White, Stephen K. Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2000.
Butler does not deny that there are illocutionary speech acts, but she questions whether the isolated picure of a necessarily effective speech act is any better as a general model of injurious speech than Althusser’s isloated picture of interpellation is as a general model of the reproduction of discursive power. In both cases, too much occurs with necessity; too much sovereignty is accorded to the intentions of the speaker; and too little resistant agency is accorded to the addressee.
… speakers wield injurious with necessarily crushing effect; and addressees are thus automatically constutted as victims. Not only does this occlude the space of possible non-state-centered political agency, but it also perpetuates a “sovereign conceit” about actors. Those in poistions of power are imagined as in full control of speech —a control limitable only by that greater sovereign, the state. And addressees are imagined as being, at least ideally, in a condition where the terms of discourse are “their own” a delusion that forges that we are all always already interpellated in a multitude of ways (92).
We do better to think injurious speech on a ‘perlocutionary’ model, where saying something initiates a set of consequences or effects; this saying and its consequences are temporally distinguishable. The word and th wound do not fuse into one. The gap between them may in some cases be quite small; but its existence is crucial to emphasize, because it constitutes the space of possible failure and resignification (92).