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Nov. 7th, 2013 04:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
iampolskI assumed for а long time, despite the number of reservations I had about Austin’s theory of constative and performative speech acts, that the performative speech act was a way of producing an event. I now think that the performative is in fact a subtle way of neutralizing the event. As long as I am to speak performatively, I have to do this under certain conditions, conventions, conventional conditions. I have the ability to do this and to produce the event by speaking. That is, I can or I may master the situation by taking into account these conventions, I may open the session, for instance. I may say “yes” when I get married, and so on. But because I have the mastery of the situation, my very mastery is a limitation of the eventness of the event. I neutralize he eventness of the event precisely because of the performativity...
This event [the death of Derrida’s mother] could not be produced by a speech act. What characterizes an event is precisely that it defeats any performativity, beyond any performative power. … The interest we are taking in speech act theory in the academy perhaps has to do with the illusion that, by using performative utterances, we produce events, that we are mastering history. The event is absolutely unpredictable, that is, beyond any performativity.
This event [the death of Derrida’s mother] could not be produced by a speech act. What characterizes an event is precisely that it defeats any performativity, beyond any performative power. … The interest we are taking in speech act theory in the academy perhaps has to do with the illusion that, by using performative utterances, we produce events, that we are mastering history. The event is absolutely unpredictable, that is, beyond any performativity.
