ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a discussion of some of the more ethico-political attempts (primarily Judith Butler’s and Jacques Derrida’s) to critically appropriate Austin’s thinking and shows how these appropriations also depend on the familiar misunderstandings of Austin’s view. That is, they believe that Austin relies on ordinary language as a standard of correctness and that he tried (but failed) to make a clear-cut distinction between performatives and constatives.
This chapter’s (and the book’s) final section “Between confidence and hesitancy—attunement” is an effort to mark out the relevance of an Austinian philosophy and an ethics of speech beyond the theory of performatives. Austin’s reflections about the “performative aspects of speech” is further explored in relation to questions about truth, contextuality, and conventionality. What emerges here is an “ethics of speech” that is not anchored in a theory about performativity and not restricted to an analysis of the semantics of overtly morally loaded utterances but that takes the fact of linguistic vulnerability—the fact that “believing persons, accepting testimony, is the, or one main, point of talking”—quite seriously, which means that the communal effort of conceptual renegotiations comes to the fore of ethics.
