the Butler did it

Frances Bolton (PHI) fbolton at chuma.cas.usf.edu
Wed Dec 23 15:43:14 PST 1998


I expect that this passage is making people that much more excited about the impending Judy fiesta. Reminder: we need people to volunteer to do each chapter. Since it was Snit's idea, she is obligated to take a chapter. Sweet Alec has already offered to do one. I am now volunteering to do one. Max--you gonna take one? Doug? How do people learn to write like this? Anyone willing to take a stab at translating it?

On Wed, 23 Dec 1998, Doug Henwood wrote:


> No doubt many of you have seen this a hundred times already. Judith Butler
> has won this year's Bad Writing Contest, sponsored by the journal
> Philosophy and Literature (anyone know anything about this journal). The
> full story is at <http://www.cybereditions.com/aldaily>.
>
> Here's the winning sentence, from her essay "Further Reflections on the
> Conversations of Our Time," in Diacritics:
>
> The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood
> to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view
> of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition,
> convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality
> into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of
> Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical
> objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility
> of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up
> with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of
> power.
>
> Doug
>



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