LANGUAGE, POLITICS, AND ACADEMIC FEUDS

 

1. Judith Butler’s op-ed in The New York Times from before I was born (lol, not to date myself) is missing a response to what I believe is valid and constructive criticism. Butler’s piece is in part a response to being crowned in a bad writing competition by a conservative journal which Martha Nussbaum likely made them aware of in her scathing critique. I know this because I wrote a poem (a sonnet) about it last year which I would be happy to share in class if there is any interest. Nussbaum, a philosopher and professor at UChicago, wrote a hit piece on Butler called “The Professor of Parody” published in The New Republic on February 22, 1999 and was shortly thereafter rebutted (indirectly) by Butler’s article published on March 20, 1999. In this article, Nussbaum argues, from a feminist perspective, that Butler and other academics have detached themselves from material politics and have adopted a defeatist politic to societal woes. These word-obsessed academics, she argues, have been incapable of addressing actual material change in the realms of legislative politics. I recommend reading it, but I also think that Nussbaum fails to diagnose that there are ruptures happening from their followers/students. And I want to see if my diagnosis is correct—I believe that this feud is symptomatic of larger distinct approaches to praxis in academe, I see the two figures in different philosophical camps. Whereas Nussbaum believes that reform happens primarily and should happen in legal institutions, Butler has a different stance, one in which reform happens in the cultural imagination of the left. While Nussbaum has been a part of the culture that influences legislation and judicial ruling (she teaches in the law school); Butler, and other gender theorists, have shifted the discourse about gender in mainstream culture in profound ways—everyone is obsessed with gender, especially conservatives (Butler teaches in the Comparative Literature and Critical Theory departments at UC Berkeley). I am interested in discussing how being in these different “disciplines” or academic departments shapes the way they engage with the political outside of the academy and how cultural studies engages with the works of these thinkers (Giroux et Al). 

 

2. Here’s a fun question: Who do you think some contemporary “conservative organic intellectuals” are? Who are some radical organic intellectuals? 

 

—Brayan