Linguistic violence and the “body to come”: The performativity of hate speech in J. Derrida and J. Butler
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Julia Ponzio
Abstract
This text analyzes the question of linguistic violence in J. Derrida and in J. Butler and shows how this question implies a consideration of the relation between language and body. The starting point is Derrida’s critic of Austin’s theory of speech acts. Through this critic Derrida establishes a relation between speech acts and writing. This connection brings to the fore the importance of the iterability as a structural feature of speech acts. The iterability becomes fundamental in Butler’s analysis of hate speech in Excitable Speech. In this book the iterability is interpreted as the ritual character of the hate speech, which reveals its political dimension. Comparing Butler and Derrida’s ideas of speech act, I try in this text to make emerge the idea of a textual body as the possibility of the resistance to the linguistic violence.
References
Austin, John, L. 1962. How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Search in Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. London: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2003. Afterword. In Shoshana Felman (ed.), The scandal of the speaking body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or seduction in two languages. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.10.1515/9780804766890-008Search in Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1982 [1967]. Signature, event, context. In Margins of philosophy, Alan. Bass (trans.), 307–347. Brighton: The Harvester Press.Search in Google Scholar
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© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Genome as (hyper)text: From metaphor to theory
- The work of Peirce’s Dicisign in representationalizing early deictic events
- The double function of the interpretant in Peirce’s theory of signs
- Integration mechanism and transcendental semiosis
- The communicative wheel: Symptom, signal, and model in multimodal communication
- Discursive representation: Semiotics, theory, and method
- Translation as sign exploration: A semiotic approach based on Peirce
- When does the ritual of mythic symbolic type start and when does it end?
- Iconoclasms of Emmett Till and his killers in Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle: A new generation of historiographic metafiction
- A dialogical semiosis of traveling narratives for self-interpretation: Towards activity-semiotics
- Entre éthologie et sémiotique : Mondes animaux, compétences et accommodation
- A pentadic model of semiotic analysis
- Linguistic violence and the “body to come”: The performativity of hate speech in J. Derrida and J. Butler
- Cultural tourism as pilgrimage
- A simple traffic-light semiotic model for tagmemic theory
- From resistance to reconciliation and back again: A semiotic analysis of the Charlie Hebdo cover following the January 2015 events
- Bilingual and intersemiotic representation of distance(s) in Chinese landscape painting: from yi (‘meaning’) to yi (‘freedom’)
- Power-organizing and Ethic-thinking as two paralleled praxes in the historical existence of mankind: A semiotic analysis of their functional segregation
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- Construction of new epistemological fields: Interpretation, translation, transmutation
- A biosemiotic reading of Michel Onfray’s Cosmos: Rethinking the essence of communication from an ecocentric and scientific perspective
- Coherence and truthfulness in communication: Intracommunicational and extracommunicational indexicality
- Poetic logic and sensus communis
- Intrinsic functionality of mathematics, metafunctions in Systemic Functional Semiotics
- Ciudadanos: The myth of neutrality
- Multilingualism and sameness versus otherness in a semiotic context
