ABSTRACT
The implicit operation of censorship is, by definition, difficult to describe. If it operates within a bodily understanding, as Taylor and Bourdieu suggest, how do we understand the bodily operation of such a linguistic understanding? If censorship is the condition of agency, how do we best understand linguistic agency? In what does the ‘force’ of the performative consist, and how can it be understood as part of politics? Bourdieu argues that the ‘force’ of the performative is the effect of social power, and social power is to be undertood through established contexts of authority and their instruments of censorship. Opposed to this social account of performative force, Derrida argues that the breaking of the utterance from prior, established contexts consitutes the ‘force’ of the utterance.
