Tahir: This is true in that an extract was posted and the rest of that text was made available to us. Quite right. But most people who responded to it got stuck on the question of writing style. I made some different points though, about the nature of the politics that this sort of writing claims to support. See further comments below.
(I posted a link to a .pdf of an essay on "contigent foundations" that is hosted on cleandraws.com. you can read what she thinks there.)
not to be terribly rude, but i don't see *why* anyone should do the translation work when, honestly?, it really feels like people are engaged in _sympathetic critique_. True, Charles, you more than anyone here is moving toward sympathetic critique, but if you truly want to go where Dwayne is pointing, then it takes a lot more than, "will someone here read her work and tell me what she says in order for me to be bothered with criticizing here. waaaaaaaaaaaaaaah."
Tahir: Some of us read what was posted and found the usual stale postmodernist rhetoric; I particularly drew attention to the following:
"Against this postmodernism, there is an effort to shore up the primary premises, to establish in advance that any theory of politics requires a subject, needs from the start to presume its subject, the referentiality of language, the integrity of the institutional descriptions it provides."
I broadly accepted this description of postmodernism and the description of some of its discontents. I made the point that the philosophers that I respect, including Adorno and Gillian Rose, have written extensively on the incoherence of dispensing with subjectivity. Secondly, as a linguist, I have no idea of what abandoning the "referentiality of language" would mean politically, but I do know that it cannot avoid a similar incoherence. I will leave the last clause alone because I don't know what it is talking about, including the pronoun "it". (I presume it is 'referring' to something, although one can never be sure with this type of writing.) Now, let us get back to the political point:
"To require the subject means to foreclose the domain of the political, and that foreclosure, installed analytically as an essential feature of the political, enforces the boundaries of the domain of the political in such a way that that enforcement is protected from political scrutiny."
I would like someone to explain to me why the proposition making up the first clause of this dogmatic little sentence should be supported, by me or by anyone else. It appears to be suggesting some kind of politics that is not open to someone who insists on the enduring problem of subjectivity. I challenged that view by saying that this putative politics is bogus and a fraud. Perhaps I was too impolite and that is why no-one took up the challenge of describing it to me. No, actually I don't think that is why I got no response on that question. The smart alec evasions of it tell me something else altogether.
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