Derrida/Searle: Deconstruction and Ordinary Language

By Raoul Moati and Jean-Michel Rabaté

Raoul Moati intervenes in the critical debate that divided two prominent philosophers in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1950s, the British philosopher J. L. Austin advanced a theory of speech acts, or the performative,” that Jacques Derrida and John R. Searle interpreted in fundamentally different ways. Their disagreement centered on the issue of intentionality, which Derrida understood phenomenologically and Searle read pragmatically. The controversy had profound implications for the development of contemporary philosophy, which, Moati argues, can profit greatly by returning to this classic debate. In this book, Moati systematically replays the historical encounter between Austin, Derrida, and Searle and the disruption that caused the lasting break between Anglo-American language philosophy and continental traditions of phenomenology and its deconstruction. The key issue, Moati argues, is not whether intentionality,” a concept derived from Husserl’s phenomenology, can or cannot be linked to Austin’s speech-acts as defined in his groundbreaking How to Do Things with Words, but rather the emphasis Searle placed on the performativity and determined pragmatic values of Austin’s speech-acts, whereas Derrida insisted on the trace of writing behind every act of speech and the iterability of signs in different contexts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Mar 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9780231537179

Book preview

Derrida/Searle

Derrida/Searle

Deconstruction and Ordinary Language

RAOUL MOATI

Translated from the French by Timothy Attanucci and Maureen Chun

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press

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EISBN: 978-0-231-53717-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moati, Raoul.

[Derrida, Searle. English]

Derrida, Searle: deconstruction and ordinary language / Raoul Moati; translated from the French by Timothy Attanucci and Maureen Chun.

   pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16670-6 (cloth: alk. paper) —ISBN 978-0-231-16671-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) —ISBN 978-0-231-53717-9 (e-book)

1. Derrida, Jacques. 2. Searle, John R. 3. Language and languages—Philosophy—20th century. 4. Performative (Philosophy) 5. Speech acts (Linguistics) 6. Ordinary-language philosophy. 7. Deconstruction. 8. Intentionality (Philosophy) I. Title.

B2430.D484M6313   2014

194—dc23

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

Cover design: Noah Arlow

References to Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

TO MY TEACHER AND FRIEND, JOCELYN BENOIST

TO MY PARENTS, MONETTE AND JACKY

TO NEJIA

TO JUDITH SADOCK

Still confining ourselves for simplicity to spoken utterance.

—Austin, How to Do Things with Words

Quotations are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions.

—Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street

Derrida was bound to be drawn to Austin’s discoveries.

—Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy

Contents

Foreword: Per Formam Doni

Jean-Michel Rabaté

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Circumstances of an Improbable Debate

A Heritage Dispute: Introduction to a Violent Exchange

1.  The Iterative as the Reverse Side of the Performative

Communication: The Meaning of a Word

Overcoming Semantics Through Force: Prolegomena to the Aporetic Dimension of the Derrida/Austin Connection

From Communication to Dissemination

Writing: The Fragmentation of Communication

The Problem of Intentional Presence

Writing and Context(s)

From Intentionality to Citationality

Austin: Disciple of Nietzsche?

Austin: Intentionalist Author?

