Searle vs Derrida on Speech Acts
A canonical analytic / deconstructionist non-meeting of minds
Venue: Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context" (1972; English tr. 1977); Searle, "Reiterating the Differences" (1977); Derrida, *Limited Inc* (1977, expanded 1988).
A polite Searle paper, a furious 200-page Derrida reply, and forty years of citation arguing whether either party engaged the other.
Derrida's 1972 paper "Signature, Event, Context" engaged J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts and proposed (provocatively, with extensive parenthetical play) that the supposed margin of "non-serious" speech (acting, citation, fiction) cannot in fact be excluded from the central case of "serious" communication. John Searle, Austin's leading analytic continuator, replied in Glyph (1977) with a sharply dismissive "Reiterating the Differences": Derrida has misread Austin, his philosophy of language is confused, and the entire enterprise of deconstruction collapses on examination. Derrida responded with *Limited Inc* (1977, expanded 1988) — a long, partly satirical, partly serious reply that argued Searle had simply failed to read the original argument, while treating the failure as itself a confirmation of Derrida's point about the impossibility of fully present meaning. The exchange is the canonical illustration of analytic-deconstructionist mutual incomprehension and is cited on both sides as evidence of the other side's philosophical bankruptcy.
Historical Context
Searle was Berkeley; Derrida had recently begun visits to American philosophy departments. The institutional context was the early American academic reception of French theory (Yale, Cornell, Hopkins) and the corresponding analytic resistance. The personal animus survived the substantive disagreement — Searle continued to denounce deconstruction throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
Parties
Austin's speech-act theory makes precise distinctions (between serious / non-serious utterances, performative / constative, locutionary / illocutionary / perlocutionary) that Derrida systematically muddles; his "deconstruction" of these distinctions trades on a series of category errors.
Key arguments
- Iterability: the fact that words can be re-used in citation and fiction does not erase the distinction between primary and parasitic uses.
- Reading Austin: Derrida's account of what Austin "really said" is interpretively inaccurate, on basic reading of the text.
- Style: Derrida's rhetorical methods (puns, repetition, parenthetical excursions) are not philosophy; they are evasions of philosophical responsibility.
- Political-pedagogical: deconstruction's academic spread is a corruption of philosophical training, not an enrichment.
Allied schools
The "margin" Austin and Searle excluded as non-serious in fact constitutes the conditions of serious speech: iterability, citation, the possibility of misfire, of misreading, of being-detached-from-context are part of what makes meaning possible at all.
Key arguments
- Iterability is constitutive of any mark: a sign that could not be repeated outside its original context would not be a sign at all.
- Searle's analytic distinctions presuppose what they purport to explain (a stable serious-non-serious distinction); deconstruction shows the presupposition is unstable.
- The polemical form of Searle's reply, treating Derrida as not having argued at all, is itself an effect of the conditions Derrida describes — a refusal to read repeated as accusation.
- Reading is hard work; *Limited Inc* parodies Searle's refusal of that work as a way of dramatising the structural point.
Allied schools
Dimensions Engaged
Observer
Observer · Knowledge Extent: how stable are the distinctions on which philosophical analysis of language depends?
Information
Information · Ontological Status: is meaning constituted by stable intentional acts, or by the iterable conditions of any meaningful mark?
Verdict in retrospect
Neither side persuaded the other or the other's readers. Within analytic philosophy of language, Searle's tradition continued without much absorbing Derridean themes; within continental philosophy, Derrida's point about iterability shaped a generation of post-structuralist work on writing, inscription, and the philosophy of communication. The exchange remains the textbook example of disciplinary incommensurability — and a major piece of evidence for the diagnosis that the analytic-continental gap is methodological as much as substantive.
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Further reading
- Derrida, *Limited Inc* (1988; Northwestern UP)
- Searle, "Reiterating the Differences", *Glyph* 1 (1977)
- Wheeler, *Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy* (2000)