Representational violence

Abstract

Of late, critical and polemical commentaries aimed at politicizing language have been focused on the damaging effects of what Judith Butler has called “excitable speech,” utterances intended to incite violence toward persons with recognizable social identities: religious groups, ethnic groups, and gays and lesbians, among others. Apart from the problem of neglecting the meaning slippage involved in assigning an unmediated causal effect to speech acts, the position of those who are arguing, for example, in favor of juridical responses to censor hate speech confronts a paradox. In order to militate against one kind of linguistic violence—the damaging effects of utterances on persons—they have to commit another kind of violence. By assigning a unitary identity to the targets of hate speech, the protectors of vulnerable bodies engage in a violence of representation. They must attribute to speech‐act victims a unitary and unambiguously coherent identity; they must dissolve hybridities, turning pluralistic and contingent historical affiliations into essential characteristics. As a result, their arguments in favor of protecting the vulnerable reinforce the identity perspectives presupposed in the discourses they oppose.