In one of the recent panel discussions, Peter Boghossian mentioned Martha Nussbaum's critique of Judith Butler so I decided to google it. To get your interest started:

These developments owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought. Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action. Many have also derived from the writings of Michel Foucault (rightly or wrongly) the fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power, and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving power in new and insidious ways. Such feminists therefore find comfort in the idea that the subversive use of words is still available to feminist intellectuals. Deprived of the hope of larger or more lasting changes, we can still perform our resistance by the reworking of verbal categories, and thus, at the margins, of the selves who are constituted by them.
One American feminist has shaped these developments more than any other. Judith Butler seems to many young scholars to define what feminism is now. Trained as a philosopher, she is frequently seen (more by people in literature than by philosophers) as a major thinker about gender, power, and the body. As we wonder what has become of old-style feminist politics and the material realities to which it was committed, it seems necessary to reckon with Butler's work and influence, and to scrutinize the arguments that have led so many to adopt a stance that looks very much like quietism and retreat.

Do you know any people on this forum who know a lot about this? I have the questions below for Chomsky, but it would be interesting to see what people on this forum think about the questions below.

Chomsky has an extremely harsh view of Critical Theory, but I think that my questions to Chomsky are lucid and will make it something that he can understand. I took like three hours to make the questions super-lucid and free of confusing grammar.

* * *

5) There could be something to Hegel, right? Richard Rorty liked Hegel. This book reads Hegel in an analytical light: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674976818.

6) Would you agree that your view on matter (about how it fell apart with Newton) is anti-commonsensical and paradoxical?

7) Does it make sense to define materialism as meaninglessness? Under this definition, Covid is pure materialism because we recognize that Covid "just happened" and is not a product of divine wrath or Mother Nature's revenge. Under this definition, materialism is about whether something is totally meaningless from our human standpoint and has no deep reason/cause/motive/goal controlling it.

8) Does this make any sense to you at all? "Kant considers the noumenal world to be out there beyond us as an unknowable substance. Hegel considers the noumenal world to be knowable as a block or contradiction or lack of meaning. Hegel's understanding resituates human beings as both free and responsible because the meaning of the world is not hidden behind the veil but it's something that we produce in response to the fact that existence can only arise as a veil."

9) Do you agree that reality is not merely honorific but is instead what stays even when we are not paying attention to it?

10) Why do you lack an "immanent critique" of the current society (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanent_critique)?

11) Why do you see no dialectical relationship between the values that you fight for and the opposites of those values?

12) Do you agree that liberal modernity privileges individuals and at the same time wipes out individual personalities, and that this privileging and this wiping out almost necessarily come together as a matter of logic?

13) Do you understand what Z means when he says that you obsess over how the system cheats/lies/manipulates us but that Z (more than you) focuses on the trap that elites are caught in? According to Z's Hegelian analysis, those in power manipulate themselves in order to manipulate us.

14) Does this make any sense to you? "Events are not material facts but instead manifestations of ideologies. These ideologies include their own negations. To take Chomsky's example of whether X/Y/Z is part of a given 'event' in history, the 'Town Destroyer' is absolutely a part of the American Revolution. The world of appearance is set in relation to the world of brutal/meaningless reality. There can be events but you can only arrive at them through critique and the critique will materially change the event."

15) Do you agree that the present colors how we conceptualize the past? Latour imagined (what the pre-modern Egyptians would've thought about the pharaoh's illness) based on Latour's notion of modernity. Today's experience mediated Foucault's image of ancient Greece/Rome.

16) Do you agree with T.S. Eliot that a true work of art breaks with the past and furthermore changes the past (not in reality, but in our symbolic space)?

17) What should we make of the fact that our common sense today (about what constitutes rape) is a good thing but implies that an extraordinary % of male-female sexual acts prior to the 20th century were rape? Are ideas eternal? Do we have the right to apply our definition of rape to the past? Can we say "X is rape for us, but not for people in the 1600s and maybe not for people in the future"?

18) Can't every past atrocity be excused by saying "they didn't know any better and they thought that they were doing the right thing"?

19) Do notions like tuberculosis/rape (that emerge in particular historical situations) throw new light on the past and change the past?

