My word is my curse: Cavell’s reading of Austin after Derrida

In his influential essay “Signature, Event, Context” (1972), Derrida puts forward a shocking appraisal of Austin’s ground-breaking doctrine of the performative. He interprets Austin’s treatment of the failures that may affect performative utterances as the repetition of the traditional philosophical treatment of the negative. In this article, I will focus on an overlooked development of Derrida’s encounter with Austin’s text, namely, the response to the aforementioned appraisal that Stanley Cavell offers in his A Pitch of Philosophy (1994). I will show that, after and pace Derrida, Cavell reads Austin’s doctrine of the performative as the exploration of the tragic dimension that is peculiar to performative utterances and consists in the terrifying risk of unintelligibility. To this end, I will examine Cavell’s alternative interpretation of Austin’s treatment of the failures that concern actions and utterances in general, and his unpacking of Austin’s anti-moralist motto “my word is my bond” into the tragic “my word is my curse.” In particular, I will cast light on Cavell’s understanding of the relation between meaning and intention, as alternative to Derrida’s, that underpins his overall interpretation of Austin’s doctrine.