PRAGMEMIC DIALOGICALITY AND ITS ROLE IN REVISITING DERRIDEAN ITERABILITY
PRAGMEMIC DIALOGICALITY AND ITS ROLE IN REVISITING DERRIDEAN ITERABILITY

Summary/Abstract: This study traces the concept of binary oppositions in ancient Rome and its role in determining cultural identity in the Flavian age. The very concept of imperial vs. periphery was elemental in separating the emperor from his centre, Rome, and the remote periphery. It was for the first time in the Flavian age that the emperor was not directly connected with the main centre of civility and the entire empire, Rome. The concept of binary oppositions became pivotal in determining identities and in creating new ideologies that dominated the ancient world for centuries. This very concept further expanded its power in later millennia to become a fundamental guarantor of stability for logic, philosophy and ideology.” Applied to the Roman empire, it is easy to see how the centre and periphery are not purely geographical, but fit into a series of binary oppositions underpinning Roman ideology.”( Zissos, 2016, p:224) As such, Rome was one of the main metropolises that introduced the concept of binary oppositions, depending mainly on the intrinsic concept of linearity. Jacque Derrida, the postmodernist thinker, tried to debunk the very idea of linearity in his theory known as Deconstruction through enforcing his coined concept known as iterability. This study further explores the vulnerability of Derridean iterability, which is the main pillar of Derridean Deconstruction, if seen from a pragmemic prism. By revisiting past correspondences between John Searle and Jacques Derrida, regarding the very idea of deconstructing texts, one can pinpoint salient aspects in Searle’s logic that were not fully crystallized at the time. By adopting a new approach to understanding speech acts today, especially from the prism of Jacob Mey’s Pragmemic theory, one observes that the idea of iterability, repetition of context in particular, is a spurious one. According to Mey, speech acts do not exist outside their nurturing context (Mey, 2010); meaning that a speech act on its own is a helpless verb that carries out no action without being pertinent to a unique context of situation. Having considered this new understanding of speech acts, one could re-evaluate the concept of deconstruction in its entirety; hence deconstruction does not exist in the actual world of contextualised pragmemes. In Pragmatics, language, whether written or spoken, is seen as a form of behavioural action, depending vehemently on the uniqueness of contexts. Every context is unique in its existence, creating thus a chain of unique pragmemes in their respective contexts. The idea of iterability as such fails to represent this intrinsic element in human language, which is the uniqueness of the situated context. This study will answer the following question: Do speech acts exist as such as influential verbs in context or as distinctive entities called “Culturemes”?. The study also concludes with emphasizing the efficacy of the Roman concept of binary oppositions, which is preponderantly influential in human thought.

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