I've known Dennis a long time, back before LBO existed when Dennis, Doug, and several others were on other lefty lists. Dennis is not someone who has some vague understanding of pomoistas.
Let's get back to what Bhandari said:
Yoshie reasons that ACT UP and other members of the gay international are sinister imperialist creations. I think this form of insinuation should not be allowed. I imagine that you are not gay, I am not either. But isn't anyone a bit sickened by the subtext here--that those morally compromised homosexuals are doing the Empire's work? Others seem to think that anti racists and feminists would not exist without the need for niche marketing. So resistance is just the most advanced wing of the system. The theorists are so much smarter than the people who have actually improved the world often at considerable personal cost. I agree with Doug's reply to Lenin. He's not making his point.
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Bhandari's been around a long time, too. He's more than familiar with Yoshie's queerness and the various faminist positions she's taken on the list. (LEt's not get started on evolutionary theory and feminism, 'k? LOL)
If he was attacking anything, it was in the heart of that paragraph where he writes, "The theorists are so much smarter than the people who have actually improved the world often at considerable personal cost."
Now, I'll agree that this aspect of the post was unfair to Yoshie, but nothing in there even hints at her supposed homophobia. At her arm chair theorizing, her distance from actual engagement in queer and feminist struggles, etc.
At 06:41 PM 10/9/2007, Dennis Claxton wrote:
>LT wrote:
>
>
> >which you appear to have missed in your eagerness to miscite Derrida.....
> >What you are doing here is using a vague understanding of left-academic
> >pomophonix to avoid the issue, or to allow others to do so.
>
>
>
>I got always already from Judith Butler and I think my understanding
>of the way she uses it is better than vague. Here's something from
>an interview with her that fits this discussion I think :
>------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> It's actually about being, as it were, always already lost to or
>always already expropriated by a past of discourse
>that I do not control, and a future of discourse that I do not
>control; that the
>time of discourse exceeds the time of my life doesn't memorialize my
>agency. It's actually a certain principle of humility and a certain principle
>of historicity, of being installed in a historicity that is not my
>own, but which
>is the condition of my own. In that sense it's a historicity that exposes the
>limits of my autonomy but which I would also say is the condition of my
>autonomy, oddly enough.
>
>But a politics, you want me to move to the politics. . . [police car
>siren sounds] . . . there's politics . . .
>a state of emergency! . . . I
>want to say that there's a different notion of responsibility. I
>think in the US
>we go around trying to target people who say racist things, and indeed there
>are good reasons to do that, targeting people who say homophobic things,
>holding them responsible for their speech. I think there are all kinds of
>reasons to stop a person when they speak such things and say, for example,
>`look, that's a racist act'. I think that's important. But I think a
>politics that
>begins and ends with that policing function is a mistake, because for me the
>question is how is that person, as it were, renewing and reinvigorating racist
>rituals of speech, and how do we think about those particular rituals and
>how do we exploit their ritual function in order to undermine it in a more
>thorough-going way, rather than just stopping it as it's spoken. What would
>it mean to restage it, take it, do something else with the ritual so that its
>revivability as a speech act is really seriously called into question.
>
>http://awayward.com/library/Philosophy/JudithButler/Judith%20Butler%20Interview.pdf
>
>
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