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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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ideal of a contradiction-free world

“Science has long been animated by the ideal of a contradiction-free world in which logical orders could merge with society, politics, culture and language. In the GRC Contradiction Studies we are working on ways of describing the multiplicity and complexity, the danger and beauty of our worlds that clearly go beyond concepts of freedom from contradiction.”

Michi Knecht
paradox

“The basis of law is not an idea as a systematic unified principle but a paradox.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
Afterlife of colonialism

“Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” (Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh)

Rozena Maart
city

“The city is a laboratory not only of modernity, but also of contradiction.”

Julia Lossau
earthing

“Geography as a discipline stands for a certain worlding, if not earthing, of contradiction, in both theoretical and pracitcal respect.”

Julia Lossau