[lbo-talk] Is this the new left?

Jerry Monaco monacojerry at gmail.com
Sat Jul 22 07:23:07 PDT 2006


On 7/21/06, info at pulpculture.org <info at pulpculture.org> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> Really> because i don't think you can understand a thing about the sex
> wars
> in feminist bloglandia right now if you haven't read butler. every single
> thing that butler discusses is illuminated by what's going on right now.
> (And please, don't give me the crap about how someone else said it first:
> not an argument.)
>
>
> Bitch | Lab
> http://blog.pulpculture.org

Please help me! I have Chomsky's problem with Zizek, Butler, Derrida, Foucault, etc.

I wish you would explain to me why Butler is worth reading. I have read three of her books and I tell you I would have gained a lot more by rereading Wolstonecraft's "Rights" three times over. Why is she worth reading except as a kind of high-spidery literati spinning tangled thoughts in order to make her living? If you are an academic maybe you have to read her so that you can spin out more articles that must get published. I am not talking about politics here.

I am just saying that whenever I read Derrida or Zizek or Butler, etc. etc. I find them next to worthless in trying to actually understand the world. I read in order to know or understand or to give me access to the experiences of others in the world and sometimes for all three reasons. The pomos don't help me in this project, for the most part, except sometimes, if I try hard enough in giving me access to "experience." Or maybe I am saying that I just can't understand what they are saying. I mean I don't consider myself stupid. I can teach myself a bit of ancient Greek and read Antigone and I can learn to follow the mathematics to allow me to follow quantum mechanics articles and I can read Virginia Wolf's "To the Light House" and Nabokov's "Pale Fire" and get something out of them. But why does most of the things that Derrida or Zizek or Butler write seem like nonsense to me?

I come away thinking that it is all a confidence game and I am not sure who is in on the con and who is the mark. Are you in on the con? Am I the mark?

Finally I come to the following conclusion: These people have little to say I can understand but what I can understand is banal and what I can't understand seems to be nothing but the obscurantism of an intellectual culture that needs to reinvent a secular version of the charisma of religious mumbo jumbo.

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