The performativity of insulting language and the limits of legal recognition as a response to hate speech

Abstract

What is at stake when we take an interpellation from the context of everyday life to the legal apparatus of the State? Is it possible for the State to account for the intermediation of languages in a way that is satisfactory to its intermediaries? We resort to a conceptual analysis of hate speech to analyze the consequences, impasses, and issues involved in these processes. Let us think with Judith Butler about ways to expand an understanding of hate speech as a consequence of the norm, through the performative use of language as a means of constructing responses in the very scene in which the insult appears as an exercise of oppression. The author requests means of action in the very space where the hate speech occurs, as a bet on the subject’s capacity for agency through nonconformity to the grammar of imposition of power. In addition, she uses language as a performative mode of action and the way through which the phantasmatic structure of the insulting speech against the other can be touched, transformed, and repositioned, thereby producing a new form for universalism.