Resignifying Excitable Speech

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Judith Butler’s work has done much good in the world. Several women have told me how reading her earlier work, Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, was a turning point in their lives. They not only found that other women were in situations similar to theirs. They also learned how to understand those situations and were shown strategies that could work to make them better.

Butler’s more recent Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997; page numbers refer to this text) is another such book. Appropriating a subtle and penetrating reading of speech act theory in Austin and others, Butler faces head-on the vexed question of hate speech, speech that “wounds,” as exemplified by racial epithets or acts, pornography, rap lyrics, and gays in the military. On the one hand, Excitable Speech is rigorously and exigently philosophical throughout, as well as a brilliant exemplification of “rhetorical reading.” On the other hand, Excitable Speech stakes out a vigorously polemical and positive position about the regulation and possible transformation of hate speech.

As Butler shows, legislation, court decisions, and books about hate speech tend to assume that such speech is what Austin called an “illocutionary” utterance, that is, it does what it says in the act of saying it. It is not the case that sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me. On the contrary, words can wound in the act of saying them. Words can cause injury, even bodily injury in the form of anguish, depression, self-hate, or as incitement to acts of bodily violence toward the victims of hate speech. These assumptions go along with the presupposition that acts of hate speech are inaugural, initiatory. They do something new in the sense of being uttered by someone who is a sovereign “I” in full possession of his or her senses and intending to use words to wound. Therefore such a person can be blamed and punished by the law. Finally, specialists in hate speech—lawyers, judges, authors of books and essays on the topic—tend to take tacitly for granted a firm distinction between “use” and “mention.” Someone who casts a racial slur is “using” the slur, but laws, lawyers, judges, book authors, and the like are just “mentioning” the slurs in a way that neutralizes their effect. Citation is not use.

Butler argues persuasively that these assumptions are wrong. Any example of hate speech is an iteration of previous examples. Their animating force comes from the social and linguistic context and from their previous use, not primarily from the intention of the one who utters them. A law that forbids, for example, the expression “I am a homosexual” by gays in the military is itself uttering the phrase it is trying to make unspeakable. The law is thereby using hate speech, not just citing it or mentioning it. The use/mention distinction breaks down: “The injurious connotation is inevitably retained” (100). Butler’s book is striking in its refusal to give examples of hate speech, presumably because to mention them would be to use them, willy-nilly. I noted only one case (100), and that is a citation from an expert on hate speech, not Butler speaking or writing in her own voice.

Butler derives from this retention of injurious connotations even in “mentions” of hate speech that state laws against hate speech, far from working to suppress it, actually re-create it. They promulgate hate speech anew: “The very intentions that animate the legislation are inevitably misappropriated by the state. To give the task of adjudicating hate speech to the state is to give that task of misappropriation to the state. It will not simply be a legal discourse on racial and sexual slurring, but will also reiterate and restage those slurs, reproduce them this time as state-sanctioned speech. Given that the state retains the power to create and maintain certain forms of injurious speech acts as its own, the political neutrality of legal language is highly...