“Judith Butler, the oft-cited post-structuralist, feminist, and queer theorist,” the Columbia Spectator reports with unrestrained joy this morning, “is coming to Columbia.” (HatTip to reader Ed Chin).
“We have every expectation that she will join this faculty full-time, but now she is just visiting,” [chair of the English and Comparative Literature department Jean] Howard said.
“The faculty is utterly overjoyed with this possibility,” she added.
Butler has authored pioneering works during her career, including “Gender Trouble,” which introduced the concept of gender performativity, and “Giving an Account of Oneself,” which discusses the limits of self-knowledge.
“She is one of the leading feminist theorists in the world. Many people in literature departments have learned from her books. We use them in this department all the time,” Howard said.
Butler also takes philosophical approaches to literature, which Howard would like to see more of in the English department.
She is indeed a prize-winner, but “[h]ave any of you ever tried to read anything by Judith Butler?” I asked in a post about queer theory on campus several years ago.
I did, once, and found it only slightly preferable to the prospect of walking barefoot over hot coals. In my view she richly deserves the first place award she won in 1998 (what took so long?) handed out by the scholarly journal Philosopy and Literature for those who commit “the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles published in the last few years.” Her prize-winning entry, one sentence from “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article in the scholarly journal Diacritics (1997):
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.
Congratulations, Columbia! Berkeley’s loss is your gain. If I were snarkier than I like to think I am, I would say that Butler’s move calls to mind Will Rogers’ comment about the migration of the Okies to California during the Depression: it raised the collective IQ of both states. (But since I’m not, the jury should disregard that last sentence.)
“Berkeley’s loss is your gain”???
Please name one person at Columbia (student or faculty or staff or vagrant) who is stupider than Judith Butler.