20) Does every epoch reconstruct its own past?

21) Was it wrong for Latour to presuppose that Latour could compare the past/present from an extra-historical perspective?

22) Does modernity overdetermine how we look at the past?

23) Is Judith Butler correct that contingent discursive construction produces gender and that sexual identity is not biologically/ideally fixed?

24) Does Butler's statement apply universally, including to cavemen? Were cavemen discursively constructing their identities when they raped their women? Or is this process something that only emerged during our time?

25) Z's answer to what I just asked is "both at the same time", but what could that mean?

26) Do you agree with Marx with this point? "Only after capitalism will we see that all of history has been the history of class struggle."

27) Didn't Marx contradict what I just quoted when he said that "capitalists" is the first true class in history?

28) Do you agree that a Medieval person would not understand what a "profession" was because in previous eras there was no choice about what you did?

29) Do these "insights" from the Hegelian left make any sense or have any usefulness? "Our own activity shapes/alters the terms of our social reality (including our moral principles). The world moves/changes as we attempt to live up to (and live through) the world's norms/values/aims. We create those norms and we are ultimately responsible for them."

30) You asked: "Are there such things as events in the world?" Does this answer make sense? "There are events in the world. They appear as oppositions. They take the form of antinomies or paradoxes. There was an event called the American Revolution. It included creation of the social values of equality/freedom. It also included the opposite ideas of inequality and terrible repression. Our efforts (to understand these events) change these events. Our efforts (to understand these events) change the terms that are set in paradoxical opposition. There are profound consequences to this. For Chomsky, the world is mostly unknown and maybe unknowable. For Chomsky, philosophers use a mysterious facility to rigorously investigate the world scientifically. For Chomsky, philosophers don't even have recourse to the concept of a material world. Chomsky's politics are separate from Chomsky's philosophical pursuits. For Chomsky, understanding the world is not fundamentally intertwined with changing the world."

31) You said: "I’d like to believe that people are born to be free, but if you ask for proof, I couldn’t give it to you." Does this response make sense? "We shouldn't admit that freedom is unknown/unprovable/incomprehensible because if we do that then we defer freedom's arrival and we (maybe) put our own subjective/limited freedom in place of real freedom."

32) This is supposed to be the advice for you: "Reverse your perspective. Ask how your politics would look from the vantage of your notion of freedom. Following this procedure might show us how we should reinvent our notion of freedom." Does that make sense?

I took notes on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne3uZSQmXzc.
See my notes below.
Does anybody here understand what's being said? I think that you need to know a lot of Hegel in order to understand it. Hegel seems to be the most relevant thinker to these ideas.
I would be hugely grateful to anyone who can help me out with this! :)
I know absolutely zero about critical theory, but I'm trying to explain it to someone who is highly critical/skeptical of critical theory, so I'm really looking for a lucid/cleasubstantive explanation of what it all means.
Obviously there are a ton of points, so feel free to just pick one and explain it really thoroughly because quality is much more important than quantity when it comes to elucidation! :))
Zizek's points are in bold text.

