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The Misprision of Pragmatics: Conceptions of Language in Contemporary French Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

J. J. Lecercle
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Extract

I come to praise contemporary French philosophy not to bury it. My aim is not to hail the appearance in France of a native brand of analytic philosophy—in itself an important event in the last decade—but to describe the indirect and selective importation of certain Anglo-Saxon concepts by French philosophers whose practice is far from analytic; and also to describe the resultant misunderstanding. In this paper I shall analyse the use of pragmatic concepts—and of the concept ‘pragmatics’—in the recent work by Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux, and I shall try to show that these concepts are the object of a creative misunderstanding, of a misprision.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 21: Contemporary French Philosophy , March 1987 , pp. 21 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1987

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References

1 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., Mille Plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980).Google Scholar

2 Cf. Austin, J. L., Quand dire c'est faire (Paris: Seuil, 1970)Google Scholar; Searle, J. R., Les actes de langage (Paris: Seuil, 1972).Google Scholar

3 No book by Davidson has so far been translated into French. Wittgenstein's main works have been available for a number of years, but have attracted comparatively little attention and discussion.

4 Parain, B.'s Recherches sur la nature et les fonctions du langage (Paris: Gallimard, 1942)Google Scholar, is a notable exception.

5 Cf. Derrida, J., Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak, G. C. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

6 Cf. Benveniste, E., Problems in General Linguistics (University of Miami Press, 1971)Google Scholar, and Culioli, A., ‘La formalisation en linguistique’, in Cahiers pour l'Analyse, 9 (Paris: 1968).Google Scholar

7 This is a simplification. Pragmatics is not necessarily hostile to Chomsky (in a ‘modular’ grammar, a module can be reserved for pragmatics). But the Deleuze-Guattari version of pragmatics certainly is. Conversely, not all Chomskyan linguists believe in innate ideas: cf. the position of the French linguist J. C. Milner.

8 Bloom, H., A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

9 Cf. ‘Signature, événement, contexte’, in Marges de la Philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972).Google Scholar

10 In Pinter, H., A Slight Ache and other plays (London: Methuen, 1961).Google Scholar

11 Cf. Derrida's readings of Jabes in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978)Google Scholar and Celan, (Schibboleth (Paris: Galilée, 1986)Google Scholar. Deleuze and Guattari have produced a reading of Kafka (Kafka (Paris: Minuit, 1975)Google Scholar) and Mille Plateaux contains a plateau devoted to short stories by Henry James and Scott Fitzgerald (plateau no. 8).

12 The 1981–82 series of lectures at the Royal Institute of Philosophy (Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series, Vol. 16, Philosophy and Literature, ed. Griffiths, , Cambridge University Press, 1983) remains an exception.Google Scholar

13 The text can be found in the appendix.

14 We recognize Searle's analysis of indirect speech-acts.

15 My translation. Cf. Lacan, J., Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966)Google Scholar; also Ecrits, a selection, trans. Sheridan, A. (London, 1977)Google Scholar, especially ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’.

16 Cf. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M., Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press, 1980).Google Scholar

17 This non-existent existence of a moment ‘before the text’, to which I have been drawn time and again, (a) is an essential structure in all dramatic texts—in Hamlet, the murder of Hamlet's father, which has no reality because it has (not) occurred before the curtain rises, is unceasingly repeated in the text (in the dumb show, in the abyme play, etc.), (b) is the general structure of origins: the mythical arche which nevertheless is the truth of the patient's history—it is in fact the core of the psychoanalytic theory of truth.

18 In ‘Signature …’, op. cit., Derrida puns on several senses of ‘communication’ (a message, but also an impulse can be ‘communicated’).

19 I keep the French word for precise reasons: its range of meaning is not captured by any English word. Cf. the introduction to my Philosophy Through the Looking-Glass: Language, Nonsense, Desire (London: Hutchinson, 1985).Google Scholar

20 Cf. Deleuze, and Guattari, , Kafka, op. cit.Google Scholar

21 Cf. Habermas, J., Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Luchterhand, 1962).Google Scholar

22 Cf. Deleuze, and Guattari, , Mille Plateaux, op. cit., 96.Google Scholar