Spurred by this post at the Blogora, I stopped by the Library to pick up a copy of Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech. Great opening paragraph. Who knows when I’ll get time to actually read the whole book.
When we claim to have been injured by language, what kind of claim do we make? We ascribe an agency to language, a power to injure, and position ourselves as the objects of its injurious trajectory. We claim that language acts, and acts against us, and the claim we make is a further instance of language, one which seeks to arrest the force of the prior instance. Thus, we exercise the force of language even as we seek to counter its force, caught up in a bind that no act of censorship can undo. (1)
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Excitable Speech is an interesting read. We read it in Diane Davis’s Performative Rhetorics seminar (around the same time we read the Derrida/Searle debate). Here’s the quote that I was thinking of as I posted that image at the Blogora:
“In the case of hate speech, there appears to be no way to ameliorate its effects except through its recirculation, even if that recirculation takes place in the context of a public discourse that calls for the censorship of such speech: the censor is compelled to repeat the speech that the censor would prohibit†(37).