--the analytical vs. continental distinction is misleading
--Robert Brandom reads Hegel in an analytical light (https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674976818)
--Richard Rorty ended up with a positive approach to Hegel
--Chomsky said that already with Newton matter became impossible to specify
--this is not a commonsensical view
--this is an extremely paradoxical view
--every Hegelian partisan of European idealism would love this idea
--this is certainly not common sense
--we have to leave behind the traditional notion of matter that's simplified to little particles (pieces of matter) jumping around in empty space
--relativity theory and quantum theory shows us many paradoxes about how matter can be dissolved into pure oscillations/variations in a curved space
--Frank Ruda refers to "materialism without matter"
--it's not relevant whether you find pieces of hard stuff that are really there
--the relevant thing is whether a process is contingent, not in the sense of obeying necessities but in the sense of whether there's a deep reason/cause/motive/goal controlling it
--imagine a comet hits Earth and destroys life
--no natural law was violated, but it's contingent because from our human standpoint it's totally meaningless
--the comet "just happened"
--this is what materialism means
--religious/New-Age people would try to read meaning into the comet ("Was it a sign of divine wrath?" "Is Mother Nature getting revenge on us for exploiting her?")
--Covid is pure materialism
--the point is that we accept the basic meaninglessness of things (like Covid)
--according to Chomsky, "real" is honorific
--in contrast, Zizek agrees with Philip K. Dick that "reality is what stays even when you stop paying attention to it"
--the difference between Chomsky and Zizek is like the difference between Kant and Hegel
--Kant considers the noumenal world to be out there beyond us as an unknowable substance
--Hegel considers the noumenal world to be knowable as a block or contradiction or lack of meaning
--Hegel's understanding resituates human beings as both free and responsible because the meaning of the world is not hidden behind the veil but it's something that we produce in response to the fact that existence can only arise as a veil
--Chomsky has no "immanent critique" of the current society (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanent_critique)
--Chomsky sees no dialectical relationship between the values that he fights for and the opposites of those values
--liberal modernity privileges individuals and at the same time wipes out individual personalities
--this privileging and this wiping out almost necessarily come together as a matter of logic
--why can't radicals like Chomsky see this?
--is this inability to take up an immanent critique the reason why Chomsky dismisses Zizek's work?
--[Zizek talks about political stuff like universal healthcare but it's so confusing that I don't even know how to summarize what the hell he's trying to say]
--Chomsky obsesses over how the system cheats/lies/manipulates us
--Zizek's Hegelian analysis says that those in power manipulate themselves in order to manipulate us
--Zizek (more than Chomsky) focuses on the trap that elites are caught in
--for Zizek, events are not material facts but instead manifestations of ideologies
--for Zizek, these ideologies include their own negations
--to take Chomsky's example of whether X/Y/Z is part of a given "event" in history, Zizek would claim that the "Town Destroyer" is absolutely a part of the American revolution
--for Zizek, the world of appearance is set in relation to the world of brutal/meaningless reality
--for Zizek, there can be events but you can only arrive at them through critique and the critique will materially change the event
--Zizek rejects the radical historicization of science
--take Latour's example of whether an ancient pharaoh could have died of tuberculosis --the present colors how we conceptualize the past --the present mediates our image of the past --Latour imagines (what the pre-modern Egyptians would've thought) based on Latour's notion of modernity --T.S. Eliot said that a true work of art breaks with the past and furthermore changes the past (not in reality, but in our symbolic space) --our common sense today (about what constitutes rape) is a good thing but implies that an extraordinary % of male-female sexual acts prior to the 20th century were rape --ideas are eternal --we have the right to apply our definition of rape to the past --it's not that we know better than people did in the past --you can excuse almost every past atrocity if you say "they didn't know any better and they thought that they were doing the right thing" --it's true that the notions of tuberculosis/rape emerged in particular historical situations --these notions threw new light on the past --these notions changed the past --we can't say "X is rape for us, but not for people in the 1600s and maybe not for people in the future" --every epoch reconstructs its own past --today's experience mediated Foucault's image of ancient Greece/Rome --Latour presupposes that Latour can compare the past/present from an extra-historical perspective --modernity overdetermines how we look at the past --Judith Butler thinks that contingent discursive construction produces gender --she thinks that sexual identity is not biologically/ideally fixed --is this a universal statement that applies to cavemen? --were cavemen discursively constructing their identities when they raped their women? or is this process something that only emerged during our time? --Zizek's answer is: "It's both at the same time." [???] --Marx made a wonderful point: "Only after capitalism will we see that all of history has been the history of class struggle." --but Marx also says that "capitalists" is the first true class in history --professions did not exist in the past because you choose your profession but in previous eras there was no choice --a Medieval person would not understand what a profession was --what insights can the Hegelian left offer socialists today? --our own activity shapes/alters the terms of our social reality (including our moral principles) --the world moves/changes as we attempt to live up to (and live through) the world's norms/values/aims --we create those norms and we are ultimately responsible for them --Chomsky asks: "Are there such things as events in the world?" --Zizek offers an answer --there are events in the world --they appear as oppositions --they take the form of antinomies or paradoxes --there was an event called the American Revolution --it included creation of the social values of equality/freedom --it also included the opposite ideas of inequality and terrible repression --our efforts (to understand these events) change these events --our efforts (to understand these events) change the terms that are set in paradoxical opposition --there are profound consequences to this --for Chomsky, the world is mostly unknown and maybe unknowable --for Chomsky, philosophers use a mysterious facility to rigorously investigate the world scientifically --for Chomsky, philosophers don't even have recourse to the concept of a material world --Chomsky's politics are separate from Chomsky's philosophical pursuits --for Chomsky, understanding the world is not fundamentally intertwined with changing the world --Chomsky: "I’d like to believe that people are born to be free, but if you ask for proof, I couldn’t give it to you." --Zizek would argue that we shouldn't admit that freedom is unknown/unprovable/incomprehensible because if we do that then we defer freedom's arrival and we (maybe) put our own subjective/limited freedom in place of real freedom --Zizek would not refute Chomsky's notion of freedom --Zizek would say to Chomsky: "Reverse your perspective. Ask how your politics would look from the vantage of your notion of freedom." --following Zizek's procedure might show us how we should reinvent our notion of freedom

I am thinking here of Giorgio Agamben's work on disoperativity and anti-sovereignty, or Jacques Derrida's notions of autoimmunity. They kind of advocate for senses of communal living that reject 'survival' as a legitimate aim. Reproduction, 'survival' or 'continued existence' are denied legitimate consideration in political theory. But ... it seems that in a way, the kind of communities advocated by Agamben etc while 'possible' simply would cease to exist after a while.
Similarly in Judith Butler's Gender Trouble she aims at critiquing the normative 'reproductive heterosexuality' that demands binary gender performances. This aims to de-naturalise hetero-sexuality and hence de-normatize it. To free up the 'moralisation' of sexuality, which is fine. But in a way, doesn't the recognition that reproduction is central to heterosexuality demand a consideration of the survivability of alternative social relation. Butler herself even writes in Gender Trouble, that

'all cultures seek to reproduce themselves'

This is an odd formulation, that anthropomorphizes 'cultures' themselves as having a desire for survival, when really from an evolutionary perspective, one might actually say, more accuratley, (and withouth judgement) that cultures that do not seek to reproduce themselves, often do not end up surviving. (ie they are more likely to die out).
Has the spencerian and eugenic legacy of theories of cultural evolution left it as a personae non-grata in philosophy? Are there any attempts to deal with relationship between the desire to survive and the likelihood of survival for cultures?

reality, hyperreality (1)
The Oxford English Dictionary defines reality foremost as "the quality of being real or having an actual existence" and supplements this with a definition of real as "having objective existence," and finally to exist as having "place in the domain of reality." These conventional definitions of reality represent a larger problem in the attempt to locate the real on the most basic level, for they are wholly circular, a set of signifiers reflecting back at each other lacking the grounding necessary to render meaning. This problem is not unique to the word ‘reality,’ indeed almost all words and signs are only able to refer back towards the internal exchange of other signs in order to produce a theoretical anchor. The slippage of reality, its elusiveness encountered even in a basic search for a definition, is an element of the hyperreal – a condition in which the distinction between the ‘real’ and the imaginary implodes. There is no static definition of hyperreality, and the interpretations employed by theorists vary on some of the most essential terms. That said, this article will attempt to extrapolate a common understanding of the hyperreal based on the work of several theorists. A general understanding of hyperreality is important for it is an issue at the crux of several critical debates within the study of media including semiotics, objects and space, the spectacle, performativity, the examination of mass media, Platonism, resistance, and the structure of reality.
The concept most fundamental to hyperreality is the simulation and the simulacrum (see Simulation/Simulacra, (2)]. The simulation is characterized by a blending of ‘reality’ and representation, where there is no clear indication of where the former stops and the latter begins. The simulacrum is often defined as a copy with no original, or as Gilles Deleuze (1990) describes it, "the simulacrum is an image without resemblance" (p. 257). Jean Baudrillard (1994) maps the transformation from representation to simulacrum in four ‘successive phases of the image’ in which the last is that "it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum" (SS p.6). (see mimesis, representation) Deleuze, Baudrillard, and several other theorists trace the proliferation and succession of simulacra to the rise of hyperreality and the advent of a world that is either partially, or entirely simulated. Frederic Jameson (1990) contends that one of the conditions of late capitalism is the mass reproduction of simulacra, creating a "world with an unreality and a free floating absence of "the referent"’ (p. 17). Although theorists highlight different historical developments to explain hyperreality, common themes include the explosion of new media technologies, the loss of the materiality of objects, the increase in information production, the rise of capitalism and consumerism, and the reliance upon god and/or ‘the center’ in Western thought. Essentially, certain historical contingencies allow for the wide scale reproduction of simulacra so that the simulations of reality replace the real, producing a giant simulacrum completely disconnected from an earlier reality; this simulacrum is hyperreality.
One of the fundamental qualities of hyperreality is the implosion of Ferdinand Saussure’s (1959) model for the sign (see semiotics) (pg. 67). The mass simulacrum of signs become meaningless, functioning as groundless, hollow indicators that self-replicate in endless reproduction. Saussure outlines the nature of the sign as the signified (a concept of the real) and the signifier (a sound-image). Baudrillard (1981) claims the Saussurian model is made arbitrary by the advent of hyperreality wherein the two poles of the signified and signifier implode in upon eachother destroying meaning, causing all signs to be unhinged and point back to a non-existing reality (180). Another basic characteristic of the hyperreal is the dislocation of object materiality and concrete spatial relations (see objecthood). Some of these problems are explored in Paul Virilio’s The Lost Dimension, in which he argues that modern media technology have created a "crisis of representation" where the distinctions between near and far, object and image, have imploded (p. 112). Virilio locates the ‘vacuum of speed’ as the historical development which produces technology that overturn our original understanding of spatial relations by altering our perceptions. This machinery "gives way to the televised instantaneity of a prospective observation, of a glance that pierces through the appearances of the greatest distances and the widest expanses" (p. 31). These ethereal qualities of hyperreality mean drastic revision for media theory surrounding the spectacle. This theory was famously articulated by Guy Debord (1977) who argued through neo-Marxian criticism that the spectacle has become central to capitalist modes of reproduction (p. 24). Hans Enzensberger also attempted his own ‘socialist theory of the media’ and proposed theories of domination and potential resistance based on a liberal/Marxist critique (1996). Yet, the world of hyperreality overturns any hope of a Marxist understanding of mass media, for the entire web of human meaning-making activities has been transformed into the symbolic exchange of empty signs, the modes of production have been liquefied and leukemized into the giant political economy of exchanging signs. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner present the hyperrealist argument against Debord and his colleagues, "this is not to say that "representation" has simply become more indirect or oblique, as Debord would have it, but that in a world where the subject/object distance is erased […] and where signs no longer refer beyond themselves to an existing, knowable world, representation has been surpassed […] an independent object world is assimilated to and defined by artificial codes and simulation models" (DBT pg. web).
The system of monetary exchange is an example of the hyperreal that should help to prevent any definitional confusion. Traditional explanations of the history of money will return to earlier societies in which people traded goods and tools that presumably had similar amounts of labor invested within their production/acquisition. At some point, a common good was substituted as a ground for exchange, and then later pecuniary units were produced in order to simulate the common exchange. At first, the monetary units had inherent value in that they were made of precious metals, but they were eventually replaced with worthless paper units, and many contemporary economies are now substituting these papers for credit information stored in computer databanks. During the process of countless successive copies, the essential reality of exchange has long since been lost, with commodities now completely disconnected from their use-value, their production cost, and even their function. Moreover, the foundational lie of exchange has long since been forgotten over the weight of countless simulacra: that there was never any trade grounded in reality, that symbolic exchange is precisely and only that which can only refer to other signs for meaning and definition.
