Butler on Spivak (was SZ)

[Katha Pollitt]

> I found an interesting letter from Judith Butler to Terry Eagleton:
> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n13/lett2113.htm
> 
>  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.

It really peeves me that Butler constantly cites Adorno as an imprimatur
for her own ghastly chewed-up-back-issues-of-Critical Inquiry prose. 
Adorno was a great prose stylist -- difficult because he was so packed,
allusive, ironic and terse.   Like a poem -- or wittgenstein's
Philosophical Investigations, another wonderful piece of difficult
writing. Butler's just a bad writer --verbose, turgid, jargonistic. She
has no metaphors or images, no startling allusions, no witty examples,
no slant use of quotation, no shrewd deployment of historical anecdote.
her books have no feeling and no voice -- can't say that about Adorno.

  In the new preface to Gender Troubles (routledge, l999) she compares
people who criticize her lack of clarity to Nixon saying "let me make
one thing perfectly clear". clarity is falsity, obscurity is truth. And
if you don't like her writing, you're dishonest, like the old unindicted
co-conspirator himself.

Katha