Continental Philosophy Review 35: 117–133, 2002.

© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

THE DEBATE Printed in
BETWEEN the Netherlands.
SEARLE AND DERRIDA 117

Language, philosophy and the risk of failure: rereading the

debate between Searle and Derrida

HAGI KENAAN
Department of Philosophy, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat Aviv 69978, Israel
(E-mail: kenaan@post.tau.ac.il)

Abstract. In this paper I return to one of the central points of contention in the renowned
debate between John Searle and Jacques Derrida with the aim of rethinking the role of suc-
cess and the place of failure in communication. What is the philosophical significance of
Austin’s decision to exclude from his investigation (in How to Do Things with Words) cer-
tain utterances that cannot qualify as successful? Examining the conflicting ways in which
Searle and Derrida understand and respond to Austin, I try to flesh out Derrida’s call to grant
failure (or the “negative”) the important place it deserves in our understanding of speech. Yet,
whereas for Derrida, the call to recognize failure as an “internal and positive condition” ul-
timately leads to a structural – albeit a deconstructive – critique of language’s conditions of
possibility, I focus instead on the implications which this insight may have for our understand-
ing of the actuality of language. Consequently, I argue that while Derrida’s critique subverts
the hegemony of success, it ironically remains, like Searle, distant from and external to the
actual reverberation of spoken language.

1. Introduction

The debate between Searle and Derrida testifies, after more than two decades,
to the depth of the breach between Continental and Anglo-American philoso-
phies of language. In this paper I wish to return to one of the central points of
contention in this debate, and to reread the disagreement between Searle and
Derrida in a manner that will allow us to revise our thinking about one of the
assumptions underlying the philosophical study of speech in the Anglo-Ameri-
can, pragmatic-linguistic tradition. According to this common yet tacit as-
sumption, the essential explanandum of communication theory is successful
communication, or, in other words, the successful communicative act is the
paradigm – the standard – for philosophical models and accounts of commu-
nication. This common-sense assumption is so obvious1 that it may not seem
worth mentioning. And yet, I believe that it needs to be unpacked further,
precisely in order to escape its apparent obviousness, and to call attention to
itself as operative in the philosophical (re)construction of the phenomenon of
speech.
118 HAGI KENAAN

I believe that the debate between Searle and Derrida over the significance
of a certain methodological move undertaken by J.L. Austin at the beginning
of How to Do Things with Words is very relevant here. Austin’s How to Do
Things with Words has been canonized as a founding text of the pragmatic-
linguistic philosophical tradition, a text whose pragmatic insights – and, in
particular, whose discovery of the “performative” – have been explicitly
embraced and developed by Searle (e.g., in his renowned Speech Acts). Searle
has not only been inspired by and committed himself to the agenda Austin
seems to have prescribed, but is also widely recognized as supplying Austin’s
intuitions with the theoretical backbone – the solid post-facto framework –
they seemed to need.2 It is not surprising, then, that Searle objects as he does
to Derrida’s reading of Austin, a reading which, in Searle’s view, neglects the
most important aspects of Austin philosophical contribution. And, in fact,
Derrida does pay very little attention to Austin’s analysis of successful speech
acts, critically focusing instead on Austin’s decision to exclude from his dis-
cussion certain utterances that cannot qualify as successful or felicitous, or
which are “hollow or void” in other particular ways.
I shall not deal here with Austin himself but, rather, with the conflicting
ways in which Searle and Derrida understand and respond to this exclusion
of his. Whereas for Searle Austin’s decision is clearly a simple “matter of
research strategy,” for Derrida it is a sign of a deeply problematic metaphysi-
cal standpoint.3 As we turn to Derrida, however, it must be said in advance
that his reading of Austin is not careful,4 and that his exact position on the issue
of success remains rather vague despite its suggestiveness. Although I con-
sider Searle’s blunt rejection of Derrida to be philosophically naïve I think
his criticism puts sufficient pressure on the Derridian insight to force us to
develop this insight in a way that is critically tenable. In this respect, my read-
ing of the debate attempts to explicate the sense in which a re-evaluation of
the notion of “success” is important for the philosophical study of communi-
cation.

2. Language and the risk of failure

Let us turn now to Derrida and Searle as they read Austin, and first, to Derrida’s
criticism of the way in which “Austin examines the possibility and origin of
failures or infelicities.” Derrida writes:

Austin’s procedure is rather remarkable and typical of that philosophical

tradition with which he would like to have so few ties. It consists in recog-
 THE DEBATE BETWEEN SEARLE AND DERRIDA 119
nizing that the possibility of the negative (in this case, of infelicities) is in
fact a structural possibility, that failure is an essential risk of the operations
under consideration; then, in a move which is almost immediately simulta-
neous, in the name of a kind of ideal regulation, it excludes that risk as
accidental, exterior, one which teaches us nothing about the phenomenon
being considered.5

