All Shock, No Therapy

Christian Gregory christian11 at mindspring.com
Sun Jan 28 09:59:21 PST 2001



>
> Not dialectical enough. It's a symbolic solution (which is fine, because
> symbols exert real power) to an imaginary understanding (all ideologies
> require the power of imagination, however feeble) to the *wrong* problem
> -- signification. Butler is arguing, along with Adorno, that "you have to
> have the tradition in oneself to hate it properly",

Seems more like Butler's argument is that you have to hate yourself properly in order to belong to a tradition -- such as are presently available in the world.

Dennis paraphrased my understanding of Yoshie's comment: Butler imagines signification as the crack in totality that will unleash transformation. In itself, this thought is banal, like restating, for the zillionth time, that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. But, like Derrida, she represents (and probably hopes for) such changes in purely formal terms. Like Jacques' watery messianism, Butler's hopes about resignifying skid into the historically particular forms of capital and power, and find themselves mangled there, like so many cars piled up in interstate motor disasters. I'm with Dennis--what needs to be mapped here is why some positions are more readily attached to than others.

Christian



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