Liberalism, performativity, secularism: introduction

Abstract

This introduction contends that performativity is central to the secular liberal state and that 1850s American literature registers this centrality. Engaging with the theories of liberalism from Michele Foucault and Claude Lefort and the speech act theory of J.L. Austin and Shoshana Felman, this chapter identifies performative utterance as the common denominator of liberal institutions and the source of their inherent instability that its twentieth-century critics identify. The antebellum liberal state and the institutions that comprise it depend upon self-authorizing performatives in order to function which the secular liberal state must misrecognize as constative. The period’s literature appropriates this insight in order to think the state and political authority on transcendent grounds drawn from the Christian theological tradition.