Talk:Judith Butler/Archive 1

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This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Contents 1 Old discussion 2 Jewish-American category 3 Bad writing prize 3.1 Dutton's schtick 4 Personal Life? 5 The sections on the individual books & npov 6 Sectioning and trivia 6.1 Discussions on specific revisions of Book Sections 6.2 Balancing books 7 Objection to inclusion 7.1 Nussbaum 8 Translation into intelligible English requested 9 Summary

Old discussion

Can somebody please remove MOST of the "" in the Gender Troubles paragraph. This is stylistically poor. I'm not qualified to do it myself. Chuck

isn't Judith Butler at Berkeley? did she move? --ALC 03:36, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Good point. Hyacinth 06:17, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I heard this as well, but I don't know where Butler is now. --Kanodin 19:49 18 Nov 2004 (PST)

"Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley" [1]. Hyacinth 05:57, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I think someone went through wikipedia at some point setting up entries on people as advertising for the European Graduate School. While they have given Butler a professorship, she rarely actually teaches courses there, in common with most of their star professors. I'm going to edit this article accordingly. --XmarkX 09:36, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

does judith butler consider herself a post-feminist? has anyone asked her? i believe it is inappropriate to identify her as such.

I think I actually read an interview where she disagreed with this classification. I'll see if I can dig it up. -Seth Mahoney 05:55, Mar 15, 2005 (UTC)

Can someone please go back to Chuck's remark about the poor writing of the Gender Trouble paragraph - he is completely right - I reread it now five times, really horrible (sorry!), very difficult to grasp its fairly simple meaning: 'This discourse exists only through repetitive signifying acts but obscures the contingency and temporality of its own genesis by producing sex as the appearance of a natural and unchanging “fact” which purports to express and therefore justify its constructions of gender and desire.' Also the 'concept of performativity' needs clarification - it is such obscurity that gives us a reputation for being academic phoneys Thank you, Dirk 23 June 2006

Jewish-American category

I added the article to Category:Jewish Americans based on her statement "I signed a petition framed in these terms, an 'Open Letter from American Jews', ..." found here. —Ashley Y 19:53, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

I think this self-identification is OK for category membership, without going into exactly what the "Jewish" means in her case. This seems on better grounds than the neo-Nazi editors who go around adding "Jewish" to the first sentence of lots of articles (of people who may or may not be Jewish), as happened to the Butler article. Nonetheless, we need to get the fact evidenced in the article itself to obey WP:V ... but without assigning undue weight to it. Readers cannot be expected to read talk pages for support of facts (let alone archives and edit histories of talk pages). I'll try to put in something discrete. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 20:05, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Bad writing prize

Lulu, what do you mean the sentence would be POV and "non-admissable" without including the quote? The sentence is not POV: she DID win the award, negative though it is. It's verifiable, notable, and perfectly "admissable." And to select that one quote from the award's discussion of her career is POV in trying to do "damage control" on a perfectly factual statement about her winning the award. I have no problem with Butler, but she has long been criticized for writing overly convoluted prose which is intended, the critics suspect, to make her "sound smart" without actually saying much of substance. Martha Nussbaum wrote a much-read polemic against Butler on just these grounds. So the award is not just an interesting bit of info about her career, but also an example of a recurring critique made against Butler. The "smartest" quote is irrelevant and tendentious. Unless you explain why it is necessary, I'm going to remove it. Babajobu 16:07, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

A non-notable jab by a non-notable journal (basically the personal blog of its editor, Denis Dutton) is extremely borderline for including at all. But I think a marginal case can be made for the mention if it is presented in a relatively light-hearted way, as a bit of quirky "trivia" rather than as a serious biography matter. This quirky inclusion doesn't become so terribly heavy-handed if we include the balancing comment... which is, after all, included in P&L's own press release. But otherwise, it would be acceptable to remove the paragraph altogether.

FWIW, I agree that the sentence P&L found is a bit of a run-on. I'd certainly prefer to break it up into two or three simpler sentences. But conceptually, there is nothing particularly difficult or opaque about the claim it makes. Including an isolated run-on sentence just to be mean-spirited is highly unencyclopedic (and I simply won't allow it in the article). In the highly unlikely event Dutton becomes notable enough to merit a (substantative) WP article, should we search for the worst run-on sentence he ever wrote, and insist it be included in his article... on the rather specious grounds that it's "verifiable"?!

Nussbaum is at least notable herself. And her criticism of Butler, while a litte bit on the capricious side, at least says something about the actual academic work of Butler. Characterizing Nussbaum's jibe as "much-read" is certainly getting carried away, but that's just on the talk page. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 18:50, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

The fact that Nussbaum (extremely notable, not just notable, BTW) brought the "non-notable jab" to the attention of the entire planet means that it is now extradorimnaily far from being a "non-notable jab" by a "non-notable journal". It is now a jab cited by Martha Nussbaim in a notable journal as a very revaleing and insightful comment on the style of writing of Butler. I live in Italy and have read Nussbaum's artricle. In fact, I learned of the existence of Judith Butler through Nussbaum. The "bad writing" criticism needs to stay in and the offsetting, hagiographical nonsense which tries to water it down "but he cites X who says that she is one of the ten smartes people alive" is taken out of context. The criticism consists in the fact that X (I've forgotenn the name and dont really care) says she is one of the smartest peeople alive BECSAUSE her writing is so deliberately convoluted and impenetrable that he must have been intimidated (literall frightenend) by it into believing that "Wow, I don't understand it. She must be smart".

I'm glad you know the word 'hagiography' and all. I see you use it in most of your talk page comments on most articles.

LOL!! Let's not get carried away now, kids.--Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 15:57, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

It's a fine and solid metaphor, no doubt (does Italian use a cognate?)---

agiografia

Nonethless, your use is extremely misguided when talking about academic bios. Such bios absolutely should be generally, even overwhelmingly, "positive"... at least in the sense of presenting a sympathetic explanation of a given person's thought. Go read the Encyclopedia of Philosophy or similar references for good examples of the right tone.

There's something pathetic, and disturbing on almost more levels than I can describe, to hear that you first heard of Butler via a rant by Nussbaum in a popular magazine. Well, there wouldn't necessarily be if you were a non-philosopher; but your user page says you are getting a Ph.D. in philosophy, so there is. In any case, if you feel so strongly that Nussbaum is so really, very, extremely ultra-mega notable, you could actually help Wikipedia by expanding Nussbaum's article to include specific discussion of more of her thought (i.e. hagiography). On the other hand, if you were to try to reduce Nussbaum's article to mere insults at the "Yo mama so ugly" level that you want here (and apparently of Wittgenstein), I would also object to that, and revert it (if I noticed, I can't watch 1.3 million articles).

FWIW, I hadn't read it before, but I do think the Fodor article has a bit of ad hominem on the criticism side. It's not so dreadful as we've seen here, but it's not quite in balance. Editors seem to have this weird image of WP as a sort of Roman gladiator thing where we point our thumbs up or down after we've heard "the evidence" on the worth of a thinker. Between the two metaphors, hagiography (biography of saints) is a lot closer to what we should strive for... not some misguided fantasy of "balance" (that ain't actually balanced in any honest, intellectual way). Thinker bios shouldn't be balanced like a tallying of their lives at judgement day... the balance is in the merit of their ideas, when presented in a sympathetic and factual light, as opposed to the arguments made by other thinkers (each addressed in their own respective bios). LotLE×talk 14:34, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

In philosophy (well, at least in analytic philsophy (;), it is very often the case that one individual's criticisms serve to clarify and deeppen underatnding about the fundamental ideas of another philosopher. Philosophy IS nothing else but argument and counterargument and countercounterargumnent (persuasian and conversion through the logical force and rhetorical efficacy of one's reasonigns, if you want it stated bluntly in my own terms). Philosophical criticisms are intelectual challenges that do not hurt the person (e.g. Jerry Fodor) does not feel BAD when Fiona Cona tries to show that his ideas about innate ideas are false or even nonsenssical) he responds by showing that and where her own arguments are faulty. The process continues on ad infinitum because philosophy is not SCIENCE. It is about speculative opinions concerning questions most of which will eventually either be setlled by sceitnfici methods, compltely forgotten, or just continue being debated for the next ten thousand years. As to other encyplopedias, I take the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy as a kind of gold standard. Somtimes you find criticism and responses of ideas of philospher X, sometimes you find a simple explication of their views. Personally, I prefer the former style. Damn, you folks are uptight. I had this problem with two typical undergraduate characters arguing over Daniel Dennett on about fiften different pages. One loathed Dennett and wanted to "expose" him as a radical eliminativist, while the other insisted that all legitimate criticism should be left out. I told them to stop acting like chidren, that they did not "own" these philosophers so they should stop acting as if they were being personally insulted of they're "favorite" philospher was being critized (AWWWWWWW MOOMMYYY!!) and to be represent ALL poistions and arguments that could be documented fairly and equally.

