Butler seems to reason that, since some cutting-edge theory is opaque, if she makes her writing opaque, it will be cutting-edge (or "subversive" or whatever she's packaging herself as these days). Even if you buy the idea that theory's difficulty reflects the world's difficulty, you don't have to buy that what Butler talks about is so difficult as to require *that* kind of prose. Or that its difficulty couldn't be rehearsed otherwise. Put differently: "difficulty" and "transparency" are ideologies, for sure, but they still reflect political and epistemological choices. I don't buy the narrative of political/epistemological necessity that Butler trots out, any more than I buy it on the part of Fred Jameson or Homi Bhaba. Just about everyone on this list is proof positive against that "necessity." Which seems to make it an academic thing (and I'm an academic, so I'm not *just* bashing academics, though I'm doing that too).
All best Christian