Congratulations, Judith Butler!

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Fri Feb 5 23:42:59 PST 1999


I don't know the context of the Butler quote which has been chosen for this award, but it seems to point to a problem in structuralism that Bourdieu has also discussed. For example, from Logic of Practice:

"If the dialectic of objective structures and incorporated structures which operates in every practical action in ignored, then one necessarily falls into the canonical dilemma, endlessly recurring in new forms in the history of social thought, which condemns those who seek to jreject subjectivism, likel present day structuralist readers of Marx, to fall into the fetishism of social laws. To make transcedent entities, which are to practice as esence to existence, out of the constructions that science resorts to in order to give an account of the structure and meaningful products of the accumulation of innumerable historical actions, is to reduce history to 'a process without a subject', simply replacing the 'creative subject' of subjectivism which an automaton driven by the dead laws of a history of nature. This emanatist vision, which makes a structure--Capital or a Mode of Production--into an entelechy developing itself in the process of self realization, reduces historical agents to the role of 'supports' (Traeger) of the structure and their own actions to mere epiphenomenal manifestations of the structure's own power to develop itself and to determine and overdetermine other structures." Logic of Practice, p. 41

It seems to me that Butler has a similar criticism of structuralism and structuralist Marxism as enunciated here by Bourdieu. But I may well understand neither. And this is not to say that they attempt to move beyond structuralism in the same way.

Yours, Rakesh



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