Interlocuzione e soggettività

Drawing on K.-O. Apel’s legacy to engage with M.M. Olivetti’s Analogia del soggetto, this contribution revolves around such fundamental terms as interlocution and subjectivity. It first explores how the performative component of speech acts in terms of distinguishable validity claims cannot be made explicit within ordinary speech in the lifeworld (vis-à-vis an argumentative Diskurs), as power claims and functional imperatives are always mixed with validity claims in the lifeworld and in differentiated social spheres/systems. In this sense I bring into question Olivetti’s notion that the “original situation”, where recognition takes place, is beset by the same problem, as the “who” of interlocution is likely to condition one’s acceptance of another’s validity claim, that obtain full expression only in the “what” expressed in the propositional component. I then move on to Olivetti’s idea of an “original interlocutionary situation” between adult(/mother) and infant(/new-born), which fundamentally shapes the interlocution at its different stages. My claim is that this overemphasises the illocutory-performative component of speech acts to the extent that interlocution is reduced to an encounter/recognition between “faces”. At the end I argue that such a perspective on communication and its plurality impoverishes the idea of subjectivity and obscures its spontaneous/innovative/creative dimension, able at same time to revise/correct the language in use.