Deleuze’s Austin. Pragmatics, Politics, and Poetics of Language

We might think that Deleuze’s vehement critique of Wittgenstein (and Wittgensteinians) in his Abécédaire would lead to an outright and general rejection of Ordinary Language Philosophy (OLP). However, Deleuze and Guattari engage more positively with John L. Austin’s notion of performative utterance, especially in «Postulates of Linguistics» in A Thousand Plateaus. Like Austin, they reject a descriptive conception of language to adopt a performative pragmatics in which «The elementary unit of language – the statement – is the order-word». What does their translation of the performative into the order-word entail? What does their interpretation do to Austin’s theory? What kind of philosophy of language is produced through this focus on the order-word? The pragmatism of the order-word leads Deleuze and Guattari to consider the political and the poetic dimensions of language, which OLP often overlooks.

References

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