There was no shortage of entertainment in reading the back and forth between Searle and Derrida. Although the debate started with Derrida’s critique of Austin’s work regarding the notion of communication, it quickly turned into a battle between Derrida and Searle. Searle published a reply to Derrida’s critique of Austin in which he was ill pressed to suggest that Derrida was somehow attacking Austin. However, Searle only came to this conclusion due to his misreading of Derrida’s original work. Ironically enough, it was in his original work that one of Derrida’s main points was the “necessarily possibility” of such misreading. That is, that one can never be sure of one’s intended message.

Basically, what Austin views as “failure” or “infelicities”, Derrida views as a “possibility”. He believes that language should not be viewed from a unique perspective since this excludes a large part of communication. Derrida introduces the notion of iterability to emphasize the ways in which repeating utterances over and over again in various contexts can come to create different meanings and interpretations. Without iterability, we would be unable to question the meaning of these utterances. According to Derrida, by labeling speech acts as “parasitic”, Austin is assigning a pejorative identity to certain speech acts while considering others as “normal”. In other words, one cannot view the speaker’s discourse as possessing absolute power but rather as indeterminate and polysemous.

Responding to Searle’s accusations that he was attacking Austin, Derrida replied with “Limited Inc. a b c …” in which he broke down Searle’s misreading in order to show how things can be taken out of context to suggest a meaning other than what they were intended to convey. Poignantly, Derrida used this technique to creatively discuss the idea of “citationality”. That is, text can always be taken out of context, and placed in another context, outside the author’s control. Essentially, Derrida is explaining that his intent was never meant to attack Austin, but merely to discuss his theory of speech acts. This really underscores the idea behind the intention inherent in language and how it can easily be misinterpreted. Nowhere does Derrida claim that intentionality plays no role in meaning and communication; he simply does not regard it with a great degree of importance. Although Derrida recognizes the speaker’s intention, he cleverly points out that the intentions attached to the utterances of the speaker become ambiguous and unimportant once they are delivered since the speaker is no longer in control of them. Viewed in this light, Derrida is not attacking the notion of intentionality but is rather questioning its omnipresence in a speech act.

Interestingly enough, I got the impression that Searle’s reply to Derrida was emotionally charged, rather than backed by logic. In fact, Derrida, in discussing his debate with Searle, suggested that there is an “ethical directive that one actually read and engage with the work one is attempting to critique”, and that Searle failed to do this. As a result of this, many have actually suggested that to label the back and forth between Searle and Derrida as a debate is actually a misnomer. Frankly enough, I would have to agree – it never seemed evident that Searle, like Derrida points out, engaged in the discussion. Two sides have to engage with each other for a debate to exist; Searle was attacking his idea of what he believed Derrida to be saying rather than what Derrida actually wrote.