I am genuinely pleased that Italy, albeit with a twenty-year delay behind the neo-avant-garde (which has by now become anachronistic and has been replaced by artistic late modernism)—has begun to recognize the centrality of pragmatics within the technical language of aesthetics. This recognition relaunches the highly original Austinian theory presented in How to Do Things with Words (1965) by J. L. Austin, with its introduction of the distinction between locution, illocution, and perlocution, later formalized and systematized in Speech Acts (1969) by John Searle, and ultimately consolidated through the theory of conversational implicatures and the principle of cooperation proposed by Paul Grice in “Logic and Conversation” (1975). It is somewhat unfortunate that similar conclusions had already been reached – according to Barry Smith (1990)- in Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes (1913), published in Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung by Adolf Reinach:
“It is rather in the work of the Munich phenomenologist Adolf Reinach (1883–1917) that one finds the first systematic theory of phenomena such as promising, asking, requesting, commanding, accusing, etc., phenomena that Reinach, like Thomas Reid (though almost certainly independently), grouped under the concept of ‘social acts’.”
One might even retreat further back, to Gottlob Frege. This small problem is conveniently ignored by Giorgio Agamben, who possesses little familiarity with legal theory. Consider, for instance, the theory of choice of R. M. Hare. The classic illocutionary assertion “I hereby christen this ship ‘Giorgio Linguaglossa’” can be divided into a phrastic component (locutionary: there exists a ship that I am christening “Giorgio Linguaglossa”) and a neustic component (illocutionary: by my act I declare that I christen the ship with that name). According to David Hume’s famous law, the “Great Divide”, the phrastic component is an assertion subject to verification or falsification (“objective truth”), whereas the neustic component is a command, subject only to evaluation (“subjective truth”). Thus every perlocutionary act contains both a locutionary and an illocutionary dimension. We therefore end up back at the starting point, much to the chagrin of Agamben. Personally, I would leave him to his anthropological studies on Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojève, Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, and the formidable Enzo Melandri. Moreover, there exist numerous contemporary critiques of the very notion of performativity: those of Donald Davidson and Willard Van Orman Quine; as well as contributions by Kubo, David Holdcroft, and Bertolet (force indicators); Edda Weigand and François Cooren (classification of illocutionary acts); Gerald Gazdar, J. O. Urmson, and Searle (the performative hypothesis); Erving Goffman, Stephen Levinson, and Searle (the social interaction of acts); and Jürgen Streeck, John McHardy Sinclair, and Marina Sbisà (questions of applicability). The NOE still has a long road ahead of it—unlike the NSEAE, which has already analyzed and neutralized the major criticisms. The extremely difficult solution would be the attempt – undertaken by the Department of Philosophy of Law at the University of Milan- to unite the analytic tradition of speech-act theory with the continental tradition of the hermeneutischer Zirkel through the theory of argumentation developed by Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel (see Ermeneutica e filosofia analitica, edited by M. Jori). The future of speech-act theory depends on the interest generated by the proposal to consider language as (inter)-action, according to two theses:
A distinction must be drawn between the meaning of an utterance and the way in which the utterance is used (its “force”).
II) The utterance of a statement may be considered the performance of an act, regardless of the type of statement produced.
In order to discuss pragmatics, one must at least have read the (now somewhat anachronistic) volume by Stephen C. Levinson, Pragmatics (Cambridge University Press, 1983; Italian translation, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985). For the less attentive, there exists the Italian edition—poorly translated—by Bertuccelli Papi. There is considerable satisfaction in observing that the NOE has followed the KNSEAE movement, with its NSEAE, along the path of replacing semantic literary criticism with a pragmatic critique of the text–context relationship. As for hijacking, the second core of pragmatic criticism, we shall wait, perhaps in vain, ad aeternum.
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Ivan Pozzoni
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