Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative

Butler is a difficult author to understand, particularly if you don't have a background in theories of performativity. I recommend reading JL Austin's How to Do Things with Words and Derrida's Limited, Inc either before or alongside this book. She also draws heavily from Foucault and Althusser. Excitable Speech is powerful for its account of how subjects are formed through the address of hate speech and how, through this very address, the conditions for the subject's agency are enabled. A previous reviewer pointed out that for Butler "the subject can only exhibit agency in and through language" and that agency in Butler's account emerges ex nihilio. This is a misunderstanding of both Butler and poststructural theories of agency in general. For Butler, agency is not produced by an autonomous actor; nor is it contained to language. Drawing from Derrida and Bourdieu, Butler's point is that agency arises from social iterability and the fact that every re-iteration opens the potential for change and subversion. Such iteration, however, is part of the structure of signification broadly conceived (not simply language) and is not the conscious effort of an individual agent. Thus, Butler points to the effect of the body and how bodies are implicated in acts of speech and iteration. In this text Butler is perhaps at her most cogent and most optimistic reach. I would recommend picking this up for anyone serious about theories of performativity.

Butler does a good job grounding speech act theory in political and legal issues, particularly racist and homophobic "hate speech." She takes Derrida's theory of iterability and shows how repetition of discourse in new contexts can be a means of resistance. For Butler, this is very applied and I liked it much better than Gender trouble.

An insightful and thoroughly researched study of the social, political, and legal ramification of not only hate speech but discourse concerning the lingusitics of hate. Butler questions the contemporary practices of the adjudication of speech which seeks to define what is correct speech and what is proscribable under law. If words are legally indistinguishable from conduct, then, Butler asks, is law not complicit in the wounds that words cause? Challenging reading