BHA: Truth and Lies

[MSPRINKER@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

               State University of New York at Stony Brook
                       Stony Brook, NY 11794-3355

                                            Michael Sprinker
                                            Professor of English & Comp Lit
                                            Comparative Studies
                                            516 632-9634
                                            23-May-1998 10:44am EDT
FROM:  MSPRINKER
TO:    Remote Addressee                     ( _bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx )

Subject: Truth and Lies

Louis et alia,

Let's take a more difficult case (which Austin would rule out
of court by virtue of its appearing in a fiction, though one
can imagine it's functioning in much the same way in non-
fictional contexts, since the issue here is persuasion).

The case I'm think of is Mark Antony's funeral oration over
Caesar in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar."  You'll recall how
he turns the phrase "for Brutus and Cassius are honorable men"
from an assertion of truth at the outset to an assertion of
just the opposite at the end--inciting the crowd against them,
which was his intention from the first.  Now the conundrum involves
the point at which the assertion "these are honorable men"
alters:  from functioning as a true assertion assertion about
Caesar's assassins, it is transformed at some point into saying
the opposite of what it appears to say.  It's illocutionary
force is thus altered, but nothing the grammar of the sentence
gives a clue of when and how this occurs.

A similar kind of argument could be made about Iago's speech
to Othello in which he first plants seeds of doubt in the
the latter's mind about Cassio's loyalty (I recent watched
the curious Orson Welles film version, so the example is
fresh in my mind).

The problem:  how does a Habermassian view of language (what
Perry Anderson once dubbed his "angelism") accommodate the
ordinary operatin of irony?

Cheers,

Michael


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