What triggers Derrida’s criticism are remarks Austin makes when he specifi-
cally brackets from consideration two kinds of “unhappiness,” two “dimen-
sions of unsatisfactoriness” to which utterances might be subject. The first has
to do with what Austin calls “extenuating circumstances,” circumstances in
which the speaker’s responsibility over the communicative outcome is reduced
or abrogated, e.g., utterances made “under duress, or by accident, or owing to
this or that variety of mistakes . . . or otherwise unintentionally.” The second
kind of “voidness” excluded by Austin is manifest in instances in which lan-
guage is used “in ways which are parasitic upon its normal use,” e.g., when
it is not used seriously, is spoken by an actor on the stage, in soliloquy, etc.
As Derrida recognizes, Austin’s decision not to include in his investiga-
tion the aforementioned kinds of “void” is not unaware – Austin would prob-
ably be the last person to be unaware – of the extent to which speech acts are
generally susceptible to these kinds of default. And, indeed, in indicating that
he is “not including this kind of unhappiness,” that “all this we are excluding
from consideration,” Austin not only emphasizes that “features of this sort can
and do constantly obtrude into any particular case we are discussing,” but even
evokes the future possibility of integrating the cases he has chosen to exclude
into a more comprehensive theory: “I suppose some very general high-level
doctrine might embrace both what we have called infelicities and these other
‘unhappy’ features of the doing of actions.”6
According to Derrida, however, this methodological deferral of treatment
is still problematic in that “Austin does not ponder the consequences issuing
from the fact that a possibility – a possible risk – is always possible, and is in
some sense a necessary possibility.” In his view, Austin’s methodological
bracketing of failure is, in fact, a bracketing of the question of “whether – once
such a necessary possibility of infelicity is recognized – infelicity still consti-
tutes an accident.” The question arises: “What is a success when the possibil-
ity of infelicity continues to constitute its structure?”7
As is implied by Derrida’s rhetoric, Austin’s methodological gesture brack-
ets more than it wants to admit – it covers up a fundamental dimension of lan-
guage constituted by the possibility of failure. Or to put things in a way that
more directly ties them to the question concerning us, Derrida is suggesting
that communication’s standard of “success” is sustained by a paradigmatic
120 HAGI KENAAN

disregard for the status of failure. If we were, on the other hand, to grant fail-
ure (or the “negative”) the place it deserves, we could problematize commu-
nication’s paradigm of “success”. What it means to recognize the constitutive
role of failure and how this should affect our understanding of success –
Derrida does not say. He himself avoids the questions he expects Austin to
address, and the main glimpse into his own position is provided – again, indi-
rectly – by the series of questions with which he concludes:

I would therefore pose the following question: is this general possibility

necessarily one of a failure or trap into which language may fall or lose itself
as in an abyss situated outside of or in front of itself? What is the status of
this parasitism? In other words, does the quality of risk admitted by Austin
surround language like a kind of ditch or external place of perdition. . . . Or,
on the contrary, is this risk rather its internal and positive condition of pos-
sibility? Is that outside its inside, the very force and law of its emergence?8

But despite their suggestiveness, or perhaps precisely because they are so

suggestive, Derrida’s rhetorical questions fail to resonate with Searle. Searle
does “not find his [Derrida’s] arguments very clear.” He even acknowledges that
he may be “profoundly” misinterpreting Derrida.9 But acknowledging this pos-
sible misunderstanding on his part does not prevent Searle from a total (and un-
charitable) dismissal of Derrida’s position. Searle shows no interest in achieving
a better understanding of what Derrida is trying to say before rejecting Derrida’s
position as fundamentally flawed. (The logic here being that what is unclear must
ultimately be flawed, or as Wittgenstein puts it in the Tractatus: “Everything
that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can
be said clearly.”)10 Derrida, according to Searle, “has a distressing penchant for
saying things that are obviously false.”11 And this is clearly manifested in his
reading of Austin, a reading which “has misunderstood and mistated Austin’s
position” in such an extreme way that “Derrida’s Austin is unrecognizable.
He bears almost no relation to the original.”12
According to Searle, Derrida is particularly mistaken – “completely mis-
taken” – in his interpretation of the status of Austin’s exclusion because the
Austinian move is in full conformity with the idea that an understanding of
failure is essential to a complete understanding of communication. Austin’s
approach is thus, in spite of Derrida’s inferences, “perfectly straightforward,”
having absolutely no metaphysical bearing. Austin’s reason for the exclusion
“is simply this: if we want to know what it is to make a promise or make a
statement we had better not start our investigation” with hollow, void, or
unserious utterances, “because in a fairly obvious way such utterances are not
standard cases of promises and statements.”13 What Derrida has failed to see
 THE DEBATE BETWEEN SEARLE AND DERRIDA 121
is that the “original” Austin, Searle’s Austin, is simply taking the most
commonsensical route available. He begins where one ought to begin, that
is, where the standard lies – in the beginning. Derrida, according to Searle,
overinterprets Austin’s gesture of exclusion, a gesture which indicates that
Austin has got his priorities right. Austin has no intention of neglecting the
dimension of failure to which speech acts are subject, but he knows that this
dimension can properly be addressed only after the standard act of communi-
cation is explicated. Only once the paradigm case is clear does it make sense
to consider the more complicated, derivative, non-standard instances of speech.
(Analogically, if you want to know – or to explain to others – what a tree, a
guitar, or a watch is, you better not start by looking at trees with hollow
trunks, untuned guitars, or watches with broken springs, etc.)14 Hence, Searle
concludes:

