Lost in Austin: Critical Inheritances of a Philosophical Maverick

We are proposing an ACLA Seminar to convene, for the first time, the interdisciplinary community of scholars working on or in the spirit of J.L. Austin (1911–1960). Though widely, albeit often begrudgingly, acknowledged as an important twentieth-century philosopher, Austin is unique among this rarified class of thinkers in several unfortunate ways: he is the progenitor of no noteworthy schools, there are no chaired positions named for him, and until recently there were no collections of essays about his work and even fewer conferences about his legacy. Yet, many scholars owe a debt to Austin, and there have been signs recently of a more pronounced reemergence of interest in him. In addition to the first collections of essays about his work and influence published in 40 years, the first biography about him was released in 2023, and—in the wake of the death of Stanley Cavell (1926–2018), Austin’s most famous student—there have been a flurry of works reassessing his legacy and reappropriating his approach to thinking. Indeed, Austin’s influence has been wide-ranging, impacting debates in everything from gender and queer studies (Butler 1990) and philosophical accounts of pornography (Bauer 2015), to literary theory and poetry (Moi 2017; Mills forthcoming), from ethics (Laugier 2020; Forsberg 2024) to legal hermeneutics (Yeager 2006), and from work in continental philosophy (Navarro 2017) to cultural anthropology (Das 2020). This is fitting: His reputation as a specialist notwithstanding, Austin was, first and foremost, a pluralist, a classics scholar and a voracious reader, who drew capaciously from literature and the arts, the natural sciences, linguistics, and legal scholarship. As he saw it, his work, though focused on the minutiae of how ordinary language works and how we use it well or poorly in philosophy, ultimately aimed at much broader humanistic goals—reimagining how we read, talk, and understand one another. 

The specific goal of our seminar is not hagiographic or historical. Rather, we aim to bring together scholars across disciplines and languages who appropriate Austin’s concepts, analyses, and/or other aspects of his methodology in their own scholarship. We are especially interested in proposals that pay close attention to the textuality of Austin’s philosophy and open new interpretive frameworks based on close readings of his texts. The proposed seminar would offer the space for Austin scholars across the world in various disciplines and departments to critically discuss diffractive readings of Austin’s key concepts and claims and how they help us to navigate contemporary issues and problems. As such, we particularly welcome proposals that develop new readings of central concepts and textual claims in Austin’s oeuvre to help us think anew about hot-button issues in, for example, art and aesthetics, moral and political philosophy, pedagogy, gender studies and sexuality, and issues in cultural studies.