WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, Volume 39, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Summer2011, pp. 236-239 (Article)

DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2011.0020

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236 WSQ: Womens Studies Quarterly 39: 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2011) 2011 by Judith Butler. All rights reserved.

I am very grateful for the two thoughtful essays on Excitable Speech. I thought to respond by focusing on two of the points made in those essays. The first one was posed by J. Hillis Miller. He asks me to think about the kind of effective force that speech acts have when they do not wound, but rather convey love. How do we think about the speech act I love you? The second is a question posed by George Shulman. He asks me to think about commitment. So I will do my best to write briefly about love and commitment from the perspective of a theory of performativity.

Miller is right to point out that if words have the power to wound, they also have the power to convey love. It is interesting that, for Miller, the opposite of wounding is not reparation but love, and it is true that the speech act that conveys love is one that brings up other questions about the relationship between language and the body. I would like to say first that to say I love you is, of course, to submit to a clich. And it may be that we are only willing to submit to such a clich for certain people and under certain circumstances. One can easily inhabit the anonymity of the phrase as a way of minimizing the exposure created by the speech act. We can ask, what kind of exposure is this? Who or what is exposed? It is a speech act that is said to some you, not knowing whether the you will receive or return the speech act as well. In fact, if the speech act is too quickly returned, it feels automatic or, rather, like the other is actually hid-ing within the folds of the clich. Sometimes it seems to matter more when there is some silence that indicates that the utterance has actually stilled language for a moment. We rely on those forms of stillness even as we do not know precisely how to fill them with speech. In saying I love you, a

Response: Performative Reflections on Love and Commitment

Judith Butler

certain I is installed in one of the most repeated phrases in the English language, a marketed phrase, one that belongs to no one and to anyone. One risks a full evaporation into an anonymous citationality: I speak as countless others have spoken, say the same words, and you are equally substitutable at such a moment. On the one hand, the citationality of the speech act offends our sense of singularity or even authenticity, if that is a value we have. On the other hand, it is precisely through the citationality of the speech act that the body emerges in a specifically linguistic form. I give some somatic feeling to you, or try to, when I say these words, and I want the words to carry that feeling from here to there to find its destina-tion with you, and to be received there, or even to alter who you are and what you feel. Even as the utterance is citational, it is also transitive. But its transitivity is never actually automatic. One can receive the Hallmark card with the love proclamation printed in gold letters, and quickly throw it away without a second thought. Sometimes someone says I love you and we find them slightly mad or overwrought. We recoil, step away, turn away. And of course, that can always happen to us: there is a chance that our speech act will be refused, and when and if it is, we are ourselves refused, and we feel that refusal in a bodily way.

So what then is the relation between speech and body here? It is cru-cial to remember, as Shoshana Felman has argued, that the speech act, when voiced, comes from the mouth and throat. The body is not only its vehicle, but something is bodied forth in the saying. Our body is not sim-ply over here as a spatiotemporal given, but is itself given over, exposed, and spoken through the speech act that emerges either as sound, as text, or in some visual form. The body is not a substance, but a modality that registers the full expanse of our relations. As such, it is there in the words, spoken or written, even as it is not there, but here. In other words, the body is given and withdrawn at the moment in which we rely on language to convey our love to someone else. We are still over here, waiting, separated from that person, and yet we have already left ourselves, have comported ourselves toward the other, have sent some sign of a corporeal and emo-tional disposition of love, which is also a modality of love and, hence, of the body itself. To say I love you is, through the strange logic of cita-tionality and transitivity, to be located over here and over there, at risk of disappearing into anonymity or of being exposed in ways that sometimes seem impossible to bear. The utterance is a wager we make, but it is also, bodily, a wager we become.

Judith Butler 237

Commitment strikes me as another problem altogether, since we can say I love you but convey no commitment at all. Or we can say those very same words and have them indicate a promise we are making, or try-ing to make. I am not sure about how commitment works, except that one never commits oneself merely once. If I commit myself to someone, I seek to stand for my future (Nietzsche made this point about promises in On the Genealogy of Morals). But if my future is precisely what cannot be fully known, I am not really able to commit myself knowingly. So if I commit myself under circumstances that cannot be predicted, that means that I commit myself in the face of the unknowable. I agree to remain committed to some you or to some ideal regardless of whatever circumstances inter-vene. This is one way to regard commitment, and it involves traditional virtues like steadfastness and consistency. Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds, as Shakespeare says in Sonnet 116. But that very phrase could serve as an indictment of love, suggesting that it is dogmatic, unbending, and terribly willful, or that it is changeable: Love is not love.

But there is another way to emerge from the Nietzschean conundrum. Commitment would be the agreement to commit oneself anew, time and again, precisely when circumstances change. And this would mean chang-ing the concrete meaning of commitment as circumstances change. In other words, commitment would rely on the renewability of the vow, if commitment requires a vow. But it would also require an openness to changing oneself and ones comportment depending on what new cir-cumstances demand. Thus, commitment would not involve inflexibility, but would entail an agreement to make oneself anew in light of the unex-pected demands that challenge ones commitment. If one is committing ones love, one is not making the commitment once, as one sometimes does in a ceremony of public proclamation. If one only commits once, then the rest of life is dedicated to honoring the commitment that one has made. But the commitment then belongs to the past, and whatever desire and love and choice were bound up with that commitment of love are also understood as historic monuments to be safeguarded at all cost. But if commitment is to be alive, that is, if it is to belong to the present, then the only commitment one can make is to commit oneself again and again. I love you and I choose you again and again. I did not just choose you once, but I continued to choose you, and what there is of me in my speech is given to you again and again through this speech act, declara-

238 Response

tion, vow, and promise, one that binds me to you in the present, whatever present that happens to be. That means as well that one binds oneself to the process of becoming different as circumstances demand, which means that in all repetition, there is unknowing. One agrees to commit ones love again, unknowingly again.

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative

Literature and codirector of the Critical Theory program at the University of California,

Berkeley. She is the author of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

(Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (Routledge,

1993), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), and Frames of War: When Is Life Griev-

able? (Verso, 2009), among others. She is also active in gender and sexual politics,

human rights, antiwar politics, and Jewish Voice for Peace, and is the recipient of the

Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities.

Judith Butler 239