Austin’s exclusion of these parasitic forms from consideration in his pre-

liminary discussion is a matter of research strategy; he is, in his words, ex-
cluding them “at present”; but it is not a metaphysical exclusion: he is not
casting them into a ditch or perdition, to use Derrida’s words. Derrida seems
to think that Austin’s exclusion is a matter of great moment, a source of
deep metaphysical difficulties, and that the analysis of parasitic discourse
might create some insuperable difficulties for the theory of speech acts. But
the history of the subject has proved otherwise. Once one has a general
theory of speech acts – a theory which Austin did not live long enough to
develop himself – it is one of the relatively simpler problems to analyze
the status of parasitic discourse, that is, to meet the challenge contained in
Derrida’s question. . . . Writings subsequent to Austin’s have answered this
question [i.e., Searle’s own work]. But the terms in which the question can
intelligibly be posed and answered already presuppose a general theory of
speech acts. Austin correctly saw that it was necessary to hold in abeyance
one set of questions . . . until one has answered a logically prior set of ques-
tions about “serious” discourse. But the temporary exclusion of these ques-
tions within the development of the theory of speech acts, proved to be just
that – temporary.15

For Searle, then, Derrida’s attempt to problematize the status granted to lin-
guistic failure is based on a simple misunderstanding which can be easily
located and corrected. Derrida has simply got a few facts wrong. He mistak-
enly thinks that Austin’s exclusion is intended as permanent, and he fails to
notice that the philosophy of language – and Searle in particular – has since
managed to systematize the results of Austin’s experimental work and pro-
vide a theory that accounts for the “infelicities” which Austin did not live long
enough to deal with.16 Having such a theory, “it is one of the relatively sim-
pler problems . . . to meet the challenge contained in Derrida’s questions.”
122 HAGI KENAAN

What this means is that if Derrida had read Austin properly and had been up
to date on speech act theory, he would have had no reason to raise his objec-
tions. Indeed, the problem Derrida raises is not really a problem at all. In other
words, according to Searle, Derrida is barking up the wrong tree.
But if we return to Derrida’s questions about the status of communicative
failure we see that Searle does not satisfactorily answer them. This is not
because he fails to provide sufficient evidence for his case but because the
case he makes is ultimately irrelevant to the problem Derrida raises. When
Derrida asks, “Does the quality of risk admitted by Austin surround language
like a kind of ditch . . . Or, on the contrary, is this risk rather its internal and
positive condition of possibility?” Searle replies, “He [Austin] is . . . exclud-
ing them ‘at present’; but it is not a metaphysical exclusion: he is not casting
them into a ditch.” That is, in reply to Derrida’s question of where the risk of
failure is located, Searle tells him when it will be addressed.
Whereas Derrida challenges philosophy’s (e.g., Austin’s) inability to em-
brace failure as language’s “internal and positive condition of possibility,”
Searle takes him to be saying that philosophy must recognize the fact that
communication is always susceptible to failure. Yet, because Searle consid-
ers such a claim to be so obvious that, in his view, no one would really want
to deny it, he does not understand why Derrida uses it as a critique of – of all
people – Austin. In other words, Searle understands Derrida to be arguing that
since Austin did not acknowledge the intrinsic susceptibility of communica-
tion to failure he excluded failure from his analysis. This, in his view, is an
inexcusable reading which can only be understood in terms of Derrida’s “dis-
tressing penchant for saying things that are obviously false.”
How else can Derrida be read on this point? We may begin by noting that
what primarily concerns Derrida are not the consequences of excluding from
discussion certain cases of failure, but, rather, the presuppositions on which
such an exclusion rests. The target of Derrida’s criticism is not the way phi-
losophy – or philosophy’s progressive representative, Austin17 – handles non-
standard cases of communication, but the metaphysical framework that
initially enables philosophy to make use of (or depend on) a substantial dis-
tinction between standard and non-standard, between success and failure,
in communication. Derrida suggests that the negative be granted an essen-
tial place in the communication framework. He does not ask that we make
sure to supplement accounts of standard speech with accounts of non-stand-
ard cases. His intent is to call into question the legitimacy of a philosophi-
cal principle which, disguised in the form of a truism, determines what
standard speech is – what the standard for our investigation of the phenom-
enon should be.
 THE DEBATE BETWEEN SEARLE AND DERRIDA 123
As has already been suggested, Derrida is not very helpful in explaining
what we lose when we accept success as communication’s standard. He does,
however, deconstruct the very notion of an ordinary standard for language,
and the crux of his critique seems to be based on the idea of iterability.
Iterability is a mark for the absence of origins. The promise I make to a friend
cannot be said to be more original than the promise made by an actor on stage
because my language always necessarily takes the form of a citation: I prom-
ise as I’ve seen one promise. Presenting the condition of iterability as consti-
tutive of the possibility of language, Derrida argues that the distinction between
standard and non-standard (parasitic) speech is groundless; there is simply no
original or rudimentary domain of speech that can ground this distinction. I
am less interested here, however, in Derrida’s argument concerning iterability.
I think that even if we find the argument convincing – and I personally do not
– then it still leaves us in the dark as to what it means to integrate into the
picture of communication a principle of failure or negativity. What would it
mean to overcome the rule of success? Moreover, can the move beyond suc-
cess reveal to us anything new about the phenomenon of speech? In what
follows I shall try to answer these questions.

