Adria, you must mean I have some 'splainin' to do? Here's what I mean: the recent overemphasis on the "prison house of language" has in common with various religious fundamentalisms that merely viewing or hearing certain images or words can have dire effects on one's psyche or soul. The essential insight of modern liberalism (in its Kantian and Millian varieties) is that speech is fundamentally different from conduct (with the exception of certain Austinian illocutionary acts such as performing a marriage or a baptism). (In jurisprudential terms, I would add Hugo Black's insight that we had best draw very bright lines around fundamental rights like freedom of speech, so that we do not let the hard cases muddy up, in a common-lawyerly fashion, our understanding of the Constitution as the people's document.)

To return to your earlier comment, it simply makes no sense to depict Muslims are particularly oppressed by the West--jihadists are often well-educated and, in the case of bin Laden, quite wealthy. The simplistic "post-colonial" binary of bad West/virtuous Other doesn't really cut it here.

that's a great topos/tropos, redolent of "the materiality of discourse" ... an oxymoron ... that great and still unanswered thang by our beloved dr cloud ... and also the ire produced by my seeing/making/doing observations (want to piss off a roomful of english professors? suggest that saying/writing something isn't necessarily doing something).
thanks, adria. xo

Thanks for posting this. Really: I'm working on that chapter right now, and am looking for recent flare-ups in the news.

This is sad. It's sad because this is a historical book that clearly doesn't involve an editor "testing the bounds of free speech." It's sad because the University is so concerned that they apparently are removing images in her book other than those of the cartoons.

And it's sad because it's been sucked into the black abyss of framing this controversy as purely a matter of free speech (you know I have to go here). People tout free speech as this moral compass, and yet refuse to take into account how it is truly just a strategy. It is a strategy of opening up space to voice dissent and build political agency. Similarly, it is a strategy of shutting down dissent and restricting political agency. If we want to talk morals about it, how we engage this strategy can move us forward or move us backward in our engagement with (O)others. At this particular historical juncture, what GOOD is it doing to print the actual cartoons? Is it helping discussion? Or is it merely bolstering the narrative that somehow our Westernized way of life is under attack yet again, because we cannot print pictures that cause riots during a time of war?

As the author herself says, "I agreed," she said, "to the press’s decision to not print the cartoons and other hitherto uncontroversial illustrations featuring images of the Muslim prophet, with sadness. But I also never intended the book to become another demonstration for or against the cartoons, and hope the book can still serve its intended purpose without illustrations."

Good. Talk about them without endorsing their print. Describe them so that you aren't endorsing their censor. Wasn't it Hariman and Lucaites that talked about the INHERENT (non-free-speech-related) difficulty in working with the rhetoric of violent images? Do you show that image at your conference presentation, etc? That's not about free speech. It's about recognizing the power of words and images. Doesn't mean you have to roll over to silence, which can be equally traumatic. Just means there's a kairos to things, no?