as different as is that of analytic philosophy? Might it make sense, in the context of the first two chapters of this book, to follow the itinerary that I describe in the third? Searle and Derrida arguing about Austin… wouldn’t such a meeting be as surreal as the one Duchamp famously evokes: that of an umbrella and a typewriter on a dissection table? Is it somehow possible that these two semantic rivers might flow together, without the product turning out to be deformed and monstrous? Derrida took the first step towards an encounter of this sort in “Signature, Event, Context” (“Signature événement contexte”, henceforth Sec49), an essay that paved the way for the misunderstandings that Searle would fall 49. I will cite Sec according to the translation by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, in Limited Inc. (1988). It may also be found in Margins of Philosophy (1982: 347–72), translated by Alan Bass.

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into. In this chapter I will analyze Derrida’s attempt to deconstruct the philosophy of Austin, seeking to show how it is inscribed within the kind of anti-tradition that I have just described. Derrida presented Sec for the first time at the Congrès International des Sociétés de Philosophie de Langue Française in Montreal, in 1971. The congress was dedicated to the topic of “Communication” and Derrida began his paper with a brief prologue, focusing his suspicion on that term: “Is it certain that to the word communication corresponds a concept that is unique, univocal, rigorously controllable, and transmittable: in a word, communicable?” (Sec, p. 1). The problem of the term “communication” thus constitutes the first moment of the conference, one that brings together the variety of problems that were to be discussed. We have before us a signifier – a series of letters that are differentiable – to which there supposedly corresponds a meaning – a sense – that makes it possible for us to communicate with one another. But what does the term “communicate” mean in this context? To begin with, as Derrida notes, this term is utilized in senses that go beyond the reach of semiotics – that is, senses that do not refer to the context of signs and language – as, for example, when we say that a billiard ball communicates its movement to another. In a case like this it is not a matter of a “phenomenon of meaning or signification”, because there is no intentionality present in the act: there is only something, some movement or force, which passes from one object to another. We might be tempted to call this non-semiotic meaning the original meaning: the proper or primitive use of the term, its literal use, where the semantic or linguistic meaning would be a derived or metaphorical use. If we accept that explanation, we would say that the meanings of words are communicated between speakers just as force is communicated between objects. This strategy would be problematic, however, because in the explanation of the concept of communication we would be using the concept itself. We would be explaining linguistic communication as a metaphor based on the physical communication of movement. The concept of metaphor would thus be implied. But, in turn, the concept of metaphor is merely, properly speaking, the idea of a displacement of meaning, which is communicated from one use to another. Trying to explain the expression linguistic communication as a metaphor based on the expression force communication would be like saying that the meaning of “communication” in its semiotic use “communicates itself ” from its literal meaning to its metaphorical meaning. One of the fundamental questions of the text is exemplified in this brief prologue: it may perhaps be impossible to extract a literal original meaning, on whose basis we could derive a secondary metaphorical meaning. But another related question is also introduced tacitly: the problematicity of meaning as an entity that is supposedly constant throughout the entire communicative act, transferred from the speaker to the listener, identical with itself independently of whether it is being



Chapter 4.  Deconstructing Austin

thought by one or another interlocutor. In order that this be possible, the meaning of what is said would have to be fully identifiable in its own self, an identification that would come about thanks to two acts of presence before consciousness: first, the speaker would have present before her the meaning of what she wants to say, forcing it to adopt the form of a chain of signifiers and transferring this chain to the hearer; and second, thanks to knowing the shared code, the hearer will be able to transcend this chain of signifiers in order to make the meaning of what has been said present again. Language would be nothing more than the wrapper in which the speaker would package the meaning prior to handing it over to the hearer. Once it is unpacked, this wrapper will be found to not have affected the content; instead, it will have preserved it in its purity, making communicative exchanges possible. However, in order that this complete identification of meaning may in fact come about, it will be necessary to completely determine the context in which the words are being used. This context would – as we already saw upon analyzing speech acts – contain elements that are both internal and external, from the past as well as the present, even from the future. Acknowledging the need to complete the context in order to fully identify the meaning of any given utterance, Derrida states the central problem of his lecture: But are the demands of a context ever absolutely determinable? Is there a rigorous and scientific concept of context? Or does the notion of context not conceal, behind a certain confusion, philosophical presuppositions of a very determinate nature?  (Sec, p. 3)

The intention of Sec would thus be to demonstrate that, since saturation of the context is completely impossible – that is, it cannot be described in an exhaustive manner –, there is a theoretical insufficiency that affects the ordinary conception of language, qua communication of meaning. Communication will never be pure; instead, the transmission of meaning will have to be understood as being a reconstruction: meaning is not communicated, but is reconstructed instead. All language would have to be conceived, therefore, as a kind of writing. With written texts, since we lack their context, we have to rewrite their meaning (which implies a certain invention of that meaning, a certain novelty and, therefore, a difference with respect to the “original” meaning). And, in the same way, oral communication will involve a certain reconstruction of the meaning of what is said, since its context is, at least in part, as absent as in the case of writing. The concept of writing suffers, in the words of Derrida, “a certain generalization and a certain displacement” (Sec, p. 3) that permits it to conquer the entire terrain of the semiotic or linguistic. And, precisely because the act of reconstruction – not pure communication – of meaning demands the intervention of a code, there appears at the same time the possibility of its deconstruction.

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Iterability: Writing as metaphor After this brief prologue, Sec is divided into three sections: “Structure and telecommunication”, “Parasites. Iter, of writing: that it perhaps does not exist” and “Signatures”. Austin will not explicitly appear until the second of these sections, since the first is concerned with problematizing the traditional concept of writing and erasing its frontiers with oral communication. Nonetheless, we will pause there for a moment. Perhaps it will be useful to recall that, when Derrida uses the term writing, it is not in the ordinary sense of the term, as if he wished to say that whenever we speak we are writing in some sense. Rather, he uses it in the metaphorical use that I described at the end of the preceding chapter. The idea that every speech act is writing seeks to show that the problematic and dangerous aspect that the phonocentric tradition saw only in written language in fact affects oral language to an equal degree. We will thus need to define what the “classical conception of writing” consists in, a task that Derrida had already begun in his readings of Plato, Rousseau and Husserl. Here, however, he analyzes the Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge of Condillac. Derrida chose Condillac as a paradigmatic example of the metaphysical attitude the tradition has accepted – with a certain lack of critique – i.e. that prior to the invention of writing “men are already in a state that allows them to communicate their thought to themselves and to each other” (Sec, p. 3). Were this so, oral language would itself constitute a self-sufficient system for transporting ideas between minds, a system that could be extended in time and space, as a kind of supplement, thanks to the invention of writing. The task taken on by Condillac consists in showing that this additional extension need not affect the original aim of language, which is nothing other than the representation of ideas with the purpose of communicating a meaning: “the birth and progress of writing will follow in a line that is direct, simple, and continuous” (Sec, p. 4). This line would begin with a pictorial representation of reality, by way of images that mimic it, until we come to hieroglyphic, ideographic and, finally, phonetic-alphabetic writing systems. Derrida describes this posture as ideological – a term hinting at the Marxist critique of ideologies, to which I referred previously. It indicates that the posture is entirely dominated by the presence of eidos: the sign represents the idea which, in its turn, represents the thing thought or perceived. The chain of representation would stretch from the thing itself to consciousness, then from there to oral language – where what the speaker seeks to say is immediately clear to her – and then from oral language to writing – which in its origins even used a pictorial imitation of the meaning represented.



Chapter 4.  Deconstructing Austin

According to this classical conception, only at the moment of writing would language be possible in the most absolute of absences. A letter, for example, unlike an oral exchange, can be read when the writer is absent, or even dead. It can also be read in the absence of the recipient for whom it was originally written, and for whom certain ellipses and non-explicit associations were woven into the text, making it inaccessible to any unexpected readers. The letter can thus be read even if those ideas to which it supposedly refers never appear on the scene. The meaning of the text and its referent never, in fact, enter into play. The possibility of this triple absence – of the sender, of the recipient and of the referent – defines writing, constituting both its greatness and its danger. Greatness, because it is able to carry the representation further and further from the thing represented, making telecommunication possible (to which the title of this section refers). Danger, because what remains of written language after this triple absence is the pure structure of the text: a fragment of code that can be repeated in multiple contexts, gathering innumerable meanings, and therefore losing that representative character that was consubstantial to it. The letter can end up saying – in a different context, for an unauthorized reader – something extremely different from what the sender supposedly sought to communicate to the recipient. Writing can end up being the hell of communication, understood as pure transmission of meaning. The term iterability, which will be central to the confrontation with Searle, comes from the Sanskrit itara (other), and integrates that characteristic of written language that gives it the possibility of being used in distinct contexts: every fragment of text has the intrinsic possibility of being cited, repeated outside the place and the moment of its original occurrence. It brings with it, therefore, a “force of rupture with the context” resulting from the structural character of its linguistic elements. Their value – as demonstrated by Saussure – does not reside in the elements themselves – be they signs, sentences or texts – but instead in their relation to that which is not themselves. This graphematic character of signs implies that, qua graphemes, their value does not reside in what characterizes them in their identity, but rather in the differences and contrasts that they can establish with other signifiers within a given context. No grapheme can in itself be different, nor is it able, therefore, to define its own identity: that possibility always gives way to another element, opening a certain space in which language gains the capacity to be meaningful. Here the visual metaphor of space or espacement is fundamental (“espacement” is probably genetically related to the Levinasian idea of exteriority as the place where the Self and the Other may co-occur, preserving their mutual distance). The idea of espacement indicates precisely that no linguistic element may become a sort of point, or self-sufficient element deprived of spatial distension. Every sign, every

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grapheme, occurs in drawn-out fashion over the course of a space in which it differs from other elements, where it is impossible to delimit the point that it occupies without making reference to something else. This implies that the meaning of words cannot be fixed in the strict realm of what has been said; rather, meaning always refers to elements that do not in fact appear in the scene, thus being marked by absence. A text can, as we have seen, function in the absence of the sender, receiver and referent; in the second place, it depends completely on the context in which it is inscribed; and finally, it can acquire meaning only on the basis of what it differentiates itself from. Therefore, what a text communicates can never fully happen; rather, it always differs from itself in time and distends itself in space, such that its presence always implies a certain absence. What Condillac sought, together with the entire tradition of metaphysical thought, is to reconstruct the path that leads from this hell of writing to the paradise of oral or gestural communication: from absence to presence. Only in this way will truth be manifested in language, and the world will make itself visible to consciousness at a point that is neither espaced nor deferred. Now the problem, according to Derrida, is not that this path from hell to paradise is difficult to reconstruct. Rather, the issue is that the paradise that Condillac aspires to rediscover never, in reality, ever existed. The traits that the tradition feared in writing are constitutive of all language in general, including oral and gestural language. To the degree that those languages are also constituted by signs, their elements can function in innumerable different contexts even in the absence of the elements that define the process of communication. In a certain sense, all language is like writing: it brings with it a force of rupture with the context. It is only due to a persistent and fallacious blindness that the metaphysical tradition has been able to constrain its fears to the frontier of the written. Oral language is also iterable, to the degree that it is constituted by marks or graphemes, which are also regulated by codes. This makes it repeatable in the absence of the addressee, and makes it function in the absence of the sender, without her signifying intention (what she intends to say) vivifying the words, gracing them with the authority of her consciousness. But in oral language, one might object, we have the speaker in our presence and we can ask her about the meaning of what she has said, something that does not normally happen with written language. Perhaps so, Derrida might respond, although we cannot forget that even in an oral conversation the meaning is always something that differs. To our questions about the meaning of what has been said, the speaker can only respond with new words, new iterable signs that must also be interpreted, without it ever being possible to say, once and for all, that the thing thought has been made present. On the other hand, the impossibility of recording oral language in some lasting medium – so that it can be manipulated, altered and repeated beyond the moment of utterance – was just a circumstantial limitation



Chapter 4.  Deconstructing Austin

that passed into history at the moment in which it became technically possible to record and reproduce sound. This technical innovation did not at all change what is substantial in the phenomenon of oral language, but allowed us to recognise that it was not so different from writing as we might have thought.

The absence of intentionality It is not a question, therefore, of bringing the hell of writing to the paradise of oral communication, but rather of making clear that this paradise never existed, and that, at base, perhaps that hell may not be as fearsome as we thought. On the contrary, the generalization of writing would have implications that Derrida believes to be quite satisfactory. Above all, it would imply a change in the notion of communication, since it would no longer be defined as a translation between consciousnesses of something – the meaning – that the sender has present before her mind. Writing, liberated from the tyranny of present meaning, could eliminate the semantic-hermeneutic horizon. Reading or listening would no longer be acts by which a reader or hearer would be forced to subjugate herself to a meaning that is previously established. Instead, her function would acquire a creative and generative nuance through which every text, in every new context, would be telling us something different. As Roland Barthes taught, after “The Death of the Author” it will be the reader who will take on the protagonist’s role in reading (1987: 49–55). We must therefore reconsider the concept of meaning in a manner that would go beyond a mere polysemia. For every linguistic element multiplies its meanings indefinitely, disseminating its possible significations, for it can never be known beforehand what a text – oral or written – might mean in an unexpected context. However, one may object, is it really true that language could function in the absence of an intentional consciousness that would give it meaning? The traces left on sand by an insect might randomly adopt the form of letters, which could be read by a passerby: would we say that there was an act of communication in this situation, even in the sense Derrida is giving to the term? Wouldn’t it have to be the case that the insect wanted to say something with its action in order for us to say, in a non misleading way, that its tracks could be read by someone? In confronting this possible objection, prior to turning to the issue of Austin, Derrida makes a brief excursus concerning a passage from the Logical Investigations of Husserl (2001). In this early work, whose publication inaugurated the 20th century, we encounter the first goal of Husserlian phenomenology: the definition of a universal grammar, that is, the logical structure that every language must have in order to make the expression of pure ideas possible. Husserl set himself the task of delimiting the margins of meaningful language – a goal which Austin (in his own

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way) also worked to achieve – by exploring the exterior of this enclosure, that is, through noting the moments in which the codes are able to function, in the absence of any intention to signify, as the empty play of signs. One the one hand, Husserl claims, language can function in the absence of a referent, when it either does not exist or is not present before the consciousness of the speaker: If while looking out the window, I say: “The sky is blue”, this utterance will be intelligible (let us say, provisionally if you like, “communicable”) even if the interlocutor does not see the sky; even if I do not see it myself, if I see it poorly, if I am mistaken or if I wish to mislead my interlocutor. (Sec, p. 11)

It is not a question of language always being used in this way: Derrida does not dispute that one can say that the sky is blue while seeing its blueness, and stating it sincerely. For the moment, the only thing he claims is that it is possible to use language in the absence of this evidence and this sincerity, without this implying that it is less communicative. But, he claims, not only can we use language in the absence of a referent: we can also use it in the absence of meaning, in at least three distinct forms. In the first place, one of the principal problems that Husserl had pointed out beginning in The Origin of Geometry – a work that had been translated, with an extensive prologue, by Derrida himself some years earlier (Husserl 1962) – was the fact that mathematics can unlink itself, in its function and development, from the subjective meaning that supposedly converts the use of language into a full act. This lack of signification – speaking baldly, the fact that we simply don’t know what the signs signify – doesn’t impede us from continuing to use mathematical language and even calling the results science. In Husserl’s opinion, this is one of the factors that gave rise to a kind of crisis in the European sciences, because it is the beginning of the loss of their lived meaning, and hence this lack of meaning has a negative connotation for him. In contrast, among certain post-structuralists this very possibility produced a widespread fascination with quasi-mathematical formalisms.50 In second place, Husserl notes the possibility that certain statements can have meaning even when they are deprived of objective signification. We can, for instance, say that the expression the squared circle means “a closed line in a plane, whose points are all equidistant from the center, forming four right angles”. We cannot say, however, that the object referred to actually exists, and even less that it might be present to us in reality, as a correlate of our intentional consciousness. And, in the third place, Husserl notes the agrammaticality by which certain expressions either imitate or violate the structure of language without, properly speaking, saying anything (such 50. A good example of this attitude is found in the last part of the interview of Derrida with Julia Kristeva published in J. Derrida (1981a: 42ff).



Chapter 4.  Deconstructing Austin

as uttering “abracadabra” or “the green is either”). In those cases, there is nothing more than the empty form of a language, totally shorn of meaningful intention. Husserl points out these possibilities in order to delimit an internal space by means of contrast, a space in which the language can be used in a fully meaningful manner. However, Derrida’s malice turns Husserl’s achievement into a Pyrrhic victory: precisely by demarcating the sort of language which has a fully meaningful intention, Husserl himself shows that a language shorn of such an intention is also possible. In order to understand this turn, what he has to ask for are the aims with which each of them approaches the phenomenon in question. Husserl, as I stated earlier, has the goal of establishing a universal grammar which would make it possible to give knowledge an ultimate ground. He seeks to establish the conditions that language must comply with in order to shelter the meaning that the speaker has present before her consciousness – that is, in order to truly express what the speaker means to say. His effort, therefore, is inscribed “in a context determined by a will to know, by an epistemic intention, by a conscious relation to the object as cognitive object within a horizon of truth” (Sec, p. 12). That is to say, Husserl’s effort only makes sense in the realm of that truth that Nietzsche talked about – i.e. the useless and contrived determination of certain human beings to erase the metaphorical and anthropomorphic origins of their own language. In so doing, they forget that their language is not a clear mirror able to reflect the very structure of reality, but an instrument for living. If, instead of embarking on that task of the will to know – which, in Nietzsche’s opinion, is nothing other than a disguised and hypocritical form of the will to power – we decide instead to develop the act of suspicion, Husserl’s own efforts can be inverted. This is precisely what Derrida seeks to do in putting the Husserlian examples at the service of intentions that are opposed to those Husserl himself had when he proposed them, that is, showing that language can be used in the absence of any intentional meaning. Pace Husserl, his examples free us from the illusion that language can only work if consciousness makes it fully functional and effective. Now, Derrida does not claim that language is never characterized by meaningful intentions, or that intentional consciousness is simply a mirage, does not exist, or does not fulfill any real role in the explanation of what we say or write. At least for the moment, the only thing he claims is that there exists the possibility that language, in some of its uses, can function as a pure code, lacking all subjective signification. As a result, we have to indicate what the difference is between those moments in which language must supposedly be understood as meaningful and those in which it becomes an empty form, as happens in those uses described above. It is not hard to see that the key is in the context. Only by paying due attention to context will we be able to discriminate between empty languages – relegated to the spaces beyond margins and frontiers – and full or complete language – preserved

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inside well-defined limits, safe from emptiness, constituting the only correct and authentic use of language. But this implies that no sign or text can ever be considered – of itself – to be safe from suspicion, since a later discovery that the context in which we read it was not absolutely appropriate may cause that putative text/sign to fall like a mask. We would have to demonstrate that the intention of the speaker was in fact appropriate, that the circumstances were correct and that the occurrences before and after the speech act were consonant with its meaning. No sign stands on its own, without reference to those contexts that fill it with meaning and make it communicative. In this way, Derrida’s approach to speech acts as a philosophical problem is marked by his suspicion that emptiness may hide behind every use of language. Only an exhaustive analysis of the context, if such a thing were in fact possible, would be able to neutralize that suspicion.

Austin according to Derrida: Expectations and deceptions We have arrived, finally, at the meeting – or failure to meet – between Derrida and the philosophy of Austin: specifically, the second section of Sec entitled “The Parasites. Iter, writing: which perhaps does not exist” (Sec, pp. 13 ff). Derrida claims to have found in Austin’s philosophy – as happened with Saussure – both something promising and something disappointing. We saw in the first chapter that the pragmatic turn in analytic philosophy confronted the naive objectivity of logical positivism, claiming that language has many uses beyond that of truthfully representing reality. The descriptive use, for the second Wittgenstein, was only one of many possible language games, one of the multiple functions that language can perform out amidst the innumerable forms of life human beings have created. According to Austin, the logical analysis of descriptive language has to be complemented by an analysis of performative language, no longer dominated by the question of meaning and reference, but guided by the notions of illocutionary or perlocutionary force, which is what permits us to do things with words, transforming reality as we speak to one another. Derrida could not help but sympathize with these ideas, insofar as they involved a shift of the focus of interest in language, leaving behind the terrain of truth and meaning in favor of the idea of force: The Austinian notions of illocutionary and perlocutionary force do not designate the transport or transfer of some meaningful content, but rather the communication of an original movement (which will be defined in a general theory of action), an operation and the production of an effect. Communicating, in the case of the performative, if such a thing, in all rigor and in all purity, should exist […], would be tantamount to communicating a force through the impetus [impulsion] of a mark. (Sec, p. 13)



Chapter 4.  Deconstructing Austin

The term force, in the semantic river of Derrida, has both Nietzschean and Freudian connotations. Nietzschean, as Derrida himself notes, because it impels us to understand the will to know – the meaning of words qua those ideas that are present before our consciousness – as an aspect of the will to power – the effect of words in the transformation of and control over reality. The descriptive use of language will have to cohabit with – or even be explained by – the performative uses that make it into a survival tool and an instrument for living. And Freudian, because one of the main tasks of the psychoanalyst is to go beyond surface meanings and to search for repressed forces that use those meanings as mere vehicles. Remaining at the level of surface meaning, Freud held, is a vain attempt to explain our behavior on the basis of the mirages of consciousness, instead of looking for the unconscious streams that determine our behavior from the shadows. In this way, the Austinian choice of force as the central concept in the explanation of language seemed to be a promising starting point; analytic philosophy would take on the task of suspicion, rescuing the question of the performative “from the authority of the truth value, from the true/false opposition, at least in its classical form” (Sec, p. 13). And Austin’s initial focus certainly contributed to generating these expectations because he had, as we saw in the first chapter, the intention of forgetting “for once and for a while, that other curious question: ‘Is it true?’ ” (1970: 185, footnote). Austin held that what is important about a performative act, what makes it either efficacious or ineffectual, felicitous or infelicitous, is the fact that it functions, and not that it appropriately describes the true arrangement of a state of things. It seemed that Austin was leaving behind a conception of language that saw its essential purpose as being the communication of certain intentional states of consciousness, whose contents would be present before the mind, and which would have to be adequately reflected in words. In contrast to this view, the notions of illocution and perlocution do not involve the communication of a meaning. The performative does not have its referent outside of it, prior to it, or in front of it. Rather, its purpose is to do, function, transform reality. By making his philosophy ruled by the value of force instead of by that of truth, Austin made a move that was “nothing less than Nietzschean” (words which, coming from Derrida, were of high praise).51 51. Pace Stanley Cavell (1994), who does not think that Derrida’s Nietzschean reading of Austin is correct, there are passages in Austin’s works where that interpretation seems to be quite appropriate. For instance: “One thing, however, that it will be most dangerous to do, and that we are very prone to do, is to take it that we somehow know that the primary or primitive use of sentences must be, because it ought to be, statemental or constative, in the philosophers’ preferred sense of simply uttering something whose sole pretension is to be true or false and which is not liable to criticism in any other dimension. We certainly do not know that this is so, any more, for example, than, to take an alternative, that all utterances must have first begun as swear-words – and it seems much more likely that the ‘pure’ statement is a goal, an ideal, towards which the gradual development of science has given the impetus, as it has likewise also towards the goal of precision” (1962a: 72–73).

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But the expectations created were as great as was the disappointment that followed: And yet […], all the difficulties encountered by Austin in an analysis which is patient, open, aporetical, in constant transformation, often more fruitful in the acknowledgment of its impasses than in its [positive] positions, strike me as having a common root. Austin has not taken account of what – in the structure of locution (thus before any illocutory or perlocutory determination) – already entails that system of predicates I call graphematic in general and consequently blurs [brouille] all the oppositions which follow, oppositions whose pertinence, purity, and rigor Austin has unsuccessfully attempted to establish. (Sec, p. 14)

In Derrida’s opinion, Austin too lightly makes the transition from locution to illocution, that is, from a mere uttering of some words to the effective performance of a speech act: every locution must be realized via a code, i.e. via a language. Language, according to the Derridean reading of Saussure, is essentially a system of differences in which no element, either in its syntactic or its semantic aspect (if we assume Derrida’s critique of Saussure’s transcendental meanings), has value or validity by itself. Every phoneme, every word and every phrase receives its own identity from the contrast that it enjoys with the surrounding elements. It is not possible to know whether a given locution in fact constitutes an illocution if we pay exclusive attention to the locution itself. However, a secure transition from what was said to what was done, would require us to isolate the language used in such a way that nothing escaped our control. In order to attain this, Austin has to imagine the full and effective realization of a performative, resorting to a permanent “value of context, and even of a context exhaustively determined, in theory or teleologically” (Sec, p. 14). This is something I touched on earlier, when I stated that, in the fourth lecture of How to Do Things with Words, Austin presented an idea that was, in his opinion, so evident that it hardly seemed necessary to formulate it: “for a certain performative utterance to be happy, certain statements have to be true” (1962a: 45). Something so evident, denounces Derrida, is at the same time problematic, because at this point Austin’s methodology makes the question of force depend on that of truth: it must be true that the subject possesses a certain authority; it must be true that she has performed certain acts; it must be true that her words have been heard; it must be true that she has the intention of acting in consequence; it must be true, therefore, that she is simultaneously in several different mental states: intentions, desires, beliefs… It seems that the force of the performative is definitively constituted by a prolonged summation of determined truths about things that happen in the world, facts that are exhaustively expressible in propositions. And it is not an accident that:



Chapter 4.  Deconstructing Austin

[o]ne of those essential elements – and not one among others – remains, classically, consciousness, the conscious presence of the intention of the speaking subject in the totality of his speech act. As a result, performative communication becomes once more the communication of an intentional meaning. [Derrida continues in a footnote:] Which occasionally requires Austin to reintroduce the criterion of truth in his description of performatives. (Sec, p. 22, n. 7)

It is precisely the fact that Austin came so close to Derrida’s own position that exasperates the Frenchman, for the possibility was at hand of inverting the relationship between truth and force – something that would have meant exploding the conventional concept of communication as the transmission of a meaning. Frustrated, Derrida assumes that Austin did not take that crucial step.

Parasitism: The forgetting of a necessary possibility Austin’s method, permit me to recall, takes as its point of departure the delimitation of complete speech acts, that is, those in which all the necessary conditions of context come together so that an infelicity won’t occur. In reality, something that might appear to be a complete speech act might be performed in an insincere, feigned manner, within a play, as part of a poem, part of a soliloquy, or within a textual citation, without our being conscious, as listeners or spectators, of that fact. All these acts, which are described by Austin as parasitic cases – not serious, not ordinary –, will have to be left aside in order to analyze the cases of complete realization which are serious and completely normal. Austin initially excludes from analysis both non-realized acts – what Austin terms “misfires” – and acts that end up being empty or vacuous – which he classifies as “abuses”. All of these are the result of the rupture of pre-existing conventions, and Austin clearly considers them to be possible; in fact, their description constitutes the first step towards theory. But understanding the way speech acts work will require imagining those acts that are not limited in their full and perfect realization. However, that exercise of imagination can only function in a negative manner, that is, by the exclusion of what is empty or imperfect (at least until the arrival of Searle). This initial exclusion is what seems intolerable to Derrida, even as a short-term methodological proposal, since it makes certain characteristics of language that he considers to be definitional and inescapable appear circumstantial, secondary and optional. Austin is falling into the contradiction of accepting failure as an essential risk of these operations in order to later exclude this same risk as though it were something merely accidental and external. If the conventional character of speech acts makes their failure possible, given that conventions intrinsically constitute the

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acts in question, this possible failure cannot be set aside, even provisionally, in order to define the alternative of success. For “[w]hat is a success when the possibility of infelicity [échec] continues to constitute its structure?” (Sec, p. 15). The axis of the problem concerns the distinction between success and failure, a distinction that seeks to be included in the theory of ordinary language, albeit in a somewhat controversial way (see Kenaan 2002). For in daily life one will have a hard time finding those complete acts that Austin seeks to make the centerpiece of his theory since, as he himself admits, there are always extenuating circumstances. In any case, it is always possible to imagine such circumstances, given that the context that would have to be analyzed in order to demonstrate the fullness of the act is virtually limitless. Instead of accepting the intrinsically uncertain character of daily reality, Austin analyzes ordinary language from an idealized position in which those mitigating circumstances play no part. And, according to Derrida, Austin imagines this situation teleologically, which means that his aim in so doing is to overcome the imperfection of everyday language, and direct ourselves towards the end of the ideal theory. In this way, the end of this kind of idealized abstraction is the elimination of the parasitic forms of language and make it able to appear in a complete, perfect way. From this teleological point of view, “no residue [reste] escapes the present totalization” (Sec, p. 14): the conventions are perfectly defined; the linguistic uses are established definitively; the conditions of internal context – that is, of the mental states of the speakers – are totally in accordance with their acts; the grammatical form of their words are transparent and perfect; their own meaning is fully explicit and literal, etc. If the theory were able to attain such an idealization, then “no irreducible polysemy, that is, no ‘dissemination’ escaping the horizon of the unity of meaning” (Sec, p. 14) would remain.52 Specifically, Derrida is truly horrified by the idea that the internal context could be analyzed in an exhaustive manner, even if only in a theoretical fiction. This procedure would imply the maintenance of consciousness as the organizing center of the whole system, since, in order that the complete act be conceivable, it would have to be performed by “a free consciousness present to the totality of the operation” (Sec, p. 15). If someone sought to carry out, for example, a full and perfect promise, she would have to utter the words while remaining absolutely in control of her own consciousness, fully dominating her own present and future intentions, knowing to perfection the literal meaning of her own words… No place would be left for the elusive character of consciousness, as was pointed out by the philosophy of

52. As Glendinning indicates (2001: 31), Derrida reproaches Austin for not accompanying him in his voluntary exile from traditional philosophy: even if Austin started by criticizing traditional philosophy for its endogenous tendency to use simplifying idealizations, he ultimately relapsed when, for simplicity’s sake, he decided to begin by considering normal cases.



Chapter 4.  Deconstructing Austin

suspicion. No place for that structural unconsciousness underlying our mental life, that difference that silently determines the contents of consciousness, but is never itself present in them. The very possibility of suspicion qua philosophical activity would be nullified by this teleological intention of the theory of speech acts. We thus encounter in the philosophy of ordinary language a devaluation of the parasitic that is equivalent to the disdain that metaphysics showed towards writing. The privileged place of the phoné would be occupied by the full speech act – resulting from a serious and literal performance – while the place of writing would correspond to the parasitic uses of language – in its essence derived, supplemental and discardable. Therefore, Derrida saw himself as obligated to deconstruct Austin’s proposal, showing that what he assumes to be the ground or essence, the keystone of the entire theory, is in reality internally constituted by what has been defined to be secondary, accessory or circumstantial, but which absolutely cannot be held to be disposable. The oratio obliqua, non-serious language, metaphor, irony, citations… all must be seen as conditions of possibility for the poorly named normal language. The theory will have to assume something that is constitutive of the fact under study: that it is completely impossible to be exhaustive in the analysis of context and that we will never have the certainty of finding ourselves in the presence of a fully-realized speech act. Failure will have to be accepted as a structural risk, which does not imply that every speech act must fail, but rather that it is necessary that its failure be possible. This is a failure that isn’t to be found outside ordinary language, beyond its borders, like an abyss that lies beyond habitual limits, and that could be seen, from the security of the complete and meaningful use of language, as being a far-off danger. On the contrary, the possibility of failure constitutes language internally, making it be what it is: does the quality of risk admitted by Austin surround language like a kind of ditch or external place of perdition which speech [the locution] could never hope to leave, but which it can escape by remaining “at home,” by and in itself, in the shelter of its essence or telos? Or, on the contrary, is this risk rather its internal and positive condition of possibility? Is that outside its inside, the very force and law of its emergence? (Sec, p. 17)

To forget this necessary possibility would mean betraying the very nature of the phenomenon to be studied: condemning as a pathology what is in fact a law of language.53 It doesn’t matter whether our aim is to discover a theory that explains the phenomenon at hand by idealizing it: it would never be licit to leave out this aspect, which is constitutive of it. 53. As Patricio Peñalver Gómez comments, “that possibility of the functioning of language in the void and in absence is a law of language, and not a pathology it suffers” (1993: 161). Therefore, this is something that must be “thought in its positivity, and, so to speak, in its primitiveness, and not as anomalous loss or a utopian desire for the entirety of its meaning” (160).

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Citability and iteration The impossibility of performing an exhaustive analysis of an utterance’s context is inscribed in the very essence of language, since no linguistic element can acquire value of and by itself. Instead, it must do so in relation with another; not through its own identity but rather through its difference, i.e. through its graphematic character. All performatives, to the degree that they require a code, and this code is established by convention – since it can only be produced with words – are affected by the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign that Saussure points to and which, Derrida holds, affects not only the signifier but also the signified, i.e. meaning. To the degree that it is formulable in a code, the grapheme can be extracted from the immediate context in which it occurs and repeated in another, acquiring new meanings as a function of the new differential relations it may establish. Given that the context cannot be analyzed exhaustively, the identity of the grapheme cannot be determined in itself. Every speech act, since it is intrinsically constituted by that graphematic character, will include the possibility of being uttered in a context that relativizes it as a quotation, as a joke or as a metaphor. Therefore, it is not possible to rigorously distinguish the normal use and the quotation, the serious word and the joking one, the literal meaning and the metaphorical: For, ultimately, isn’t it true that what Austin excludes as anomaly, exception, “nonserious,” citation (on stage, in a poem, or a soliloquy) is the determined modification of a general citationality – or rather, a general iterability – without which there would not even be a “successful” performative? So that – a paradoxical but unavoidable conclusion – a successful performative is necessarily an “impure” performative. (Sec, p. 17)

Derrida’s argumentation thus concludes with a paradox, but not a reductio ad absurdum. This is not the first time that Derrida reveals his opposition to the logic of the excluded middle, which demands we choose between two alternative possibilities without any mixing between them: either language is serious or else it is a joke, either it is literal or it is metaphorical, either it is normal or it is parasitic. The paradox that Derrida exposes is that it cannot be the one without being the other. In order to be successful every performative must use a code and, for this reason, runs the risk of being re-iterated in a context that is not under the control of the sender. This kind of performative is thus irremediably open to the dissemination of its meaning. To believe that it is possible to defeat this openness of the context, even in a transitory fashion, by appealing to the purity of the complete act is – in the best of cases – an act of naiveté. A naiveté that is not lacking in nasty implications since, in the opinion of Derrida – an opinion which may certainly seem debatable – Austin’s effort to purify the normal in the realm of everyday or ordinary language hides – subtly – “the teleological lure of consciousness”. This



Chapter 4.  Deconstructing Austin

lure carries in its interior a “teleological and ethical determination”, i.e. an ideal of fullness or plenitude that is established as an evaluative gradation, like a scale of values according to which the parasitic appears, so to speak, as a fall from the state of grace. There is, therefore, a certain value judgment hidden in the theory itself, whose terms (success/failure, felicitous/infelicitous, normal/abnormal, ordinary/ parasitic) are far from being aseptically neutral. In opposition to this evaluative scale, teleologically directed towards the illusion of completeness, Derrida proposes exploring a distinct path. It is no longer a question of distinguishing the full act from that which is empty, success from failure, the authentic utterance from that which is repeated or iterated. Instead, it is a matter of “construct[ing] a differential typology of forms of iteration” (Sec, p. 18).54 Only in this way will it be possible to escape that ethical and teleological discourse that nihilistically subjugates reality to the supposed perfection – always promised, but which never arrives – of the idea.55

The event of the signature The third and final section of Sec (“Signatures”) is a detour from the question of oral utterances – to which, as Derrida notes in the quotation that he places at the front of his text, Austin had limited himself “for simplicity’s sake” – to that of writing. Note that, initially, Austin had attempted to delimit the realm of the performative using semantic criteria (certain verbs that implied actions) or grammatical (having the form of the indicative first person present). However, having seen the failure of these attempts, he was obligated to make use of pragmatic criteria that do not apply just to linguistic utterances (what in fact is said), but also to the context in which the utterance takes place (who says it, how and when). Nonetheless, in an attempt to justify his initial preference for the forms of the first person indicative present in the active voice, Austin appealed to the pragmatic justification that, in these uses, one is appealing to the “source of the utterance”.

54. For possible uses of this differential typology see (Fish 1982: 700–10) and (Macelay 2001). 55. Kenaan (2002: 131) is right in that it is not just a matter of showing that the possibility of failure is inherent to success, but rather of questioning the very notion of success – the effective transmission of content between speakers – as the regulative ideal of the philosophy of language. Nevertheless, in my opinion, Kenaan appears to be wrong in holding this to be a criticism of Derrida who, he claims, has only taken a first step, but not yet the crucial second. On the contrary, it is probable that Derrida was pointing in that same direction (see, for example, the first pages of Sec, which I have already analyzed, where he urges us to consider communication as something distinct from the mere successful transmission of a meaning).

