Abstract

The purpose of this article is to address the place that speech acts occupy in practice, both as identified phenomena and as intellectual tools, in Michel de Certeau’s work. We will thus steer clear of discussions about his participation in the “linguistic turn:” he worked instead to bring to history facts readily abandoned to other disciplines, writings that had until then been studied solely from scholarly or religious perspectives. History according to Certeau is a slow and meticulous scholarly endeavor “in the archives.” It is a discourse, the articulation of this scholarly work, making available the knowledge and recognition of the past as past. It is also a decision, a volo, a preliminary act, a choice, a transformative experience lived in the present, in the first person. Very specific to his style, quotation marks are a mark of speech acts; in other words, they are an act with language. They do not so much mark distancing or doubt as the preliminary volo, the choice of history in the first person.