Maya Nitis

Excerpt: "Assuming that the lack of trust in words has to do with the 'use' to which they are put, the following pages elaborate upon the proposition that language belongs to those who need it and, while neither inherently violent nor innocent, it is characterized by sharing. Toni Morrison’s bird of a language is offered by children to a blind woman, asking her to guess whether it is dead or alive. The woman, this writer, refuses the choice, perceiving the trick the question contained. Turning to language as this bird in Excitable Speech, Judith Butler echoes the proposal that we, too, refuse the unlivability and cruelty of this choice and others of its ilk. We could then read (this) language as not only characteristically mutable but also moving in many senses of this multivalent verb. This essay attempts to bring together several different strands that span discourse and nonviolence, a broad enough territory, but not a field (or vice versa?). An overlapping and non-collapsible opening gapes as one approaches the space and time of discourse—itself a doing yet not coextensive with “action”—and nonviolence, neither passive nor violent direct action. We enter this zone of complexity through a transdisciplinary approach. The argument that hopefully unfolds amid these border zones is one in which complexity breaks with elitism, where nonviolence moves not only beyond limits (for instance, the phantasmatic ones among language and action, or the obfuscated ones among discourse and direct action) but gives rise to subversive traditions whose stakes exceed given revolutionary, reformist, and reactionary tracks."