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This source – which is nothing other than the intentional consciousness of the speaker – is manifestly present, according to Austin, in oral utterances. However – and here Derrida finds the clue needed for attacking that idea – the Englishman holds that in written sentences the linkage with the source of the utterance is equally guaranteed by the writer’s signature. Despite the fact that a written text is created with the impersonal letters of a typewriter, Austin claims that the presence of the handwritten signature, with a place and date, indicates that the source of the text, the subject who signs, was present at the moment of writing. Thanks to this deferred presence, the signed text preserves, at the moment of its reading, the same intentional meaning that it had at the moment it was written, just as spoken words receive their meaning from the presence of their source when they are uttered. Confronting this argument, Derrida wonders about the nature of signatures: “Is there such a thing? Does the absolute singularity of signature as event ever occur? Are there signatures?” (Sec, p. 20). In order for a segment of ink on paper to be considered a signature, it must necessarily be repeatable, iterable, since it is its form that we recognize, and not the materiality of its realization. And if the signature is iterable, its originality is debatable, since it is conceivable that the same form might occur in the absence of the source of the utterance, the person who has written the signature, i.e. outside that context where the source was present. Of course signatures exist, and Derrida does not deny this. They are written every day, but “the condition of possibility of those effects is simultaneously, once again, the condition of their impossibility, of the impossibility of their rigorous purity” (Sec, p. 20). The issue is not just that the signature can be imitated or falsified, but rather that even a signature written by the subject herself, in determined circumstances, might not be considered a valid signature. It might have been written under coercion, for instance, or in an unconscious and mechanical manner, misinterpreting the text that comes before it, which will have to be retracted later. Or, finally, the author might not have foreseen later misinterpretations, which she herself would have to consider more correct than her own version, if had she considered it closely. The signature, qua iterable form, does not guarantee once and for all the presence of the source of the text, her conscious authorship of what it says. It is no more than the trace of that presence, a presence that is deferred, being inevitably postponed and altered, as is shown – ironically – by Derrida’s own signature, written at the end of the text. If this is true for a written signature, Derrida claims, the same thing will occur with the “oral ‘signature’ constituted – or aspired to – by the presence of the ‘author’ as a ‘person who utters, ‘as a source,’ to the production of the utterance” (Sec, p. 20). This oral “signature” would also be iterable, since it is not the materiality of its presence but rather its form that truly defines it. The gesture, the expression, the tone of voice… all these elements are encodable and repeatable, susceptible of occurring in the absence of an intentional consciousness that supposedly gives them meaning.



Chapter 4.  Deconstructing Austin

In a somewhat hurried way, Derrida finishes his lecture by indicating certain implications that can be extracted from the arguments he has made. Firstly, communication, qua writing, would no longer be considered as “the means of transference of meaning, the exchange of intentions and meanings [vouloir-dire], discourse and the ‘communication of consciousnesses’ ” (Sec, p. 20). All these elements that are constitutive of human subjectivity, following the general leitmotif of post-structuralism, would in reality be the effect – and not the source – of an immense ‘play of differences’ that transcends that subjectivity and dissolves it. Secondly, Derrida doubts, given the character of communicative acts, that there would be any need for a deciphering hermeneutic that would unveil underlying meaning. In his view, this objective would clearly be on the wrong path, since in fact there will be no ultimate meaning or truth identifiable as that content which is transmitted by the words. Thirdly, he defends maintaining the terms writing and absence as part of a strategy that seeks to invert the classical oppositions (speech or presence), just as Nietzsche had done with terms such as matter and force, opposing them to idea and meaning – which garnered for him, as I mentioned in the preceding chapter, Heidegger’s accusation of falling into an inverted Platonism. Derrida holds that this inversion is necessary if, in fact, deconstruction aspires to act on the “field of non-discursive forces” that underlies the problems at hand. As I will later discuss, even though the notion of writing in the works of Derrida does not coincide with the traditional conception of the written text, he prefers to continue using the term when it comes to inverting the ancestral logocentric hierarchy. And he does so in order to favor the liberation of a force – the graphematic character of the written text – that, within that same tradition, had resisted subjugation. The hurried character of his conclusions highlights the fact that the argumentation that weaves through Sec is not, properly speaking, a demonstration. Rather, it is presented as just one more contribution to a longstanding controversy about subjectivism.56 The role played by Sec in that controversy is only noted in passing at the end of the text and at sporadic moments within it, as when Derrida notes that the iterability that constitutes language affects, in his opinion, every form of experience. This structural possibility of being separated from the referent or from meaning (hence from communication and from its context) seems to me to make every mark, including those which are oral, into a grapheme, i.e., the non-present permanence [restance] of a differential mark (cut off from its putative “production” or origin). And I would even extend this law to all “experience” in general if it is conceded that there is no experience consisting of pure presence but only of chains of differential marks. (Sec, p. 10) 56. Marcelo Dascal thus appears to be right when he holds that Derrida first accepted the debate as being a controversy, and not as the dispute that it ended up degenerating into (2001: 326ff).

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The parallelism is clear: in language every sign is a grapheme and demands an appeal to what is different – its code, its context – in order to be understood. With experience, similarly, everything that is experienced must be assimilated, in contrast to something it is differentiated from: “there is no experience consisting of pure presence but only of chains of differential marks”. In fact, only if the experience is itself differential will it be susceptible to being expressed and acquire a meaningful form. This is precisely what the Derridean critique of the phenomenology of Husserl consisted in, which I discussed previously: phenomenological description, since it is obligatorily linguistic, is only conceivable if we give up our allegiance to the supposed purity of what is described. Indeed, what is experienced can only be described if it is differentiable, and it can only be differentiable if it is already differentiated of itself, i.e. if it has a form that is iterable and repeatable, thus constituting a grapheme whose identity does not reside within itself, but rather in its differential relations with that which is not present in that experience. That is to say, the very content of experience appears as a structured form of language, or, even better, of writing. Here is where Derrida’s proposal enters into a more direct confrontation with Searle’s interpretation of Austin’s work. The goals of both authors seem to be, in this sense, completely opposed to one another: Derrida’s intention is to show that all experience is language, or even writing; for Searle, in contrast, it is language that must be understood as the correlate of a mental state, i.e. of an intentional experience. Is all experience a form of language, or is all language, rather, a form of experience? This time the order of the factors does alter the product.

chapter 5

The indignation of the rightful heir Derrida in the U.S. From the end of the ’70s to the beginning of the ’80s Derrida’s ideas began to penetrate the Anglo-American world in a decisive though irregular way.57 There were numerous specialists that saw Derrida’s proposal as being a tremendously significant, even revolutionary, contribution in at least two disciplines: literary theory and cultural anthropology.58 On the one hand, in the realm of literary theory, Derrida provided a philosophical discourse that supported the new strategy of reading which, thanks to the development of the so-called School of Yale, gradually achieved dominance.59 Until then, the conventional manner of reading, in the classic tradition of literary studies, found its goal through the search outside the text for an explanation of the text itself. Reading could not stop until it went beyond the work, identifying something exterior – the original intention of the author, the social context in which the work arose, its moment in history… – as the terra firma that would permit developing a correct and definitive analysis. In contrast to this hermeneutic and humanist reading – which sought to interpret the person that was behind a given work –, criticism discovered another way of playing the game. 57. On this issue, there is a very interesting sociological study by Michele Lamont (1987) in which the author, following Pierre Bourdieu, analyzes the differing diffusion of Derrida’s “theoretical trademark” in France and the United States. In Lamont’s opinion – and using a mercantilist terminology that might be disconcerting to some – the key to the U.S. success of the Derridean “cultural product”, greater even than what he received in his own country, was the “segmentation of the cultural market”: “the legitimation of Derrida’s work in the United States was made possible by its adaptation to existing intellectual agenda and by a shift in public from a general audience to a specialized literary one” (586). In addition, François Cusset (2008) performed a detailed sociological analysis of the reception of post-structuralism in the U.S. 58. Searle explained this situation as follows: “In many disciplines, for example, analytic philosophy, they found the way blocked by a solid and self-confident professorial establishment committed to traditional intellectual values. But in some disciplines, primarily those humanities disciplines concerned with literary studies – English, French, and Comparative Literature especially – the existing academic norms were fragile, and the way was opened intellectually for a new academic agenda by the liberating impact of the works of authors such as Jacques Derrida, Thomas Kuhn, and Richard Rorty” (1993a: 71). 59. Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller and Derrida himself collaborated in the collective work Deconstruction and Criticism (Bloom et al. 1979).

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The new rules were found in the contributions of the French post-structuralists, with Derrida at their head, who offered a philosophical grounding that denied the necessity – and even the possibility – of looking outside the work in order to find its meaning. It would henceforth be the work itself, or, rather, its text, which would offer its own interpretative key through its inter- and intratextual weaving. The objective of this kind of literary analysis is to demonstrate how a text acquires meaning – always as a function of that textual interweaving – and not what it means – as though its meaning were something separable from the text itself and able to survive without it once it has been interpreted. What was in play was intentionality as a source of meaning: an intentionality that, via the structuralist notion of a code, was questioned as a guide to literary interpretation. On the other hand, in the realm of anthropology, Derrida was also a stimulus for the development of the so-called cultural studies, where diverse types of more or less radical cultural relativism flowed together, representing opposition to the scientific spirit then dominant. The conception of contemporary science as a discipline that progressively approaches the truth about the real, offering us a description of the world that is valid in and of itself, and that transcends all epochs and all cultures, was criticized with the aid of deconstructionist methods, which revealed the weak and stale metaphysical foundations of this naive universalist objectivism. Precisely because of his success in these circles, Derrida was seen by many to be the enemy to be fought. Deconstructionism had to be refuted, either in defense of a new hermeneutic proposal for reading literary texts, or else defending a revised realist epistemology that was capable of standing up to the relativist challenge. In any case, the contribution of Derrida undoubtedly awakened, at least in the areas of literary theory and anthropology, that confrontation and polemic that he himself had sought out, most likely in deliberate fashion. Nonetheless, despite this clamorous invasion of a good part of the AngloAmerican cultural space, much of philosophical endeavor remained – and remains so even to the present day – completely alien to Derrida’s contributions.60 This is a striking symptom of the fissure that divided the humanities and, specifically, philosophers, in U.S. universities at that time. On the one hand one could find a hard core of thinkers in the analytical tradition – to which Searle belonged, as one of its principal representatives – willing to undertake their work in collaboration 60. The lecture that Derrida gave in Oxford in 1967 was a premonition: “The thing was received quite badly: cold consternation rather than objection and criticism, but Ayer exploded in cholera, the only one who lost his sang-froid, in the midst of Ryle, Strawson, etc. Whenever I encounter unpleasantnesses [mésaventures] in Oxford, where Austin taught (or, later, in Cambridge, even when things ended up turning out well), I always think of him” (2003: 91) [Translator’s note: the English version of this work does not contain the cited text; I have defaulted to translating directly from the Spanish version, the French remaining inaccessible.]



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with the scientific contributions of the day, whose primary objective was, in the majority of cases, the search for a conceptual map that will be in accord with a more or less reductionist naturalism. On the other hand, there was another group of philosophers, normally in the minority, who were often inheritors of American pragmatism, a movement which was strongly influenced by continental philosophy, Heidegger in particular. This latter group was not, therefore, so committed to the pretensions of scientism and physicalism, and flirted methodically and stylistically with literature. It hardly needs saying that this second group was more open to Derrida’s ideas.61 The relationship between these two groups was not at all fluid, not even today, despite the fact that there are authors that have made the transition between them with a certain ease. The case of Richard Rorty is prominent: a dissident from the first group who has ended up being a paradigm for the second; or the one of Hilary Putnam who, in the latest – for now – stage of his personal philosophical journey, has entered into an open dialog with the anti-realist positions of continental philosophy. But these instances of mingling between the two groups are more anecdotal than anything else. Generally speaking, the gap between these two worlds has been unbridgeable, not so much because there is any confrontation between them but because, as I pointed out in the introduction, there is a mutual lack of knowledge and mutual disdain. Richard Rorty himself, for example, was practically unknown to many of his hardcore analytical colleagues at Stanford University, as one of those colleagues confessed to me personally. This mutual ignorance, rather than open confrontation, is what characterizes the world of Anglo-American philosophy, a kind of microcosmos that reflects the macrocosmos of the analytic-continental confrontation. Hardcore analytical philosophers tend to address philosophical problems in a highly specialized way, collaborating with various scientific disciplines; it is only through working in groups that they acquire a more global perspective. Within the context of their daily routines, contributions that are so profoundly divergent and wide-ranging as that of Derrida tend to pass them by completely. Nevertheless, this time things went differently.

An unexpected response The republication of Sec in the American journal Glyph, six years after it was presented at the congress in Montreal, was followed by a sharp response by Searle: entitled “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida” (1977, Reply from here on), which produced a small intellectual earthquake on both sides of the Atlantic. 61. Even within this group, Derrida’s reception is uneven, as Rorty points out in “Is Derrida a Transcendental Philosopher?”, in (1991: 119–28).

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By choosing Austin as the object of his criticisms, Derrida had stuck his finger into the open wound of American philosophy, thus making an encounter between two great philosophical traditions possible. Nevertheless, in Searle’s opinion, this encounter never even took place: It would be a mistake, I think, to regard Derrida’s discussion of Austin as a confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions. This is not so much because Derrida has failed to discuss the central theses in Austin’s theory of language, but rather because he has misunderstood and misstated Austin’s position at several crucial points, as I shall attempt to show, and thus the confrontation never quite takes place. (Reply, p. 198)

The occasion was too perfect not to take advantage of: Derrida had committed the stupidity of laying himself open to having a heavyweight amongst the hardcore analytical philosophers refute shamefully his post-structuralist follies. Searle was situated in a clearly advantageous position, since his studies at Oxford under the direction of Austin permitted him to sustain with authority that “Derrida’s Austin is unrecognizable. He bears almost no relation to the original” (Reply, p. 204). The legitimate heir to the philosophy of Austin was getting ready to defend his teacher, arming himself with all his irony and sarcasm. Searle has always proved to have an extraordinary ability to discard the positions of his adversaries with short and categorical sentences, without even stopping to take into serious consideration ideas that he sees as erroneous or obsolete. On this occasion, however, he analyzed Sec over the course of a dozen polemical and hurtful pages which today are difficult to obtain: his reticence to allowing practically any republishing or translation of the text forced Gerald Graff to include a summary of Reply, instead of the complete text, in his edition of Derrida’s works concerning the polemic.62 Why did Searle refuse? Was it because of the harsh rhetoric of the text? Or because of the alleged errors of interpretation he might have committed, which were later pointed out by Derrida? Or rather, as Mark Alfino holds, was it because of the absolute indifference with which Searle preferred to deal with the question? Prof. Searle refused to permit the republication of this article in Limited Inc because, as he himself told me, he does not believe that the type of books that Derrida writes were legitimate (nor, generally speaking, were they intelligible), and preferred not to incite the deconstructionists, or anyone else, by giving the debate more attention than it had already received. (Alfino 1991: 143)

62. See Graff ’s edition of Limited Inc. (1988: vii and 25–7). John Hopkins University only published the journal Glyph between 1977 and 1981. Although the article was never republished in English, Searle’s reticence was not absolute, given that in 1991 there appeared, unexpectedly, a French version, translated and with an epilogue by Joëlle Proust (Searle 1991).



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It appears that Searle did not want to throw more fuel on the fire of an issue that he considered to be a one-off, almost an amusement whose purpose was to ridicule the illegibility and meaninglessness of a wayward intellectual’s work. Nonetheless, this reticent attitude did not, years later, prevent him from returning to the issue, broadening his criticisms of deconstructionism in a set of texts which I will analyze closely in Chapter 7, but which I will use occasionally here when they serve to clarify the positions already covered in Reply. At any case, and despite the time that he dedicates to it, Searle does not at all seem to think that in his debate with Derrida issues were raised that could affect the very heart of his theory of speech acts, and less still his philosophy of mind or of society. Later I will seek to justify my claim that, had the debate been carried out with a little more seriousness, this collision would have led to a discussion that was fruitful for all these disciplines, stimulating a critical review of the concept of intentionality that runs through them transversally. Instead, the tension of the context – between the hard core of analytic philosophy and the barbarian invasions of continental poststructuralism and postmodernism – is revealed through harsh rhetoric, whose only result was a sterile, failed encounter.

Derrida according to Searle: Writing and absence Reply is made up of two sections: the first (“Writing, Permanence, and Iterability”) discusses Derrida’s ideas about communication and the concept of writing, while the second (“Derrida’s Austin”) focuses on Derrida’s critique of Austin’s philosophy. The text is dense, hurried and, above all, there is a scarcity of examples – something that is not at all common in Searle’s works, and which I will attempt to compensate for by adding my own examples as an aid in clarifying his posture. I will initially pause in the first section in order to analyze a series of theses that Searle attributes to Derrida and which, following my exposition of Derrida’s thought in the two preceding chapters, should appear, at the very least, to be disconcerting. At the beginning of Reply there is a brief summary of Sec which, generally speaking, is not too far off base, at least if we take into consideration what comes after. In Searle’s summary, Derrida’s intention was to demonstrate, in the first place, that writing necessarily can function in the absence of the context of enunciation and, specifically, of the present intention of the speaker, which is where he got the idea that the purpose of writing is not the transport of meaning between consciousnesses. In what follows, according to Searle, Derrida holds that the characteristics classically attributed to writing affect all language, all communication and all experience in general. Searle concludes by saying that the Frenchman thinks he has demonstrated that none of these phenomena can be explained as the effect of acts by

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means of which the intentional consciousnesses of the speakers share their contents. The argument has as its axis the concept of iterability, which Searle understands tacitly as the possibility of repetition of linguistic elements. After this supposedly objective and innocuous summary, Searle directs his criticism to the distinction between oral and written language, which, in his opinion, Derrida completely misinterprets. Searle claims that, according to Derrida, there are two aspects which characterize writing: iterability and absence. Searle, in contrast, states in the first place that iterability is not a characteristic that is specific to writing, but rather is an essential aspect of language that affects all its possible manifestations, qua conduct governed by rules. For example, let us imagine that linguistic elements were not repeatable: the utterance of the word “dog” in a particular moment (t1) could not be considered to be an utterance of the same word were it uttered in a distinct moment (t2). One would have to invent semantic and syntactic laws that set out norms for use with each of the possible occurrences (in t1, t2,… tn) of that word – which could not even be considered to be the same word. In order for the idea of a rule to be understandable, we must accept that a self-similar phonetic chain – or a series of graphemes, in the case of written language – counts as a repetition of the same linguistic element, despite any differences in pronunciation, accent, shape, etc. This characteristic is nothing other than an application of the basic distinction between token identity, where each element is numerically the same, and type identity, where one can say that distinct exemplars are qualitatively the same to the degree that they share certain characteristics. This distinction is constitutive of language, whether it be oral or written, and affects all levels equally, from the phoneme to discourse, and from the grapheme to the text. Now, as Searle will clarify later, what is iterable is not the marks or signs themselves, in their material realization, but rather the types to which they belong (1994: 643). My copy of El Quijote is the same today and yesterday, without there being any iteration at all; in contrast, this copy and that which is in the library are only the same to the degree that they are cases that fall under the same type: iterations of a single form. To speak of iteration in the first sense involves a tremendous conceptual confusion, since there is no iteration at all in the phenomenon of temporal permanence. In second place, the absence of the sender or receiver that habitually accompanies writing is not at all, according to Searle, an essential feature, as Derrida seems to believe, since writing can function perfectly well with the speakers present. On the contrary, what differentiates written language from spoken is its distinct permanence: written texts last physically in time, while oral utterances, unless they are recorded, are ephemeral. Allow me to add here an example of my own making: let us imagine two friends seated together during an intensely boring concert; one of them can’t take it any longer and decides to leave the auditorium, but first he must tell his friend that he



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will wait for him outside. In this situation he can choose between telling him in a low voice “I’ll wait for you outside when this is done”, or else writing the same words on a piece of paper, in order not to cause noise that would annoy the other concert-goers. The statement uttered will be the same, both in its oral as well as in its written form; the only thing that differentiates the first case from the second is that the utterance or physical realization of the first will not last in time, while the second will. This difference means that, hours after the concert, the paper might be found by the janitor, with the original interlocutors having left, thereby making it possible that it might be interpreted differently, since the context of utterance is not known. But no iterability is involved here: the written note and the found note would be the same statement, the same token, and not an iteration or repetition of the original. In the case that the hearer did not understand her friend’s words and the friend repeated them for her, the phenomenon of iteration would have occurred, since the same statement would have been uttered twice. But this could have occurred with oral language – because of not having heard the words properly – as easily as with writing – because the letters weren’t understandable. Iterability, therefore, is a phenomenon that affects oral language and written language equally. And the same occurs with absence, which, although it tends to affect written language more, is neither essential to it nor exclusive. Both communicators can be present at the moment of writing, or can be absent at the moment of listening, if the utterance had been recorded. Derrida’s argument appears to be confusing iterability, permanence and absence. Furthermore, it seems that he didn’t specify which of these aspects is the one that differentiates oral language from written. And to add icing to the cake, the Frenchman introduced into this swamp the concept of citation, which would be a combination of the phenomena of iterability and the physical writing of the signs. Returning to the previous example, let us imagine that the janitor finds the paper the next day and, since both the original sender and receiver are absent, he reads out loud the words that are written on the paper: “I’ll wait for you outside when this is done”. His co-worker who, focused on her work, had not noticed the appearance of the paper, would doubtlessly be annoyed at the prospect of having to finish everything herself. But her colleague would have calmed her down immediately, showing her that his utterance was in fact a citation: the iteration of a previous utterance that lasted over time, by way of its written materiality. This is also something circumstantial, since the citation can be performed independently of whether it is via writing, a sound recording or the exercise of memory.

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Intention and the communicative act Once he has cleared up the series of confusions that he claimed to have found in Sec, Searle states that “intentionality plays exactly the same role in written communication and oral” (Reply, p. 202), since both types of utterance make sense to the degree that the sender has used them intentionally in order to communicate with the receiver. Whether she writes a note or speaks in a low voice, the spectator wanted to say what she said, and her words should be interpreted in that sense. Only in the case of the citation, above all when the context of the utterance has been lost, the intention of the original writer or speaker can be distant, or even inaccessible. But one should not use the fact that it is possible to separate utterance and utterer in order to claim that the utterance must be interpreted without taking into account the intention that it was uttered with. No doubt this kind of – somewhat irresponsible – interpretation could in fact be carried out. We might imagine, for example, that the words “I’ll wait for you outside when this is done” form part of a dramatic suicide note in which a lover is making reference to the end of the world, which is the only hope she has of finding her lost love again, beyond the time and space that have so cruelly separated them. And no doubt this interpretation would seem to us to be more poetic and grandiloquent, but it wouldn’t tell us anything about the fact that someone in the audience was sick of listening to Mozart. If what we are interested in is reality, no matter how prosaic it might seem, the correct interpretation of the words will be linked to the context of utterance and, concretely, to the intentional content that the speaker wants to attach to them. “Outside” does not refer to the afterlife, but rather to outside the theater; the deictic “this” does not point to this cruel world, but rather to this horrendously boring concert. In Searle’s opinion, written language acquires a “genuinely ‘graphematic’” character – although it is hard to imagine what that word might mean when he uses it – by the fact that it abides over time, which “enables it to survive the death of its author, receiver, and context of production” (Reply, p. 201). In this way, words can be interpreted as though they said something different from what they mean in their original use. But this does not justify Derrida’s crazy proposal, according to which we have to explain all of language without making reference to the communicative intention that produces it. An even less well-founded argument is that according to which we occasionally use language without intentionality. Derrida, let us recall, stated in his discussion of Husserl that agrammaticality is an example showing that certain expressions transgress the intentional structure of language without actually saying anything, as when we utter the sentence “the green is or”. Here Derrida believed he had encountered the perfect example of language being able to function as a vacant form, totally lacking meaningful intention. Certainly, it is inconceivable that a color could be a disjunctive conjunction, and as a result



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this idea cannot be expressible in language. But this does not imply, according to Searle, that on saying this sentence, we are using language without an intentional conscience backing it up: what we are doing is just mentioning a series of words, not using them. The argument is constructed, once again, upon a confusion between ridiculously simple concepts, on this occasion, those of use and mention. Searle claims that this same practice is maintained throughout the entirety of Sec, which is nothing more than a string of incongruent arguments where the most basic concepts of philosophy are confused, concepts that make one blush from having to make them explicit. Against all the hot air emitted by the Frenchman, the American reaffirms his fundamental theses about language, which he sees as opposite to those of Derrida: The situation, with regards to intentionality, is exactly the same for the written word and the spoken. To understand a statement consists in recognizing the illocutionary intentions of the author, intentions that can be realized more or less perfectly by the words used, be they written or spoken. (Reply, p. 202)

No text should be considered, by itself, as a communicative act unless it represents “the standing possibility of an intentional speech act” (Reply, p. 202). The idea is made even clearer in a later article (1994: 651 and ff), where he emphasizes the distinction – which we have already discussed in Chapter 2 – between sentence meaning and utterance meaning: the meaning of the sentence is not determined by the concrete intentions of the speaker that uttered them, but rather by the linguistic conventions in force. This means that any fragment of code, whether it was uttered consciously and intentionally or by pure chance, has a literal and objective meaning. Even a sentence written on the sand by the capricious coming and going of waves could have meaning, qua sentence, and could exemplify a type of linguistic utterance. Up to this point, Searle’s position does not seem far from that of Derrida: a text consists of words and sentences, and will continue to have linguistic meaning independently of the intentions of the author. In addition, it is also possible to define “text” syntactically, as a set of words and sentences, however it was that they were produced. And in this case the meaning of a text can be ascertained while leaving aside any authorial intention, because the meaning of the text consists in the meaning of the words and sentences that it is made up of. (1994: 652)

Now, it is only when the speaker uses the sentence in order to communicate something that the sentence will have illocutionary intentions and meaning qua utterance, a meaning that might or might not coincide with what one would ascribe to the sentence itself, if interpreted literally. As a result, this independence of language qua code does not imply that there is a lack of intentionality at the base of linguistic phenomena, since “the entire system of syntax only exists relative to human

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intentionality” (1994: 654). In reality, the meaning of the sentence is nothing more than an abstract convention that we establish on the basis of prevailing usage, i.e. on the basis of the utterances where speakers have used it. When Derrida holds that language can function essentially independently of intentionality, he is clearly being partial in his perception of the problem. Why does Derrida have such a “distressing penchant for saying things that are obviously false”? (Reply, p. 203) In Searle’s opinion, it is because his conception of language is a slave to two implicit illusions that, when combined, turn out to be disastrous. In the first place, there is the illusion that illocutionary intentions lie behind utterances, as though it were a matter of two separate processes: one, uttering certain words; and two, wanting to say something with them. On the contrary, the illocutionary act takes place upon uttering the words, not on a mysterious second level that has to be brought into the light. In the second place, claims Searle, Derrida is also a slave to the illusion that intentions must all be conscious, present as a separate set of mental states, apart from the simple act of writing or speaking. He thus falls – which Searle does not mention explicitly – into an error similar to that which, in his opinion, characterizes the so-called higher order thought theories about the functioning of consciousness: believing that, in order that a mental act be consciously realized, there must be a second act by which the mind monitors it.63 Nevertheless, in Searle’s opinion, there are not two acts but only one: “[s]peaking and writing are indeed conscious intentional activities, but the intentional aspect of illocutionary acts does not imply that there is a separate set of conscious states apart from simply writing and speaking” (Reply, p. 202).

Derrida’s Austin, according to Searle In what to unsuspecting ears might have sounded like an act of humility or modesty, Searle had stated the following at the beginning of his Reply: I should say at the outset that I did not find his arguments very clear and it is possible that I may have misinterpreted him as profoundly as I believe he has misinterpreted Austin.  (Reply, p. 198)

This possibility of misinterpretation, it hardly need be said, would not have been provoked by a lack of attention or interest on the part of the reader, but rather by the malicious ambiguity of the original author, behind which an empty and incoherent discourse is hidden. So, in the second part of the Reply we encounter a memorable 63. Concerning higher-order thought theories see Rosenthal (2002: 406–21). Searle’s alternative vision can be found in his (1992: chap. VI).



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act of reported speech, where Searle attempts to reconstruct – probably badly – how it is that Derrida misinterprets Austin. Searle begins this part of his analysis by stating that “according to Derrida, Austin excludes the possibility that performative utterances (and a priori every other utterance) can be quoted” (Reply, p. 203), by ejecting both parasitic and fictional discourse from the realm of ordinary language. By excluding these abnormal forms as merely accessory risks of the performative act, Austin would have constructed his theory while in ignorance of an essential and definitional aspect of language itself. The problem, according to Searle, is not that Derrida’s criticisms are unjust, but rather that “Derrida’s Austin is unrecognizable” (Reply, p. 204): what Derrida is criticizing is not, properly speaking, Austin’s philosophy, but rather the effect of a fallacious and misguided reading that is the fruit of a long series of errors committed by the Frenchman in his own reading of Austin’s work and in his own conception of how language functions. In the first place, Derrida fails to grasp the methodological purpose of Austin’s exclusion of infelicitous and borderline utterances: it is a mere research strategy, whose only aim is to provisionally isolate paradigmatic cases. Searle himself had applied and expressly defended this methodology in Speech Acts: The proper approach, I suggest, is to examine those cases which constitute the center of variation of the concept of referring and then examine the borderline cases in light of their similarities and differences from the paradigms. (1969: 28)

Letting himself be swayed by the pejorative meaning of the term “parasitic”, Derrida thinks – unjustifiably – that Austin’s exclusion has the character of an unappealable moral judgment. Instead, in reality, the relationship between normal and parasitic language is an innocuous logical dependence: parasitic usages are built on ordinary usages, which are more basic. Austin’s strategy is not just correct, according to Searle, but absolutely necessary, because one cannot explain parasitic use without referring to normal use – while it is perfectly possible to explain normal use without referring to the parasitic. Let us imagine, for example, that a person exclaims “Look what a wonderful day it is!” while we see a terrible storm through the window. If we seek to explain how the irony of that exclamation works, we will need to previously show what the normal meaning of the words is in order to, afterwards, note that the intention of the speaker is to say the contrary of what the words mean. However, in order to show the normal meaning of the expression “Look what a wonderful day it is!” there is no need to previously explain that it can be used in an ironic fashion. The ironic use is parasitic – that is, logically dependent – on the normal use, and for this reason the latter must be explained by the theory of speech acts prior to the former, which does not in any way imply a morally negative judgment about the parasitic use.

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In second place, as an effect of the misunderstanding analyzed earlier, Derrida confuses the notions of citability and parasitism, a distinction that is directly related to that of use and mention. In the case of the citation, the expression is being mentioned, but not used; on the contrary, in the case of parasitism, the expression is being used, although the meaning is not the habitual one. Another example: imagine that, in the earlier situation, the words “Look what a wonderful day it is!” were written on the wall, and the speaker had spoken them without any other intention than that of communicating what someone had written. In that case the speaker would not be using the sentence, either normally – since she is not intending to say that it is in fact is a good day – or ironically – since she also does not wish to say the contrary – since she is simply mentioning the sentence. She does not use it intentionally other than, perhaps, to point out what the intention of the author was. Confusion rises to a fever pitch when Derrida states that citability and parasitism are not only the same thing, but also that they coincide with another distinct concept, iterability. Thanks to this conceptual morass, Derrida comes to the conclusion that, by provisionally excluding parasitical utterances, Austin excludes the citability and the iterability of speech acts. The error in Derrida’s interpretation is unpardonable, says Searle, since Austin would never have excluded iterability from his explanation of language, not even provisionally. The repeatability of linguistic elements – their character as conventions subject to the type-token distinction – is absolutely inseparable from the very idea of language, and Austin knew that perfectly. But Searle’s list of misreadings goes on: it is possible to confuse the concepts even more by assimilating, as Derrida does, the distinction between normal and parasitic language with the difference between oral and written language. This assimilation does not work, because the relationship between parasitic and normal language – as with that between fiction and non-fiction – is one of logical dependence, as I showed above, while the relationship between oral communication and writing is a mere contingent fact about the history of human languages. While it is not possible to understand the parasitic language without making reference to the normal, it is possible to understand what writing consists in without referring to oral language, given the contingency of their relationship. In fact, Searle holds, in mathematics and logical symbolism, the relation of dependence is inverted: writing is prior to any oral manifestation. Finally, Searle ends by criticizing the thesis that he believes to be the fundamental goal of Sec: that, as a consequence of the iterability of linguistic elements, there is “an essential absence of intention to the actuality of the utterance” (“Reply”, 204). On the contrary, holds Searle, this iterability is “the necessary condition of the particular forms of intentionality that are characteristic of speech acts” (“Reply”, 208). That is, that there is no language without iterability, and that this does not



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mean that language is not a conscious and intentional activity. Rather, the iterability of its elements is the condition of possibility of the linguistic manifestation of that intentionality – and not what makes it impossible, as Derrida had proposed (in Searle’s view).

Philosophical false friends: Writing The sensation that remains after having read Reply is truly disconcerting. On the one hand, it is clear that the arguments given by Searle are common sense, and that the distinctions he establishes between citability, parasitism, iterability, writing and permanence are clear and correct. On the other hand, however, Searle gives the impression of having misunderstood not just the central theses of Sec, but also the objective that Derrida had had in writing the text – and in general, all of his work. Before giving the floor back to Derrida by considering his reply to Reply, we need to stop a moment in order to show just how far Searle’s reading is off-track, due to his completely ignoring the semantic river that feeds the terms used in Sec. A mere translation of those terms from French to English is not sufficient to transmit the meaning of what its author meant to say, since they cannot be dumped into a different language without losing the echoes that reverberated at their origin. It is profoundly naive to believe that terms like écriture or intentionalité can be simply translated by writing or intentionality, without losing any of their meaning in transit. The question that is in play goes beyond a mere translation between languages and involves the semantic, theoretical, emotional and even moral cargo carried by the terms used, as a function of who uses them.64 The misunderstanding does not arise from a mere bad translation between languages, but rather from the lack of an explicit nuancing of the different uses that both authors make of the same terminology, whose meaning is only superficially shared. Just as translators must avoid letting faux-amis tempt them into making an incorrect translation because of the tricky similarity of the words from distinct languages, we must avoid hastily coming to the conclusion that, when Derrida says écriture and Searle says writing, both are referring to the same thing. It will be necessary, instead, to clarify what the differing cargos are that are carried by the terms of the discussion, according to who is utilizing them on each and every occasion.65 64. See the interesting and controversial article by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel: “A Pre-Requisite for Rational Philosophical Discussion”, in (Rorty, ed., 1967: 356–359). 65. Concerning the implications of the phenomenon of false friends for translations in general, and those of philosophical texts in particular, see the study by Pedro J. Chamizo-Domínguez (2007).

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Oddly, when at another moment he is reflecting in the abstract about the logic of conversations from the point of view of linguistic pragmatics, Searle shows that he is quite conscious of certain ideas that, however, he did not put into play in his debate with Derrida. For instance, in his opinion “conversations can only proceed given a structure of expectations and presuppositions”, since they imply collective intentionality (see his “Conversation”, in Searle et al. 1992: 11). However, in order that this be the case, i.e. in order that the interlocutors may properly speak of the same thing, there must be a Network of prior beliefs and a common Background (mandatory conditions for intentionality, which I have already discussed in Chapter 2). It’s not absurd to think that Searle, a few years after his fateful debate with Derrida, might have had that occasion in mind when he writes: some of the most frustrating and unsatisfactory conversations occur between people with radically different backgrounds, who can converse for a long time while only achieving mutual misunderstanding. (Searle et al. 1992: 29)

As Habermas notes in his reading of the debate, the interlocutors in a conversation “can act communicatively only under the presupposition of intersubjectively identical ascriptions of meaning” (1987: 198). However, this identity should not be naively presupposed. On the contrary, the conditions of this identification of meaning must be brought to light – the Network, the Background, history and the semantic river that runs through every word – in order to avoid the illusion of expressions whose meaning is perhaps only apparently shared. Let’s begin with the word writing: as we already saw in the preceding chapters, Derrida’s use of this term differs significantly from the usual meaning, giving rise to a confusion that the author himself, perversely, is guilty of. In order to avoid this confusion, I will reserve from now on the term “writing” in order to refer to the Derridean concept, and will use the expression “written language” when I wish to refer to the traditional concept – defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “letters or characters that serve as visible signs of ideas, words, or symbols”. Written language, let us recall, had represented for the tradition both an advantage and a danger. The advantage is the permanence of what is said beyond the instant of its utterance; its danger is distortion, given that the utterance can be separated from the context and can function in the absence of the sender, receiver and referent. While this duality had traditionally been considered to be a feature specific to written language, it is evident that, from the moment in which we had the technical means to record and reproduce sounds, oral language is affected by it too: it also enjoys this advantage and suffers from this danger. The idea is that, once the illusion of the phonocentric tradition has been dispelled, we have to accept that oral language and written language show an identical vulnerability to being interpreted in the absence of the sender and the receiver. That is, using Derrida’s expression, both oral language and written language are writing.



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Searle’s critique is disconcerting because Derrida had never claimed that iterability and absence were essential features of written language, features that would be lacking in oral language. On the contrary, for Derrida, iterability is necessarily an aspect of both; and absence – of the sender, receiver and referent – is a possibility, not a necessity, that also affects them both equally. That is to say, what Searle criticizes Derrida for not understanding is in reality the latter’s own position: that iterability and the possibility of absence are constitutive aspects of all language. Translated into Derridean terminology, Searle would paradoxically be claiming that oral language and written language are writing.

