The Judith Butler Reader Paperback – March 5, 2004

For those who have to read Judith Butler, or who want to read her voluntarily, this is a useful introduction to a writer widely regarded as tough stuff, if interesting. Recommended.

Salih does an excellent job of of helping the amateur philosophy enthusiast access some of Butler's more complex ideas across her career.

I am very happy with the book and the service and the seller. thanks.

So, what is going on here? Do we have anything to worry about? Should we be concerned about an academic whose writing we can barely understand and who, when we do understand her appears to be saying things that either are true, but banal and uninteresting, or when they are interesting, turn out to be false? Should we be concerned that Butler’s theorizing is drawing a generation of young people into the cool shade of the campus when they should be out on the street dodging tear gas? We might have hoped that Butler, as a feminist,would have something useful to say about pornography and women, but she does not. We might have hoped that Butler, from her comfortable, well paid academic security, would be able to say something constructive on behalf of unions which are struggling for equal pay for women, but she is silent. We could hope that she would say something supportive to the people who are fighting day after day to eliminate injurious and dangerous working conditions for women, but she does not. She says nothing about abortion, about contraception, about child care, about the poverty faced by single black women, about drug addiction among the poor, about Latinas working two jobs on minimum wage. She says nothing about the day to day realities faced by transgender people. About the trafficking and enslavement of women for prostitution she says nothing. About women who are tortured and murdered to protect a man’s honor, she says nothing. About all of this she says nothing. It’s worth dwelling on this for a few moments. About all of the problems that women in the world face today, Butler says nothing. Here’s what she does say; "This implicit theory, by which I mean this set of untheorized presumptions, relies upon a representational realism that conflates the signified of fantasy with its (impossible) referent and construes “depiction” as an injurious act and, in legal terms, a discriminatory action or “real” effect. This gliding from representation to the ontological claim moves in two directions at once: it establishes the referent first as that which the representation reflects and re-presents and, second, as that which is effectively performed and performatively effected by the representation." (p 185) Enough.

excellent

Missing pages and one chapter doubled

great academic resource