>i think there's a little confusion here: zizek does his own share of 'pomo
>bashing', though not perhaps of the indiscriminate (or rather, infinite
>repository) variety we have enjoyed so much of late on lbo.
>
>Angela
I found an interesting letter from Judith Butler to Terry Eagleton: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n13/lett2113.htm
"Terry Eagleton only damages himself by refusing to read and engage Gayatri Spivak's important contribution to the theory of cultural studies with the seriousness that it deserves (LRB, 13 May). Surely he knows that her influence on Third World feminism, Continental feminist theory, Marxist theory, subaltern studies and the philosophy of alterity is unparalleled by any living scholar, and that she has changed the academic terrain of each of these fields by her acute and brilliant contributions. He faults her for writing in an inaccessible style, but we all know that her critical interrogation of the political status quo in its global dimensions has reached tens of thousands of activists and scholars. So perhaps it is precisely her well-earned popularity, her ability to reach so many people, and change their thinking so profoundly, that forms the basis of Eagleton's *ressentiment*. Surely, neither the LRB nor Eagleton believes that theorists should confine themselves to writing introductory primers such as those that he has chosen to provide. The wide-ranging audience for Spivak's work proves that spoon-feeding is less appreciated than forms of activist thinking and writing that challenge us to think the world more radically. Indeed, the difficulty of her work is fresh air when read against the truisms which, now fully commodified as 'radical theory', pass as critical thinking. Adorno surely had it right when he wrote - in *Minima Moralia* (1951) - about those who recirculate received opinion: 'only what they do not need first to understand, they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar.' Luckily for us, Spivak's new book gives us the political landscape of culture in its obscurity and proximity, staying, temporarily, the death of thought her reviewer prescribes, and taking the kind of risks that make her so provocative and indisputably important.
Judith Butler University of California, Berkeley -------------------------------- comments? questions?