rida, a critic of metaphysics. Derrida, who knows this, still at-
tributes to Austin the prejudices of a metaphysical thinker.
Derrida argues in “Signature Event Context” that phi-
losophers, including Austin, characteristically and wrongly see
writing and speech as communication. In Derrida’s essay,
this word,communication,bears a metaphysical burden. It im-
plies the conveying of content (meaning) by means of an ap-
paratus (tongue movements or pen movements, say) and the
delivering of this content to an addressee. Philosophers, ac-
cording to Derrida, want to reliably transport meaning by
keeping it controlled, tied to its proper context. Language, in
their view, is merely an instrument. Signs are used to carry
meaning from the speaker’s mouth to the ears of an audience:
from the writer’s script to the reader’s eyes.
Derrida disagrees with this idea, which he attributes to
Austin and to philosophy in general.^5 For Derrida, writing is
not to be thought of as communication, the stable transport-
ing of meaning; and neither, therefore, is speech, which he
considers a subset of writing. What he calls the iterability of
words, the structure of repetition and variation that makes
words signify, prevents context from being pinned down. In
different situations (or cultures, or periods of history), the
same words will have widely divergent meanings.
What then does Derrida want of Austin? (as Stanley Cavell
puts the question in his essay on the two thinkers).^6 Derrida is
intrigued by Austin’s category of the performative, which
seems to “beckon toward Nietzsche” and to break with meta-
physics (Margins 322 ). But then Derrida takes back his compli-
ment. As it turns out, Austin does not divorce himself from
metaphysics at all. Derrida charges that Austin is a logocentrist
who believes that meaning requires a clear, conscious inten-
tion on the part of the speaker ( 323 ). Here is Derrida’s state-
160 Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud