Performativity, with Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and Hortense Spillers

• In Event: Doing Things with Performativity

Abstract

This paper revisits elements of JL Austin’s midcentury philosophy of language in connection with 20th and 21st century texts and events that contend with the sexual and/or racial politics of performativity. With a new reading of Austin’s How To Do Things with Words, and drawing also on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Austin’s ordinary language philosophy of performativity is reconsidered and repurposed in conversation with political theory, feminist theory, queer theory, and black studies, drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Hortense Spillers, Eve Sedgwick, and Judith Butler. Peformativity once meant the power to inaugurate but it has come to mean inauthentic or insincere action. How might we reclaim the inaugural powers of speech and action, thinking with and beyond J.L. Austin, his readers, and his critics?

Author

• Bonnie Honig, Brown University