QUILTING POINTS:

Thursday 15 November | 5 - 6.30pm | LHRI | All welcome  For our third session of the year, we will be focusing on Butler’s analyses of hate speech, censorship, and ‘obscenity’ in the introduction to Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997). Excitable Speech continues Butler’s investigation of subject categories in the context of language and rhetoric. She returns to speech act theories, this time developing questions related to hate speech, injurious name-calling (such as racial slurs or epithets), pornography, rap lyrics, and gay self-expression in the US military – all these topics receive an introductory gloss in this week’s material. Central to her thesis is the rhetorical elision between physical and linguistic injury. Can words wound? How are bodies implicated in, or interpellated by, verbal pain or injury, such as name-calling or legal legislation? Her introduction, and the study as a whole, demonstrates an anxiety about the limits of resignification....

January 28th: 'Right of Death and Power over Life' The first meeting of 2015 will be on Foucault's 'Right of Death and Power over Life'. This will be the first meeting focusing on the theme of biopower and subjectivity, which we will be building on throughout the semester.  Introducing the text will be Ed Powell, PhD student in the School of English and Ben Chwistek, PhD student in the School of Classics and co-director of Quilting Points. A link to the text can be found here:   'Right of Death and Power over Life' This semester we will be meeting at the slightly later time of 15:30, and will be finishing at 17:30. As before, we will be meeting in the LHRI Seminar Room. Benjamin Chwistek and Ryan Topper Directors, Quilting Points 2014/2015