tests against the practices of everyday life. Perhaps, he may
suggest, some of Plato’s or Aristotle’s or Kant’s ideas just don’t
work. For the Continental philosopher, the question of what
works—what passes the tests of ordinary life and ordinary lan-
guage—usually does not arise.
Austin is perhaps Derrida’s strangest choice for an inter-
locutor. Straitlaced and meticulous, a model of the restrained
Oxford don, he was best known for developing the theory of
the “performative utterance”: the idea that our sentences do
things in the world more often than they describe the world, as
he put it in his lecture series “How to Do Things with Words”
( 1962 ). Austin’s laconic seductiveness, practical and under-
stated, couldn’t be further away from Derrida’s pull-out-the-
stops hyperbole, his spectacular proclamations of the end of
man and the monstrous, ineffable specter of futurity.
Derrida’s strategy against Austin in “Signature Event
Context” is to claim that Austin’s modest hemming concealed
an authoritative, even dictatorial penchant for drawing the
boundaries of legitimate speech. Austin, however, is really in-
terested not in laying down the law but in testing the weight of
our particular actions. We do things with words so that we
can excuse, avoid, or subtly revise the meaning of our deeds.
Derrida proves indifferent to this provocative ethical face of
Austin’s work: its character as a psychological analysis that tells
us about ourselves, and specifically about our wishes to evade
or misrecognize our actions. Instead, he sees in Austin only a
typical metaphysician’s wish to prove the reliability of the con-
scious ego’s words and thoughts.
The mild-mannered Austin with his pipe, tweeds, and
horn-rimmed glasses was in fact a philosophical revolution-
ary. A code-breaker for Britain during World War II, he often
headed for the nursery when he visited a friend’s house, be-
158 Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud