hierarchy of places and a power relation. Let us take a fairly frequently speech
act: uttering a threat. It is indeed a specific speech act, with its specific
illocutionary force, forming part of a specific language game (one does not
make threats willy-nilly, any more than one makes promises). Habermas
broaches threats in a context where he is attempting to distinguish
communicative action from strategic action. The framework of his thinking
is familiar to us by now:
Communicative action must satisfy certain conditions of cooperation and
mutual understanding:
The participatating actors must conduct themselves cooperatively and
attempt to reach an agreement about their plans (in the horizon of a shared
lifeworld) on the basis of common (or sufficiently overlapping) situation
interpretations.
The participating actors must be prepared to achieve the intermediate
goals of a common situation definition and of action coordination in the
roles of speakers and hearers by way of processes of reaching understanding,
i.e. by means of the unreserved and sincere pursuit of illocutionary aims....
The manner in which mutual understanding in language functions as a
mechanism for coordinating action is that the participants in an interaction
agree about the validity claimed for the their speech acts, that is, they
recognize criticisable validity claims intersubjectively.^4In Habermas’s world, following the English expression ‘let us agree to differ’,
the only possible expression of dissensus is another form of consensus. Since
Habermas is a great philosopher, and does not deny the facts, he is aware that
a certain number of linguistic phenomena offer counter-examples to his theory.
The insult with which I started out in Chapter 1 is one of them. For his part,
he opts to dispose of threats. This is what he has to say four pages later:
Imperatives or threats that are deployed purely strategically and robbed of
their normative validity claims are not illocutionary acts, or acts aimed
toward reaching understanding, at all. They remain parasitic insofar as their
comprehension must be derived from the employment conditions for
illocutionary acts that are covered by norms.^552 • Chapter Three
(^4) Habermas 1992, pp. 79–80.
(^5) Habermas 1992, p. 84.