The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages

by Shoshana Felman, Stanley Cavell, Judith Butler

What is a promise? What are the consequences of the act of promising? In this bold yet subtle meditation, the author contemplates the seductive promise of speech and the seductive promise of love. Imagining an encounter between Molière’s Don Juan and J. L. Austin, between a mythical figure of the French classical theater and a twentieth-century philosopher, she explores the relation between speech and the erotic, using a literary text as the ground for a telling encounter between philosophy, linguistics, and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. In the years since the publication of this book (which the author today calls “the boldest, the most provocative, but also the most playful” she has written), speech act theory has continued to play a central and defining role in the theories of sexuality, gender, performance studies, post-colonial studies, and cultural studies. This book remains topical as readers increasingly discover how multiply relevant the speaking body is. Moving beyond the domain of formal linguistic analysis to address these questions, the author has written a daring and seductive book.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Grad School

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Shoshana Felman is an American literary critic and current Woodruff Professor of Comparative Literature and French at Emory University. She was on the faculty of Yale University from 1970 to 2004, where in 1986 she was awarded the Thomas E. Donnelly Professorship of French and Comparative Literature. She specializes in 19th and 20th century French literature, psychoanalysis, trauma and testimony, and law and literature. Felman earned her Ph.D. at the University of Grenoble in France in 1970.

Felman works in the fields of psychoanalytic literary criticism, performativity theory, feminism, Holocaust testimony, and other areas, though her writings frequently question, ironize, or test the limits of the very critical methods being employed. Often in her writing a reversal will occur so that the critical vocabulary gets subjected to and converted into the terms of the literary or cultural object being scrutinized rather than simply settling the meaning of the object; thus in Felman's style of criticism there is no fixed hierarchy of theory over and beyond the reach of the literary object. As such, her methods share an affinity with deconstruction, for which she is sometimes associated with the Yale School and colleagues such as Paul de Man.

Jacques Lacan is a significant influence on Felman and she was among the vanguard of theorists—and perhaps foremost among those addressing Anglophone audiences—to rigorously apply his concepts to the study of literature.

Since the 1990s Felman has written texts on testimony and trauma, particularly in the context of the Holocaust and other collective trauma.

Reviews

[Gyuris Fruzsi · Rating 5 out of 5]

KURVA JO MINDFUCK

[Guilherme Smee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peguei esse livro para ler para tentar entender melhor os atos de fala e os atos de fala performativos, a partir das teorias dos filólogos e linguistas J. L. Austin e Emele Beneviste. Shoshana Felman analisa a peça Don Juan, de Molière, para investigar a sedução e a promessa inserida dentro dos atos de fala. Com o nome "o escândalo do corpo que fala", Felman também se utiliza de pressupostos nietzschianos e freudianos aliados à filosofia da linguagem para dar base aos seus pressupostos. Mas realmente, me arrependi de ter pego logo esse livro para tentar entender toda essa imbricada e intricada teoria. Não que, de alguma forma eu não tenha entendido, mas que a complicação por usar só e tão apenas Don Juan como exemplo - uma peça a que não estou familiarizado - afetou meu entendimento da "big picture". Entretanto, esse livro reiterou a importância para mim e minhas pesquisas do livro Excitable Speech, de Judith Butler que, vejam só usa todas essas mesmas teorias de uma forma mais universal e menos complicada. Vale dizer que o livro de Butler saiu quase 20 anos depois do de Felman e que a própria Butler escreve um posfácio na novíssima versão do livro, explicando a importância e a influência dos atos de fala e da performatividade do discurso de Austen e Beneviste em suas ideias sobre a performatividade de gênero. Peguei novamente o Excitable Speech e, apesar de todos os pesares, me senti mais confortável lendo apenas os destaques que tinha feito dentro da prosa e dos exemplos de Butler que em todo o livro de Shoshana Felman.

[Jenny Webb · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading (slowly) through different responses to Austin's work, and Felman's book ranks right up there as one of my favorites so far. It's readable, it's interesting, it takes Austin's own body of work as a whole into account, and for the most part, I think she gets Austin right.