Philosophical false friends: Intentionality Another important term that is in play here, and which is only “shared” in a fallacious and deceptive way, is that of intentionality. Neither of the two authors appear to realize that its semantic cargo is profoundly distinct in the two languages, despite the fact that there clearly are shared aspects. For example, both are conscious of the historical origin of the term, that its first usage was by medieval scholastics, and that it was recuperated by Franz Brentano in the 19th century in order to refer to something that he considered to be exclusive to and definitional of mental events: their capacity to refer to something different than themselves (Brentano 1973). Now, for Brentano intentionality was an objective feature of the mind that could be studied by psychology as an empirical science: empirical subjects are those which, according to Brentano, have the capacity to refer mentally to something outside themselves. When somebody says, for example, “I like this table”, the sounds that she utters have their origin in her vocal tract, while her concepts and mental representations occur in her mind. What she is referring to, however, is not found in either place. Both refer to something that is outside the subject, since sound and mental representation point to the intentional content: the table. We saw earlier how Husserl, a disciple of Brentano, adopted the idea of intentionality as the axis of his entire theory of phenomenology. To that end, he wanted to separate it beforehand from the psychologistic sense that impregnated the work of his master: the intentionality that Husserl refers to corresponds to the transcendental subject and not to a concrete empirical subject, which can be the object of a psychological analysis. Otherwise, his phenomenology would be in no condition to pursue a ground for the empirical sciences nor, therefore, would it offer a way out of the crisis of the European sciences, and a means to escape the loss of the living meaning of their theoretical constructs. By means of the idea of intentionality, Husserl sought to save the concept of the subject from both the Kantian idealist posture – inevitably foundering on the futile search for the “thing in itself ” – as well as from solipsism. The intentional consciousness, in this sense, is not in the

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world – an error that, as we saw earlier, Descartes had committed – but rather it is transcendent, qua condition of possibility of the world: it is the transcendental subject. On the other hand, the objective world, the things themselves, would in the final analysis be nothing more than the intentional correlate of that consciousness. Let us imagine that it is possible to cognize the intentional result of all possible experience, without any temporal or spatial limitation. This would be an experience that lacks the obstacles that habitually impede the grasping of certain aspects of reality by the concrete empirical subject, given the limits of her sensibility and intelligence. In such a case, the objective world itself would be indiscernible from the experienced world, with the result that it would be nothing other than the intentional correlate of that experience. In the case of Husserl, furthermore, the notion of intentionality is directly related to that of eidos or idea: what is present before the mind in an intentional manner is the pure idea of the thing, which is given in the very facticity of its concrete occurrence (Husserl 1982). When I see a table, I see it qua table; when I speak with a person, I speak with her qua person. The essence of the table or of the person is made present to me in every intentional act through which I relate with a concrete table or person. Thanks to this it is possible to perform the so-called eidetic reduction, by means of which the phenomenological description can access the essences of things themselves, to the degree that they are present to consciousness. This is the intentionality that Derrida is fighting against: an intentionality that aspires to identify what there is with the presence of an eidos, that is, with the correlate to an intentional consciousness. Reality would be one, the same, self-identical, without any possibility that an act of suspicion might reveal an intrinsic difference, an otherness that would have remained unjustly forgotten, behind the illusions of consciousness. Derrida’s target is not the concept of intentionality in general, but rather the tendency to assimilate it to the ideal model of full and absolute presence. Derrida does not deny that there is such a thing as intentionality, or that it is an essential feature of language. What he criticizes instead is the idea that the intentional contents of consciousness should be taken as unshakable foundations, which would not require any further explanation or justification precisely because their content is allegedly fully present to us. Now, this concept of intentionality has little to do with the one that Searle employs, despite the fact that he himself tends to identify both in quite an unpremeditated manner, giving the impression of knowing the continental tradition in only a superficial and indirect way. This is clearly the case with the first chapter of The Rediscovery of the Mind, where Searle claims that the same defense that he himself makes of the notions of consciousness and intentionality against eliminative materialism is also applicable to continental philosophy as a whole:



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I will confine my discussion to analytic philosophers, but apparently the same sort of implausibility affects so-called Continental philosophy. According to Dreyfus (1991), Heidegger and his followers also doubt the importance of consciousness and intentionality. (1992: 20, footnote 4)

Searle does not seem to recognize at all the enormous distance that separates the positions of the two traditions and he produces a disconcerting effect in the reader when he puts the functionalist or eliminativist proposal of Churchland and the Heideggerian critique of Husserl’s transcendentalism into the same bag. For Searle, that intentionality whose value he works so hard to demonstrate would be a fact in the world, about our minds and, ultimately, about our brains. It is not a matter of an act that would be constitutive of the objective world, as occurs in Husserl, but rather of just another objective feature that defines us as a biological species. Husserl would have directly accused him of being a psychologicist, since the Searlean idea of intentionality only affects the mind qua empirical reality – that “little bit of the world” that Descartes, let us recall, thought he had saved from methodological doubt – and is not referred to subjectivity, qua transcendental source of all possible meaning.66 Derrida himself would probably have accused him of just that – and he in fact does so tacitly (for instance, in 1988: 66–7) – since, despite his divergence from the phenomenology of Husserl, the Frenchman makes the latter’s denunciation of psychologism his own. Nonetheless, beyond the difference in his way of conceptualizing intentionality, there are things that are shared between the two philosophers and need to be analyzed. Perhaps there is even a greater closeness between the Derridean and Searlean concepts of intentionality than between their notions and the one of Husserl, which is guided by an ideal of complete presence from which nothing can escape. As I will show later in this book, by making the notion of intentionality depend on that of the Background, Searle eludes that totalizing intention, which brings his views closer to those of Derrida. In any case, what we mustn’t forget is that the terms used – of which we have only seen a few up to now – are far from representing a single immediately shared meaning between our authors.67 That shared meaning is something to construct, more than something we can take for granted, and the results of those efforts should always be handled with great caution. 66. Concerning the differing ontological positioning of Husserl and Searle regarding the notions of consciousness and intentionality, see L. Sáez Rueda (2002: chap. VI) and K. Mulligan (2003). J. J. Acero has also explored a number of connecting paths between the analytic and phenomenological traditions related to these issues in (1991: 11ff). 67. Ian Maclean has analyzed other misunderstandings found in Reply – regarding “the play of differences”/ “le jeu des différences”, “a simple element”/ “un élément simple”, “referrals”/ “renvois” and “simple presence or absence” – that result, in his opinion, from ignorance on Searle’s part of certain ideas that must be understood for a meaningful reading of Derrida’s text (Maclean 2004: 59–60).

chapter 6

Deconstructing S.A.R.L. Let’s get serious… Derrida’s counterreply came without delay, appearing in the same year (1977b) in both French and English (in French it was in the form of a pamphlet, while in English, as translated by Samuel Weber, it appeared in the following issue of the journal Glyph). It would later be much more read and known than the brief text of Searle that it responds to. It was an immense article bearing a strange title – “Limited Inc a b c…”, Limited from here on –, whose text is divided into 23 sections of irregular length, each of which is preceded by a letter of the alphabet, starting with d.68 The author doesn’t tell us anything about this whimsical distribution, although one might speculate that it is a wink at the idea that thought cannot completely unlink itself from the arbitrary form of the signifiers into which it has to materialize. In addition, the fact that there are no sections corresponding to the first three letters of the alphabet could be interpreted as a first playful dose of irony aimed at Searle, its recipient, who must be assumed to have “knowledge of certain a b cs of classical philosophy,” (Limited, p. 100) despite appearing to lack that knowledge.69 Following on the title and the distribution of chapters, the text itself of Limited is, because of its style, completely disconcerting. It is plagued precisely by that parasitic language that is the object of the polemic, and as a result it is never possible to know for certain whether a given affirmation should be read as serious, sarcastic, ironic or literal. Derrida’s constant repetition of the words “Let’s get serious…” creates an even greater disorientation in the reader, who at each step has to abandon the idea that she had already entered into the serious part of the text. In fact, one is never totally sure that that seriousness has finally arrived. Hence, it is in the form of the text, more so even than in its content, that Derrida responds to “Sarl” – an acronym whose meaning I will explain later – challenging him to decide, for each sentence, whether its meaning is literal or not. It is immediately clear that Limited was not written to convince anyone by means of its arguments. Rather, it is an extensive display of virtuosity in the age-old – and 68. The citations, as I indicated in the Introduction, are from the translation into English by Samuel Weber, edited by Gerald Graff in (Derrida 1988). A laudable effort to make the text of Limited understandable is (Culler 1981). See also his (1982: 100–20). 69. For other possible interpretations, see (Spivak 1980: 45).

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very French – practice of satire. Derrida’s exercise must have delighted the clique of lovers of poststructuralism, but it did little to clear up the numerous misunderstandings that fettered participation in a moderately reasonable debate. It certainly wasn’t just Derrida who should be accused of responding with mockery, since Searle’s attack was also disrespectful and offensive. However, the Frenchman did have the chance to reduce the tension of the moment by showing that the solidity of his arguments had no need for verbal violence in order to shine through. Instead he went overboard with the aggressiveness of his response, as he himself saw when he retrospectively reviewed the texts of the debate.70 In contrast to how I have handled the various texts up to now, I will not analyze Limited by following the development of its text. While it closely follows the order of Searle’s objections and offers a careful and systematic response, on occasion the result is tediously repetitive. Therefore, my method here will be to reorganize and synthesize Derrida’s central ideas – as well as some of his more marginal concepts – while saving my personal reflections for later.

Searle according to Derrida: Recognizing himself in the enemy In Derrida’s opinion, Searle converts Sec into “[his] own autistic representation” (Limited, p. 46), taming and distorting its meaning, while reading it with such haste and lack of attention that in his reply he returned as criticisms certain ideas that in Sec were upheld as theses. Derrida says that on occasion he had the bizarre sensation of having written Reply himself, as he came face to face with his own arguments, inexplicably brandished against him. In this regard, it is hard not to agree with Derrida. It is at least surprising that Searle attributes to the Frenchman the thesis that iterability is a distinctive trait of writing that is absent in oral language, thus establishing a radical difference between them. The aim of Sec was clearly the opposite: to demonstrate that iterability is necessarily shared by all language – even by all intentional phenomena – which makes it impossible to establish a clear dividing line between oral and written language. The demonstration in Sec moves in an area where the distinction between writing and speech is no longer pertinent, and where “every mark, including those which are oral” can be seen as a “grapheme in general” (Sec, p. 8). How exactly Sarl, who cites this same phrase on the following page, could transform it into an objection to Sec, is a mystery [sic]. (Limited, pp. 46–47)

70. See the “Afterword” of (Derrida 1988: 111–12).



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This strange sensation runs through the entirety of his reading of Reply: see for instance the final sentence, which Searle views as the colophon of his critique: “Iterability […] is the necessary presupposition of the forms which that intentionality takes.” (Reply, p. 208). Disconcerted, Derrida wonders “[h]ow can one seriously claim to raise this as an objection to [Sec], much less assert it to be ‘the converse thesis,’ when in fact one is saying the very same thing?” (Limited, p. 105). All throughout Reply, Searle employs an odd “reply and reapply” strategy, displaying a from/to rhetoric about Sec that seeks to disarm Derrida’s position by disconcertingly sending his own arguments back to him. As I’ve said, we must admit that Derrida is right on this point. However, it is no less a necessity of justice to point out a certain naiveté or, rather, an attempt at self-refutation, in Derrida’s denunciation of Searle’s lack of understanding. I will raise certain questions here, and will return to them in the following chapter: How can Derrida claim that what Searle says in Reply is identical to what he himself has said in Sec? Isn’t he tacitly assuming the very thing he is attempting to rebut, namely, that an act of communication might be the transfer between consciousnesses of a pure meaning separable from words and contexts? Even if the utterances of both authors were identical in their meaning-bearing structures, that is, even if they uttered the same words, could we then claim that they are saying the same thing? What could Searle have meant when he claimed that iterability is the indispensable condition for manifesting intentionality? Probably that the type/token distinction rules language, for it is a sort of behavior governed by rules and, therefore, the repeatability of the linguistic elements is a condition of possibility of language itself. Iterability would be what makes the transfer of meaning possible. But, on the other hand, what could Derrida mean when he advances a thesis that is identical in appearance? That this necessity is a condition of impossibility of the full transmission of meaning. Wherever there is iterability, the elements of language have a graphematic character: they pass to receiving their value and meaning from a context that cannot be delimited in a definitive way. In turn, this makes impossible any strict and unequivocal fixing of the meaning of what is said. Returning to Limited, it is clear that the entire discussion with Searle develops around terms that are only apparently shared, terms that orbit irregularly around the notion of iterability. Recall that Searle had accused Derrida of confusing the question of iterability with those of permanence, citability, fiction, parasitism… to which Derrida responds ferociously: What Sec was about, without confusing citationality with parasitism (or fiction, literature, or theater), was the possibility all of them have in common: iterability, which renders possible both the “normal” rule or convention and its transgression, transformation, simulation or imitation. (Limited, p. 98)

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The problem is that the concept referred to by Derrida via the term iterability aspires to be shaped by a different logic, as happens with so many other central terms in his philosophy: différance, writing, mark, margin, supplement, pharmakon… In all these cases the goal is to show that the only way the traditional concepts of metaphysics – meaning, idea, substance, essence, the oral – preserve themselves is by giving up absolute solidity. This means that they cannot exclude from themselves whatever it is they are opposed to; rather, their others – the signifier, matter, the accidental, the circumstantial, writing – must constitute them from within. Iterability is, simultaneously, language’s condition of possibility – since without it one cannot conceive of the meaningful form, the sign – and its condition of impossibility. Due to iterability no language can be complete and erase itself in order to make way for the pure transfer of meaning. The logic that rules Searle’s work is, at base, the same that Derrida, as I noted earlier, had already denounced in Plato and Rousseau: that of “either/or”. Either written language is beneficial – since it allows for transmitting what has been said beyond immediate time and space – or it is prejudicial – for it weakens our faculties and is easily used for misrepresentation. Either iterability is the condition of possibility of intentionality and of language or it is what makes its completeness impossible. Undecidability is immediately excluded by any logic based on the excluded middle principle. Given that Searle employs this kind of logic, built upon a visceral fear of contradiction, and despite seeming to share terms and problems with Derrida, his reading of Sec couldn’t have been even minimally competent. Instead, he treated Derrida’s posture as being the negative alternative (iterability makes language qua intentional communication impossible), whose adoption meant that the positive alternative (iterability makes language qua intentional communication possible) had to be soundly negated. Derrida replies that he never claimed that intentionality was simply impossible. Rather, what would be impossible is its complete realization – its telos, that towards which it tends as its aim. Intentionality, indeed, demands iterability in order to take place, since it must manifest itself in a form that is recognizable, repeatable, citable… However, it is that same dependence that makes its pure and perfect manifestation impossible, according to Derrida, and hence every intentional act is contaminated by the form in which it manifests, since this form can be iterated in the absence of any intentionality whatsoever. For similar reasons we must admit that Derrida is correct when he claims that he never held the other thesis that Searle attributes to him: that absence is an unavoidable aspect of written language. What Derrida does hold is that written language can – necessarily – function in the absence of the sender, receiver and context, which does not mean that it can only function when these are absent.



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Sec never said that this absence is necessary, but only that it is possible (Sarl agrees) and that this possibility must therefore be taken into account: it pertains, qua possibility, to the structure of the mark as such.  (Limited, p. 47)

Searle’s arguments on this point are not pertinent, since they seek to show that writing can function even while sender, receiver and context are all present – such as when we write a note to a friend during a concert. But what Derrida wants to claim is that, even when these three aspects are all physically present, their presence is never able to determine the meaning of what has been said in a definitive way, a possibility that is simply not conceivable. It is always possible that what one wants to say is different from what is understood – that what seemed serious turns out to be a joke, or that what seemed literal was only a metaphor. And this indetermination, this danger that the tradition sought to confine within the limits of written language, is intrinsic to all communication, since it is a necessary implication of the iterability of linguistic forms – an iterability that, as Searle knows well, is common to all its possible manifestations. [I]f one admits that writing (and the mark in general) must be able to function in the absence of the sender, the receiver, the context of production, etc., that implies that this power, this being able, this possibility is always inscribed, hence necessarily inscribed as possibility in the functioning or the functional structure of the mark. […] it can no longer, either de facto or de jure, be bracketed, excluded, shunted aside, even temporarily, on allegedly methodological grounds. Inasmuch as it is essential and structural, this possibility is always at work marking all facts, all events, even those which appear to disguise it. (Limited, p. 48)

Speech act theory should not start by negating a constitutive aspect of speech acts: the fact that meaning, whether it be in oral language or written, inevitably disseminates itself. The supposed presence of the sender, receiver and context cannot do anything – or, at least, nothing absolutely determining and definitive – to avoid it.

Derrida’s “Sarl’s «Derrida’s Austin»” Bearing in mind everything said up to now, we now return to Austin. Just as Searle claims in Reply that Derrida had not understood Austin, Derrida claims in Limited that Searle had not understood him, nor, therefore, had he correctly assimilated his reading of Austin: “Sarl’s «Derrida’s Austin»”, the Frenchman paraphrases ironically, “is unrecognizable” (Limited, p. 85). In Searle’s opinion, Derrida attributed to Austin the idea that normal language can’t be cited, nor used to crack a joke, or serve as the basis for a stage monologue or a metaphor. His philosophy of language would thus be built upon the exclusion

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of the possibility of these parasitic manifestations, and an absolute moral judgment would thus have fallen on them, considered as degenerate forms of language use. However, exclaims Derrida in his defense, he never made such a claim in Sec: the accusation directed at Austin was not that of denying the possibility that language might be cited or used in parasitical fashion, but rather the eventuality that this possibility is being realized in a given case: Sec distinguishes clearly between possibility and eventuality; the possibility or fact that performatives can always be cited (“can be quoted,” as Sarl puts it; and Sec never said that Austin excluded the fact “that performative utterances can be quoted’,) is not the same as the eventuality, that is the fact that such possible events – citations, “unhappinesses” – do indeed happen, occur, something which Austin, no less indisputably, excludes from his analysis, at the very least de facto and for the moment. (Limited, pp. 86–87)

Austin, clearly, had to assume that all language can be quoted at a given moment, or that it could be used in an ironic or a metaphorical manner… However, it is not this possibility that the Englishman denied, according to Derrida, but rather the eventuality that, in taking a supposedly normal case, we might in reality be dealing with a citation or a parasitic act. And, of course, Austin does do this right from the outset of his investigation, by temporarily leaving aside language that has been cited, theatricalized, merely mentioned, etc. Beginning with the imaginary delimitation of a fully normal language – that paradigmatic case that, as we saw in the first chapter, is defined via the exclusion of a long series of possible infelicities. Here Austin believed – mistakenly, in Derrida’s opinion – that his theory could be developed in an aseptically clean theoretical space, where it peacefully makes itself at home, safe from parasitism. For Austin’s theory, the risk of parasitism would constitute a necessary possibility that, eventually, would have remained unrealized in the paradigmatic cases. Nevertheless, these paradigmatic cases are, as Derrida denounces, nothing more than a methodological fiction which excludes something that forms an intrinsic and inevitable part of that normal language that Austin seeks to study. In real life there exists no paradigmatic case that is safe from any possible reinterpretation; rather, it is necessary that the possibility of parasitism constitutes every linguistic act. It is therefore impossible to exclude the eventuality that this possibility is being realized in a given moment.71 71. It is possible in this case that the dialogue was being impeded by the interference of a false friend. Not, in this case, a philosophical one, as we dealt with in the previous chapter, but instead a false friend in the more elemental sense: in French “éventuel” refers to that which depends on the circumstances (“de la suite des événements”), in a sense that approaches the Spanish “eventual”, which implies contingency. In contrast, the English “eventual” has the meaning of “occurring at the end or as a result of a series of events”, but without any contingency at all being implied. Neither Searle nor Derrida indicate awareness of this possible source of misunderstanding (Chamizo-Domínguez 2007: 137–41; 145–46).



Chapter 6.  Deconstructing S.A.R.L. 123

Once it is iterable, to be sure, a mark marked with a supposedly “positive” value (“serious,” “literal,” etc.) can be mimed, cited, transformed into an “exercise” or into “literature,” even into a “lie” – that is, it can be made to carry its other, its “negative” double. But iterability is also, by the same token, the condition of the values said to be “positive”. (Limited, p. 70)

Austin does not deny this necessary possibility, but instead aspires to domesticate it, negating the eventuality of its occurrence in the paradigmatic case.72 In this way, his entire theory is built on a conscious and voluntary oversight, one which seeks to leave at the margins of normal language – outside of it – an aspect that, in reality, necessarily constitutes it from within.

The subject, Ltd. Co. The problem resides, as noted by Sec from the beginning, in the ambiguity of the notion of context. Nothing in the act of linguistic communication can be understood without it; hence, the theory of speech acts will have a inadequate beginning if it aspires to bracket the context for methodological reasons, as though it were a merely secondary question: Either the difference in context changes everything, because it determines what it determines from within, in which case it can hardly be bracketed, even provisionally. Or else it leaves certain aspects intact, and this signifies that these aspects can always separate themselves from the allegedly “original” context in order to export or to graft themselves elsewhere while continuing to function in one way or another, thus confirming the “graphematic” thesis of Sec. In order that this Either/or not become an alternative or an insurmountable logical contradiction, the value of context must be reworked via a new logic, of a graphematics of iterability.  (Limited, p. 78)

On the one hand, linguistic elements are nothing without their context; on the other hand, however, they constitute a force that breaks with every given context, since they can function outside of them. For Derrida, this functioning implies that the context is not saturable – i.e. it is not susceptible of being exhaustively described in such a way that its problematic character could be cast aside. No matter how much we try to delimit the context that a performative is realized in – attempting, for instance, to determine beyond all doubt whether what was said was said seriously or as a joke, literally or metaphorically – there will always remain aspects to be described, so that a later reading may undermine our interpretation of what 72. The relation between “necessary possibility” and “essential possibility”, crucial to the Derridean reading of Austin, has its origin in Husserl’s phenomenology, as Kevin Mulligan notes (2003: 270).

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was said. An utterance can only have meaning in a context, although, at the same time, it can never be trapped eventually by a given context either. Its potential for acquiring new meanings can never be neutralized. The notion of context, recall, is made up of both external elements – the time and place of the utterance, the acts or happenings that precede and follow – and internal elements – the mental states of the sender and receiver. While the external elements can also be problematic, it is the internal elements that Derrida focuses his criticisms on – probably because of the echoes of Husserlian phenomenology that he thought he saw, and which made him see Searle as being a more continental author than he himself is (see Derrida 1990). In order that the normal or paradigmatic case – on which the theory of speech acts is constructed – be imaginable, the internal context would have to be saturable: the subjects in question would have to be in perfectly adequate conscious and intentional states. For example: to make a normal promise, there must be an intention to fulfill what was promised (or at least, let us recall, the speaker should have the secondary intention that her utterance places her under the obligation to have that primary intention). To congratulate in a normal way someone who has just won a prize, it is necessary to have the belief that the prizewinner deserves it. And in order to make a normal request it is necessary to have the desire that what is asked for indeed occur. Beliefs, desires and intentions must be fully and perfectly present in the act of uttering, if we want the paradigmatic example to even be conceivable as such, and to thereby give rise to the possibility of developing pragmatics as a scientific discipline.73 The way to guarantee the concurrence of these mental states is to assure that there is proximity between the utterance itself and its source, that is, the intentional consciousness of the speaker. The fear of losing the proximity of the source is, let us recall, at the origin of the phonocentrism that has long characterized Western philosophy, in Derrida’s view. This fear is the basis for the West’s persistent suspicion of writing, which is a dangerous instrument that permits the utterance to distance itself indefinitely from its source. This same anxious desire to maintain the closeness of the source is what Derrida noted in the final section of Sec regarding signatures. The entire issue of signatures – their authorship and copyright… – is therefore an unavoidable aspect of the discussion. It is an aspect that Reply forgot about completely, but which Limited analyzes in a manner that is both careful and jocular. Derrida reminds us that every signature and every copyright must necessarily materialize in a form, a mark which, as such, can be iterated in the absence of the sender, which thus makes it usurpable, corruptible.

73. As Dascal indicates, pragmatics “focuses on those aspects of meaning borne by that linguistic activity in which the subject is treated as a full intentional agent” “La pragmática y las intenciones comunicativas”, in (Dascal, ed. 1999: 33).



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Playing around with the issue, Derrida humorously performs several stylistic turns, such as, for example, citing Searle’s copyright over and over again, citations of citations of citations…, asking whether this kind of endless iteration could, somehow, acquire the character of an illocutionary act or, perhaps, cause the supposed original to be lost: “ “ “Copyright © 1977 by John R. Searle” ” ”.

(Limited, p. 31)

And, let us recall, this is a copyright that, despite being self-refuting – Derrida indicates that he received the manuscript with that mark before the end of the year 1976 – would have to be firmly exercised by its owner, impeding – at least partially – any republishing and copying. On the other hand, as he wonders about the identity of the author who signed Reply, Derrida recalls that the American thanked – in a note to the title of the article – at least two persons: D. Searle and H. Dreyfus. On the one hand, the reference to D. Searle – probably Dagmar Searle, his wife, to whom he had dedicated all of his books – makes the copyright into something that refers to “a Searle who is divided, multiplied, conjugated, shared” (Limited, p. 31). On the other hand, the debt to Hubert Dreyfus, Searle’s colleague in Berkeley, provides an unexpected view on the shared authorship of the text: What a complicated signature! And one that becomes even more complex when the debt includes my old friend, H. Dreyfus, with whom I myself have worked, discussed, exchanged ideas, so that if it is indeed through him that the Searles have “read” me, “understood” me, and “replied” to me, then I, too, can claim a stake in the “action” or “obligation,” the stocks and bonds, of this holding company, the Copyright Trust. (Limited, p. 31)

Thus Reply is not just signed by a single author, but by “3 + n”. At its origin there is no single spring that the utterance arises from. Rather, there is a confederation of sources, a Limited Company (Limited Inc) that Derrida finds himself obligated to respond to, feeling that in a certain way he himself belongs to both sides in the battle. Therefore, in what is probably the most clever touch of irony in the entire text, Derrida decides to only reply to the author of Reply by means of an acronym for what in reality is a Société à Responsabilité Limitée: S.A.R.L.74 74. He does so in Limited, beginning on page 36. It hardly needs to be said that there is little difference – if any – between the pronunciation of “Searle” and that of “S.A.R.L.”: just as happened with the term différance, Derrida introduces an alteration in the spelling that is only distinguishable from the original in its written form. In contrast to Hans-Johann Glock’s interpretation of this point (2008: 257), I would not say that Derrida is accusing Searle of a “lack of intellectual integrity or responsibility” because of these acknowledgments – he could hardly recriminate Searle for something that Derrida himself is claiming cannot be avoided (i.e., being the one and only source of what one says).

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Derrida is happy then to apply the same argument to himself, and to question his own place as source of his work. In this way, he apparently defends the same thesis as Searle, claiming that, between them, or between himself and Austin, no “confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions” has taken place: Evidently, John R. Searle and “myself ” do not sign here, or speak for ourselves. We are nothing more than “prête-noms,” “borrowed names,” straw men. In this simulated confrontation, we are “fronts”: […]. But these “fronts” do not, as Sarl suggests, represent “two prominent philosophical traditions”[…]. [W]hat weighs upon them both, transcending this curious chiasmus, are forces of a non-philosophical nature.  (Limited, p. 37)75

In an echo of Nietzsche, Derrida suspects that, behind the consciousness of the subjects, behind the meaning they believe they are giving to their utterances, what rules is force, and the unity of the speaker is a mere mask that hides plurality and discordance. And in the face of that “front”, what certainty and security could the idea of saturable context have? How – and for whom – will those intentional states be fully present that are supposedly inseparable from the fully normal act? [A]t the “origin” of every speech act, there can only be Societies which are (more or less) anonymous, with limited responsibility or liability – Sarl –, a multitude of instances, if not of “subjects,” of meanings highly vulnerable to parasitism – all phenomena that the “conscious ego” of the speaker and the hearer (the ultimate instances of speech act theory) is incapable of incorporating as such and which, to tell the truth, it does everything to exclude. (Limited, pp. 75–76)

The metaphysical presuppositions of speech act theory appear to be much less aseptic than what might have been expected in the beginning.

The intention in the utterance Having come to this point the reader may wonder if there is anything “serious” and “rigorous” behind the cunning wordplays that Derrida uses to mock Sarl and his copyright. Mightn’t the sanity of common sense bring this inane house of cards tumbling down? Isn’t it obvious that an acknowledgment is one thing and assuming co-authorship another thing altogether? Doesn’t the author have authority over what his article says, independently of who he might have spoken with previously? 75. Weber’s translation lightly alters the original: “À l’évidence John R. Searle et « moi-même » ne signons pas ici. Nous ne sommes que des « prête-noms ». Dans ce simulacre de confrontation, nous sommes des « fronts » […]. Mais ces « fronts » ne représentent pas comme le suggère Sarl, « two prominent philosophical traditions ». […] ce qui pèse sur eux au-delà de cet étrange chiasme, ce sont des forces non philosophiques” (Derrida 1990: 78–9).



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No matter how much D. Searle and H. Dreyfus appear in footnotes, they can’t be made responsible for the content of Reply, since only John R. Searle, a biological and legal person, is the presumed authority with responsibility for and ownership of what has been said. So what is Derrida talking about? Is there some way to take all of this seriously? In order to reply to this commonsensical gambit we must first apply suspicion to its roots, casting into doubt precisely what is taken for granted in an acritical and unquestioning manner. This is what Derrida had already attempted to do, when analyzing the problem of vouloir-dire in Husserl: demonstrate that, because of the very constitution of language, it is impossible that an act of communication could consist in the pure, perfect and unperturbed transmission of the meaning thought by the speaker or writer. For there is no thought without language, nor any expression of what has been thought by another without stain or loss of some kind. Furthermore: how is it possible, in general, for an intention to manifest itself in an expression? On this point, Derrida identifies – perhaps hastily, as I have already noted – the Searlean notion of intentionality with that of Husserl: “[I]ntentionality plays exactly the same role in written as in spoken communication.” I know this argument well. It, like the entire substratum of Sarl’s discourse, is phenomenological in character (cf. Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, for instance). (Limited, p. 56)

Once the new opponent has been identified with the one defeated earlier, Derrida thinks he need do no more than brush off his critique of Husserlian phenomenology in order to defeat Searle’s theory: I have never opposed this position head on, and Sec doesn’t either. […] at no time does Sec invoke the absence, pure and simple, of intentionality. Nor is there any break, simple or radical, with intentionality. What the text questions is not intention or intentionality but their telos, which orients and organizes the movement and the possibility of a fulfillment, realization, and actualization in a plenitude that would be present to and identical with itself. (Limited, p. 56)76 76. The reapplication to Searle of the criticisms Derrida had leveled against Husserl has recently been decried by Raul Moati (2009: 115) as a mistaken move on the Frenchman’s part. I agree with Moati, although only in part, since he attributes to Searle a non-intentionalist and purely conventionalist conception of speech acts, a claim that seems excessive to me. In Searle’s philosophy, indeed, convention and intention are not opposed to one another. On essential points they can be identified with one another through the principle of expressibility – a move that has drawn controversy, e.g. by François Recanati (2003), or Navarro (2009). But from the fact that such a principle is postulated it does not at all follow, as Moati claims, that “for Searle the intentional value of an utterance resides entirely in the usage of conventions”, without there being any necessity to appeal to the “the presence of a living subjectivity” (p. 121). Were that the case, for example, the Chinese room would be fully capable of performing speech acts, if its behavior

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Searle had in fact tried to rebut it, as though Derrida had claimed that intentionality did not exist, or that it does not perform any function in human communication. But, Derrida claims, this is not his position: he is not abandoning the notion of intentionality. Rather, he merely seeks to limit its tendency towards idealization, i.e. towards postulating its content as being completely present before us, a presence that is maintained in its linguistic manifestation.77 In this double act of grasping and uttering, the subject of phenomenology would enjoy the exercise of a limitless autonomy, something which, in Derrida’s opinion, is impossible (or, at least, impossible in fullness). On the contrary, every speech act must be something of an event: it is in part something that we do, but is also something that happens to us, which is given to us, which may occur to us or not, depending on a context that we cannot control. This makes the performative into something intangible, something uncontrollable, and condemns to failure any attempt to master it through a system – whether it comes from Husserlian phenomenology or from the theory of speech acts.78 Searle asserted in Reply – and accused Derrida of believing the contrary – that in conscious and normal speech acts there are not two acts – the utterance and its conscious intention – but only one: “the intentional aspect of illocutionary acts does not imply that there is a separate set of conscious states apart from simply writing and speaking” (Reply, p. 202). In Searle’s opinion, it is the very act of speaking agreed perfectly with established conventions. There is something correct, therefore, in Derrida’s reuse of his critiques of phenomenology. However, to split hairs, attention needs to be paid to the limitations that the notion of Background implies for subjectivity, an issue that I will return to in a later section, and that I study in more detail in the cited paper. 77. Manfred Frank puts it as follows: for Derrida “the meaningful effects of discourse can never be ‘dominated’ and controlled in a conventional manner and with Cartesian certainty”, with the result that “there is no pre-established harmony between animating intentions and their utterance” (1984: 399). 78. Derrida developed the idea further in a recent lecture: “It must not only surprise the constative and propositional mode of the language of knowledge (S is P), but also no longer let itself be commanded by the performative speech act of a subject. As long as I can produce and determine an event by a performative act guaranteed, like any performative, by conventions, legitimate fictions, and a certain “as if,” then, to be sure, I will not say that nothing happens or comes about, but I will say that what takes place, arrives, happens, or happens to me remains still controllable and programmable within a horizon of anticipation or precomprehension, within a horizon, period. It is of the order of the masterable possible, it is the unfolding of what is already possible. It is of the order of power, of the “I can,” “I may,” or “I am empowered to…” No surprise, thus no event in the strong sense. (I may, I can). […] The force of the event is always stronger than the force of a performative. In the face of what arrives to me, what happens to me, even in what I decide […], in the face of the other who arrives and arrives to me, all performative force is overrun, exceeded, exposed.” “The University Without Condition”, in (Derrida 2002b: 233–5). This reclaiming of heteronomy brings to light the Levinasian inheritance that I noted in the third chapter.



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or writing that is intentional of itself, and not because of a parallel and hidden conscious mental act that controls it and monitors it. The intention in this type of speech act – according to an expression of Searle that Derrida, shockingly, does not pay sufficient attention to – must be fungible, i.e. consumable in the very act of its utterance, being identical with it. It doesn’t co-exist on some mysterious second mental plane, as though on the one hand we pronounce some words and on the other wish to say something with them. Against these ideas, Derrida counterattacks, attributing to Searle the very same point that he seems to be combating: [N]o criterion that is simply inherent in the manifest utterance is capable of distinguishing an utterance when it is serious from the same utterance when it is not. Solely intention can decide this and it is not identical with “realization.” Nothing can distinguish a serious or sincere promise from the same “promise” that is nonserious or insincere except for the intention which informs and animates it.  (Limited, pp. 68–69)

If it were really the case that the intention is identical to the normal utterance, there would be no way of distinguishing a serious promise, for example, from a joke promise, or a promise made onstage in the theater. If there is anything that definitively distinguishes them – as Searle claims – it is that the first is supposedly animated by an intention that is not present in the second. Nonetheless, their realizations can be formally identical, and therefore the intention is not found in the utterance with which it was realized. Rather, pace Searle, it would have to be sought in a mysterious second mental plane. Here Derrida is unequivocal: to the degree that the act can exist without a conscious intention, or the conscious intention without the act, there can be no identification of the two: Searle’s position is inconsistent. The same thing occurs with Searle’s accusation – definitely shocking – in which Derrida appears to claim that “all intentions must be conscious”79: Confronted with this assertion I must confess that I had to rub my eyes. Was I dreaming? Had I misread? Mistranslated? Was the text suddenly becoming sarcastic? Or even, as I had just wished, ironic? Was it all a joke? Was the patented theoretician – or theoreticians – of speech acts calling us to task for forgetting the existence of the unconscious? […] To claim that for Sec all intentions are conscious is to read a contre-pied, fake(d) out, in the sense of Littre. For not only does Sec say that all intentions are not conscious: it says that no intention can ever be fully conscious, or actually present to itself. (Limited, p. 73)

79. “This illusion [that in some way the illocutionary intention is behind the utterance] is related to the second, which is that intentions must all be conscious. But in fact rather few of one’s intentions are ever brought to consciousness as intentions.” (Reply, p. 202).

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Derrida comes to the conclusion that it is not just that Searle had misinterpreted him, but that he had probably also lost sight of the position of his own teacher, Austin, who was much more sensible when describing the effects of consciousness on our acts. In fact, an important passage from Austin’s article “Three Ways for Spilling Ink” (which Derrida inexplicably only makes a brief reference to in a note) takes up this same idea of the limited character of consciousness and intention: Even if we do have this notion of my idea of what I’m doing – and as a general rule we conceive of this idea as it were a miner’s lamp on our forehead which illuminates our path forward – we shouldn’t suppose that there are any precise rules about the extent and degree of the illumination it sheds. The only general rule is that the illumination is always, limited, and that in several ways. It will never extend indefinitely far ahead. (Austin 1970: 284)80

Our consciousness of performing acts or speaking words is always limited. According to Derrida, this is what Searle seems to have forgotten, in contrast with Austin (so that, oddly enough, the criticisms of Sec would have been more appropriately directed at the former rather than the latter). Nevertheless, it is precisely this very forgetfulness that Searle accuses Derrida of suffering. I will attempt to clarify this tremendous misunderstanding. It seems that the difference between Searle and Derrida consists, from the former’s perspective, in that there are conscious intentions and unconscious intentions, both of which are able to exercise causality through our actions. While there may be shades of gray between the two, in principle it is possible to define and work theoretically with the notion of a fully conscious intention. According to Derrida, however, the separation between the two cannot be definitive, as though we could establish a precise barrier between what is fully conscious and what is not. For him, there cannot 80. The italics are Austin’s. Derrida cites it in Limited, p. 109, footnote 3. José Medina relies on this attitude of modesty in order to defend the interpretation of “The New Austin” that I referred to in the first chapter, an Austin who would not have sought to delimit the notion of context in a definitive way. As a result, Derrida’s criticisms would have been off the mark, according to Medina (2006: 147), following the interpretation of Butler. Nonetheless, in my opinion, it is hard to deny that Austin’s awareness of this limitation was counterbalanced by his indefatigable determination to bring to light each and every one of the elements involved in the phenomenon of the speech act. For this reason, Austin might well have recriminated Medina, or Butler, for succumbing to the same impatience he sees in Wittgenstein when, recall, he said that there are innumerable language games, but could only come up with 17… Perhaps Austin would have claimed that the reason why Medina and Butler hold it to be it impossible to saturate the conditions of context is just an effect of intellectual laziness. This is why I am inclined to interpret this passage of “Three Ways for Spilling Ink” as meaning that, according to Austin, it is the speaker who must accept her own epistemic limitations, but not necessarily the theoretician who, while reflecting on the nature of speech, should never take those limitations as definitively insurmountable.



