Insult

An insult is effective precisely because it does not function as a constative utterance but rather as a proper noun; because it uses language in order to give a name in such a way that the named can not accept his name, and against which he cannot defend himself (as if someone were to insist on calling me Gastone knowing that my name is Giorgio). What is offensive in the insult is, in other words, a pure experience of language and not a reference to the world.

(Agamben, The Friend, in What is an Apparatus?, p.30)