Butler's intro

Alec Ramsdell a_ramsdell at yahoo.com
Thu Jan 14 09:43:39 PST 1999


---Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
>
> I think this also bears on the exchange over nationalism. Does
something
> like black nationalism - and I'm framing this as a question not out of
> coyness but out of real uncertainty - suffer from using the tools of
the
> power one opposes? Does it reproduce the same tendencies to exclude
and
> hierarchicalize? . . .

Depending on how things go, I wanted to bring up something similar with Ch. 6. Freud argues the foreclosure that happens with mourning and melancholy--the two are distinct, but more on that later--can happen against any number of different ideals, including the ideal of country or nationality. One of the major originary myths guiding America was that of the City on the Hill, the New Jerusalem. Today, with income inequality the worst it's been since measurement started, and with racism rampant, and with callous disregard, it seems, for things non-American, what does this say about that ideal "America"? Since the popular imagination seems to be looking forward rather than looking back nostalgically (a la, say, Hofstader's intro to _The American Political Tradition_), what does this say about the tenacity of a formative ideal? Does this clinging to an ideal come back to "the loss of the loss," the object that was incorporated in it's loss?

I've got some other ideas for Ch. 6. We'll see how it goes. I'm also thinking of how "sexed positions" are constructed.


>
> Mentioning institutions of state and capital point to a lack in all of
> Butler's writing - an almost complete silence on issues of money and
> property (both of which grant privileged access to state power).

Yeah, since her background is rhetorics, she doesn't stray from certain registers. Also in Ch. 6 she elaborates a metaphor of melancholia as a defeated rebellion. I don't have the book on me now, but I'll post some eventually.

Alec

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