Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative
- ISBN-10
- 1000366421
- ISBN-13
- 9781000366426
- Category
- Philosophy
- Pages
- 188
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2021-03-29
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Author
- Judith Butler
Description
‘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.
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
Butler Matters: Judith Butler's Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies
By Warren J. BlumenfeldThis collection, which considers not only Gender Trouble but also Bodies That Matter, Excitable Speech, and The Psychic Life of Power, attests to the enormous impact Butler's work has had across disciplines.
-
Judith Butler: Live Theory
By Vicki KirbyOffering an account of the work and thought of Judith Butler, this guide is meant for those studying this pioneering thinker within the context of sociology, cultural studies, literary criticism, feminism, and philosophy.
-
Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
By Judith ButlerIn their most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds in this profound appraisal of post-9/11 America to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper understanding of how mourning and violence ...
-
Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death
By Judith ButlerThe book relates the courageous deeds of Antigone to the claims made by those whose relations are still not honored as those of proper kinship, showing how a culture of normative heterosexuality obstructs our capacity to see what sexual ...
-
Hidden Dimensions of Education: Rhetoric, Rituals, and Anthropology
By Christoph Wulf, Tobias Werler... Excitable speech . Furthermore , the relation between the language of " performance " and the body expressing the content is shown more clearly in Excitable speech . According to Butler Bourdieu especially overlooks " the abiding ...
-
Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France
By Judith ButlerThis classic work by one of the most important philosophers and critics of our time charts the genesis and trajectory of the desiring subject from Hegel's formulation in Phenomenology of Spirit to its appropriation by Kojève, Hyppolite, ...
-
What Is Theology?: Christian Thought and Contemporary Life
By Adam KotskoAdam Kotsko provides a unique guide to this fraught terrain. The title essay establishes a fresh and unexpected redefinition of theology and its complex and often polemical relationship with its sister discipline of philosophy.
-
The Cost of Free Speech: Pornography, Hate Speech, and their Challenge to Liberalism
By A. LevinThe distinctly contemporary proliferation of pornography and hate speech poses a challenge to liberalism's traditional ideal of a 'marketplace of ideas' facilitated by state neutrality about the content of speech.
-
Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America
By Jayne Wark48 For discussion of such films, see Banes, Greenwich Village, 1963, 212–19. 49 The Paris, London, and New York performances of Meat Joy are described and documented in Schneemann, More Than Meat Joy, 63–87. 50 Johnston, “Meat Joy,” 13, ...
-
Fearless Speech
By Joseph Pearson, Michel FoucaultI would like to distinguish between the 'history of ideas' and the 'history of thought.' The history of ideas involves the analysis of a notion from its birth, through its...