The next important intersection between the theory of hyperreality and media studies is performativity. Although the problem of performance is not one unique to modernity, it does seem as though it has been exacerbated in the hyperrealist environment with the proliferation of identities and recognizable performative actions. Social performance is a copy that instantaneously reproduces itself by being viewed thus disseminated to others who will potentially incorporate the performative action into their own technologies of self. Jeffrey T. Nealon in his book Alterity Politics interprets the work of Butler and Derrida to argue that basic performances underlie all social agency, "agency is necessarily a matter of response to already given codes" (p. 23). But where are the originals, the carved wooden blocks that produced so many performative copies? The ‘originals’ are constantly referenced through discursive performance, mostly as ‘human nature’ or some equivalent concept. Performances based on gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and a number of smaller modes of action consistently refer back to a fabricated biological essence, a ‘truth’ of the body. Yet as my own performance in this course revealed, gender (and by insinuation the entire structure of human nature) is entirely performative lacking any grounding in biological or otherwise human essence. My ability to simply change the gender of my everyday performance elucidated the lack of any biological grounding to gender or sex, and illuminated all social performance as media simulacrum.
The role of performance within mass media must thus be studied in the two following ways: firstly as being reproduced among wide scale audiences, and secondly as a forged ‘unreality’ that implies the ‘realness’ of everyday performance. The first form of analysis is obvious, that commonly portrayed performances such as race or gender normalize those modes of behavior and train audiences to take on, improve, and master those performative identities thus replicating the simulacra. Umberto Eco (1983) touches on this aspect of simulations in his book Travels in Hyperreality, where he notes that the simulacrum not only produces illusion, but "stimulates demand for it" (p. 44). In the second instance of media criticism, Baudrillard’s metaphor of Disneyland should be employed, that the constructed realm of fantasy exists to imply that the rest of the world is real (1994, p. 12). The obviously unreal performances of characters in television and movies should be examined in light of their significant role for persuading populations that their own social performances are ‘real,’ and providing the most foundational ‘other’ to stabilize all identities.
Deleuze helps to connect hyperreality to another strain of media theory originating in one of the oldest known media theorists, Plato. Suspicion of media technologies is not a uniquely modern phenomenon, indeed Plato advanced a critique of the written word through the dialog of Socrates in the Phaedrus (quite similar to that of Baudrillard in CPS). Plato, in his Allegory of the Cave, purports the existence of truth in ideal forms, accessible not in reality but through the philosopher’s ideas and intellectual pursuit of the forms. Plato presents a clear understanding of simulations in the Caves; although he concedes that any artistic reproduction of ideal forms would constitute representation, he is clear that it entails the copy of an original, true form. Deleuze argues that Plato contrasts these legitimate copies to fearful simulacra, "Plato divides in two the domain of images-idols: on one hand there are copies-icons, on the other there are simulacra-phantasms" (p. 256). It is thus that Deleuze is able to claim that with the arrival of hyperreality Platonism has been reversed, for any original truth or ideal forms that provided the anchor for representation have since been permanently lost in the reproduction of simulacra and the construction of a hyperreality without any connection to the real.
The role of resistance in relation to hyperreality differs greatly among theorists. Some thinkers are fairly optimistic, such as Marshall McLuhan’s portrayal of media technologies as a generally benign force, expanding and evolving toward a society with great communicative potential. This interpretation directly clashes with Baudrillard, who sees the mass media as inherently non-communicative, a quality that allows them to exert social control over mass populations. In his earlier work Baudrillard’s proposal for resistance is radical but clear: obliterate the transmitters, destroy the world of media technologies through revolutionary action and resume normal face to face conversation (1981: p. 170). Yet in his later work, Baudrillard borders more on nihilism, with the closest articulation of resistance being his advocacy of mass indifference to simulacra (IL 1994: 60-61). Eco is far more hopeful about the possibilities for resistance. Eco, in a move theoretically similar to Enzensberger, advocates what he calls the guerrilla solution, modeled off the metaphor of guerrilla resistance; he claims that revolutionaries and critical theorists can use the grassroots television programming to spread their subversive message (142-143). My own performance proposed a strategy of resistance adopted from the work of Judith Butler, to reverse certain performative signs in a subversive manner around the body so as to expose, reveal, and de-familiarize specific media technologies– to dress in drag in order to denaturalize simulated norms of sex and gender.
The conceptual use of hyperreality is consistent enough within the literature to give space for a common working definition for media theory, but the contrasting term ‘reality’ is used in far too many divergent ways to arrive at a unified understanding. However, it may be helpful for readers to conclude this article with a few brief theories of reality as a starting point for further study. For Lacan, the term real is composed in opposition to that which is encompassed by the symbolic and the imaginary (see symbolic, real, imaginary). The real is what eludes representation, what cannot be either symbolized (in terms of Saussure’s notion of signifiers) or imagined and perceived within the images of the conscious and unconscious (Sheridan 1978: p. 280). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1983) understand desire to be based upon the lack of the object, yet nonetheless a productive force that renders into reality the fantasy of that object. ‘Reality’ is thus nothing more than a "group fantasy" reified by ‘desiring machines, for "desire produces reality, or stated another way, desiring-production is one and the same thing as social production" (p. 30). For a definition of reality in contrast to hyperreality, Baudrillard represents many of the hyperrealists with his claim that the real is "fictional," a phantasy generated by "doubling the signs of an unlocatable reality" (1994: p. 81). Baudrillard concludes on reality that it is nothing more than a fairy tale, it is "now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real" (1994: p. 21).
Nicholas Oberly Winter 2003
The University of Chicago

