Nussbaum on Butler w/ a Pollitt kicker

Nathan Newman nathan.newman at yale.edu
Sun Nov 21 12:09:39 PST 1999



>From today's NY TIMES MAGAZINE: a large profile on the U of Chicago prof
Matha Nussbaum:

==Earlier this year, Nussbaum took aim at Judith Butler, the radical feminist philosopher who has attained cultlike status (through dense monographs like "Gender Trouble") for arguing, among other things, that society is built on artificial gender norms that can best be undermined with "subversive" symbolic behavior, like cross-dressing. Appearing in The New Republic, Nussbaum's 8,600-word essay, "The Professor of Parody," castigated Butler for proffering a "self-involved" feminism that encouraged women to disengage from real-world problems -- like inferior wages or sexual harassment -- and retreat to abstract theory. "For Butler," she wrote, "the act of subversion is so riveting, so sexy, that it is a bad dream to think that the world will actually get better." By abdicating the fight against injustice in favor of "hip defeatism," Butler, Nussbaum concluded darkly, "collaborates with evil."

The review received a visceral response within the academy and beyond. Butler's defenders branded it an ad feminam attack on an innovative thinker whose reputation was surpassing Nussbaum's own. "It was a crassly opportunistic act," said Joan Scott, a historian at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Others welcomed Nussbaum's blow against the hermetic politics of postmodernism. "The piece was a skillful and long-overdue shredding," said Katha Pollitt, the feminist writer.

Although it would be hard to find two more ideologically dissimilar thinkers than Bloom and Butler, according to Nussbaum's withering judgment they were guilty of a common crime: both were mandarin philosophers who refused to use their theories to help wage the battle for freedom, justice and equality. While Bloom was at least openly skeptical about philosophy's connection to democracy (he disparaged those who dared to seek practical advice from his beloved Greek texts), Butler drew Nussbaum's ire because she claimed to be using philosophy to address political issues even as she manipulated poststructuralist theory to sidestep them. "I thought of the Butler and Bloom reviews as acts of public service," she said. "But a lot of my impatience with their work grew out of my repudiation of my own aristocratic upbringing. I don't like anything that sets itself up as an in-group or an elite, whether it is the Bloomsbury group or Derrida." ===



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list