Performatives: Violence and demiurgic power
Performatives: Violence and demiurgic power

Summary/Abstract: This paper questions Habermas’s basic term ‘validity claims’. Conceiving of utterances as raising ‘claims’ presupposes a pre-set critical difference between what an utterance immediately says (the words) and what has been uttered by it (the intention, the state of affairs, or intersubjective norms). Habermas inherits this distinction from John Searle, where the difference between intention and illocutionary force, as well as the difference between propositional content and state of affairs are always already presupposed. But such differences, I argue, are not present in the actual performance; they are always only secondarily produced by further performative acts of questioning or contestation. With the help of Derrida and his analyses in the essays ‘Declarations of Independence’ and ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, a basic level of speech can be revealed. Namely, the level of the immediate – demiurgic to some extent – constitution of I-Thou-world relations where no stable point is presupposed but all the points are directly affirmed within the actual performance itself. With respect to this level – which is in some sense decisionist, arbitrary, and violent – criticizing and grounding could be conceived as secondary aspects of communication. Far-reaching conclusions can be drawn from that: power is no longer merely a strategic action that should be erased from communication, it is an immanent part of the latter. Hence, intersubjective norms are not neutral, they are always sedimentations of power – and their validity and legitimacy depend not on the elimination of their power but on further actual recognition or non-recognition of their power stakes.

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