is occurring at all—say, if you have been drugged or brain-
washed by your potential spouse—then this lack of awareness,
imposed against your will, can indeed be grounds for an
annulment. But you cannot squirm out of a marriage by
claiming that you didn’t really mean to get married, or weren’t
paying attention (even if these things are true). Instead, like
Touchstone in As You Like It,you must hope for a truly serious
glitch: a ceremony performed so badly that it proves invalid.
Derrida claims that Austin does not properly consider
the crucial status of the misfired or infelicitous, the way the
botched cases make the successful ones possible. In fact, both
Austin and Derrida assert the pervasiveness, the central im-
portance, of misfiring. But misfiring means something differ-
ent for each of them. For Austin, as Cavell writes, misfired
cases and the excuses tied to them hint at the “unending vul-
nerability of human action, its exposure to the independence
of the world and the preoccupation of the mind” (Philoso-
phical 53 ). In Derrida, by contrast, the seemingly marginal
misfired cases prove central because they show that context is
drifting and indefinable. Any wedding could turn out to be a
stage play, any groom a bigamist. (Such possibilities have
stocked the skeptic’s arsenal since Descartes: those people on
the street might be automata, Descartes suggests in his Medi-
tations.) One cannot, therefore, according to Derrida, attain
the specific local description, the accurate account of a partic-
ular situation, that Austin trusts in (or longs for).
Derrida is wrong to claim that Austin believes in the
power of conscious intention to define situations. This mis-
reading may not matter, however. The real quarrel between the
two thinkers lies in a somewhat different place: Derrida simply
doesn’t believe in situations, and Austin does. For Austin,
where we find ourselves instructs us as to who we are. Austin
162 Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud