judith butler | Pandaemonium

CONFORMING, NOT TRANSFORMING

April 9, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Last week, Brendan Eich, CEO of Mozilla Corporation, the technology company that, among other things, is responsible for the Firefox browser, resigned after it was revealed that in 2008 he had given a $1000 donation to Proposition 8, the Californian campaign against gay marriage. Mozilla decided that his views were incompatible with its core values of ‘diversity and inclusiveness’. This week Brandeis University in America withdrew its offer of an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the campaigner against female […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: ayaan hirsi ali, free speech, gay marriage, homophobia, islam, islamism, islamophobia, judith butler, maajid nawaz, racism, tariq ramadan, wendy doniger

ON DESCRIBING THE OTHER

September 7, 2012 by Kenan Malik

I had assumed that my post on Judith Butler and the Adorno Prize would draw most fire from supporters of Israel incensed at my defence of Butler’s right to win the Prize. In fact it seems to have most annoyed supporters of Butler who have taken umbrage at my comments about her ‘impenetrable prose’. My criticism is not primarily about Butler’s style; it is principally about the substance of her arguments and, more broadly, of poststructuralist arguments. I am not […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: edward said, judith butler, kenan malik's books, levinas, michel foucault, orientalism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, richard rorty

INTELLECTUAL CHARLATANS & ACADEMIC WITCH-HUNTERS

September 3, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Judith Butler is a queen, perhaps the queen, of poststructuralist philosophy. A pioneer of queer theory and one of the world’s leading feminist philosophers, she made her name with her 1990 book, Gender Trouble, which dismisses the idea of sex and gender as fixed categories, viewing them instead as forms of social artifice. Butler introduced in the book the concept of gender as ‘performativity’: by behaving as if there were male and female ‘natures’ we create the social fiction that these natures […]

Categories: Academia, Free Speech • Tags: academic freedom, adorno prize, anti-semitism, cultural boycott, free speech, israel, judith butler, martha nussbaum, michel foucault, palestine, post-structuralism, postmodernism