3. The prioritization of success

In fleshing out the “positive” implication of Derrida’s insight it would first

be helpful to clarify the asymmetrical roles played by success and failure in
the conceptualization of communication. We need, in particular, to see that
the systematic prioritization of success (over and against failure) is typically
obscured once we focus, as Searle does, on the apparent openness of the com-
municative act to both success and failure. The susceptibility of communica-
tion to failure is, of course, a commonplace, and in framing the study of
communication the philosophy of language is typically prepared to also ad-
dress instances of communicative failure. Nevertheless, on a deeper and more
fundamental level, the philosophy of language disavows the significance of
failure and embraces the standard of success. To appreciate this we need to
note how the possibility of failure is dependent on a context in which the fully
constituted communicative act is already present. Failure is understood as a
possibility into which the communicative act may eventually fall or deterio-
rate. This means that failure is not constitutive of what a speech act is but,
rather, only functions as a “trap into which language may fall or lose itself as
in an abyss situated outside of or in front of itself.”18 In other words, although
failure is taken to be a condition that constantly haunts the communicative
124 HAGI KENAAN

act, a condition into which specific communicative acts regularly fall, it is

nevertheless not understood as intrinsic but as always exterior to the essence
of the phenomenon. Likewise, the conceptualization of the communicative act
is, at heart, independent of any possible failure that may (or may not) turn out
to be its fate. At the same time, the communicative act must always be struc-
turally open to the possibility of failure (or success). What allows particular
speech acts to fail (or succeed) is that their internal structure is success-di-
rected. Success is a structural condition of speech. Unlike failure, it not only
belongs to the contingent circumstances that color specific speech acts, but is
understood as belonging to the essence of communication.
To put this differently, we may say that for the philosophy of language suc-
cess is intrinsic to the idea of communication: one can be said to communi-
cate only when one communicates successfully. What underlies this common
sense is the predominant conception that communication is an intrinsically
purposeful or aim-directed phenomenon. Indeed, the communicative act is
typically understood as an intentional act essentially directed at the aim of
successful communication.19 It is an act that fully becomes what it is only when
it fulfils its intrinsic purpose, only when it is successful. And it is successful,
realizing its essential goal, only when it communicates.20
Why shouldn’t this framework be considered so natural that philosophers
simply adopt it? Does the standard of success really deserve to be called a
prejudice, one that needs to be called into question? Alternatively, in what sense
is this framework a misleading one, or an unsatisfying one?

4. The construction of speech

There are a few matters worthy of notice here, and we may begin by pointing
out that the internalization of the success standard is not in itself a philosophi-
cally innocuous move. It is a consequential move that preemptively qualifies
and ultimately distorts the character of the field of speech. As the rule of suc-
cess is already operative at the preliminary stage when philosophy construes
the setting for its discussion of communication, the phenomena of speech are
inevitably forced into a reductive dualistic structure: as instances of commu-
nication, they can either succeed or not succeed, i.e., fail. They either accom-
plish their intrinsic aim, becoming what they should be, or fall short of that
standard. Their purposiveness allows no other option. Moreover, these two
possibilities open to speech are not only antithetical, but are also hierarchi-
cally ordered. Whereas the possibility of success is posited as essential to the
nature of speech, failure is thematized as accidental; success serves as the
 THE DEBATE BETWEEN SEARLE AND DERRIDA 125
paradigm while failure is merely an exception (albeit a common one) to the
rule. This means that those instances of speech in the communication frame-
work that cannot be labeled “successful” have no autonomous standing. Not
only are they posited as secondary, but they are construed as derivative, as
conceptually dependent on the framework’s standard of success. Speech phe-
nomena that do not meet the standard of success can only be defined nega-
tively: they are substandard, irregular, defective, etc. They are what they are
precisely because they are not what they should be.
Intrinsic to the purposiveness of communication, success governs the
thematization of these speech phenomena from the moment they’re introduced
into the framework. Given the standard of success, the communication model
preemptively fits the character of the phenomena under consideration into the
binary structure implied by the standard. In applying a determinate rule to the
phenomena it appropriates, the model (re)constructs a phenomenological field
that consists of two – and only two – mutually exclusive and complementary
domains: the domain of communicative acts that are true to and that reflect
their essence; and the domain encompassing all the rest, namely, deformations
of the rule, or failures. In other words, communication is construed as a phe-
nomenon which necessarily adopts one of two opposing values. It either meets
or fails to meet its predetermined standard (What standard? The standard of
success).
The first major problem with this binary construction of communication
has to do with the fact that the equation of non-success with failure covers up
a wide intermediate spectrum – an intricate phenomenological landscape ly-
ing between absolute success and failure – in which the actual life of language
takes place. In this context, I think that Derrida’s suggestion to think of the
risk of failure as communication’s “internal and positive condition” may be
understood as a call for reclaiming this intermediate spectrum of phenomena.
Ascribing to failure an “internal” role in (the constitution of) communica-
tion implies that success no longer has an exclusive monopoly over the
phenomenological field. Ascribing to it a “positive” role means that failure is
an autonomous factor and not just the negative derivation of success. And as
success ceases to be the only organizing principle of speech phenomena, the
binary structure that it dictates also loses its force. The introduction of failure
as a second constitutive principle means that the rule of success can no longer
bifurcate the phenomenological field under consideration. The field no longer
presents itself only through the opposition of success/failure, but unfolds as a
spectrum in which success and failure are but the end points.
But, we might now ask, what is the significance of uncovering this spec-
trum? What does this phenomenological spectrum consist of?
126 HAGI KENAAN