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be any absolutely conscious intention, since there always remains a residue in the unconscious, something hidden that is not present to the subject. This does not imply, however, that unconscious intention is prevented from having effects on our behavior. Searle – and this is not noted by Derrida, probably because he did not know the details of Searle’s position – would hold an equivalent but inverse opinion, in the sense that he believes that there are no mental states that are completely and definitively unconscious. Instead, every mental state, in order to be meaningful at all, must in principle be susceptible to being brought fully into consciousness.81 In short, what is in play in the discussion about intention and utterance is the type of event that speech act theory has to deal with: “the plenitude of intentional meaning [vouloir-dire], and all of the other values – of consciousness, presence, and originary intuition – which organize phenomenology” (Limited, p. 58). On this point, Derrida completely identifies Searle’s posture with that of Husserl, and accuses both of believing that language can in some way bring the contents of mental life fully into consciousness, giving them an expressible form without, at least in ideal cases, causing any alteration at all in them. Incredibly, in this criticism Derrida makes no reference to the “principle of expressibility” – which Searle explicitly introduced in Speech Acts as being one of his basic premises –, a principle that would be difficult to make compatible with the notion of structural unconsciousness that acts in Derrida’s thought. The Frenchman also passes over in silence the notion of Background, which is a fundamental aspect of Searle’s theory. The truth is that Derrida appears to know very little about Searle’s theory, because those notions are crucial to the point at issue. What is worse, he seems to think it is unnecessary to know his opponent’s position in detail in order to subject it to a devastating criticism. Nonetheless, an appeal to concepts like expressibility and the Background would have made the discussion more fruitful and interesting, producing results that might not have been as devastating to the theory of speech acts as Derrida wanted, but which were, perhaps, also not as harmless as Searle believed, as I seek to demonstrate in a later section.

Is the methodology harmless? At the base of the entire discussion there is a reproach that Derrida directs at the theory of speech acts: that behind the methodical idealization a moralizing prejudice is hidden. Searle, evidently, cannot allow this reproach to pass, since in his opinion if both he and Austin exclude parasitory language – quotation, irony, 81. Searle’s position on the unconscious mind can be found in his (1992: chap. VII), as well as in his (2004: chap. IX).

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metaphor, etc. – during the initial stage of their investigations, it is not because they criticize its non-normality, as though it were a matter of a moral defect. Rather, from a strategic perspective, the sensible thing is to start with the simple and progress to the complex, going from normal use to parasitory, from literal meaning to figurative. Searle claims in Reply that idealization is indispensable for the development of a rigorous theory of speech acts, since that very idealization is, in fact, the condition of possibility for any theory. Many years earlier, he had already explicitly defended this approach in Speech Acts: This method, one of constructing idealized models, is analogous to the sort of theory construction that goes on in most sciences, e.g., the construction of economic models, or accounts of the solar system which treat planets as points. Without abstraction and idealization there is no systematization.  (Speech Acts, p. 56)

Newton, to give an example, initially passed over the problem of friction, postulating that the movements of solid bodies occur without any resistance, either between the various bodies or with the surrounding air. From this idealized situation, he was able to propose the famous laws that define classical mechanics. Later, he was obligated to introduce friction coefficients that permit the theory to produce results closer to everyday, real experience. However, their initial exclusion was not the result of a furtive moralizing mechanism (even if a foolhardy psychoanalyst might, shall we say, relate this “rejection” of friction to the Puritan aversion to physical contact). To the contrary, it is a matter of a methodically designed strategy, which seeks to simplify its object by limiting itself to essential aspects. It does not disdain the elements excluded from the idealization, but merely postpones their explanation on a provisional basis. If one seeks to do with speech acts what Newton did with mechanics, it will be necessary to idealize, to leave to one side certain aspects that, while always accompanying everyday experience, could only be hindrances to the development of an explanatorily powerful theory. What isn’t clear is whether this type of idealization can be applied to the theory of speech acts without negative consequences. Derrida reiterates his criticism in Limited, claiming that not even in an idealized situation can a completely normal speech act be imagined, an act totally immune to all forms of parasitism: “[E]ven in the ideal case considered by the strategy, there must already be a certain element of play, a certain remove, a certain degree of independence with regard to the origin, to production, or to intention”. (Limited, p. 64)

It is iterability, evidently, which is responsible for this remove: every linguistic act is constituted by elements that are necessarily iterable, graphematic. Hence, they can be extracted from their supposedly “original” context and be grafted into another, distinct one, where what seemed to be normal ends up being parasitic, and the



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literal becomes ironic or metaphoric. A completely normal, literal and pure case cannot be postulated as the paradigmatic axis of the theory, except by excluding an essential aspect of the phenomenon under study: the corruptibility of linguistic forms, which demands of us that we extend our suspicion to every so-called literality and all apparent purity. Furthermore, as Derrida alleges, the exclusion of those phenomena does imply moralizing: the terms used by Austin are not at all aseptic. Terms such as “abnormality”, “parasitism”, “extenuation”, are all clearly and explicitly pejorative, indicating a degeneration or fall from an imaginary state of grace. Derrida’s criticism, we mustn’t forget, only applies to the theory of speech acts within a broader strategy, that of deconstruction. The goal of this practice is showing that every theory, every project of idealization, is marked by iterability; that is, it is damaged by a différance that prevents it from fully attaining its objective: No process [procès] or project of idealization is possible without iterability, and yet iterability “itself ” cannot be idealized. For it comports an internal and impure limit that prevents it from being identified, synthesized, or re appropriated […]. But under such circumstances, one will reply, no scientific or philosophical theory of speech acts in the rigorous, serious, and pure sense would be possible. That is, indeed, the question. (Limited, p. 71)

Searle’s perplexity is justified: were we to adopt Derrida’s position, the very project of a theory of speech acts – which is intended to explain, regulate and predict the functioning of language through a rigorous scientific theory – would be, simply put, impossible. Happily impossible, Derrida would say since, by ignoring the problem of iterability, speech act theory would be attempting to dangerously extrapolate the model of the natural sciences to the human sciences. Something of the confrontation between Dilthey and Brentano – about the necessity for a special method for the human sciences – still echoes in Derrida’s words, despite his well-known antipathy to humanism: The language of the theory always leaves a residue that is not formalizable nor idealizable in the terms of that theory of language. Theoretical utterances are speech acts. Whether this fact is regarded as a privilege or as a limit to speech act theory, it ruins the analogical value (stricto sensu) between speech act theory and other theories. (Limited, pp. 69–70)

Every theory must be expressed in a language; the problem appears when, in addition to being formulated in a language, a given theory seeks to take over language itself. This is the absurd pretension of speech act theory, which seeks to pull itself up by its own bootstraps. Using a serious and rigorous language, its goal is to delimit the uses of language in general. However, in order to do so, it must necessarily use a metaphorical language, for where else would the analogy between experimental

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sciences and human sciences find support, if not in a metaphor? And that analogy would be at the very base of speech act theory, making it entirely into something metaphorical, figurative and not literal, as Nietzsche had accused truth-bearing discourse in general of being. Speech act theory itself would be a good example of what it, in principle, seeks to exclude. In addition, this obsession with idealizing would mean leaving aside an aspect that can’t be considered secondary or accidental to the phenomenon in question, in the way that in Newtonian mechanics friction could be considered secondary with respect to motion. The possibility of parasitism is an absolutely inseparable trait of every speech act, which is internally characterized by vagueness and lack of definition. Searle acknowledges the need for an “idealization of the context analyzed” at the very moment when he undertakes to define the “structure of illocutionary acts.” In the face of “the looseness of our concepts,” which might “lead us into a rejection of the very enterprise of philosophical analysis,” he reacts much as, in appearance at least, the great philosophers of the tradition have always done (Austin being in this respect a partial exception). He considers this “looseness” as something extrinsic, essentially accidental, and reducible. (Limited, p. 67–8)

But this vagueness of language, the fruit of the iterability of its forms, might perhaps be defining, unavoidable – we might even say essential, if it wasn’t for iterability, which is precisely what makes it impossible to develop any firm definition of the essence of the thing. Were we to exclude this constitutive vagueness, the theory itself would be invalidated at its origin: it would be as if Newton had attempted to define his mechanics by prescinding provisionally from the idea of space. Any further steps would necessarily go awry, since one of the fundamental principles of mechanics would be taken out of play. In the same way, Derrida claims, when analyzing speech acts one must take into consideration the fact that speakers can only express their own contents of consciousness in a confused and poorly-defined way, through the penumbra of their own unconscious mind, which always remains partially opaque. This finitude and opacity of consciousness may perhaps be inseparable from the question at hand, with the result that the notion of context cannot, necessarily and unavoidably, be seen as something saturable, not even in a methodological idealization.

Theoretical fictions The presence of an idealized fiction at the very foundations of speech act theory reveals, from a different angle than that indicated up to now, the lack of grounding that Derrida denounces. It is only in literary fiction – and, probably only in bad literature – that it is legitimate to think that the beliefs, desires and intentions of the



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characters are completely closed facts whose determination allows for saturating the context and infallibly discerning the normal uses from the parasitory: (“[T]he author says what he means”), cannot even be formulated ideally. Except, that is, under the heading of “fiction,” about which I could not say whether or not it would be serious, or external to the field of other types of fiction (in particular, to that of literature), but which would certainly lead to the following question: in what way, or to what extent does traditional philosophical discourse, and that of speech act theory in particular, derive from fiction? Is it capable of assuming full responsibility for such fictional discourse, or of positing itself as such, and if so, how? etc. But I do not believe that this latter concept of fiction would be very compatible with Searle’s thematics of fiction.  (Limited, p. 77)

The concept of “real life” employed by Searle is, according to Derrida, contaminated by a rather naive conception of literary fiction. Let’s imagine that we take a character from a novel; we could say about her that, at a determined moment in the book, she has a saturable series of beliefs, desires and intentions: those that the author ascribes to her. It makes no sense to ask the author how he knows that his character is found in those mental states: it is under his control to make it be so, because his character is a free creation. Let’s imagine that this character, in the novel, makes a specific linguistic utterance. Because he knows all the elements of the context, the author can determine the type of speech act that was carried out: a promise, a threat, an invitation… He will know with certainty what his character has done, because he is the one who makes her do what she does. Of course, this conception of literature, dominated by the hegemony of the author, would be highly debatable – and Derrida himself would surely think it misguided – but it gives an idea of how far this model of literary fiction molds the view that Searle has about “real life”.82 Let’s take a parallel example, which comes from that “non-fiction” that we supposedly live in: imagine that it is a normal person, and not a literary character, that

82. On some occasions, this adoption of the literary model when developing speech act theory is openly explicit. For example, Searle claims that the performative act is not realized upon uttering the words, at least not in the sense where the words are uttered and then, afterwards, the act is realized. Rather, the process is of absolute immediacy. When someone says “I promise that I will come to visit you tomorrow”, her promise is not a causal effect of the words, an agreement that will come into being immediately after saying them; rather, it is an act that is totally simultaneous to the utterance itself. The present-tense used there is, according to Searle, a “present present” similar to that used in a play in order to indicate what the characters are doing: “We are to think of sentences such as, ‘John sits’ or ‘Sally raises the glass to her lips,’ not as reporting a set of events that occurred previously, nor as predicting what will happen on the stage, but as providing an isomorphic model, a kind of linguistic mirror of a sequence of events” (1989: 566–7). Carrying out a performative speech act would be like being the author and actor in our own little play, something that would guarantee us complete control over the development of the plot.

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performs the speech act. In order that there be a single correct interpretation of the character – as is allegedly possible in fiction – someone would have to be in that privileged position that the author claims to occupy with regard to his work. That is, somebody would have to be able to determine all of the elements of the context, both external and internal, of both the speaker and the hearers, who influence the speech act in question. And that would require that somebody have the contents of consciousness of the participants perfectly present before herself, and that she could not err in her analysis of them, just as the author believes that he cannot err regarding the mental states of his characters. Derrida’s point is that, in principle, nobody may occupy this privileged position, nor is it shared among the speakers in such a way that each would have the contents of her own consciousness fully present before her, since their respective self-consciousnesses are limited by the eternal dusk of the unconscious. Our linguistic forms must always permit more than a single unique possible use, and may thus never be associated with a single, identical content of consciousness. Because they are iterable, they are intrinsically vague, diffuse, and can be interpreted in many ways, even by the speaker herself, and may never be definitively identified with particular intentions. To believe that in “real life” the context can be saturated is to imagine it from the point of view of an odd model of literary fiction. Speech act theory, once again, would be building itself upon that which it itself seeks to exclude. Furthermore, what is this “real life” that is supposedly the object of the theory of speech acts? Is its language constituted exclusively by literality, by seriousness? Is it itself not plagued with metaphors, fictions, citations, parasites…? Parasitism does not need theater or literature in order to show itself. […] that “real life” about which Sarl is so certain, so inimitably (almost, not quite) confident of knowing what it is, where it begins and where it ends; as though the meaning of these words (“real life”) could immediately be a subject of unanimity, without the slightest risk of parasitism; as though literature, theater, deceit, infidelity, hypocrisy, infelicity, parasitism, and the simulation of real life were not part of real life! (Limited, pp. 89–90)83

Underneath this accusation there lies a very Marxist, very Nietzschean suspicion, which criticizes Searle’s theory for having the same acritical confidence that characterized the entire Enlightenment: the illusion of believing that theory can be 83. Both Searle and Derrida have specifically studied the nature of metaphorical language; for example, see Searle’s “Metaphor”, in (1979a: 76–116), and Derrida’s “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” (1982: 207–72). In the interests of a sensible brevity, however, I will not discuss this issue at any great length because the problem our authors confront has to do with an aspect of language that is not specific to metaphor, but is found at the root of all forms of parasitism, such as irony, sarcasm, quoting and the theater.



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aseptic, can be stripped of any distorting interest and can give a clear and objective image of the reality it describes. As though scientific knowledge could be free from prior metaphysical presuppositions and, above all, from all hidden influences of the society it arises from.84 Derrida, on the contrary, openly defends the need for the intellectual to intervene and transform the fabric of forces on which she operates, and in which she must be inscribed. And this, thinks the Frenchman, is something unavoidable: not even Searle can escape, despite all his efforts, from the fact that the theory of speech acts exercises, in the theoretical plane, a moral coercion and a juridical duress that in no way arise from the reality that she seeks to study; instead, they are imposed in a surreptitious and arbitrary manner.85 Now, Derrida would claim, just trying to liberate oneself from this moralizing and juridical character is perhaps the greatest of illusions, the most Enlightened and self-deceiving desire of all. For this reason, he does not simply reject this ethicaljuridical aspect of speech act theory: what he wants it to be made explicit, with all its consequences: I am convinced that speech act theory is fundamentally and in its most fecund, most rigorous and most interesting aspects (need I recall that it interests me considerably?) a theory of right or law, of convention, of political ethics or of politics as ethics. […] this “theory” is compelled to reproduce, to reduplicate in itself the law of its object or its object as law; it must submit to the norm it purports to analyze. Hence, both its fundamental, intrinsic moralism and its irreducible empiricism. (Limited, p. 97)

84. This is an attitude that has been denigrated by some as “anti-theoretical”, since it seems to always be “at the service of moral and political projects”. Mulligan, Simons and Smith extend this critique to the entirety of continental philosophy in “What’s wrong with contemporary philosophy?” (2006). 85. Of course, even if we admit the necessary intervention of interest in the formulation of the theory, this critique remains debatable. Of particular relevance is the participation of Jürgen Habermas in this discussion, a thinker who allegedly shares with Derrida the same antitheoretical prejudice that Mulligan, Simons and Smith denounce – in his case, with specifically neo-Marxist motives. Unlike Derrida, Habermas does not believe that the context of normal daily life that ordinary language philosophers build their theories on constitutes a moralizing coercion, or an unjustified imposition of a fiction: “The constraints under which illocutionary acts develop a force for coordinating action and have consequences relevant to action define the domain of ‘normal’ language. They can be analyzed as the kinds of idealizing suppositions we have to make in communicative action. […] but these idealizations are not arbitrary, logocentric acts brought to bear by theoreticians on unmanageable contexts in order to give the illusion of mastery; rather, they are presuppositions that the participants themselves have to make if communicative action is to be at all possible” (1987: 196–7).

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The alternative proposed by Derrida is far from being offered as an objective gaze, a theory stripped of interest that reflects the very structure of the real. On the contrary, it is instead a mode of acting upon reality, in reality itself. His is an alternative that doesn’t seek to escape from the world in order to study it, just as it also doesn’t seek to leave jocose and parasitic language outside in order to define it from the within of serious and literal language. Therefore, rather than establish a firm, clear border between normal and parasitic language, the Derridean alternative seeks to develop a “typology of the forms of iteration”, that is, to demonstrate that plain, normal language can only be seen as such in relation to certain parasitic forms that it excludes. In its nature, however, this normal language can itself turn out to be parasitic on another possible context – another context that we can never totally exclude in favor of the given context, for the simple reason that the context of an utterance is never definitively and absolutely given. But this “does not imply that all ‘theorization’ is impossible. It merely de-limits a theorization that would seek to incorporate its object totally but can accomplish this only to a limited degree” (Limited, p. 71). The theory itself must accept its impossible separation from the theorized, admitting that its gaze is not pure, and that it cannot definitively exclude fiction. Rather, it must assimilate the instability of its own foundations, admitting that all its seriousness and literalness might at base be built, to paraphrase Nietzsche, on a “mobile army of metaphors”. In this way, the theory constitutes itself as an openness, admitting at its origin an undecidability that respects the dissemination of meaning and, simultaneously, acts on it. The danger that frightens Searle, probably, is not that fiction is going to invade reality, but rather that the absence of a clear border between the two worlds will shake to its roots the very notion of the real world. If a fiction can only be delimited with the help of another fiction, it being impossible to escape these limits and say with certainty that a given language is definitively not parasitic, then the doors remain open for a cultural relativism that assimilates the very idea of a “real world” – including its scientific description – into a quasi-literary fiction.86 Since speech act theory naively believes that it is in a privileged position to determine the reality of its own object, its results ironically appear to Derrida as something laughable, fictitious and unreal: [Speech act theory] is not scientific and cannot be taken seriously. Which is what constitutes the drama of this family of theoreticians: the more they seek to produce serious utterances, the less they can be taken seriously. It is up to them whether they will take advantage of this opportunity to transform infelicity into delight [jouissance]. (Limited, p. 72)

86. See, for example, Stanley Fish’s reading of the debate in his (1976).

chapter 7

A flawed debate The word turned upside-down After the publication of Limited in the same year that Sec was reprinted and Reply appeared, the debate continued sporadically during the coming decades. The texts that I will analyze in the current chapter do not properly constitute replies or counter-replies, since they weren’t directed at one another. On the contrary, they are a good example of that classic-but-childish attitude whereby two people decide not to talk to each other directly, even when both are present. Instead, they use intermediaries in order to “talk” to each other: Searle wrote his review about Jonathan Culler, which was followed by an exchange with Mackey, in order to attack Derrida. In turn, Derrida talks with Gerald Graff about his conflict with Searle. The American then attacks Derrida – this time without citing any of his works – as being the principal representative of “postmodernism.” Afterwards he again attacks Derrida, stuffing him into a box with a number of literary theorists that he shares little or nothing with. The debate is flawed, the same arguments are repeated ad nauseum, and nobody seems ready to seek mutual understanding. I will start with the book review that Searle published six years after that fateful issue of Glyph. Its title, “The Word [sic] Turned Upside Down,” (1983, Review from here on) is illustrated by a caricature by David Levine which features Derrida hanging upside down, following the medieval tradition of “pittura infamante.”87 Searle sought, as I mentioned earlier, to not dedicate any more attention to the issue than it deserved. He therefore decided not to write a rigorous and consistent article that would refute Derrida’s position. Instead, he wrote a review of a then-recent book that defends the Frenchman and sets out the basic principles of his new literary theory. Johnathan Culler, the author of On Deconstruction, is press-ganged into serving as an intermediary for this confrontation, Searle having chosen him to be the target of his attacks. In a way, Searle’s choice is lamentable, since Culler had made a valiant effort to leave behind the obscurantist slang of deconstruction – a decision that exposed him to the attacks of his adversaries. Clarity has its risks and, unfortunately, Searle’s attack would serve as a caution to others in 87. “[H]istorical sources document commissions for paintings [between the 13th and 15th centuries], almost none of which have survived into the present. Examples include portraits of traitors, debtors and political opponents, often suspended by their legs in disgrace” (Suckale et al. 2006: 38).

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the poststructualist camp: in the future they would not follow Culler’s example in writing as clearly as possible, and would instead remain ensconced in the closed rhetoric that has characterized the movement. Searle’s Review is ferocious, albeit clearly partial, since it only deals with a few chapters of the work. He spends the greater part of his time attacking Derrida instead of the author of the book, using the excuse that the Frenchman is the intellectual godfather of the philosophical program defended by Culler. Austin seems to have completely disappeared from the scene (despite the fact that Culler’s book discusses him specifically), since Searle chose to focus his attention on deconstruction in general, conceived of as a critique of the logocentrist Western culture, in its obsession with truth, rationality and logic. According to what Searle is able to glean from Culler, the deconstructive method of reading has a triple goal: 1. Detect traditional binary oppositions in the texts (speech/writing, man/woman, truth/fiction, …) and invert their hierarchy. 2. Indicate the words (like parergon in Kant, pharmakon in Plato, and supplément in Rousseau) that pervert the rule of the game that the author is seeking to “play.” 3. Pay special attention to those aspects which are supposedly marginal to the text, such as the metaphors the author uses. Carried into practice, this effort to turn “the word upside down” gives rise to a whole slew of nonsensical notions, of which Searle analyzes two. The first is the Nietzschean deconstruction of the idea of causality where, in his opinion, Culler confuses the causal origin of the phenomena (what produces what) with the epistemic origin of our knowledge (how we find it out). Searle thus focuses on a passage of Culler’s book that, as Derrida himself would later say (Afterword, p. 124), is especially weak. However, we may want to nuance any critique of this passage, since its author presents it merely as an initial didactic approach to the deconstructive method. It is an effort to make it more intuitive and accessible for beginners. While Culler’s discussion of causation may be imperfect and in need of nuancing, it could still be considered as successful in providing an introduction to and preparation for deconstruction. Searle’s decision to focus on this part of the book as a paradigmatic example of deconstruction opens it to a critique that is perhaps over the top. The second example of deconstruction considered by Searle in Review is, however, truly paradigmatic: the binary opposition of speech and writing, a hierarchy where the tradition has supposedly given priority to the first of the pair. From a historical point of view, as Searle holds, Derrida’s position is manifestly inconsistent: the authors of the Western philosophical tradition have not paid the slightest attention to the distinction between speech and writing, except perhaps for Husserl. In addition, if we want to find examples of priority being given to a particular type of language, it would have to be writing, since the importance of logic and



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rationality are emphasized in written language. It wasn’t until the 1950’s – and here the shadow of Austin reappears – that oral language becomes, according to Searle, an issue of importance for philosophy. With a biased and pretentious reading of history, Derrida’s “effect is not so much apocalyptic as simply misinformed.” Up to this point it looks like Searle is again falling into the error that I discussed in the case of Reply: confusing Derrida’s notion of writing with the conventional definition of written language. But then he suddenly turns the argument around, escaping from that first error: Derrida’s tactic for showing that writing is really primary, that speech is really a form of writing, is to identify the features which “the classical concept of writing” attributes to writing and then show that these are features of speech as well. For Derrida, then, both written words and spoken words are repeatable or, as he prefers to say, “iterable.” Both have been institutionalized, both can be misunderstood, and perhaps most importantly, both rest on a system of differences. (Review, § 2)

Searle brings Saussure into the debate here, whose linguistic theory is supposedly at the origin of these ideas. I already showed in Chapter Three how Saussure analyzes the elements of language as being a system of differential relations where no single element acquires meaning by itself. Nevertheless, the fact that it is differences that define the elements does not mean, according to Searle, that there are no identities or presences in the language: what Saussure showed, precisely, is that language is a system of presences and absences, and not, as Derrida claims, a system where nothing is truly present. Basing himself on this crazy idea, the Frenchman’s strategy consists in an arbitrary redefinition of the terms that is “not based on any empirical study,” nor is it “innocent.” With the term “writing,” all Derrida is referring to is the mere fact that language functions as a system of differential marks, which turns his mysterious initial thesis – that all language is writing – into an idea that is as trivial as it is superfluous. Via a redefinition of terms Derrida can demonstrate anything he wants, but the only thing that might have any value are the reasons he presents for this redefinition, and according to Searle he doesn’t provide any.

The frontiers of concepts The final sections of Review take an interesting turn, beginning with the moment when Searle states that Culler makes Derrida look “worse than he really is.” Such praise would come as a shock for a reader who has read the first texts of the confrontation, since up to then Searle hadn’t given the impression of believing that such a feat was possible. His motive is that “Culler seems unconscious of the fact that Derrida is responding to certain specific theses in Husserl and is using weapons

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derived in large part from Heidegger to do it” (Review, § 4). His work appears to be looking for a confrontation with a tradition that, with Plato, Descartes and Husserl, wants to find an indestructible metaphysical foundation for knowledge, language, meaning, mathematics and morality. According to Searle, under the influence of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, the 20th century had left this tradition behind, and Derrida – “correctly”! – has confirmed that these foundationalist pretensions are off the mark. But the error that he then commits, which makes Derrida into a “classical metaphysician,” is believing “that somehow or other such foundations were necessary, the belief that unless there are foundations something is lost or threatened or undermined or put in question.” And this is what, in Searle’s opinion, Wittgenstein showed would not occur: that these foundations are not just unattainable, they are completely unnecessary: The only “foundation,” for example, that language has or needs is that people are biologically, psychologically, and socially constituted so that they succeed in using it to state truths, to give and obey orders, to express their feelings and attitudes, to thank, apologize, warn, congratulate, etc. (Review, § 4)

The reason that deconstruction is “generally ignored” by analytic philosophers is that it persists in maintaining those prejudices that Wittgenstein had brought crashing down, which Searles synthesizes into two propositions: 1. that, unless a distinction is rigorous and precise it doesn’t exist; 2. that, in order for any concept to be applied, a mechanical procedure of verification must be admitted. By maintaining the prejudice that theoretical distinctions must be clear and distinct, a question of black and white, the entire conceptual order comes crashing down around the deconstructionists. Speech becomes a form of writing, presence becomes a certain kind of absence; the marginal becomes central; the literal, metaphorical; the truth, fiction; understanding, misunderstanding; health, neurosis… However, this conceptual order is not what has to be reworked, as Searle points out; rather, it is that stale prejudice that must be thrown out. Furthermore, from the second prejudice there follows the idea that the intention of the author cannot have any importance in a consistent literary theory, since we lack mechanical criteria to determine it. From the fact that there is no objectivizable and completely determinable meaning in language, the deconstructionist concludes that all interpretation is characterized by a certain arbitrariness, that it is always possible to read the texts in another way, and that we are irremediably condemned to unsayableness and the free play of signifiers. What is especially odd is that both prejudices are defined by Searle as “positivist”, i.e. as belonging to that epoch that I discussed in Chapter One under the heading of “inherited conception.” This epoch was superseded by Wittgenstein



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and Austin, when the fascination with the rigor and precision of a logically perfect language was left behind, thus making the treasure of ordinary language known to philosophy. Also contributing to this overcoming was the abandonment of any obsession with “mechanical procedures of verification.” This in turn permitted behaviorism to be overcome, as we saw in Chapter Two, thereby permitting a new look at the problems of consciousness and intentionality through the philosophy of mind. At the moment when these principles were abandoned by figures like “Chomsky and Quine, Austin, Tarski, Grice, Dummett, Davidson, Putnam, Kripke, Strawson, Montague and a dozen other first-rate writers,” there arose – in Searle’s opinion – a genuine “golden age of the philosophy of language”: No doubt all of these theories are, in their various ways, mistaken, defective, and provisional, but for clarity, rigor, precision, theoretical comprehensiveness, and above all, intellectual content, they are written at a level that is vastly superior to that at which deconstructive philosophy is written. (Review, § 5)88

Compared with these pearls of the analytical tradition, deconstruction appears to be an irresponsible game that anyone can play, a game one might even play with deconstructive philosophy itself (which Searle himself seeks to do, without much success, in the text of Review). In this way, deconstruction has mesmerized many literary theoreticians with the tantalizing idea that, given that there is no different between scientific, historical and fictional texts, and that there is no reality that is truly beyond the texts, it is the literary critics, not scientists nor artists, who have the responsibility to play the protagonist’s role in Western culture. Months later, the New York Review of Books published a brief exchange about Review, where Louis H. Mackey accuses Searle of having performed a fragmented, partial and tendentious reading of Culler’s work (Mackey and Searle 1984). According to Mackey, Searle’s selection of quotations is out of context, lacking rigor, ill informed, and placed at the service of a bad-faith critique. But faced with this accusation, Searle doesn’t retreat an inch in his reply to Mackey; on the contrary, he continues with his denunciation of deconstruction, attributing to it a triple rhetorical strategy consisting in the following three movements: 88. Hilary Putnam, who is known to be more predisposed to establishing an open dialogue with continental and ‘postmodern’ thinkers, has exposed the partiality of this value judgment: “While I am pleased to have been included in Searle’s list, I wonder at the particular way in which he distinguishes between what is ‘intellectual weakness’ and what is ‘first-rate philosophy.’ If, on the other hand, the crime with which Derrida is charged is to deny that there is any absolute meaning, any meaning except the immanent one, in which texts stand in a relation of reference to the ‘real world,’ surely Quine belongs in the prisoner’s box along with Derrida. Somehow the change of language from ‘il n’y a pas de hors texte’ to ‘truth is immanent’ changes intellectual pretenders to first-rate philosophers” (1985: 71–72).

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1. Maintaining a “systematic evasiveness”: the nutty deconstructionist theses are never stated directly, but instead are woven into conditional clauses that relativize them, preventing the reader from identifying the opinion of the author with clarity. 2. A strategy of “Heads I win, tails you lose”: on showing that an argument or datum that has been adduced in favor of deconstruction is false, it is immediately held that the opposite alternative also serves to support the theory. 3. The “straw man” argument: obscure utterances are made that lack literal meaning considered as types and which are seen to be trivial and empty once they have been analyzed as tokens. In reply to Mackey’s criticism for not having given a more sympathetic reading to Culler’s text, Searle claims that there are good reasons for his “lack of sympathy,” since “[t]here is an atmosphere of bluff and fakery that pervades much (not all, of course) deconstructive writing.” Unfortunately, he does not explicitly indicate the part of this writing that escapes his objections.

An apology for deconstruction In 1987, that is, five years after the appearance of the review of Culler’s book, Derrida agrees to participate in an epistolary interview with Gerald Graff, which will bear the title “Afterword: Toward An Ethic of Discussion” (henceforth Afterword), and which would be published together with a selection of texts that include Sec, Limited and a summary of Searle’s Reply – given his refusal to allow it to be republished. In the interview, Derrida gives signs of having read the review and he accepts the challenge of moving the questioning towards deconstruction in general, thus contributing to the de-centering of Austin relative to the center of gravity of the debate. The interview came out somewhat disjointed, without a clear thematic order. In what follows I will divide the questions that were discussed into two blocks. In the current section I will analyze the theoretical aspect of the discussion, concerning the validity and value of deconstructive methods (in order to avoid redundancy I will not revisit questions that have already been dealt with in previous chapters). I will leave for the following section Derrida’s reflections on the violent and aggressive character that the exchange adopted, the reasons for which I will explore in the last chapter. In an appraisal that might be shocking for those who only know of Derrida through the secondary literature, the Frenchman emphatically affirms in Afterword his belief in an idea that Searle had accused him of having:



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Every concept that lays claim to any rigor whatsoever implies the alternative of “all or nothing.” Even if in “reality” or in “experience” everyone believes he knows that there is never “all or nothing,” a concept determines itself only according to “all or nothing.” Even the concept of “difference of degree,” the concept of relativity is, qua concept, determined according to the logic of all or nothing, of yes or no: differences of degree or nondifference of degree. It is impossible or illegitimate to form a philosophical concept outside this logic of all or nothing. (Afterword, pp. 116–7)

If Searle held seriously that his own observations are neither precise nor rigorous, the complete apparatus of distinctions on which his discourse is sustained would melt away like the snow under the sun. To each word will have to be added “a little,” “more or less,” “up to a certain point,” “rather,” and despite all this, the literal will not cease being somewhat metaphorical, “mention” will not stop being tainted by “use,” the “intentional” no less slightly “unintentional,” etc. (Afterword, p. 124)

Speech act theory, whatever its most prominent adherent says, must seek a precise and determining distinction between what is a promise and what is not. Searle must once again visit the controversial distinction between the theoretical plane and “real life,” a vague and fallacious concept that, in reality, emerges from an internal necessity of the theory itself. For example, in Review, Searle had claimed that he had not sought, with his theory, to establish an absolute distinction between what is a promise and what is not, something that Derrida is not in agreement with: If the theory of speech acts (and it should always be added: in the form given it by Searle, which is far from being its sole representative, much less exhausting it) does not “seek some sort of precise dividing line between what is and what is not a promise,” what exactly does it do? All the more, since this strange affirmation should be valid of all speech acts, and not only for the promise, which is here only an example of them. If one does not look for, and hence does not find any “precise dividing line,” how will a promise be determined? How will one proceed to the “idealization of the concept analyzed”? How will “the center of the concept of promising” be differentiated from “all sorts of marginal cases”? (Afterword, p. 125)

Although in “real life” pure cases of illocutionary acts do not occur, the theory conceives of them from a hypothetical situation of purity, in which all the elements that must co-occur are fully present. Those cases in which these elements are not present must be marked, excluded, marginalized, seen as abnormal and imperfect.89 This is so primarily because of the co-occurrence of the concept of intentionality, which 89. Searle’s opinion in Review is that “it is a condition of the adequacy of a precise theory of an indeterminate phenomenon that it should precisely characterize that phenomenon as indeterminate; and a distinction is no less a distinction for allowing for a family of related, marginal, diverging cases.” (p. 78). Precision must be in the theory, not in the phenomenon itself. Nevertheless, in order to attain this precision, the phenomenon must be idealized; this is where Derrida’s critique attacks.

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always – on principle – aspires to a present totalization, since the concept itself is conceived of as being the presence before the mind of something distinct from the mind itself, as a perfect and immaculate identity between intention and expression. A classical or conventional attack on the theory of speech acts would have consisted in a skeptical critique of the presupposition that real life must conform itself to the theory, or in suspecting the epistemological validity of the data that sustain it. This type of attack is what Searle apparently identifies in Derrida’s texts, when he compares the latter’s criticism with the behavioral and positivist prejudice holding that everything we know about language must be verifiable by means of “mechanical procedures.” But Derrida’s attack is a very different animal: for him it is the very structure of the conceptual order that he thinks is arguable, something that, paradoxically, brings him much closer to that second Wittgenstein that Searle sees as being his own point of reference. The concept of iterability, in this sense, shows that it is impossible for any concept to definitively establish itself according to its own internal logic. No concept, much less that of intentionality, can be simply thought and applied with complete purity, because every concept implies iteration: its reappearance in diverse contexts that are not predictable beforehand. And it is an iteration that, contrary to what Searle claims, is more than mere repetition: it is insufficient to point out that something that has already occurred, namely the linguistic sign, happens again. Instead, what Derrida is pointing to is that every appearance is necessarily contaminated and altered by the very fact of being repeatable, since its meaning and its signification, its validity and its function in the system, depend not only on its capacity to happen again, but also on those contextual elements it appears among and that are not the appearance itself. Iterability is not just the possibility of repetition, but also the unavoidable necessity of alteration and contamination: There is no idealization without (identificatory) iterability; but for the same reason, for reasons of (altering) iterability, there is no idealization that keeps itself pure, safe from all contamination.  (Afterword, p. 119)

This conceptual, non-empirical impossibility underlies all idealization and all theory, but, as I noted in the preceding chapter, it is especially virulent when what is in play is a theory about language, since all theory is, in turn, language. And its implications, in Derrida’s opinion, are devastating for Searle’s scientistic obsession: There can be no rigorous analogy between a scientific theory, no matter which one, and a theory of language, for several reasons, which I indicate. I do not exclude the possibility of this leading to extreme consequences, but to my eyes this is neither obscurantist nor antiscientific; on the contrary, it is not clear that what we call language or speech acts can ever be exhaustively determined by an entirely objective science or theory.  (Afterword, p. 118)



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We are not dealing with a classical skeptical, positivist or behaviorist objection about the epistemic impossibility of reaching the first-person perspectives of speakers or hearers. In turn, Derrida’s critique of the concept of intentionality does not seek to simply negate it in favor of supposedly more accessible and objective explanations. On the contrary, the concept of intentionality conserves its place in the Derridean understanding of language: it remains there like a great central enigma that demands reflection. What intentionality has lost for Derrida is the trait of being the definitive ground for the explanation of language and experience, the point of support for a theory that aspires, even if just ideally, to describe its object as though it were entirely present, in a single moment, before our eyes (even if, for the moment, such a theory cannot fully grasp and control its subject matter because of partial and circumstantial limitations). If the concept of intentionality lacks a self-sufficient base and cannot stand on its own feet even in the idealized situation of the theory, then what is interpretation? What is reading, for example, when it is impossible to isolate the meaning that has been thought and expressed by the author? If the meaning of what has been said is not a fact, something that definitely happened before the expression, and which ought then be elucidated by the interpreter, how do we avoid being trapped in the position that has been attributed to Derrida on an infinity of occasions, i.e. that everything goes in the reading of texts? He himself is clear: “First of all, I never proposed ‘a kind of “all or nothing” ’ choice between pure realization of self-presence and complete freeplay or undecidability” (Afterword, p. 115). It isn’t the case that, once the concept of intention has left the stage, that the doors are wide open for making any given text say whatever one wants. Between the pure and perfect determination of intentional meaning as fact, which Searle appears to aspire to, and its complete indeterminacy, which would pave the way to an absolute freedom for the interpreter when assigning meanings, there must be something: a space that Derrida seeks to explore without being imprisoned in the dialectic of all or nothing, once again escaping the logic of the excluded middle. What he defends is not a complete freedom in attributing meanings, but rather the existence of a “certain constitutive space” in every text, an undecidability that is impossible to overcome, no matter how much we imagine the concurrence of contextual elements that could ideally be present before us, the interpreters. Derrida’s point is not that, in practice, we could never find the unique determinate meaning of some given communicative act because the author’s intention may never be “present” to us as interpreters. Instead, his point is that, even in the idealized conditions of pure theoretical speculation, meaning is something that will always escape our model. The vouloir dire is not the kind of thing that could be definitely captured and controlled by a theory.

