/lit/ - Literature

What's so bad about merely describing something? What else does Zizek do when he talks about a movie?

>>6693209
Well, Butler argues that her "bad writing" is in fact disruptive of the status quo and if she were to write clearly it would lose some or all of its power.

Zizek says she doesn't disrupt anything.

My guess is that Zizek's youtube videos do more to spread Marxist ideas than Butler's work does to create new ways of living through language.

Yes. He is right.

>>6693236

I agree with you.

I think Wittgenstein is basically right in his argument that language is a reflection of ways of living. You can sort of push in the direction of a new way of living by jamming language together but it's just as easy, under W's theory, to just end up confused. Huge obscure texts don't do anything but make you look like a crank. Without institutional backing people would view her like a schizophrenic.

Short, sort of strikingly unusual work, that moreover is humorous, is going to do a lot more towards changing how we approach the world.

>>6693168
>Is Zizek right when he says that Judith Butler "merely describes the existing order?"
I think it's extremely hilarious how well this 'critique' fits Zizek himself. More so than Butler, in any case.

>>6693236
Granted, Zizek is a better seller, at least when it comes to audiences outside academia. But the question is not only how many people can make sense of what you're writing, but also how critical it is, i.e. to what extent it enables you to make a difference.

If you look at that infamous 2007 index of most cited humanities scholars, theres Foucault, derrida, and Butler in the Top 10 - none of whom I would say write very clearly. Granted, Butler is not a very good writer, and she herself admits to that. But the same is true for almost any philosopher who tried to create new ways of thinking, and there are very few exceptions. What we call clear or common sence writing often runs into the same old dead ends (see Nietzsche's critique of taking grammar as a model or structure for philosophy), hence why a lot of authors try to avoid these traps by using a language that cannot easily be reduced to ordinary language and short-circuit reasoning.

Aside from that, reality really is complicated, and Butler's writing pales beside the complexity of the world. Couldn't we then, in turn, accuse Zizek of oversimplyfying as so many Marxists have done before him?

>>6693236
>Well, Butler argues that her "bad writing" is in fact disruptive of the status quo and if she were to write clearly it would lose some or all of its power.
hahhahahahha, really? I knew she was a complete scrub (like most 'postmodern' theorists, really), because she has a verified account on (rap)genius, where she comments on her own texts and reveals that she doesn't understand them herself (i.e., they don't have a complex but precise meaning, but are infact artificially opaque gobledegook).

>>6693273
Not only does Zizek admit he's focused primarily on interpretation over change (his oft quoted Feuerbach inversion), there are times where he's actually offered better ways of living (e,g. when he talks on ecology or charity).

>>6693276
I do not think we should accuse Zizek because of oversimplifying. Imagine what would happen if he said something wrong and if people took him too seriously. I think he is leaving things open. He doesn't want people to rush to conclusions. Everyone wants fast answers to their but it is really bad to seek them. We should think more than we did in the past.

>>6693283
That's what her reply was after being awarded so many Bad Writing awards.

She wrote a column in the NY Times and namedroped some Frankfurt school Marxists to justify how obscurity is radical and dangerous.

>>6693301
To their questions*

Fuck these mistakes

>>6693273
> More so than Butler, in any case.

Can you justify this?

>>6693283
You might be right, but for all the wrong reasons. And you sound like a retard

>>6693276
I don't think you've read Butler at all.

You don't understand what language means for Butler. If all she does is describe the order, her entire theory goes out the window.

Butler thinks by changing language we can change ways of life. If all she is doing is describing the status quo, despite using a different language, then language simply doesn't control everything.

If Zizek simply describes the order, that's fine, useless, maybe, but it doesn't dismantle a Lacanian reading of Hegel/Marx.

>>6693276
You've said nothing. I really doubt you have even read Butler but seem to be defending her work out an inclination that she must be right.

>>6693236
>living through language
Absolutely disgusting. Postmodernism needs to end.

>>6693326
Where did I say Butler claims to do a mere description of reality? All I said was that there's nothing wrong in doing mere descriptions. Description is one the most difficult literary forms, I don't get why Zizek would see it as negative or lacking in any way.

And yes, I've read her. It was very painful. For me.

>>6693333
Do you have an actual opinion or did you just need 27 words to express that you think I'm completely wrong?

>>6693393
>living through language
>post-modernism
Go read a book you uneducated piece of shit

Butler makes me cringe so much :{

>All I said was that there's nothing wrong in doing mere descriptions.

