Nussbaum on Butler

By RISHI CHAUDHURI

In her 1999 arti­cle in The New Repub­lic[1], Martha Nuss­baum tells us that Judith But­ler has “led …many to adopt a stance that looks very much like qui­etism and retreat.” She tells us that But­ler gives us no mean­ing­ful polit­i­cal pro­gram, that she writes badly, that her ideas are either false or uno­rig­i­nal, that her argu­ments neglect mate­r­ial fact, that she is a nihilist who wants to deny all norms, that she finds oppres­sion sexy and that her project “col­lab­o­rates with evil.”

These are strong charges and, for the most part, based on a blink­ered view of Judith Butler’s project. But they are not unprece­dented. Vari­a­tions have been lev­eled at most species of Con­ti­nen­tal philoso­pher by oppo­nents on the left and right for over a hun­dred years[2]. In their con­stant return, they high­light not sim­ply a dif­fer­ence in style or even in choice of ulti­mate ques­tion; they also carry a fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent under­stand­ing of the pos­si­bil­i­ties and role of philo­soph­i­cal cri­tique, and rep­re­sent fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent choices of how these pos­si­bil­i­ties should be deployed. In this case, we see ten­sions between But­ler and lib­eral fem­i­nism that can­not be rec­on­ciled by an appeal to more thor­ough under­stand­ing, or by the search for a higher van­tage point.

Martha Nussbaum’s pri­mary com­plaint is that Judith But­ler dis­tracts from prac­ti­cal action: “Fem­i­nist thinkers of the new sym­bolic type would appear to believe that the way to do fem­i­nist pol­i­tics is to use words in a sub­ver­sive way, in aca­d­e­mic pub­li­ca­tions of lofty obscu­rity and dis­dain­ful abstract­ness. These sym­bolic ges­tures, it is believed, are them­selves a form of polit­i­cal resis­tance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as leg­is­la­tures and move­ments to act daringly.”

Nuss­baum keeps return­ing to a vari­a­tion on this point— namely, that fem­i­nism should pri­mar­ily be a prac­ti­cal and polit­i­cal mat­ter, with a def­i­nite pro­gram of action, and that Judith Butler’s fem­i­nism fails this prac­ti­cal test. This is an odd argu­ment to make, espe­cially for an aca­d­e­mic. Every pro­gram needs its the­o­rists, and very few aca­d­e­mics directly and imme­di­ately cause prac­ti­cal change. Most seem com­fort­able with this, and few of our intel­lec­tu­als are simul­ta­ne­ously dash­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies. But if Nuss­baum can’t really be demand­ing an end to the­ory, what she must be say­ing is that But­ler both mis­un­der­stands the role of a fem­i­nist intel­lec­tual and that her pes­simism about the extent of human free­dom is dam­ag­ing to the movement.

The prob­lems and, to a large extent, the solu­tions are clear to Nuss­baum, and she sees the end­less the­o­riz­ing as dis­tract­ing from clearly appar­ent action. To But­ler the actions are often based on shaky ground. A com­mon fea­ture of much left-radical phi­los­o­phy is an ambiva­lence to moder­nity: a belief that lib­er­al­ism, despite its ben­e­fits, rests on shaky foun­da­tions and that an uncrit­i­cal accep­tance of the cat­e­gories we inherit from it may lead us to pre­serve hier­ar­chies we’re hop­ing to dis­solve. Lib­eral, often rights-based, con­cep­tions of the human being have been a valu­able weapon in the fight for jus­tice. But they also tend to assume a for­mal equal­ity that neglects con­text, con­ceive of the self as a pre-existing monad, with rights and desires prior to soci­ety and, at least his­tor­i­cally, in claim­ing a uni­ver­sal human nature have rei­fied exist­ing socio-economic rela­tions and cre­ated new unde­sired and uncon­scious nor­ma­tive constraints.

Nuss­baum keeps return­ing to a vari­a­tion on this point— namely, that fem­i­nism should pri­mar­ily be a prac­ti­cal and polit­i­cal mat­ter, with a def­i­nite pro­gram of action, and that Judith Butler’s fem­i­nism fails this prac­ti­cal test. This is an odd argu­ment to make, espe­cially for an academic.

If we buy some ver­sion of this cri­tique, then we are led to the con­clu­sion that inter­ro­gat­ing received cat­e­gories and con­cep­tions is cru­cial to fem­i­nist thought, and that this ques­tion­ing must include the ubiq­ui­tous and foun­da­tional cat­e­gories of sex and gen­der. More­over, the attempt to unset­tle what seems nat­ural must inevitably seem dif­fi­cult, obscure, and con­tra­dic­tory. So to Nussbaum’s ques­tion, “Why does But­ler pre­fer to write in this teas­ing, exas­per­at­ing way?” and her con­clu­sion that this “bul­lies the reader into grant­ing that … there must be some­thing sig­nif­i­cant going on,” But­ler can only reply, “No doubt, schol­ars in the human­i­ties should be able to clar­ify how their work informs and illu­mi­nates every­day life. Equally, how­ever, such schol­ars are obliged to ques­tion com­mon sense, inter­ro­gate its tacit pre­sump­tions and pro­voke new ways of look­ing at a famil­iar world…. If com­mon sense some­times pre­serves the social sta­tus quo, and that sta­tus quo some­times treats unjust social hier­ar­chies as nat­ural, it makes good sense on such occa­sions to find ways of chal­leng­ing com­mon sense. Lan­guage that takes up this chal­lenge can help point the way to a more socially just world. The con­tem­po­rary tra­di­tion of crit­i­cal the­ory in the acad­emy, derived in part from the Frank­furt School of Ger­man anti-fascist philoso­phers and social crit­ics, has shown how lan­guage plays an impor­tant role in shap­ing and alter­ing our com­mon or “nat­ural” under­stand­ing of social and polit­i­cal real­i­ties.”[3]

