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