I have a new essay in Tablet on Judith Butler’s journey from TERFy Hegelian to tragic themlet, tracing her formative years with Gadamer and (the unjustly forgotten) Maurice Natanson, early engagement with Beauvoir and the ‘Sex Wars’ of the 80s, and some salacious bits of family/sexual history, in order, I hope, to get some new perspectives on what ‘gender’ is even about, and to re-articulate what’s philosophically and politically at stake in debates over how we interpret ourselves and each other.
I have been so puzzled by what happened to the gay movement/community—how gender seems to have swallowed everything. And so quickly too.
The authoritarianism which seems baked into gender stuff these days also puzzles me. Where my sexuality is an important part of my life if someone mistakes me for straight I don’t feel it violates me. I don’t feel like my being or personhood depends on being recognized as gay—correctly, always.
Yet so often that is exactly what I hear from gender activists. That to deny someone’s gender identity is to deny their very being. And even mistakes can be viewed as suspect and as potential attacks or abuse.
I struggle to understand this authoritarian shift? If that’s what it is?
And too the bizarre conflation of gender volunteerism, and essentialism, which you point out, makes my head spin.
Wow the young Butler looks so cool in that Lesbian Sex Mafia photo, very much somebody who belongs in your gay photo album / gallery of Periclean heroes with Stambolian, Amador and Shilts. I learned a lot from this essay, I’m amazed you could get so much philosophy into a very accessible magazine article. Forgive me for this way-too-long comment.
Funnily enough I think that the “good” Butler of Gender Trouble that you try to save has weaknesses not dissimilar to Pippin’s. Pippin and the constellation of “Chicago/Pittsburgh/Leipzig neo-Hegelianism” (lol) in which he shines is for my money the closest thing contemporary philosophy has to an avant-garde. Pippin’s theory of modernist art as “philosophy by other means,” an expression of autonomy that is also an interrogation about what autonomy means in a given time and place is also very suggestive. But the whole thing has had limited influence within academia and zero outside of it because the philosophy is dry as dust (not even unreadable in an alluring way like French Theory) and the philosophical art criticism is… workmanlike. He can give a Hegelian explanation of why he likes the art he likes, but does Pippin’s constipated Hegelianism actually help us appreciate or produce art?
Butler’s version of Hegelianism is less academically solid or stolid but more suggestive. (I can’t blame Pippin for the Subjects of Desire review, that book only becomes interesting when you know it is the prequel to Gender Trouble. A bit like Fukuyama Butler is interested in Kojève’s Hegel, not the real thing: all that time in Heidelberg and Butler writes a book on Hegel without referring to Henrich or Theunissen? The undercooked Foucault chapter really is an epitome of bad 80s trends. But this becomes irrelevant when you realize Butler isn’t really doing Hegel scholarship or French intellectual history.) The interesting thing Butler does, which you describe extremely well, is use Gadamer (and as you show Natanson, who I haven’t read) x Kojève and his successors to come up with a theory of roles or desires that are neither simply given nor simply chosen. The nature of the roles or types or desires instead have to be negotiated in an always-provisional way, and can be philosophically inhabited through a sort of comic self-knowledge or parody. On this basis they bring out the philosophical aspect of gay sensibility. And this is a major achievement! (I’m either too cowardly or too attached to the useful fictions of political liberalism to call Butler “her.”)
But even for the Butler of Gender Trouble, what does the philosopher/theorist add to the parodic performance of the drag queen or the complex negotiation of desire at work in BDSM? I don't think she ever had a clear answer, and as you show, the temptation for the philosopher to play policeman (and not it a fun way!) became irresistible. Butler has a certain ideal of autonomy (that shifts from comic self-knowledge to parody to the acceptance of melancholy) and judges gay practices based on whether they live up to it, without opening her own position up to challenge or interrogation. There’s nothing like this censoriousness in Pippin, but as a result the gap between his theory of autonomy and actual freedom in art and life is canyon-like.
Thanks so much for this kind and generative comment! I'm so glad to hear it reads easily, since I think of all my work in the last few years this one took the most time with the most painful texts...