Actually, the offense I take at foolish condemnatory sections in academic bios has much less to do with wanting to defend the virtue of the given thinker than of defending the "virtue" of Wikipedia. It pisses me off for a homphobe to stick "lesbian" as the third word of this bio—or a while back when a neo-Nazi added "Jewish" as the third word. But I'm not annoyed because Butler isn't a "Jewish lesbian" (to a rough approximation of the meaning of those adjectives, neither of which she'd be entirely sanguine about). It annoys me because those descriptions are unencyclopedic (at least for the lead). Likewise, I would be equally annoyed if Fodor's article led with "Jerry Alan Fodor is a heterosexual gentile philosopher at Rutgers University, New Jersey." (I think those things are true—unless they're not, I hardly care—but they're not the stuff of encyclopedias). LotLE×talk 17:47, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

No, please. If that's the sort of thing that some people are engaging in, I'll strongly back you up on keeping it out. --Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 18:46, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

P.S. I don't need to defend my article on Fodor or nay of my other work. That has been praised by some very serious people indeed. I should not have sucked into this row though. You guys probably play that game of tag-time 3RR and all that nonsense, eh?? I'll leave the article to y'all if you really don't want my input. I don't have time for this--Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 15:35, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

::More broadly, this article is profoundly POV. Surely Martha Mussbain is not the only intellectucal on the planet who has criticized Butler. Good lord. Look here, I'm a very big [b]admirer[/b] of Jerry Fodor. But notice how many criticisms, I myself, dug up and included and how fairly they are represeneted in that article which I wrote. Take a look at the article on Karl Popper!! the criticism section is longer than the rest of the article. Let's stop the partisan POV pushing and try to write balanced, non-POV articles here, eh??--Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 09:04, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Dutton's schtick

Curious what he's about, I found this (verifiable) information:

Simmons filed Strickland's suit in the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. on October 12, and Dutton was served notice on October 16 — the day before Lingua Franca editor Hearst wrote his hurried letter to the MediaNews site. In it, Dutton and Academic Partners are accused of having "appropriated for themselves the fruits of Strickland's intellect and labor," and Dutton is called "a highly polished con–man" and "a cyber–predator of the most insidious sort."[2]

Maybe that needs to go in the Dutton article? Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 19:06, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

I wouldn't object to inclusion of it in the Dutton article, though of course it would have to be noted that it was written by a lawyer who was representing a woman suing Dutton, which may or may not count as a reliable source. P&L isn't at all a blog for Dutton...if he has a blog, it's Arts & Letters Daily, which the Guardian named the best website on the internet and which has gotten a slew of other awards. The Bad Writing prize also gets a good bit of attention in mainstream press, including, again, in The Guardian. I'm not particularly interested in your declarations about what you will "simply not allow in this article." This article does not belong to you, nor does any Wikipedia article belong to individual. These things will be hashed out by consensus, to which your own opinion will contribute but will not determine. Regardless, unflattering info has just as much place in any biographical Wikipedia article as does flattering info, and unflattering info should not be offset by celebratory quotes cherry-picked to make the subject look good. And no one has suggested including the award-winning quote itself, just that she won the award. And it belongs in the article. Babajobu 19:27, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Actually, if you look through the edit history, you'll see repeated insertion and removal of the "award winning" quote. In any case, information that is unflattering solely with the goal of being unflattering (as opposed to being substantative to debates around the thought of an academic) has absolutely no place in an academic bio. I've been fighting a bunch of brush fires that are just like this... someone finds some utterly non-notable criticism of an academic, and claims WP must include it because its "verifiable". But y'know what, even if you can find a source who says that "Butler is ugly and she smells bad", the mere existence of a URL doesn't mean it belongs in the article... nor likewise for any other academic, regardless of their looks and hygiene. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 19:43, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't know who originally inserted it, but I certainly support its inclusion. How many have opposed it? And the bad Writing award was absolutely substantive: it was a pointed criticism of academics in the social sciences who use a bloated and convoluted writing style for no good reason. The Sokal hoax was in part a huge piss-take based on this. Such writing habits compromise (it is argued) their effectiveness as scholars, and allows them to cloak a lack of substance behind a gaudy veneer. This is in no way analagous to poor hygiene...though if an academic was known for exceptionally poor hygiene--as Sartre was legendary for his in his later years--there's no reason that shouldn't be included somewhere in their article. As is, the celebratory quote just looks like fluff added by a fan of Butler's to offset unflattering info--and that's unencyclopedic. Babajobu 20:01, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Every individual academic bio is not the place to rehash a general free-floating dislike of everything vaguely French-seeming. The celebratory quote was no doubt added to the Philosophy and Literature press release to make it seem less purely mean-spirited, but it was Philosophy and Literature that included it. Selectively extracting only the nastiest parts of an already mean-spirited (but still not notable) personal rant by Dutton only make it that much less encyclopedic.

I'll tell you what... if you can find one single article on an academic outside of post-whatever traditions that contains a similar sort of ad hominem rambling "criticism" then I'll... well, what I'll do is go to that article and edit out the unencyclopedic nonsense. But the issue is sort of moot, since those sort of ad hominem attacks just simply don't occur in articles about Anglo-American philosophers, nor about other generally middle-of-the-road (or rightwing) thinkers in other fields. The sentiment that "all vefifiable trivia must be included, but only if critical, only is applied to 'suspicious' academics like Butler". I don't have a lot of patience for hypocricy and editorializing in place of writing encyclopedic contents. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 20:16, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

What are you talking about? You keep talking as though someone has argued for inclusion of some of the criticisms from the press release. No one is. The only person who wants to reproduce comments from the press release is you, who have a pet sentence from the press release you want in the article. And certainly no one has argued for inclusion of any ad hominem attacks...which the Bad Writing award itself is not. It's a criticism of her writing style. And--newsflash!--Butler is herself very much "Anglo-American," even if you think her style is "French-seeming." I don't think there is anything "suspicious" about Butler. It sounds like you have some sort of a chip on your shoulder from working on articles on other philosophers. I don't know what other articles you've worked on: what I do know is that Butler won a notable award, and it is unacceptable that you insist on making sure the article only includes information that corresponds to the high esteem in which you hold its subject. That's called POV warring...and I don't have a lot of patience for it in place of writing encyclopedic contents. Babajobu 20:29, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

No, no, no, no, no.... Butler did not win a "notable award". One neo-con writer with a personal journal decided to snipe at her (in what is unambiguously simply an ad hominem attack). In contrast, the numerous actual awards she's won are generally not actually in the article (nor do they really need to be). You're certainly right that I've seen the same editorializing in a lot of articles, so I guess accumulated annoyance at the unencyclopedic content could be called a "chip" (your edits have certainly not been the worst of it... but they do lean slightly in the unencyclopedic direction).

Since you obviously cannot find any analogous pseudo-criticism on Wikipedia of thinkers who are not post-[modernist/structuralist/colonialist/etc]... how about showing me one single example of any similar pseudo-criticism anywhere else. There's a reason the EB, or Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or the like, don't include ad hominem attacks like these in their articles. It's not because they endorse some particular thinker, it's because they're trying to write encyclopedias! And yeah, I'm pretty pissed off at the editors who want to prevent WP from being the fine encyclopedia it can be (and mostly is) out of some undue emphasis backdoor POV-mongering. And indeed I am in a general way protective of academics... not just ones I agree with as such (though I confess I mostly edit articles about thinkers whose thought interests me; so I thereby have a certain sympathy with them, while certainly not agreeing with any one of them on everything). On the other hand, it's probably true similar pointless "verifiable" sniping occurs about actors, or musicians, or sports figures, whose articles I don't much care about editing... and only occassionally read. I don't want to claim it's a unique peril to academic articles. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 21:37, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

I didn't find any "analagous pseudo-criticism" of "thinkers who are not post-[various things]" because I didn't look. I'm not interested in fishing through other articles to find examples to satisfy you. Likewise, I wouldn't expect you to go trawling through other articles to find an example in which citation of a negative award is set off with an arbitrary positive quote to provide spurious "balance." The question is whether these specific sentences are appropriate in this article. Also, you're talking rubbish when you make comments about my edits running unencyclopedic: I've never even encountered you before, so far as I know. You are making an ad hominem attack to avoid addressing the actual issue we are discussing: however, you seem to have little idea what an "ad hominem attack" is...surprising for someone who is interested in philosophy. If you really think that criticizing a specific example of someone's writing as long-winded and relatively content-free amounts to an ad hominem attack, I suggest you read the ad hominem article. It'd be a good concept to get your mind around if you are going to work on Wikipedia. Thanks. Babajobu 21:55, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

I've read, at least at a skimming level, the article of maybe a few dozen contemporary philosophers. I mention them only as a guide to what a proper academic bio looks like. The pattern I've found is that biographies of analytic-tradition philosophers NEVER (as in, not once, no single example) have pseudo-criticisms along the line of the "bad writing award"; in contrast, biographies of the French-sympathizing posties frequently are rife with blithe and vacuous repetitions of what some sophomore was told by his/her analytic-tradition philosophy professor about how awful those PoMos are. And no, it ain't because every thinker in the analytic tradition avoids all run-ons and has thoughts above reproach or criticism.

The unencyclopedic nonsense certainly does grate on me. The analytic-tradition biographies, in this respect, are done exactly right... FWIW, they also almost never have anything by way of a "criticism" section; because that's a matter for professional articles, not for an encyclopedia. And let me be clear again that it has nothing to do with whom I agree with. For example, I think, e.g. Rawls is pretty much full-of-shit (well, the whole school of overly individualistic ethical thought, nothing special about Rawls). But if I saw someone putting in a "criticism" section in his article that amounted to petty sniping, I would fight tooth-and-claw to keep it out of there (or I would if I actively watched the article).

Hmmm....they almost never have a criticism section,eh??? Jerry Fodor, Karl Popper,Structure of Scientific Revolutions (i.e. Thomas Khun). And the ones that do not, should have them. Two wrongs do not make a right. For example, I'm working on an extremely lengthy and detailed criticism section for the FA Ludwig Wittgenstein.

