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Introduction
Having a penchant for theory, academic infighting, and (less admittedly) old white
men waxing philosophical, I find the 1970s debates between Derrida and Searle over
Austin and the nature of language at once juvenile and bullying, but also relentlessly
captivating—much more is at stake than I assumed.
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As theorists, writers, and humanity
in general are wont to relate to one another—and to position themselves in relation to one
another—through language, what Searle and Derrida have to say mattered then and
matters now. So too, I am a student of the politics of recognition and what has been
called “culturalism,” or the race-gender-sexuality triad of leftist intellectualism, where
rethinking language has become of critical importance in revitalizing and also refiguring
contemporary political theories of identity and group difference—this task has been taken
up most recently by Linda Zerilli and Patchen Markell.
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In particular, the linguistic phenomena of iterability and unserious speech
unpacked, or almost unpacked, by Derrida and Searle—more so, I think, than authorial
intent and authorial absence—bear acutely on identity, as identity and indentitarian
strategies of political resistance are interminably intertwined (at least in academe) with
“performance,” “mockery,” “insurrectionary speech,” and the redeployment of words and
signs to dislodge dominant cultural conceptions of, say, “woman,” or “race,” or “law,” or
the universe.
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I therefore review the debate between Searle and Derrida, and explicate Searle’s
interpretations of iterability and the unserious as presented by Derrida in Signature Event
Context (Sec). I am partial ultimately to Derrida, as I consider, like Derrida in Limited
Inc abc… (Limited), that Searle (Sarl) misinterprets and maybe purposively reconstructs
Derrida’s argument to mock and invalidate it. So too, Searle’s logic of critique is the
very practice under scrutiny in sec, and thus incapable of (rhetorical, empirical)
persuasion without antecedently defending itself. In other words, that sec itself could be
a response to Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida (Reply) might suggest the
Reply’s very failure. However, Derrida and Searle both hit the same epistemic wall, and
the logics of each theorist are unverifiable, un-provable, and unknowable. We will never
know the “true” nature of unserious speech, or for that matter the significance of
authorial intention or discursive absence. Renewing an interrogation of ‘unserious
Convention