Content area
Full text
Excitiable Speech: A Politics of the Performative Excitiable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. By Judith Butler. New York: Routledge, 1997; pp. x + 185. $16.95 paper.
Excitable Speech might seem surprising to readers of Butler's previous work. Having argued, in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, that bodies and subjects are constructed in the cultural forms that articulate them, Butler now argues that to speak is not quite the same as to act. For Butler the conservative conflation of speech and act is neither performative nor, in her sense of the word, constructionist, because it argues for a notion of free speech that presumes an unconstrained, sovereign subject.
Butler considers this problem and its possible remedies in her analyses of Supreme Court decisions, anti-pornography arguments, and the policy against homosexuals in the military. In every instance, she complicates the relation of speech to act, by introducing fantasy, linguistic instability, and temporality, arguing against censorship and the legal redress of hate speech and for its critical re-articulation. The key move in the analysis comes in the opening chapter, "On Linguistic Vulnerability," where Butler deconstructs the relation of the body to speech. Working from texts by Toni Morrison and Shoshana Felman, Butler argues that language and the body are neither strictly separable nor simply the same, but speak together, as it were, to produce the effect known as the social speaking subject. Thus verbal threats, for example, are also, in some way, bodily ones: "[T]he...