Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative

nothing to complain about

While Ms. Butler is Professor of rhetoric at Berkeley University, and yes I confess I was expecting a work actually dealing with "speech", "politics", "the performative" (see Austin), I am confronted with Ms. Butler's views on homosexuals in the military, whether Derrida or Bourdieu was the better of the two (she knows - but does she know that, by the way, the two individuals did not exactly write on the same issues?), etc. etc. etc. ... So, while delighted to know this, for my own work, totally irrelevant.

Efficient

It arrived on time and in good shape. It arrived on time and in good shape. It arrived on time and in good shape.

gift, didn't read

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.

Judith Butler est une analyste brillante qui, comme philosophe, sait donner de nouvelles dimensions à des questions fondamentales.

Muchas gracias. A tiempo y en perfectas condiciones.