Hi everyone. At the request of a reader, this post (made 4/5/2019) has been recovered (on 9/30/2020) from a now thankfully banned debate subreddit. I'm no great fan of my thinking from this period, but it's a healthy biographical marker in that it was the last time I ever tried to commune in good faith with women who hate me for being trans. The main point about queer theory sharing much of its thought with radical feminist theory remains compelling. The comments which were also lost were pretty much all cruel, hostile, and abusive, but if you know what you are doing you can recover them using RedditSearch.
Hello everyone. Effortpost incoming. I do not usually post here but have considered starting.
After reading this post and its comments, it is clear to me that most users on this forum do not know what queer theory is. So this is an introduction to queer theory. I am covering basic concepts: use of language, beliefs about identity, and relationship to radical feminism. I am writing this to clear up what I believe are obvious misconceptions both trans-accepting and trans-denialist people seem to have, and to serve as a masterpost link to others making misstatements about queer theory in the future.
I am a queer feminist. More relevant to this forum, I am transgender. I have read feminist theory and queer theory since I was a teenager. I am a queer advocate and a woman advocate. I say this is to make clear that I am partisan. However, I hope this is well-cited enough that all parties find it helpful. I have tried to speak as simply as possible.

What Is Queer Theory?

In this primer, I will repeatedly stress the following analogy: queer theory is to sex-gender nonconformity as feminist theory is to women. I say "sex-gender nonconformity" to express the full breadth of queer theory, which can range from intersex writers (Iain Moorland, Morgan Holmes), to studies in something as seemingly superficial as drag (The Drag King Book, Judith Butler), to racial intersections (Mia McKenzie, Tourmaline) & Che Gossett) and postcolonial third genders (Qwo-Li Driskill).
Like feminist theory, queer theory is not one thing. It is a collection of diverse approaches to explaining the condition of sex-gender nonconformity in society, and, in the case of radical queers, improving that condition towards the radical end goal of the abolition of all sex-gender norms. Like feminist theory, queer theory is theory. Not all feminism is feminist theory. Not all queer advocacy is queer theory. Queer studies is not queer theory. Queer history is not queer theory. Queer praxis is not queer theory. Being queer is not queer theory.

Queer Theory & Language

Not all people who practice sex-gender nonconformity consider themselves queer. In fact, some consider the word exclusionary or pejorative. This is no more exceptional than the fact that some women do not consider themselves feminists, and consider the word exclusionary or pejorative.
Just as some black women reject feminism as being white (Clenora Hudson-Weems), some black sex-gender nonconformers reject queerness as being white (Cleo Manago). And just as some women reject feminist theory as harmful to society (Esther Vilar), some sex-gender nonconforming people reject queer theory as harmful to society (Sheila Jeffreys).
This problem, in which the purported subjects of a theory actively reject it, and even their positions as subjects within it, is no more destructive for queer advocacy than it is for feminism. The challenge has been answered affirmationally in various ways in both queer theory and feminist theory (MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, pgs. 115-117; Dworkin, Right Wing Women; Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto; Stone, A Posttranssexual Manifesto).
However, because much more of queer theory takes its subject's status as queer to be uncontroversially entirely socially constructed, and its use of language to be therefore open to social change, queer theorists encounter this problem less often than feminist theorists. We usually acknowledge that, in forcing people to be queer or not queer, we are passively reinforcing the exact forms of oppression we seek to end through our analyses. Leslie Feinberg, who did not use the word queer as a political identity, noted in hir Transgender Liberation (1992):

