Please Help New English Review
For our donors from the UK:
New English Review
New English Review Facebook Group
Follow New English Review On Twitter
Recent Publications by New English Review Authors
The Literary Culture of France
by J. E. G. Dixon
Hamlet Made Simple and Other Essays
by David P. Gontar
Farewell Fear
by Theodore Dalrymple
The Eagle and The Bible: Lessons in Liberty from Holy Writ
by Kenneth Hanson
The West Speaks
interviews by Jerry Gordon
Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy
Emmet Scott
Why the West is Best: A Muslim Apostate's Defense of Liberal Democracy
Ibn Warraq
Anything Goes
by Theodore Dalrymple
Karimi Hotel
De Nidra Poller
The Left is Seldom Right
by Norman Berdichevsky
Allah is Dead: Why Islam is Not a Religion
by Rebecca Bynum
Virgins? What Virgins?: And Other Essays
by Ibn Warraq
An Introduction to Danish Culture
by Norman Berdichevsky
The New Vichy Syndrome:
by Theodore Dalrymple
Jihad and Genocide
by Richard L. Rubenstein
Second Opinion
by Theodore Dalrymple
Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline
by Theodore Dalrymple
In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas
by Theodore Dalrymple
Defending The West:
by Ibn Warraq
Nations, Language and Citizenship:
by Norman Berdichevsky
Romancing Opiates
by Theodore Dalrymple
Which Koran?
by Ibn Warraq
Our Culture, What's Left of It
by Theodore Dalrymple
What The Koran Really Says
by Ibn Warraq
Life at the Bottom
by Theodore Dalrymple
The Origins of the Koran
by Ibn Warraq
Why I Am Not Muslim
by Ibn Warraq
Spanish Vignettes: An Offbeat Look Into Spain's Culture, Society & History
by Norman Berdichevsky
Leaving Islam
Edited by Ibn Warraq
The Danish-German Border Dispute, 1815-2001: Aspects of Cultural and Demographic Politics
by Norman Berdichevsky
What's Love Got to Do with It?: Emotions and Relationships in Pop Songs
by Thomas J. Scheff





Wednesday, 29 August 2012
An Introduction To The Prose Of Judith Butler Bookmark and Share

From the Wikipedia article on Judith Butler:

In 1998, Dennis Dutton's journal Philosophy and Literature gave Butler First Prize in its "Bad Writing Competition," which claims to "celebrate bad writing from the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles."[44] Butler's 94 word long sentence, published in the journal Diacritics, for which she received the award was:

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.

Dutton discontinued the contest after being criticized for its apparently hostile spirit. Butler responded to Dutton's criticism, with a letter to the London Review of Books  and an op-ed piece for The New York Times. She argued that writing clearly can make the author too reliant on common sense and as such make language lose its potential to "shape the world" and shake up the status quo. Stanley Kurtz, in turn, argued against Butler's op-ed in a letter to the New York Times titled, "Bad Writing Has No Defense." Stephen K. Roney also responded that "many—indeed, most—generally recognized “great thinkers” have been clear and lucid in their writing [...] Is Butler claiming to be deeper than all of them?"

Posted on 08/29/2012 9:25 AM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Comments
29 Aug 2012
Christina McIntosh

And by way of contrast, David Bentley Hart, from 'The Beauty of the Infinite', Part 2 'A Dogmatica Minora', section 1 'Trinity', subsection 4, part iii, 'Analogia Entis':

"All things - all the words of being - speak of God because they shine within his eternal Word.  This trinitarian distance is that "open" in which the tree springs up from the earth, the stars turn in the sky, the sea swells, all living things are born and grow, angels raise their everlasting hymnody; because this is the true interval of difference, every metaphysic that does not grasp the analogy of being is a Tower of Babel, attempting to mount up to the supreme principle rather than dwelling in and giving voice to the prodigality of the gift".

Now, to fully understand what this passage means, one must read the rest of the book that contains it; but even without that, one can sense from it that Hart loves and respects words, language, reason and reasoning.  The passage demands to be read aloud.  

The whole of 'The Beauty of the Infinite' is a dense and difficult and closely-argued book that is, in part, a sustained riposte to the likes of Judith Butler, and that contains many thorny passages that require careful re-reading; but it is full of passages like this, where argument shifts gears and suddenly transforms itself into something like poetry.  (One other such passage is a sustained discussion of the nature of the music of J S Bach).






Most Recent Posts at The Iconoclast
Search The Iconoclast
Enter text, Go to search:
The Iconoclast Posts by Author
The Iconoclast Archives
sun mon tue wed thu fri sat
    1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31  

Subscribe