I had been wondering if you'd done academic work in philosophy, btw...
I don't know if you'd have read my essays on Fukuyama (for Foreign Policy) or Sedgwick and BAP (for Tablet), but I'm interested in all of them as engaged, directly or via Allan Bloom, with Kojeve, who I wouldn't presume to claim to understand but who I certainly find stimulating and among whose readers I feel like I can at least trace different sorts of engagement with the idea (which I think his lectures posit ironically, or anyway unstraightforwardly) of a world-historical trajectory towards 'equality' understood--as in the famous footnote on Tokugawa Japan in the revised edition of the lectures--as 'America', the state of purely animal unthinking post-cultural existence that may or may not be avoidable.
I guess for whatever reason over the past couple of years I've found that lineage of a certain Hegelianism more interesting than either the Marxist or the neo-Hegelian analytic one, and certainly more than Hegel himself, and it's been stimulating to me (maybe not to anyone else!) to see common points of origin for Straussian political theory and queer theory as American appropriations of Kojeve... and, maybe, if it's possible, to get back to what might still be fresh and promising in those traditions--not least, as you suggest, a reappraisal (in part via a new look at Arendt and Foucault, themselves much concerned with the sort of themes this tradition raises, albeit not through Kojeve in their cases but through Nietzsche and Heidegger) of how they might offer something to the expression of a gay sensibility (as Avital Ronell--whom I mean soon to defend--put it, a truly 'gay' science)...
That to say, I have no access to the analytic or German appropriations of Hegel, and not much interest in them on their own terms... I heard rumors of Pippin from my then philosopher-of-language ex, but since I don't care at all about the kind of problems that stuff might be taken to solve, I have never been tempted to read him... And although I'm a resident of Hyde Park and as such have a certain second-hand impression of Pippin (my partner did some coursework with him, etc), I've only read Hegel's Idealism, and that only in part (my first attempt, in college, made me feel like he's less understandable, sentence by sentence than Hegel! which I'm not sure isn't true) and his current over-all project, which indeed, as I was working on the Butler essay, a number of interlocutors told me with surprise seems quite similar to what I understand to be her own...
For instance there are a number of UChicago PhD in Social Thought, and youngish faculty members like Florian Klinger, working on topics apparently about 'art' and it's autonomy (for Klinger, 'the aesthetic' and its constitutive 'indeterminacy', 'ambivalence' etc)... not only do these people invariably have terrible taste in art (they can salute the canonical, and whatever serious sludge is hailed at the moment, but that's not *taste*--and I very much feel from my experience with such people how Arendt and Denneny were set to work on the problem of taste by their short time in Social Thought in the 60s!) and actually very little use for any particular concrete work of art on its own terms of pleasure, surprise, propaganda, seduction, and seem to really be interested (this is also a Raymond Geuss problem) in instances of the category 'art' that check rather boring boxes and illustrate already-solved philosophical-historical 'problems'... which is, of course, just the approach to art that Butler--or someone like Lauren Berlant, another great they/them lol--takes in her work... one would never know reading her what drag is actually like, much less that it's fun, competitive, beautiful-ugly, etc... And it's not a coincidence that they're bad writers!
So as you say there's a double problem of what does art actually add to philosophy on their account--its autonomy or capacity to resist norms or whatever seems to consist of something in fact quite tame and predictable (but I think, in general, it's a mistake to try to defend the autonomy of art, literature, the human, whatever, in the first place--not being a German I have no idea what autonomy is and suspect it's a false problem inherited from a certain kind of post-Christian who wants to know that he's truly free in some respect, that there's somewhere a locus of non-determination, which is just not something that keeps me awake at night)--or put the way you do, why do we need philosophy if the drag queens and art-works are already doing all this ambivalent parodic questioning? Except that of course it's the theorist who really knows what the artists are only dumbly executing--the theorist who must tell them what it's all been about, and set proper limits to their play... the desire to be the policeman at the end of history seems built-in to this tradition, in a way that has none of the fun of Kojeve saying that having understood Hegel he is, literally, God...