Most impor­tant among the cat­e­gories that But­ler wishes to dis­miss is sex, and Nuss­baum sees this as both false and dan­ger­ous. False, she says, because “we might have had the bod­ies of birds or dinosaurs or lions, but we do not; and this real­ity shapes our choices.” And yes, this is tau­to­log­i­cal. But it is by no means obvi­ous that we have access to the ways in which our bod­ies shape our choices, and his­tory should con­vince us that the dif­fer­ences that count as essen­tial and those that count as arti­fi­cial are never nat­u­rally given. If we reached a point where sex no longer told us any­thing about a person’s capa­bil­i­ties, expe­ri­ence and his­tory and lead us to expect noth­ing from them as a con­se­quence of that attribute, then it is hard to see how it would exist as a cat­e­gory more mean­ing­ful than, say, hair color. This may seem implau­si­ble, but regard­less, the attempt to dethrone sex as an absolute cat­e­gory and as the unre­flec­tive foun­da­tion to which gen­der is loosely teth­ered seems valu­able. It is also good to remem­ber that But­ler is not say­ing that there is some nat­ural androg­yny under­ly­ing it all that we’ve some­how missed. A tran­scend­ing of sex will also take con­tin­gent shapes and given that none of these cat­e­gories are given to us with­out medi­a­tion, it could not be oth­er­wise.[4]

Judith Butler’s retreat to sub­ver­sion is entailed by her rejec­tion of uni­ver­sal norms: by her recog­ni­tion that power is every­where and we can­not step out­side of it and look down. But how then do we pre­serve our nor­ma­tive force? Nuss­baum sees no way of fol­low­ing through this crit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy with­out becom­ing a pas­sive nihilist:

“There is a void, then, at the heart of Butler’s notion of pol­i­tics. This void can look lib­er­at­ing, because the reader fills it implic­itly with a nor­ma­tive the­ory of human equal­ity or dig­nity. But let there be no mis­take: for But­ler, as for Fou­cault, sub­ver­sion is sub­ver­sion, and it can in prin­ci­ple go in any direc­tion. Indeed Butler’s naively empty pol­i­tics is espe­cially dan­ger­ous for the very causes she holds dear.”

There are a cou­ple of responses that could be made to this. The first is that at the very least the attempt to his­tori­cize and cri­tique what seem like nat­ural unchang­ing truths is, in the tra­di­tion of crit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy, already resis­tance, and opens up the space of human free­dom. To real­ize the con­tin­gency of our con­text is to real­ize our power to shape it for our own ends, even if in small ways; and to real­ize how thor­oughly we par­tic­i­pate in the con­tin­u­a­tion of that which we try to resist is also to real­ize how essen­tial we are to it.

This doesn’t give us a uni­ver­sal notion of jus­tice. And worse, it doesn’t quite give us a pro­gram for action. At best it hints at a pro­ce­dural or method­olog­i­cal approach to jus­tice, an attempt at con­stant crit­i­cism and vig­i­lance. Yet at some level, very lit­tle has changed.

There is no alter­na­tive to act­ing under a set of norms and beliefs (not act­ing is itself a def­i­nite choice). At the end of this jour­ney, we’re left with many of the same projects we started with. We are a lit­tle more crit­i­cal and alert for con­tra­dic­tions, more ten­ta­tive and ironic in our con­clu­sions, simul­ta­ne­ously real­iz­ing how power rela­tions occupy every crevasse and alert to our dis­rup­tive poten­tial. But we are not now dis­in­ter­ested and detached sub­jects, free of pol­i­tics and engagement.

This is all cer­tainly a dis­trac­tion from fem­i­nism as Nuss­baum imag­ines it. And it might even turn out to be a dis­trac­tion from fem­i­nism as we should under­stand it. An attempt to respond to Nussbaum’s crit­i­cism does not imply an accep­tance of Butler’s posi­tion. But it is a recog­ni­tion that the choices But­ler makes and the ways that she sees the world are com­pelling and impor­tant ones, and that these are choices we must engage with and attempt to under­stand in our strug­gle for a crit­i­cal philosophy.

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[1] Martha Nuss­baum, “The Pro­fes­sor of Par­ody”, The New Repub­lic, Feb­ru­ary 22^nd, 1999

[2] For exam­ple, Bertrand Rus­sell and A.J. Ayer on Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger. For an inter­est­ing con­tem­po­rary exam­ple see Terry Eagleton’s essay on Gay­a­tri Spi­vak in the Lon­don Review of Books, May 13^th 1999. This, and the ensu­ing debate, reca­pit­u­lates Nussbaum’s cri­tique in another arena.

[3] Judith But­ler, New York Times, March 20^th 1999

[4] In case you were won­der­ing, Nuss­baum says that the dis­missal of sex is dan­ger­ous because research on women’s par­tic­u­lar bod­ily needs (lac­tat­ing moth­ers, female ath­letes) has been use­ful. Lack­ing a good coun­ter­fac­tual, this prag­matic view of sex­ual iden­tity seems beside the point.

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Rishi Chaud­huri is a grad­u­ate stu­dent in Applied Math­e­mat­ics at Yale.