Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2019
Abstract
Austin's speech act theory was transformed thanks to Derrida's deconstruction into Butler's conception of performative gender identity. That is a common interpretation of the "history" of the term performativity.
This approach tends to overlook contribution of other poststructural philosophers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari to the current debates on the contexts and meanings of the term. The present study scrutinizes reflections of the speech act theory by these authors.
The aim is to shed more light on how is the linguistic dimension of speech acts related to its ethical or political dimensions. To do so, the paper focuses on the performative force and iterability of utterances.