As I understand it, radical feminism, particularly as developed by MacKinnon, is based on a binary account of power in which having, or not having, power, is what defines gender. It’s paradoxical, then, that one of the main criticisms radical feminists make of post-modern feminists is that the posties, in critiquing the idea of the subject, deprive women of agency; it’s surprising, because hadn’t the radical feminists, albeit unintentionally, already done that? I’ve been wanting to think about this question for some time, and more generally about the questions about agency and subjectivity that are raised by debates between radical feminists, feminists of color, postmodern feminists, queer theorists, and others. As luck would have it, I also need to pick a “special topic” for a forthcoming exam on contemporary political theory; so, “Feminist political theory from 1980 to the present” it is. I’ve made a preliminary reading list, mostly obvious texts, with a couple of additions I happened to find in second-hand book stores. Any recommendations you have (for things to read or, indeed, for things to avoid) would be gratefully received: Read more↴

Adam points to the annoying habit among people doing academic work of moralizing about the “relevance” or accessibility of their work, and, I think, gets to the heart of what’s wrong with the way this usually proceeds. By positioning themselves in opposition to academic “irrelevance”

the speaker can make a double assertion:

1. The common people are right to be suspicious of some intellectual work, which really is useless at best or counterproductive at worst.
2. I, however, do not do that kind of intellectual work and am very suspicious of it myself.

The problem with this is that by focusing on the individual’s choice of academic style, this kind of move distracts from a critique of the exclusionary power structures of academia. Read more↴

She took off her T-shirt, then her bra, then her skirt, and as she did she pulled the most incredible faces. She twirled around in her skimpy panties for a few seconds more and then, not knowing what else to do, began getting dressed again.

— Michel Houellebecq

Read more↴

I never really paid much attention to how I read things when I was an undergraduate; rather, I picked up the strange form of telepathy practiced by analytic philosophers, where the text is merely some kind of mediating fetish object in the transfer of ideas from mind to mind (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Then I got beaten about the head by Quentin Skinner (figuratively; he’s actually a perfect gentleman, of course), and encouraged to think about how to read as it were self-consciously, paying attention to what it might mean that certain words and turns of phrase were chosen instead of others. But what I’d really like is to learn how to misread. Read more↴

One of the disadvantages of studying political theory in the US is the fact that Hannah Arendt is, rather inexplicably, taken very seriously. I never felt the slightest encouragement to read her before I moved here, but now I have to read her, and I rather wish I didn’t. Perhaps I’m missing her vital insights, but I’m too put off by her asinine methodology. What do you do with someone who can write:

Each of them, and again none more than Marx, found himself in the grip of certain genuine contradictions. It seems to lie in the nature of this matter that the most obvious solution of these contradictions, or rather the most obvious reason why these great authors should have remained unaware of them is their equation of work with labor, so that labor is endowed by them with certain faculties which only work possesses. This equation always leads into patent absurdities.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

So “patent absurdities” apparently follow from failing to respect a distinction Arendt invented about ten pages earlier, giving little justification of its validity and certainly no explanation as to why it might be relevant to Marx. I’m reminded of fundamentalist Christians, who insist that there is such a thing as a “literal” reading of the bible. This seems like an extraordinarily stupid faith in the fixed meaning of words, as if there is one set of concepts divorced from time and place, that Marx must have been working with the same concepts as Arendt. “The loneliness of the laborer qua laborer is usually overlooked…” Perhaps it’s not “overlooked”? Perhaps those who don’t think the laborer is “lonely” actually disagree with Arendt, and perhaps they disagree with her because she is wrong. Arendt seems incapable of thinking that someone might have a substantive disagreement with her; any divergence is explained by a failure to appreciate the timeless truths Arendt has so generously uncovered for us. This kind of narcissistic insulation from criticism is sometimes put forward as a fault of something called “Theory.” Unusually, this appears to actually apply in Arendt’s case (Arendt isn’t, as far as I know, generally considered part of the amorphous blob of Theory), along with other criticisms that get leveled at the same target: superficial engagements with texts; grand, content-free generalizations; a refusal to give reasons for any of her assertions. I’m a little shocked, actually; I can’t remember the last time I read a respected work which is as bad as The Human Condition.