- Hardcover: 200 pages
- Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (3 April 1997)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0415915872
- ISBN-13: 978-0415915878
- Product Dimensions: 2.4 x 1.5 x 0.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 4,399,201 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
"Powerful and persuasive arguments."
-"Signs
"Butler's exploration of racist, sexist, and homophobic language is hence of acute significance to anyone concerned with the sociopolitical and theoretical implications of hate speech."
-"The Lesbian Review of Books
"This book offers a challenging analysis of the free speech debates. As she moves from the often frightening contradictions in legal arguments to the visceral pain caused by hate speech, Butler makes a compelling case that our laws--and our lives--are determined by conceptual frameworks."
-"Lambda Book Report
""Excitable Speech offers a thoughtful consideration of the ways in which speech and speaking are used by all points on the political spectrum to further political ends."
-The Bay Guardian
"This sober and subtle work draws us into the dark heart of a world where words wound, images enrage, and speech is haunted by hate. Butler intervenesbrilliantly in an argument that tests the limits of both legal claims and linguistic acts. She explores the link between 'reasons' of state and the passions of personhood as she meditates on utterance as a form of incitement, excitement, and injury. There is a fine urgency here that expands our understanding of the place of the 'affective' in the realm of public events."
-Homi Bhabha, The University of Chicago
-"Signs
"Butler's exploration of racist, sexist, and homophobic language is hence of acute significance to anyone concerned with the sociopolitical and theoretical implications of hate speech."
-"The Lesbian Review of Books
"This book offers a challenging analysis of the free speech debates. As she moves from the often frightening contradictions in legal arguments to the visceral pain caused by hate speech, Butler makes a compelling case that our laws--and our lives--are determined by conceptual frameworks."
-"Lambda Book Report
""Excitable Speech offers a thoughtful consideration of the ways in which speech and speaking are used by all points on the political spectrum to further political ends."
-The Bay Guardian
"This sober and subtle work draws us into the dark heart of a world where words wound, images enrage, and speech is haunted by hate. Butler intervenesbrilliantly in an argument that tests the limits of both legal claims and linguistic acts. She explores the link between 'reasons' of state and the passions of personhood as she meditates on utterance as a form of incitement, excitement, and injury. There is a fine urgency here that expands our understanding of the place of the 'affective' in the realm of public events."
-Homi Bhabha, The University of Chicago
Product Description
With the same intellectual courage with which she addressed issues of gender, Judith Butler turns her attention to speech and conduct in contemporary political life, looking at several efforts to target speech as conduct that has become subject to political debate and regulation. Reviewing hate speech regulations, anti-pornography arguments, and recent controversies about gay self-declaration in the military, Judith Butler asks whether and how language acts in each of these cultural sites.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
The title of J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words poses the question of performativity as what it means to say that "things might be done with words." Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
The title of J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words poses the question of performativity as what it means to say that "things might be done with words." Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
An insightful and thoroughly researched study of the social, political, and legal ramification of not only hate speech but discourse concerning the lingusitics of hate. Butler questions the contemporary practices of the adjudication of speech which seeks to define what is correct speech and what is proscribable under law. If words are legally indistinguishable from conduct, then, Butler asks, is law not complicit in the wounds that words cause? Challenging reading.
5 of 26 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The results of Butler's attempt to tackle the very serious issue of speech rights are disappointing in the extreme. With no legal background whatsoever and a myopic philosophical vision which seems ingorant of the liberal tradition upon which the right of free speech is grounded, Butler provides an obfuscted discussion (and that's all it is, a discussion) of the issue that is at the best of times, irrelevant, and at the worst of times, offensively misleading. The book is worthwhile only as an example of what happens when a postmodern thinker in the French tradition tries to tackle a subject outside the race/power/gender/subjectivity canon outlined by the philosophers of the 1960s. If you have an appetite for reading philosophical trainwrecks, then by all means read it. If you want something serious on the issue of free speech, look elsewhere.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5 reviews
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Butler and Agency
10 July 2004
Format:Paperback
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.
24 of 29 people found the following review helpful
When words injure, what do we do?
12 July 1997
Format:Paperback
An insightful and thoroughly researched study of the social, political, and legal ramification of not only hate speech but discourse concerning the lingusitics of hate. Butler questions the contemporary practices of the adjudication of speech which seeks to define what is correct speech and what is proscribable under law. If words are legally indistinguishable from conduct, then, Butler asks, is law not complicit in the wounds that words cause? Challenging reading
24 of 31 people found the following review helpful
Butler's most "grounded" work
10 Oct 1998
Format:Hardcover
Butler does a good job grounding speech act theory in political and legal issues, particularly racist and homophobic "hate speech." She takes Derrida's theory of iterability and shows how repetition of discourse in new contexts can be a means of resistance. For Butler, this is very applied and I liked it much better than Gender trouble.
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