No you didn't. You were pratting on about popularity and making other vacous statements. You also don't understand how devasting the critique of descriptiveness of the status quo is.

If language is used for power, there is no way out of that trap. You must always be reigniting it, everytime you change it. There is no way to speak from the margins, because the center is simply realigned when you do. And this incapacity to use language as an empancipatory tool *is* the status quo. When Butler describes performativity she is just describing the status quo.

I've read neither author. Fuck reading. Burn books.

>>6693268
And I agree with you.

>>6693470
I'm waiting for someone to comment on this so that I can understand what you wrote here.

>>6693470
>No you didn't.
See >>6693209 you fuckwit.

>If language is used for power, there is no way out of that trap.
>When Butler describes performativity she is just describing the status quo.
There is no status quo, simply because performativity means that every arrangement is fragile and has to be reproduced in every next instance in order to persist. I guess descriptiveness is only bad in the eyes of diehard Marxist who are foaming their mouths over how people are still not interested in recognizing objective power structures after a hundred and fifty years of "muh ideology".

>>6693499
You know what else is fragile and has to reproduce all the time? Capitalism. Pure ideology right there.

"Also, humans are fragile and reproduce! Human nature, bitch! Ever think of that?"

Writing changes the way in which thinking finds itself. Giving form to intensities and velocities of concepts and orientations itself makes the manifestation of those concepts different.

Look at what Nietzsche was doing with Zarathustra, Spinoza with the geometric method, Benjamin with his intertextual criticism, Deleuze with rhizomatic writing. Or even going beyond the written language, consider how Artaud speaks of utilizing the specific form of the stage for a new language. Structure and form matter.

Anyone involved in the creative process of thinking in transmission, of writing, or of gesturing would know this.

>>6693523
That's not what reproduction means.

Look at the shit that the NAACP chapter pres did. She convinced everyone she was black through the performative repetition of the black identity.

Or look at how empty you are in substance really. You are a certain set of coherent habits and spaces and matrices of intelligibility (I think I am X because I think in terms of Y.)

>>6693539
Fuck up at what you're doing and be destroyed (life).

Before you get destroyed you create a new form of yourself. Like... "New" capitalism. Same, but different. How is this not reproduction?

>>6693528
I think an especially good example of this is Heidegger's writing. By twisting language he really gets the reader much closer to experiencing his world. Actually, if he had used ordinary language he would be much more obscure.

>>6693499
>There is no status quo, simply because performativity means that every arrangement is fragile and has to be reproduced in every next instance in order to persist.

100% cancerous.

>I guess descriptiveness is only bad in the eyes of diehard Marxist who are foaming their mouths over how people are still not interested in recognizing objective power structures after a hundred and fifty years of "muh ideology".

Wow. Time to take a break buddy.

It's been 25 years since gender troubles I think the focus on her feminist/gender work is disingenuous to her work within ethics as a whole.

Her best work for me is giving an account of oneself, i.e. her contributions to intersubjectivity that sit well alongside Habermas' earlier work and Levinas' work. She's best as a philosopher who illuminates things previously overlooked but like many she's not so great at illuminating solutions. In that regard I think she's far superior to Zizek, but I think they both fail at the latter.

(Frames of war is pretty good too though)

>>6693528

>Anyone involved in the creative process of thinking in transmission, of writing, or of gesturing would know this.

Based on my experience with academia, I think the correct verb is 'should'. It'd make the shitty task of trawling through conference papers and journal article submissions a lot easier.

>>6693415
>All I said was that there's nothing wrong in doing mere descriptions.
> Do you have an actual opinion or did you just need 27 words to express that you think I'm completely wrong?

You just explained why you're wrong. Butler thinks there is something VERY wrong with just doing descriptions.

According to Butler, just doing descriptions is just doing reinscriptions. You maintain the oppressive linguistic forces which regulate and control all of life.

You have not read Butler.

>>6693499
No, descriptiveness is not bad in the eyes of Marxists. They want to describe the economic power structures.

Do you even read?

Zizek is critiquing Butler because she thinks you can do away with Marx and just check your pronouns and everything will be better. Zizek says "fuck that, own the means of production."

>>6693701
> Everything good she did Foucault did better

Fixed that for you.

Here's a quote from Judith Butler, worst paragraph ever written, how can anyone take her "philosophy" seriously?


>Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast and considering what is more that as a result of the labors left unfinished crowned by the in a word the dead loss per head since the death of Bishop Berkeley being to the tune of one inch four ounce per head approximately by and large more or less to the nearest decimal good measure round figures stark naked in the stockinged feet in Connemara in a word for reasons unknown no matter what matter the facts are there and considering what is more much more grave that in the light of the labors lost of Steinweg and Peterman it appears what is more much more grave that in the light the light the light of the labors lost of Steinweg and Peterman that in the plains in the mountains by the seas by the rivers running water running fire the air is the same and then the earth namely the air and then the earth in the great cold the great dark the air and the earth abode of stones in the great cold alas alas in the year of their Lord six hundred and something the air the earth the sea the earth abode of stones in the great deeps the great cold on sea on land and in the air I resume for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis the facts are there but time will tell I resume alas alas on on in short in fine on on abode of stones who can doubt it I resume but not so fast I resume the skull fading fading fading and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis on on the beard the flames the tears the stones so blue so calm alas alas on on the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the labors abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the skull alas the stones Cunard (mêlée, final vociferations)

>>6694087
dont shitpost

>>6694087
Report submitted! This window will close in 3 seconds...

>>6694071

I think you mean Riceour/Levinas/Derrida and even then you're wrong.

>>6694292
Nope, it's really just Foucault with some Derrida pulled up whenever she wants to disprove something "lol its been always already deconstructed BTFO."

>>6694303
plus there's a smell of liberal "just let them be" in Butler that you can find in neither F nor D

>>6694303

Then again you could argue Foucault's work is just Marx with Nietzsche's Power replacing Economics. I would say Adorno but Foucault didnt actually read him until late in his life.

>>6693236
>Butler argues that her "bad writing" is in fact disruptive of the status quo and if she were to write clearly it would lose some or all of its power.
>>6693499
>There is no status quo, simply because performativity means that every arrangement is fragile and has to be reproduced in every next instance in order to persist. I guess descriptiveness is only bad in the eyes of diehard Marxist who are foaming their mouths over how people are still not interested in recognizing objective power structures after a hundred and fifty years of "muh ideology".

>my face when there are human beings on planet earth, in the year two thousand and fifteen, some of them posting on this very cambodian sculpture listserv, who still don't believe that the new left is a servant of capital

Judith Butler is a fucking lame-ass human being

All moralists are

>>6694087

That passage makes more sense than anything she wrote.

>Well, Butler argues that her "bad writing" is in fact disruptive of the status quo and if she were to write clearly it would lose some or all of its power.

What a brave warrior against the most dire of injustices.

>implying it is desirable to disrupt the existing order or to spread some ideology
spook overload

>>6695446
>preserving spooks is desirable
>i don't know what play is
spooky last man overload

>>6693236
>Well, Butler argues that her "bad writing" is in fact disruptive of the status quo and if she were to write clearly it would lose some or all of its power.
This makes sense if you think of Derrida and translate it into what she probably actually said, something along the lines of "the existing language reproduces existing ways of thinking".
Anyone who's read Derrida knows how he struggles to say something that is not thinkable in ordinary language.

>>6695636

I'm sympathetic to that idea because i love Heidegger, but derrida just abuses that.
And to be entirely honest he is never getting at something so different that he could not have said it better.
I think derrida is valuable but fucking Christ the payoff is so diminished compared to the work necessary.

And this idea that "bad writing" adds to something.
Hegel and Heidegger are very dense, some argue its "bad" but there was no truly correct way to express their ideas. They did the best they could and so can't truly be blamed.

Arguing your shit writing that could easily be better somehow adds something. lol please fuck off

Its not "Play". Its not Poetic, It does not suspend the normal and allow for something that was not to be.

All that shit might exist, but derrida never achieved it.

>>6695603
>he actually fell for the epic "Overman creating your own values" meem
top spuck

>>6695648
Well, Derrida argues against the notion of expression i.e. that there is first a thought which is only then put into language, and that therefore there are more or less adequate ways of saying something. This is not far from Heidegger's critique of adequacy in relation to truth. So what he's doing can be seen as deliberately pushing the language to say the yet unsayable, thus unpredictable even to the author himself.
I'm not trying to defend everything Derrida does with this and I'm not that satisfied with him either, but the above makes sense to me.