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Searle holds that, in the “ideal” cases (which in his theory end up, we know not how, intermingling with the “normal” cases) this grasping of meaning is fully possible, and therefore is determinable as an objective fact. Derrida, on the other hand, claims that at the base of every attribution of meaning there is also a forgetting of the fact that what is said or written could have meant something else, if we had accepted other presuppositions. Given that the notion of context cannot be fenced in or limited, either in theory or in practice, every interpretation is always supported by the decision to take on a determinate context. All interpretation is built on that previous decision, which is not the affirmation of a fact but rather the putting into practice of a putative right. It is an exercise of power, more or less explicit, by which certain hegemonic criteria are imposed at a given moment: The reconstitution of a context can never be perfect and irreproachable even though it is a regulative ideal in the ethics of reading, of interpretation, or of discussion. But since this ideal is unattainable, for reasons which are essential […] the determination, or even the redetermination, the simple recalling of a context is never a gesture that is neutral, innocent, transparent, disinterested.  (Afterword, p. 131)

A certain politics always underlies every interpretative act, an exercise of force and power: every copyright has a law that sustains it; every signature has a notary public that guarantees it; and for every law and every notary, there is a judge, forces of order, statutes that both defend and impose all of these. This political order need not be repressive, but must be political, not the fruit of a neutral scientific or theoretical discovery susceptible of being imposed on everybody because of its supposed truth. Even the interpretation that most wishes to be aseptic (the commentaire redoublant that I will analyze in the next chapter) must rest upon presuppositions that in reality are arguable, but which we accept without being offered an unshakable or self-evident certainty. All of this means that the notions of interpretation and of truth – since we are dealing with intentional concepts about something – rest on the assumption of contexts that, no matter how stable they look, are neither definitive nor immutable. Unless we become conscious of the legitimate fictions that are at the base of that social order – and in so doing we admit the inevitable central role of politics in interpretative and cognitive practices – that is, unless we take deconstruction to be an unavoidable challenge, the debatable practices employed by theoreticians of language – such as the exclusion of the marginal and the search for purity – will extend their tentacles until they come to that “real life” where we were supposedly safe.



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Towards an ethics of debate That base of power relations and social conventions which, in Derrida’s opinion, supports interpretation and truth, became evident in the academic debate that took place between our authors. Derrida’s primary interest in accepting the interview, as became clear in the subtitle of Afterword, was to debate the possibility of an “ethics of debate” able to regulate confrontations at the heart of the university: The violence, political or otherwise, at work in academic discussions or in intellectual discussions generally, must be acknowledged. In saying this I am not advocating that such violence be unleashed or simply accepted. I am above all asking that we try to recognize and analyze it as best we can in its various forms: obvious or disguised, institutional or individual, literal or metaphoric, candid or hypocritical, in good or guilty conscience. (Afterword, p. 111–2)

Derrida recognizes the “aggressiveness” of his counter-reply, although he justifies it by noting the “brutality” that Searle attacked him with, both in Reply and in Review, by performing a reading that lacked good faith, lucidity and rigor. Derrida’s own aggression and malice when writing Limited were also justified, in his view, by a double writing strategy – to which I will return in the following chapter – by means of which he sought both to argue from a conventional point of view, and also to act at the level of the non-discursive forces that underlay the debate. With this complicated move, by means of this perverse rhetoric, he aimed to distort the innocent confidence his opponent had in fully literal and direct language, (“Moreover, it was as though I was telling Searle, in addition: Try to interpret this text too with your categories,” Afterword, p. 114). This complex and disconcerting way of writing is probably what lead Foucault to label the Derridean style as “terrorist obscurantism,” according to a conversation Searle refers to in Review: The text is written so obscurely that you can’t figure out exactly what the thesis is (hence “obscurantisme”) and then when one criticizes it, the author says, “Vous m’avez mal compris; vous êtes idiot” (hence “terroriste”). (Review, § 2)

Derrida looks with suspicion on the authenticity of this private and auricular accusation – “I don’t know whether the fact of citing in French suffices to guarantee the authenticity of a citation when it concerns a private opinion” (Afterword, p. 158), and he defends himself by attacking his opponent with his own weapons: Those who wish to simplify at all costs and who raise a hue and cry about obscurity because they do not recognize the lack of clarity of their good old Aufklärung, are in my eyes dangerous dogmatists and tedious obscurantists. No less dangerous (for instance, in politics) are those who wish to purify at all costs. (Afterword, p. 119)

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When the former are united with the latter, that is, when academics obsessed with clarity are united with politicians obsessed with purity, the effect can be devastating. In an interesting footnote, Derrida offers a perfect example of how this violent, purifying politics was exercised on his own person, making use of that controversial quotation: In authorizing herself in turn with the same judgment of authority, and in citing this same unverifiable citation, the Halleck Professor of Philosophy at Yale, member of the International Institute of Philosophy, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Chairman of the American Philosophical Association (1976– 83), President of the Association for Symbolic Logic (1983-), Mrs. Ruth Barcan Marcus wrote to the French government (State Ministry, Ministry of Research and of Technology) 12 March 1984, to protest my nomination (in truth the unanimous election by my colleagues) to the position of Director of the International College of Philosophy. (Afterword, p. 158)

In Derrida’s opinion, in cases like this one we certainly are confronted with chains of repressive practices and with politics in its basest form, on the frontiers between an alleged academic freedom, the press, and state power. The international dimension of this repressive politics (a kind of academic “interpol”) is manifest, I could provide other evidence.  (Afterword, p. 159)

Paradoxically, those who appeal to a non-deconstructable truth are ultimately only able to defend it by having recourse to the political order, that is, to things external to the realm of academic discussion, things that require the exercise of a repressive power that permits maintaining the academic status quo. In 1992 a similar situation arose, on this occasion producing greater commotion: Barry Smith, together with another 17 eminent specialists in philosophy (including W. O. Quine, David Armstrong, Kevin Mulligan and, again, R. B. Marcus) published a letter in the Times of London (May 6th) and in other international newspapers to protest the granting of a doctorate honoris causa to Derrida by the University of Cambridge.90 In the opinion of these authors, even though he considers himself to be a philosopher, Derrida’s “influence […] has been to a striking degree almost entirely in fields outside philosophy – in departments of film studies, for example, or of French and English literature.” They did not believe that his work, “loaded with logical fallacies,” reaches the “accepted standards of clarity and rigour” that would have merited his honoris causa election. In the end, however, these various defects did not prevent him from obtaining the honorific title that he was presented with.91 90. A year prior, Kevin Mulligan had expressed his criticism of the Derridean style in his “How not to read: Derrida on Husserl” (1991). 91. Concerning the Cambridge incident, see J. Derrida: “Mnemosyne,” in (1989).



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In response to this recourse to the political order in order to regulate and purify intellectual discussions, Derrida would appeal in later texts to the necessity of a “university without conditions”: a realm in which nothing is protected from being questioned, and where “the principal right to say everything [is respected], even if it be under the heading of fiction and the experimentation of knowledge, and the right to say it publicly, to publish it” (Derrida 2002b: 205). The possibility of truly free thought does not reside in the hypocritical negation of power as a support for truth, but rather in its acceptance as the unavoidable ground of every discursive act.

The barbarian invasions One year after the rambunctious Cambridge episode, Searle published an article in Daedalus entitled “Rationality and Realism, What is at Stake?” (1993a, RR henceforth) – where he decided to openly oppose the attacks of the contemporary “subculture” of postmodernism.92 In his opinion, the model of the university that has been dominant from the origins of European culture up to now is in danger: a model based on certain principles that constitute the foundational pillars of the entire Western Rationalist Tradition: There is a conception of reality, and of the relationships between reality on the one hand and thought and language on the other, that has a long history in the Western intellectual tradition. Indeed, this conception is so fundamental that to some extent it defines that tradition. It involves a very particular conception of truth, reason, reality, rationality, logic, knowledge, evidence, and proof. Without too much of an exaggeration one can describe this conception as “the Western Rationalistic Tradition.” (RR, p. 57)

These principles – many of them “essential to any successful culture” (RR, p. 58) – have been synthesized into six: 1. Reality exists independently of human representations (RR, p. 60). 2. At least one of the functions of language is to communicate meanings from speakers to hearers, and sometimes those meanings enable the communication to refer to objects and states of affairs in the world that exist independently of language (RR, p. 61). 3. Truth is a matter of the accuracy of representation (RR, p. 62). 4. Knowledge is objective (RR, p. 66). 92. Searle had already begun this defense in “The Storm Over the University,” (1990), an article he published in the New York Review of Books that provoked two discussions in the same newspaper: the first, with Gerald Graff, George Levine and Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1991) and the second with Graff alone (1991). See also (Searle 1993b).

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5. Logic and rationality are formal (RR, p. 67). 6. Intellectual standards are not up for grabs. There are both objectively and intersubjectively valid criteria of intellectual achievement and excellence (RR, p. 68). More than theses or explicit theories, as Searle will discuss in The Construction of Social Reality (1995: chap. VI), these ideas constitute background elements, inscribed in our most ordinary forms of life and reflected in our intellectual practices. Nonetheless, this has not avoided the fact that, in a certain way, they have always been in question – for one of the distinctive traits of the Western Rationalist Tradition is its capacity to practice self-critique and subject its own foundations to questioning. But what is new about the current situation is that our foundational principles are not being questioned regarding the limitations that are constitutive for us as human beings, and which block us from fully attaining those principles – something which the Tradition itself is quite aware of. Instead, they are being questioned qua regulative ideas. They are not being criticized for being unreachable, but (supposedly) for being unjust and arbitrary instruments of political oppression. In the face of this oppression, under the influence of thinkers such as Derrida and Rorty, a certain amount of reading of Kuhn and, to a lesser degree, of Foucault, the “Nietzschean left” – an expression that Searle inherits from Allan Bloom – is taking control of the weakest humanities departments of the American academic spectrum, subjecting their research projects, in a more or less explicit manner, to certain political agendas. In Searle’s opinion, this has resulted in a proliferation of departments of Women Studies, Chicano Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, African American Studies and other similar cases (RR, p. 74). Set up as a defender of Western culture and civilization, leading a heroic crusade against the apostles of everything goes, Searle defends analytic philosophy as the only guarantee of rationality, truth, coherence and clarity. Up to now, the hegemony of this school had been beyond question in English-speaking countries,93 although, as Searle notes elsewhere with a certain bitterness, it seems to be condemned to decline: Analytic philosophy has become not only dominant but intellectually respectable, and, like all successful revolutionary movements, it has lost some of its vitality in virtue of its very success. Given its constant demand for rationality, intelligence, clarity, rigor and self-criticism, it is unlikely that it can succeed indefinitely, simply because these demands involve too great a cost for many people to pay.(2003: 21)

93. Claiming Searle as his authority, Hans-Johann Glock dared to assert that this hegemony of analytical philosophy extends to all Western philosophy (2008: 1).



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Now, what Searle is proposing in RR goes beyond the problem of analytical philosophy, since it affects the complete Western Rationalist Tradition, identified – at least “to a certain point” – with the Western intellectual tradition as a whole (giving the impression that any thinker that questions its principles is, to a certain degree, an uninvited intruder). In the face of this situation, it is not Searle’s intention to defend these principles with solid and convincing arguments; indeed, for such arguments be accepted and function, these same principles would have to already have been accepted: The situation is a bit like the common occurrence of the 1960s in which one was asked to justify rationality: “What is your argument for rationality?” The notion of an argument already presupposes standards of validity and hence rationality. […] You might show that certain canons of rationality are self-defeating or inconsistent, but there is no way to “prove” rationality. (RR, p. 80)

So, one gets the impression that Searle is counterattacking by offering precisely what he criticizes: “slogans and battlecries” (RR, p. 78) collected in a kind of credo that must be accepted if one wishes to fully belong to the non-degenerate intelligentsia. Searle thus positions himself far from the proposals of University Without Conditions, even in their antipodes. And he adopts an even more decisive tone in another, later article that remains mostly unknown. In it he calls upon his experience as a member of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities and accuses the representatives of postmodernism of “hypocrisy and deceit” for taking money from institutions that should promote knowledge, proposing a progressive ceasing of these funds: It is perfectly legitimate, indeed desireable for English professors, as well as professors in any other disciplines, to engage in whatever political activity they like. But that is not what they are paid to do. That is not what the funding agencies have in mind when they set up and continue to fund these departments. […] My modest proposal would be simply to phase out those departments, journals and other institutional structures that cannot be justified by the criteria that they officially endorse but effectively despise and undermine. (Searle 1998: 87)

In any case, coming back to the task at hand – the explicit debate with Derrida – in those texts there is, properly speaking, no analysis nor any discussion of his interpretation of speech acts nor any other concrete aspect of his philosophy. Instead, what we have is a Manichean critique of a stereotyped, even caricatured Derrida, whose barbarous invasion of the American intellectual scene has been an agent for the dangerous spread of the decadence of the Old Continent. In case the reader thinks that speaking of “caricaturing” is exaggerated, I reproduce the following fragment:

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For example, suppose I call my car mechanic to find out if the carburetor is fixed; or I call the doctor to get the report of my recent medical examination. Now, suppose I have reached a deconstructionist car mechanic and he tries to explain to me that a carburetor is just a text anyway, and that there is nothing to talk about except the textuality of the text. Or suppose I have reached a postmodernist doctor who explains to me that disease is essentially a metaphorical construct. (RR, p. 81)

Employing elementary rhetorical tactics, more appropriate for a sidewalk argument than for a serious and rigorous article, Searle seeks to show that the opinions of Derrida and Rorty are inconsistent with ordinary linguistic practices. However, the positions of his adversaries appear as blurred clichés and the debate seems to have degenerated hopelessly. In Derrida’s case, as opposed to those of Rorty and Kuhn, Searle doesn’t cite his works even once. Already identified with the coarse stereotype he has attempted to escape from so many times, the Frenchman is reduced to a parody of himself. Conscious of the simplification he is forcing the issue to obey, Searle notes at the end of his article that: However, there is one danger endemic to any such presentation. You are almost forced to present the issues as clearer and simpler than they really are. In order to describe the phenomena at all, you have to state them as more or less clear theses on each side: the subculture of the traditional university and the subculture of postmodernism. However, in real life people on both sides tend to be ambivalent and even confused. They are often not quite sure what they actually think. (RR, p. 82)

That is to say, if an intellectual thinks that she doesn’t fit into the simplified stereotypes described by the article, then she must not have her head screwed on right.

The discontents of literary theory We find the final scene of this long-lasting failed encounter in an article that, as with Review and Afterword, has a certain indirect character. Searle barrels onwards without dedicating a complete text to Derrida, which would give the Frenchman too much importance. Instead, Searle stuffs him into a corner in an eclectic article, “Literary Theory and Its Discontents” (1994, LT from here on), in which he brings together a diverse series of critiques against various literary theorists. The text, much more argumentative and detailed than those that came earlier, appeared first in French in 1993 and then in English, with a final addition, in 1994.94 Graff ’s compilation is 94. The French version appeared in a monographic issue on the division between analytic and continental philosophers in the Stanford French Review (17, 2–3, 1993, pp. 221–256). See critical discussion in (Lucy and McHoul 1996).



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profusely cited in both printed versions of LT, despite the fact that the text was already presented in a seminar in 1987, a year before Graff ’s book was published. Searle’s intention in LT is to refute three positions taken by literary theorists, positions which not only do not share anything with each other, but are in many aspects complete opposites. The first is the conception of the meaning of texts held by Stanley Fish (at least for a time), according to which the interpretation depends totally on the reader’s response. The second, opposed to the first, is that of Stephen Knapp and Walter Michaels, according to whom the meaning of the texts depends totally and exclusively on the intention of the author. The third and final position, “the most obscure of the cases” (LT, p. 657), is the Derridean position that meanings are undecidable and radically indeterminable. Postures that are so diverse can be criticized in a single article because they all have the same problem at root: an ignorance of “principles and distinctions that are commonly accepted in logic, linguistics, and the philosophy of language” (LT, p. 637). Searle’s intent in the article is to enlighten those theorists about these philosophical tools, since if you get certain fundamental principles and distinctions about language right, then many of the issues in literary theory that look terribly deep, profound, and mysterious have rather simple and clear solutions. (LT, p. 639)

While at the beginning Searle says he will propose half a dozen principles, in the end he analyzes eight (the majority of which I have already touched on): the Background; the distinction between token identity and type identity; between sentences and utterances; between use and mention; the compositionality of language; the need to distinguish between ontological and epistemological problems; and, finally, the non-identity between syntactic and physical properties. In what follows I will analyze these questions, focusing on the novelties that they bring to the debate. LT begins by making an explicit defense of that conceptual vagueness that Derrida had criticized in Afterword. The concepts of the philosophy of language, according to Searle, and just as he had discussed in Review, do not have to have unequivocal limits, since the intentional states which sustain them lack the “crystalline purity” that some people attribute to them. This is a pre-Wittgensteinian assumption that Searle considers surpassed, and one of the motives is the importance of the notion of Background – which, in my opinion, should have been central to the debate right from the beginning, if both parties had been clear about the reasons for their failed encounter. This idea reminds us of Chapter 3: according to Searle, the intentionality of our language is not interpretable if we only take semantics into account from an abstract point of view. It is also necessary to take into consideration a series of non-intentional abilities and capacities, a know-how that permits us to give meaning to what we say. Searle’s classic example is the following: to know what “cut the pie” means, it is not enough to look it up in a dictionary. One must learn what doing such a thing consists in, since “cut” must be interpreted in very different

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ways in other situations, such as “cut the grass” and “cut off the water,” which, nonetheless, share a single literal meaning. The infinite interpretations that the literal meanings of words permit are always limited by our pre-intentional know-how. This is an idea – whose antecedents are in Hume, Nietzsche and, above all, Wittgenstein – that, as Searle himself makes clear, is not as “commonly accepted” as he might like (we thus begin this enumeration of generally established principles with an exception). Its effect is that “there are no such things as intentional states having the kind of purity they were alleged to have by the traditional authors on intentionality in the phenomenological tradition, such as Husserl” (LT, p. 642). The meanings of the words are not “present” to us in crystalline fashion, because the Background that makes them possible is not, in turn, an intentional content of consciousness, but instead is a mode of relating with things. For this reason, Derrida’s accusation against speech act theory, because of its supposed tendency to postulate the full presence of intentional contents, is, in Searle’s opinion, completely unjust. He would in fact be the first to accept, following Wittgenstein, that there is no crystalline self-presence. Searle finally comes to say the following: It is a consequence of my view that meaning and intentionality have a much more radical form of indeterminacy than is conceivable to Derrida, because they have no independent functioning at all: they only function relative to a nonrepresentational Background. (LT, p. 659)

As I noted earlier, the notion of Background contains the seeds of cultural relativism, and can appear as an intrinsic limitation for the full development of a theory of language. Nonetheless, Searle would like to contain these interpretations from the beginning: there is no cultural relativism at all because the Background is nothing more than an objective fact about our brains, bodies and societies. And it does not at all imply a theoretical limitation in the analysis of language, but rather the opposite: it is one of the essential elements to consider when linguistic intentionality is in play and, in general, the intentionality of our mental states. It is not an obstacle for the theory; instead, it is its condition of possibility – provided that we are able to adopt a post-Wittgensteinian conception of the notion of theory. The principle of expressibility, for instance, is not affected by the problem of the Background for the simple reason that it is always possible to say what we want to say, given the availability of the appropriate Background: However, given a set of Background capacities and a Network of intentionality, including the mastery of a common linguistic apparatus shared between speaker and hearer, meaning and communication can be completely determinate. When I complain about the heat or order a hamburger, I am, in general, able to do so without ambiguity or vagueness, much less indeterminacy. Within the constraints set by the conditions of the possibility on the speech act, I can say what I want to say and mean what I want to mean. (LT, p. 659)



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Where is meaning? In order to show that the notion of iterability is badly defined in Derrida’s work, Searle returns anew to the distinction between type identity and token identity, refining the critique that had already appeared in Reply. The Frenchman is clearly mistaken, in his opinion, because he claims that “marks” and “signs” can be iterated. In reality what is iterated or repeated is not the marks or signs themselves, qua physical entities, it is the types under which they fall. This explicit identification of exemplars or tokens with physical objects, as is clear in The Construction of Social Reality (1995: chap. IV), is of great importance for Searle, because it marks once again the limit of cultural relativism. No matter how much we grant meanings and intentionality to words and objects via the use of language and other conventional institutions, it is essential to emphasize that the existence of these things is a brute fact, something physical, not dependent on our language nor on our conventions. Sounds or scratchings of ink are not iterable; they are individual in their occurrence and independent of how we think about them or classify them. Another of the principles that Searle talks about in his article is related to this assessment: “syntax is not intrinsic to physics.” Even though every sign has a physical realization, syntactic categories are not physical categories: “There are, for example, no acoustic, chemical, gravitational, electromagnetic, and so on, properties which all and only sentences of English have in common” (LT, p. 648). What they do have in common is that all of them are regulated by a system of conventions, which brings us to the four following distinctions, closely related to each other. Even though Searle does not later use them expressly in order to refute Derrida, they are of vital importance for understanding his conception of how language functions. On the one hand, Searle wants to refute Fish’s position, who holds that meaning is a free creation of the reader. He also seeks to dispute the opposite stance taken by Knapp and Michaels (1981), according to whom a fragment of code cannot be considered language unless it has been produced consciously by an author, whose intention is what gives meaning to a text. Does the meaning depend on the intention of the author? Searle’s response is yes, but only to a certain point: linguistic signs, of themselves, have a meaning as a function of the accepted conventions of the language they belong to. And they do so with complete independence from their origin, since they are readable even though there is no author that has produced them intentionally. Given a set of socially accepted conventions – for example, the English language – the strokes of ink that make up a meaningful text mean what they mean. The meaning of individual words derives from the system of established conventions, i.e. from the semantics of the language in question. Similarly, the meaning of a complete sentence is determined on the basis of the meanings of its parts, according to the principle of compositionality. Nonetheless, the sentence cannot be considered an utterance unless someone utters it, in which case the utterer could be using it or mentioning it. If she is using

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it, the speaker would be wanting to say what the sentence means; if she is mentioning it, however, she would only be referring to it.95 Refining what he had already stated in Reply, Searle once again accuses Derrida of mixing distinct concepts in the notion of citationalité. For instance, when an actor utters some words on stage she is neither citing nor mentioning: she is using them, but only in a restricted context. The meaning of the phrase as I have just defined it need not coincide with the meaning of the speaker, who can want to say something different than what his words effectively and literally say. In this case, the hearer or reader must make a deduction in order to understand the meaning of what has been said. In that deduction she must take into consideration not just the literal meaning but also the context, in order to determine whether the speaker is being ironic, speaking metaphorically, telling a joke, etc. But the fact that the speaker can do this with his words does not imply that these non-literal meanings form part of the meaning of the sentence, which is defined exclusively by linguistic conventions. Searle believes that with these principles in hand, confronting Fish as well as Knapp and Michaels is quite simple. Responding to the first, meaning is not a creation of the reader in any sense. Her function can only be to confirm what the literal meaning of the sentence is, or else to deduce what the speaker’s intention was. It is only if the reader herself becomes a speaker or author that she can give the words a distinct meaning. And, responding to the latter two, a code fragment has a literal meaning independently of whether or not there was an author at its origin. What it does not possess is utterance meaning, since there is no such utterance unless there is an utterer to whom the meaning of what has been said can be attributed. And, while an author can want to say something different from what her words actually mean, she cannot change what those words mean in fact, since that depends on conventions that she cannot modify.96 Furthermore, while the meaning that she gives to her sentence may be different from its literal meaning, it is only possible to transmit the former by relying on the latter. It is only if the hearer knows the literal meaning of a phrase, the meaning the sentence has in and of itself, that it is possible for her to deduce the ironic or metaphoric sense that the speaker wished to give it in a certain moment.97 The idea that the literal meaning does not depend 95. There are those who claim that in this second case the linguistic elements are not properly present, but rather only their “proper name”; this is, however, a position that Searle holds to be mistaken (1969: 82ff). 96. Knapp and Michaels (1999: 669–75) replied to these critiques by stating that a purely literal interpretation of the code fragments – which would be carried out without taking into account the speaker’s intentions at all – would be completely arbitrary. To start off with, the reader or hearer would have to choose, with no justification whatsoever, which conventions are going to regulate the meaning of the text. 97. A strong debate has arisen around the idea that, in literal uses, conventions regulate communication to the point of making it unnecessary that the hearer perform any contextual deduction



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on the speaker but on accepted conventions is essential not just for communication, but even for thought itself, since “It is only possible to communicate, or even to think, complex thoughts given a structure of sentence meanings” (LT, p. 647). The implications of this idea in psychopragmatics, that is, in the study of how language is somehow used as a vehicle for thought, are of great interest.98 It could be argued that the fact that words have meanings of themselves, independently of what the speaker who uses them intends to say with them, has the implication that the intentionality of mental states is superfluous for understanding the functioning of language. Facing this possibility, Searle hastens to note that the intentionality of the sentence is only, in reality, of a derived type, not intrinsic: it is only the mental state that the speaker is in when making an utterance that is intrinsically intentional. The literal intentionality of the sentence itself derives from the intentions with which it is normally uttered by the speakers of a given society: Notions such as “sentence of English” cannot be defined in terms of, for example, acoustics or mechanics. There are no acoustic properties, for example, which all and only English sentences have in common. There is a deep reason for this, and that is that the entire system of syntax only exists relative to human intentionality, including the Network and the Background. (LT, p. 654)

The meaning of a sentence does not have an intrinsic intentionality, but that doesn’t mean that it does not have its reference established in a firm and objective way. In fact, while the literal meaning ultimately derives from the meanings of the speakers, these meanings can only be expressed (or even thought) thanks to the conventions that establish sentence meanings. It looks like concepts are being defined here in a vicious and circular way, but Searle responds to this impression in other texts, such as The Social Construction of Reality. He claims there that socially accepted conventions, such as the semantics of a language, only exist because there are subjective intentional attitudes that assume their existence but, even though these attitudes are of a subjective character, the reality that they give rise to is an objective fact. The word “dog” objectively has a meaning in English, just as a 50 dollar bill has an objective value, a couple can be objectively married or a person can have received, also objectively, an honorary distinction. Even if none of these facts could come about if the subjectivity of human beings did not exist, they are nevertheless objective facts, because humans do collectively grant them a value and a meaning, i.e. a derived intentionality.

whatsoever. In this regard, Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish (1984) have developed a theory of speech acts that gives the hearer’s deductive capacity a much more fundamental role. Searle has explicitly tackled “the currently fashionable views that performatives are some kind of indirect speech act where the supposedly non-literal performative is somehow derived from the literal assertion by Gricean mechanisms” (1989: 101). 98. Concerning the notion of psychopragmatics see (Dascal 2003: 47).

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Ontology and epistemology: What the theoretician aims to accomplish Finally, I must comment here on the last principle that Searle discusses in LT: the distinction between ontological and epistemological problems, a distinction he applies specifically to Derrida. It is crucial to distinguish questions of what exists (ontology) from questions of how we know what exists (epistemology). […] Epistemic questions have to do with evidence, and though they are immensely important to biographers, historians, and critics, they are of very little interest to the theory of language. Roughly speaking, as theorists we are interested in the ontology of language, and the epistemological question – how do you know? – is irrelevant. (LT, p. 648)

For a historian it might be very complicated to find out what such and such a person wanted to say with her words, if she spoke seriously or was joking, if she was being ironic or speaking literally… but these problems only affect the specialist when it is a question of the meaning of a specific utterance. Nevertheless, when what is in play is the theory of language, epistemological problems must be set aside, since we are imagining ourselves in an idealized position where such problems do not exist. Perhaps the person did not know what she wanted to say, or spoke half in earnest and half jokingly. That, however, is one question (ontological, about what occurred) while another very distinct issue (epistemological, about how we discover things) is whether we will be able one day to know for certain what she wanted to say. Even if we are not able to ascertain it, that does not necessarily mean that the subject did not want to say something quite concrete with her words. That is, in Searle’s terms: “the standard mistake is to suppose that lack of evidence, that is, our ignorance, shows indeterminacy or undecidability in principle” (LT, p. 648). Taking up again the idea that he had already spoken of in Review, Searle accuses Derrida of sharing with the neopositivists the “endemic vice” of identifying ontology and epistemology. The latter hold, via the principle of verifiability, that only what is empirically testable should be accepted as a fact. Derrida, in turn, wants to turn deficiencies in our epistemic access to the determination of meaning into implications on the ontological plane: [b]ut from the epistemological limitations, from our lack of evidence nothing whatever follows about the ontology. […] To put the point quite simply, empirical evidence has no bearing whatever on the issue of indeterminacy or undecidability in principle. Indeterminacy and undecidability in principle are problems that arise given perfect knowledge given that all of the epistemic questions have been solved. It is simply a confusion to apply these notions in an epistemic fashion. (LT, p. 662)



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Searle’s intention in rigorously separating ontology from epistemology might seem pre-Kantian to continental ears, since he seems to believe that it is possible to speak directly about the thing in itself, ignoring the problem of our epistemic access. But what will be even more disconcerting for the reader of LT is that Searle never gets to the point of identifying Derrida’s specific critique: that the theoretician, precisely in adopting this kind of God’s eye point of view, is in fact taking on a metaphysics of presence. This is, again, the position according to which all the elements that determine the meaning of language (conventions, intentions, Network, Background…) may come to be ideally present, even though in fact they could never come to be so in reality. This approach means, according to Derrida, that speech act theory is governed teleologically by an ideal of complete presence. Its objective is the achievement of a situation where everything that has occurred, including the meaning itself, would be determined by a series of factualities which, while unable to be tested de facto, would theoretically be testable de jure. The form that the Frenchman uses to break down this illusion does not consist, as Searle has accused him of repeatedly, in noting the epistemological and empirical impossibility of discovering the truth about what happened – the classic skeptical argument that I referred to above. On the contrary, Derrida’s argumentation appeals to the very structure of the conceptual order, principally by way of the notion of context. Saying that the notion of context can simply be given, ontologically rather than epistemologically, is what Derrida calls into question. Searle says nothing regarding this challenge; instead, he takes as given precisely that which has to be questioned, even if it is only to defend and reaffirm it. What we end up with is a dialogue of the deaf, because the fundamental problem is not brought to the fore; indeed, it was never even formulated by either party. In its stead, Searle questions how it is that Derrida might display such an amazing lack of knowledge of the fundamental principles of the disciplines involved (logic, linguistics and philosophy of language). In so doing, he does at least stumble upon, albeit in a partial fashion, certain keys that permit an understanding of the why of the failed encounter. I believe the mistakes derive not only from neglect of the principles I have mentioned but also from a general lack of familiarity with the recent history of the philosophy of language, as well as recent linguistics. “The philosophy of language,” as we now use the expression, only begins in the late nineteenth century with Frege, and continues via the works of Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Tarski, Quine, and others right up to the present day. […] As far as I can tell, Derrida knows next to nothing of the works of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein and so on; and one main reason for his incomprehension of Austin’s work, as well as of mine, is that he does not see how we are situated in, and responding to, that history from Frege to Wittgenstein. (LT, p. 663)

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Given his grievous ignorance, Derrida “still cannot grasp that [speech act theory] does not proceed from his traditional philosophical assumptions” (LT, p. 664). For his part, the references upon which the Frenchman builds his work go back to Rousseau and Condillac, not to mention Plato; in speaking of linguistics, however, he does not go any further than Benveniste, or even Saussure. Derrida’s sources are, in Searle’s view, definitively outmoded. His opponent’s philosophy remains anchored in the past. It is “pre-Wittgensteinian” and as a result cannot even reach the problems that are to be debated in the present day. Rather, given his antiquated philosophical background, Derrida could not help but continue speculating about the sex of angels: All of these are important and distinguished thinkers [Plato, Rousseau, Saussure,…], and their work should certainly not be neglected, but you will not understand what is happening today if that is where your understanding stops. (LT, p. 663)

The peculiar relationship that Derrida establishes with his historical predecessors is disconcerting for Searle. But, for a continental philosopher, what is no less disconcerting is the idea that Searle has of “what is happening today.” Where does this today take place, if Derrida is not included? Does he mean that nothing has occurred at all in continental Europe since the members of the Vienna Circle abandoned it in the 1930s? If Searle accuses Derrida of being “pre-Wittgensteinian,” can we not accuse him of something similar? It is hard to deny that he appears to know practically nothing about the work of Heidegger, Lévinas, Gadamer, Habermas, Ricoeur, Vattimo, Blumenberg and a lengthy etcetera of thinkers who have been decisive for the development of (continental) philosophy in the 20th century. And how can this not be an obstacle for him to speak aptly about phenomenology, ontology, intentionality, writing, interpretation, reason, or metaphor? For it is completely anachronistic today to even mention these issues, unless one is well aware of the contributions of these authors. Even if we accept, with Martial Gueroult, that “Authentic philosophy, as with authentic science, is always final hour philosophy” (1979: 268), we still need to find out where that “final hour” occurs, and whether it is possible to give it a meaning that goes beyond the mechanical measurement of clocks. I believe that the most fruitful path – rather than getting tangled up in mutual accusations about who lives in the past and who in the present – will be to analyze how the assimilation of divergent philosophical perspectives always starts from one’s own perspective. One can only begin to interpret the other from the tradition in which one has been trained, in which one’s own intellectual labor gains meaning, and with eyes fixed on the project for the future that one has committed oneself to bringing to fruition. If, instead of discussing the authenticity of our own present and pointing



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out the outdated views of the other, we decided to follow this path, we would become conscious of something that none of the parties involved appears to have understood: that this phenomenon that I have just described not only affects the other when he fails to understand our own position, but also us, when we fail to understand the other.

chapter 8

When philosophizing is doing Philosophy as a speech act I discussed in the first chapter how, at the roots of this entire failed encounter, was the discovery that descriptive language is only one particular use of human language. There is no reason why this use has to be the only one that attracts the interest of philosophers, as the logical neo-positivists seemed to believe. Thanks to Wittgenstein and Austin we know that, aside from describing reality with pretensions to truth and fit, human language makes it possible to carry out acts of diverse natures, which in turn transmit a certain force with which we do something in uttering our words. In reality, as we saw then – following one of the possible developments of Austinian analysis – descriptions can only occur within illocutionary acts, so that in a certain sense the pragmatic aspect of language swallows up the descriptive function: one can only say how things are by means of a speech act, that is, by doing things with words. The description is also subject to the possibility of infelicity, given that the meaning of what we say can only occur in a discursive context through the exercise, on someone’s part, of a certain illocutionary force. As Searle later stated, “Propositional acts cannot occur alone; that is, one cannot just refer and predicate without making an assertion or asking a question or performing some other illocutionary act“ (1969: 34). So, it would seem that the parties to this debate, albeit to different degrees, resist applying these same principles to the philosophical discussion that they themselves are caught up in. Both of them act as though, through their words, meanings could describe reality by themselves, with no trace of any illocutionary force that could contaminate them. It is as though doing philosophy weren’t something that we do with words, but rather the transmission of an image of reality that can stand on its own, immaculate, adapted to the order of the world, and thus true. But philosophy is unavoidably a linguistic activity, and as such, is a chain of speech acts, so that philosophy too is a way of doing: a doing that can be carried out in numerous forms, with innumerable distinct objects. For example, when doing philosophy, the intention of our acts can be to: Hold a theory – Exercise suspicion – Posit a ground – Link oneself to a tradition – Develop an argument –

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Seduce – Convince – Naturalize a phenomenon – Express a mea culpa – Systematize – Seek a certain liberation – Appeal to evidence – Deconstruct theories – Debate the author’s intention in a text – Ground, defend, interpret, vindicate, discredit.

No doubt the reader herself might recall philosophical works that have the goal of carrying out each of these actions, or many others, and the hierarchy that has to be established between them isn’t given beforehand.99 How can philosophy, necessarily a linguistic activity, aspire to free itself from the plurality of uses that it itself attributes to language? Won’t the various philosophies suffer the same destiny as language games themselves did? For there will be family resemblances between them, but there won’t be any essence of philosophizing, per se. Above all, how could we reach agreement about that essence, if it is not by means of illocutionary speech acts, that is, by means of a linguistic practice? Isn’t the defining purpose of philosophy an understanding of the reality in which we live? Or is it the establishing of a network of concepts that permit surviving in it? Should philosophy make an effort to articulate its knowledge and thereby pave the way for present-day science and technology to better know and control our environment? Or is its objective, on the contrary, fighting to ensure that this control is never absolute? To preserve a redoubt in the world that is inaccessible to all method, thereby assuring that the implementation of this control is, in principle, impossible to achieve? And, what is more important, could a pure collision occur between philosophical theories, a discussion about which one is true, without these ground-level questions dominating the entire process, in a more or less explicit fashion? It is an essential feature of speech acts that one can only contrast their locutionary aspects – that is, what they said, their meaning – if we presuppose that there is an identity underlying their respective illocutionary forces (see Fish 1980: 284). 99. As Glock (2008: 6) notes, “arguing is not the only activity in which philosophers legitimately engage. They also describe, classify, clarify, interpret, gloss, paraphrase, formalize, illustrate, summarize, preach, etc. Whether all these other activities must ultimately stand in the service of argument is a moot point”. Austin had already said, in a text I have referred to earlier, that “We certainly do not know that this is so, [regarding the priority of statements in comparison with other types of speech acts] any more, for example, than, to take an alternative, that all utterances must have first begun as swear-words” (1962a: 72–3).