But I'm not up to the task right now. If you look on the talk page Talk:Ludwig Wittgenstein,you will note that I argued to have included many verifiable staments about the odd personal behavior, sexism and so forth of LW. However, that page (like this one and so many of these fucking things on Wackipedia) is controlled by one ore two people who claim that these criticisms and biographical observations (admittedly closer to ad hominen than any substantive criticism of someone's writing style) are "trivial". I gave up on it.--Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 09:27, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

I've edited Wittgenstein, though not recently. Most certainly, if you wanted to turn that article into some sort of personal rant about (verifiable) personalistic detractions of him, I would very strongly oppose that too (if I were editing it). I'm glad to hear editors over there are stopping the insertion of such nonsense. LotLE×talk 14:05, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

No, I'm talking about very,very substantive criticisms which come from Karl Popper, Saul Kripke and Michael Dummett, among others. All of that's beside the point, though. I was just rebutting the claim that there are no criticism sections in analytic philosophy articles. But "detractions"?? Why are factual assetions which add human depth to an article, such as Wittgenstein's sexism and anti-sociality, or John von Neumann's rabid quasi-Nazi militarism and collaborationism with the militray-industuial complex, for example, detractions pf personality?? To me, they simply highlight the fact that these damned beings are fallible, normal human beings with rich and complex lives like the rest of us, not prettified abstractions that exist in the Platonic third-realm of Great Men and Great Things they have said and done. It's very ironic stuff. I would have though that such thinking was particularly declassé among students of postmodernist and deconstructionist. No??--Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 15:08, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

That seems reasonable to mention, concisely. Even real philosophical critiques shouldn't dominate bios; it's better to have pointers to articles discussing the specific disputes, or at least back to the thinkers who make the critiques. A little bit of trivia isn't terrible either, but it should be kept under wraps. Like Wittgenstein's sexism might merit a sentence, but certainly not a paragraph... and no doubt the poker thing makes for an amusing footnote (or the chewing carpet story). Heck, I myself added the thing about Sraffa flipping of Wittgenstein to the Sraffa article ("...and that children, is where the PI came from"). LotLE×talk 18:00, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

In mentioning your edits, I refer only to those on this specific article. Still, I'd avoid lecturing me on how to edit WP, given I've been doing it for twice as long as you (though only 25% more edits... you've been busy over the last year... all power to you for your contributions). Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 00:36, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Also, as per standard wikietiquette and practice, please do not use automated reverts for non-vandalism. Instead, do it manually and use a descriptive edit summary. Thanks. Babajobu 19:30, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

OK... fair enough. I should have given a proper edit summary... I just love those popups, so it's too easy to use them :-).

Looking around, there's quite a bit more to this Dutton story than I might have guessed. This article isn't the place for it... but maybe in some others. I fixed up the cite on Lingua Franca, for example. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 19:35, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Finally, why have you also restored the irrelevancy about who won runner-up? How is that relevant to Butler? Babajobu 19:31, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

It's important for readers to get a sense of the "award" itself. Since the award doesn't have its own WP article, when/if it's mentioned, we need to give a sense of what it's about. But actually, I can move the Bhabha thing to the footnote. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 19:35, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Personal Life?

Does she have one? If so, would like to know more. -- LKS 7/6/06

i just found this more or less private information [3]

but i am not so sure if this information should be part of the wikipedia article. but of course it seems to be quite interesting since butler is writing about kinship and means of reproducing technologies. does anyone know more? anonyma 11/02/06

It may not be appropriate here, but it's hardly private - it's on a web page.--csloat 10:39, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

true, even so I would not favour inclusion in the article unless there were more than one source substantiating it. --Isolani 11:07, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

As far as I know there is more than one source stating that she raises a boy with her longtime companion. What in my opinion is more disputable than the facts is the relevance if it for the article. -- hermelina

The sections on the individual books & npov

Is there any reason certain books are picked and others not? It seems capricious. Also, the language of the descriptions of the book should probably be more encyclopedic in origin, and not borrow so heavily from the author's own terms--this would be more neutral and accessible for a reader. They don't have to contain criticism--but they should contain what the works are really about. If that can be determined.

This thing about "certain books" is just silly. Editors presumably don't try to summarize books they haven't read, so those discussed in more detail are those about which some editor(s) are knowledgeable. Very few thinkers, and even fewer contemporary thinkers have completely uniform coverage of their works on WP. If you want discussion of a book not yet discussed, read it, understand it, and summarize it. Griping deosn't add anything. It might be possible though to add a placeholder blurb on any missing books: even just the dust jacket blurb on what a given work is about reminds editors that there is something that needs fleshing out, without being unencyclopedic until such time. LotLE×talk 16:10, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

To put Butler's arguments in something like "encyclopedic language" -- if by that you mean "common sense" or "everyday" language -- is antithetical to those arguments. I don't think what you ask is possible. The exegeses of Butler's works that actually appear in the article are both responsible and accurate to the complexity of her texts. While they do presuppose some background knowledge of 20th century continental philosophy, I think such background knowledge must necessarily go with any responsible interpretation of Butler's writings. I imagine the reason not all the books are covered here is because people simply haven't read all the books closely or recently enough to offer well-rounded, complete, and fair summaries. Agnaramasi 14:51, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, then they don't belong in an encyclopedia. Even in Husserl's encyclopedia article on phenomenology, he takes great pains to explain what phenomenology is, what its role is, etc. What Butler does, as Nussbaum points out, is try at great pains to obfuscate meaning, because she doesn't believe 'meaning' exists, in the sense that most think of that--she likes to think she eschews traditional "definitions". But the problem with that, however, the encyclopedia's role is to explain the author's significance and the significance of his/her's ideas--the article at present does a fine job of the former, but fails in the latter because it is not presented in a fashion readable for the average educated person. I believe it also goes against "neutral point of view", which in the case of Butler, must mean a neutral language, i.e., not the language she is using. If it can be standardized, the individuals sections on the books, that's fine. But if they're not standardized, they constitute meaningless leftist propaganda points unreadable to the masses, and I will delete them. They shouldn't be 'accurate to the complexity of the texts', they should attempt to give a general sense of what the text is saying. The summaries people offered here are really offered in the spirit of Butler's language, and not in the effort to clarify her language for the average reader--it took no effort on their part, just a spouting off of Butler's jargon in a particular arrangement. Kmaguir1 02:58, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Well you just unilaterally gutted all of our work on her books. What gives you this right to destroy the hard work of others because you deem it "unencyclopedic," especially if you admit you don't understand the first thing about "meaningless leftist propaganda"? I think we should revert to the former version and have a full discussion before we take out exegeses of Butler's most crucial ideas. Instead of completely deleting our work, tell us what you don't understand specifcially, and we can spend time to clarify it. --Agnaramasi 14:51, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Agnaramasi is entirely correct here. If you want more description of other works, add it. Destrorying the summaries editors have provided is completely counter-productive. LotLE×talk 16:12, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Um, excuse me... NOW who's acting unilaterally! You deleted the sentence plus the explanation, which was not the last version, and was not what we were even talking about working towards. This action was not discussed or debated, and I'm reverting. You're biased on your page--you want to "get rid of categories" and yet join the Marxist group. This needs an edit that is NOT political, specifically from someone (unlike one of Butler's drones) who believes that humans can actually BE NOT political. -Kmaguir1 18:17, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Again, it is not that I do not understand. I never said that in my comments. I have taken time to understand Butler's ideas and have rejected them unequivocally. However, her ideas can still be, and should be, expressed here. However, they have to be expressed in a manner which is encyclopedic, which represents a neutral point of view, i.e., a point of view which does not treat her language as 'neutral' but instead highly specialized and thus often times unavailable to the general public, even the educated general public. It isn't the hard work of others--it's Butler's work, and it needs to be summarized, not merely reiterated or reformulated as summary. The summaries I left "gutted" dismissed Butler's jargon as paraphrased, and left the general ideas of the individual works--admittedly, for one of these books, that left just a sentence. The problem is that I understand, and that the content here did not enable anyone to understand anything of substance, only to be exposed to. Thus the summaries as I edited give the general direction in which Butler is moving, and do not attempt to go non-neutral, or unencyclopedic, but only to get to the heart of the point of her works as that can be determined--it's Butler who makes that difficult, and I understand her product, but her product cannot be granted the tacit endorsement of adopting her difficult language in the very summarizing of that product. - Kmaguir1 21:43, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Firstly, it has already been discussed here at length, and was decided that it is totally inappropriate to waste space in this article quoting out of context from the so-called "bad writing contest". It has nothing to do with Butler or her ideas, and is only relevent to the group of individuals who are involved in that culturally conservative publication. Secondly, tell me the sentences in the article you find "unencyclopedic" and I can try to unpack some of the language, or at least link the technical terms to articles where they are more fully explained. General statements about Butler's allegedly "unclear" or "meaningless" language and your claims about what the "average educated person" (yourself?) understands do not get us anywhere. --Agnaramasi 14:51, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

The bad writing contest excerpt is integral for a hint of criticism of Butler, namely Nussbaum's criticism, that she is more interested in spouting her jargon than she is in actually expressing anything meaningful. Put it out on the pages to see if readers feel that that criticism is valid, and if she merited the award. Let's see if readers think it is bad writing. As it is, almost everyone in the world would disagree with Butler, many who know of her DO disagree with her, but precious little space is given to a fair and honest exposition of what she's up to. I was going to quote her from UNDOING GENDER in which she says that "sex outside of marriage may indeed open us up to a new idea of community" (paraphrased). That's controversial, controversial statements need to be objectively presented, with no subjective bias, the same subjective bias, ironically, Ms. Butler would argue, is unavoidable. Let people judge it objectively.

