Excitable Speech Book

Judith Butler makes an important contribution here by emphasizing the stakes of power and agency in speech-act theory. She revisits key authors in speech-act discourse, such as J.L. Austin and Althusser, revising many of their theories which posited language too conventionally (Austin) or posited language as issuing from a sovereign or divine (otherwise non-human) agent (Althusser). In doing so, Butler questions the presumption that hate speech always works; this is not to minimize pain suffered as a consequence, but "to leave open the possibility that its failure is the condition of a critical response." (19) A key term which she introduces to the equation is the notion of speech-act's "efficacy," or the presumption that speech-acts always somehow works. The inclusion of Toni Morrison's parable about young children playing a cruel joke on an old woman represents beautifully the way that power and agency can be subverted, and that language, as a kind of 'Schrodinger's' bird in the children's hands, is both a nonliving system and a 'living' thing which is contingent upon something beyond itself, particularly beyond anything you or I could contain.

Ultimately, this relates to the term 'Excitable' of her book, which she appropriates from law discourse to emphasize her point about language: "My presumption is that speech is always in some ways our of our control… Untethering the speech act from the sovereign subject founds an alternative notion of agency and, ultimately, of responsibility, one that more fully acknowledges the way in which the subject is constituted in language, how what it creates is also what it derives from elsewhere." (15-16) This is then tied into the concept of injurious speech, namely: hate speech, (mis)naming, and interpellation in ways that subverts a subject (e.g. the famous Althusserian scene of the policeman 'hailing' a subject; the subject, upon responding, then inscribes him/herself in guilt). The question becomes: when and how does an utterance perform meanings beyond that which is stated? Are we rendering more power to hate speech by regulating/legislating against it, thus calling it into a more privileged existence than it had before? And ultimately, what kind of language 'ought' we use--I ask, furthermore, how should that 'ought' be rendered?

Disagreement with Butler ultimately comes from a worldview which sees race, sexuality, and sexual performance as even issues, and which does not define 'hate speech' beyond what is currently the norm in today's liberal-political schema; her arguments are nonetheless strong. I do appreciate her inter-systematic approach in using supreme court decisions, law, censorship, and other culturally-derived spheres to make her arguments. This webpage has a good summary of her arguments: