And when it is words that wound, […] how are we to understand the relation between the word and the wound? If it is not a causal relation, and not the materialization of an intention, is it perhaps a kind of discursive transitivity that needs to be specified in its historicity and its violence? What is the relation between this transitivity and the power to injure? […] The subject who utters the socially injurious words is mobilized by that long string of injurious interpellations: the subject achieves a temporary status in the citing of that utterance, in performing itself as the origin of that utterance.
Judith Butler, Excitable speech, 1997 # 35
When words wound
Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
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- I can’t help but think of that curious delay [in translation], the gap between the spoken word and its effect. I mean the delay that we notice whenever we attend a conference or debate in several languages: the way the laughs come out of sync once the translator manages to convey the comic effect, …
What if everything is entangled
Words do not only acquire meaning from the dictionary. They carry the histories of how they have been used — who has spoken them, to whom, under what conditions, and with what consequences. That history sticks to the word. It cannot simply be washed off.
A seemingly harmless word can become an insult, a racist attack, a wound. To be called by a word is to receive its history en plein figure.
And sometimes that history brings the dead back with it.
For the speaker, this means a responsibility: intention is never enough. Even the most innocent intention can become naive in the face of the histories a word carries. We speak through those histories, whether we know it or not.
Meike Gleim, 2026of our Imagination
