Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative‘When we claim to have been injured by language, what kind of claim do we make?’ - Judith Butler, Excitable Speech Excitable Speech is widely hailed as a tour de force and one of Judith Butler’s most important books. Examining in turn debates about hate speech, pornography and gayness within the US military, Butler argues that words can wound and linguistic violence is its own kind of violence. Yet she also argues that speech is ‘excitable’ and fluid, because its effects often are beyond the control of the speaker, shaped by fantasy, context and power structures. In a novel and courageous move, she urges caution concerning the use of legislation to restrict and censor speech, especially in cases where injurious language is taken up by aesthetic practices to diminish and oppose the injury, such as in rap and popular music. Although speech can insult and demean, it is also a form of recognition and may be used to talk back; injurious speech can reinforce power structures, but it can also repeat power in ways that separate language from its injurious power. Skillfully showing how language’s oppositional power resides in its insubordinate and dynamic nature and its capacity to appropriate and defuse words that usually wound, Butler also seeks to account for why some clearly hateful speech is taken to be iconic of free speech, while other forms are more easily submitted to censorship. In light of current debates between advocates of freedom of speech and ‘no platform’ and cancel culture, the message of Excitable Speech remains more relevant now than ever. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Preface by the author, where she considers speech and language in the context contemporary forms of political polarization.
|
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 70
... question of whether language injures. Of course, there was not much disagreement on the question of whether what people say can surely hurt others. The question was whether racist speech and invective should be understood as a component ...
... question the primacy of “free speech” in U.S. jurisprudence, asking why speech that clearly discriminates should not be prohibited on the grounds that it deprives those addressed and injured of their rights to equal treatment. My own ...
... question was different: why is it that some forms of expression are considered so patently grave to be legally impermissible while others constitute permissible forms of hatred? The question seemed most acute to me at the time because ...
... question of why it hurts as it does, and whether it is something in language that hurts or how that language is used, including the contexts in which it is used. If we resolve that some words are injurious no matter who uses them and ...
... question is this one: can the repetition of the word or phrase that causes injury in certain aesthetic and cultural forms not only seek to demonstrate or exhibit that injury but redirect its power? Under what conditions, if any, is the ...
Contents
on linguistic vulnerability | 1 |
1 Burning acts injurious speech | 43 |
2 Sovereign performatives | 70 |
paranoia and homosexuality in the military | 103 |
4 Implicit censorship and discursive agency | 127 |
NOTES | 165 |
INDEX | 181 |