Date: Fri, 27 Feb 1998 18:12:16 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: M-I: labels


Speaking of Judith Butler's labeling of non-Marxist Alan Sokal as a
"neoconservative Marxist," I picked up a copy of the Jan/Fed issue of
Radical Philosophy to find a review by Jean-Jacques Lecercle of Butler's
book Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Lecercle opens by
recalling his excitement, 30 years ago, on first reading Althusser's essay
on the ideological state apparatus, and says that reading Butlers latest,
which he pronounces "a great book," gave him just such a rush today. "With
the immediate consequence that her subtitle is apt, that one reads a book
where political thought has found its critical edge again, where a form of
Marxism has found renewed performativity, in a context where woolly
consensual liberalism and narrow reactive political correctness seem to
dominate." A form of Marxism, hmmm. Later: "Butler operate a retour a
Althusser, which, like his own return to Marx, both preserves and
supersedes." So does all this make Butler, against her own proclaimed
intentions, a neo-Althusserian Marxist?

Foucault sometimes reads like a Marxism without a notion of capital; why
not JB too?

Doug




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