/lit/ - Literature

Derrida believes that, in Austin's eyes, what makes a quote from the stage non-serious is that it repeats something said elsewhere. He therefore objects that all language is necessarily repeatable, has what he calls iterability; and that without language there were no performatives.
Parts of the remark are mundane. One can perhaps think of wordless performatives, e.g. in a ceremony, but they should at least be paralinguistic. To quote is always to iterate*; and every linguistic utterance, thus also a performative one, is iterable. So far, Derrida is reasonably on the dry side.
But <i>in quoted form</i> a performative sentence is not performative. Thus, citation is not the form of iterability without which nothing can be a performative.
A similar blunder plus a gross misinterpretation of Austin's words plagues the closing grumble about signatures. Derrida's fame as a reader of philosophical texts is not well deserved.

*To the extent that it is clear what iterability is, Derrida seems to assume that repetition is an uncontroversial concept, at least here. Those who have familiarized themselves with the tradition from Frege through Wittgenstein to Austin and Hampshire about the 'same' find him clueless.

1. A first characteristic is that analytic philosophy views philosophy as an *activity* not as doctrine. The able philosopher is not necessarily one who brings lasting truths but instead one who exercises certain abilities.
2. A second characteristic is that analytic philosophy views philosophy as essentially argumentative. Proofs can't always be expected but reasons that strongly suggest a certain viewpoint can, and even though a chain of reasons that don't stop anywhere aren't enough it is a feeble analytic who doesn't reason but instead "intuits" or the like.
3. A third characteristic is that analytic philosophy prefers to ask small and clear questions about the known to asking big and obscure ones about the unknown or merely guessed. It braces itself against the temptation to be synthetic. It distances itself from attempts att grandiose amalgamations of human knowledge and doesn't offer a collected world-view. The task of philosophy is not to join together.
4. A fourth characteristic is that analytic philosophy breaks a concept down into its parts, a reductive atomism.
5. A fifth characteristic is the belief that traditional philosophical problems are normally conceptual confusions or conceptual mix ups. The task of the philosopher is to clear them up.
6. A sixth characteristic is a strong belief in the analytic/synthetic dichotomy and a related certainty that if a proposition is true but not analytic its truth value must be certifiable empirically, "in principle".
7. A seventh and more content related characteristic is that analytic philosophy takes the relation between language and thought as the capital P Problem. The problem is viewed as one of meaning rather than knowledge.