Thanks so much for writing back, this gives me a lot to think about. I’m maybe not the best judge of readability since I’ve actually read Subjects of Desire, but I’ve been really impressed at the intellectual level you’re able to maintain in Tablet (which is what lead me to your substack). It was a quick move from “oh, an essay on Barthes or Arendt” to “hum, this magazine guy knows what he’s talking about and doesn’t make stupid errors” to “wait, he actually has something to say.” I haven’t read your essay on Fukuyama but I’ll be sure to do so.
I’m not some Pippin disciple, I read his stuff while working on Hegel in grad school and got nothing out of it. I left academia but have been thinking about going back so I read the more recent stuff and became convinced there was at least some gold under the dross. It is probably easier to do this if you *don’t* live in Hyde Park. I actually think that the core of Pippin’s project isn’t that dissimilar from Fukuyama's. Pippin is the overly accessible Fukuyama’s obscure doppelgänger: one is from Strauss and Kojève via Bloom, the other via Rosen. Both want to defend Strauss’s “second wave” of modernity from the attacks of the “third wave” (Nietzsche and Heidegger), while admitting that you have to re-formulate the project of the second wave in light of third-wave critiques. If that means getting rid of the slogan “autonomy” as too Christian, fine, but the resistance to “totalitarianism” you describe in your Butler essay has at least a family resemblance to what people try to mean by autonomy. I see something broadly similar (*very* broadly ofc) in Foucault’s and Arendt’s appropriations of Kant, and also in neglected Strauss fan Claude Lefort. Almost everybody missed this in Hegel’s Idealism thanks to Pippin’s constipated writing and his desire to pretend that he was an analytic philosopher, but the main lines of Pippin’s interpretation of Hegel’s Logic come from Heidegger’s Hegel seminars, not Wilfred Sellars or even from Henrich and Theunissen (except to the extent that H & T themselves were working in grandpa Heidegger’s shadow).
Pippin to his credit doesn’t play the policeman. He makes the artists be philosophers, not good or bad illustrations of Hegelian formulas. In this respect he’s very alive to Geuss’s objections that you mention. But the problem is that this makes his art writing (and perhaps his philosophy in general) superfluous. Unless, of course, we are supposed to judge his Alfred Hitchcock books on their aesthetic merits...
I can imagine you're right about Pippin--I haven't read his Heidegger book, but my partner took his Heidegger seminar recently and somehow now, Pippin says, both Heidegger and Hegel are, rightly understood, right about everything!
This is ofc in some way also what I take most of the Theory-people, rightly understood, to have been getting at--a properly open-ended Hegelianism, and a non-evil Heidegger, goofy-maxxed and irony-pilled, let us keep alive a philosophical life in a liberal democracy... sort of trying to do with the modern Germans what Strauss claimed to be doing with the Ancient Greeks (but was of course also actually doing with those same modern Germans)... But wasn't Taylor already smarter than that when she made fun of herself for wishing for "the 1830s but without all the racists"?
I am alternately interested in this possibility of, you could say alternately, reformulating the second wave in light of the third, or making the third somehow safe for us--thus my sympathetic readings of Barthes' and Foucault's soft-Nietzscheanism (at least this is what I see them as having worked towards by the end of their lives), my attempts to make Rieff seem less of a reactionary, to see what's redeemable in Sedgwick and Butler... but I'm also skeptical about to what extent this project is feasible or desirable--my critiques of Fukuyama, of Habermas (also in Foreign Policy), of BAP, and of Arendt's theory of the aesthetic (in Tablet) sort of suggest that in post-modern conditions the legitimation of the modern through the right kind of taking-on-board of modern self-critique is perhaps simply doomed...
Some of that ambivalence is animated precisely by my fear (which the BAP, Fukuyama, Habermas and Arendt pieces--along with the one on Bernard-Henri Levy--all somehow address) that it may not be possible to intelligently and efficaciously address audiences in public writing--that is to say I have strong doubts about the sort of thing I've been doing, and I try to give those doubts a fair hearing!
