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

From its humble origins in J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory of the 1950s, the performative has grown to permeate wildly diverse scholarly fields, ranging from deconstruction and feminism to legal theory and even theories about the structure of matter. Here Jeffrey T. Nealon discovers how the performative will remain vital in the twenty-first century, arguing that it was never merely concerned ...