Who Are You Writing To When You Write a Shopping List?

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Introduction: Austin, Searle, and Derrida in Aisle 7

When you jot down milk, eggs, bread on the back of a receipt before heading to the grocery store, who are you really writing to? Yourself? Your future self? Your partner? The fridge? And what kind of act is that—an instruction, a reminder, a plea?

Though it seems mundane, the humble shopping list opens up one of the most profound debates in 20th-century philosophy of language—a debate about meaning, intention, presence, and absence. It began with J.L. Austin and John Searle’s theory of speech acts and culminated in Jacques Derrida’s provocative critique, which argued that even such an everyday artifact as a list destabilizes our assumptions about how language functions. Let’s take a walk down Aisle 7.

Austin and Searle: What We Do with Words

In How to Do Things with Words (1962), British philosopher J.L. Austin upended the idea that language simply communicates facts. Some utterances, he noted, are not descriptive but performative: they do something rather than merely say something. Saying “I promise to meet you” is not reporting a promise; it is the act of promising.

Austin divided speech into three interwoven layers:

• The locutionary act: the actual utterance (e.g., “I will buy milk”),
• The illocutionary act: what one does in saying it (e.g., promising),
• The perlocutionary act: the effect it has (e.g., reassuring a spouse).

John Searle, building on Austin in Speech Acts (1969), sharpened the theory by emphasizing conventions and intentions. A speech act, he argued, depends on shared rules—like the unwritten etiquette that makes “I do” at a wedding count as marriage. Without context, intentions, and mutual understanding, words might not act at all.

But what about written words? Notes, letters, lists?

Austin sidestepped that complication. Fiction, irony, and writing were labeled "non-serious" uses of language, best excluded from the discussion. The real action, for Austin, took place in face-to-face situations, in live conversations—where intentions are visible and contexts shared.¹

Derrida’s Disruption: Signature, Event, Context

Jacques Derrida wasn’t convinced. In his essay Signature Event Context (1972), he scrutinized Austin’s lecture with a mix of admiration and suspicion. Why, Derrida asked, must we exclude writing, jokes, or imaginary speech from our theory of language? Why assume that presence—the speaker, the hearer, the shared moment—is a requirement for meaning?

Derrida pointed out that Austin’s theory rests on a metaphysical hierarchy:

• Speech is privileged over writing,
• Serious over non-serious,
• Presence over absence.

In fact, Austin admits in a footnote that non-serious utterances—such as fictional dialogue—have all the same structure as regular speech acts. And yet, he brackets them off. Derrida seizes on this: the very fact that these “parasitic” forms resemble “real” language shows that language is always iterable, repeatable, detachable from its origin.

Writing, for Derrida, exemplifies this. It’s a form of communication where the author need not be present, and the context can always be severed. That’s not a flaw—it’s the condition of meaning. A note scribbled on a napkin, a line from a poem, or yes, even a shopping list, can survive its sender, drift from its setting, and still carry force.

This is why Derrida writes in Of Grammatology:

“The outside bears with the inside a relationship that is, as usual, anything but simple exteriority.”²

In other words, the boundary between original meaning (the “inside”) and its external expression (the “outside”) is never clear. The sign does not merely point to something else—it generates a network of meanings. Meaning is never fully “in” the message—it’s in play.

Context is never fully saturable, it always escapes complete specification. This structural impossibility of fully capturing or fixing context is central to his critique. Language involves a continual drift, delay, and distortion, making meaning inherently unstable and open-ended.

The Shopping List as Pharmakon

Let’s revisit the shopping list. It seems simple—just a tool to aid memory. But why write it? Because we forget. And because we forget that we forget. Writing, here, becomes both remedy and risk.

In Phaedrus, Plato recounts the story of Theuth offering the invention of writing to the Egyptian king as a cure for memory. The king replies that it is not a cure but a pharmakon—a word that means both remedy and poison.

Derrida adopts this concept: writing supplements memory but also erodes it. When we externalize thought—whether in a list or a diary—we offload responsibility. Writing allows the mind to relax, but at the cost of dependence.

The shopping list is a pharmakon. It helps you remember milk. But it also allows you to forget that you ever needed to remember milk in the first place.

And to whom is it addressed? Maybe to your partner. Maybe to your future self, disoriented and caffeinated under supermarket lighting. Maybe it’s not for anyone at all—but still it acts, performs, means.

Searle’s Rebuttal and Derrida’s Reply

Searle was unimpressed. In his published response, he accused Derrida of misreading Austin and failing to distinguish between “serious” and “parasitic” utterances.³

But Derrida replied with characteristic playfulness—and sharp critique—in Limited Inc. (1977). The title is a pun: it refers both to a fictional publisher, “Limited, Inc.,” and to the philosophical idea that meaning can be included or incorporated, but never fully contained.

Derrida argued that Searle’s insistence on clear, stable intentions misses the point: the very structure of language makes meaning vulnerable to drift, delay, distortion. Even this debate itself—Searle quoting Derrida, Derrida quoting Austin—shows how texts circulate without their authors, take on lives of their own, invite misreadings, and resist closure. It’s a shopping list that always has room for one more thing.

Conclusion: Philosophy in the Supermarket

So the next time you write a shopping list, consider this: you’re not just preparing for dinner—you’re stepping into a centuries-old debate about presence, meaning, and writing.

Is your list a command, a whisper to yourself, a fragment of fiction? It’s hard to say. What Derrida teaches us is that the line between serious and non-serious, real and fictional, speaker and listener, is never as clear as it seems. Even the most ordinary inscription—a few words on a crumpled piece of paper—participates in a system of difference, repetition, and deferral.

Notes

¹ Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. Harvard University Press, 1962. See especially Lecture X.
² Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, p. 35.
³ Searle, John. “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida.” Glyph, 1 (1977): 198–208.
⁴ Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Northwestern University Press, 1988.