[lbo-talk] Butler

Jerry Monaco monacojerry at gmail.com
Mon Jun 9 10:28:03 PDT 2008


On Sat, Jun 7, 2008 at 3:47 PM, shag <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:


> At 11:22 AM 6/7/2008, Jerry Monaco wrote:
> >In pomo
> >talk you can substitute the word "discourse" for "system", "ideology",
> >"discipline", "discussion", and on and on.
>
>
> that's pretty funny, tho!
>
> shag

Why is it funny? It is rather amusing that you can quote the footnote but not deal with the paragraph that it is a postscript to.

'"For instance I think if you look behind the ontology of the very notion of "discourse" in the way most post-moderns use it, you will find behind it an assumptions about the "irreducibility" of language, an assumption never spelled out (implicit in Saussure) because at base there is no reason for making it. (Also see postscript below for more on the troubling notion of "discourse.") The notions of language that underlie "discourse" (and meaning within language) are taken as-if they are a separate ontological ground or reality. This is simply a conclusion that is never concluded or even stated explicitly. (Quite frankly these notions of language are in practically every single paragraph I have read of Butler.)"

That's pretty great. How can anyone resist its charms?

Doug

Butler's charms are in fact pretty resistible. Just read her very uninformed and quite ignorant essay on Antigone. If she were a graduate studying the classics I would never let her graduate.

When ever she writes about something I know well, and she is not simply spinning her wheels with the usual babble I find her uninformed, wrong or repeating truism. Quite frankly reading her Antigone essay was a little like seeing the construction of a con game. Yet people who want to puff themselves up or don't know better allow themselves to be conned.


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