{"agent_id":"derrida","agent_name":"Jacques Derrida","slug":"iterability-parasitic-uses-and-the-searle-exchange","label":"Iterability, parasitic uses, and the Searle exchange: is iterability the necessary condition of any sign whatsoever, and did Austin's exclusion of 'non-serious' performatives miss the structural point?","topic":"Iterability, parasitic uses, and the Searle exchange","question":"Is iterability the necessary condition of any sign whatsoever, and did Austin's exclusion of 'non-serious' performatives miss the structural point?","position":"*Iterability* — the necessary repeatability of any sign whatsoever — is the structural condition of the sign as such, not a property limited to citational or \"parasitic\" uses. A sign that could not be repeated would not be a sign. The repeatability is what makes the sign *be* a sign, beyond the ostensive presence of the speaker, the receiver, the context, the intention. Austin's exclusion in the Eighth Lecture of *How to Do Things with Words* — the bracketing of \"non-serious\" performatives uttered in a play, in a poem, in soliloquy, in citation — is methodologically suspect because what Austin treats as the parasitic case is in fact the structural condition of the standard case. The \"serious\" performative is possible only because it can be cited, repeated, deployed in a play. Searle's reply in \"Reiterating the Differences\" (1977) misses this on multiple counts: it treats iterability as a property of citational uses rather than as the condition of any sign, it confuses my argument about the structural impossibility of the parasitic/non-parasitic distinction with a claim that \"all uses are parasitic,\" and it proceeds with a polemical haste that the philosophical issue did not warrant.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"*Iterability* — the necessary repeatability of any sign whatsoever — is the structural condition of the sign as such, not a property limited to citational or \"parasitic\" uses.","n":[]},{"t":"A sign that could not be repeated would not be a sign.","n":[]},{"t":"The repeatability is what makes the sign *be* a sign, beyond the ostensive presence of the speaker, the receiver, the context, the intention.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Austin's exclusion in the Eighth Lecture of *How to Do Things with Words* — the bracketing of \"non-serious\" performatives uttered in a play, in a poem, in soliloquy, in citation — is methodologically suspect because what Austin treats as the parasitic case is in fact the structural condition of the standard case.","n":[]},{"t":"The \"serious\" performative is possible only because it can be cited, repeated, deployed in a play.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Searle's reply in \"Reiterating the Differences\" (1977) misses this on multiple counts: it treats iterability as a property of citational uses rather than as the condition of any sign, it confuses my argument about the structural impossibility of the parasitic/non-parasitic distinction with a claim that \"all uses are parasitic,\" and it proceeds with a polemical haste that the philosophical issue did not warrant.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"'Signature Event Context' in Margins of Philosophy (1972, originally a 1971 conference paper at the Congrès des Sociétés de philosophie de langue française); Limited Inc abc (1977, Glyph 2, in reply to Searle); 'Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion' (1988, in Limited Inc, Northwestern); Of Grammatology (1967) on the gram and the trace as the structure of repetition. Reception: John R. Searle, 'Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida' (Glyph 1, 1977) — the polemical reply; J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962, especially Lecture VIII on 'parasitic' uses) — the target text; Stanley Cavell, 'Austin at Criticism' (Philosophical Review, 1965) and The Claim of Reason (1979) as the more careful Wittgensteinian-Austinian interlocutor; Henry Staten's Wittgenstein and Derrida (1984) on the productive parallels with the later Wittgenstein; Samuel Wheeler's Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy (2000) bridging the analytic divide; Marian Hobson's Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (1998) on the precise structure of the iterability argument.","works":["'Signature Event Context' in Margins of Philosophy (1972, originally a 1971 conference paper at the Congrès des Sociétés de philosophie de langue française)","Limited Inc abc (1977, Glyph 2, in reply to Searle)","'Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion' (1988, in Limited Inc, Northwestern)","Of Grammatology (1967) on the gram and the trace as the structure of repetition"],"reception":"John R. Searle, 'Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida' (Glyph 