File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_2000/foucault.0012, message 35


Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 03:27:09 -0600
Subject: Re: Intellectual Specificity and Inner Fascism
From: Asher Haig <ahaig-AT-warped-reality.com>


on 12/19/00 6:41 PM, Chris Jones at ccjones-AT-turboweb.net.au wrote:

> Whatever you do; please do not be discouraged from reading Butler by
> my position and arguments. In fact, quite the opposite, I am out to
> force a confrontation with the texts. Butler is important in
> undermining the commonsense understanding of gender and sexuality as
> being natural or essentialist. My problem is simply that what Butler
> does is not good enough. It contains an imanent failure. I would
> suggest a queering of theory following the etymology of queer as a
> diagonal cutting across. That is a trangression that refuses the
> interminable dialectic of subversion.

Everything you say is interesting, but I'm not sure as to what, exactly,
it's relevant. I don't believe that I've engaged in such an
essentializing/reductive view of Butler. I also don't believe I've made any
normative statements. My point has simply been that your reading of Butler
that is able to conclude that Butler's theory is "not good enough" is a
misreading that has already incorporated failure. The confrontation can
never occur within the reading you provide because your interpretation is
set up from the start to fail by trying to normativize Butler.

---

Asher Haig           ahaig-AT-warped-reality.com
Dartmouth 2004



   

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