Jeffrey T. NealonFates of the Performative
From the Linguistic Turn to the New Materialism
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.
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