On the other matter, every sentence I deleted or modified I considered to be unencyclopedic, unexplained, irrelevant, or immaterial in some manner which rendered the section better off without it. It does not need to be expanded, i.e. conflated. It needs to be shrunk to get the main idea Butler has expressed, and that's it--anything else is merely iterating her arguments for her contentions, which are hers, not this encyclopedia's. Get a few basic ideas of the books out there, and leave it at that. - Kmaguir1 23:55, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Three points in response: (1) You haven't even attempted to make a case why specific parts of the article are "unencyclopedic" as you allege. Just because you disagree with Butler's ideas, for whatever reason, doesn't mean that she is not an influential critical theorist and philosopher, and that it is not appropriate for exegeses of her most crucial ideas be included in the article here. You obviously don't like Butler's politics and want to compromise any attempt to make her ideas accessible to inquiring wikipedia readers beyond superficial generalizations (the gutted remains of the article after your vandalism). Tell what specific sentences are problematic for you, and I will fix them or offer more complete defense of what they are saying. I have read the majority of Butler's books as well as many thinkers she cites and I find this article, though still a work in progress, quite adequate to those texts it addresses. 2) It is completely inappropriate to include an out of context quotation form a culturally-conservative publication biased against Butler's political project in this article to "allow the reader to judge for herself". Nussbaum's critique of Butler is not relevent to Butler herself or her work. Butler doesn't even respond to it -- they are from completely different philoshical traditions and discourses. I also want to point out that if you actually read Nussbaum's so-called critique of Butler, you will find that her supposedly "clearer" more "plain language" paraphrase of the sentence in question displays Nussbaum's own misunderstanding of what Butler meant by that sentence (shift from Marxian-Althusserrian to Gramsciian (hegemony) theories of society), which contrary to your and your conservative allies' contention, is not an example of "obviously bad writing". In short, I think the short mention of the dubious contest is already more than enough, and I am reverting to that previous version. (3) Why did you add "lesbian". I'm not sure Butler has ever directly assumed that identity in her writing, nor does she accept identities unproblematically. Much of work is actually a critique of identity. Until you find compelling evidence for its inclusion, I am removing "lesbian". --Agnaramasi 14:51, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

But they're not "exegetical"! That's the point! Exegesis would be great--they're spouting off the same jargon, and that's not exegesis. Exegesis of the Bible is supposed to give me the point of a certain passage. Exegesis of Butler's work should do the same--that's why I tried to narrow down the summaries to the main points of the books. Whether I am conservative or not is not up for debate, and is not relevant to my criticism. Conservatives can be bad writers, so can liberals, so can Marxists. I'm not saying Butler is a bad writer, merely that she won such a contest, and that that information is encyclopedic in that it relates a common criticism that her writing is bad--whether or not I believe that; this is irrelevant. These common criticisms are always necessary, specifically with philosophers whose views and or writing styles remain vastly unknown from a community which would unequivocally reject them if exposed to them. There's a section in the Foucault article on criticism, on almost every continental philosopher of the 20th century. I am also adding back the 'lesbian' as I provide evidence for it. -Kmaguir1 19:46, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Again, I have three responses. (1) About naming Butler a lesbian. I'm worried that the website you cite may not be credible. I visited it and fail to see why it would be authoritative in any way, and not merely the kind of unreflexive speculation about assumed identities that Butler would herself not condone. I think the only evidence which would justify the inclusion of "lesbian" in this article, especially in view of Butler's own critique of identity, would to find an ocurrence in her own writing or interviews of Butler naming herself with that word explicitly. Until you offer such evidence, I am removing "lesbian." (2) About your allegation that the article is "unexegetical": you still are not pointing to specific parts of the article's text which you deem too close to Butler's own "jargon," as you call it. Until you tell me exactly what instance of language use is troubling for you, I cannot try to help you. (3) About your inclusion again of the sentence for which she won the dubious "bad writing" contest. I still do not think that inclusion of the sentence itself is either appropriate for this article or fair. You keep arguing that "average people" should be able to read the sentence for themselves so they can judge for themselves how "obviously bad" Butler's writing is. Two points in response here. (a) The point of a Wikipedia article is not to assemble polemical quotations from significant thinkers, reduce those thinkers to those quotations, and then offer them up neatly packaged for easy evaluation by your so-called "average person" -- the same fantasy person who you seem to think would so unequivocaly reject Butler's ideas if given the chance to read that one sentence you so persistently want included. Your argument on that basis for the sentence's inclusion is therefore invalid. (b) It is totally unfair to Butler's ideas to take a single setence out of context from her larger text, and parade it around as an example of her "obviously bad writing." It is an unfair misrepresentation of the textual place of that sentence in her work, and it does nothing to enhance this article's goal of providing solid exegesis of Butler's ideas; it just misrepresents those important ideas and contributes nothing towards the main purpose of an article like this one. I, hopefully for the final time, will therefore revert to the previous version. --Agnaramasi 14:51, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

More evidence on the lesbian comment. Although your contention that her assertion she's a lesbian has to be there for us to "call" her one is LUDICROUS, such assertions I have found:

"I became a lesbian at the age of fourteen. And I didn't know anything about politics. I became a lesbian as I wanted somebody very deeply." http://www.lolapress.org/elec2/artenglish/butl_e.htm

"Lesbians make themselves into a more frail political community by insisting on the radical irreducibility of their desire. I don't think any of us have irreducibly distinct desires." http://www.egs.edu/faculty/butler-resources.html

So please leave at least that unmolested. I will go on to address your other problems as soon as I reedit the page.-Kmaguir1 20:48, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

No, especially for Butler, it is absolutely the case we need her verified self-identification. Identity in relation to Butler's theories is not unproblematical. Just because someone might sleep with others of the "same sex" does not mean they maintain a certain identity.

Read the interview she gave where she says "I became a lesbian at the age of fourteen... I became a lesbian as I wanted..." That is her verified self-identification!!! She calls HERSELF a lesbian! -Kmaguir1 20:59, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

That's what agnaramasi wanted, and there it is! -Kmaguir1 21:00, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

You added the quotation of the so-called "bad sentence" again -- this time without even attempting to justify it on this page in light of my above case against its inclusion. Until such time that others weigh in here and a broader consensus is reached against its inclusion, I won't bother getting rid of it again (because you'll just change it back), and I have added a subsequent paragraph offering an interpretation of the sentence in question other than as "obviously bad". It expalins what Butler might mean (contrary to your claim she purposely "obfuscates meaning") by the sentence and how the sentence can be read to connect with larger context of Butler's theories. --Agnaramasi 14:51, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

That's not true. I justified it by adding "out of context" leading in to the quote, which addresses your legitimate concern about it been taken as such. Thus, I deleted your "explanation", which really explains nothing, and kept my "out of context" to adequately address your concern. I think the general point is what Nussbaum calls "willful obscurity" applies to that sentence in or out of context, and thus, the general point of the difficulty of finding meaning in it (again, meaning in language, Butler would disapprove!) is apparent regardless of context.

Several points in response (1) You cannot unilaterally delete others' work. Wikipedia operates on consensus, especially in NPOV disputes like this one. (2) The fact that the sentence is taken out of context was not my ONLY concern above. My main argument is that the sentence by itself does not serve to advance the goal of the article to provide solid exegeses of Butler's ideas. Nor does it do anything to further clarify the "willfull obscuratanism" charge, especially in light of the alternative and meaningful interpretations of the sentence that are possible (and which I demonstrated). To claim that the sentence is "obviously meaningless" is just closed-minded ignorance and embarrassingly parades your's (and Nussbaum's) lack of basic exposure to developments in 20th century Marxism. Before you make any more claims about ideas you obviously have made no effort to read up on, I suggest consulting the Althusser, Gramsci, and Birmingham School Wikipedia articles. (3) If you look above on this very talk page, there was a dispute about whether to add the setence in question and it was decided NOT to. There is no compelling reason to reopen this debate. On the basis that this dispute has ALREADY been resolved by consensus, as per Wikipedia NPOV dispute policy, I am going to revert back to a version without the sentence. You cannot be the only one advocating for this change. (4) If you continue to unilaterally add things to the article that were ommitted by consensus and remove things from the article that were written by other users, arguably much more well-versed in Butler's works than you, we will have to resolve this dispute more formally. At this stage your unilateral edits -- against all Wikipedia etiquette and policies -- are verging on vandalism. (5) Usually, and this is another Wikipedia guideline, if you are going to tag an article with disputed neutrality, you are expected to point to the specific parts of the text you think are POV. I have repeatedly asked you to do so and you have not. Until you do so I am removing the tag. --Agnaramasi 14:51, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

