citable and soul-wringing. Sartre was about love and death, re-
ligious belief, murder and suicide. He made you feel like a
member of the disillusioned, tough-minded elite: daring you
to know the world’s harsh truths, and still to act in lonely
independence. Austin, unlike Sartre, talked about ordinary
actions like promising, betting, and making excuses; about
speech acts that “misfire” (an eccentric bishop’s blessing of the
penguins, or the bigamist’s “I do”). I had no idea that philoso-
phy could be so attentive to small things, could show them in
a new light, one that made me think harder than I ever had be-
fore. Austin opened my eyes to how philosophy might be about
life, as we meet it every day—trivial, significant, odd.
But Derrida, from my eighteen-year-old’s perspective,
blew Austin away. He accused Austin of trying to tether people
to the statements they made and the actions they performed,
so that situations would always be stable and reliable. For Der-
rida, such stability was an impossible fantasy. Our words are
drifting, uncontrollable: once they leave our mouths, they take
on a life of their own. Speech, Derrida asserted, is not so dif-
ferent from writing. Plato called the written word an orphan.
You never know who will pick up and read a book, or what that
reader will make of it. Writing wanders ceaselessly. The author
has no control over his work’s future interpretation. Derrida
went further than Plato, arguing that not just writing, but
speech, is a homeless drifter. Even in our conversations, Der-
rida insisted, we have no mastery over our meaning, however
much we insist that we do.
I did not know it at the time, but Derrida was my intro-
duction to skepticism, a long tradition in philosophy. When I
chose Derrida over Austin, in spite of my fascination with
Austin’s stance and style, I was giving in to the skeptic’s classic
argument: that we cannot trust the evidence of our words and
xii Preface