From: "Max B. Sawicky" <sawicky at bellatlantic.net> Date: Wed, 11 Aug 1999 20:27:11 -0700
. . .
>>So they didn't, giving rise to some controversy in the ranks.
>>I took it as a sign of seriousness.
>
>Or a sign that a woman's right to an abortion just isn't that
>important? Is that what you mean by serious? And people thought
>Judith Butler was delusional when she said:
>
>"This resurgence of Left orthodoxy calls for a 'unity' that would,
>paradoxically, redivide the Left in precisely the way that orthodoxy
If dividing the left means redefining it so that JB isn't in it, then yessirree Bob.
>purports to lament. Indeed, one way of producing this division
>becomes clear when we ask, which movements, and for what reasons, get
>relegated to the sphere of the merely cultural, and how that very
>division between the material and the cultural becomes tactically
>invoked for the purposes of marginalizing certain forms of political
>activism? And how does the new orthodoxy on the Left work in tandem
>with a social and sexual conservativism that seeks to make questions
>of race and sexuality secondary to the 'real' business of
>politics...."
What JB calls 'relegating' or 'marginalizing' is really prioritizing for the purpose of forging broad consensus. Hers is the cry of someone who will not settle for less than her *entire* loaf, while contentedly accepting the wholesale marginalization of the most basic issues going to material well-being. Since to her everything is backwards, real leftism is conservative, and her own unreal, unreadable speculations are revolutionary.
Something tells me this will not settle the argument.
mbs