When I first read Nussbaum's essay a few years ago, I thought it was a really nice take-down. But I became more sympathetic to Butler when I read John McGowan's post on Michael Berube's blog:
Nussbaum v. Butler, Round One Guest post by John McGowan http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/nussbaum_v_butler_round_one/
Part two is at: http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/theory_tuesday_nussbaum_v_butler_round_two/
[...] But the longing for contact with an ineffable that lies beyond the self need not take a very religious form. From Blake to the "language poets," the avant-garde has been interested in changing the terms of perception. Nussbaum simply fails to register Butler's argument about language. Butler points toward an experienced gap between the categories supplied by language and felt reality. Her work, quite simply, is for misfits, for people who have felt themselves to be square pegs that are constantly being pushed and prodded into round holes. The available categories are simply inadequate. They also carry normative force; they lay out everything that is deemed "normal." Misfits are abnormal—and subjected to a variety of practices aimed at changing them, quarantining them, or rendering them invisible. Butler's work—like "queer theory," generally—questions the legitimacy and inevitability of prevailing definitions of the normal. As such, it has proved enormously enlightening and liberating to those who suffer most from the stigma of abnormality.
Nussbaum's most egregious failure is her inability to recognize that Butler addresses a "real" source of pain felt by "real" people—and that Butler's work empowers such people by providing intellectual resources with which to cope with and respond to ungenerous norms. That failure undermines Nussbaum's taking the high ground as the one who is really attending to the needs of the oppressed. To ignore the suffering to which Butler's work is so clearly addressed, and thus to avoid considering if that work succeeds in any way to alleviate that suffering (as it clearly aims to do), is to refuse to assess the work fairly. No work—intellectual or otherwise—can set out to do everything. And we can even fault someone for taking up the wrong task, for fiddling while Rome burns. But, at least, we should correctly identify what that work sets out to do—and then explain why the worker should be doing something else or why the worker has failed at the task she has undertaken. Nussbaum misses the avant-garde aim of transforming the terms of thought and the forms of perception, and she misses the on-the-ground consequences of social categories that stigmatize.
Nussbaum clearly has no avant-garde intimations or yearnings toward the ineffable, so she cannot have any sympathy for a writing style that is trying to reach toward the "unthought," or the "inexpressible." Such styles are everywhere in romantic and modernist art—and they are built precisely on the premise that language is an imperfect tool, that our received vocabularies and categories are inadequate, and their inadequacy must be signaled even as we use the words we have inherited. Butler's work is perhaps best compared to Benjamin's. They are both figures who exist in some ill-defined space between avant-garde art and discursive, argumentative thought. (So here's another practice that defies easy categorization or location within neat disciplinary markers. To call Benjamin and Butler literary critics seems pretty lame, but they aren't quite philosophers or political theorists either. We end up with catch-all terms like "intellectual" or "man [sic] of letters" or "social critic." And I suggest that we see their obscurities as less a product of being "over-academic" and more akin to the obscurities of Mallarmé, Joyce, and Pound.)
Trying to push thought beyond received categories is frustrating—and certainly courts failure and incomprehension. But that doesn't justify rapid recuperation of avant-garde work back into received notions and terms. Nussbaum keeps assuring us that various things Butler has to say aren't at all new. Apparently, Nussbaum smugly assumes that the problems feminists are addressing are obvious: some individuals are not treated equally. We're past defining the problem; we just need to focus on solutions now. So she is deeply impatient with anyone who says, "Wait a minute; I'm not sure that's really what the problem is. I'd like to consider the nature of individuality and our investments in it, because I feel a deep urge to slough off my individuality, plus I also find the range of available individual identities oppressive." For Nussbaum, that's intellectual fiddling while Rome burns.
Nussbaum's lack of an avant-garde sensibility is not a major failing in my opinion, although it is a symptomatic one. But her blindness to the pain caused by received categories is more troubling. Avant-garde experimentation is not just a luxury for the comfortable sons and daughters of the professional classes. Even if it is play-acting in some cases, it is liberating and ennobling work in others. Nussbaum could only be so contemptuous of Butler's work if she "didn't get" the "gender trouble" felt by those who find it very difficult to be the "girl" or the "boy" that others expect them to be. And Nussbaum's very failure to "get it" reinforces Butler's argument that the categories of thought guide perception. [...]