KILLING WORDS. SPEECH ACTS AND NON-VERBAL ACTIONS IN SOPHOCLEAN TRAGEDIES1

Ulf Heuner

Are words able to kill? I think so. For instance, if I said to someone ‘I am going to kill you!’, and he is so scared by my words that he has a heart attack and dies; in that case, my utterance ‘I am going to kill you!’ would be a performative utterance, such as described by John Austin at the beginning of his book How to Do Things with Words (1975). An utterance is performative if ‘[. . .] by saying or in saying something we are doing something’.2 If I kill somebody with my words ‘I am going to kill you!’, I obviously do something by saying something. But Austin gives some ‘necessary conditions’ for a ‘happy functioning of a performative’. The first is: ‘There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect’.3 Killing a person immediately by saying ‘I am going to kill you!’ can hardly be called a conventional procedure having a conventional effect. In most cases, the ‘illocutionary act’4 of the utterance ‘I am going to kill you!’ would be to threaten, and the perlocutionary effect would not be to kill, but to frighten. Words are also able to kill in a more mediated manner. For exam- ple, a king orders one of his soldiers to kill somebody and the soldier does it. Or someone learns that a person he loves has died, and as a consequence commits suicide. Or, he becomes so depressed because of this bad news that he is more dead than alive. In this case, words kill in a metaphorical way. According to Hölderlin, words in Greek tragedies kill in a mediated manner. In his ‘Anmerkungen zur Antigonae’ (‘Remarks on Antigone’)

1 I wish to thank Irene de Jong and Albert Rijksbaron for editing my text. I also thank Jeremy McIntosh, Simon Srebrny and Steve Haring for their careful read- ing of earlier versions. 2 Austin (1975: 12). 3 Austin (1975: 14). 4 Austin distinguishes between a ‘locutionary act’, an ‘illocutionary act’ and a ‘perlocutionary act’ of an utterance. Cf. Austin (1975: 94ff.). 202 u. heuner

Hölderlin writes: ‘Das griechischtragische Wort ist tödtlichfactisch, weil der Leib, den es ergreifet, wirklich tödtet’.5 Thomas Pfau trans- lates this sentence as follows: ‘The Greek-tragic word is deadly-factual, for the body which it seizes truly kills’.6 Killing is a consequence of the word, but the word itself does not kill. It needs a body as medium which kills. Hölderlin makes a distinction between Greek tragedies and dramas of his own age, of modern times. Words in modern (‘patriotic’) dramas are able to kill immediately. They are ‘tödtend- factisch’ (‘murderous-factual’) in contrast to ‘tödtlichfactisch’ (‘deadly- factual’).7 This means, as far as I understand Hölderlin’s neologism, that while words in a modern drama kill immediately, they do so in a metaphorical manner: [. . .] it ends not in murder and death, for the tragic must be com- prehended herein, but more in the manner of Oedipus at Colonus, such that the enthusiastic word is terrible and kills, not concretely Greek, in the athletic and plastic spirit where the word seizes the body so that it is the latter which kills.8 In Hölderlin’s view, Oedipus Coloneus is not a real Greek tragedy; it is rather a modern drama, because we cannot find any real murder in it but only the ‘enthusiastic word’. A real Greek tragedy requires mur- der, it requires a body which really kills. Hölderlin’s distinction between deadly-factual words in Greek tragedies and murderous-factual words in dramas of his own age is often neglected or ignored by scholars who interpret Sophocles with the help of Hölderlin. For example, in her book Antigone’s Claim (2000), Judith Butler writes about the words in Sophoclean tragedies: They act, they exercise performative force of a certain kind, some- times they are clearly violent in their consequences, as words that either constitute or beget violence. Indeed, sometimes it seems that the words act in illocutionary ways, enacting the very deed that they name in the very moment of the naming. For Hölderlin, this constitutes something of the murderous force of the word in Sophocles.9 I think that only the first part of Butler’s quote applies to Hölderlin’s theory of tragic Greek words. In Hölderlin’s view, words in Greek

5 Hölderlin (1962: 269). 6 Hölderlin (1988: 113). 7 Cf. Hölderlin (1962: 270; 1988: 114). 8 Hölderlin (1988: 114). 9 Butler (2000: 63).