Stanley Cavell, Religion, and Continental Philosophy by Dahl Espen

Author:Dahl, Espen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253012067
Publisher: Indiana University Press

According to Cavell, Derrida’s failure to notice this quotation is symptomatic of a general unwillingness on Derrida’s behalf to detect Austin’s distinctive voice, more specifically the peculiar profundity implied in Austin’s voice. The ignorance of the quotation is perhaps due to the common perception of Austin as averse to profundity as such (i.e., not only the false profundity of philosophy that he openly scorns), and hence the tendency to regard him as superficial. However, the tragic depth is explicitly inscribed in Austin’s texts, and, as Cavell puts it, “soon the diagnosis of the sense of his superficiality darkens” (PoP, 88).

What is the relation between this invocation of the tragic and the two temporary “exclusions”? Regarding the first exclusion, Austin thinks that excuses (and justifications) in general presuppose that someone has done something untoward and is trying to get out of it. In excuses, “we admit that it was bad but don’t accept full, or even any, responsibility.”7 Austin hints at this in his lectures on speech acts, referring to “extenuating circumstances.” Cavell finds a strange relation between Austin’s and Freud’s “slips”: for Freud, slips are matters of over-determination that always reveal more about yourself than you want to be—and yet have to be—answerable for, whereas for Austin, slips betray the tendency, due to our embodied being, to produce effects and consequences that we cannot fully be responsible for (CW, 333). To consider human actions to be in need of excuses presupposes that actions are not under our full control and that they can be done unintentionally, unwillingly, involuntarily, and so forth—in short, excuses presuppose the fallibility implied in human finitude. Hence, Austin’s writing of excuses concerns the “unending vulnerability of human action” (PoP, 87).

Inadvertent actions seem to be the price for being capable of acting in the face of human finitude, for having a body, and for our exposure to the world. From this perspective, Cavell finds it surprising that Derrida accuses Austin of considering failures to be external to our actions:

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