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WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, Volume 39, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Summer

2011, pp. 236-239 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2011.0020

For additional information about this article

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Response: Performative Reflections on Love

and Commitment
Judith Butler

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 hiding 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
236

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

Judith Butler237

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 destination 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 crucial 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 simply 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 emotional 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 citationality 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.

238 Response

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 trying 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 intervene. 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 changing 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 circumstances demand. Thus, commitment would not involve inflexibility,
but would entail an agreement to make oneself anew in light of the unexpected 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-

Judith Butler239

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 Grievable? (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.