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The critical commentary on Judith Butler's Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative focuses primarily on her use of speech-act theory for political purposes. Admitting the limitations of Austin's work, she introduces an extended supplement to her linguistically based performative theory in Excitable Speech: a discussion of embodied subjectivity presented in ways never before instanced in her work. That is, in this text, she continues to use speech-act theory articulated with Derridean iterability (her usual practice) to ground performativity, while presenting a version of embodiment newly derived from psychoanalysis to establish the political efficacy of the subject. Although this shift has gone unremarked in the literature, Butler herself treats this psychoanalytic dimension as animating the entire argument. This article reviews her logic and the place that psychoanalysis holds in her theory to establish the viability of the embodied political performative and its utility for historicism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the notion of performativity as part of the movement against the notion of 'thinking' by René Descartes which is an argument of co-extensivity. The author points out that the notion of performativity names an approach that refuses to tie the fact that 'there is thinking' to identity or ontology. She adds that to speak of performativity in relation to the subject of subjectivity is to focus on the practices of this conditioned element within the various matrices by which it is sustained. The author quotes Judith Butler's thesis which interrogates differentiated subject formation within practices that sustain lines of power and power effects.