1) I am not unilaterally doing anything. I made an edit, you changed it. We both feel strongly about what we've put up. If you want consensus, open up the debate. No one is commenting as it is. Get your friends to say their piece, and there you go... 2) The primary goal of the article is to explain who Judith Butler is, why she is important, and some basic ideas she puts forth. A secondary goal could' be exegesis of her works. But that's not what's offered here--it is just a spouting off of her ideas, not an explanation of them or of great meaning coming from them. This again is difficult to do, because she eschews meaning. In the absence of an exegesis, part of which should demand departing from her language as much as she wants to departs from ours, my position is that my limited edit version of the sections of works (which I have NOT re-added after the original posting) serves the purposes of brevity and clarity with greater precision and consistency. Whatever is the case, there must be room for criticism of Judith Butler (see criticism of Michel Foucault). So I will add soon after this criticisms from Nussbaum or whatever. Your best argument is that winning that award is not criticism, or is not valid criticism--but I think that's a doubtful stance. I read the above arguments about inclusion of the quote. I don't think consensus was built adequately or comprehensively, and the objection of others, "on my side", showed significant dissent. But nevertheless, I will use some fair use selections from Nussbaum's article in a new criticism section to be built, if that fits you well. You cannot have an article on Judith Butler that spouts off her original borrowed philosophy in her original language and then ALSO expect that there not be criticisms of it. That's why I put the NPOV tag on the page, because the two of these in conjunction, submitting to Butler's language as gospel in lengthy spouting off on her points (would that she had some!), AND the lack of any described criticism of her language or of her "points" themselves, these two working together, makes the article skewed. 3)I'm not vandalizing anything, and you know that. I'm trying to make the article dually both more balanced and more accessible. -Kmaguir1 21:48, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

First, I want to respond to your claim (which is also Nussbaum's main criticism) that Butler somehow "echews" or "obfuscates" meaning. The claim is that Butler's use of technical poststructuralist, post-marxist language and the language of continental philosophy results in "meaningless" text. Such a "critique" comes from outside of Butler's own discourse from Anglo-American analytic philosophers and political conservatives. It rests on a the fundamental claim that her language use is "impossible to understand" and therefore irresponsibile. What is really underpinning these critiques is a complete reluctance on the part of Butler's detractors to seriously engage with the intellectual traditions of Marxism, French Feminism, and continental philosophy Butler is working within. Even a basic familiarity with these traditions yields rich readings of Butler's texts, an wealth of interpretive possibilities I tried to demonstrate partly in my reasonable and just interpretation of the "bad sentence" (which you deleted with characteristic unilaterality). For this reason, so long as you insist on including the out of context sentence (announcing it as such is not sufficient to restore its context), I will restore my interpretation which attempts to show possibilities for understanding the "bad sentence" as meaningful. As long as the sentence is included with the opinion of its supposed meaningless and "badness", there is no possible case you can make against including an alternative interpretation of that sentence as meaningful while maintaining NPOV.

Nussbaum's "critique" therefore rests on a systematic (unfair and irresponsible) refusal to confront Butler in her own language and on her own terms. For example, look at her paraphrase of Butler's infamous "bad sentence." She actually gets the distinction Butler was getting at and I elucidated in my interpretation backwards! How do you respond to someone claiming your writing is meaningless when they refuse to learn your language? If we reject Nussbaum as unfair to Butler because it relies on a refusal to discuss Butler's own ideas with her seriously, that is not to say that Butler sets herself up using "difficult language" to escape any possible critique or call to accountability. There are many objections one can make to her ideas within the very conceptual landscapes and languages she herself navigates. So if you are preparing a section on critiques of Butler, I suggest you expand your scope beyond Nussbaum and Dutton, to include for example, Butler's direct debates with Slavoj Zizek and (even more significantly) opposition within American feminism to Butler's anti-essentialism. Any "criticism" section to be either fair or complete certainly must not exclude Butler's detractors within her own field. --Agnaramasi 14:51, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Nussbaum's critique was published, it is seen by many as valid, but has its detractors. That is not my concern. Nussbaum's objections and the sentence's presence are two separate issues. And yes, a more expansive criticism section could be written, the Butler/Benhabib debates, etc. I don't know enough about this, and I hardly know anyone else who cares enough about it who isn't a fan of Butler who would write such a criticism. This criticism however is relevant and pointed. And I don't like the way you reattached my separate sections. In my version, one clearly deals with her style and politics as one section and criticism of her on another. I am dissatisfied with the current outcome for the follow reasons: 1) the language of the descriptions of the individual works implies tacit endorsement as well as contains too much "stuff" that can't be understood and isn't relevant to the general points of the book, 2) there should be a criticism section separate from that of the style and politics section, 3) any explanation as to a purported Nussbaum misunderstanding does not belong here--it is merely a criticism, good or bad, but academic in nature, 4) the double presence of the sentence she won for AND your explanation of it consistutes clear bias. I will rectify all of these now in full, however, I will fix #4 specifically by deleting your explanation of the sentence she won. I have no objection to it staying there, other than to say, I will keep the NPOV on if it does stay there. As for the change of #1 that I refrained from going back to, you have shown me no effort on the page to remedy my concerns reflected in the edit I post now. -Kmaguir1 06:32, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Just because you claim not to understand what I and others regard as excellent exegetical work on Butler's ideas, does not give you the right to remove that work from the article. You say that the result of your "edit" is Butler's "basic points"? Have you even read her books closely? Have you seriously studied them? How would you know what she's talking about if you refuse to even concede that her writing has meaning??? I am restoring the previous versions for all the book sections because there is no way that you should be able to singlehandedly destroy the collective work of this community because you think it is biased -- even though after I have repeatedly asked you to tell me specifically what parts you have a problem with, you won't discuss the specific parts of our text with which you have problems. We can improve this article only by WORKING TOGETHER, not by unilaterally destroying each other's contributions. I will address your other changes, like your removal of my neutral alternative interpretation of the allegedly "bad" and meaningless sentence, later. But for now restoring the content of this article's treatment of Butler's major ideas is the priority.

PS this kind of radical destruction of the community's work DOES constitute vandalism and is in BAD FAITH. We need other people to enter this discussion because you are not respecting Wiki conventions and etiquette.

Also -- the "bad" writing quotation needs to be referenced to the work from which it was taken. And there is no stylistic reason for it to be in bold. --Agnaramasi 14:51, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Now, about the "bad writing" setnence. I don't know how you can argue that my inclusion of an altnernative interpretation of the out of context sentence constitutes bias. In fact, it seems clear to me (as I explained in my arguments above) the only way to preserve NPOV if you insist on including the sentence in question would be to provide it with context by interpreting it and placing it in relation to Butler's ideas as they are presented elsewhere in the article. I am against inclusion of the sentence in the first place, as I don't think it adds to the article's purpose of elucidating the significance of Butler and her ideas. Until such time that there is broader consensus on its inappropriateness, the only way to preserve NPOV while including the sentence is by restoring my alternative interpretation. You can't quote from Butler out of context, claim that the passage is meaningless and thus proves to the "average reader" that Butler is a "bad writer" while maintaining NPOV. Obviously, if alternative interpretations of the sentence as meaninful are possible they must be included to ensure that the requisite diversity of points of view are included. Therefore, I am restoring my alternative interpretation to establish provisional NPOV in your new "criticisms" section.--Agnaramasi 15:01, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Note that I toned the paragraph down slightly. --Agnaramasi 15:20, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

The major error you make is saying that, and I quote, "the article's purpose [is] elucidating the significance of Butler and her ideas". No, no, no. The purpose of the article is to simply state who Butler is, what her ideas are and how they are relevant to an average, educated reader. That's what an encyclopedia entry does, it explains, but it does not 'elucidate the significance'. Leave that for an academic journal. Vandalism, again, is not what this constitutes. You can enter people into the discussion, but the problem with that is again, you're getting the 1% of the population who cares about Butler's ideas, either as gospel, or as extremely destructive, but usually, as gospel, as the ones who would think that they would be extremely destructive (the other 99%) have probably not read her works--not that I could blame them. We need to find a way to resolve the issue surrounding the sections on the individual books, because you have not done what you said you would do, which is to clarify them for an educated encyclopedia reader with little or no background in not just continental philosophy but philosophy in general. That's what virtually ALL the other encyclopedia articles about philosophers accomplish, even the one on Foucault. Since you have insisted on leaving a response to the Bad Writing Contest 'criticism', if it constitutes that, I have changed the title of the newly created section to Criticism and Response, and also, as I said I would, put up the NPOV, because I do believe response to a widely publicized context, response which goes even DEEPER into specifics which no one would be able to understand just happening upon the encyclopedia, is inappropriate, and constitutes caving in to trying to, as Nussbaum points out, find meaning, when really, even according to Butler, meaning of the sort an average encyclopedia reader would hope to find, is impossible. -Kmaguir1 17:55, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Sectioning and trivia

I see the long discussion above between two editors. Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to follow since it lacks any indentation to indicate threads, has no subsections, and many comments lack signatures. Please, please remedy this in future comments.

In general, I have several comments:

1. The solution to uneven coverage of books calls for expansion of discussion, not deletion of that explanation that exists
2. There seems to be an argument without any genuine distinction about whether this article is supposed to "inform a general reader" vs. "explicate Butler's ideas". I have no idea what the difference between those two things is, both are perfectly reasonable characterizations of the goal of an academic bio. There's definitely a danger of excessive arcana and field-specificity in the language used. On the other hand, an article shouldn't try to "dumb down" discussion of complex thinkers into crude caricatures of what they actually do. Both poles should be avoided, but neither rhetorical extreme does anything useful. FWIW, not every article can be understood by every reader: A pretty small subset of WP readers will ever be able to understand the article on the Shimura–Taniyama theorem... and that's exactly how things should be.
3. There's some odd debate about whether Butler is a lesbian. If this is just about the "lesbian writers" category, leave the damn thing. Of course she's a lesbian, at a first level of approximation. (I've met her a few times, and she's hardly in the closet or anything). But if there had been some belabored original research claim in the article earlier regarding the matter, that should be omitted: Whatever a philosopher might happen to do in their bedroom has nothing much to do with the books they write, not even in the case of Butler who often addresses issues of sex and gender. Followup: I just noticed that the foolishness was in the lead: Yuck! Shall we go call, say John Rawls, a "prominent heterosexual political thinker"?! Who did this awful crap?!
4. The whole "bad writing" slander thing was way too belabored already. Adding a "defense" of Butler is gratuitous. Of course anyone familiar with post-structuralism perfectly well understands the meaning of Butler's sentence. Had I been her editor, I might have wanted it broken into a couple sentences to avoid the run-on, but it's hardly any paradigm of especially bad writing. Neither is the sentence particularly meaningful to people who never worked in the same field as Butler. Just like the fact that not a lot of non-mathematicians are going to have much luck making sense of: The Jacobian of the modular curve can (up to isogeny) be written as a product of irreducible abelian varieties, corresponding to Hecke eigenforms of weight 2. Big fucking deal, non-experts don't always understand technical areas they don't work in!

