This reply to the commentaries takes up the issue of “giving and taking offence” and draws on Judith Butler's analysis of “excitable speech” to explore the productivity as well as the impact of injurious speech. The paper then briefly examines the psychoanalytic frame and the various readings of transference that arise from thinking psychoanalytically beyond the clinical setting. Laplanche's notion of “unbinding” is clarified as belonging to this context. The argument for the specificity of the functioning of the transference in different domains is reiterated, and it is argued that psychoanalytic sensitivity requires paying attention to the way the research act throws us off the psychoanalytic subject. The paper ends with Butler's feminist notion of conversation as “a mode of doing something together and becoming otherwise”.