The Problem of Citationality in Austin

Signing: The Subject

2.  Do Intentions Dissolve in Iteration? From Differance to the Dispute (Différend)

Intentionality and Writing

Iterability and Permanence

Intentionality and Iteration

On the Use/Mention Distinction

Serious Discourse and Iteration

The Stakes at Play in the Unconscious

The Meaning of a Footnote and the Logical Status of Fiction

Parasitism and Citation

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Foreword

Per Formam Doni

Jean-Michel Rabaté

It seems that today, almost ten years after the untimely demise of Jacques Derrida, there are three main ways of approaching his impressive legacy. There is first of all the biographical approach. Since 2010, Benoît Peeters’s excellent biography has allowed us to reconsider Derrida’s oeuvre in light of his personality. What makes Peeters’s biography engaging and refreshing is that we discover a different Derrida, one who appears more driven, tormented, excessive, impassioned than a successful and charismatic world-renowned philosopher. We are surprised to see a neo-Romantic thinker whose vaunting narcissism had to be kept in check and whose power of seduction seemed boundless, yet one with a darker, brooding, melancholy side. He was obsessed by death, his own and that of his loved ones, but stuck until the end to a grueling schedule of international lectures that only an athlete in the physical and intellectual sense could carry through. It was not by chance that Peeters felt the need to publish along with his huge biography a slim volume in which he accounts for the difficulty of such a daunting task.¹ This second book should be made available in English: one should read it side by side with the biography whose author all but disappears and erases his voice to let Derrida speak.

What makes Peeters’s biography invaluable is its modesty and the thoroughness of its documentation. Peeters sums up countless letters, manuscripts, and unpublished seminars that one can have access to (which is not always granted) by going to the library of the University of California at Irvine. Thus, for instance, Peeters presents the context of the fifty-two-page letter sent by Derrida to his school friend Pierre Nora, who had published a scathing indictment of the French presence in Algeria. This letter, now added to the republished book by Nora, shows that Derrida sided with Albert Camus and Germaine Tillion, the liberals of the time, while remaining uncompromising on issues of ethics and human rights.² The debate about the rights of the French colonists to remain in Algeria or even to belong there throws a sharper light on Derrida’s otherwise radical politics. This proves that there is a need to know more about Derrida’s past secrets hidden in his huge archive in which his private life, his theoretical positions, and his ethical and political commitments are intermingled. I would include in this first category the books written by friends and disciples who want to honor his memory, testify to his charisma by making better sense of his ideas. This is the case with books by Nicholas Royle, Peggy Kamuf, Derek Attridge, and Geoffrey Bennington.³ They attempt to memorialize their mentor and disseminate his teachings while trying not mourn him too soon. These four books, written by excellent commentators who have important things to say about aspects of Derrida’s theories, hesitate between personal memoirs and textual exegesis. They explain why Derrida is hard to follow, in all the meanings of the expression.⁴ Avoiding the dangers of hagiography, they testify to the pathos of a personal loss while making sense of the French philosopher’s lasting legacy.

The second approach is what I would call a systemic interpretation of Derrida’s philosophy. It is often provided by authors who were not as close to Derrida as the previous group. They attempt to rethink his concepts and methods from a distance and in their own vocabulary. What they are eager to eschew is the risk of mimetic ventriloquism, a danger faced by all those who grapple with Derrida’s idiosyncratic readings of other texts. We see this in Peter Sloterdijk’s Derrida, an Egyptian,⁵ or in Alain Badiou’s homage in his Pocket Pantheon.⁶ Sloterdijk uses thinkers and writers, like Freud, Franz Borkenau, and Niklas Luhmann, to reach a central metaphor in Derrida’s oeuvre, which hinges on an inverted Egyptian pyramid. In this way, Derrida becomes, if not immediately a Kafkaian figure, at least a Joseph-like interpreter calling up the hero of a novel by Thomas Mann. Badiou insists on the politics at work in deconstruction, since he chooses to see in Derrida a man of peace, who destroyed all dichotomies—whether philosophical (like Being and being), racial (like Jew versus Arab), or political (like democracy versus totalitarianism)—in order to reach an instable and fugitive point of undecidability. Key in Derrida’s thinking is a productive indistinction of distinction, which leads neither to confusion nor to pure difference. Even if there is a huge gap between Badiou’s system and Derrida’s proliferating texts, they can be joined by a similar concern for the notion of the undecidable. A similar but more sustained effort at rethinking the whole system of Derrida’s thought has been deployed by Martin Hägglund in his groundbreaking Radical Atheism.⁷ This book unifies Derrida’s project and refutes the idea that Derrida would have moved from a playful mode of Nietzschean critique of all foundational concepts to a more serious, that is, more ethical or even religious, concern with alterity, justice, messianicity, and the dream of a democracy ever to come. Going back to the earlier insights developed by Derrida when he launched the concept of writing as trace, deferral, and active différance in the sense of the creation of a temporal as well as spatial distance, Hägglund posits the logic of survival as the keystone of deconstruction. Thus there is only one Derrida, from his first essays to the moving last interview with Jean Birnbaum in 2004,⁸ and he is the thinker of a radical finitude, the true heir of Heidegger, and not a Levinassian in disguise.

