Ever since the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle defined the human being both as a political animal (zoon politikon) and as an animal endowed with speech and reason (zoon logon echon), the relationship between our linguistic capacities and our forms of collective life has preoccupied philosophers and political theorists. Our species-specific powers of speech, signification, and verbal communication shape diverse political ideologies and ways of organizing collective life. Debates about our linguistic powers have intense implications for who gets to speak, when, and how—and what their words will mean to listeners. As the political rhetoric of the powerful continues to wreak transformative and devastating effects, and as these powers imbue artificial intelligence’s large language models with epoch-making agency, we are in pressing need of an analysis of the nexus between language and politics that can help us get our bearings in the current historical moment.
In this course, we’ll investigate the multifaceted political uses of language and the philosophical legacy of arguments about language and politics. We will ask: does political equality mean a universal capacity and right to public speech? Or are our “natural” communicative endowments indifferent to political content? Given our ability to make people do things with words through political and legal “speech acts,” what does it mean to “perform” our politics? What are the salient political valences of different speech acts, including slogans, commands, insults, and lying? What does it mean to be both a political and a linguistic animal in different historical moments? In dialogue with ancient and modern philosophy, we will interrogate a range of contemporary thinkers who have sought to reframe the relationship between the linguistic and the political: Paolo Virno’s writings on the political grammar of negation, Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on infancy, and Judith Butler’s inquiries into political speech will be among our key texts.
