Derrida and Austin Reader Response

Derrida and Austin Reader Response

In reading both J.L Austin’s ‘How to do things with words’ and Jacque Derrida’s ‘Signature Event Context’ it’s apparent that both Authors take issue with many established concepts in linguistic theory and dominant notions of ‘common sense’.  Seen in Austin’s rejection of the binary idea that statements must be seen ‘either truly or falsely’ and Derrida’s rejection of Condillac’s presupposition of context. Although in many ways Derrida starts from where Austin left off, Derrida immediately takes issue with the word or signifier ‘communication’ itself. He recognises the danger in defining ‘communication’ as the ‘transmission of meaning’ due to its protean nature within various contexts and more importantly it’s semantic ‘polysemy’, ‘plurality’ and ‘several meanings’. It’s clear that Derrida’s intention is to refute previous presumptions and ideas of ‘common sense’ through rejecting the traditional logocentric and hierarchal approach to linguistics, best exemplified in dictionaries where a word or signifier has a primary meaning listed first followed by a secondary meaning and argues that context is reductive, in that it can ‘reduce’ the meaning of not only ‘communication’ but any word to a more unifying meaning that can be collectively agreed upon. In exploring this, Derrida develops Austin’s idea of ‘performativity’ in recognising that one can ‘communicate a movement’ in the literal and physical sense but also that ‘different or distant places can communicate between each other by means of a given passage’ in a figurative and metaphorical sense. Unlike Austin, Derrida is cautious to emphasise that one must not speak of linguistic communication as a metaphor for physical communication as with that assumption one could equally assume the literal meaning of something is what is figurative which becomes hugely problematic when attempting to distinguish the two and how we get from one to another and back.

Word Count: 300