politics

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.

Several years ago, I saw a film entitled Total Eclipse, which is a dramatization of the complex and ill-fated relationship between Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, two nineteenth-century French poets. In one scene, a manic Rimbaud, played by the pubescently-challenged Leonardo Dicaprio, exclaims that "The only unendurable thing about life is that nothing is unendurable" (I may have misquoted this slightly; as I said, its been several years since I saw the film). As I recall, the film was rather silly by and large, although I found that this particular exclamation had the ring of solid truth (incidentally, at the time I had been an autodidactic devotee of Nietzsche's philosophy). I subsequently incorporated it into my own repertoire of pithy aphorisms, held at the ready the appropriate occasion present itself.
However, by reading Butler's Excitable Speech in tandem with a whole host of other works of a theoretical/critical sort, I came to realize that there is in fact one thing that is truly unendurable for what appears to be just about every latter-day theoretician: viz., poststructuralist discursive determinism, especially the agentless, discursively animated individual that such determinism entails. Hence Butler's insistence upon the fundamental citationality of speech, which strikes me as the continental philosopher's version of the notion of "weak voluntarism" popular among certain ethicists of an Anglo-American bent. Butler's notion of the subject's agency is certainly a qualified one, in that the subject can only exhibit agency in and through language. But nevertheless, it appears that Butler considers this deterministic influence of language to be less than rigidly absolute. Agency does not in fact emerge ex nihilo, because it is impossible to produce positive effects by using absolutely nothing. The subject must have at her disposal something with which to demonstrate her agency, because agency is observed through its effects--just as "government" [an abstraction] is manifested only through people's comportment in a manner understood to be in accordance with the principles of such an abstraction. Language is a medium as well as a matrix. However, if agency is manifested empirically, that is, through effects, then it follows that agency is a posteriori synthetic, because we observers ascribe causal necessity to the action in relation to its source, the performer of the action. Therefore, I remain uncertain as to how these effects point to a capacity for agency that is intrinsic to the subject as constitutive of the subject a priori. Perhaps the answer lies in the distinction Butler draws between "agency" and "mastery," the latter of which connotes an absolute agency which is inimical to the "weak voluntarism" thesis she advances in Excitable Speech."

Judith Butler has managed to show that it is possible to emerge from the post-structuralist morass in favor of free speech. What's both endearing and disturbing is how difficult and how complicated the endeavor was for her. In 'Excitable Speech,' the (sometimes) eloquent theoretical discussions of 'Gender Trouble' and 'Bodies that Matter' are reduced to a bizarre, idle name-dropping that takes very simple arguments and makes them unnecessarily circuitous.

Butler's concern in 'Excitable Speech' is to critique legal representations of hate speech from a post-structuralist perspective. Why a post-structuralist perspective? It's unclear. Really the only thing that she accomplishes, as far as I can tell, is to put a real-world debate in the vocabulary of a cloistered group of irrelevant intellectuals such as herself.

None of Butler's arguments are "post-structuralist," really at all. Rather than bringing to bear a strong application of her earlier theorization of performativity, Butler appears to abandon her earlier theses all together and just re-hash liberal arguments about free speech. What makes her book unique is that instead of saying, "Legal scholars are wrong to say that hate speech automatically deprives people of their rights," she makes the reader listen to several pages of irrelevant Foucault quotes about the decline of juridical models of power to establish her perspective as being authoritatively "post-structuralist." As if needlessly re-hashing the history of bio-power wasn't enough, she then begins invoking speech act theory (especially the distinction between perlocutionary and illocutionary speech acts) when all she really needs to say is, "Terms such as .... aren't intrinsically injurious." Rather than saying, "Hate speech is an arbitrary category," she has to make those typical outlandish-sounding postmodern truisms ("the real is no longer real!") such as "the State produces hate speech." She then immediately acknowledges how stupid that sounds and explains what she really means (that the State produces the category of hate speech).

What I'm trying to get across is that Butler has nothing profound to say about hate speech. She takes simple arguments for free speech that everyone's already familiar with, draws them out, laces them with Foucault quotes, and tosses in fairly large quantities of postmodern jargon. What's weird is that she herself seems to find the theoretical apparatus she invokes to be needlessly unwieldy. But instead of hitting the "delete" key on her keyboard, she wastes even more of our time by backing away from the rhetorical power (or at least the rhetorical authority) of her initial formulations.

This book isn't interesting. It's nothing you haven't heard before. However, if you think that taking a very significant national debate and translating it into jargon so that you can discuss it with a bunch of Ivy Leage graduate students is a worthy endeavor, then go ahead... I guess.

What a waste of time. I wish Butler would stick to making interested, substantiated arguments instead of throwing out platitudes and saying, "Foucault said something kinda like this in The History of Sexuality!" That's great, Professor Butler. Really. We're soooo proud.