Baptism as a Performative Sign

Abstract

“There are … conventional human acts which although verbal have the quality not of describing but of doing something. Let us, with J. L. Austin, call these sign-acts ‘performatives.’ Perhaps the place where we most readily recognize performatives is in legal documents. After certain necessary preliminaries, we may find the document saying, ‘I hereby donate my ranch to my stepdaughter, Susan.’ This is, as lawyers say, the operative, or as we shall say, the performative clause. The action of the verb (in this case, ‘donate’) is not described by the performative clause, it is accomplished.”