Sovereign Performatives in the Contemporary Scene of Utterance

Abstract

Recent proposals to regulate hate speech on campus, in the workplace, and in other public domains have spawned a set of ambivalent political consequences and raised crucial questions concerning the status of language: Is hate speech a kind of action? Does it have the power to constitute offensive conduct? Not only is language-construed either as an offensive mode of address or as the uttering of offensive epithets-said to have the power to injure those to whom it is addressed, but the sphere of language has become a privileged domain in which to interrogate the cause and effects of social injury. Whereas earlier moments in the civil rights movement or in feminist activism were primarily concerned with documenting and seeking redress for various forms of discrimination, the current political concern with hate speech emphasizes the linguistic form that discriminatory conduct assumes, seeking to establish verbal conduct as discriminatory action.' But what is verbal conduct? Clearly, the law has definitions to offer, and those definitions often institutionalize catachrestic extensions of ordinary understandings of speech; hence, the burning of a flag or even a cross may be construed as speech for legal purposes. Recently, however, jurisprudence has sought the counsel of rhetorical and philosophical accounts of language in order to account for hate speech in terms of a more general theory of linguistic performativity. Strict adher-