Ordinary language and psychoanalysis: Felman, Lacan and Austin

Abstract

This article discusses Shoshana Felman’s reading of Austin’s theory of speech acts in the light of Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly the concepts of desire, enjoyment and the unconscious. This criticism lies in the fact that Austin’s “Felmanian” interpretation, attached to the letter of the text it interprets, forgets the essentially economic nature of Austin’s theory, supported by the idea of communicative effectiveness, from which the theory of the misfortunes and all the elements that Felman notes as comparable to the Lacanian conception of language and discourse, among which the pleasure produced by jokes and the place occupied by unfortunate and unhappy speech acts. Thus, the thesis is raised that Felman’s reading misses one of the central points of the architecture of Austin’s theory, and lets it escape, to a large extent, due to a “dialectical déficit” in the exercise of its interpretation, particularly in the way in which it conceives the referent of any utterance.