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Article published In:
When Dialogue Fails
Edited by Anja Müller-Wood
[Language and Dialogue 12:1] 2022
► pp. 35–53

The parasites of language

“President Trump, please liberate Hong Kong”

| Chapman University

This article examines how “parasitical” political language can help explore a new understanding of oppositional opinions in a global context of political polarization. By parasitical political language, I refer to what speech act theorist J.L. Austin calls “infelicitous speech acts”, language that is used unsuccessfully. Jacques Derrida argues that these “incorrect” utterances can escape from an already determined context and extend to a more liberated kind of communication. To explore the potentially “positive” effect of parasitical language, this article examines the utterances of Hong Kong protesters prior to the 2020 US elections as infelicitous speech acts. Their radical political approach, surprisingly, spawned an anti-globalist activist subculture shared by protesters in other parts of the world.

Keywords: Hong Kong protests, infelicity, speech act, Derrida, Rancière, democracy, anti-globalism, dissensus
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Infelicitous speech acts in the Hong Kong protests?
  • 4.The collapse of the sensible and the breakdown of communication
  • 5.The residue from the collapse
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 7 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00110.tan
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