ABSTRACT
Judith Butler has herself generated a great deal of excitable speech: Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter 1 brought forth critical reactions ranging from the ‘bad reader’ 2 who felt thereby authorised to reduce gender to a choice, to the critics who denounced the density of her work as politically useless. 3 Now she has published a book of that name. Excitable Speech revisits the contingent ground of performativity through the work of J.L.Austin, and thereby functions somewhat as an archaeology of her previous works. Here Butler is driven to a greater degree of explication of her theoretical debts and methodology in an effort perhaps to halt further misappropriation, which is faintly ironic given the emphasis of her work on the necessity of re-signification. At the level of both content and form, however, she is anxious to ratify the political use value of performativity as her subtitle prominently declares. This ratification is specifically signalled by the location of her analysis: recent legal case histories in America all of which involve a disputation regarding the status of certain speech acts or acts understood as speech. Where, after all, could ‘mere’ words have further consequence?