1, 1977) — the polemical reply; J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962, especially Lecture VIII on 'parasitic' uses) — the target text; Stanley Cavell, 'Austin at Criticism' (Philosophical Review, 1965) and The Claim of Reason (1979) as the more careful Wittgensteinian-Austinian interlocutor; Henry Staten's Wittgenstein and Derrida (1984) on the productive parallels with the later Wittgenstein; Samuel Wheeler's Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy (2000) bridging the analytic divide; Marian Hobson's Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (1998) on the precise structure of the iterability argument.","status":"The exchange — Searle's \"Reiterating the Differences\" (1977), my *Limited Inc abc* (1977), and the 1988 \"Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion\" — is the paradigm case of analytic-continental misunderstanding. Searle defended an inheritance of ordinary-language philosophy he took to be threatened by what he took to be relativist play; the actual argument was structural and rigorous. Stanley Cavell's earlier \"Austin at Criticism\" (1965) and *The Claim of Reason* (1979) are the more careful Wittgensteinian-Austinian engagements with the Eighth Lecture's exclusion. Henry Staten's *Wittgenstein and Derrida* (1984) and Samuel Wheeler's *Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy* (2000) work the parallels between iterability and the later Wittgenstein on rule-following. Searle's polemic survived in analytic philosophy of language; the philosophical issue is largely settled in continental and bridge work.","era":"1930-2004","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Limited Inc","page":"pp. 19–20","canonical":"","quote":"Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the current sense of this opposition), in a small or large unit, can be cited; put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable.","label":"Limited Inc, pp. 19–20"},{"n":2,"work":"Limited Inc","page":"p. 25","canonical":"","quote":"I return then to a point that strikes me as fundamental and that now concerns the status of events in general, of events of speech or by speech, of the strange logic they entail and that often passes unseen.","label":"Limited Inc, p. 25"},{"n":3,"work":"Limited Inc","page":"p. 106","canonical":"","quote":"This \"or\" marks another relationship. The \"confusion\" that Sarl denounces precipitously in Sec (\"Derrida in this argument confuses no less than three separate and distinct phenomena: iterability, citationality, and parasitism\"), this \"confusion\" is precisely that of which Sec warns: explicitly, insistently, /iterally.","label":"Limited Inc, p. 106"},{"n":4,"work":"Limited Inc","page":"pp. 105–106","canonical":"","quote":"I will add here (and is this only a matter of detail?) that parasitism (in the strict sense, if one can still speak of this) is always susceptible to the parasitism of citation, just as citationality can always be parasited by the parasite. The parasite parasites the limits that guarantee the purity of rules and of intentions, and this is not devoid of import for law, politics, economics, ethics, etc.","label":"Limited Inc, pp. 105–106"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"deconstruction-as-philosophy-or-literature","label":"Deconstruction as philosophy or literature: is deconstruction a rigorous post-Hegelian philosophical method or a literary practice that plays at the margins of philosophy?"},{"slug":"diff-rance-the-infrastructural-chain-and-the-quasi-transcend","label":"Différance, the infrastructural chain, and the quasi-transcendental: is *différance* a master-word, a name of God, or the rigorous quasi-synthetic condition of possibility-and-impossibility for any concept whatsoever?"},{"slug":"phallogocentrism-sexual-difference-and-the-deconstruction-of","label":"Phallogocentrism, sexual difference, and the deconstruction of 'woman': is the deconstructive use of 'woman' as figure for the undecidable a rigorous philosophical move or an erasure of empirical women?"},{"slug":"the-heidegger-relation","label":"The Heidegger relation: Nazism, spirit, and the Geschlecht series — can the conceptual apparatus be inherited without inheriting the politics?"},{"slug":"marx-hauntology-and-the-messianic-without-messianism","label":"Marx, hauntology, and the messianic without messianism: does *Specters of Marx* evacuate materialism in favor of a meditative messianism, or does it name a structural condition of justice that any inheritance of Marx must address?"},{"slug":"religion-without-religion-negative-theology-and-the-caputo-h","label":"Religion without religion, negative theology, and the Caputo–Hägglund debate: is the late work theological-without-theology, rigorously atheist, or structurally distinct from both?"}]}