LotLE×talk 18:20, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Do we need page protection here? -Kmaguir1 18:33, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

I took some effort to look through the edit history since you joined, Kmaguir1 (I had taken this article off my watchlist some months back, so hadn't followed it). It looks really quite alarmingly bad on your part. Apart from repeatedly inserting that utterly idiotic "lesbian" adjective into the lead sentence (idiotic because irrelevant and unencyclopedic for lead sentence), you also repeatedly (and seemingly randomly) deleted wide swatches of relatively good description of Butler's thought. It's hard to imagine any good intention here, since it looks like purely malicious disruption of the article. Take this as a warning: drop the nonsense this very moment. LotLE×talk 18:52, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Your one liner in reverting back with modifications was not enough of a justification at ALL for the numerous distinct criticisms Nussbaum enters against Butler. So I'm reverting unless you tell me how any or all of what I wrote was unencyclopedic or irrelevant to criticism of Butler. And why are you warning me? What are you going to do if I continue to edit the article for the better based on consultation with fellow group members and a desire to see a more critically engaged, vibrant piece of work? -Kmaguir1 21:27, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

You'll wind up blocked if you continue to disrupt this article. Don't do it! LotLE×talk 21:35, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

And with what justification will you block me? I haven't vandalized by anyone's standards (mocked the subject, or cleared out the article), which I would never do, as I only want people to have an honest sense of what this woman really believes and how she writes. I have just as much a right to edit this page as you. I don't think the page conforms to a neutral point of view as it is. I haven't received this sort of treatment on any other page when adding criticism and fair truth to the philosophers' biographies or philosophical work. This is just ridiculous! -Kmaguir1 21:40, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm certainly not going to block you... I'm not an admin. But if you continue to disrupt, you will wind up blocked. Funny how that happens. Don't try to mislead about your edit history, btw; it's right there for everyone to look at. And for the most part, it consists of inane attempts to turn this moderately good academic bio into a bunch of foolish insults. When you've edited 1/50th the number of articles I have, I'll start worrying about your "rights" to edit... inexperience and ignorance just ain't soapboxes to stand on. LotLE×talk 21:53, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

I don't understand on what grounds you think your rash edits have restored any kind of "criticism and fair truth" to this article. Also it is a blatant lie (attested to by your edit history) that you have "edit[ed] the article for the better based on consultation with fellow group members". Most of your edits were completely unilateral and based solely on your personal dislike of Butler's arguments as presented in the article. You wanted to get rid of this "meaningless leftist propaganda" (a direct quote!) because it is obviously unpalatable to your point of view. Your objection to the article consists solely in a general claim that it is unreadable and irrelevent. But after I have repeatedly prompted you to point to specific parts of the article you find problematic so we can discuss how to improve them, you have simply refused and just deleted whole swaths of text on your own accord without consulting with others. If you want to contribute to this community why don't you actually pick up one of Butler's books, devote yourself to a close reading, and do a summary for us. Thx. --Agnaramasi 00:22, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

We did consult, and I edited and cited based on that consultation, for example, the inclusion of the 'lesbian' proviso, you objected to, then I found irrefutable evidence, and so it got left in, at least until Lulu made the unilateral action of deleting my work to back that up. But that's a not problem. I'll be honest--I think it's questionable whether or not the 'lesbian' belongs there, as well. I put THAT in for a variety of reasons, but think it may serve to hurt my NPOV concerns, because it works both ways--it separates Butler off from a group of readers and draws her closer to another group, and shuns objectivity by categorization. So I relinquish that point--her lesbianism can be inferred. It is interesting she problematizes sexual identity and then calls herself a lesbian. But that's not my criticism to make (at least not 'here'). However, on the other issues, I am very, very frustrated. I try to very well summarize Nussbaum, and it gets cut down to what it was before. See, the problem here is proportionality. If I find seventeen critiques of Butler, all of which together take about 5,000 words, that's not appropriate, because the criticism would outweight her "ideas", and thus be unencyclopedic. But I don't think it's too much to have a six-sentence or so paragraph of one prominent critique that people actually read in the popular world (The New Republic isn't Hypatia). But people have to know that she is, even perhaps admittedly, a radical. This is why I suggested maybe a series of quotes from Butler. The quote "sex outside of marriage may indeed give us a renewed sense of community" (paraphrased from UNDOING GENDER) might help us there. Not many English speakers, or anyone for that matter, agree with that, and so Butler's ideas are put politically where they should be. It seems to me there's a lot of philosophical aura here without political accountability--that is, owning up to the radicalism inherent in Butler's Marxism, feminism, queer theory mentality. And people shouldn't have to go digging for a Nussbaum critique on that--they should be linked to it, and given a short summary in a section on 'controversy' or 'criticism'. How short? We are all reasonable men and women. Let's discuss. But for example, look at other leftists who get critiqued on here. The critique section on the postmodernism page is HUGE, and rightfully so.

About the sections on individual books, I think it bothers me that their length gives too much "prominence" to them. They're not WAR AND PEACE. They're very minimally read books, read mostly by a specialized audience. William Faulkner: read by a lot more (and a far better writer!), winner of the Nobel Prize, and no individual sections. Even in the Foucault article, we get subtitles, not whole sections. And yes, I still have very deep concerns that the sections do not, in any sense, attempt to explain Butler's project in human language--and I do not know how to begin this, which is why I didn't even try. I think it probably impossible. So omit. The argument that 'well, such and such physics theorem is still on Wikipedia) is patently ridiculous. By reading the section on anything in science, I should know how the concept functions, but perhaps not be able to use the concept or understand it as much as a specialist. Let me do this. Let me try to make the language more simple, and I'll submit it to you, and see what you think, before editing. Although I'm not sure how to do that (would I just put it here?). -Kmaguir1 02:58, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

I think you should leave the task of simplifying the language to people who have read more of Butler's works and are more familiar with the tradition she works within. We can go line by line and I can try my best to simplify things. But I need you to point to somewhere to start (the paragraph in Gender Trouble section perhaps pointed to below?). And I think it is obvious that Butler is politically radical and not something we need to say explicitly (if they read the article's exposition of her ideas, they will see that). Making a section of out of context quotations which purportedly express her radicality is totally inappropriate and will just generate confusion and misunderstanding of her ideas. We could add her to the "critical theory" category perhaps to make her radical politics more plain to readers? --Agnaramasi 13:47, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Update: The dense middle paragraph of the Gender Trouble section has been expanded into two more friendly and less technical paragraphs. Do you have complaints about any other specific parts of the article?--Agnaramasi 20:04, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Discussions on specific revisions of Book Sections

I've taken two classes not on Butler, but using Butler: one on Philosophy of Violence which used Precarious Life and another on Feminist Ethics which used Undoing Gender. I'm going to work on some common language changes now. -Kmaguir1 02:44, 26 July 2006 (UTC)\

Well can you then make sure to post your revisions and what you propose to change on the discussion page prior to updating the article itself so we can discuss it collectively. In particular, I wrote the section on Giving an Account of Oneself, and I don't feel it is overly difficult to read or needs to be changed substantially. Since I already fixed up the difficult paragraph on Gender Trouble, the only book section which still requires revision -- mostly more concision, though, and not substantive changes to language itself -- is Excitable Speech. Also, I would suggest that if you are familiar with Undoing Gender or Precarious Life (that's her 9/11 response right??) you might want to consider adding sections for those. No other editors seem available for those tasks at the moment. Good luck!--Agnaramasi 03:09, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Here's a proposal for the section on Excitable Speech:

In Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Judith Butler began to address the issue of "hate speech", language and censorship. Warning that she was not totally opposed to legal limitation of hate speech in some circumstances, she then argued that hate speech exists only retrospectively; that is, when it has been declared such by legal authorities. As such, the state appropriates to itself the possibility of defining hate speech and the limits of acceptable discourse. Pornography constitutes such "hate speech", on the sole grounds that U.S. courts have previously decided the matter. Judith Butler discusses Catharine MacKinnon's anti-pornography stance, in the context of it conferring on the state the power of censorship to condemn it. Butler warns that this tactic of appealing to the state’s power to enforce law may backfire on progressivists.

Moreover, quoting Foucault's first volume of the History of Sexuality, she argues that any attempt of censorship, by justice or otherwise, is forced to duplicate the forbidden.[1] Censorship produces its own discourse, and the discourse on sexuality has never been as great as when it was completely censored. This repetition of words forbidden (by the spreads those hate words in the very attempt of stopping them. Indeed, Butler argues that censorship is basic to language, and that the "subject" is only an effect of this original censorship (in the same way as Foucault argues that the "subject" or the individual is an effect of power, instead of power being a property of individual subjects. "If discourse depends on censorship, then the principle to whom we would want to oppose ourselves is also the principle of production of the discourse of opposition". She says of silence that it is “the performative effect of a certain type of discourse, the discourse which address itself to someone to delegitimate his discourse [sic]". The one who carries this type of repressing discourse expects state power to influence him or her.

