Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force

Extract

Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force. By James Boyd White. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 256p. $29.95.

James Boyd White's recent work is as impressive as his earlier work in terms of the clarity of argument, the originality of thought, and the commitment to social analysis that incorporates language analysis, legal theory, and ethics. While drawing from current theories of language, White does not quite belong in the postmodern tradition because he searches for authentic representations of thoughts and emotions. This brings him closer to phenomenology. His title phrase, “living speech,” taken from Simone Weil, sets forth his primary argument. He makes a distinction between living speech, which represents genuine, creative thought, and “dead speech,” which reiterates slogans, clichés, and speech patterns from a culture's ideologies, including advertising and propaganda. Dead speech endeavors to get the listener to act in a prescribed way, while living speech tries to persuade the listener to see the virtues of an argument. White's goal is to encourage living speech in order to move societies closer to love and justice. Like the postmoderns, he believes that speech is the foundational human activity because it conveys the imagination, but unlike postmoderns, he wants to talk about the ways in which speech articulates aspects of a human mind by making meaning.