5. Between understanding and misunderstanding

Situated between the end points of success and failure, we immediately rec-
ognize the middle ground of partial understanding as a domain of varying
degrees and types of combinations of success and failure. If you say to me, “I
am going home now” and I don’t actually know where you live or what you
call “home,” then my general understanding of what you are saying can en-
velop a deep misunderstanding of where you are actually headed once we say
goodbye (“What? Are you actually leaving the country?”). In the philosophy
of language this kind of example is typically analyzed in terms of the gaps
between the meaning of sentences, the speaker’s intended meaning, and the
meaning of utterances issued on particular occasions. But other kinds of gaps
may also concern the force or mood of the utterance. Hence, for example, I
may fully understand where you are heading when you talk of going home
but, at the same time, fail to understand the expressive or performative aspects
of your speech. That is, I might fail to grasp that your words not merely de-
scribe your intentions but express discontent or anger, or, alternatively, that
they are uttered sarcastically, or meant as a joke, or are simply an indirect
request to be offered a ride home. These kinds of combinations of understand-
ing and misunderstanding have not become the center of philosophical dis-
cussion but they have not escaped the attention of philosophers of language.
When they are discussed, however, they do not seem to provide a reason for
questioning the paradigm of success. Partial communication is typically un-
derstood as a matter of a measured balance between the fundamentally suc-
cessful mechanism of a communicative act and certain discrete disruptive
points of failure. As the basic relation between success and failure remains
external, however, the concept of “success” remains the rule in relation to
which failure is a derivative substandard.
But is partial understanding necessarily the result of discretely analyzable
forms of failure? Is this the only way understanding and misunderstanding can
meet? Are the depths of misunderstanding always definite or determinate? And,
more specifically, are the gaps in our understanding always informational in
character? I believe the answer to these questions is negative. However, I can
also see how, by confining ourselves to the paradigmatic examples employed
by the philosophy of language, we may easily be tempted to answer these ques-
tions in the affirmative. As long as the horizons of the philosophical study of
speech are set (or governed) by such examples as “the cat is on the mat,” “Wulf
is a dog,”21 or “the ball missed the hoop,”22 then no room indeed will be made
for a consideration of the more tangled and complex – but not less common –
ways in which misunderstanding dwells within understanding.
 THE DEBATE BETWEEN SEARLE AND DERRIDA 127
When the doctor says to A that she has no more than six months to live, A
does not understand (she actually says she does not understand, and asks the
doctor to repeat what he has just told her). She does not understand because
she understands so well. A friend whom I haven’t seen for years comes for a
visit. He tells me how happy he is with his new life – yes, it appears that he
has made quite a few changes – and asks me if I understand. Do I understand?
Can I understand? What would understanding him mean? Let us consider a
completely different example. How is understanding and misunderstanding
applicable to the debate between Searle and Derrida? On the one hand, we
may have – commentators certainly have had – sufficient reason to regard this
philosophical communication as unsuccessful. And yet, has the communica-
tion between the two thinkers simply failed? Has it not communicated? And
even if we wish to speak of partial success here, can we explain that partiality
in terms of specific points of failure without which this communication would
have achieved success? Is it so easy to locate the misunderstanding that un-
derlies Searle’s reply to Derrida? Was it Derrida’s smoke and mirrors and
bravado that barred Searle from understanding? Or has Derrida simply failed
to express his intentions properly? Perhaps Searle, lacking necessary back-
ground information, failed to grasp what Derrida was saying? Or does Searle
refuse (or pretend not) to understand? Along these same lines, has Derrida
simply failed on this or that point to understand Austin? Indeed, has Searle
successfully understood Austin? Is Searle’s speech act theory informed by a
successful understanding of Austin while Derrida’s sympathetic yet critical
reading is driven by a simple misunderstanding?
I think that the debate between Searle and Derrida is a good example – and
in no way an unusual example – of a case of communication that does not lend
itself to the strict opposition between success and failure, understanding and
misunderstanding. It is a communication that withstands the question of suc-
cess and that, as such, exemplifies the manner in which the success/failure
dichotomy distorts the actual character of the speech phenomenon. More spe-
cifically, by considering the particular complexity of the communicative in-
teraction between the two thinkers, we may learn not only about how irrelevant
the measure of success is for understanding the character of the event, but how
the application of this standard abolishes the intricate net of varying senses
of success and failure, of understanding and misunderstanding, which are
multivariously constitutive of the communicative event. The possibility of
uncovering these other senses is tied, in my view, to yet another dimension of
speech which is also abolished by the standard of success. This dimension may
become clearer once we take a second look at that indeterminate field lying
between success and failure.
128 HAGI KENAAN