A part of Butler’s problem of the duplication of "hate speech" in the legal discourse that outlaws it, lies in the issues of meaning: if J.L. Austin's concept of "performability" is correct, and that it is possible to "do things with words" (hence the problem of hate speech), words themselves do not have one absolute meaning, but various meanings depending on the context. Language is a mix of words and body, and bodies can alter the meaning of a spoken word. Judith Butler thus underlines the difficulty of identifying a hate-speech. Ultimately, the state itself defines the limits of acceptable discourse, according to her. However, Judith Butler takes the precaution to explicitly deny being against all forms of limitation of discourse.

Judith Butler's complex demonstration shows that it is not possible to easily judge censorship. This debate is also cultural, as shown by the different legislation concerning historical revisionism, which can be protected in the US under the First Amendment, but forbidden in European countries as dangerous forms of hate speech. Most important, Butler shows that our conception of the workings of censorship must be renewed, as well as our ideology of an independent individual to whom the power of censorship could be attributed. -Kmaguir1 03:10, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

I will read this over and get back to you sometime tomorrow.--Agnaramasi 03:14, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, I'm going to change it now, because you haven't gotten back to me about it, but it's a starting point--maybe some of the substitutions are a little far-fetched, but there's no 'juridical' or 'signification'. See also Lotus' claim that the paragraph needed slimming down. -Kmaguir1 17:01, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

I just replaced your version with one I did up in the meantime. I read Excitable Speech a few years ago, so I am not crystal clear on the details, but I made the original much more concise (over 100 words shorter than your edit) and reorganized it so that some of the general comments about the book which originally appeared at the end of the section are now a lead-in at the beginning. I also improved what was generally awkward and clunky phrasing. I left one of the Butler quotations intact (because its so perfect and clear!), but I don't have a copy of this book, and it needs a page citation.--Agnaramasi 19:25, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Balancing books

On the original complaint about the unevenness of the sections on the books: I think the sections on Gender Trouble and Giving an Account of Oneself are generally fine. The section on Excitable Speech is a bit long, and could probably be more concise. This, unfortunately, is a book I haven't yet read closely or completely enough to be confortable taking that on. I think the section on Bodies that Matter ought to be expanded, especially in its relation to Gender Trouble, but again I don't feel comfortable right now doing that myself. Two of her most significant books that are notably missing are The Psychic Life of Power and Undoing Gender; it would be great if someone familiar with those texts could do up a few short paragraphs on them.--Agnaramasi 19:03, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree on all these points. The Excitable Speech description is too long, and sort of digresses into minor concerns. And obviously, Bodies that Matter needs expansion (maybe I can get to that), but probably not this week. Some of the rest could probably be made slightly more concise, and also slightly more accessible to non-technical readers. Unfortunately, I've only skimmed Psychic Life and Undoing Gender (can you tell when I finished my Ph.D. in this stuff :-)). Maybe someone can at least put in a one-sentence blurb on each of the missing books, even if only paraphrased from the publisher blurbs on them, or from some review. LotLE×talk 19:13, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Objection to inclusion

I further object to the presence of this article in the Philosophy Wikiproject, as I dispute that she actually is a philosopher, as does Nussbaum. How would one go about detaching this article from that project? -Kmaguir1 21:09, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Just put on your red shoes, click your heals three times, and repeat "there's no place like home." LotLE×talk 21:21, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Futher to Lulu, both your and Nussbaum's opinions of Butler's status as a philosopher have absolutely nothing to do with the FACT she is one (just look in the top corner of the back cover of her books). Stop messing around.--132.206.59.241 22:08, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

And what does this mean? -Kmaguir1 21:28, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

I object to the term 'trivia' in the title. That's not true. It's relevant, and not 'trivial in that sense. I think just 'Criticism' is fine. -Kmaguir1 03:13, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, maybe of Nussbaum, but definitely not of the writing contest. Calling that "criticism" isn't even close. LotLE×talk 03:32, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Nussbaum

Obviously, Nussbaum engages in a bit of sophistry herself in the quoted article, which is disappointing. Martha should know better. Without throwing in the word-stew of casual insults that Kmaguir1 does (sloppily quoting Nussbaum, and definitely not at Nussbaum's best), I do think it's reasonable to leave in the general thrust of Nussbaum's critique. The obscurantism thing is OK to mention, but is a bit forgettable as criticism. Of some minor significance is this notion of universalizable values. While that's more a question of different traditions than of these two individual thinkers, it is a difference of philosophical interest. Kantians like Nussbaum obviously have an actual philosophical beef with anti-essentialists like Butler; and that fact is somewhat illuminating in explaining to readers the general school or tradition that Butler falls in. Of course, none of this is worth belaboring—this is an article on Butler, not one on Nussbaum, so the overwhelming focus should remain Butler's own thought (Nussbaum has her own article, a perfectly good one... though actually it could use some more concretes on Nussbaum's thought, not simply on her life history). LotLE×talk 01:16, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Nussbaum is a virtue ethicist, not a Kantian. -Kmaguir1 03:01, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

And I talk about the Nussbaum article in a section above (new comment). -Kmaguir1 03:21, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Translation into intelligible English requested

Please note, first, that I am a member of the Democrats of the Left, formerly Communist Party of Italy (PCI). So any red-herring accusations of being a conservative will REALLY get you into logical trouble in my case. I should think that the following paragraph, being unintelligible to someone who has read as many books in his life as I have (literally hundreds of thousands in English), is not the kind of thing that the average reader of a general, non-academic universal on-line encylopedia will be able to grasp:

"The most widely read and misread move in Gender Trouble is Butler’s claim that sex, gender, and desire are made culturally intelligible through repeated actions, stylizations, and enactments in, around and on the body within a regulative discourse. She argues that the regulative discourse that produces gender, sex, and desire obscures the signification of those categories behind the appearance of sex as a fact with ontological priority over gender and desire. This discourse exists only through repetitive signifying acts but obscures the contingency and temporality of its own genesis by producing sex as the appearance of a natural and unchanging “fact” which purports to express and therefore justify its constructions of gender and desire. Butler claims, then, that without a critique of sex as discursively produced, the sex/gender distinction as a feminist strategy for contesting constructions of binary asymmetric gender and compulsory heterosexuality will be ineffective."

Please remeber who the target audiecne is here folks. Small hint: it is not yourselves and the rest of the lit crit in-group. Butler may indeed "intend" to write the way she writes (though I doubt it) in oder to reach only an elite adience with the appropriate background. Wikipedia is DEFINITELY NOT intended for such a audience. What does the above paragroph mean, then?--Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 09:58, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

I will return later today to provide a more "plain language" paraphrase of that paragraph. --Agnaramasi 13:41, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

I, along with all other people not familair with Butler's works (i.e. scientists, mathematicians, logicians, non-Butlerian philsophers) would most certainly appreciate it. --Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 14:40, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Here is a first try: a little longer, but I hope a lot clearer.

The crux of Butler’s argument in Gender Trouble is that the coherence of sex, gender, and sexuality – the natural-seeming coherence, for example, of masculine gender and heterosexual desire in male bodies – is culturally constructed through the repetition of stylized acts in time. These stylized bodily atcts, in their repetition, establish the appearance of an essential, ontological “core” gender. This is the sense in which Butler (in)famously theorizes gender, along with sex and sexuality, as performative. The performance of gender, sex and sexuality, however, is not a voluntary choice for Butler, who locates the construction of the gendered, sexed, desiring subject within what she calls, and borrowing from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, regulative discourses. These, also called frameworks of intelligibility or disciplinary regimes, decide in advance what arrangements of sex, gender, and sexuality can appear as coherent or “natural” and include within them disciplinary techniques which, by coercing subjects to perform specific stylized actions, maintain the appearance in those subjects of a “core” gender, sex and sexuality.

A significant yet sometimes overlooked part of Butler's argument concerns the role of sex in the construction of “natural” and coherent gender and sexuality. Butler explicitly challenges biological accounts of binary sex, reconceiving the sexed body as itself culturally constructed by regulative discourse. The supposed obviousness of sex as a natural biological fact attests to how deeply its production in discourse is concealed. The sexed body, once established as a “natural” and unquestioned “fact,” is the alibi for constructions of gender and sexuality, unavoidably more cultural in their overt appearance, which can purport to be the just-as-natural expressions or consequences of a more fundamental sex. On Butler’s account, it is only on the basis of the primary construction of natural binary sex that binary gender and heterosexuality can be constructed as natural too. In this way, Butler claims that without a critique of sex as produced by discourse, the sex/gender distinction as a feminist strategy for contesting constructions of binary asymmetric gender and compulsory heterosexuality will be ineffective.