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A simple example: three subjects – A, B and C – perform three speech acts with identical locutionary content, but a different illocutionary force: A – “Marcos is closing the door.” B – “Marcos, close the door!” C – “Hopefully Marcos is closing the door.”

Does it make sense to ask whether A, B and C are in agreement with each other, taking into consideration only the content expressed in these utterances? Can we really say that these utterances coincide with each other, or do they contradict each other instead? Although their locutionary content is the same, referring intentionally to a single factual situation – Marcos closing the door – and therefore having a meaning in common, the illocutionary force with which this meaning is attained is different in each of the cases. When it is used by A, it is a description; by B, an order; and by C, the expression of a desire. In order that there be agreement or dissent in a strict sense, there must be a coincidence in the force: that A says that Marcos is closing the door, while B states the contrary; or that B gave Marcos the order to close the door and C says to not do it. No doubt there can be relationships between a description and an order, or between the manifestation of a desire and the description of a fact, … but these relations cannot be simply of identity or opposition. Rather, they must be nuanced in function of the relative illocutionary force that the utterances are carrying. Something similar occurs, like it or not, with philosophical texts: their meanings cannot enter into a direct relation of identity or opposition, other than through the respective forces they are uttered with. I don’t mean that philosophical concepts and problems don’t exist independently of those contexts of use and the practices they are grafted into.100 Instead, I limit myself to stating that the contents of theories – their purely locutionary, predicative aspect – can only occur and acquire argumentative value in the exercise of an intellectual activity which puts them to use. They must be impelled by a certain illocutionary force, by means of which someone aims to attain certain perlocutionary achievements as well. As Dascal has maintained, “a purely semantic approach [is insufficient] for capturing the peculiar nature of controversies” (2003: 280).

100.  While Richard Rorty would probably try to extract this pragmatist implication, even going so far as to dilute philosophy into one more literary genre, perhaps we don’t need to accompany him in going that far: “sometimes he talks as if there were some common project (Heaven knows what) on which he and Condillac, Humboldt, Saussure, Chomsky, Austin et al. were engaged, and as if he had arguments for the superiority of his own views over theirs. […] I think that his attempts at internal criticism usually miss the mark, and that he indeed does not share a common subject with those he discusses.” (Rorty 1977: 674). See also (Rorty 1979, 1984).

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I will offer a couple of examples of this dependence that I have noted. In the first place, dealing abstractly with an utterance like the following: “Iterability is the necessary presupposition for the forms that intentionality adopts,”

the force with which this utterance is emitted will vary drastically, depending on whether we find it in a text by Derrida or one by Searle. Apparently, this is a thesis shared by both: Derrida defends it openly in Sec, accusing Austin of having forgotten it. Searle turns the same weapon against Derrida, at the end of Reply, as being his own decisive critique. Derrida, in turn, is amazed in Limited to find his own thesis defended by his opponent, as though it were there to rebut the position taken in Sec. At base, something is occurring that is similar to what I described in the previous example, when I asked whether A, B and C, while saying the same thing, can be in agreement or not. It is not a question that can be settled while ignoring the speech acts in which the expressions used occur. In Derrida’s case, the utterance forms part of the exercise of suspicion: it is the central movement of his deconstruction of Austin’s theory, by which the Frenchman seeks to denounce the metaphysical and phonocentric roots of a certain analytic philosophy. In the case of Searle, it is the keystone for the formation of a theory of speech acts that would systematize Austin’s intuitions. We can only thoroughly represent the coincidence or clash between their respective positions by taking into consideration the mode in which what they have said – which apparently coincides – is integrated into the series of tasks that each one seeks to carry out – which is, in each case, profoundly different. One might initially be shocked because of the fact that both authors appear to be in complete disagreement while holding similar theses. This perturbation is, at bottom, something as naive as the misunderstanding that someone watching a duel might experience if she doesn’t understand why the two duelists are confronting one other, bearing the same kind of weapon in their hands. Second example: I noted in the Introduction that the modus operandi of Alain Sokal in his polemical article was, in a certain way, a variation of the Chinese Room argument or, rather, putting that argument into practice. The argument of Searle and the strategy of Sokal are constructed in the same way: in order to demonstrate that what you say makes no sense, I imitate your speech acts and verify that, from my first person perspective, what I say makes no sense, without that impeding you from taking it in a serious and literal manner. In the case of the Chinese Room, the words that I write on a piece of paper are read by you as though they constituted a meaningful language, when in reality they are the effect of syntactic games. In the case of Sokal, the text of “Transgressing frontiers” is accepted by the postmodern community as a meaningful and valuable contribution, when in reality it is merely an irresponsible set of vague and fallacious arguments. In both cases, the form of language is iterated, repeated in the absolute absence of meaning; nonetheless, it



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continues to work. The value of the latter, just as with all philosophical arguments, depends on the intentions that it is put into play with. For Searle and Sokal, the argument serves to refute contrary positions. For the former, the Chinese room demonstrates that the project of Strong Artificial Intelligence, based on functionalism, is on the wrong track, since the room functions on the basis of mere syntactic considerations, without letting semantics enter into the game. For Sokal, it is the nonsense sold by postmodernists that shows them to be absurd, since after the bombast of their language there is only a vastness empty of meaning. Nonetheless, if we understand this argument as an instrument in Derrida’s hands, its use would be completely the opposite. For Derrida, both the Chinese Room argument as well as Sokal’s strategy would be perfect examples of what he himself seeks to defend. The linguistic form can be iterated in the absence of seriousness – Sokal – or even of meaningful intention – Searle – without “communication” ceasing to be effective and performative. Language triumphs happily in its function of communicating force via the impulse of a mark. The absence of an intentional consciousness that acts as the source of the utterance wouldn’t then have to be an impediment for the unfolding of writing. We must recognize the fact that neither theses nor philosophical arguments have value in and of themselves; rather, their value derives from the task that puts them to use.101 Philosophizing, from this point of view, is not just saying something, for instance, about the world, knowledge or language: it is necessarily something that we do via the utterance of those words.

Philosophical training Early in the Philosophical Investigations (2009: § 1) Wittgenstein criticized Augustine of Hippo’s description of the language-learning process. According to Augustine, the child links new words with their referents by ostension, as though learning were a matter of accumulating a glossary. This description, holds Wittgenstein, is partial and means little, since in the majority of cases learning a language is learning to use it in practical contexts. It does not mean memorizing what the words refer to, but rather being instructed in their use. In the same way, the procedure for learning philosophy doesn’t consist in the assimilation of a series of doctrines that aspire to 101.  An extreme example of this is the rhetorical strategy, condemned by Searle in his response to Mackey, that I discussed in the preceding chapter. “Heads I win, tails you lose”: a concrete argument or datum and its refutation can both be used for the same end. Nevertheless, this possibility does not imply that both must be equally effective for such an end. Seeking to use determined instruments for determined actions can be a tremendous error.

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represent the essential structures of the world, of reality or of subjectivity. On the contrary: it consists in a prolonged practical apprenticeship through which we learn to philosophize by doing something with words, interacting with other people. This is an instruction in the development of a social practice, and not the intellectual acquisition of a series of concepts.102 What does a philosopher do, qua philosopher? What does learning to philosophize consist in? We tend to hide the diversity of philosophical practices behind ambiguous, vague terms, such as analyzing or synthesizing, systematizing or criticizing, as though doing philosophy always consisted in undertaking a similar series of tasks. But doing it in an analytic domain, for example, is something profoundly different from doing it in a hermeneutic, post-structuralist or neo-Marxist context. According to whether one acquires the capacity to philosophize in one domain or other, the pupil will be learning to do something profoundly different. The determination of what turns out to be not just true or false, but rather correct or incorrect, valuable or banal, reasonable or idiotic, is established by way of those practices, which necessarily imply a scale of values, and which are integrated into certain ways of life that go beyond the strictly academic. In being instructed in her new capacity, through carrying out certain practical tasks, the philosopher learns certain rules of the game that determine her future skills. This is why the first chapters of this book should not be read like a succession of doctrines that give meaning to the respective theories of Searle and Derrida. On the contrary, these semantic rivers that I have been referring to represent the continuity of the tasks taken on in their respective works, tasks that have meaning to the degree that they develop certain traditions that pre-exist them. This is work that has been taken up and shared over the course of generations, and which flows out into the actions that have been carried out, concretely, by each of them. Philosophical traditions are not a set of theories that progressively become obsolete; instead, they are the long, drawn out practice of an activity, the drawn out genesis of a single game – no matter how ductile and malleable its rules may be – in which the participants learn how to do what they do, to say what they say and to be what they are. Perhaps the coincidence in the name we give to their respective practices, “philosophy,” hides an absolutely radical difference that, nonetheless, we can pass over

102.  “An adequate philosophical teaching must nowadays provide apprentices with the instruments required to evaluate the philosophical debates that are taking place today, and to later participate in them on their own. A correct historiography of philosophy may not be satisfied with mere information about doctrines, ignoring the debates they foster and bring about” (Dascal 1998: 1583–4).



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unseen.103 What we call “football” in Europe, – soccer, according to Americans – has little to do with what they call “football” in the United States – American football, according to Europeans. The apparent identity of a single name leads to two games that are completely distinct. Imagine the absurd situation that would be produced between American and European friends who had agreed orally to play a game of [ˈfʊtbɔːl]. The clash of the rules would make the game impossible, and there is no facile solution, for instance by saying that certain rules are different on each side of the Atlantic. Rather, it is a question of two activities that are clearly different, with objectives – “play,” “score,” “win” – that only bear the same name because of an uncertain analogy. Mightn’t the same thing happen with the term philosophy/filosofía/ philosophie? How much divergence is hidden beneath the apparent homophony of their names? Isn’t it a mirage to believe that the different philosophies can be placed in opposition, beyond and apart from their traditions, as though they were pure doctrines, as though their locutionary contents were separable from the activities that they form part of? And wouldn’t this attempt at abstraction constitute a starting place of itself, an abandonment of the pretensions of suspicion, in favor of a search for a pure theory? And isn’t this search a debatable activity in itself? When an intercontinental encounter – like the one that I am analyzing in this book – occurs, the lack of an explicit consciousness about the diversity of the rules of the game can lead to situations as confused as our imagined “football” match. What makes the game possible – its rules, the training in these rules, the know-how that they show up in – is precisely what makes an inter-game difficult. Perhaps in our case it is even worse, since the failed “football” match would surely never even get started – given that it would be clear at a glance, because of its dimensions and structure, that the field is totally different from what was expected by one of the teams. Nevertheless, Searle and Derrida actually begin their game, believing that they shared a single discursive space: that which is established by Austin in How to Do Things with Words. In the failed encounter between the two, the terrain seemed to be the same: a square, eight by eight boxes of black and white, where everything seems ready for the start of a game. And the game in fact starts, but the players soon discover, after various absurd and contradictory moves, that one team is playing chess, while the other is playing checkers. Who is right? How might

103.  As Derrida notes, “These differences – for example, between the so-called continental and Anglo-Saxon philosophies – are sometimes so serious that the minimal conditions for communication and co-operation are lacking. […] Within a single linguistic area, for example, the anglophone world of Britain and America, the same interference or opacity can prevent philosophical communication and even make one doubt the unity of the philosophical, of the concept or project supposed behind the word philosophy, which then constantly risks being but a homonymic lure” (2002a: 103–4).

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this misunderstanding be cleared up? What would it mean to be in agreement? And, above all, which of the two is the rash player who cedes, for the good of the game, to the challenge of continuing the game with the rules of the other? Let us not forget that the players are not alone; they are surrounded by an informed and diverse public that will evaluate their actions in function of criteria and objectives that are clearly different for each. Who will dare to put his own prestige at risk, his own position as a paradigm of the good game, and accept participation in a match in which one is a mere novice, an inexpert player in the enemy’s terrain, or even a traitor, in the view of boosters back at home?104 Few have the audacity to take on this challenge; for good or for ill, neither Searle nor Derrida did so. They proved to be only partially aware of the fractal and recurrent aspect of the debate they were engaged in. Searle, for his part – and despite asserting that the project of the European Rationalist Tradition was being attacked, and that these attacks must necessarily threaten the rules of the game – acts surprised and indignant in the face of the disconcerting moves his opponent was making. Derrida, for his part, despite expressly holding that the apparent clash between their respective positions would have to be resolved at the level of underlying forces, says he doesn’t understand the ill will on Searle’s part, nor why the latter made such uncalled for remarks.105 An analysis of this collision that limits itself to a confrontation between the meanings of their respective acts can only give rise to nonsense. If we were able to explain to Searle the merely locutionary content of Derrida’s works – and not just translating it from French to English, but including the whole semantic load of the terms and transmitting everything that they mean for Derrida – Searle could only respond with stupefaction, as he in fact did. He naturally saw these ideas as trivial and evident, but he still thinks it wrong to assume, from this starting point, that a serious theory of speech acts is impossible. For him it was inconceivable that this theory might not be desirable in itself, and he couldn’t grasp the possibility that certain constitutive and defining aspects of the reality to be studied – whether it is the iterability of the linguistic elements or the elusiveness of the Background – might invalidate any pretensions of carrying out this task inherited from previous generations. What Searle would need to see are not, therefore, Derrida’s theses, in 104.  “Sharing a common definition of good work is essential not only for the integration of a theory into a cultural milieu but also for its actual diffusion. To understand this legitimation process, it is necessary to identify channels of diffusion; cultural products are not diffused in unified markets but rather among actors whose definition of good work segments cultural markets” (Lamont 1987: 608). 105.  Concerning the necessarily violent character that the debate took on – because the very concept of rationality was at risk – see (Potte-Bonneville 1992).



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case there are any, but rather the task that the latter seeks to carry out. This task, in turn, is nothing other than preventing the ideal of theory – and in particular speech act theory – from developing fully. Searle would have to be shown that Derrida’s perseverance in denouncing a theoretical impossibility is not just an irresponsible defense of the most absolute relativism. Rather, it is part of a process of deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, by means of which Derrida aspires to maintain and preserve those differences that had been allegedly crushed by the logic of identity and totalitarianism. If Searle could grasp this task, and the motives that lead Derrida to carry it out, that would make a certain understanding possible, albeit in the form of a reasoned disagreement. Understanding the confrontation at the level of the forces implied in the texts, and not as the aseptic clash of their meanings, is an indispensable condition for even intuiting why their encounter failed. Even though taking on this perspective, of course, does not guarantee the attainment of a definitive resolution. On the contrary, rather: having accepted this kind of outlook, it is much more complicated to discern who can win in this debate, principally because the meaning of “win” – in all games – always emanates from their own rules. Winning, for Searle, would mean establishing by the force of his arguments, even be it temporarily, the hegemony of his own position. However, for Derrida, this objective, should he attain it himself, would be a Pyrrhic victory, since his goal is the rupture of consensus and the obstruction of any hegemony. And who would win in our imaginary game, the player that checkmates her opponent, or the one that manages to eliminate the last of his opponent’s pieces…?

Communication and reconstruction of meaning The best example of the degree to which their games are profoundly different is found in Searle’s own words, when he apparently lowers his weapons for a moment and tries to understand Derrida without malice: On a sympathetic reading of Derrida’s text we can construe him as pointing out, quite correctly, that the possibility of parasitic discourse is internal to the notion of language, and that performatives can succeed only if the utterances are iterable, repetitions of conventional – or as he calls them, “coded” – forms. But neither of these points is in any way an objection to Austin. (Reply, p. 207)

The charitable operation that Searle performs, precisely at the moment when he proposes a sympathetic reading of Sec, could not be anything but anti-pathic for Derrida. Searle’s will to construct or reconstruct the original intention of the author is the antithesis of the kind of lecture promoted by him and his followers,

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deconstruction, which first off seeks to undo the rhetoric of the text.106 The objective is to demonstrate that the putative source of expression that gives it meaning, the subject, in reality loses its control over what has been said from the very moment in which she has to use language in order to express it, if not before. The subject itself, a notion that the work of Derrida seeks to dethrone, would in reality be an effect of its signs, rather than being the owner and lord of its meaning. So, there is something profoundly paradoxical in Searle’s posture when, intending to be charitable or “sympathetic” to a deconstructionist, he proposes to construct him through the meaning of his text. In the face of this fruitless exchange, Derrida seems to give it all up as a bad job – “despite all of this sympathy between us” (Limited, p. 102) – thinking that it isn’t possible to make his opponent understand the value of his own theses: To this point at least, the speech acts of Sec remain unintelligible, illegible and, in any case, inoperative for anyone who isn’t interested in the questions that brought these analyzes into existence. This is also an extenuating circumstance for anyone that does not understand them. (Limited, p. 104)

But is it only to Searle, to his error and lack of interest, that we have to attribute the causes of the misadventure? Was Derrida really as – in his own terms (Afterword, p. 147) – “pedagogical” as might be desired? At the beginning of Limited he proposed to construct his discourse so that no reference to the rest of his publications was needed. Instead, he would limit his arguments to what might be assimilated by a reader that, coming from a distinct tradition, did not know of Derrida’s past trajectory. Nevertheless, as he advances in writing Limited, giving free rein to his sarcasm and, above all, recognizing the impossibility of coming to an understanding with Searle, Derrida progressively develops a rhetoric that doesn’t seek a clear explanation of the argument itself. Instead, it is to be built on allusions and tacit references to questions that the reader probably doesn’t know of. During the reading of Limited, the reader has the sensation that Derrida is no longer writing for Searle, but rather for his own public. A good example is the way he has of invaliding his opponent’s position, holding that it is the distinct temporal permanence of the signs that makes written language differ from oral language. Claiming he has been misunderstood, Derrida points to his own notion of restance, with obscure allusions to earlier works, which make it difficult to understand what the confusion is all about (Limited, pp. 50ff.). The innumerable language games in Limited, in which “the difficulty of translation constitutes part of the demostrandum” (Limited, p. 47), are another good example showing that the supposed pedagogy of Derrida is, in 106.  The point is lost in the French translation of Joëlle Proust: “Une lecture plus favorable du texte de Derrida pourrait conduire à y voir…” (Searle 1991: 22).



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reality, a malicious move. And, above all, Derrida makes a terminological decision that is decidedly equivocal: that of using the term writing in order to indicate something that, at base, does not affect written language more than any other type of language – its graphematic character, the possibility of functioning, as a play of differences, in the absence of the addresser, the addressee and the referent. Why call it writing, knowing that it will cause confusions like the one that traverses Reply from beginning to end, and which would even give rise to the narrow-minded views of the so-called textualist critique? And so, one cannot fail to detect in Derrida a certain enjoyment – shared with more than one fellow citizen, as Sokal and Bricmont denounced – in being misunderstood, appearing as the enfant terrible of contemporary philosophy, while leaving for future generations the slow process of discovering his enigmatic intentions. The fact that Searle aims to reconstruct him through empathy cannot end in anything more than an unpleasant joke, a disconcerting move – à contre-pied –, and a symptom of how little, in the terrain of illocution, is shared by the two authors.

“What if Sec were doing something else?” As I have already noted, Derrida appears to be somewhat more conscious than Searle about the fact that in the debate there was a failed encounter at the level of the different illocutionary forces, rather than at the locutionary level. His reflection about the purpose of Sec shows this clearly: Does the principal purpose of Sec consist in being true? In appearing true? In stating the truth? And what if Sec were doing something else? What? All right, some examples: 1. Saying something apparently “false” […] or something dubious, but presenting it in a manner, form, and shape which (full of traps and parasitical in nature) would increase the chances of the debate getting started […]. Or else: 2. Proposing a text, as is again here the case, a writing and signatures, whose performance (structure, event, context, etc.) defines at every moment the oppositions of concepts or of values […], offering the performance of a text which, by raising in passing the question of truth (beyond Austin’s intermittent impulses in this direction) does not simply succumb to its jurisdiction and remains, at this point, qua textual performance, irreducible to “verdictive” (as Austin might say) sentences of the type: this is true, this is false, “completely mistaken” or “obviously false”. (Limited, p. 43)

Despite this moment of lucidity, in these lines one detects an obsolete conception of speech acts, a conception that Austin had already put aside during his investigation, and which Derrida himself would certainly discard if it were presented to him

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in an explicit way. Let me remind the reader that, in principle, Austin sought to identify – apart from descriptive language, which has been well-studied by earlier philosophers – another language of a performative nature whose goal is not that of being true but rather of doing something upon uttering the words. Nonetheless, at the end of his investigation, Austin began to accept something that others would develop in time: the idea that this initial effort had been in vain, since it might be built upon a kind of categorial error. Merely saying something is also an act that has its own contextual conditions of performance. That is, the description of something is a speech act that also has illocutionary and perlocutionary aspects. Thus, in the face of an initial intention to distinguish the performative from the descriptive, Austin would opt for sketching a theory of illocutionary forces in which both the one as well as the other would be integrated as distinct uses of language (a view that would later be developed by Searle in Speech Acts). One can clearly see that Derrida, in the text I have just cited, maintains, at least in appearance, Austin’s first taxonomy. He catalogues Sec as a text that is not descriptive but rather performative – as though it were a question of an alternative category –; a text which, therefore, would not be directly governed by the demands of veracity. If Derrida’s description of his own text is correct, its prime objective would not be being true, but rather performing, by means of its rhetoric, a questioning of the principles of any theory of language that seeks to constitute itself as an idealized and absolutely true description of its object. Sec would not be constituted by a series of supposedly true descriptions of the functioning of language, but rather by a succession of speech acts, whose objective is to obtain various effects. Some of these would be of an illocutionary nature, since they would be performed upon uttering the propositions – for example, the destruction of the theory of speech acts – while the others would be perlocutionary – such as the effective abandonment, on the part of the philosophical community, of any pretensions to an ideological systematization of that theory. Consider, for instance, the following example of the performability of the Derridean text: when he describes his own attitude in the face of his work saying “I give my word of honor that I shall be of good faith in my argument. I promise this in all sincerity and in all seriousness, literally, raising my hand above the typewriter” (Limited, p. 45), his intention is just that of showing the absurdity of the ambition to cleanly distinguish serious language from a joke. The reader does not know how to take these words, since there is nowhere that provides a firm place to stand in order to judge them as normal or parasitic language: where is this word of honor to be found if not in the written words it manifests in? And how is it possible to assure the literalness of these words, when they themselves are iterable in the absence of the seriousness they say they have? Couldn’t they be a joke too? The text swallows up even that source of the utterance that might, from outside, end up limiting its



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meaning: so what if Derrida in fact raises his hand and promises to be serious and literal? Even if we could demonstrate that, physically, he performed such and such an act, wouldn’t this act be reinterpretable in turn? Wouldn’t it be a sign as well? Would it not also be iterable, just like the words that he could have thought in the previous instant, or those which he would have written next? Derrida’s text, as a speech act, carries out his ambitions independently of their supposed truth: it throws a shadow of doubt on any ambition language might have to limit its possible interpretations, whether it be by intratextual strategies – “let’s get serious” – or turning to supports that are found, supposedly, outside the text – “raising my hand…” – but which cannot escape falling again into the warp and weft of textuality. Searle’s text, on the other hand, generally aspires to support itself not on a rhetorical structure, but rather in appealing to something that is outside of the text itself, i.e. the supposed evidence of its thesis; evidence that, in Searle’s opinion, Derrida fought repeatedly against because of his “distressing penchant for saying things that are obviously false” (Reply, p. 203). Derrida defends himself from this by holding that “the notion of evidence, together with its entire system of associated values (presence, truth, immediate intuition, assured certitude, etc.), is precisely what Sec is calling into question” (Limited, pp. 40–41). Could Sec be refuted, as Searle seeks to do, for being “obviously false”? If the notion of obviousness, of evidence, and the idea of truth itself, is what Sec seeks to question, then the response to its move cannot consist simply in a denunciation of its evident lack of veracity. It would be like demonstrating to someone that she is wrong in denouncing the injustice of the penal code by referring to something that is said in that very same code. Derrida is conscious that it is force, not meaning, that controls the destiny of his text. But he appears to conceptualize this fact in accordance with Austin’s failed initial distinction, as though his work were performative, and that of Searle merely descriptive. On the contrary, an adequate response by Searle to the linguistic action of Derrida could only consist in a new illocutionary act, a new counterpoised action, which would discredit – by seeking to make it impossible – the performance of what the other contender has proposed. Searle’s response took the form of a new speech act, whose goal would be to nullify Sec’s perlocutionary effects: that is, to assure that the text doesn’t intellectually pervert anyone else. Therefore it is possible to return Derrida’s own question to him, asking whether the principal purpose of Reply was to be true. What if Searle were doing something else? What if his appeal to the evidence of his theses were nothing more than a strategy to discredit deconstructionism and, in so doing, the postmodern relativism with which, correctly or incorrectly, he identifies it? Probably, Derrida would have answered that an intention like this is only licit if it presents itself as such: that, if it is openly accepted that the philosophy of ordinary language, and specifically speech act theory, are not developing as pure intellectual

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entelechies that are supposedly true because they fit the order of the world. Rather, they respond to a determinate will to power, a will that, in turn, cannot be justified by the theory itself. In a certain way, the denunciation of the force that underlies the meaning defended by his adversaries – Austin in Sec, Searle in Limited – had been Derrida’s principal aim all along.

The double game of the infiltrator Apparently, Derrida writes to make himself understood. Even though he appears on occasion to enjoy his position as a misunderstood, even demonized thinker, at least some of his texts are distinguished by a clarity and systematicity that many of his colleagues in his philosophical school lack. He could even be said to be a kind of neo-Cartesian, a bit perverse, who pursues evidence to an extreme, but not with the intention of discovering a firm basis in certainty. Rather, he seeks precisely to demonstrate that we can only believe that we have attained absolute evidence at the price of ceasing our analysis, leaving certain aspects that escape us to be forgotten. Just as Descartes did, Derrida holds that no merely relative certainty can be proposed as being unmovable. For example, when Searle claims that the difference between an illocutionary act that has been realized and an infelicity need not be definitive, Derrida rejects this ambiguity and claims that, unless a difference is clear and distinct, it is not a difference at all: “when a concept is to be treated as a concept I believe that one has to accept the logic of all or nothing” (Afterword, p. 117). Now, as opposed to Descartes, Derrida believes that purity and certainty, in the establishment of those limits or margins, are unreachable. This is not, however, because of any deficiency in our faculty of knowing. Instead, it is because of the very structure of the concepts of representation, idea, truth,… which are inseparably united to the structure of sign and language, in its ungraspable play of differences. With this point of departure, Derrida’s deconstruction infiltrates the postures of the different authors, apparently accepting their rules of play, in order to demonstrate how they themselves lack any evident support, for at base they have only an arbitrarily chosen position. However, he offers no new evidence through a parallel argumentation, but instead stops at the moment in which he leaves the adversary’s strategy naked: her deconstructed system. He doesn’t set out an alternative in his own terms, a new theory, but rather proposes a radical change in rules and purposes. Thus, his philosophy is revealed to be constitutionally parasitic, since it feeds on what has been deconstructed via a double play: on the one hand Derrida appears to accept the other’s rules, while on the other hand he works from the interior of the system in order to reveal its lack of consistency and to prevent its concepts from closing in on themselves in a self-sufficient manner. In the face of classical



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philosophy, which despises the rhetoric of the text in favor of the order of reason and evidence, Derrida shows that this order of reason is not, at base, anything but a particular sort of rhetoric, a rhetoric which he himself decides to employ, with the intention of disrupting it. While being an infiltrator demands a constant attitude of simulation – since Derrida accepts the game with the intention of perverting it – on a few occasions the Frenchman lets his mask fall, speaking with a disconcerting sincerity about his own work. This tends to occur in texts that transcribe interviews or conversations, as do Positions and Afterword, in which he appears as a commentator on himself, indirectly reflecting on his own work. We already saw in the preceding chapter how, in those moments of metadeconstruction, the infiltrator appears to lower the weapons of his rhetoric, explaining his own strategies openly: “Limited Inc …” makes uncomfortable reading because its text is written in at least two registers at once, for it answers to at least two imperatives. On the one hand, I try to submit myself to the most demanding norms of classical philosophical discussion. I try in fact to respond point by point, in the most honest and rational way possible, to Searle’s arguments, the text of which is cited almost in its entirety. On the other hand, in so doing I multiply statements, discursive gestures, forms of writing, the structure of which reinforces my demonstration in something like a practical manner: that is, by providing instances of “speech acts” which by themselves render impracticable and theoretically insufficient the conceptual oppositions upon which speech act theory in general, and Searle’s version of it in particular, relies (serious/nonserious; literal/metaphoric or ironic; normal forms/parasitical forms; use/mention; intentional/nonintentional; etc.).  (Afterword, p. 114)

Limited is thus open to a double reading, as happens with many of Derrida’s other texts: on the one hand, they can be read according to the “the most demanding norms of classical philosophical discussion,” i.e. as a series of evident arguments that defend a determinate philosophical posture against that of the adversary. On the other hand, they are like a series of supposed performative acts, which pervert the very system of evidence, upon which the discussion itself is built. This double game, while being perverse and profoundly debatable, is at least coherent as a strategy. The problem appears with those metadeconstructive texts where the double game is provisionally placed in parentheses with the intention of clarifying it. It gives the impression that, from the moment in which Derrida seeks to explain in these interviews what he did in his original texts, be it ultimately the game of “classical philosophical discussion,” i.e. conventional arguments – the evident, the plausible, the truth, the meaning of what has been said,… – which takes on the determinant role:

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I have decided to avoid writing here in this dual mode. Or at least to try, since it is not always possible, by definition. In addressing myself to you in the most direct manner possible, I return to a very classical, “straightforward” form of discussion. (Afterword, p. 114)

It is worth asking whether this lowering of his weapons – even if it is to aid in a clear and sincere explanation of his own position, however nuanced it is – does not of itself imply a certain surrender. It looks like we encounter Derrida in the same contradictory position that we found Searle in, when he sought to perform a sympathetic reading of his opponent. In reflecting upon his own text, Derrida seeks to reconstruct the meaning of his texts, explaining what they do and what they mean, as though his commentary could locate itself outside the field of action, ceasing to be performative, abandoning his double game, and being, even if for just a moment, sincere, almost free of rhetoric. The following example is worth citing: One of the definitions of what is called deconstruction would be the effort to take this limitless context into account, to pay the sharpest and broadest attention possible to context, and thus to an incessant movement of recontextualization. The phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction (“there is nothing outside the text” [il n’y a pas de hors-texte]) means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking.  (Afterword, p. 136; the italics are mine)

Faced with expressions like “means nothing else” (ne signifie rien d’autre) or “says exactly the same thing” (dit exactament la même chose)107 it is inevitable that one wonder where exactly that dissemination of meaning is that Derrida sought to demonstrate in every text, and which made of it an inexhaustible source of new interpretations. It seems, on the contrary, that he appeals here to his power as author in order to determine and delimit once for all the only correct meaning of what has been said, beyond its contingent linguistic materialization, so that the form of the signifiers becomes dispensable, substitutable without prejudicing the full manifestation of their meaning. This Derrida that reflects out loud about his own work seems to believe that its meaning is isolable via an act of consciousness that can make it fully present. This act would confer on him the authority necessary for certifying that, indeed, we find ourselves facing the correct interpretation, the right translation of his slogan, a slogan that “means nothing else” than what he wants it to mean.

107.  See the French edition of Afterword in (Derrida 1990: 252).



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It seems that it is only by appealing to that authority that one can postulate the author as the privileged interpreter of her own work, which would have the original meaning in her eyes, a meaning she could bring to light in order to eliminate misinterpretations. Derrida’s own criticisms turn against him when it is he who is the one under scrutiny. Let us recall, for instance, the following moment of Limited, where its author is reflecting on one of Searle’s affirmations: “The problem is rather that Derrida’s Austin is unrecognizable. He bears almost no relation to the original.” This is true. But what is unrecognizable, bearing no relation to the original, is not simply Austin, but indeed “Derrida’s Austin.” I fully subscribe to what Sarl says: reading it there, “Derrida’s Austin is unrecognizable”. (Limited, p. 88)

Amazingly, and despite all the irony infused into this text, Derrida seems to defend that he has a privileged knowledge of his own posture, of his version of Austin, knowledge that would justify the exasperation  – prolifically demonstrated in Limited – that he feels in the face of biased interpretations of that original. But just as Derrida laughs at Searle when he appeals to the original Austin, we can laugh at Derrida when he appeals to the original “Derrida’s Austin,” or when he exerts himself uselessly in order to ensure that his text “means nothing else” than what he himself wants it to mean. Derrida appears to refute himself, ironically, in the moment in which he appeals to the correct interpretation, unique and definitive, of his own work. He is carrying out a movement that, at least in appearance, is profoundly out of step with his own outlook.

The doubling commentary Derrida himself had to confront this kind of accusation, nuancing for the umpteenth time the posture of deconstructionism regarding the notion of truth: [L]et it be said in passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn’t it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or “meaning-to-say,” how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, precision, rigor? […] In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that’s right: false, not true) and feeble. (Afterword, p. 146)

Derrida’s deconstructionism – if we pay attention to the interpretation that he himself offers, which is precisely what is in question – would not exclude the notion of

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truth, nor that of intention. It would not, therefore, be the case of an out of control relativism, as Searle attributes to him in RR, in which the play of signifiers lacks the most minimal determination, where the interpretations of the texts can be multiplied without end, without it being possible to argue about them nor give them a justification, and where all texts become homogenized in a bland, dehierarchized monotony: Otherwise, one could indeed say just anything at all and I have never accepted saying, or encouraging others to say, just anything at all, nor have I argued for indeterminacy as such. (Afterword, pp. 144–5)

There are, as a result, interpretations that are correct and false, but the correctness of a given interpretation is not definitively established once the context of the linguistic utterance has been confirmed, because of the simple fact that no context is saturable. The interpretations are correct or false in function of a context that cannot be sharply delimited. This means that any commentary on what has been said, no matter how authorized it may be, remains an open interpretation, a reading that preserves a certain indetermination. There cannot exist a commentary that simply duplicates the meaning of what has been said without perverting it, without the introduction of conventions and agreements that make the commentary itself possible – for they are what delimit, in a provisional manner, and always a bit arbitrarily, the context in which that commentary is developed and accepted. Gerald Graff shrewdly reminds Derrida in Afterword (p. 142) that he himself had referred to the possibility of a “doubling commentary” (commentaire redoublant) in Of Grammatology: a commentary – for example, on a literary work – which has the sole purpose of explaining what this original text seeks to say, not glossing or altering its meaning. Apparently, that moment of the interpretation would have duplicated what was said by the author, paraphrasing in a literal manner, thereby erecting a barrier to the dissemination of its meaning and to the free play of interpretations.108 Responding to Graff ’s question, twenty years after the publication of On Grammatology, Derrida nuances his posture on this issue, claiming that he does not believe in “the pure and simple possibility of a ‘doubling commentary,’ ” and therefore gives the example of what would be an authorized reading of Rousseau:

108.  Graff is probably referring to the following passage: “This moment of doubling commentary should no doubt have its place in a critical reading. To recognize and respect all its classical exigencies is not easy and requires all the instruments of traditional criticism. Without this recognition and this respect, critical production would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything. But this indispensable guardrail has always only protected, it has never opened, a reading” (Derrida 1997: 158).



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This paraphrastic moment, even if it appeals to a minimal competence (which is less common than is generally believed: for example, familiarity with French, with a certain French, in order to read Rousseau in the original text), is already an interpretive reading. This moment, this layer already concerns interpretations and semantic decisions which have nothing “natural” or “originary” about them and which impose, subject to conditions that require analysis, conventions that henceforth are dominant […]. Simply, this quasi-paraphrastic interpretation bases itself upon that which in a text (for instance, that of Rousseau, of which I was then speaking) constitutes a very profound and very solid zone of implicit “conventions” or “contracts.” Not of semantic structures that are absolutely anchored, ahistorical or transtextual, monolithic or self-identical […]. (Afterword, p. 144)

In this way, Derrida can defend a particular interpretation – of his own work or that of anyone else – as the correct interpretation, the quasi-literal paraphrase of the original text, only to the degree in which a firm base of conventions – albeit arbitrary and revisable – permit him to justify his reading. But it will be impossible to discover an abstract and definitive ground for it, other than by adopting this conventional basis that is neither “natural” nor “original”. No reading nor any commentary will be able to duplicate the literal meaning of what is said; rather, it will always imply interpretation and imposition of certain conventional marks that alter its meaning and transform it. Derrida falls into a clear contradiction when he glosses his own work using expressions that are clearly offered as commentaries that are strictly duplicating, imperative and peremptory. In order to say that Il n’y a pas de hors-texte “means nothing else than…” or “says exactly the same thing as…” is to present some putatively perfect and unpolluted duplication of the meaning of what had been said – something Derrida himself discards as impossible. Every interpretation and every commentary is performed upon a foundation of dominant conventions, and the appeal to the identity of the author – in order to guarantee a commentary that escapes from that very foundation of conventions – seems to be illicit, indeed reviled by the deconstructive tradition itself. In particular, when Derrida’s text is offered in an intellectual context in which its original conventions are not dominant – as is the case, for example, in the domain of analytical philosophy – the correct interpretation of what has been said can be radically distinct from what might be expected by the author – without it being licit for him to denounce such interpretation as incorrect, given that the conditions of correctness belong to the system of conventions itself. Derrida falls victim to his own argument, since he cannot impede his text from being iterated graphematically and grafted into new contexts in which its meaning is disseminated, to the point that it becomes unrecognizable to its own author.

