> On Sat, 20 Nov 1999, Katha Pollitt wrote:
>
> > writing. Butler's just a bad writer --verbose, turgid, jargonistic.[SNIP]
>
> So she's a little wordy. Doesn't mean she doesn't have smart things to say
> or that her ideas are invalid, though. [SNIP]
Mostly on the say-so of posters to this or other maillists I spent a good deal of time on Judith Butler. (*Bodies That Matter*, an NLR article, her sections of *Feminist Contentions*) And I have never considered the charge of "bad writing" to be a legitimate challenge to any writer's content. (I see the claim that form and content are inseparable as a major 20th c. superstition. Content is inseparable from *some* form, but there may be many forms, including badly written ones, that express the same content. To put it another way, unless paraphrase is possible, society is impossible.)
But: Neither on the basis of my own reading nor on what anyone I've read has said about her have I found the least reason not to think that Samuel Johnson over 2 centuries ago said everything that needs to be said about her (quoted from memory): This book contains much that is new and much that is true, but that which is new is not true and that which is true is not new. I would be content with a formulation of an old truth which gives it sharper or more relevant focus, but I have not found anything of that sort in her either.
And she is dishonest. Her blatant dishonesty in the NLR article (refusing to name specific instances and specific writers who exemplifed "marxist conservatism") is not an aberration but a reflection of her basic rhetorical strategies in *Feminist Contentions* and *Bodies That Matter*. She has much to say, for example, of how her attitude towards materialism has been misinterpreted or misunderstood -- but she does not explicitly meet the arguments of any serious critic of her work.
Carrol