Nussbaum

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From today's NY TIMES MAGAZINE: a large profile on the U of Chicago prof
Matha Nussbaum:

==Earlier this year, Nussbaum took aim at Judith Butler, the radical
feminist philosopher who has attained cultlike status (through dense
monographs like "Gender Trouble") for arguing, among other things, that
society is built on artificial gender norms that can best be undermined with
"subversive" symbolic behavior, like cross-dressing. Appearing in The New
Republic, Nussbaum's 8,600-word essay, "The Professor of Parody," castigated
Butler for proffering a "self-involved" feminism that encouraged women to
disengage from real-world problems -- like inferior wages or sexual
harassment -- and retreat to abstract theory. "For Butler," she wrote, "the
act of subversion is so riveting, so sexy, that it is a bad dream to think
that the world will actually get better." By abdicating the fight against
injustice in favor of "hip defeatism," Butler, Nussbaum concluded darkly,
"collaborates with evil."

The review received a visceral response within the academy and beyond.
Butler's defenders branded it an ad feminam attack on an innovative thinker
whose reputation was surpassing Nussbaum's own. "It was a crassly
opportunistic act," said Joan Scott, a historian at the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton. Others welcomed Nussbaum's blow against the
hermetic politics of postmodernism. "The piece was a skillful and
long-overdue shredding," said Katha Pollitt, the feminist writer.

Although it would be hard to find two more ideologically dissimilar thinkers
than Bloom and Butler, according to Nussbaum's withering judgment they were
guilty of a common crime: both were mandarin philosophers who refused to use
their theories to help wage the battle for freedom, justice and equality.
While Bloom was at least openly skeptical about philosophy's connection to
democracy (he disparaged those who dared to seek practical advice from his
beloved Greek texts), Butler drew Nussbaum's ire because she claimed to be
using philosophy to address political issues even as she manipulated
poststructuralist theory to sidestep them. "I thought of the Butler and
Bloom reviews as acts of public service," she said. "But a lot of my
impatience with their work grew out of my repudiation of my own aristocratic
upbringing. I don't like anything that sets itself up as an in-group or an
elite, whether it is the Bloomsbury group or Derrida."  ===