>From "The Performances of Judith Butler" by Michael Levenson in the Sept. "Lingua Franca": --- This is the very terrible claustrophobia of her vision, constructed brick by heavy brick from the theorists she cobbles together. Everything is packed up, hemmed in, wadded tightly together in a single structure of laws that breeds desire, and norms that incite abnormality; always with the implication that this is the general structure of human existence. No thought is given to other social circumstances, different historical moments, alternative desires or instincts that might not merely be sparks excited by the power machine, but might live outside the total system of power--as Freud's Eros lives outside Thanatos--love not as the surprise precipitate of the regime of death, but as its genuine adversary. Where's the evidence for Butler's stringent views? The evidence is in previous theory, in passages from Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, and Althusser: These are the master texts providing insights that can be sifted, selected and arranged. She doesn't look in the archive (like Foucault); she doesn't survey human history (like Hegel); she doesn't listen to patients (like Freud). "I make no empirical claims," she writes at one point. No kidding. Butler extracts theory from theory, and this is what gives such an impalpable, disembodied character to the book. Her power has no neighborhood, no nation, no epoch. Subjects have no names, no histories. There are no people here. --- I will scan in the whole article this evening and post it to PEN-L. It is very good. Levenson discusses Butler's "Excitable Speech" at length, which is a postmodernist attack on bans on "hate speech." Although the book is focused on the anti-pornography efforts of Catherine McKinnon, it would seem to include things campus codes against racist speech or graffiti. Logically, this would include taking a position on the anti-Indian mascot campaign. I suspect that behind McKinnon's "daring" defense of outrageous behavior--both right and left--is a rather banal free speech absolutism of the kind championed by Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
