![]() ![]() Because you will spend the next two hours around the round table that makes conversing easier, you consider waiting a few minutes before entering the room. Usually you are nestled under blankets and the house is empty. You let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows. When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices CITIZEN 2. The company of Citizens stand in silhouette. Standing outside the conference room, unseen by the two men waiting for the others to arrive, you hear one say to the other that being around black people is like watching a foreign film without translation. CITIZEN: AN AMERICAN LYRIC An empty stage. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and, as insane as it is, saying please. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. After considering Butler’s remarks, you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. “Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. ![]()
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