I have not, however, read Lefort or Rosen (who is so much present in the footnotes of Hegel's Idealism!)...or, speaking of the Legitimacy of the Modern, Blumenberg...
the comments section being kind of cumbersome for extended communication, do email me sometime at b_e_smith@outlook.com !
Not to say you're wrong about this (how would I know?), but is this something that would happen today:
"Pippin’s negative review of Butler’s book, in which he exercised on a junior scholar his rage at broader intellectual trends, hampered her chances of a career in the field of philosophy, and doubtless contributed to her shift soon after to the new pastures of gender (if only he could have foreseen the consequences!)."
Aren't there enough competing schools of every Great Man that the outcast from one would find refuge with (and defenders in) another, so that no one's career can really be ended or substantially derailed by one bad review? If Pippin trashed my book (not that he would read it, but let's say I worked on Hegel), I can't imagine I'd even care. I'd just hate him personally and exercise revenge against him when the opportunity presented itself and otherwise carry on as if it had never happened. Has academia changed? Or was Butler unusually vulnerable? Maybe I am unusually insensitive.
or, put another way, Butler found a new field--gender--where what seemed to others to be her sloppy understanding of European philosophy could be turned to a great profit... how much she understood this at the time, and how much was a bizarre windfall, idk!
I mean I have no idea what would happen today! But there weren’t many women in philosophy in the 80s—and not many out lesbians (Butler herself wasn’t out)—and she didn’t have a tenure-track job, so I imagine she felt a lot of precarity/insecurity, and that a negative review (along with other not-great reviews elsewhere) could create at least the subjective impression on her part that the discipline of philosophy wasn’t going to be a place where she could pursue her ambitions (this something she addresses, indirectly, in one of her essays “Can the Other of Philosophy Speak?” [lol!])… Pippin himself was originally supposed to be a Kant guy but his first book, on Kant, got trashed and it took him some fumbling (including a book on Marcuse… again, lol) before finding his feet as a Hegel Expert…
That was so good.
I have been so puzzled by what happened to the gay movement/community—how gender seems to have swallowed everything. And so quickly too.
The authoritarianism which seems baked into gender stuff these days also puzzles me. Where my sexuality is an important part of my life if someone mistakes me for straight I don’t feel it violates me. I don’t feel like my being or personhood depends on being recognized as gay—correctly, always.
Yet so often that is exactly what I hear from gender activists. That to deny someone’s gender identity is to deny their very being. And even mistakes can be viewed as suspect and as potential attacks or abuse.
I struggle to understand this authoritarian shift? If that’s what it is?
And too the bizarre conflation of gender volunteerism, and essentialism, which you point out, makes my head spin.
thank you so much! I keep trying to figure all this out myself…
I can’t wait to read this. I’m trapped at my yacht club without reading material so this is perfect.
Wow the young Butler looks so cool in that Lesbian Sex Mafia photo, very much somebody who belongs in your gay photo album / gallery of Periclean heroes with Stambolian, Amador and Shilts. I learned a lot from this essay, I’m amazed you could get so much philosophy into a very accessible magazine article. Forgive me for this way-too-long comment.
Funnily enough I think that the “good” Butler of Gender Trouble that you try to save has weaknesses not dissimilar to Pippin’s. Pippin and the constellation of “Chicago/Pittsburgh/Leipzig neo-Hegelianism” (lol) in which he shines is for my money the closest thing contemporary philosophy has to an avant-garde. Pippin’s theory of modernist art as “philosophy by other means,” an expression of autonomy that is also an interrogation about what autonomy means in a given time and place is also very suggestive. But the whole thing has had limited influence within academia and zero outside of it because the philosophy is dry as dust (not even unreadable in an alluring way like French Theory) and the philosophical art criticism is… workmanlike. He can give a Hegelian explanation of why he likes the art he likes, but does Pippin’s constipated Hegelianism actually help us appreciate or produce art?
