Encounters of the Third Kind: Performative Utterances and Forms of Life

J. L. Austin’s category of the perlocutionary has generally been neglected in favor of the category of the illocutionary. The former has often been reduced to the expression or production of affects, and somehow apart from the speech act itself. My goal here is to follow Stanley Cavell’s claim – explicit in his late essay ‘Passsionate and Performative Utterances’ and throughout his work – that not only is the perlocutionary dimension crucial to a conception of ordinary language as expressive, spoken by a human voice within a form of life; it is part of the precise description of language Austin aims at and is essential to the elucidation of speech acts– of what Austin calls ‘The total speech act in the total speech situation’. It thus calls for further elucidation of perlocutions as an integral part of the ‘total speech act’, pointing two directions of development of Ordinary Language Philosophy: towards a reassessment of ‘performance and achievement’, and, second, towards a philosophy of expression grounded in the grammatical investigation of perlocutions.

Cite this article: Laugier, S. (2020). Encounters of the third kind: performative utterances and forms of life. Inquiry, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2020.1784785