John Searle, hardly an outsider, on Derrida Ha! Searle is worse than an outsider--he's an outsider by choice. Searle's misreadings of Derrida are laughable--

John Searle, hardly an outsider, on Derrida Ha! Searle is worse than an outsider--he's an outsider by choice. Searle's misreadings of Derrida are laughable-- and then he has the balls to blame his sloppy reading on JD being obscure. But don't take my word for it: read the essays in questions. Derrida's "Signature Event Context" is a brief text, and not terribly difficult to read (if you have read Austin, as Searle has.) Searle's reply, "Reiterating the Differences", is a disaster. Searle somehow got it in his head that Derrida was attacking Austin (which he was not), and wrote a "defense" of Austin that misreads Derrida atrociously. (Searle has since refused to allow his piece to be anthologized, so you have to hunt it down in the original publication. I have.) Derrida rebutted with a piece called "Limited Inc a b c", which responds, patiently and at great length, to each of Searle's points. In fact, Derrida manages to quote every single sentence of Searle's piece within his own (which is not an accident, since the dispute is in large part about quotation and citationality in Austin.) The two Derrida works, along with a precis of Searle's piece, and an interview on the subject, has been published as "Limited Inc", and is a great introduction to Derrida for those coming from the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. Searle comes out of the debate looking foolish beyond belief, in my opinion.