Finally, a third group of authors discussing Derrida can be called dialogical. They aim at reopening various dialogues between Derrida and other philosophers or writers. The collection edited by John Sallis under the title Deconstruction and Philosophy provides a good model.⁹ Derrida is paired with Hegel, with Heidegger, with Kant, and with Husserl, and contextualized within the discourses of metaphysics and ethics. Derrida appears hence as a left Heideggerian (as one would speak of left Hegelians, including Feuerbach, Stirner, and Marx), that is, as a revolutionary thinker who had the audacity of replacing Heidegger’s ontological difference with the question concerning technology. The true audacity consists in using Heidegger’s main concepts against themselves. Of course, Derrida had to transform technology into writing, a startling move toward the material, perhaps even toward dialectical materialism, that made a world of difference. If ontological difference can be rewritten as technological difference, writing acquires a new valence, a new violence, and an almost unlimited power in the world of thought and facts. More recently, Leonard Lawlor went to the root of this replacement when he reopened the dossier of Derrida’s critique of phenomenology in his superb Derrida and Husserl.¹⁰

It is within this group of dialogical approaches that I see Raoul Moati’s elegant book published in 2009 by the Presses Universitaires de France in a series aimed at students, Derrida/Searle: Déconstruction et langage ordinaire. Moati is less interested in the genealogy of the confrontation between Derrida and Searle about the true meaning of Austin’s theory of the performative—one may note that it is rare to see such polemical ferocity on both sides in a philosophical discussion—than in the general question posed to deconstruction in its dialogue with Anglo-American philosophy of ordinary language. Moati is well equipped for such a task: his interests have roamed freely from Slavoj Žižek to Emmanuel Levinas,¹¹ and he approaches the discussion opposing Derrida and Searle as dispassionately as possible. He betrays no undue sentimentalism, and he does not bring his personal testimony; in place of a disciple’s piety, he displays the candid probity of a true philosophical investigator. This was a prerequisite, since the ground appeared mined due to the fracas, the exchange of insults, and finally an excess of mutual incomprehension. One needs to have sympathy for both camps in order to eschew the effects of transference and countertransference. There is no adulation, adoration, detestation, or denigration of any school here. Moati prefers pointing out Derrida’s blind spots and Searle’s dead ends to any blind endorsement. Thus Moati insists on Derrida’s dependence upon metaphysical models that he had been the first to debunk. He sees in Searle a dangerous rejection of the unconscious. This is the condition for an impartial assessment of what we can learn from the debate today.

What is at stake fundamentally is the productivity of the concept of the performative as it was launched by Austin. Moati provides a genealogy of the concept, explaining why its contested legacy was the object of a rivalry, a struggle for appropriation by Derrida and by Searle. Both use the term intentionality systematically but with radically different meanings. As Derrida admits in the afterword to Limited Inc, he often felt closer to the speech act theory developed by Austin than to the phenomenological tradition he came from: I sometimes felt, paradoxically, closer to Austin than to a certain Continental tradition from which Searle, on the contrary, has inherited numerous gestures and a logic I try to deconstruct.¹² It was not absurd for Derrida to point to a Husserlian background in Searle, an unthought background of which the American philosopher was blissfully unaware. What Derrida gave us in the end was a more complex and subtle concept of the performative, a concept that could not be limited by reason and social regulation alone, a concept that would not dissolve itself in the aporias of impossible