Butler’s version of Hegelianism is less academically solid or stolid but more suggestive. (I can’t blame Pippin for the Subjects of Desire review, that book only becomes interesting when you know it is the prequel to Gender Trouble. A bit like Fukuyama Butler is interested in Kojève’s Hegel, not the real thing: all that time in Heidelberg and Butler writes a book on Hegel without referring to Henrich or Theunissen? The undercooked Foucault chapter really is an epitome of bad 80s trends. But this becomes irrelevant when you realize Butler isn’t really doing Hegel scholarship or French intellectual history.) The interesting thing Butler does, which you describe extremely well, is use Gadamer (and as you show Natanson, who I haven’t read) x Kojève and his successors to come up with a theory of roles or desires that are neither simply given nor simply chosen. The nature of the roles or types or desires instead have to be negotiated in an always-provisional way, and can be philosophically inhabited through a sort of comic self-knowledge or parody. On this basis they bring out the philosophical aspect of gay sensibility. And this is a major achievement! (I’m either too cowardly or too attached to the useful fictions of political liberalism to call Butler “her.”)
But even for the Butler of Gender Trouble, what does the philosopher/theorist add to the parodic performance of the drag queen or the complex negotiation of desire at work in BDSM? I don't think she ever had a clear answer, and as you show, the temptation for the philosopher to play policeman (and not it a fun way!) became irresistible. Butler has a certain ideal of autonomy (that shifts from comic self-knowledge to parody to the acceptance of melancholy) and judges gay practices based on whether they live up to it, without opening her own position up to challenge or interrogation. There’s nothing like this censoriousness in Pippin, but as a result the gap between his theory of autonomy and actual freedom in art and life is canyon-like.
Thanks so much for this kind and generative comment! I'm so glad to hear it reads easily, since I think of all my work in the last few years this one took the most time with the most painful texts...
I had been wondering if you'd done academic work in philosophy, btw...
I don't know if you'd have read my essays on Fukuyama (for Foreign Policy) or Sedgwick and BAP (for Tablet), but I'm interested in all of them as engaged, directly or via Allan Bloom, with Kojeve, who I wouldn't presume to claim to understand but who I certainly find stimulating and among whose readers I feel like I can at least trace different sorts of engagement with the idea (which I think his lectures posit ironically, or anyway unstraightforwardly) of a world-historical trajectory towards 'equality' understood--as in the famous footnote on Tokugawa Japan in the revised edition of the lectures--as 'America', the state of purely animal unthinking post-cultural existence that may or may not be avoidable.
I guess for whatever reason over the past couple of years I've found that lineage of a certain Hegelianism more interesting than either the Marxist or the neo-Hegelian analytic one, and certainly more than Hegel himself, and it's been stimulating to me (maybe not to anyone else!) to see common points of origin for Straussian political theory and queer theory as American appropriations of Kojeve... and, maybe, if it's possible, to get back to what might still be fresh and promising in those traditions--not least, as you suggest, a reappraisal (in part via a new look at Arendt and Foucault, themselves much concerned with the sort of themes this tradition raises, albeit not through Kojeve in their cases but through Nietzsche and Heidegger) of how they might offer something to the expression of a gay sensibility (as Avital Ronell--whom I mean soon to defend--put it, a truly 'gay' science)...
That to say, I have no access to the analytic or German appropriations of Hegel, and not much interest in them on their own terms... I heard rumors of Pippin from my then philosopher-of-language ex, but since I don't care at all about the kind of problems that stuff might be taken to solve, I have never been tempted to read him... And although I'm a resident of Hyde Park and as such have a certain second-hand impression of Pippin (my partner did some coursework with him, etc), I've only read Hegel's Idealism, and that only in part (my first attempt, in college, made me feel like he's less understandable, sentence by sentence than Hegel! which I'm not sure isn't true) and his current over-all project, which indeed, as I was working on the Butler essay, a number of interlocutors told me with surprise seems quite similar to what I understand to be her own...
