Book Section
Lucilla Guidi

Language as Embodied Practice

Notes on Performative Processes of Subjectification with Reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and Judith Butler
Language as a web of sedimented and embodied practices points to a performative process of subjectivation in which normativity and communities are formed, sustained, and renegotiated. Drawing on Wittgenstein and Cavell, this article examines our mutual attunement in a shared and embodied practice of language. It further deepens the idea of this mutual attunement through Butler’s notion of opacity as a relational and affective ontology.
Title
Language as Embodied Practice
Subtitle
Notes on Performative Processes of Subjectification with Reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and Judith Butler
Author(s)
Lucilla Guidi
Identifier
Description
Language as a web of sedimented and embodied practices points to a performative process of subjectivation in which normativity and communities are formed, sustained, and renegotiated. Drawing on Wittgenstein and Cavell, this article examines our mutual attunement in a shared and embodied practice of language. It further deepens the idea of this mutual attunement through Butler’s notion of opacity as a relational and affective ontology.
Is Part Of
Place
Berlin
Publisher
ICI Berlin Press
Date
April 28, 2026
Subject
embodiment
performativity
attunement
opacity
relationality
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
Cavell, Stanley
Butler, Judith
Rights
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Language
en-GB
page start
15
page end
48
Source
Performing Embodiment: Choreographies of Affect, Language, and Social Norms, ed. by Alberica Bazzoni and Federica Buongiorno, Cultural Inquiry, 39 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2026), pp. 15–48
  • Butler, Judith, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (Routledge, 1993)
  • Butler, Judith, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (Routledge, 1997)
  • Butler, Judith, Giving an Account of Oneself (Fordham University Press, 2005) <https://doi.org/10.5422/fso/9780823225033.001.0001>
  • Butler, Judith, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard University Press, 2015) <https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674495548>
  • Butler, Judith, ‘Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance’, in Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay (Duke University Press, 2016), pp. 12–27 <https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373490-004>
  • Cavell, Stanley, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 1979)
  • Cavell, Stanley, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (Blackwell, 1995)
  • Cavell, Stanley, ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’, in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 41–67 <https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316286616.006>
  • Derrida, Jacques, ‘Signature Event Context’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. by Alan Bass (The Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 307–30
  • Derrida, Jacques, Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology, ed. and trans. by Leonard Lawlor (Northwestern University Press, 2011)
  • Guidi, Lucilla, ‘Die Grundlosigkeit der Praxis in Wittgensteins Über Gewißheit. Kritik als Übung des Kontingenzbewusstseins’, in Crisis and Critique: Philosophical Analysis and Current Events; Contributions to the 42nd International Wittgenstein Symposium 2019, ed. by Anne Siegetsleitner and others, Contributions of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, XXVII (Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, 2019), pp. 86–90
  • Guidi, Lucilla, ‘Emotions as Embodied Expressions: Wittgenstein on the Inner Life’, Humana.Mente, 12.36 (2019), pp. 146–69 <https://www.humanamente.eu/index.php/HM/article/view/295> [accessed 11 November 2025]
  • Guidi, Lucilla, ‘Iterabilität und Kontingenz der Praxis in Wittgenstein und Heidegger’, in Praxis. Ausüben. Begreifen, ed. by Michael Corsten (Velbrück, 2021), pp. 46–68 <https://doi.org/10.5771/9783748912583-46>
  • Kelz, Rosine, The Non-Sovereign Self, Responsibility, and Otherness: Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, and Stanley Cavell on Moral Philosophy and Political Agency (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)
  • Khurana, Thomas, ‘This New Yet Unapproachable Community: Formen der Gemeinschaft bei Cavell und Blanchot’, in Happy Days: Lebenswissen nach Cavell, ed. by Kathrin Thiele and Katrin Trüstedt (Fink, 2009), pp. 43–65 <https://doi.org/10.30965/9783846747254_005>
  • Kripke, Saul, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition (Harvard University Press, 1982)
  • Laugier, Sandra, and Daniele Lorenzini, ‘Who’s Afraid of the Perlocutionary?’, Inquiry, 68.6 (2021) <https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2021.1990792>
  • Marrati, Paola, ‘The Fragility of Words, the Vulnerability of Life’, MLN, 130.5 (2015), pp. 1055–66 <https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2015.0081>
  • McDowell, John, ‘Wittgenstein on Following a Rule’, Synthesis, 58 (1984), pp. 325–63 <https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00485246>
  • Mills, Catherine, ‘Undoing Ethics: Butler on Precarity, Opacity and Responsibility’, in Butler and Ethics, ed. by Moya Lloyd (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 41–64 <https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748678860-004>
  • Mulhall, Stephen, ‘Criteria, Scepticism, and the External World’, in Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 79–108 <https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198238508.003.0006>
  • Murphy, Ann V., ‘Corporeal Vulnerability and the New Humanism’, Hypatia, 26.3 (2011), pp. 575–90 <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01202.x>
  • Norris, Andrew, Becoming Who We Are: Politics and Practical Philosophy in the Work of Stanley Cavell (Oxford University Press, 2019)
  • Puhl, Klaus, ‘Die List der Regel. Zur Konstitution sozialer Praxis’, in Institutionen und Regelfolgen, ed. by Ulrich Baltzer and Gerhard Schönrich (Mentis, 2002), pp. 81–99
  • Sparti, Davide, ‘Fra Scetticismo e riconoscimento. Breve guida alla filosofia di Cavell’, in Stanley Cavell, La riscoperta dell’ordinario: la filosofia, lo scetticismo, il tragico (Carocci, 2001), pp. 505–23
  • Sparti, Davide, ‘Projective Imagination: Therapy and Improvisation in Wittgenstein’s (and Cavell’s) Vision of Language’, in Wittgensteinian Exercises: Aesthetic and Ethical Transformations, ed. by Lucilla Guidi (Brill/Fink, 2023), pp. 19–44 <https://doi.org/10.30965/9783846767450_003>
  • Sparti, Davide, ‘Dal riconoscimento alla riconoscibilità. Soggettivazione e la questione dell’umano in Axel Honneth e in Judith Butler’, Lares, 89.2 (2023), pp. 205–22 <https://doi.org/10.1400/297478>
  • Wehrle, Maren, ‘Bodily Performativity: Enacting Norms’, in Phenomenology as Performative Exercise, ed. by Lucilla Guidi and Thomas Rentsch (Brill, 2020), pp. 120–39 <https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004420991_009>
  • Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Zettel, ed. by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe (Blackwell, 1967)
  • Wittgenstein, Ludwig, On Certainty, ed. by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. by Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Blackwell, 1969)
  • Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, ed. by G. H. von Wright, trans. by G. H. von Wright and others (Blackwell, 1998)
  • Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, ed. by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, rev. 4th edn (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)

Publication scheduled for 28 April 2026