Otherhood and apple pie

Queen of the Idiocracy, Judith Butler, has been trying to climb out of a hole of her own digging:

AVIVA-Berlin: How do you feel about the accusation that you have perhaps taken an anti-Semitic position concerning your statement about the Hamas and the Hezbollah as progressive social movements? (On: http://radicalarchives.org/2010/03/28/jbutler-on-hamas-hezbollah-israel-lobby/) Does that bother you more as a philosopher or on a personal level?
Judith Butler: Unfortunately, that clip was cut short and did not include all of my response. What I actually said was that although groups like Hamas and Hezbollah should be described as left movements, that like all left movements, one has to choose which ones one supports and which ones one refuses. They are “left” in the sense that they oppose colonialism and imperialism, but their tactics are not ones that I would ever condone. I have never supported either group, and my very public affiliation with a politics of non-violence would make it impossible for me to support them. The editing of my response was obviously an effort to distort my view, and I am very sorry that the distortion has been able to circulate as it has. Thank you for giving me the chance to clarify what I actually said and what I have always thought.

I’m starting to find this sort of thing rather charming. There’s only one movement today that seeks to establish a genuine, non-metaphoric, empire, colonising the whole world in the process. It’s lovely to see Judith say, of two of the most prominent members of this movement, that they “oppose colonialism and imperialism”.

And look! She’s channelling the strapline of Howard the Duck:

As for vulnerability: it seems clear to me that in being named “a boy” or “a girl” we are vulnerable to the language that others use to describe us. We are brought into the world by being named by others, and that primary vulnerability is there, before we have any power to name ourselves. Do we ever escape the social interpellations of others? Do we ever escape the social imprint? Or do we struggle with and against that legacy we never chose?

Lovely, lovely, lovely.

The piece is educational too. Setting aside for a moment the struggle for the basic human right to be born spontaneously, into a vacuum, without parents or language, she explains an important concept to her German interviewer:

So if we fight for the rights of gay people to walk the street freely, we have to realize first that some significant number of those people are also in jeopardy because of anti-immigrant violence – this is what we call “double jeopardy” in English.

Yes, “double jeopardy” is what we call – in English – facing two different types of threat. Double, as in two; jeopardy, as in danger. See?

Does the professor genuinely not know that double jeopardy means being tried twice in court on the same set of evidence (and is widely prohibited around the world), or is this performance art? Does it matter? Can it affect our delight at her suggestion that war might be prevented by dance?

Of course not. For people of my age – which is roughly the same as that of Butler, these Cretaceous feminists are as comforting, and irrelevant as a long-lost ball of darning wool: a reminder of one’s childhood, completely useless today.

Let’s end with the sight of her wibbling away about overcoming “otherness”, contentedly oblivious to the irony that her entire life seems devoted to creating a sense of “otherness” and the denial of human commonality – a commonality that makes it completely proper, a duty even, to apply the same standards to everyone, regardless of race, colour or gender, even though Ms Butler thinks of such universalism as racist.

AVIVA-Berlin: In an interview with Jill Stauffer you said that getting to know “the other” is connected to the challenge of reacting non-violently. But to what extent is it possible to understand the other? Is it important to admit a certain “opacity”?
Judith Butler: Yes, we have to move away from the idea of “knowing” as mastery. Perhaps there is a way to think about “acknowledging” the vulnerability of the other, the equal rights of the other, and to pursue the question, “who are you?”. The question is a direct address, a way of entering into relation, but it is not the same as trying to possess the other through knowledge or relegating the “Other” to some permanent site of unknowability.

Judy, baby, the only person trying to relegate the “Other” to permanent unknowability is you.