Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Continental Insularity: Contemporary French Analytical Philosophy
- The Misprision of Pragmatics: Conceptions of Language in Contemporary French Philosophy
- Ants and Women, or Philosophy without Borders
- Motifs towards a Poetics
- The Relevance of Cartesianism
- The Enlightenment without the Critique: A Word on Michel Serres' Philosophy
- The Teleological and Deontological Structures of Action: Aristotle and/or Kant?
- The Crisis of the Post-modern Image
- Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Perception
- Epistemological History: The Legacy of Bachelard and Canguilhem
- History as Genealogy: An Exploration of Foucault's Approach to History
- Beyond Deconstruction?
- Further Adventures of the Dialectic: Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Althusser
- Paradoxes of the Pineal: From Descartes to Georges Bataille
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
The Misprision of Pragmatics: Conceptions of Language in Contemporary French Philosophy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Continental Insularity: Contemporary French Analytical Philosophy
- The Misprision of Pragmatics: Conceptions of Language in Contemporary French Philosophy
- Ants and Women, or Philosophy without Borders
- Motifs towards a Poetics
- The Relevance of Cartesianism
- The Enlightenment without the Critique: A Word on Michel Serres' Philosophy
- The Teleological and Deontological Structures of Action: Aristotle and/or Kant?
- The Crisis of the Post-modern Image
- Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Perception
- Epistemological History: The Legacy of Bachelard and Canguilhem
- History as Genealogy: An Exploration of Foucault's Approach to History
- Beyond Deconstruction?
- Further Adventures of the Dialectic: Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Althusser
- Paradoxes of the Pineal: From Descartes to Georges Bataille
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
I come to praise contemporary French philosophy not to bury it. My aim is not to hail the appearance in France of a native brand of analytic philosophy—in itself an important event in the last decade—but to describe the indirect and selective importation of certain Anglo-Saxon concepts by French philosophers whose practice is far from analytic; and also to describe the resultant misunderstanding. In this paper I shall analyse the use of pragmatic concepts—and of the concept ‘pragmatics’— in the recent work by Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux, and I shall try to show that these concepts are the object of a creative misunderstanding, of a misprision.
Pragmatics: For historical reasons, the first analytic concepts were imported into France by linguists, in the early seventies. This is why the borrowing is selective: the texts made available to the French public were those which were of immediate interest to linguists. Performative utterances, illocutionary force, and, later, conversational implicature: Austin and the so-called Austinians rather than Davidson or the disciples of Wittgenstein. And this is also why it is indirect: the concepts were reappropriated by philosophers like Deleuze when they borrowed them back from linguistics. We can easily imagine that in such a situation the occasions for misunderstanding and betrayal would be multiplied. The reasons for this alliance, on the common ground of pragmatics, between Anglo-Saxon philosophy of language and post-structuralist philosophers, can be found in the history of linguistics in France in the last decade.
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- Contemporary French Philosophy , pp. 21 - 40Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989