[Fwd: Re: Butler on Spivak (was SZ)]

[Katha Pollitt]

Max B. Sawicky wrote:
> 
> Carrol Cox wrote:
> 
> >Then I'll specify the nature of the dishonesty. She is lying. The critics
> she
> >is replying to, or the conservative marxists she is attacking, don't exist.
> 
> When I heard her delivering that paper at the Rethinking Marxism
> conference in December 1996 I had the same reaction. "Who the hell is
> she talking about?,"
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
> 
> I'd like to know too.  As far out as I am on race, class
> & gender, I would not classify race or gender as "merely
> cultural."  I do not rank them or depict them the
> same as others, but their political and economic
> salience is beyond question.  Who would say otherwise?
> 
> One explanation is that the notion of someone on the
> left classifying gender as cultural is really a way
> of attacking someone who is believed to put class
> over gender, or someone who says Butler is not much
> worth reading or relevant to politics on the planet
> we call Earth.  So the idea is really a rhetorical
> slur.  Now it's one thing to exaggerate someone's
> position for polemical effect.  It's another to base
> a whole bloomin' analysis on it.
> 
> mbs

 yes, well I was one of the "left conservatives" attacked at a
conference at Santa Cruz a couple of years ago that Judith Butler and
her partner Wendy Brown  (daughter of Norman O brown) were involved
with. The left cons mentioned were me, Barbara Ehrenreich, Barbara
Epstein and Alan Sokal -- I think todd gitlin might have been mentioned
also. Our crimes were not that we considered race or gender
insignificant -- whatever our failings, I don't think that'
s a criticism many would make of Barbara Ehrenreich or me!. It was that
we had all criticized anti-foundationalist academic feminist "Theory,"
supposedly believed in "truth with a capital T," thought Alan Sokal's
hoax was funny etc. 

  Interestingly, Norman Mailer described himself as a "left
conservative" in the 60s-early seventies. Partly Meaning he was
anti-feminist. Naturally I didn't appreciate being put in the same
basket with him!