often describes cases in which we try to get away with some-
thing; such cases end by reining us in: suggesting how, and to
what, we are obligated.
Derrida rebels against such obligation. For him, the au-
thor or speaker of a statement is not provably bound to the
statement. Our word is notour bond, Derrida boldly asserts
(Margins 328 ). (Again, he is a classic skeptic in this regard.)
Yet, as Austin would point out, in an ordinary way, and in a
legal way too, we have to be tied to what we say. It is not a very
effective excuse to say that our words were simply out of our
hands, or our mouths. The endless human inventiveness in the
field of excuses suggests to Austin that finessing responsibility
is one of the main things we do.
Derrida, convinced that responsibility as a concept must
be metaphysical and therefore flimsy, decides not to care about
it. But for Austin one is responsible if the circumstances ren-
der one so; there is nothing metaphysical about the question.
(Austin adds that responsibility is not an apt criterion in all
cases; it too can become a canard [Papers 181 ]. Each instance
demands judgment.)^7
None of Austin’s questions involving our habitual, un-
avoidable ways of judging ourselves and our actions are of
philosophical concern to Derrida. Rather, he tends to charac-
terize them as metaphysical illusions, inescapable yet insub-
stantial. Austin’s aim of clarifying words and ideas by submit-
ting them to the practical test of ordinary life seems worse than
futile to Derrida, for whom the ordinary, as he confesses in
“Signature Event Context,” is not a viable concept at all.
Austin, who died a decade before Derrida’s lecture on
him, was not able to answer his deconstructionist opponent.
But “Signature Event Context” spurred a heated reply by a fol-
lower of Austin, John Searle. Derrida then answered Searle in
Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud 163