#excitable speech

[klainesheilen]

I may seem smart because I read and annotate Butler's Excitable Speech but in reality it took me over 10 minutes to read and understand the first page (and that's ok)

[philosophybits]

The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.

Judith Butler, Excitable Speech

[putawaytheglobe]

Morning bus reading

[objetpetita]

“The notion that speech wounds appears to rely on this inseparable and incongruous relation between body and speech, but also, consequently, between speech and its effects. If the speaker addresses his or her body to the one addressed, then it is not merely the body of the speaker that comes into play: it is the body of the addressee as well. Is the one speaking merely speaking, or is the one speaking comporting her or his body toward the other, exposing the body of the other as vulnerable to address. As an "instrument" of a violent rhetoricity, the body of the speaker exceeds the words that are spoken, exposing the addressed body as no longer (and not ever fully) in its own control.” —Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative

“In society, nothing is without meaning. Nothing has no content. Society is made of words, whose meanings the powerful control, or try to. At a certain point, when those who are hurt by them become real, some words are recognized as the acts that they are.” —Catharine A. MacKinnon, Only Words

“Words, like sticks and stones, can assault; they can injure; they can exclude.” —Mari J Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, And The First Amendment (from the back cover)

[philosophybits]

We do things with language, produce effects with language, and we do things to language, but language is also the thing that we do. Language is a name for our doing: both “what” we do (the name for the action that we characteristically perform) and that which we effect, the act and its consequences.

Judith Butler, Excitable Speech

[objetpetita]

Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative 

[cyberneticienne]

For Scarry, the body is not only anterior to language, but she argues persuasively that the body's pain is inexpressible in language, that pain shatters language, and that language can counter pain even as it cannot capture it. She shows that the morally imperative endeavor to represent the body in pain is confounded (but not rendered impossible) by the unrepresentability of the pain that it seeks to represent. One of the injurious consequences of torture, in her view, is that the one tortured loses the ability to document in language the event of torture; thus, one of the effects of torture is to efface its own witness.

[lisafrankfurtschool]

"We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."