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Intellectual agendas If we are consequent with Derrida’s argumentation, it is licit to suppose that, in a context like that of analytic philosophy in the 1970s, Derrida’s words – both his slogan Il n’y a pas de hors-texte, like any other text of his: Sec or Limited, in their entirety – can literally mean something other than what the author herself believed they meant and, above all, what this author, years later, might believe that he meant back in the day. I do not wish to say that they can mean anything at all, nor that there is no determination in their meaning, nor that any given reading of the words, no matter how crazy, must be equally valid. On the contrary, and without this implying that we possess an immaculate duplicate of the original meaning, there can be readings that are more correct than others, richer, more fruitful and, above all, more pertinent. But in order for this to take place, it is important that the interpreter participate in the acceptance of certain norms, attitudes and values, thus creating “interpretive contexts […] that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable,” contexts that make it possible to invoke “criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy” (Afterword, p. 146). To the degree that those elements are absent, Derrida denounces, “Searle was not ‘on the right track’ in order to understand what I wanted to say” (p. 147). Where the Frenchman errs is in believing that a supposed healthy dose of “pedagogy” should suffice to inspire a more benevolent reading. The only reference that Searle makes to Derrida in The Construction of Social Reality – a later book that should be replete with them, if the debate had produced the fruits that were to be expected – makes clear the failure of that strategy: Derrida, as far as I can tell, does not have an argument. He simply declares that there is nothing outside of texts (Il n’y a pas de ‘hors texte’). And in any case, in a subsequent polemical response to some objections of mine, he apparently takes it all back: he says that all he meant by the apparently spectacular declaration that there is nothing outside of texts is the banality that everything exists in some context or other! What is one to do then, in the face of an array of weak or even nonexistent arguments for a conclusion that seems preposterous? (1995: 169)

It’s clear here that Derrida’s theses, if they are explained pedagogically in such a way that they acquire meaning for someone at a distance from their intellectual context, come across as pure banalities. This is precisely because the interest a particular work may have – not just those by Derrida, but any other philosophical text – does not reside in the theses it presents, that is, in its purely locutionary aspect, but rather in what the author seeks to do with those theses. They acquire value and can be properly understood only by considering what was said as a part of that labor. This means that a supposedly duplicative commentary like the one Derrida offers of himself – a gloss that aspires to re-express a single meaning using certain



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other signifiers, supposedly more accessible – fails completely when seeking to explain to Searle not what deconstruction consists in, but why it is necessary to put it into practice. For the simple reason that, paraphrasing Derrida himself, there is a radical divergence in the set of dominant conventions that define the literality of interpretation. And this set of conventions, the tradition or paradigm in which Searle inscribes himself as a reader and as a critic, is defined by a task shared over the course of generations, a practical mission that establishes methodologies, goals and scales of values that differ greatly from those that the Frenchman has. Even if they are glossed in a less polemical manner, the terms Derrida expresses do not acquire a clearer meaning, because the determination of what a theory means is not performed in the pure, neutral and abstract space of ideas. Rather, it establishes itself within the framework of an intellectual program of action that is extended in time, and shared in by many thinkers: an effort that is integrated into a certain preceding tradition, thereby opening perspectives on the future. In the case of Searle, this program can be traced back to the crisis of the so-called inherited conception – with its interest limited to descriptive, logically perfect language, and its positivist obsession for limiting investigation to observable behavior – and thence to the defense of a biological naturalism that permits understanding language and social reality as being effects of the conscious, intentional mind. If Derrida’s posture could be expressed in a series of theses and we wanted to make them understandable to Searle, the latter would have to make them fit somehow into the intellectual agenda established by this program of analytic philosophy. It is action projects – intellectual action, one might say, but action all the same – that establish the values that the various theories, hypotheses, arguments and concepts can adopt. Derrida’s critique of the central character of intentionality in the theory of speech acts could only be taken by Searle, fallaciously, as a confused mixture of behaviorism and epiphenomenalism. Searle doesn’t really know whether Derrida intends to deny the very existence of intentional states of consciousness, or whether he only denies their causal effect on speech acts. In any case, Searle would see Derrida’s error as being unpardonable, since he would be leaving out of play precisely that which explains, in his view, the functioning of language and the mind. In Searle’s struggle to define his own posture – somewhere between functionalists, who still seem to be reluctant to admit a strong first person perspective, and mysterians, who assume the existence of such a perspective, but deny we could ever find a scientific explanation for it – Derrida’s ideas simply do not fit. And they don’t fit because they don’t work, they don’t permit doing anything – nothing, at any rate, that would make sense in the agenda that Searle has in hand. As a result, those theses cannot even be discarded as false: they are simply irrelevant. But it would be a grave error to believe that Derrida is safe from this problem, since the same thing happens to him when he is only able to understand

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Searle’s theses as a sort of extemporaneous, naturalistic version of Husserlian phenomenology. Nonetheless, when Searle appeals to intentionality in order to explain language, his aim is not to find, on the transcendent plane of consciousness, an apodictic grounding for European science and culture. In Searle there’s no obsession to define the purely present contents of consciousness as foundational groundings on which one can support the edifice of knowledge. In this sense, it is unforgivable that Derrida pays no attention to the fecund notion of the Background, which is so essential in Searle’s theory of intentionality. It is an idea that brings together the wisest intuitions of the 2nd Wittgenstein about the lax and indeterminate character of meanings, which would imply, as Searle himself notes, that “there are no such things as intentional states having the kind of purity they were alleged to have by the traditional authors on intentionality in the phenomenological tradition, such as Husserl” (LT, 642). That is, an idea that Derrida himself might have sympathized with. This sympathy might not have extended very far, however, since with the notion of Background Searle does not aspire to subvert any ontological nor epistemological prejudices of importance (as I discussed in Chapter 2, for Searle the Background is nothing more than a brute, biological and social fact about human beings). In any case, one thing is clear: the predisposition to discredit the position of the adversary should not have impeded the exploration of possible points of convergence. Perhaps Derrida should not have been so quick to recycle his critique of Husserl when he saw certain elements in Searle that were repeated in both authors. It is precisely Derrida who should have been aware that this apparent iteration of terms – like “intentionality,” “conscience,” or “meaning”  – inevitably hid an important alteration, since they are only the same in appearance. Perhaps it was not so easy to transplant the tree of deconstruction to the soil of analytic philosophy. In sum, neither is Derrida obsessed in any way, as the behaviorists were, with the firmness of an objective and shared experience, nor does Searle have as his goal the apodicticity of a pure phenomenology that, in the style of Husserl, might provide an undoubtable ground for scientific knowledge. Nonetheless, that is what each decided to believe about the other, each integrating the adversary into his own preconceived schema, thereby making it impossible to gain a correct understanding of the other’s posture.109 What is true is that, in any case, the understanding must pass through the integration of the position of the adversary into our own project: 109.  As Rorty notes with irony, in these cases of failed encounters between traditions, it seems that one can only recognize the position of the other by identifying it with an obsolete, surpassed posture of one’s own history: “an author working in an unfamiliar tradition must necessarily be trying (and failing) to do the sort of thing which authors with whom one is more familiar are doing” (1991: 94, footnote 12).



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the intellectual agenda we take on, with its cargo of prejudices and values, with its respect for some previous tradition, is what makes our reading possible since, without it, there would simply be no understanding nor interpretation – which is one of the basic tenets of hermeneutics (see Gadamer 1989: 277–304). And every intellectual agenda, far from being a structure of aseptic concepts, is defined by the shared activity that we find ourselves integrated into, which is the condition of possibility of carrying out one’s own individual philosophical action. So – as hermeneutics has also demonstrated – this absorption of the other’s posture must be accompanied by a will to go out from oneself, to transform oneself, to open oneself to the meaning that we see in that which we are interpreting. This is an attitude that should be reflected in a certain openness to revising one’s own agenda and being disposed to upset the peaceful course of our own history when we encounter an unexpected breakout. The open question, the deepest problem, is therefore whether this heterogeneous set of intellectual agendas, each of which proclaims itself to be the present-day philosophy, may share certain defining traits that make it still possible to enclose all those various actors on a common stage – no matter how precarious it might be. Or perhaps, as Rorty predicts (1991: 23), with the passage of time those diverging tendencies will produce the effect of distinct discursive practices that share one same name, “philosophy,” as a quaint historical accident.

Conclusion The precarious unity of philosophy Having analyzed the confrontation between such different ways of doing philosophy, I’ve shown that we cannot conceive of it, naively, as just a clash between distinct theories or doctrines. Especially when not all philosophical practices have an underlying systematic doctrine with pretensions to truth, a doctrine which can be compared to those of one’s adversaries. A good example of this are the numerous authors – not just Derrida, but also Socrates, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the most obvious case, the later Wittgenstein – who cannot be discarded as philosophers without causing serious violence to the established canon; they nevertheless lack, properly speaking, a defined doctrine. However, it is not simply a matter of contrasting this type of authors, who tend to see philosophy as an activity, with others whose philosophy is properly describable as a doctrine. It is not just a question of this contrast because, in a certain way, one could say that there are no philosophies that are definable as purely conceptual doctrines, but rather that there are some philosophical activities that have this type of doctrine as their goal. No doctrine is, of itself, philosophy – neither analytical nor continental, nor any other variety – if there is nobody to defend it, someone who is willing to accept it as their own, thus maintaining it alive. Not even those authors who aspire to develop systematic or doctrinal contents can escape the fact that philosophy is, for them too, a form of know-how (confirming one more time that what at the outset appeared to have a marginal position can end up swallowing everything we thought was normal). It will thus never be enough, I claim, to simply counterpose the doctrines of the contenders. Rather, those doctrines are instruments that are placed at the service of a determined activity, i.e. philosophical praxis, which is made concrete in an agenda whose goals, values and projects give meaning to one’s research. A serious divergence in the conception of that praxis will necessarily give rise to failed encounters, perhaps constituting the key that is fundamental for understanding them. To a suspicious reader the proposal I’ve just laid out might seem overly pragmatist, because it appears to subordinate the question of the truth or falsehood of theories to their functionality or efficacy in action contexts. But this idea need not lead – a probable motive for this reader’s mistrust – to an unsalvageable relativism. In holding that theories and doctrines can only be evaluated within the context of philosophical praxis, I only wish to note the fact that it is a human activity that

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gives them meaning and validity. Outside of that context, they simply do not function: they cannot even fulfill their function of being a theory or a doctrine. What I wish to say regarding philosophy is analogous to what happened to the predicative function of language over the time between the Tractatus and the rise of speech act theory. In contrast to the preceding view, which saw language as something that can represent the world and yet be true in and of itself, it was discovered, with the so-called “pragmatic turn,” that the locutionary content of an expression can only occur within a speech act. That act always bears the force that a speaker deploys in a shared linguistic context. Indeed, all instances of predication have to appear in a linguistic utterance, being said by someone, constituting an action (be it a warning, a request, a promise or a mere, supposedly aseptic, description) that has conditions of felicity (conventions, appropriate mental states, know-how, etc.). What I have claimed here is that, in the same way, philosophical ideas can only happen – and happen linguistically, for how else would they occur? – to the degree that they are used, that is, within a philosophical praxis shared by a community. They thereby bear a force that makes them into an action: from the most simple action, such as reproaching somebody or formulating a hypothesis, to complex and sophisticated acts like, for example, systematizing and giving grounds, or suspicion and deconstruction. In the face of what this suspicious reader might think, and in contrast to what Searle seems to claim in RR, I think that the fact that the definition of philosophical praxis enters into play does not close off debate, nor does it leave us stripped of arguments to continue it. On the contrary, it is probably in this debate about the modes and ends of philosophical activity that the greatest interest lies. However, this debate also brings with it the greatest difficulty: when the ends are established and it is only a matter of finding the means for carrying them out, the contenders have a place where they can stand on something solid and come to a certain understanding. On the other hand, when it is the ends themselves that are in question, the problem is no longer merely technical, for there is no method that can lead us to a resolution, with the very conception of method itself in play. Still, the discussion need not sink into an irrationalist decisionism. To use the terminology of Dascal, when it is not possible to continue the “discussion” according to strict, pre-established rules, in order to avoid having it degenerate into a fierce “dispute,” one must make use of the ductile and malleable logic of the “controversies.”110 110.  “Viewed from point of view of their ends, discussions are basically concerned with establishing the truth, disputes with winning, and controversies with persuading the adversary and/ or a competent audience to accept one’s position” (2001: 315). See also (Dascal 1998 and 2007). However, the greatest impediment is the problematic reliance on a “competent audience,” as I indicated above.

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The difficulty that arises when it comes time to establish a priori a definitive framework of evaluation that permits resolving this kind of confrontation need not be seen as an unsurmountable impediment. It was a dangerous error of logical positivism – although perhaps more common than we might think – to hold that we must define the rules of the philosophical game beforehand, and that this point of departure must make possible an irrevocable progress in the resolution of theoretical conflicts, once the positions that are located outside of these rules have been discarded as meaningless, and not merely errors. On the contrary, the peculiarity of philosophy as a discipline resides in the fact that it cannot legitimately appeal to a metadiscipline that would exempt it from having to ask this kind of question over and over again. Metaphilosophy cannot locate itself outside philosophy, as a discipline that comes from without in order to establish the fundamental rules of the game of philosophy, for the simple reason that putting those rules into question is the most unavoidable task of philosophy itself.111 Therefore, in my opinion, it is not a question here of abandoning properly philosophical questions in favor of perspectives that explain or justify the development of the discipline in terms of factors that are external to it. Of course those external factors – sociological, historical, political, etc. – must also be taken into account, but what we are discussing here does not necessarily go in that direction. The controversy about the validity and justification of the various intellectual agendas is an activity that is just as philosophical as the rule-guided discussion carried out within each agenda; and it is no less important for us, qua philosophers, to keep these methodological factors in mind and discuss them. Philosophy ought not reflect merely on the what of what is proposed, but also about the how, the because and the what for of its own activity.112 The topic our authors confronted each other over, i.e. speech acts theory, is also a privileged place for asking the question about philosophy as an intellectual activity and its relationship to other types of discourse, such as science and literature. 111.  As Hans-Johann Glock has noted, following Tugendhat and Cohen, “The very nature of philosophy is itself a contested philosophical issue, and views about this issue are philosophically controversial. Although the investigation of the proper aims and methods of philosophy is nowadays known as ‘metaphilosophy’, it is not a distinct higher-order discipline but an integral part of philosophy itself ” (2008: 6). 112.  The classic debate about the relevance or superfluity of the history of philosophy for the understanding and justification of its theses forms part of the problem that I have noted, although it is not totally identified with it. The necessity of seeing philosophy as an activity has, without any doubt, a historical component, for intellectual agendas cannot be understood without reference to the traditions that they proceed from. However, it is also reflected in the present time of each concrete situation and in its foreseeable future, since the values, methodologies and projects that make up these agendas in the present day are no less determinant.

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It is not in vain that heavyweight authors like Rorty and Habermas have entered into this debate to argue in favor of their own metaphilosophical positions. The first, in order to claim that once Derrida’s philosophy has been washed clean of the messianic and transcendental coloring of Heidegger, the discipline appears as just one more literary genre: sophisticated, edifying, but not essentially distinct from literary fiction (Rorty 1977).113 The second, in order to defend the Austinian notion of normalcy as a necessary regulative ideal. In Habermas’ opinion (1987: 234–40), that idea is a condition of possibility of any understanding, since it marks the difference between fictional discourse, which has no pretensions to truth, and the rational demands of theoretical and philosophical discourse. In any case, both authors show that what is in play in the debate goes beyond the specific domain of linguistic pragmatics, or even philosophy of language, and touches on philosophy in general, on the relationship that it has to establish with the notion of truth, and on the place that corresponds to it in the overall culture. The fact that, for philosophy, questioning and defining itself is an unavoidable challenge has the consequence that, in failed encounters such as that between Searle and Derrida, there is no possibility of a definitive reconciliation. But the fact that the rules must always be in question does not mean that the dialogue has to be seen as a failure: perhaps its success does not consist in the definitive attainment of an achievement, in reaching and indefinitely prolonging a golden age of consensus, assent and concord.114 On the contrary, the success of the dialogue, and of philosophy itself, may consist in the appropriate, cordial and peaceful development of a certain activity, and not in the occurrence of something that may happen after this activity or process.115 It is not by chance that the origin of philosophy coincides historically with that of democracy: apart from the demands of tolerance and respect that are consubstantial with both, the two produce results that are essentially revisable, precarious and transitory. In the face of the desire to find a sempiternal Great Way Out for philosophical disagreements, it seems more intelligent and sensible to promote precarious and 113.  Cf. Sáez Rueda (1996: 35–53). 114.  Following Dascal again, we can ask ourselves: “If the controversy has had a constant and important presence over the course of the history of philosophy, perhaps it is not simply the sign of a lack of maturity, of pre-scientific trial and error, but rather an essential component of philosophical activity” (1998: 1583). 115.  As Hagi Kenaan holds: “I think that the debate between Searle and Derrida is a good example – and in no way an unusual example – of a case of communication that does not lend itself to the strict opposition between success and failure, understanding and misunderstanding. It is a communication that withstands the question of success and that, as such, exemplifies the manner in which the success/failure dichotomy distorts the actual character of the speech phenomenon” (2002: 127).

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fallible encounters that, through their provisional and limited character, can make some type of understanding imaginable. It is not, therefore, a case of establishing a way of stating things that would finally dissolve any differences, but rather of permitting the inter-traditional philosophical controversy to be carried out with a certain fluidity. This goal demands that certain attitudes, abilities and kinds of knowledge join together in the intellectually skillful participation of the philosophers engaged. Unfortunately, these traits are often not present in discussions between philosophical schools. Attitudes such as calmness, patience and a certain confidence – however poorly grounded it might appear to be – in the possibility that the other is not as inept as she looks. Abilities, not only for explaining – pedagogically – one’s own theses to those who may come from a different tradition, but also, and above all, for reformulating the problems that one intends to discuss. These problems are the basis of the agenda that one is committed to, and which have to appear to the other to be not just understandable from a cold, theoretical point of view, but also valid and able to foster intellectual motivation. And knowledge, of course, about the position of the interlocutor and of the tradition she works within, which goes beyond a mere quasi-journalistic divulgation, beyond a sporadic and decontextualized reading of a collection of textual fragments. These are not great principles about the essence of philosophy that establish what its fundamental contents are or should be, nor the ends and goals it should tend towards. Any discussion about these questions will come later, as occurred with Rorty and Habermas, for example. However, in order to get to that point, the norms – merely formal – that I have just indicated must be accepted: ways of acting that must always go hand in hand with philosophy, insofar as it is a discursive activity. These requirements might seem trivial, and precisely for that reason it should be as surprising as it is inadmissible that these principles manifestly not be complied with, not just in the confrontation between Searle and Derrida, which in this instance is nothing more than an example, but also in the greater part of those debates which have marked the recent history of our discipline. And the effect of this failure to observe these principles is that those philosophers who work within opposing traditions simply cast one another aside, as I stated in the Introduction, like the background noise that one has to ignore in order to get to work on what is really important. If something similar to a debate in fact begins, its only fruit will be mutual misunderstanding, which tends to degenerate into insults. What has to be done to avoid this situation is to let the dialog become practicable by fostering those attitudes, abilities and kinds of knowledge I noted above. In this sense, the goal of the present book has been to contribute to structuring the debate: an effort that implies a commitment, uncertain but firm, to the unity of philosophy. I hope that by using this term in such different contexts I am doing something more than a mere transfer by homophony. It would certainly have been much more

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comfortable to align myself here with either Searle’s or Derrida’s posture: defending the authentic philosophy, whichever it is, locating myself definitively within a school and discarding what is being done in the other camp as being an absurd pack of nonsense. Especially if one does not choose her own side based on reasons, but rather leaves it to the inclinations of her temperament, or to the arbitrariness of having been brought up in one or another of the paradigms in question. On the contrary, taking on the challenge of an interphilosophical encounter results in one being considered a Guelph among the Ghibellines, and a Ghibelline amongst the Guelphs… but this is a risk that I am disposed to accept, given the importance of my wager. So that these words don’t disappear into the limbo of abstract intentions, I would like to sketch here a possible confluence of the positions of both authors. This is not so much to find a point of agreement between them as much as to delimit, in the clearest way possible, where the confrontation takes place and how we can avoid having it become stagnant. My effort, tentative and unfinished, aspires to show that what in fact did not take place was nevertheless possible: a fertile and productive dialog. But for this purpose it won’t suffice to let their ideas just follow one another in turn, as has occurred up to now, in a mere collage where they alternate without mixing together; rather, I’ll need to identify the problems and their distinct formulations, fusing them within a single reflection about language and the intangible character of speech acts.

Opposing positions Over the course of this book I have pointed out the aporetic moments, impasses, misunderstandings and failed encounters that have marked the debate between Searle and Derrida. In an effort to clarify their positions, following the model of the Kantian antinomies, I will enumerate, in summary fashion, their respective positions regarding central issues, locating them in opposing columns: John R. Searle

Jacques Derrida

It is licit – and likely indispensable – to analyze language by methodically imagining idealized situations; that idealization is innocuous and merely descriptive (non-normative).

Any attempt to idealize language  – which is constitutively a play of differences  – treats it with the arbitrary and violent intention of reducing it to the logic of identity.

The objective is to establish a theory of speech acts, as an idealized systematization of the distinct uses of language and its conditions of context. This theory will subsequently be founded upon a philosophy of mind and will serve in turn as the foundation for a social philosophy.

The objective is to establish a differential typology of forms of iteration, which preserves the unsayability that is characteristic of every speech act. In the final analysis, this typology would confirm the impossibility of establishing an absolute ground for a science of language.

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Language is ruled by the principle of expressibility: for everything that a speaker might want to say, there is a literal expression that says it (even though the speaker might not know of it, or the language itself might demand innovations).

Language is always contaminated by iterability: any sign, on having a repeatable form, is susceptible to being grafted into a different context, with the possibility of finding itself empty of meaning.

In idealized situations, the context is fully determined; it is a kind of thought experiment where the theoretician situates herself in the eye of God.

Neither in reality nor in theoretical fiction is it possible to saturate the context: there always remain aspects that are open to reinterpretation.

One of the fundamental elements of the context is the conscious intention of the speaker. This person, in normal conditions, can know with certainty what she wants to say since, at least on those occasions, she has full authority (from the first person perspective) over the intentional contents of her consciousness.

One of the fundamental elements of the context is the conscious intention of the speaker. But she will never have her own contents of consciousness fully present to her. Her authority, therefore, is never absolute: the un-thought persists (the meaning differs, is postponed, is about to arrive).

We can distinguish literal use from parasitory thanks to the fact that, in the normal case, there exists the possibility that the speaker might say exactly what she wants to say.

In the final analysis, it is undecidable whether a use is literal or parasitory: even the case that seems most normal might later turn out not to be so.

In the literal and normal use of language, the speaker’s intention is fungible: there is no mysterious second act that has to occur behind the utterance; indeed, in a way it is identical to it.

The speaker is never owner and absolute lord of the meaning of what has been said, since her own intention, a fundamental aspect of the context of interpretation, is never fully present, neither to the speaker nor to others.

Once the normal and literal use has been understood, the theory of speech acts must assimilate the variation of parasitism in a kind of corollary about sophisticated cases. This is a variation in the rules of normal use.

The theoretician can only establish in-themoment frontiers between the literal and the parasitory that are revisable and provisional, conscious that the parasitory is not something that has been left out of normal language, but rather it constitutes it internally.

Both oral and written language receive their meaning from the intentionality of the subjects involved in the communication. The only thing that makes one differ from the other is the greater temporal permanence of written utterances, which can continue to be read in the absence of their original context.

Oral language shares with written a trait that the tradition had considered to be dangerous, and thought it had confined to writing: the separation between the utterance and its source, the intentional consciousness. In reality, in none of these cases may the distance be overcome, since both are contaminated by iterability.

These positions seem completely irreconcilable, both because of the goal they propose to reach as well as the method they follow in order to reach it, and because of the fundamental theoretical principles they rest upon. Nevertheless, my intention is to find some point of contact that can give rise to the debate and, in doing so, I will not hesitate to shamelessly reformulate Derrida’s objections, so that they are

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more effective in the context of Searle’s theory. I will no longer pay attention to either the expressions or the arguments advanced by the contenders, since what I seek to do next, in contrast to what I have sought to do over the course of the book, is not to faithfully reflect the disaster that in fact occurred, but rather to sketch out the possibility that what happened could have been different, if the arguments had been better directed. I will start with the notion of permanence, a trait that marks the difference between oral and written language, which forces me to distinguish between the act of uttering and the form of what is uttered. Next, I will question the supposedly fungible character of the intention in normal acts, which will lead me to revisit the idea that the meaning of the utterance and the meaning of the sentence can simply coincide, as Searle assumes in adopting the principle of expressibility as a point of departure for his theory of speech acts.

What remains over time? Despite the profound differences in their philosophical outlooks, I believe that it is possible and necessary to point to something that, even in its most naive and innocent formulation, both combatants can take as the object of their discourse: what Austin called a “speech act,” that is, the fact that people use language in order to perform actions as varied as promising, describing and marrying. In performing such acts, the speaker utters certain words that count as something (a promise, a description, etc.) in a particular context. The two authors agree that it is a secondary question whether the utterance is realized orally or in writing. According to Searle, what characterizes written language is that its exemplars generally remain over time: the bits of ink on the paper, for example, make it possible for what is said to travel further than the context of the utterance, while voice is usually extinguished in the very moment in which it is uttered. This difference is merely accidental: on the one hand, voice can also be recorded and thus remain beyond the moment of the utterance; on the other hand, we can imagine a kind of writing that does not persist in time beyond the instant in which it is read. Think of how Helen Keller, deaf, mute and blind, learned to communicate with her governess by writing letters in the palm of her hand (Keller 1967: ch. IV and ff): nothing remains of this writing beyond the act itself in which it is written, with the acts of emission and reception being strictly simultaneous, as usually occurs with oral language. The only nonaccidental difference between the two would be the differing materiality that the signs adopt: voice takes its form in time while writing does so in space, something that appears to have little theoretical interest for the study of the intentionality of speech acts.

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When Searle notes that a written text is nothing more than the manifest possibility of an intentional speech act (Reply, p. 202), the same thing could be said with respect to any vocal sound: both the text as well as the voice must be in use by someone for them to take on the character of an utterance. In reality, written and oral language are in an identical relationship as regards intentionality: in the moment they are uttered, the utterance receives its meaning from the intention of the speaker or writer, while the permanence of what is uttered in time is nothing more than a secondary and circumstantial phenomenon in both cases. So: it is clear that what remains over time is never the utterance itself, but rather what was uttered. The act of writing is always left behind, as with the act of oral uttering, it making no difference whether it is being recorded or not. Indeed, both acts occur without leaving a trace, with nothing remaining of them but the empty form of what has been said: the voice, if it is recorded, or the ink, so long as it is not erased with time. The utterance itself does not remain, but only what is uttered: something which might be read in a context distinct from the original, by somebody who will seek to reconstruct its meaning, and achieving it with greater or lesser fidelity. Let’s imagine what the permanence – no longer of the uttered, but of the utterance itself – would consist in: how would it be possible to prolong an act of uttering? If the speaker pronounces the words more slowly, or writes more slowly, does the act remain for more time? Doesn’t it seem instead that the act itself can only be considered as performed at the instant in which it terminates, no matter how much we prolong its occurrence? In any case, its permanence cannot be inertial, as with the permanence of what is uttered which, qua physical event, continues to be what it is even though nobody makes it be so. If someone leaves a sign on her door that says “Do not disturb,” is she uttering the speech act the whole time that the sign is on the door? Can we say that there is a prolongation of the act of utterance, and not just of what is uttered? And what if she forgets to take the sign down? In which moment is she ceasing to utter it? Wouldn’t it be more sensible to say that she only uttered it at the moment in which she put the sign on the door, upon physically carrying out the movement of the hand she uses to hang it there? It could no doubt be said that the act of uttering needs time in order to occur, since it begins to be carried out in one moment and ends in another. But in speaking of the permanence of the act and of the utterance we are referring to very different phenomena. It’s the time we spend in giving form to the utterance that counts as permanence for the act of uttering, and not the time that that form remains recognizable as such, or in force.116 116.  Searle refers here to an “intention-in-action” by which, beyond the “prior intention,” the agent carries out the act (in this case, the speech act) over the course of its entire temporal duration, in a conscious and voluntary way (2001: 44–5).

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The act of uttering and the form of the utterance are, therefore, two very heterogeneous elements, which makes their immediate identification problematic. What is uttered runs – intrinsically – the risk of distancing itself from the act of uttering, the source of the utterance. According to Derrida, this is something that the tradition of Western metaphysics sees as dangerous, since it opens the possibility that language might free itself from the idea represented in it. In order to avoid that risk, the Western tradition sought to negate written language, in favor of oral, which was held to be the genuine, authentic and original model of language. Given that the words uttered cannot survive the act of their utterance (since acoustic methods for recording didn’t exist), both aspects of the speech act would necessarily be simultaneous, susceptible to being fully identified with one another. This is the illusion denounced by the Frenchman when he holds that both oral language and written language are in fact writing: in both cases the result is an utterance which, whether it lasts or not, is heterogeneous with regard to the act from which it arises. Both oral language and written language would in reality be equally threatened by that danger that the tradition thought it could confine to writing. Even if the utterance could never in fact last, even if it isn’t possible to record sounds and all written language was like that of Helen Keller, Derrida claims that the act of uttering and the form of the uttered would continue to be two profoundly different realities, whose identification is problematic. Despite their differences, Searle and Derrida agree that nothing essential differentiates the two types of language. What distinguishes the two authors is that they perform this identification with distinct values: for Searle written language is like oral, while for Derrida oral language is like written. Searle – as with Austin in his reflection on signatures – holds that written words, in the act of writing, were so close to their source it was as though they had been stated orally; for his part, Derrida claims that spoken words, in the very moment they are pronounced, are as far from their source as if they had been written a long time ago. The problem is not a question of temporal duration, but rather that this distancing occurs in the very instant of the utterance, whether the latter is oral or written.

The fungible intention The distinction between speaker meaning and sentence meaning, essential to Searle’s theory, is based on the other distinction I have just discussed, that between the act of the utterance and the form of the uttered. A fragment of code, says Searle in response to Knapp and Michaels (LT, pp. 649ff.), can be considered to be language to the degree that its form conforms to certain linguistic conventions, thereby having meaning independently of its origin. This is something that occurs to what has been uttered: it has, of itself, certain characteristics, lasting or not, a certain

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form that can be read and recognized qua convention. The sentence, both if it has been uttered or not, will have of itself a certain literal meaning. Thus, the meaning of the speaker, i.e. that meaning which the act of utterance has, can coincide or not with the literal meaning of the sentence that she has uttered. In the case that they do in fact coincide, the act of utterance will coincide in its meaning – speaker meaning – with the meaning of the utterance – sentence meaning. In cases like this one, says Searle, the speaker’s intention does not occur on a mysterious and hidden second level that must be brought to light via a wise interpretation of what is said; rather, the intentions are fungible: they are consumed in their use, being manifested in the very act of uttering. This would be, in his opinion, a practical example of the validity of the principle of expressibility: the speaker would be saying, simply, what she wants to say. In the case of a non-ironic, nonmetaphorical, non-sarcastic utterance, if it is not a case of a citation, nor of a poetry recital, nor any other similar act of parasitism, the intention will be fully expressed in what is said, with the mental state of the speaker being immediately present. This outlook leads to at least two problems: one of an epistemological character (how do we know if the speaker is saying what she wants to say?), and another that is ontological/linguistic (how is it possible that the speaker say what she wants to say?). I will initially focus on the first problem, even if Searle is right to claim that it is of much less theoretical interest. In order to know whether the speaker is uttering her speech act in the literal sense, the hearer will have to take context into consideration. He will have to make use of a criterion that, taking into consideration the tone of voice of the speaker, her claims about the seriousness of her words, the moment in which she uttered them, and a never-ending set of contextual traits, will permit the hearer to attribute a specific meaning to the words. But each and every one of those traits are imitable, iterable, susceptible to occurring with a distinct intention, or even in the absence of any intentionality. Searle himself is quite conscious that one can always suspect that a trick has been played, as is clear in his Chinese Room argument, which carries that suspicion to an extreme. And he does so by showing that it is possible to imagine a situation in which, by way of a strictly syntactic procedure – that is, without actually using the signs, but only mentioning them – a subject apparently participates in a conversation, emitting all the outputs that might be expected from a conventional interlocutor, without in fact understanding what she is hearing or saying. With this argument, Searle believes he has defeated the Turing Test, and with it functionalism, since a perfect imitation of the conversation would be possible, a functionally identical replica of a speaker, without those signs being imbued with intentionality: the utterances it appears to make from the inside of the Chinese room do not even constitute speech acts, since in the context there would be a lack of an intentional consciousness that would act as the source of the utterance. The words that come out of the Chinese room, just as happens with the

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artificial linguistic emissions of a computer, would be the result of a mere mechanical algorithm, perhaps syntactic – something which is also debatable – but in any case completely lacking semantics and intrinsic intentionality. The force of the Searlian argument is such that one cannot appeal to the gesticulation of a real interlocutor, nor to any other physical manifestation of consciousness, since all of those traits are also codifiable, and are therefore iterable in the absence of intentionality. For example, let us imagine that Searle, inside the room, not only receives instructions for creating linguistic outputs, but also has instructions to make an apparently human robot gesticulate in a manner that is perfectly coherent with the flow of a conversation. The robot could, for example, physically display the same anger and dismay that any conventional speaker would display when an interlocutor doubts whether she understands the words she utters. Similarly, Searle would not know what he is saying in Chinese, and would also be ignorant of the movements that the robot makes outside the Room: he would only be making certain signs, although this time it would not be a case of linguistic signs, but rather of gesticulations. Certainly, the complexity of this task would have increased, but there would be no theoretical difficulty added that might make the mental experiment incoherent.117 It is therefore unacceptable, at least in principle, to call on any linguistic or behavioral evidence that could permit distinguishing with certainty literal language from parasitory, nor the fungible intention from the complete absence of intentionality. In addition, the fungible intention must be expressed in a recognizable form, that of what is uttered, which is in itself imitable and falsifiable. The question is not whether the form of the utterance can remain over time in the absence of intentionality, i.e. the fallacious problem of writing, but rather whether that form can even occur, in that instant, in the absence of intentional consciousness. As I pointed out in the previous section, the temporal permanence of what has been said is not the problem; rather, it is the connection between what has been said and the intention of the utterer which, at the very moment in which the utterance is uttered, is in reality absent from the scene. For Searle, the epistemic problem is irrelevant because he considers it to be common sense to call upon the authority of the first person, which had been unjustly excluded from the study of the mental – originally by behaviorism and, in a derived manner, by functionalism. This authority is the only thing that could confirm, ultimately, the presence of a certain fungible intention: I know that what I am saying is, literally, what I want to say. The principle of expressibility can only be realized in practice if we admit the authority of the first person since, in the act of utterance, what 117.  Concerning the non-falsifiable character of the Chinese Room argument – and its consequent lack of efficacy – see (Navarro 2005).

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is uttered occurs at the same time as the confirmation, on the part of the subject, that she is being the source of the utterance, and that therefore the form of what is uttered coincides with the conscious intention of her act of uttering it. We can hold that the context is full because the subject would be fully conscious of her own mental states. It is undeniable that this fullness does not occur in all cases of language use, but nothing seems incoherent in the choice – as paradigms of the theory of speech acts – of those cases in which it does occur: acts in which all of the context elements would be present. For a historian or a biographer the epistemic question might be a genuine headache, since the subject whose speech acts she is attempting to get to know is not herself. In seeking to grasp the meaning of what was said some time ago by another person, there would be certain aspects of the context that would not be present to the investigator, aspects which, no matter how much they are studied through documents and interviews, could only be formulated as hypotheses. But for the theoretician of speech acts, from the moment in which she creates her theory, starting with the idealized situation in which all the elements of context are present, the epistemic problem ceases to be decisive. From her position in “God’s point of view,” such a theoretician would have present, at sight, even those aspects of the imagined scene that are only accessible to each particular participant, in the privacy of her own consciousness. The intentionality of literal speech acts would be effectively fungible for the author that envisages the situation, since she would be lord and master of her own mental experiment. To the degree that she remains within this kind of mental realm, and in so far as the situation has been imagined by her, it is simply impossible that she be mistaken. Just as with the cogito of Descartes, the Chinese Room argument only functions if it is carried out in the first person: “Inside the room, I know that I am merely manipulating symbols.” It is only if each one of us takes on Searle’s role inside the room that will we understand what its author is referring to, and we will assume the validity of his argument. On the contrary, if we limit ourselves strictly to what is observable from the outside, we won’t have any more motives for believing Searle than for believing the mysterious interlocutor that returns its symbols to us through the slot in the room, or the robot that gesticulates at us, indignant at our lack of trust. Only if I am the one that imagines himself inside the room can I know that my utterances in Chinese lack meaning as utterances, no matter how much they give the opposite impression.118 118.  Searle does not normally support his argument expressly on this first person perspective, but rather on the verification that one and the same biological material constitutes those beings that we think are gifted with intentionality. But this movement merely postpones the problem, since a generalization based on biological similarity also begins with the idea that, from my first person perspective, I possess an intentionality that, given the biological similarity that I have with all other human beings, they share with me.

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In depending on a first person perspective, Searle’s position cannot avoid inheriting some of the problematic issues that plague Cartesianism: excessive confidence in the authority of consciousness, stagnation regarding the problem of other minds, and a tendency towards solipsism. Nonetheless, in the Searle’s opinion, these are all epistemological problems that common sense excludes from any serious consideration: that common sense whose vindication permitted Moore (1925) to inaugurate the golden age of analytical philosophy. It is not so much the case that these questions are resolved, as that they are useless and unfruitful for aiding philosophical activity, as Searle sees it, to continue its course. Questions such as that of the sex of angels were not abandoned because they were finally solved, but rather because they ended up being seen as ridiculous and outlandish. In order to avoid having Searle and Derrida’s exchange degenerate into equally empty disputes, whether they are about the existence of the external world, the existence of other minds or the possibility of intentionality, the former holds that we must not succumb to the latter’s temptation, which is nothing other than playing irresponsibly by holding positions that are “evidently false.”

