Butler’s Lies
Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler
In 1998, UC-Berkeley philosophy professor and superstar sex/gender radical public intellectual Judith Butler took first prize in a contest for bad writing held by the journal Philosophy and Literature. The winning bit of prose, from a 1997 article, runs as follows:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
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Alexander T. Riley is a senior fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars.
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