Linguistically Mediated Injuries: Differentiation Between Naming and Stigmatization

This talk seeks to explore the advantages of a discursive approach to critical studies of language use for understanding institutionalized social and cultural inequalities. It will discuss the importance of understanding ’discourse’ as a concept that is to grasp the dialectic differentiation of the text/context distinction that is structured by ’plurality’ within specific relations of power. The talk will try to challenge the reduction of discourse to sign systems (including language) as well as the binary perception of Foucaultian and Gramscian concepts of ’power’. In order to go beyond the valorization of one side of the binary of positivist universalism of reality versus constructivist relativity of representations, the paper will look at the various forms of linguistic stigmatization over the past twenty years in Hungary and develop a ’constituist’ position, bringing together particular arguments developed by Butler 1993, Sedgwick 1993, Gee 1999, and Harding 2006.  With the help of the actual examples of hate speech, the paper will demonstrate why it is important to establish which articulation of hate speech emerges as a relevant point of departure for critique and may result in a potentially more subversive meaning of “linguistic injury”.