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Declarative Speech Acts as a Discursive Practice of Disruption. An Analysis of Same-Sex Marriage and Blessings in German Church Discourse.

Contribution

Jonas Trochemowitz

2025

This paper discusses how the category of declarative speech acts can be used in the context of discourse analysis. For this purpose, similarities as well as differences between the works of Searle and Foucault are being discussed in order to illustrate the possibilities and challenges of theorizing declarative speech acts as discursive practices. To elaborate on these problems, a study on the felicity conditions of marriage in Islamic as well as Christian cultures is critically reviewed. The paper ends with an analysis of the discourse of same-sex marriage as well as blessing ceremonies in German churches and the discursive conflicts revolving around those practices.

Trochemowitz, Jonas. 2025. Declarative Speech Acts as a Discursive Practice of Disruption: An Analysis of Same-Sex Marriage and Blessings in German Church Discourse. Discourse in/of Disruption (Diskurs – interdisziplinär 12) 9, 89–98. https://doi.org/10.21248/idsopen.9.2025.48

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idea of democratic critique

“If you think that acts of contradicting someone always need to point to better solutions, you haven’t really understood the idea of democratic critique.”

Martin Nonhoff
interstice

“The contradiction of law in Derrida lies in the interstice that separates the impossibility of deconstructing justice from the possibility of deconstructing law.”

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decolonial scholarship

“Creating decentralizing and decolonizing scholarship on contradiction, contradictory phenomena, and contradicting processes is a challenging task.”

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relational

“At first I thought contradiction was always a relational thing; but the more I ponder it, the more I think contradiction creates relation.”

Ingo H. Warnke
l’illusion d’une unité

“Foucault speaks of contradiction as l’illusion d’une unité.”

Ingo H. Warnke