For instance there are a number of UChicago PhD in Social Thought, and youngish faculty members like Florian Klinger, working on topics apparently about 'art' and it's autonomy (for Klinger, 'the aesthetic' and its constitutive 'indeterminacy', 'ambivalence' etc)... not only do these people invariably have terrible taste in art (they can salute the canonical, and whatever serious sludge is hailed at the moment, but that's not *taste*--and I very much feel from my experience with such people how Arendt and Denneny were set to work on the problem of taste by their short time in Social Thought in the 60s!) and actually very little use for any particular concrete work of art on its own terms of pleasure, surprise, propaganda, seduction, and seem to really be interested (this is also a Raymond Geuss problem) in instances of the category 'art' that check rather boring boxes and illustrate already-solved philosophical-historical 'problems'... which is, of course, just the approach to art that Butler--or someone like Lauren Berlant, another great they/them lol--takes in her work... one would never know reading her what drag is actually like, much less that it's fun, competitive, beautiful-ugly, etc... And it's not a coincidence that they're bad writers!
So as you say there's a double problem of what does art actually add to philosophy on their account--its autonomy or capacity to resist norms or whatever seems to consist of something in fact quite tame and predictable (but I think, in general, it's a mistake to try to defend the autonomy of art, literature, the human, whatever, in the first place--not being a German I have no idea what autonomy is and suspect it's a false problem inherited from a certain kind of post-Christian who wants to know that he's truly free in some respect, that there's somewhere a locus of non-determination, which is just not something that keeps me awake at night)--or put the way you do, why do we need philosophy if the drag queens and art-works are already doing all this ambivalent parodic questioning? Except that of course it's the theorist who really knows what the artists are only dumbly executing--the theorist who must tell them what it's all been about, and set proper limits to their play... the desire to be the policeman at the end of history seems built-in to this tradition, in a way that has none of the fun of Kojeve saying that having understood Hegel he is, literally, God...
For Pippin at his most fatuous and willing to be flattered by idiots--which for what I hear is how his seminars unroll: https://youtu.be/-oGqcvrGURc?si=MAYa4y9fJIH6dQbB
Thanks so much for writing back, this gives me a lot to think about. I’m maybe not the best judge of readability since I’ve actually read Subjects of Desire, but I’ve been really impressed at the intellectual level you’re able to maintain in Tablet (which is what lead me to your substack). It was a quick move from “oh, an essay on Barthes or Arendt” to “hum, this magazine guy knows what he’s talking about and doesn’t make stupid errors” to “wait, he actually has something to say.” I haven’t read your essay on Fukuyama but I’ll be sure to do so.
I’m not some Pippin disciple, I read his stuff while working on Hegel in grad school and got nothing out of it. I left academia but have been thinking about going back so I read the more recent stuff and became convinced there was at least some gold under the dross. It is probably easier to do this if you *don’t* live in Hyde Park. I actually think that the core of Pippin’s project isn’t that dissimilar from Fukuyama's. Pippin is the overly accessible Fukuyama’s obscure doppelgänger: one is from Strauss and Kojève via Bloom, the other via Rosen. Both want to defend Strauss’s “second wave” of modernity from the attacks of the “third wave” (Nietzsche and Heidegger), while admitting that you have to re-formulate the project of the second wave in light of third-wave critiques. If that means getting rid of the slogan “autonomy” as too Christian, fine, but the resistance to “totalitarianism” you describe in your Butler essay has at least a family resemblance to what people try to mean by autonomy. I see something broadly similar (*very* broadly ofc) in Foucault’s and Arendt’s appropriations of Kant, and also in neglected Strauss fan Claude Lefort. Almost everybody missed this in Hegel’s Idealism thanks to Pippin’s constipated writing and his desire to pretend that he was an analytic philosopher, but the main lines of Pippin’s interpretation of Hegel’s Logic come from Heidegger’s Hegel seminars, not Wilfred Sellars or even from Henrich and Theunissen (except to the extent that H & T themselves were working in grandpa Heidegger’s shadow).
