The Double Excess of Intentionality and the Politics of Performative in Judith Butler

This article focuses on Judith Butler’s analysis of linguistic violence in Excitable Speech (1997), which connects the American debate on linguistic violence with the theoretical question of the intentionality of utterance. The connection is particularly thought–provoking, for it gives rise to the relation between intentionality and embodiment. The idea of linguistic violence, indeed, presupposes the power of an utterance to act on a body, to injure a body exercising a force on it. The article shows how, in Butler’s thought, this connection between intentionality and embodiment entails a reformulation of the idea of intentionality within a horizon in which the subject reacquires a bodily dimension and a relation with alterity.