Where's the Sanctity of Marriage Act when You Really Need It?

JUDGE SILVERMAN: Friends and relatives, we are gathered here today to witness the marriage of Allison and Cary. To do so, we must perform these vows in an act of ceremony.

But what are these things: to wed, to marry, to take a wedding vow? They are what the philosopher J. L. Austin, in his study How to Do Things With Words, calls “speech acts,” of which there are two different kinds: constative speech acts, whose primary attribute is that they say something; and performative speech acts (of which this ceremony is an example), whose primary attribute is that they do something....

Although we've just begun the ceremony—or have we?—some interesting questions have already gathered on the horizon: Is this set of words, so far, “accepted”? Are they “appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked”? Are we executing the procedure “correctly” and “completely”? Is it enough simply to say, “Do you, Allison, take Cary to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

ALLISON: “I do.”

JUDGE SILVERMAN: “And do you, Cary, take Allison to be your lawfully wedded wife?”

CARY: “I do.”

JUDGE SILVERMAN: As it turns out, it is enough, and the words just uttered by both Allison and Cary are sufficient—but not because of the words themselves.

First of all—according to Austin and according to the law—the words must be meant “seriously” and not self-referentially.

The problem with that, though, as Jonathan Culler has pointed out in his discussion of Jacques Derrida's critique of Austin, is that the distinction between serious and nonserious is always uncertain, always subject to deconstruction, and any attempt to solve that problem by insisting on the “proper” context for a statement is bound to fail....

It's because his work inspired others into flights of crap like this that Jacques Derrida was assassinated by wet works agents of the French and American governments anyway.

What?

Oh, come on. You don't really believe a 74-year-old man just "developed" pancreatic cancer, do you? How naive.