Pippin to his credit doesn’t play the policeman. He makes the artists be philosophers, not good or bad illustrations of Hegelian formulas. In this respect he’s very alive to Geuss’s objections that you mention. But the problem is that this makes his art writing (and perhaps his philosophy in general) superfluous. Unless, of course, we are supposed to judge his Alfred Hitchcock books on their aesthetic merits...
I can imagine you're right about Pippin--I haven't read his Heidegger book, but my partner took his Heidegger seminar recently and somehow now, Pippin says, both Heidegger and Hegel are, rightly understood, right about everything!
This is ofc in some way also what I take most of the Theory-people, rightly understood, to have been getting at--a properly open-ended Hegelianism, and a non-evil Heidegger, goofy-maxxed and irony-pilled, let us keep alive a philosophical life in a liberal democracy... sort of trying to do with the modern Germans what Strauss claimed to be doing with the Ancient Greeks (but was of course also actually doing with those same modern Germans)... But wasn't Taylor already smarter than that when she made fun of herself for wishing for "the 1830s but without all the racists"?
I am alternately interested in this possibility of, you could say alternately, reformulating the second wave in light of the third, or making the third somehow safe for us--thus my sympathetic readings of Barthes' and Foucault's soft-Nietzscheanism (at least this is what I see them as having worked towards by the end of their lives), my attempts to make Rieff seem less of a reactionary, to see what's redeemable in Sedgwick and Butler... but I'm also skeptical about to what extent this project is feasible or desirable--my critiques of Fukuyama, of Habermas (also in Foreign Policy), of BAP, and of Arendt's theory of the aesthetic (in Tablet) sort of suggest that in post-modern conditions the legitimation of the modern through the right kind of taking-on-board of modern self-critique is perhaps simply doomed...
Some of that ambivalence is animated precisely by my fear (which the BAP, Fukuyama, Habermas and Arendt pieces--along with the one on Bernard-Henri Levy--all somehow address) that it may not be possible to intelligently and efficaciously address audiences in public writing--that is to say I have strong doubts about the sort of thing I've been doing, and I try to give those doubts a fair hearing!
I have not, however, read Lefort or Rosen (who is so much present in the footnotes of Hegel's Idealism!)...or, speaking of the Legitimacy of the Modern, Blumenberg...
the comments section being kind of cumbersome for extended communication, do email me sometime at b_e_smith@outlook.com !
Will do!
Not to say you're wrong about this (how would I know?), but is this something that would happen today:
"Pippin’s negative review of Butler’s book, in which he exercised on a junior scholar his rage at broader intellectual trends, hampered her chances of a career in the field of philosophy, and doubtless contributed to her shift soon after to the new pastures of gender (if only he could have foreseen the consequences!)."
Aren't there enough competing schools of every Great Man that the outcast from one would find refuge with (and defenders in) another, so that no one's career can really be ended or substantially derailed by one bad review? If Pippin trashed my book (not that he would read it, but let's say I worked on Hegel), I can't imagine I'd even care. I'd just hate him personally and exercise revenge against him when the opportunity presented itself and otherwise carry on as if it had never happened. Has academia changed? Or was Butler unusually vulnerable? Maybe I am unusually insensitive.
or, put another way, Butler found a new field--gender--where what seemed to others to be her sloppy understanding of European philosophy could be turned to a great profit... how much she understood this at the time, and how much was a bizarre windfall, idk!
I mean I have no idea what would happen today! But there weren’t many women in philosophy in the 80s—and not many out lesbians (Butler herself wasn’t out)—and she didn’t have a tenure-track job, so I imagine she felt a lot of precarity/insecurity, and that a negative review (along with other not-great reviews elsewhere) could create at least the subjective impression on her part that the discipline of philosophy wasn’t going to be a place where she could pursue her ambitions (this something she addresses, indirectly, in one of her essays “Can the Other of Philosophy Speak?” [lol!])… Pippin himself was originally supposed to be a Kant guy but his first book, on Kant, got trashed and it took him some fumbling (including a book on Marcuse… again, lol) before finding his feet as a Hegel Expert…