Let me know if any parts are still problematically technical.--Agnaramasi 17:11, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, that's much better. I appreciate the effort. I've added some appropriate links and so on to help futher clarify. That section seems fine to me at this point. There are some other parts that might be clarified a bit. --Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 07:28, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

I made some minor edits to your edits. Mostly, I deleted the adjectives cultural and biological in front of gender and sex. It is precisely the ontological status of these that Butler is questioning, and therefore inappropriate to "answer" her question for her implicitly in our description of her question by calling gender "cultural" or sex "biological." Butler is concerned with how those categories come to be in the first place. --Agnaramasi 15:03, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

I take the point. But there does need to be a brief explanation or link to something, IMO, which gives the reader some idea what the distinction between the terms gender and sex is, in the first place, that she is using. There's a broad disambig page on gender which gives, as one of its defintions, the "traditional" notion of gender as a linguistic category. Then there's the notion of gender understood as a primarily cultural creation and sex as biological. It should be clarified, that is, exactly what the original notions are that she is calling into question in the first place. That's all I'm suggesting.--Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 17:51, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Aside: I was hoping when I made a link for sex/gender distinction there would be some article in the feminism category about this. It really relates to 1970s american feminism... Do any of you know if this exists?--Agnaramasi 17:40, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

K, I added an article on this. So all the jargon should be now explained.--Agnaramasi 21:30, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Summary

Someone asked me to take a look at the situation over here in terms of POV, balance and so on. Having looked through the comments and read the article, it seems that there is not such a serious problem of POV since criticism sections are optional anyway. Sometimes I use them, somtimes I don't. But the problem of comprehensibility is quite legitimate and I think thre vast most editors on Wikipedia who read this (as an experiment, you should try sending this through "Peer Review") would agree with me on this. The other stuff is mainly nonsense, though intersting nonsense.--Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 16:06, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

I think Peer Review might indeed help. I don't even disagree that a bit more "ordinary language" is possible in the descriptions. But please read what I wrote above (the part with numbered points). "Dumbing down" technical material to pretend its not technical isn't good for an encyclopedia either. This afflication seems to be especially bad in relation to philosophy articles, and most especially in relation to post-structuralist type philosophers. No one, I presume, would dream of demanding that this be written in "plain English": The Jacobian of the modular curve can (up to isogeny) be written as a product of irreducible abelian varieties, corresponding to Hecke eigenforms of weight 2. (or similarly for other technical areas, like various sciences). There's an odd mistake in imagining philosophy to be non-technical, or even imagining that all its areas and concentrations can or should share the same terms.

Moreover, "criticism" sections in academic biographies (on WP) are almost always stupid and pointless, and least in my a random sample. They almost always amount to sniping and insults, not real engagement with the thought of whomever. The Popper article actually seems like an exception here. It has a criticism section, but that section presents Kuhn and Lakatos in sufficiently respectful ways, and really addresses the content of Popper's thought. The Fodor tends towards the sniping side, though not as badly as some versions of this article.

While this article has room for improvement (what doesn't), it's actually pretty good. The lead is completely readable to any layperson: basically just, when was Butler born? Where does she teach? What general fields does she work in? Exactly the non-technical stuff you would want most bios to lead with. But past that, look at the description of Gender Trouble. The first paragraph again just generally describes the circumstances of its publication, its impact, and the general areas it addresses. Just slightly technical, but very little. The next paragraph jumps into the fairly dense language that Butler herself uses. But readers who want just the general sense are free to stop reading there. The other book descriptions mostly follow a similar pattern.

This type of structure is really quite ideal for articles on dense or technical thinkers or concepts. Start with generality accessable to the broadest readership, and follow with the more technical stuff with narrower readership. Each reader can stop reading a section as soon as she has gotten to the point where it's "over her head". The pretty good article I mention on the Taniyama-Shimura theorem (or most good math articles) have a similar structure. Start with the general field of interst, then follow with the mind-numbing stuff. Actually, that theorem (and most math articles) get a lot denser a lot faster than this bio of Butler does. Other than some personal animosity towards Butler, editors who want to put in sniping stuff have a burden to justify the double standard they have towards topics they fetishize versus those they dislike. LotLE×talk 17:24, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Given that I feel a weighty criticism section is necessary because Nussbaum's review is so prominent, I think we should renew talks on the fuller, more complete Nussbaum criticism as well as the Bad Writing quote, which Butler herself addresses in the NY Times, adding to its prominence (at least, according to her logic in Excitable Speech). -Kmaguir1 03:04, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

On what basis do you claim it is "prominent"? I for one think the section's treatment of Nussbaum and Dutton is fine as is, but that the section requires more details about other and (IMO) more serious criticisms from Butler's fellow feminists and poststructuralists. I, for one, never heard of Nussbaum's "criticism" before I read this article on Wikipedia. Never mentioned in any course or seminar treatment of Butler nor in any academic articles about Butler I've read.--Agnaramasi 03:27, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Likewise, of course. I've read most of Butler's books. Read dozens of articles about Butler (some critical, but within the same field). Took courses that read Butler. Met Butler a couple times. Taught Butler. And the first time I ever heard of either Nussbaum's rather flakey "yo mama" "critique", or the even sillier bad writing thing, was on Wikipedia. LotLE×talk 08:32, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I agree wholeheartedly. I think the real problem is that there should either be NO criticims section (as in many articles) or a more substantive one (with criticism, responses to critisicms and that sort of thing). If you can do that, I would highly recommend it. As I think it over, the "bad langauge" thing is basically nonsense. I can quote post about 50 examples of completely unintelligible writing by Michael Dummett. That is, writing that is unintellgible to someone who has studies analytic philosophy fairly extensively. And, for that matter, one of the reasons (which Kant himself admitted) that he was so difficult to interpret was that he was simply a god-aweful writer who wished he could prsent his ideas as clealy and prettily as Hume could, but decided that he was more concerned with the content.

Dummett is hardly the worst :-). Though not the best either. Quine and Putname, for example, are simply amazingly beautiful writers. Though even there, you can find some doozies in Quine (they're there for a reason, but you need to know quite a bit to understand the reason).

I mostly agree with Lacatosias on the no criticism or substantive criticism choice. I tried to add the sentence about universalism to the Nussbaum matter, which starts to border on something about content. While Nussbaum probably does have an interesting and anti-Butlerian position here, writing for a popular magazine isn't really the place to find something meaty. I wouldn't mind recruiting some genuine philosophers, probably in an analytic tradition, who have a principled opposition to anti-essentialism (assuming they actually mention Butler specifically, rather than WP editors inferring Butler's closeness to those critiques).

But clearly what the section really needs to exist is something like the critical remarks on Butler that say, Zizek, Haraway, Laclau, etc. make... i.e. disagreements within the very field Butler works in, not just someone who "doesn't understand it" because they do something different. LotLE×talk 08:32, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

One thing that strikes me, though, about Butler's defense of her prose style as necessary to break the conventions of tradtional langauge usage (or something along these lines) is that if you are going to systematically undermine the existing langauge by violating all the rules, you have one of two choices: you can either write in a language compltely devoid of social meaning, full of signs and symbols which have no correspondence with anything mental or physical and hence no meaning at all except to oneself (see Wittgenstin and private language argument). That is, complete nonsense. OR, you have to institute a new commincable language which, at least in certain points is intertranslatable with existing langauges. In the latter case, you need to provide some, at least approximate, manual of translation from the new to the old vocabulary. The substance of Martha Nussbaim's critique, I think, lies here: this particular school of philosophers/critical theorists seems to be using an esoteric language to communicate solely with each other and past the normal population. The weakness in the argument, for Nussbaum, is that analytic philosphy aslo has ITS own technical vocabulary and use of concepts which set members apart in a sort of elite ivory tower community which engages in highly abstract and useless speulcation and does not generally communicate with the general population. The critism was perhaps formulated more consistently in an interview that I once read of Gloria Steinem (non-academcian),who said something like "No, I try to stay away from places like Yale because these acamedic feminists just live on word-bubbles and have nothing to offer in the real world." But don't cite that. It was not a specific criticism of Judith Butler and I have no idea where I read it. --Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 08:05, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

On the point about plain language and so on: you have to distinguish. The article on physics should be much more general and accessible than the article on affine transformations or quantum chromodynamics. In a similar way, an article on truth that most of the editors considered too techincal was addressed by creating an article called theory of truth. I tried to address criticism of my article in Jerry Fodor as too technical by seperating out the more detialed parts into other articles. It is still too technical, but I haven't had time to deal with it. Some editors addres this sort of thing by creating a separte article for bio of X and Philosophy of X. There are various ways of dealing with this. The article on Judith Butler should definitely be more general than the articles on her books or on specific theories and ideas of her school of thought. You don't need to use "plain" langauge, in my opinion, but any technical terms shuld be cleraly explained or linked, etc.. The raticle now seems to be moving in that direction in any case.--Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 08:19, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Great poinhttp://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B2GGGL_enIT177&q=Nussbaum+and+Butlert! It wasn't mentioned in my classes, either. I had to look on the internet for it, which goes to show that the feminist continental community has no interest in debate or in presenting alternative viewpoints that might shatter their glass worlds. -Kmaguir1 03:42, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Or Nussbaum's "critique" might not be so important or "prominent" as you want us to think.--Agnaramasi 15:07, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Hmmmm....206,000 hits on Google. [4]

That's fairly prominent, I think. Academic importance is another matter. I'm really trying to remain as NPOV as possible on this!! If you leave the criticism section in, the Nussbaum hullaballoo should probably be mentioned as one, among other, criticisms--Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 18:40, 26 July 2006 (UTC).

I can buy into that too. Especially now that some of the books have their own articles, we could probably get by with generally accessible summaries, with more arcane details split off into the book articles. And maybe we can use the text in this bio to either start or enhance those book articles. But I'm not sure entirely what should be accessible outside the book discussions, other than the general birth, job, etc. that goes in the lead. Maybe pull out and simplify a few comments from the several book sections that sketch Butler's general influence and direction. Hmm... LotLE×talk 08:38, 26 July 2006 (UTC)