Description: In a provactive work that brings new tools to the history of philosophy, Karen S. Feldman offers an elegant account of how philosophical language appears to produce the very thing it claims to describe. She demonstrates that conscience can only be described and understood through tropes and figures of langugae. If description in literal terms is impossible, as Binding Words convincingly argues, perhaps there is no such thing. But if the word "conscience" has no tangible referent, then how can conscience be constructed as binding? Does our conscience move us to do things, or is this yet another figure of speech?
Review Quotes: "A brilliant consideration of the relationship between performativity and conscience, Binding Words is a tour de force, written with admirable lucidity, vitality, imagination, and originality. It is at once rhetorical and philosophical, full of vibrant and unexpected readings."
--Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley