File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9712, message 719


Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 16:53:34 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: M-TH: movement


As part of my continuing corruption by postmodernism, I just came across
this in a short commentary by Adam Phillips that Judith Butler included in
her book The Psychic Life of Power:

"Starting with two sexes, as we must - described as opposites or
alternatives or complements - locks us into a logic, a binary system that
often seems remote from lived and spoken experience.... We should be
speaking of paradoxes and spectrums, not contradictions and mutual
exclusion. Every child rightly wants to know whether there is a position
beyond exclusion or difference or separateness - a world in which leaving
and being left out disappears, an idea taken up at a different level in
utopian socialism, which aims at a society without margins and therefore
without humiliation....
   The language of boundaries that psychoanalysis is so intent
on...promotes a specific set of assumptions about what a person is and can
be. It is a picture of a person informed by the languages of purity and
property, what Mary Douglas more exactly called purity and danger. It may
be more useful to talk about gradations and blurring rather than contours
and outlines when we plot our stories about gender. Butler's language of
performance keeps definition on the move, which is where it is anyway...."

I imagine a lot of Marxists would find this heretical. I'd love to hear
some comments.

Doug




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