6. Success and the homogenization of the ordinary

Another look at this intermediate field reveals the presence of types of speech
whose form defies the very applicability of the standard of success to begin
with. A man, standing on a balcony on the thirty-sixth floor, is calling out the
names and birthdays of all his previous lovers. In a cafe two young women
are making funny, quick, but rather nonsensical remarks about the appearance
of passers-by. As observed above, these cases are among the kinds of talk that
Austin moves to exclude from consideration. Together with other, simpler,
forms of infelicity, Austin regards the soliloquy, the actor’s address to his
audience, slips of the tongue, poetic expressiveness, and delusional and non-
serious talk as utterances that should all be bracketed until a more general
theory of speech acts can accommodate them. Austin’s move is explicitly
committed to what must methodologically come first, that is, to utterances
“issued in ordinary circumstances.”23
In fact, with this methodological act of deferral Austin is setting the stage
for his investigation – and for a whole philosophical paradigm – in a manner
that takes for granted what ordinary speech is, or what the ordinary is for
speech. More specifically, in this demarcation of a line between standard and
marginal cases of speech Austin embraces and reaffirms a conception of or-
dinary speech whose parameters are determined by the rule of success. His
gesture may indeed seem to have been made on an ad hoc basis. Neverthe-
less, it constitutes a point of no return. It irreversibly determines the status of
those cases in which success is not an issue. Since they are no longer in a
position to put any pressure on the rule, the status of these cases can no longer
be called into question. What’s more, these cases pose no risk to the standard
itself, having already been labeled exceptional deformations. (And this is
precisely the logic behind Searle’s justification of Austin’s exclusion: since
the excluded cases are non-standard they have no bearing on the standard; as
such, they can be bracketed until the standard-theory is developed.) In this
respect, saying that Austin’s exclusion marks a point of “no return” should
not be understood to imply that speech theory has failed in becoming suffi-
ciently general to account for the excluded cases. It means, rather, that once
the theory was general enough to accommodate these cases, it no longer al-
lowed for certain very important questions to be asked. Once the poetic, the
non-serious, the fantastical or utterly imaginative, the uncontrollable, and the
irresponsible are labeled as non-standard or marginal cases of speech, they
are unavoidably bound to serve as a constant affirmation of the uniformity of
the ordinary. That is to say, once defined as the exceptional substandard of
speech, these cases can only uphold the view that ordinary speech is funda-
 THE DEBATE BETWEEN SEARLE AND DERRIDA 129
mentally unaffected – even if occasionally “infected” – by the “ill” to which
they themselves are heir.24
But what can we hope to gain by rethinking the status of these allegedly
marginal cases in which we speak to ourselves, or to no one in particular –
cases in which we speak without knowing what we want to say, when our
tongue gets the better of us? By rethinking these dimensions of speech which
defy the standard of success we will be in a position to appreciate how they
are not only typical of what Austin called “extenuating circumstances,” but
that they belong to the essence of the language phenomenon, to the very heart
of our life with language.
By loosening the binary grip of the success standard we open up the pos-
sibility of releasing ourselves from the influence of a particular conception
of communication which levels down and distorts – which prevents us from
recognizing – the rich heterogeneous and complex nature of ordinary language.
And thus, in resisting the rule of success we would be taking the first steps in
recovering for ordinary language the roots it has in such dimensions of expe-
rience as the aesthetic, the ethical, the fantastical, the incoherent, irrational,
artificial, non-serious, nonsensical, ironic, obsessed, fixated, symbiotic, in-
continent, self-indulgent, self-deceptive, etc. We would, in other words, be on
our way to showing that the essence of ordinary speech is not as ordinary as
philosophers of language seem to believe.

7. Resisting the standard: toward a phenomenology of speech

In this context, there remains another question we have not yet asked. What
is it that makes the rule of success inapplicable to those cases of speech which,
as we have seen, defy its standard? This is an important question. My first re-
sponse is to suggest that the forms of speech of concern to us here are not
regulated by that definitive telos which allows the philosophy of language to
speak of success in the first place. At an earlier stage in this paper I made the
connection between the standard of success and a teleological conception of
communication. Indeed, the act of speech is typically conceptualized in terms
of a regulative and constitutive telos which implies that the essential aim of
speech is to communicate. In itself, this phrasing is underdetermined. More
precisely, it is dependent on how one interprets or specifies what is meant by
the term “to communicate.”
In the Anglo-American linguistic tradition there is a general consensus about
how we should understand this term. This consensus derives from the uniform
manner in which the philosophy of language sets the stage for investigating
130 HAGI KENAAN