What has been said and what has been thought I will leave aside – a little surreptitiously – the epistemological problem, i.e. the question of whether we have a criterion for distinguishing literal and fungible intentionality from its parasitical iteration. But we still have the ontological/linguistic problem that I also mentioned: how is it possible that the speaker say what she wants to say? With this second issue, it is no longer a matter of explaining how we can find out whether this is the case, but rather of clarifying how it is even possible that the case come about, i.e. how thought could come to express itself fully in the conventions of the language. Isn’t the principle of expressibility precisely what is most unattainable in practice? Can mental states really be fully expressed in linguistic utterances? Searle presents the principle of expressibility as “an analytic truth about language,” and hence doesn’t see it as necessary to give empirical data that would corroborate it. An experiment that would falsify this principle would most likely not even be thinkable, since in order to demonstrate that there is something thought that is ineffable, that something would have to be represented and, therefore, said. So it is a case of a logical necessity, an analytic judgment that is true by definition. What Searle has been proposing since the beginning of Speech Acts is a simultaneous conception of thought and language, which would define the one in terms of the other. In a certain way, his strategy recalls the isomorphism between world, thought and language that Wittgenstein defended in the Tractatus,

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although restricted this time – at least provisionally – to the relationship between the two last terms. It is precisely this similarity that moves me to recall the argument that Wittgenstein used in his second period in order to break down his own initial proposal: the use of words is not determined because the subject knows what they mean, but rather because she knows how to use them. Speaking demands a certain skill on the part of the speaker: a practical knowledge that is acquired socially through the shared use of the linguistic tool chest. Knowing how to speak does not consist in having accumulated semantic connections between things and terms – a naive conception of how one learns to speak that Augustine of Hippo allegedly presents in the citation referred to above – but rather a subject learns to speak when she learns to use the words in contexts of intersubjective praxis. The speaker does not have present before her the linguistic correlate of her mental state. Rather, she knows how to use a linguistic expression appropriate to the context she is in, including in that context her own mental states and those of others (whom she learns to identify, incidentally, precisely by means of those same practices). Applying this idea to the principle of expressibility, we would have to cease to read it as though it pointed to the existence – even just in the imagination of the theoretician – of a perfect dictionary in which it would be possible to find, for each mental state, a speech act that expresses it literally. On the contrary, what is pointed out in that principle is the existence of a linguistic instrument that can be used appropriately in any context – external and, above all, internal – that the subject might find herself in. Searle is already quite conscious of this issue, and it’s probably for this reason that he defends, tooth and nail, the hypothesis of the Background: language can only function if it can rely on a series of skills that, not being intentional themselves, make the manifestation of intentionality possible. The literal meaning of an utterance is established by the semantic conventions in force in a given moment; however, the meaning of the utterance requires, even for being literal, not just the concurrence of a Network of intentional beliefs and desires, but also a Background of practical abilities. Here is where there might be a certain inconsistency in Searle’s framework, to the extent that he seems to hold, on the one hand, that the literal meaning of a sentence is definable by purely semantic conventions and, on the other, that the literal meaning of the utterance can only occur if, in addition to these conventions, the Background or know-how of the speaker coincides. How can the one be fully identified with the other, when they are so heterogeneous? How could the principle of expressibility be put into practice, if in what I want to say there is always something that is not completely captured in what I in fact say?119 119.  I have explored this problem in (Navarro 2009), studying its implications for Searle’s philosophy in general (regarding language, the mind, society and action).

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The meaning of the sentence, insofar as it is a purely semantic question, determines the meaning of what is said, but lacks force, and cannot as such face reality. In contrast, the utterance is constitutively an act by which the subject exerts that force, something that determines how her utterance has to be interpreted. In order for the subject to exercise that force, it is necessary that she not only know what her words mean in the abstract, but also how she must use them in order to deal with the reality that surrounds her. And that capacity doesn’t derive from the acquisition of theoretical contents (know-that), but rather results from instruction in practical abilities (know-how), skills that cannot themselves be made a part of the semantic conventions of the words used. This is a problem that the analytical tradition itself is investigating today, responding to the challenge of externalism: Hilary Putnam, for instance, claims that it is not enough to know what the subject believes her language to mean in order to know what that language in fact means. In his opinion, “meanings are not in the head,” because the words that we use are only meaningful to the degree that they actually relate to the things that surround us, through our social practices. While the subject, from her first person point of view, may have mental images or concepts which she believes refer to the world, of themselves they cannot refer to anything, and cannot even be intentional, unless their contents have a causal relationship with what is referred to, something that can be verified, externally, seeing what the subject – and her linguistic community – relates with when employing her images and concepts. We have to consider how we relate with the world in order to know what our own language means.120 Putnam’s argument seems, in reality, to be almost Derridean: the form that must be adopted by all contents of consciousness is iterable in the absence of its supposed referent. The subject may have a mental image of, for example, a tree; however, that image does not refer to real trees just because it looks like them, since it is possible to imagine a mental experiment where we introduce that image into her mind without the subject ever having had a relation with trees, whether real or imaginary. The form of what is said or thought is iterable in the absence of the signifier that we thought was associated. Up to a certain point we could say that Derrida’s slogan – Il n’y a pas de hors-texte – and Putnam’s – Meanings ain’t in the head – end up claiming something not so different. But only up to a certain point, because the objectives that both slogans tend towards involve very different intellectual tasks: Putnam, for example, seeks in that text to reconstruct the objectivity of semantics by seeking causal relations, empirically observable, that are established between words and things by way of the practices of the speakers; Putnam’s argument in that text is thus animated by a naturalistic intention that is absent in Derrida’s works. 120.  See “Brains in a Vat”, in (Putnam 1981: 1–21) and, for a critique of the notion of literal meaning that runs along the same lines, J. J. Acero (2006: 9–30).

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Can know-how be present? In order to approach Derrida’s critique of Searle, we need to ask ourselves now whether the Background can be present, not just before the consciousness of the empirical subject – of a biographer or historian – but even before that God’s eye in which, in an idealized mental experiment, the theoretician of speech acts is situated. Is our know-how something that can be determined like a fact, something susceptible to being simply and fully present in the context of our speech act? The concept of know-how is as suggestive as it is obscure, and leads us once again, as we will see in what follows, to the hazy notion of fungibility. Gilbert Ryle showed that an ability at the moment of acting is not something that occurs apart from what can be observed from outside, on a mysterious second mental plane, but instead occurs in the practice itself (2002: ch. II). There is no hidden plane that exists parallel to observable conduct, where the subject is carrying out, for example, the mental act of being handy while she does something handily, as though a kind of phantasm, the mind, had to carry out the act in a conscious mode, while the body itself would be a mechanical instrument at the mind’s service. Acting intelligently or skillfully is, on the contrary, carrying out a certain behavior in a determined manner – something which, in Ryle’s opinion, could also be said about the fact itself of being conscious, although we don’t have to go with him that far for the argument I am developing here. According to this perspective, being skillful, that is, being in the possession of a certain know-how, is something fungible with the occurrence of the action. It does not have to be presupposed or deduced on the basis of the action, but can be directly observed in it, since it consumes itself in it. Know-how does not appear to be affected by the problem of the iterability of the form, since it itself is identifiable qua form, to the point that we would not say that a robot appears to be skillful, but rather that it just is so. This door is left open by Searle himself, at the moment when he claims that the Background is not intentional. If what artificial intelligence lacks is the intentionality of the semantics, there doesn’t appear to be any impediment to ascribing a Background to a robot, at the moment at which it demonstrates a certain knowhow. Even though Deep Blue, the IBM computer that beat Kasparov in 1997, could not know that it was playing chess, nor even what a pawn is, nor who was sitting in front of it, would we say that it only appeared to be playing chess? Would it only appear that a chess game was taking place, a game that never really happened? Did Deep Blue merely give the impression of being skillful in its moves? That doesn’t seem to make sense: we could say that it did not know it was doing anything at all, but there was no doubt about what it actually did, and that it did it well. That is, we can doubt its intentionality, holding that in reality it did not leave its own particular Chinese room, but we cannot deny the preintentional know-how that it

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demonstrated in its behavior. It demonstrated that it knew how to play chess, even though it did not even know what it was doing. Nevertheless, no matter how much know-how seems to be fungibly identifiable with its own occurrence, that relationship can also be questioned: is it not possible that someone might appear to know-how what she does, without her knowing how to do it at all, or having hoped in reality to do something different from what we thought she was doing? Someone might appear skillful, while her acts were in fact the fruit of accident, or the effect of an intention different from what we thought we had encountered. All Wittgenstein’s reflections on the difference between following a rule and appearing to be following it would enter into play here, a reflection that has been very fruitful within the analytic domain itself, opening perspectives of great interest in epistemology and philosophy of language.121 As a result, the same argument I brought up about the fungible intention of the literal speech act can now be applied again: that fungible character of know-how does not at all imply an infallible presence, since every act has a form that can be iterated. Where is the difference between being skillful and only appearing to be? Is it something that we do not have present because we are finite beings, fallible in our cognitive capacities, meaning that we are dealing with a mere epistemic problem? Or is it that not even a God’s eye view could deliver us from doubt when we try to distinguish between someone that merely does something by chance and somebody that knows how to do it? The issue is that, in the final analysis, the difference is nowhere to be found. It is not just a matter of something that we haven’t already encountered, but rather of something that will never appear, no matter how much we try to describe the totality of what has occurred. What is important here is that the problem that was once epistemological, a question of criteria, now reappears affecting the very ontology of acts of expression: it is no longer about how we know what is the case, but rather about how it is possible that it be the case. If we were to admit that the literal expression is – it doesn’t merely manifest itself, but properly is, in a fungible manner – the appropriate use 121.  This idea is brought up by various authors who have studied this debate. Simon Glendinning, for example, combines the concept of Derridean iterability with Wittgenstein’s antimentalism in his reflection on the problem of other minds (1998: ch. 8). In addition, Frank B. Farrell combines the Wittgensteinian interpretation of the concept of a rule and Hilary Putnam’s externalist view of meaning in order to posit that Searle’s position is incorrect, since the meaning cannot be delimited in the present context (1988: 53–64). A similar reference to the indetermination of concepts in the last Wittgenstein is found in Alfino (1991), as well as in Acero (1989), where the author holds that what is of “greatest interest in the work of Derrida is that his reasonings are very close to what in recent decades authors such as Willard van O. Quine and Donald Davidson have advanced concerning the possibility and the limits of semantic analysis, or similar to what Wittgenstein claimed in his last stage” (p. 125).

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of the terms, it is not clear where exactly the difference lies between one manifestation that is intelligent, conscious and intentional and another that only appears to be.122 To the degree that the Background is at the base of intentionality, it itself is affected by the ontological problem noted here. And it’s not possible to appeal to the consciousness of the speaker, from the moment in which the Background that supports that consciousness is no longer something that may be present as a content – delimitable by a knowing-that – either in the presence of the speaker’s (or anybody’s) consciousness. The Background, being a fundamental element in the context, can never itself be fully present, for where could it be? Not in the action itself – which can appear to be intelligent and intentional while not being so – nor in the consciousness of the speaker – for practical skills are not something that can occur before the mind, as mental contents allegedly do.123 The fact that someone feels confident that she knows how to do what she is doing is also not a guarantee of it being so; and, to the degree that speaking is a mode of doing, all language would be affected by this problem.124 There would therefore be a radical, ontological indetermination that would not come from our epistemic deficiencies, but rather from the very constitution of the speech act, which is supported at all levels by the idea of form. Since this latter is iterable, the concept of fungibility wavers, with authenticity and the copy becoming ontologically indistinguishable. Iterability, that is, the possibility that every element of the context has – whether it is intentional or not – of being repeated in the absence of what is supposedly concomitant to it, makes all effort to idealize the situation seem impossible. An ironic phrase from the movie producer Sam Goldwyn masterfully exemplifies the situation we find ourselves in: The most important thing in acting is honesty; once you learn how to fake that, you’re in.125 122.  For this reason, and in contrast to Searle, Daniel Dennett (1996: ch. II) believes that intentionality, in the end, is a question of description: the intentional character, from this point of view, is not intrinsic to the act but rather something dependent on the observer. 123.  Peter Hadreas has held precisely that the notion of Background allows us to establish that what Searle and Derrida defend is practically identical, at least in regards to the literality of meaning (1996: 317–26). Along the same lines, Dascal notes in passing that Searle “disassembles the precise context for the understanding of a speech act into distinct components, of which at least one – the “background” – is described as ‘unarticulated’, a notion that recalls Derrida’s insistence on the ‘indeterminate’ character of the context” (2001: 334). 124.  Stated with admirable concision: “Saying is not wanting-to-say, it is not the wanting-to-say of a consciousness: saying is doing” (Peñalver Gómez 1993: 164). 125.  Cited in (Fish 1982: 693).

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Ultimately, it seems as though there can be no aspect that is intrinsically non-feignable – and therefore fungible – that would distinguish the literal speech act from that which only appears to be such. It is no longer a question of not being able to distinguish them: in a certain sense they are, in themselves, indistinguishable.126 In practice, this makes every expression susceptible to later reinterpretations: use can be seen as mention, or as a citation; the upright intention, as irony or as metaphor. Every discourse, in sum, can always turn out to be vacuous: a situation that makes the speech act a happening that is intrinsically precarious.127 Perhaps we are mistaken in believing that the act of uttering is of the same nature as what is uttered: the latter is somehow a thing that simply happened in a way that could be considered as definitive and unappealable; some words were uttered, something which, qua deed, could later be simply ascertained as a given. Nonetheless, it could still be the case that the former, the very occurrence of the speech act itself, will never just be a question of sticking strictly to the facts, because they will always leave a certain space open, creating the possibility of appealing to a right: that legal order that structures the discursive context and the relations of power where our acts are integrated. Words happen, and speech acts happen – but perhaps they do not happen in the same way.

126.  As G. C. F. Bearn has affirmed, “the most disquieting consequence of iterability is perhaps that nothing is simply authentic. Everything is also theatrical: every utterance, a performance; every action, acting” (1995: 23). See also the reading that Stanley Cavell makes of the problem of pretending in Austin (1994: 77ff). 127.  Derrida has described the situation in another context with such an unusual clarity that it is worth quoting him at length: “I have a relation to myself to which you never have immediate access and for which you must believe me by taking my word for it. Therefore, I can always lie and bear false witness, right there where I say to you, “I am speaking to you, me, to you,” “I take you as my witness,” “I promise you,” or “I confess to you,” “I tell you the truth.” By reason of this general and radical form of testimoniality, whenever someone speaks, false witness is always possible, as well as equivocation between the two orders. No one will ever be able to demonstrate, moreover, no one will ever be able to point to properly theoretical proof that someone has lied, that is, did not believe, in good faith, what he was saying. The liar can always allege, without any risk of being proved wrong, that he was in good faith when he spoke, even if it was in order to say something untrue. The lie will always remain improbable, even where, in another mode, one is certain of it. In my address to another, I must always ask for faith or confidence, bet to be believed at my word, there where equivocation is ineffaceable and perjury always possible, precisely unverifiable”. “Typewritter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)”, in (2002b: 111).

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Arguments and motivations Despite what has been said, however, we can also continue to defend the necessity of the principle of expressibility, if our aim is to develop a successful theory of speech acts, one that could later serve to ground those practices and theories that go beyond being merely speculative. Searle’s theory, for example, has noteworthy applications in the moral, social and legal domains, since it serves to determine the responsibility of the subjects in the face of the commitments that they take on via their words, thereby contributing a foundation to the institutional facts on which we construct our societies.128 It also has application even in domains ruled by more lucrative purposes, such as economics and marketing.129 That is, we might see the theory of speech acts as so useful that we must run the risk of overlooking the instability of its foundations. The effects which this theory might have in those domains is something that could in turn be questioned: there are those who, with Derrida, hold these effects to be essentially coercive, tending towards totalization, since they appear to aspire to complete control and dominion over subjectivities. To the degree in which the meaning and force of what has been said are considered as constituting determined facts, as having happened inevitably, there would remain no freedom to reinterpret what has happened, nor would it be possible to assume that the past can always be seen in the future from a different perspective. The present, understood as a fullness of presence, would have eliminated all possible difference. A particular manner of seeing reality would be trying to impose itself as a definitive and final criterion, hiding the one-sidedness of its own perspective, i.e. the contingent play of forces from which it itself has arisen. Therefore the opposite alternative can always be defended: that the suppleness of speech acts must be preserved, that the identity signaled in the principle of expressibility can – must – be placed into question. But both alternatives would have to be assessed, taking into account what we want to do with our theories: the reasons for opting for the one or the other belong

128.  See (Amselek and Bankowski, eds., 1986). Let the following examples suffice for these applications: P. M. Tiersma, “The Language of Defamation” (1987); J. Yovel, “What Is Contract Law ‘About’? Speech Act Theory and a Critique of ‘Skeletal Promises’” (2000); M. Polaino Navarrete, Cometer delitos con palabras: teoría de los actos de habla y funcionalismo jurídico-penal (2004). 129.  See H. R. Ewald and D. Stine, “Speech Act Theory and Business Communication Conventions” (1983); or G. T. Bilbow, “Commissive speech act use in intercultural business meetings” (2002). Searle (2001: 6ff) himself notes some possible applications of his notion of rationality in the reformulation of classic decision theory, habitually used in market research. Even as just an anecdote, see the dossier by the International Service Marketing Institute (2005), where the effect of verbal promises by businesses is studied upon their gaining the confidence of financial services clients.

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more to the order of projects and agendas than to that of facts. And this is another effect of that fractal character of the debate I have analyzed, to which I have referred throughout this book: just as with speech acts, force cannot be reduced to meaning, nor knowing-how to knowing-that, nor in philosophy can the arguments end up subjugating the projects that they are inscribed in, because these arguments only enter into play if we want to do something with them. Many times the importance of what we want to do leads us to emphasize certain theoretical aspects of the problem that are beneficial for us, overlooking others that could act as obstacles. And, generally speaking, we do not normally claim that the arguments are decisive, unless they fit our motivations. This is something that our authors have experienced over the course of their respective intellectual trajectories, although they always denounce it as a dishonest attitude on the part of their adversaries. Searle, for example, waxes indignant because the functionalist project of artificial intelligence continues its course, despite the fact that his Chinese Room argument, in his opinion, had refuted it irrevocably twenty years ago. As he himself has mentioned, an argument can do little against an entire project of interdisciplinary research. For his part, Derrida has claimed to be astounded by the reluctance he has encountered, over and over again, to accept the effects of deconstruction; he doesn’t appear to see that a deconstructed theory need not be abandoned if the motive for its construction continues to be present. Deconstruction, in fact, does not demonstrate the falsity of any theory, as a conventional argument would attempt to do: the only thing it aspires to, and which is no mean goal, is to show the intrinsic possibility, in every theory, of sustaining its contrary, an unsayableness that the theory in question can neither exclude nor marginalize, since it is inscribed in its own center. Nevertheless, just because we demonstrate to someone that it is intrinsically possible to sustain the contrary of what she is sustaining, we will not get her to abandon her posture, if the motives that brought her to it continue to remain as vibrant as before. In sum, we will have to redirect the discussion toward the point in which the distinct forces of the debate truly enter into play, since it is no longer a question of determining what the true thesis about language is – whether it is better reflected in a “principle of expressibility” or “the iteration that contaminates” – but rather of finding out which alternative will allow us to do what we want to do, and whether we are right or not in attempting to do it. The pure truth must doubtless have its place, but one should not forget that no truth has ever come in by the front door by itself, imposing itself on the contenders in a debate, unless somebody decides to take its side. Just in case someone is disappointed about this kind of conclusion, I reply that it has never been my intention to find a way out of the debate, but rather to enter into it in order to make it operative, allowing it to continue in the most fluid way

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possible. In this sense, I hope to have shown that there are still weighty arguments on both sides of the scale. However, so that it cannot be said that I am not taking my own medicine, I am willing to accept that this is debatable as well, and that I don’t believe what I have claimed here because it is true, or at least, not just because of that. Rather, it is because it responds to my motivations, since it permits me to win my wager that it is possible to continue doing philosophy – in the singular – even though it may be by quite different paths.

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Author index

A Acero Fernández, J. J.  3, 21, 115, 204, 206 Alfino, M.  102, 206 Amselek, P.  209 Aristotle  25, 45 Austin, J. L. passim Austinian  34, 37, 88–89, 165, 192 Avramides, A.  40 B Bach, K.  158 Bankowski, Z.  209 Barrios Casares, M.  63 Barthes, R.  85 Bearn, R.  208 Bearn, G. C. F.  208 Benveniste, É.  28, 162 Bilbow, G. T.  209 Bishop, M.  48 Blanchot, M.  15, 76 Bloom, M.  99, 152 Blumenberg, H.  162 Boly, J. R.  69 Bouveresse, J.  5 Brentano, F.  113, 133 Bricmont, J.  5, 175 Burkhardt, A.  41 C Carnap, R.  1, 15, 17, 161 Cavell, S.  31, 35, 37, 89, 208 Chalmers, D. J.  55 Chamizo-Domínguez, P. J.  111, 122 Collins, R.  3, 9 Cometti, J.-P.  8 Condillac, E. B. de  74, 82, 84, 162, 167 Critchley, S.  3

Culler, J.  8, 11, 16, 31, 117, 139–141, 143–144 Cusset, F.  99 D D’Agostini, F.  4 Damasio, A.  55 Dascal, M.  3, 97, 124, 159, 167, 170, 190, 192, 207 Davidson, D.  143, 206 Dennett, D.  207 Derrida, J. passim Descartes, R.  15, 21, 45-48, 55, 67–68, 114–115, 128, 142, 178, 201-202 Descombes, V.  65 Dreyfus, H. L.  3, 115, 125, 127 Duchamp, M.  79 Dummett, M. A. E.  3, 143 E Engel, P.  3–4 Ewald, H. R.  209 F Faigenbaum, G.  22 Farrell, F. B.  206 Felman, S.  28, 35 Fish, S. E.  11, 28, 34, 95, 138, 155, 157–158, 166, 207 Flanagan, O.  55 Føllesdal, D.  3 Foucault, M.  149, 152 Frank, M.  11, 41, 54, 128, 206 Frege, G.  15, 18, 161 Freud, S.  60–61, 69, 75, 89 G Gadamer, H.-G.  162, 187 Glendinning, S.  3–4, 11, 92, 206 Glock, H.–J.  3, 125, 152, 166, 191

Goodman, N.  3 Graff, G.  8, 16, 102, 117, 139, 144, 151, 154–155, 182 Grice, H. P.  39–40, 143 Gueroult, M.  162 H Habermas, J.  3, 11, 16, 28, 53, 112, 137, 162, 192–193 Hadreas, P.  207 Halion, K.  11 Harnish, R. M.  158 Hartman, G.  99 Heidegger, M.  1, 6, 15, 17, 53, 63–67, 75, 97, 101, 115, 142, 162, 189, 192 Hippo, A. of  64, 169, 203 Hume, D.  156 Husserl, E.  15–16, 53, 63, 66–70, 72–74, 82, 85–87, 98, 106, 113–115, 123-128, 131, 140–142, 150, 156, 186 J Jackson, F.  54–55 K Kant, I.  67, 140 Kantian  113, 161, 194 Kasparov, G.  205 Keller, H.  196, 198 Kenaan, H.  92, 95, 192 Kenny, A.  55 Knapp, S.  155, 157–158, 198 Kripke, S.  143 Kuhn, T.  2, 19, 99, 152, 154 Kundera, M.  8–9 L Lamont, M.  99, 172 Lepore, E.  52

222 How to Do Philosophy with Words

Lévinas, E.  6, 16, 63–66, 72, 75, 83, 128, 162 Levine, G.  139, 151 Lucy, N.  154 M Macelay, R.  95 Mackey, L. H.  139, 143–144, 169 Maclean, I.  24, 115 Man, P. de  99 Marcus, R. B.  16, 150 Marx, K.  60–61, 69, 82, 136–137, 170 McHoul, A.  154 Medina, J.  10, 35, 130 Michaels, W. B.  155, 157–158, 198 Miller, J. H.  99 Moati, R.  11, 31, 127 Montague, R. M.  143 Montaigne, M. de  189 Moore, G. E.  15, 32, 161, 202 Mulligan, K.  115, 123, 137, 150 Mundle, C. W. K.  23 N Nagel, T.  54–55 Navarro, J.  127, 200, 203 Nietzsche, F.  6, 13, 15, 60–63, 69, 72, 75, 87, 89, 97, 126, 134, 136, 138, 140, 152, 156, 189 Norris, C.  3, 11 P Pavón Rodríguez, M.  1 Peñalver Gómez, P.  69, 93, 207

Perelman, C.  24 Plato  21, 63, 71, 73–74, 82, 120, 140, 142, 162 Polaino Navarrete, M.  209 Popper, K.  19 Potte-Bonneville, M.  172 Prades Celma, J. L.  21 Preston, J.  48 Proust, J  102, 174 Putnam, H.  3, 47, 50, 101, 143, 204, 206 Q Quine, W. von O.  3, 19, 143, 150, 161, 206 R Rabossi, E.  41 Recanati, F.  3, 41, 53, 127 Ricoeur, P.  3, 11, 60, 162 Rorty, R.  3, 11, 99, 101, 111, 152, 154, 167, 186–187, 192–193 Rosenthal, D. M.  108 Rousseau, J.-J.  74, 82, 120, 140, 162, 182–183 Russell, B.  15, 18, 32, 161 Ryle, G.  15, 21, 45–46, 52, 55, 100, 205 S Sáez Rueda, L.  21, 35, 69, 115, 192 San Juan, Cristina  xvii Sanfelix Vidarte, V.  21 Saussure, F. de  15, 66, 70–74, 76, 83, 88, 90, 94, 141, 162, 167

Searle, D.  125 Searle, J. R. passim Sellars, W.  3, 19 Simons, P.  137 Smith, B.  16, 137, 150–151 Smith, B. H.  16, 137, 150–151 Socrates  74, 189 Sokal, A.  1, 4–6, 16, 168–169, 175 Sperber, D.  40 Spivak, G. C.  117 Stine, D.  209 Strawson, P. F.  6, 21, 40, 100, 143 T Tarski, A.  143, 161 Tiersma, P. M.  209 Tugendhat, E.  3, 191 Turing, A.  15, 46–48, 199 V Van Gulick, R.  52 Vattimo, G.  162 W Weber, E.  8 Weber, S.  7, 79, 117, 126 Wilson, D.  40 Wittgenstein, L.  6, 12, 15, 18–22, 28, 39, 45–46, 51, 59, 64, 88, 130, 142, 146, 156, 161, 165, 169, 186, 189, 202–203, 206 Y Yovel, J.  209

Subject index

A Abnormal  5, 13, 40, 95, 109, 122, 133, 145 Absence  69–93, 97, 103–105, 110–115, 120–121, 127, 141–142, 175, 195, 204 Action  13, 24–31, 38, 42–45, 50, 57–58, 60, 70, 88, 95, 137, 165–173, 177, 180, 185–190, 196–197, 203–208 Intentional action, see Intention See also Illocutionary act, Locutionary act, Perlocutionary act Actor  33, 135, 158, 172, 187 Agenda  99, 152, 184–187, 189, 191, 193, 209–210 Agent  45, 54, 124, 153 Collective agent  57, 112 Analytic philosophy  1–12, 17–23, 35, 45, 66–69, 79, 88–89, 99, 100–103, 115, 142–143, 152–154, 170, 183–186, 202 Antinomies 194 Artificial intelligence  5, 46–49, 56, 169, 200–201, 205, 210 Audience  99, 171, 190 Author  66, 73, 77, 83–85, 96, 99, 106–113, 124–126, 135–136, 142, 147, 155–158, 180, 184, 196, 201 See also Signature Authority  29, 60, 83–85, 89–90, 102, 125–127, 150, 180–182 First-person authority  45, 55, 136, 195, 200 see also First-person perspective

B Background  48–53, 112, 115, 128, 131, 155–156, 159, 161, 172, 186, 203–207 Being  17, 64–67, 72 C Cambridge affair  16, 100, 150–151 Chinese room  5, 16, 48–49, 127, 168–169, 199–201, 205, 210 Citation  32, 91, 93–94, 105–106, 110–111, 117, 119, 122, 125, 136, 139, 149–150, 158, 180, 199, 203, 208 Cognitivism 46 Communication  61, 79–85, 91, 95, 97, 103, 106–107, 119–123, 127, 151, 156–159, 169, 171, 173–192, 195–196, 209 Concepts  2, 8, 141, 145–147, 178 Consciousness  30, 53–56, 68–76, 81–89, 91–94, 96, 108, 113–115, 124, 126, 129–134, 136, 143, 156, 185–186, 195, 199–207 Constitutive rules, see Rules Content  38–39, 81, 89, 128, 195, 204, 207 Intentional content  38–39, 68, 73, 113–114 Locutionary content, see Locutionary act Propositional content  44, 50 Context 5–7, 26–28, 31–35, 38–42, 51–53, 56, 59, 81–85, 88, 90–92, 105–106, 120–121, 123–128, 130, 132, 134–138, 146–148, 158, 161, 180–184, 195, 199–205 Contex of justification vs. context of discovery  19

Insaturability of context 123–126, 134–135, 182 Internal contex  92–95, 124, 135 ‘Real life’ context, see Real life Continental philosophy  1–6, 9, 12, 17, 66, 68–69, 101–103, 114–115, 137, 143, 154, 161–162, 171, 189 Controversy  11, 15, 18, 44, 57, 97, 127, 167, 190–193 Convention  26–29, 31–32, 39–41, 49–53, 91–94, 108, 110, 127–159, 173, 183, 203–204 Conversation  23, 37, 47–49, 57–58, 84, 112, 199–200 Copy  104, 125, 207 Copyright  124–126, 148 See also Author Cultural studies  100 D Deconstruction  6, 13–16, 77, 80–81, 93, 97, 100–103, 133, 139–144, 173–174, 178–186, 210 Deep Blue  205 Difference  13, 62–77, 93–94, 97, 114–115, 141, 178, 209 Différance  74–76, 125, 133 Dissemination  77, 85, 92–94, 121, 138, 180–183 Double game, see Game Doubling commentary  181–182 E Epistemology  19, 28, 160–161, 199–202, 206–207 of ignorance, see Ignorance Epiphenomenalism 55–56 Espacement 83

224 How to Do Philosophy with Words

Ethics  28, 65, 95, 148–149 Eventuality 122–123 Experience  54–57, 67–73, 97–98, 145 Expressibility  13, 19, 24, 31, 42–44, 70, 85, 90, 107, 127, 131, 134, 142, 146–147, 159 206 Principle of expressibility 32, 38–41, 156, 195–196, 199–203, 209–210 Exteriority 83 F Fiction  109–110, 151, 192 Legitimate fictions  128, 148 Theoretical fictions  92, 122, 134–143, 195 First-person perspective  45, 54–56, 147 see also Authority (First person authority) Folk psychology  13 see also Intention (intentional states) Football 171 Force  33–34, 60–62, 72, 80, 83–84, 88–90, 97, 107, 126, 128, 148–149, 165–169, 172–173, 177–178, 190, 204, 209–210 Illocutionary force  26–30, 41, 165–169, 175–176 Form  5, 45, 66, 69–73, 96, 98, 117, 120, 124, 168–169, 180, 195–201, 204–207 Forms of life  21 Logical form  18–19 Functionalism  13, 47–48, 53, 55–56, 115, 169, 185, 199–200, 210 G Game  38, 46, 140, 143, 170–173, 191, 205 Double game  178–180 Games of differences  72, 74, 77 Language games  22, 88, 130, 166, 174 Glyph journal  7, 16, 101–102, 117, 139 God  63, 65, 67–68, 195

Grammatology  16, 72, 182 Graphemes  76–77, 83–84, 90, 94, 97–98, 104, 106, 118–119, 123, 132, 175 H Hermeneutics  1–3, 6, 11, 41, 97, 99–100, 170, 187 I Idealization  6, 17, 34, 38, 41–42, 56, 92–95, 114–115, 128, 131– 137, 145–148, 160–161, 176, 192, 194–195, 201, 205, 207 Ignorance  10, 101, 155, 160, 162 Illocutionary acts  14, 26–34, 37, 44, 107–108, 125, 128, 134, 137, 145, 165, 177–178 see also Force (Illocutionary force) Infelicity  28–33, 38, 89, 91–92, 95, 109, 122, 136, 138, 165, 178 Inner speech, see Soliloquy Insincerity  30–32, 41–44, 91, 129 Institutions  74, 141, 153, 157, 209 Intention Fungible intention  126–129, 195–206, 208 Illocutionary intention 107–108, 129 Intentional action  42–44, 57, 108, 111, 120, 197, 207 Ironic intention, see Irony Intentionality  12, 16, 31, 37–38, 48–57, 68, 80, 85, 100, 103, 106–108, 110–115, 119–120, 127–128, 143–147, 155–159, 162, 167–168, 185–186, 195–197, 199–207 Intentional consciousness 54–57, 68–69, 85–87, 96, 98, 104, 107, 113–114, 124, 169, 185, 195, 199–200 Intentional states  44, 50–51, 56, 89, 124, 126, 155–156, 185–186, 124, 185–186, 203 Intrinsic intentionality  48–54, 159, 200 Pre-intentionality  52, 155–156, 203–205 (see also Background)

Irony  5, 32, 40, 52, 93, 109–110, 117, 122, 133, 136, 138, 158, 160, 181, 199, 208 Iterability  82–83, 94–98, 103– 123, 132–146, 157, 168, 172–177, 195, 200–208 J Joke  1, 5, 129, 175–176 See also Seriousness K Know-how  155–156, 171, 203–206 Philosophical know-hows, see Skills (Philosophical skills) See also Background, Skill Knowledge argument  54 L Lie  31, 44, 208 Lifeworld (Lebenswelt) 53 Linguistics  23, 70–73, 162 Linguistic phenomenology, see Phenomenology (Linguistic) Literal meaning  6, 40–42, 51–53, 80, 94, 107, 121, 132–134, 144, 156–159, 183, 195, 199, 201–208 Literary theory  99–100, 139, 142, 154–155 M Margin  27, 33, 38, 77, 85–87, 123, 140–148, 178, 189, 210 Mark  84, 97–98, 118, 121–125 Meaning, see Literal meaning Mention (vs. use)  107, 110, 145, 157–158, 199, 208 Metaphor  38–39, 40, 62, 80–83, 93–94, 133–136, 138–142 Metaphysics  7, 17–18, 34, 60, 63–66, 71–77, 84, 142, 173 Methodology  41, 73, 109, 131–134 Modality see Necessary possibility



N Necessary possibility  91–93, 122–123 Network  51, 112, 156, 159, 161, 203 Normal see Abnormal See also Real life O Ontology  35, 46, 69, 75, 160–162, 206 Oral language  73–85, 105, 112–113, 141, 174, 195–198 Other  3, 65, 69–77, 82–84, 114 Other minds  202, 206 Oxford  2, 6, 20, 37, 100, 102 School of Oxford  21 P Paradigm  2–4, 109, 185, 194 Parasitism  32–33, 41, 91–95, 109–111, 118, 122, 126, 132–138, 178, 195 Performatives  24–31–34, 88–91, 94–95, 109, 128, 135, 176–180 Perlocutionary act  14, 26–27, 88–90, 176–177 Permanence  104–105, 111–112, 174, 195–197, 200 Phenomenology  2, 6, 66–73, 98, 113–115, 123–128, 131, 156, 186 Linguistic phenomenology 22–23 Philosophy of suspicion,  see Suspicion Phonocentrism  73–74, 124 See also Voice Point of view of God, see God Politics  137, 148–150 Post-structuralism  2, 6, 97, 99 Postmodernism  1, 5, 103, 139, 151–154, 168–169 Pragmatics  21–22, 26, 28, 112, 124, 192 Pragmatics-semantics interface 34 Psychopragmatics 159

Subject index 225

Presence  44, 56, 61, 66–77, 81–84, 96–98, 114–115, 121, 128, 141–142, 146–147, 156, 206–209 Metaphysics of presence  7, 71, 161, 173 Promise  24–34, 41–44, 92, 124, 129, 135, 145, 176–177, 208–209 Q Qualia 54–5 Quotations  13, 33, 109, 122 R Real life  122, 135–136, 145–148, 154 Responsibility  43–44, 47, 54, 209 Authority and responsibility 125–127 Irresponsibility  106, 143, 168, 173, 202 Moral responsibility  32 Restance  97, 174 Rhetorics  4–5, 119, 143–144, 149, 154, 174–180 Robot, see Artificial intelligence Rule  38, 40–49, 52, 54–57, 104, 119–120, 170–173, 178, 190–192 Constitutive vs. regulative rules  54, 57 S Saturability, see Context (insaturability of) Sentence vs. utterance meaning 107, 198, 199 Seriousness  117, 136, 138, 169, 176, 199 See also Joke Sign  70–74, 88, 98, 120, 126, 146, 157, 177–178 Signature  95–96, 124–125, 148 Sincerity, see Insincerity Skills, see also Know-how Linguistic skills  203–207 Philosophical skills  169–173, 189–190

Social reality  57, 152, 157, 184–185 Soliloquy  13, 33, 91, 94 Solipsism  67, 113, 202 Source of the utterance  74, 95–96, 169, 176, 198–201 Speech acts, passim Structuralism 70–73 Supplement  82, 120 Suspicion  60–62, 71, 74, 87–89, 114, 168 T Teleological  92–95, 161 Token identity, see Type vs token identity Trace  2, 74–76, 85, 96, 165, 197 Truth  15, 25, 30–35, 61–64, 87–89, 91, 148, 151, 175, 177, 181, 192, 210 Turing machine  46–47 Turing test  47, 199 Type vs. token identity 70, 104–105, 110, 119, 144, 155, 157 U Undecidability  120, 138, 147, 155, 160, 195 Use (vs mention), see Mention Utterance meaning, see Sentence vs. utterance meaning V Voice  70, 74, 196–197 See also Phonocentrism Vouloir-dire  97, 127, 131, 147 W Writing  73–76, 81–85, 96–98, 103–113, 118, 121, 140–142, 175, 195–198, 200 Y Yale (School of)  99