ABSTRACT
Conventional accounts of censorship presume that it is exercised by state against those who are less powerful. Although the psychoanalytic use of foreclosure is richly complicated, the author proposes that the people actively misappropriate the term for other purposes, transpose its proper meaning into an improper one, for the task of rethinking the way in which censorship acts as a "productive" form of power. Within literary and cultural studies recently, the authors have witnessed not merely a turn to the personal voice, but nearly compulsory production of exorbitant affect as the sign of proof that the forces of censorship are being actively and insistently countered. The key terms of modernity are vulnerable to such reinscriptions as well, a paradox to which the author returns toward the end of the chapter. The author proposes to borrow and depart from Bourdieu's view of the speech act as rite of institution to show that there are invocations of speech that are insurrectionary acts.
