On Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction, and its influence on Judith Butler and feminism.

Egalitarianwhistle · 2020-03-16T00:23:57+00:00

"This inherent intellectual weakness is what makes these activities inherently anti-academic. The rejection of the intellectual standards established since the symposia of Ancient Greece has become steadily more marked, until we reach today’s tactics of simply refusing to allow contrary opinions to be stated in the first place."

rotmeat · 2020-03-16T08:10:49+00:00

Thanks for the share. I didn't go to an elite university, but what the author talks about rings true to what I saw at my mediocre local gender studies department.

I enrolled as a gender studies major right off the bat, thinking I'd be learning all this cool new science about how sex and gender worked in the real world, but instead, it was just bad.

I don't simply mean that the stuff they talked about, as often as not, was provably untrue (which should, on its own, be disqualifying for any academic discipline); I mean that it wasn't even particularly progressive.

I mean, science discriminates against women because logic and evidence aren't "women's ways of knowing"? Did Cixous just say that women can't logic? Or that the reason why there are no matriarchies is because women are just naturally more egalitarian than men, so whenever they have power, they always share it equally - not only is that gender essentialist, it's also benevolently sexist.

I found that you could read Butler if you read super, super carefully, and bore in mind that, like an dim version of Tolkien's Ents, she would take a very long time to say something, and would never say something unless she had very little to say. Most of her queer theory I'm pretty confident you can sum up as "women can enjoy masculine things and men can enjoy feminine things", which was already a well-established cornerstone of liberal thought and didn't seem to add anything.

Most of the other things I "learned" about were similarly obvious inasmuch as they were true, and false inasmuch as they were not: that men and women sometimes had different perceptions of society (or else that an understanding of gender was literally a product of a doubled X chromosome); that women were often afraid of being raped (or else that society widely encouraged and supported rape specifically against women); or that gender socialization began even before birth with the choosing of names and such (or else the author literally meant that you could change someone's sex by what color you painted the nursery).

At first, I was disappointed.

But then, I realized that even if it was all bullshit, no one would take your criticisms seriously unless you'd put in your time and worked your way up the status hierarchy by getting a degree, then a graduate degree, then a respectable position, and that this would all work because hey, academia is all about freedom of inquiry, so as long as you could support your arguments, you'd be safe, right?

Boy, do I feel stupid.

Kuato2012 · 2020-03-16T06:37:26+00:00

Great read. I know it's a long one, but I encourage anyone here just to skim the comments to dive into the article.

Melthengylf · 2020-03-16T12:11:26+00:00

I liked very much how he described Derrida. The problems of translation are quite accurate.

XYZRGBCMYK · 2020-03-19T14:36:47+00:00

Derrida may have a good person to those who knew him but his thinking was always utter trash. Judith Butler is not much better.

Title	On Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction, and its influence on Judith Butler and feminism.
Author	Egalitarianwhistle
Upvotes	22
Comments	23
Date	March 16, 2020 12:17 AM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/fjbl6f/on_jacques_derrida_deconstruction_and_its/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/on-jacques-derrida-deconstruction-and-its.1063827 https://theredarchive.com/post/1063827

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