Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface: Why the Performative?

Part I. Genealogy of the Performative

1. The Truth Is a Joke? Performatives in Austin and Derrida

2. Two Paths You Can Go By: Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

3. The Bodacious Era: Thoreau and New Materialism; or, What’s Wrong with the Anthropocene?

Part II. Performativity and/as/into Biopolitics

4. Biopolitics, Marxism and Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century

5. What Is a Lecturer? Performative, Parrhesia, and the Author-Function in Foucault’s Lecture Courses

6. Literary RealFeel: Banality, Fatality, and Meaning in Kenneth Goldsmith’s The Weather

Conclusion: On the Returns of Realism and the (Supposed) Exhaustion of Critique

Notes

Index

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. 

"A powerful new examination of the performative that asks "what's next?" for this well-worn concept"--