Fates of the Performative is a major intervention in the theory of the performative. Although performativity is not severed from language, in Jeffrey T. Nealon's view it is persuasively linked to the biopolitical. No theorist invested in the question of the biopolitical has gone down the path Nealon is following by proposing that we understand the embodied and the material, or the agency of the material, as a version of the performative. The idea that life doesn't adapt but performs—that it is distanced from itself by staging what it is—is a novel proposition, which means that this book will reorient theoretical debate about what the performative is and productively complicate our understanding of it.