Their attempts to regulate language only limit the political imagination, making true liberatory politics impossible

Such dogmatism appears as well in the effort to circumscribe speech that injures, excites, threatens, and offends. Whether it is the censorship of particular kinds of representation or the circumscription of the domain of public discourse itself, the effort to tighten the reins on speech undercuts those political impulses to exploit speech itself for its insurrectionary effects. The intellectual opposition to questions that destabilize a sense of reality seems a mundane academic case in point.

To question a term, a term like "the subject" or "universality," is to ask how it plays, what investments it bears, what aims it achieves, what alterations it undergoes. The changeable life of that term does not preclude the possibility of its use. If a term becomes questionable, does that mean it cannot be used any longer, and that we can only use terms that we already know how to master? Why is it that posing a question about a term is considered the same as enacting a prohibition against use? Why is it that we sometimes do feel that if a term is dislodged of its prior and known contexts, that we will not be able to live, to survive, to use language, to speak for ourselves? What kind of guarantee does this effort to refer the speech act back to its originating context exercise, and what sort of terror does it forestall? Is it that in the ordinary mode, terms arc assumed, terms like "the subject" and "universality," and the sense in which they "must" be assumed is a moral one, taking the form of an imperative, and like some moral interdictions, a defense against what terrifies us most? Are we not paralyzed by a fear of the unknown future of words that keeps us from interrogating the terms that we need to live, and of taking the risk of living the terms that we keep in question?