The quibble I come up with (that seems right the more I sit with it) is that Felman's reading is influenced by Benveniste (both via Lacan, and Benveniste's response to Austin) and while she's clearly aware of that influence, and even makes an explicit break with Benveniste's reading over the concept of singularity, she still sees Austin as saying that language is self referential and thus generative (as does Benveniste, as does Lacan). But a friend pointed out that Austin never commits ultimately to language as self referential; instead, the generative move in Austin comes out of what he sets in motion with "hereby", and it's generative in the sense of messianic recapitulation rather than fantasy (e.g., the Phallus/phallus of Lacan).

So ... that's more of a note to myself of what I want to keep thinking about and sorting out in Felman's book than it is a review of the book itself.

Anyways, Felman's a brilliant reader, and her readings of Don Juan and Austin are both really well done, and rich. It's a book that will reward re-reading, and re-thinking. Recommended to those interested in the performative, lit theory, philosophy, embodiment.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another book that I bought many years ago, but never bothered to read until now. It's much clearer and more interesting than I'd expected. It won't make much sense if you haven't previously read Austin's How to Do Things with Words.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to this book for the J. L. Austin more than the Don Juan--for the speech act theory more than the literary criticism. I don't have much of a background in French literature (Felman works primarily with Moliere's play Dom Juan or The Feast with the Statue), so the section on Don Juan ("The Perversion of Promising") was, though interesting, a little tough for me to follow. But then! The way Felman reads Austin, and reads Don Juan alongside Austin, was revelatory. Just as Felman notes herself seduced by Austin, so I found myself seduced by Felman, eager to turn pages in a way that I'm often not in the case of academic books--even ones I like.

In a way, the book serves as an indirect response to Derrida's reading of Austin in "Signature Event Context." While Derrida criticizes Austin for relegating or dismissing speech acts that are playful, literary, infelicitous, etc. to those that are "serious," Felman emphasizes the playful and comic qualities of Austin's work. By way of illustration:

"How to do things with words," "a plea for excuses," "three ways of spilling ink": what [J. L.] Austin’s titles do, through humor, is to suspend their own entitlement—their own authority. The titles, as titles, are promises (promises of new subjects, promises of authorial authority, promises of knowing or learning: "How to do … "; "we could scarcely hope for a more promising exercise than the study of excuses" [PP, p. 184])—and, at the same time, in the same breath, the titles call into question their own right to promise, subvert their own promise. This amounts to saying that the titles, drops of spilled ink, only do something—with wit—by suspending their own authority to say something. (92)

That said, Felman's critique of linguist Emile Benveniste sounds similar to Derrida's critique of John Searle, so I think it's less that Felman and Derrida disagree about speech-act theory in general and more that they just read Austin's approach to speech acts in different ways. They are certainly both skeptical of Austin's more self-serious interpreters.

After the Austin section comes "Knowledge and Pleasure, or the Philosopher's Performance (Psychoanalysis and the Performative)," which adds Lacanian psychoanalysis into the mix. As that title suggests, Felman's argument is itself very playful and performative, better encountered than constatively summarized. So I'll leave it at that.

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I imagine I would have benefited more from this book if I had any familiarity--at all--with Moliere's Don Juan or with Austinian theory. Nevertheless, Felman is an astute reader of both who is more than happy to lead her reader by the hand through the history of speech act & performative theory in both a philosophical and linguistic context. Indeed, Felman's argument suggests that Austin's true 'scandal' is in exceeding the very boundaries erected between linguistics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Her insistence on the erotics, the pleasure, and the humor in Austin's work (as well as what she believes to be a new order of materiality in the work of the performative) seem particularly fascinating to me, though again, I think this is a text I'll need to come back to when I have greater knowledge of her source material. Much denser and more challenging than "What Does a Woman Want?", but worth the effort, I think.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of my favorite responses to Austin--light enough to be readable, but progresses questions Austin raises. (Or are all of these books just different "readings" of Austin? Ugh. I feel like the pressure's on to be deep now that I've started adding professors to my Goodreads friends...) Anyway, the body-and-mind (not mind/body) relationship hangs together rather nicely and I like the idea of reading an artifact into a theory as well as a theory against an artifact. Neat.