Im inclined to think that old white men philosophers like Zizek or whoever talking shit about politically correct liberalism is a stance they assume out of egoism-- I mean it makes sense that they would frame their simple human defensive reaction in terms of yammering on about how political correctness and notions of celebrating diversity play into the hand of capitalism

At the same time though, the reasoning checks out. Laypeople enjoy identity politics more than Marxism. It's hugely entertaining to them to get in theatrical facebook fights about how it isn't possible to be racist to white people. Moreover the stuff that they get worked up over is never boring stuff it is usually related to pop culture or this Austin Trask sort of "call-out sociology"

>>6695717
Austin Josh Belulah Trask, I meant

>>6693470
That's what literally every postmodern theorist says, though. The entire movement seems to be people repackaging a few simple propositions in more and more obscure terms.

>>6693605
I don't think you're wrong but this is pretty much an oversimplification and mischaracterization of Heidegger's thinking.

>>6695736
On the other hand you've never read a whole work by any of them so you might be talking out of your ass.

>>6695686
>Derrida argues against the notion of expression i.e. that there is first a thought which is only then put into language
This is something Heidegger basically supports, though. Read Language and Logos.

>>6695748
On the other hand I'm correct. That's what postmodernism boils down to.
>Does the signifier outweigh the signified?
>Performativism or essentialism?
>Power structures or power flows?
>How can you know what words mean when words don't know what you mean? :^)

>>6695754
in a different way.

hiedegger thought meaning/truth was faced away from man, and we could not get at it directly. but he thought that truth left a wake like a boat.

There is an energy in the wake, that distinguishes it from the water around it. It creates a "space" in which one can feel the direction truth is headed in, and a wake also "tows" you along so that getting in a proper wake orients you in the correct direction.

derrida is more "LEL i dun even know XD are you getting meaning from this shit yet"

Judith Butler is a talentless dyke.

>>6695765
>derrida is more "LEL i dun even know XD are you getting meaning from this shit yet"
In some vague sense kinda, it stems from his philosophy. But it's not like his writing is completely disorganized and has no direction, hoping to produce something good by chance. He's way of working seems something like hammering in circles, it's a bit like hermeneutic circle but a bit more rough and struggling and decentered.

>>6695828
meant for >>6695788

>>6695788
Heidegger also makes a distinction within language between speech and the written word that I don't think can be incorporated into Derrida's philosophy.

Thank you for changing the world Butler.

>>6695981
Don't forget to also thank Nietzsche for killing so many Jews.

>>6695686
>>6695648
>>6695754
>>6695788
There's nothing in Derrida that wasn't first in Heidegger.

All he did was translate Heidi into french and then convince people there's nothing fascist in Heidegger's work.

>>6694358
That would be correct. He's Marx without Hegel, is how I would put it.

>>6693523
>You know what else is fragile and has to reproduce all the time? Capitalism. Pure ideology right there.
So what? Of course capitalism is fragile as shit.

>>6693471

I think we should also take W's work to heart when we want to change the world: it isn't nearly enough just to write philosophy in such a way that it seems "disruptive." We have to change the way we live and persuade others, especially those we respect, to do the same. From there, the language will emerge, like a perfect poem emerges from immersion in the classics and a long habit of writing. W actually points towards Marx's famous thesis. Philosophy almost a dead end, certainly a diversion, from the real work at hand, which is the world and life.

>>6697536
It means that changing the way we write again and again and claiming that it is fragile would resemble capitalism.

>>6697619
I don't get it. Just beause an old building is fragile and we need to refurbish it from time to time would then also mean that building resembles capitalism?

Butler's notion of performativity isn't just directed against essentialism of any kind, it also claims that performance opens the possibility for change and applies to both marginal ways of living or becoming but also to the majoritarian ones (sorry, I'm actually more of a Deleuzian). Isn't this why people who struggle with heteronormativity and stuff dig her so much?

>>6697036
>and then convince people there's nothing fascist in Heidegger's work.
There's a lot in Heidi that Derrida explicitly ignores, then. Does Derrida ever deconstruct the analytic of Dasein as presented in Being and Time? I feel like he would have to if he wanted his own method to have any support, since he drew so much from Heidegger.

tfw I work too many hours of physical labour to write my judith butler slash fiction which includes a hot Hezbollah co-ed and fucking in the back of a dark green Volvo 240 in a shady Cornell University parking lot :.(

>>6697728
Sounds good m8. Don't give up on that dream.