At 05:29 AM 6/10/2008, Tahir Wood wrote:
> >>> <lbo-talk-request at lbo-talk.org> 06/09/08 8:46 PM >>>
>From: "shag" <shag at cleandraws.com>
>Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Thoughts on Butler
>jumping jesus christ on a pogo stick already. all you had to do was
>read
>the excerpt posted here as to what she thinks. why is that so freakin'
>hard? it isn't even difficult prose!
>
>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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