speech. What serves as a backdrop for that stage is a limited, at times even
dull, picture of human experience that allows and even encourages philoso-
phers to interpret the telos of communication as the transmission of seman-
tically structured, intended, content from one person to another. For the
philosophy of language, the so-called speech situation is thus fundamentally
equivalent to a functional, conventionally governed setting in which compe-
tent “language users,” or “language practitioners,” employ language in order
to communicate and communicate in order to achieve specific – practical or
theoretical – ends. This setting of sender (speaker), receiver (hearer), medium
of transmission, and message transmitted25 ineluctably determines a narrow,
instrumental telos that locates speech in between agents – not to speak of
human beings – whose relation to themselves, to their language, and to each
other is governed by the form “in order to.” Indeed, where language users can
only say to one another such phrases as ”there’s the door,”26 “That bar is the
standard meter stick,” 27 “Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals,”28 or “I’d like
a gin and tonic, please,”29 it is not surprising that the standard of success reigns
so completely. What would happen if we refuse to look at speech through such
a narrow teleological prism? Will success remain a standard for our under-
standing? Think of a mother who speaks softly to her daughter while comb-
ing the child’s hair. Is she transmitting a message? Is success at all on the
horizon of her speaking? And what about those things we uttered upon see-
ing that strikingly beautiful bird sitting up in a tree? Or when two brothers
share a childhood memory they know so well? Is it the content they are try-
ing to convey? No, for the content is already known.
It is probably clear by now that my attempt to question the standard of suc-
cess is ultimately tied to a more general concern with breaking out of a deeply
entrenched understanding of communication that dominates much of our think-
ing about language. I cannot supply here a comprehensive critique of this
influential conception of communication. What I have tried to do is examine
how immanent the standard of success is to it, showing that this standard is
not only a symptom but also a principal characteristic of the setting in which
speech becomes – or is reconstructed, or staged as – a subject of the philoso-
phy of language.
This paper began as an attempt to rethink the relationship between success
and failure in the context of the debate between Searle and Derrida, a debate
which, itself a complex and unresolved case of communication, exemplifies
the need to problematize the standard of success in communication. I have
assumed the task of fleshing out answers to the central questions posed by
Derrida: “Does the quality of risk admitted by Austin surround language like
a kind of ditch or place of perdition which speech . . . can escape by remain-
 THE DEBATE BETWEEN SEARLE AND DERRIDA 131
ing ‘at home’ . . . in the shelter of its essence and telos? Or, on the contrary, is
this risk rather its internal and positive condition of possibility?”30 Focusing
on the significance of granting failure (or the “negative”) the important place
it deserves in our understanding of speech, I have tried to show why, despite
its apparent obviousness, the standard of success needs to be resisted. Yet,
whereas for Derrida the call to recognize failure as an “internal and positive
condition” ultimately leads to a structural – albeit a deconstructive – critique
of language’s conditions of possibility, I have focused instead on the impli-
cations which this insight may have for our understanding of the actuality of
language. My aim in this paper was not to demonstrate that failure is, in some
sense, constitutive of the possibility of success, but to show how the very logic
of success and failure prevents us from encountering fundamental dimensions
of the phenomenon of speech that deserve philosophy’s attention. I have pur-
sued this direction because I think that, while Derrida’s critique subverts the
hegemony of success, it ironically remains, like Searle, distant from and ex-
ternal to the actual reverberation of spoken language.
What needs to be asked, in other words, is not the binary structured ques-
tion of whether the risk of failure is – or is not – language’s condition of pos-
sibility. The question is not simply about the tenability of a view of language
that disregards the essential place of failure (I agree with Derrida that such a
view is not tenable), but, rather, about what it can mean for us – what possi-
bilities can open up for us – once our thinking about language learns to em-
brace the condition of failure. To put this more directly, I think that the attempt
to problematize the hegemony of success can become genuinely significant
only if it enables us to listen and hear the speaking of language in ways we
haven’t heard it before.

Notes

1. This assumption is so deeply rooted that it prevails in the whole spectrum of the litera-
ture, from textbooks on communication and linguistically-oriented treatments of the
subject to the most sophisticated philosophical accounts. I quote just a few examples.
Cf. A. Akmajian, R. Demers, and R. Harnish, Linguistics: An Introduction to Language
and Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 391–392: “Linguistic com-
munication is easily accomplished but, as it turns out, not so easily explained; any theory
of linguistic communication worth the title must attempt to answer the following ques-
tion: How does successful communication work?” A similar statement can be found in
the introduction to the communication theory expounded by Kent Bach and Robert. M.
Harnish in Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1979), p. xiii. See also Katz’s account of the “communicative act” in The Philosophy of
Language (New York: Harper and Row, 1966): pp. 103–104: “The Speaker . . . chooses
132 HAGI KENAAN

