Linguistic violence and the “body to come”: The performativity of hate speech in J. Derrida and J. Butler

This text analyzes the question of linguistic violence in J. Derrida and in J. Butler and shows how this question implies a consideration of the relation between language and body. The starting point is Derrida’s critic of Austin’s theory of speech acts. Through this critic Derrida establishes a relation between speech acts and writing. This connection brings to the fore the importance of the iterability as a structural feature of speech acts. The iterability becomes fundamental in Butler’s analysis of hate speech in Excitable Speech. In this book the iterability is interpreted as the ritual character of the hate speech, which reveals its political dimension. Comparing Butler and Derrida’s ideas of speech act, I try in this text to make emerge the idea of a textual body as the possibility of the resistance to the linguistic violence.