The performative speech act — Austin’s foundational distinction between utterances that describe states of affairs and utterances that enact them — receives strikingly varied treatment across the depth-psychology and philosophy-of-language corpus housed in this library. Benveniste approaches the performative from within the theory of énonciation, demonstrating that the first-person singular is the grammatical seat of performativity: ‘je jure’ is an act, ‘il jure’ merely an information. His careful attention to the unique, unrepeatable character of the performative utterance — its singular anchorage in circumstances, time, and place — prefigures later critiques. Derrida radicalizes this analysis in ‘Signature Event Context,’ arguing that the very iterability that makes a mark legible necessarily opens every performative to citational displacement, parasitism, and failure, thereby destabilizing Austin’s clean distinction between felicitous and infelicitous performance. Ricoeur mediates these poles, insisting that illocutionary force generalizes the implication of doing in saying beyond explicitly performative forms, and that constitutive rules — not moral rules — govern what an act ‘counts as.’ A secondary tension emerges between the linguistic performative and embodied performance: Gallagher’s notion of ‘performative awareness’ in motor action inhabits adjacent conceptual terrain without reducing to speech-act theory proper, suggesting that the performative is a site where philosophy of language, phenomenology of the body, and ethics productively intersect.
the performative’s referent … is not outside it, or in any case preceding it or before it. It does not describe something which exists outside and before language. It produces or transforms a situation, it operates
Derrida distinguishes the performative from the constative by showing that its referent is internally produced rather than externally described, making transformation of situation its structural function.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
la séance est ouverte est un acte, tandis que la fenêtre est ouverte est une constatation. C’est là la différence entre un énoncé performatif et un énoncé constatif … l’énoncé performatif, étant un acte, a cette propriété d’être unique
Benveniste illustrates the performative/constative distinction through canonical examples and identifies the unrepeatable singularity of the performative act as its defining formal property.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966thesis
would a performative statement be possible if a citational doubling did not eventually split, dissociate from itself the pure singularity of the event?
Derrida argues that iterability — the structural possibility of citation — is the condition of possibility for every performative, even as it undermines the singularity Austin requires for felicitous performance.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
Ritual is not an eventuality, but, as iterability, is a structural characteristic of every mark … Austin does not ask himself what consequences derive from the fact that something
Derrida indicts Austin for treating the risk of failure as contingent rather than as an essential structural predicate arising from the iterability inherent in every mark.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
the illocutionary act is joined to a more fundamental act — the predicative act … The notion of illocutionary force thus allows us to generalize beyond performatives, properly speaking, the implication of doing in saying
Ricoeur extends the performative logic beyond its canonical Austinian scope by linking illocutionary force to the predicative act, showing that constatives too implicitly contain a performative dimension.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
je jure, qui est un acte, et il jure, qui n’est qu’une information. Les termes ‘performatif’ et ‘constatif’ n’apparaissaient pas encore
Benveniste traces his own prior, independent discovery of the performative/constative distinction through the first-person/third-person contrast in verbs of swearing, antedating his encounter with Austin’s terminology.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966supporting
Illocutionary acts, such as promising, ordering, warning, and noting, are distinguished from one another by their ‘force,’ which is itself constituted by the rule that says, for example, that promising is placing oneself under the obligation to do tomorrow what today I say I shall do
Ricoeur explains how constitutive rules — not moral norms — determine the illocutionary force of speech acts such as promising, thereby grounding performativity in rule-governed institutional practice.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
have we not, in the course of our investigations, often taken the term ‘act’ (speech act!) to be synonymous with the terms ‘acting’ and ‘action’?
Ricoeur reflects on the analogical unity linking speech acts to action in the broader ontological sense, suggesting that the performative exemplifies the metacategory of being as act.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
in addition to the conditions for success (was an order actually given in accordance with the conventions authorizing it?), speech acts are also subject to conditions on their satisfaction (was this order followed by obedience or not?)
Ricoeur, drawing on Vanderveken, introduces the distinction between felicity conditions and satisfaction conditions for imperative speech acts, extending performative theory into the domain of moral obligation.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
J. L. Austin, ‘Performatif-constatif’ … See Benveniste, ‘La philosophie analytique et le langage’
This editorial note documents the precise bibliographic pathway by which Austin’s performative-constative distinction entered Benveniste’s theoretical orbit, establishing the intertextual genealogy of the concept in his work.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
If I am aware of my body in the motor act, my awareness is a pre-reflective, performative awareness rather than a vivid perceptual presence
Gallagher imports the term ‘performative’ into phenomenology of embodiment to designate a pre-reflective, enactive mode of bodily self-awareness operative in motor action.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
can we say that part of what it takes to generate a linguistic act (a gesture or a speech act) depends on the body schema?
Gallagher raises the question of whether body-schematic processes are constitutive conditions for the generation of speech acts, linking performative utterance to the embodied motor substrate.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
Mythoi by contrast were the ideals of men of action, weighty, performative, supportive of the truth: alēthea mythēsasthai (‘to speak the truth’) occurs as a formula five times in Homer
McGilchrist mobilizes the ancient contrast between mythos and logos to suggest that archaic performative speech — weighty, truth-bearing mythoi — preceded and outranked propositional logos in the Greek tradition.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside
we have been led to distinguish between a secondary speech which renders a thought already acquired, and an originating speech which brings it into existence, in the first place for ourselves, and then for others
Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between secondary and originating speech offers a phenomenological precursor to the performative, in that originating speech constitutes rather than merely expresses its meaning.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962aside
it is neither statements nor even utterances that refer but … speaking subjects, employing the resources of the sense and the reference of the statement in order to exchange their experiences in a situation of interlocution
Ricoeur insists on re-anchoring the pragmatics of utterance in the speaking subject and the situation of interlocution, warning against the drift toward a factualist reduction that would dissolve the event-character of the speech act.
, Oneself as Another, 1992aside