A review by jolles
Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative by Judith Butler

4.0

I don't have much exposure to Judith Butler, mostly because I very easily fall into the paradigm of having read Gender Trouble first and then automatically assuming that any and all of her contributions would stem from/take issue with ideas of gender/sexuality/etc. This is incredibly small-minded of me because in reading Excitable Speech I found myself so very taken with the ways in which she explores ideas of trauma and mourning through language. I think where her ideas intersect with Derrida's is a place that could lend itself to very fruitful further exploration and I was so pleased with the reading I was tasked to do in this book for class. What I think I found most disenchanting with Butler's work, and the reason that I can't conscionably give this a higher rating, is the fact that her use of language is seemingly so arbitrary. While this, in and of itself, could be performative of the very things she is trying to explicate in her writing, I find that she either writes with such striking clarity or buries so much of her work in unnecessary jargon that is basically unreadable. Regardless, this book just made me want to read Precarious Life.