That passage is dense, in the sense of tightly packed and not merely hard to read, but you could make the point more clearly at probably three times the length. Which would be the way to do it if you're writing for a popular audience, but if you're writing an academic book, why not express it this concisely?
Doug
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Well, I'll give you the argument against. It goes like this. Evidently there is a significant academic audience who share the problem that a more popular audience shares, for example Noam Chompsky.
But I won't pursue this line.
I was having fun, trying to come up with an argument against Butler that had none of the angry tone of denouncement, and also didn't plunge even deeper into specialist language.
Actually there are several specialist language approaches or schools from which to mount a critique. One uses analytical philosophy and attacks Butler directly. If I wanted to go there, how would I do that? I am not sure. Probably start with an analysis of some of her text, pick a part its grammar, syntax and vocabulary and demonstrate that it is meaningless. This is the highbrow version of the gibberish theory school that Chompsky seems to belong to.
BTW this is the approach Carnap took against Heidegger at Davos. I am re-reading the introduction this morning. I came to think of analytic philosophy as the Pick'm To Death School.
Another approach would be to just deconstruct her text with phenomenological arguments and nuance or erase or re-enscribe it a la Derrida until it disappears. This is the Eraser School.
In a way, I think of Butler as a sub-school of the Eraser School, that I call the Smear or Schmir School. They use bad erasers at the Smear School so you can still make out some of the text.
Now I am talking out my ass because I couldn't do either of these, and really don't want to try.
I agree with Butler most of the time in the points I think I've been able to understand. So, why would I want to argue?
Agree is the wrong word. Maybe a better one, I like her points and they do illuminate thoughts I've never had before. So I learn things from reading JB.
Well, and there is the fact I just sent three long and very densely pack posts on Cassirer, hoping that someone out there would read them and go get some Cassirer, like it and learn from it. So, I am nobody to complain about difficult reading. Cassirer has certainly been a gold mine for me.
For example, Cassirer's critique of the Aristotelian object moves in a similar direction to Butler's critique of sex and its constructions. The difference is Cassirer performed a much more sophisticated critique, raised his critique of the concept of the object to exponential heights, and applied it to the foundation of mathematics. I posted a short paragraph that seem to capture this or at least indicate a crude sketch of it.
Anyway, it's always fun to argue if we're nice about.
CG