Derrida and Searle on Speech Acts

Iterability: no sign is bound to its context

Derrida argues that a mark can function as a sign only if it can be repeated in the absence of its sender, its addressee and its original situation. This “iterability” is not an accident that befalls ordinary speech but a condition of all communication, performatives included: “Could a performative utterance succeed if its formulation did not repeat a ‘coded’ or iterable utterance …?” Austin’s exclusion of the quoted and the staged thus sets aside what makes speech acts possible; no context can be fully determined, and intention cannot fully govern what an utterance means. In the 1988 afterword Derrida glossed his earlier phrase “there is nothing outside the text” (il n’y a pas de hors-texte) as “there is nothing outside context”.

Held by

• Jacques Derrida1930–2004

Intention, convention and a sensible exclusion

Searle replied that Derrida had misconstrued and misrepresented Austin’s position in several decisive respects. Austin’s exclusion of fiction and the stage was a matter of research strategy, not metaphysics: a pretended promise is logically dependent on serious promising, so the serious case has to be analysed first, and “parasitic” names this logical dependence rather than a lesser value. Iterability, Searle holds, is no threat to intention; repeatable conventions are precisely what allow speakers to express their intentions and hearers to understand them. Derrida, in his view, also confused iterability with the permanence of writing, which lets a text survive its author and context for reasons quite different from those that make quotation possible.

Held by

• John Searle1932–2025

A missed encounter between two traditions

Many later readers see the exchange less as a contest with a winner than as an encounter that only partly took place. Searle himself opened his reply by warning against treating it as a confrontation between two philosophical traditions – in his view because Derrida had misread Austin. Reception has stayed divided: Jonathan Culler (On Deconstruction, 1982) defended Derrida’s reading, while Jürgen Habermas (The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 1985) sided with Searle in holding on to the distinction between serious and “parasitic” uses of language. Raoul Moati (Derrida/Searle, 2009; English 2014) traces the disagreement to two ways of understanding intentionality – phenomenologically, from Husserl, in Derrida’s case, pragmatically in Searle’s.