Re: Intellectual Specificity and Inner Fascism

I?m not familiar with the thread, or indeed Nussbaum. Maybe what he / she is
getting at is Post structuralism?s (PS) failure to ground itself in any
politico-ethical framework. Furthermore, it has taken left academia into a
discursive navel gazing whereby the symbolic becomes the foundational. The
retreat from any economic or materialist analysis (which PS caricatures as
'economic reductionism') and its attendent effects on concioussness is made
all the more ironic as capitalism further penetrates our inner lives.
Intellectuals abdicate responsibility for any sustained engagement. Instead
they cripple themselves with talk of 'specific intellectuals', meanwhile the
globalised juggernaut of late capitalism continues to universalise
oppression.

I seriously doubt that Nassbaum was wishing to be 'morally led' by wishing
to know what butler grounds her 'perfomativity' in. By the way, does Butler
provide any empirical evidence for her claims except a vague mention of
transexualism as indicative of teh performative nature of subjectivity?

cheers,

Doug Stokes.

>Hi~
>
> Nussbaum complains the Butler doesn't provide a criteria by which to
>differentiate between Good and Bad. This seems to be an appeal to Butler to
>act as what Foucault calls the universal intellectual, rather than to open
>up spaces for specific intellectuals. Could the desire to be morally "led"
>by philosophers be attributed to Deleuze's concept of inner fascism?
>
> I'm gone for a week. I hope to return to an overflowing inbox :)
>
>Cheers
>
>~Nate
>
>--
>
>"Thought is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it
>offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates,
>unites, or re-unites; it cannot help but liberate and enslave.
>Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must
>be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm,
>thought, at the level of its existence, in its very dawning, is
>in itself an action--a perilous act."
> -Michel Foucault
>

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