some message he wants to convey to his listeners . . . this message is encoded in the form
of a phonetic representation of an utterance by means of the system of linguistic rules
with which the speaker is equipped. . . . Hence, because the hearer employs the same
system of rules to decode what the speaker employs to encode, an instance of the suc-
cessful communication occurs [my emphasis]. In the Language of Thought (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1975), Fodor puts the question of communication as follows:
“The fundamental question that a theory of language seeks to answer is: How is it pos-
sible for speakers and hearers to communicate by the production of acoustic wave forms?
To put it more precisely: under certain conditions the production by speaker S of an
acoustic object U which is a token of a linguistic type . . . suffices to communicate a
determinate message between S and any other suitably situated L-speaker. How is this
fact possible?” p. 103. Further on (p. 106), Fodor explicitly presents successful commu-
nication as the “paradigm case” for his investigation. The fact that the terms “model of
communication” and “model of successful communication” are typically, and uncritically,
interchangeable in the literature is even evident in Gareth Evans’s renowned The Vari-
eties of References (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 21. Introducing the
Fregean “model of the communicative situation” which “serves as a clear and effective
benchmark” for his investigation, Evans interchangeably speaks of the “Fregean model
of successful communication.”
2. See, for example, The Philosophy of Language, ed. A.P. Martinich (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), p. 103: “Austin presented a tentative . . . theory of speech acts
in How to Do Things with Words. John Searle substantially revised that theory and pre-
sented what has since become the standard theory in Speech Acts.”
3. Jacques Derrida’s “Signature Event Context” and John Searle’s “Reiterating the Differ-
ences: A Reply to Derrida” first appeared in the form of a polemic in Glyph 1 (1977).
Derrida’s reply to Searle, “Limited Inc abc,” appeared in Glyph 2 (1978). They were
reprinted together with “Signature Event Context” in Limited Inc, ed. G. Graff (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1988).
4. For a critical discussion of “Derrida’s Austin” which resists the common temptation to
reproduce the patterns of the debate, see Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 55–127.
5. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” Glyph 1, (1977): 15. Hereafter, SEC.
6. J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J.O. Urmson and M. Sbisa (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 21.
7. Derrida, SEC, p. 15.
8. Derrida, SEC, p. 17.
9. John Searle, “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida,” Glyph 1 (1977): 198.
Hereafter, Reply,
10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, tr. C.K. Ogden (London: Routledge,
1981), p. 78, 4.116.
11. Searle, Reply, p. 203.
12. Searle, Reply, p. 204.
13. Searle, Reply, p. 204.
14. As Searle points out, “parasite” utterances are not simply more complicated than stand-
ard cases but are, in fact, logically dependent on the standard. “The existence of the
pretended form of the speech act is logically dependent on the possibility of the non-
pretended speech act” (p. 205).
 THE DEBATE BETWEEN SEARLE AND DERRIDA 133
15. Searle, Reply, p. 205.
16. In A Pitch of Philosophy, Cavell provides an alternative reading of Austin’s “exclusion”:
“It is hard to conceive that one who has read through Austin’s comparatively small quan-
tity of writing will fail to recognize that the headings Austin suggests for what the doc-
trine he has just excluded is a doctrine or a theory of – ‘extenuating circumstances’ and
‘factors reducing or abrogating the agent’s responsibility’ (which Austin places in quo-
tation marks as indicating, I assume, that he is quoting something he takes as well enough
known to need no more than reminding of) – are headings that refer to Austin’s own
work on excuses, summarized, as said earlier, in one of his thirteen collected papers.
. . . I accordingly conclude that Austin has excluded this general doctrine only from
explicit discussion in How to Do Things with Words (‘I am not going into the general
doctrine here’), that in saying so he is implicitly including it, in his way, in asking us to
‘remember’ its pertinence” (p. 86). And thus, according to Cavell, one should read Derrida
as having “iterated Austin’s views without knowing this piece of them.”
17. For Derrida, Austin is clearly the most interesting and radical philosopher in the Anglo-
American tradition of the philosophy of language (SEC, p. 13). In this respect, his cri-
tique of Austin is a fortiori a critique of the philosophical tradition to which Austin
belongs.
18. SEC, p. 17.
19. Although a successful communicative outcome is in itself not always the sole purpose
of communication – serving as a means for achieving other ends – it is nevertheless
commonly regarded as communication’s principal aim among a series of objectives
ordered by the relation of means to ends.
20. Indeed, it should not be surprising that the term “communication” serves to designate
the act itself, its constitutive purpose, and the fulfillment of that purpose in the act’s
successful outcome.
21. Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Com-
mitment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 160.
22. Brandom, Making It Explicit, p. 259.
23. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p. 22.
24. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p. 22.
25. See, for example, how A.P. Martinich introduces the “elements of communication” in
the opening of his Communication and Reference (Berlin and Hawthorne, NY: Walter
de Gruyter, 1984): “At least three things are needed in an act of communication: a mes-
sage, a sender, and a receiver . . . human beings however cannot communicate with one
another except through some medium that carries the message from the sender to the
receiver . . . for a philosophical treatment of communication in general, then, we need
to consider four element: message, sender, receiver, and medium.”
26. William G. Lycan, Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction (London and
New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 189.
27. Brandom, Making It Explicit, p. 469.
28. Brandom, Making It Explicit, p. 370.
29. Stephen Neale, “Context and Communication,” in Definite Descriptions, ed. Gary Ostertag
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 321.
30. Derrida, SEC, p. 17.
134 HAGI KENAAN