[lbo-talk] Butler

[wrobert at uci.edu]

> On
> 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.)"
>
Jerry, you've made a number of claims about the ontological assumptions of
Butler (that have not been quite the same thing).  However, I have not
seen any evidence for these claims. If they are in 'practically every
single paragraph" it shouldn't be all that hard to come up with a place to
provide that evidence.  I hate to use the same kind of rhetoric that I use
with my composition students, but this feels like a much more elaborate
and intellectually sophisticated version of 'clearly.' These would have to
be the kind of textual engagements that Dwayne Monroe mentioned.

      The other substantial problem that I have with the line of
argumentation that you have engaged in is the way that 'pomo' keeps
getting thrown around as if it meant something.  The set of authors
you are discussing are involved in very different projects, projects
that are often actively antagonistic to each other (for instance, it
was well known that it was forbidden to attend both Lacan and
Deleuze's lectures.)  Any attempt to create a coherent whole out of
this political contestation is going to wind up being a mess, and
more fundamentally, a misreading of the authors involved.

      The only intellectually consistent version of postmodernism that I
have really come accross has been Jameson's which make a claim that
it is a common cultural condition that a variety of thinkers are
trying to negotiate at a variety of levels of mystification.  But
this 'postmodern' is a very different beast than the one that you
are talking about.

     Last, although I haven't read the wellek lectures on Antigone, I
remember them primarily focusing on how the story has been taken up
in philosophical discourse to understand questions of the law and of
symbolic intelligibility.  Most of it is an engagement with Irigiray,
Lacan, and Hegel, and the gaps and problems in their readings.  Is
there some problem with that work that you could identify more
specifically?  Without that, the claim of 'incompetence' and 'con
game' are kind of empty claims.

                   robert wood


> 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.
>
>
>
>>
>>
>> http://cleandraws.com
>> Wear Clean Draws
>> ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)
>>
>> ___________________________________
>> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>