FREUD TO DERRIDA Derrida published a doctoral thesis on Husserl and geometry In the same year there was posthumously published a set of lectures by the Oxford philosopher J L Austin (1911–60), entitled How to Do Things with Words, which contained a theory of the different kinds of speech acts In 1967 Derrida published three highly original works (Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology) which bore clear marks of Austin’s influence The two philosophers, however, treated the same topic in very different ways Austin started, as early as 1946, from a distinction between two kinds of speech, constative and performative A constative sentence is used to state how things are as a matter of fact: ‘It is raining’, ‘The train is approaching’ Performative utterances, however, were not statements that could be judged and found true or false by comparison with the facts; they were speech acts that changed things rather than reported on them Examples are ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’, ‘I promise to meet you at ten o’clock’, ‘I bequeath my watch to my brother’ Austin went on to classify many different kinds of performative utterances, such as bets, appointments, vetoes, apologies, and curses, and to identify concealed performative elements in apparently straightforward statements In its developed stage his theory made room, in speech acts, for three elements: the locutionary, the illocutionary, and the perlocutionary force Suppose someone says to me ‘Shoot her!’ The locutionary act is defined by specifying the sense of ‘shoot’ and the reference of ‘her’ The illocutionary act is one of ordering, or urging, etc The perlocutionary act (which takes place only if the illocutionary act achieves its goal) would be described by, for example, ‘He made me shoot her’ Austin introduced many new technical terms to bring out distinctions between different kinds of speech acts and elements within them Each term, as introduced, is defined in lucid terms and is illuminated by examples The overall effect is to bring clarity, at a microscopic level, into a vast and important field of the philosophy of language Derrida’s method is quite different He, too, introduces technical terms in great profusion: for instance, ‘gram’, ‘reserve’, ‘incision’, ‘trace’, ‘spacing’, ‘blank’, ‘supplement’, ‘pharmakon’, and many others But he is much less willing to offer definitions of them, and often seems to reject the very request for a definition as somehow improper The relevance of his illustrative examples is rarely clear, so that even banal features of language take on an air of mystery 91