 | Fates of the Performative : From the Linguistic Turn to the New Materialism A powerful new examination of the performative that asks "what's next?" for this well-worn concept Fates of the Performative takes a deep dive into this "performative force" to think about the continued power and relevance of this wide-ranging concept. Offering both a history of the performative's mutations and a diagnosis of its present state, Nealon traces how it has been deployed by key writers in the past sixty years, including foundational thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, and Judith Butler; contemporary theorists such as Thomas Piketty and Antonio Negri; and the "conceptual poetry" of Kenneth Goldsmith. Ultimately, Nealon's inquiry is animated by one powerful question: what's living and what's dead in performative theory? In deconstructing the reaction against the performative in current humanist thought, Fates of the Performative opens up important conversations about systems theory, animal studies, object-oriented ontology, and the digital humanities. Nealon's stirring appeal makes a necessary declaration of the performative's continued power and relevance at a time of neoliberal ascendancy. Jeffrey T. Nealon is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Philosophy at Penn State University. His most recent books are I'm Not Like Everybody Else: Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and American Popular Music ; Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life; and Post-Postmodernism ; or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism . |
