The Habermasian and Deleuzian Appropriation of Austin and Searle’s Theory of Speech Acts

Abstract

The theory of speech acts of Austin and Searle allowed positioning the pragmatic within the philosophical field to philosophically problematize and describe the many possible relationships between language and world.
A speech act is the realization of an action in the moment of enunciation. Habermas appropriated of the theory of speech acts of Searle to extract from it a normative content interpreting the conditions of possibility of a speech act as the rules of use without which this act would not exist, so that, for Habermas the language theory is part of the action theory and both have universalist pretensions. Deleuze and Guattari, recovering more to Austin, put the emphasis not on the rules of use, but in the implicit imperative presuppositions, that make possible the realization and the enunciation of the speech act. And from their interpretation of the language in terms of consign and free indirect discourse allowed thinking not only a distinction of the different regimes of signs but the absence of an extra-linguistic or transcendent origin of language. The objective of this paper is to show how the deleuzo-guattarian critique of the assumptions of the linguistic based on the pragmatic can affect the articulation and the support of the theory of communicative action of Habermas.