Transgendered people are demanding the right to choose our own self-definitions. The language used in this pamphlet may quickly become outdated as the gender community coalesces and organizes—a wonderful problem.

Today, Feinberg's "transgender[ed] people" is now most often used apolitically, for what was once called "transgenderists": the demographic of those who live or attempt to live, socially, as a sex-gender outside of that first placed on their birth certificate. "Queer" has come to have most of the solidarity-driven political meaning of Feinberg's "transgender." However, Feinberg's conception of "transgender" is not uncommon today.
Insofar as queer advocacy permits its subjects to change, establishing their own voice, own vocabulary, own concerns, and own dissent, while feminism does not, the two must be antagonistic. Riki Wilchins addresses this tension directly in hir essay "Deconstructing Trans":

Genderqueerness would seem to be a natural avenue for feminism to contest Woman's equation with nurturance, femininity, and reproduction: in short to trouble the project of Man. Yet feminists have been loath to take that avenue, in no small part because queering Woman threatens the very category on which feminism depends.

However, Wilchins is wrong: this tension between feminist theory and queer theory is local to specific versions of queer advocacy and feminism, and is not inherent to either.

Queer Theory & Gender Identity

What the hecky, y'all? Queer theory rejects gender identity politics almost unconditionally. Get it right.
There are very few things queer theorists universally agree on: this is one. In fact, queer theorists reject sexual identity politics almost unconditionally (e.g. Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism). Queer theorists regularly assert that all identity formation (including identity formation as a man or woman, flat) and even the very concept of selfhood emerge as a regulatory apparatus of power, usually that of The State. These critiques in queer theory are developed out of postmodern critiques of identity and the self. Consider, for example, these quotes from Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus:

To write is perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call my Self (Moi). I is an order-word.
Where psychoanalysis says, "Stop, find your self again," we should say instead, "Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet, we haven't sufficiently dismantled our self." Substitute forgetting for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation. Find your body without organs. Find out how to make it.
There is no longer a Self (Moi) that feels, acts, and recalls; there is "a glowing fog, a dark yellow mist" that has affects and experiences movements, speeds.

This denial of self is directly tied to Deleuze's concept of becoming-minority), and is constructed again and again and again in queer theoretic concepts: in anti-sociality, in death drive, in anal sublimation and butch abjection, just over and over and over again. Anyone who does not understand this general concept does not understand a single thing about queer theory, straight up.
Among the transgender population specifically, it is extremely easy to find transgender people rejecting the concept of gender identity as something forced upon us by a cisgender establishment which has all the power. It's easy to find on writing. It's easy to find on video. It's easy to find on reddit. And most of us aren't even queer theorists.
So, what is it queer theorists do, if not snort identity for breakfast? Well, generally, we sort through history, literature, science, language, the social psyche, most especially real-life experience, and whatever else we can ooze our brainjuices over to analyze and undo the structures of our oppression, the very means through which we become "queer." We argue that this oppression and our position as uniquely oppressed subjects within it is socially constructed, unnecessary, and morally outrageous. And, on most analyses, this is what many feminist theorists do with women, as well. Few have even argued that, in a culture that constructs manhood as its norm, there is a sense in which to be a "woman" is also to be "queer."

Queer Theory & Radical Feminism

It has never been clear what radical feminism is. In general, I understand people who call themselves or are called "radical feminists" to be one of the following:

Socialist feminists, who assert women are a class in some previously understood, usually Marxist sense, who must achieve liberation through techniques espoused in pre-existing theory, e.g. wages for housework.
Post-Marxist feminists, who assert women are a "sex-class," where "class" is some new, peculiarly feminist sense of the word, who must achieve liberation through some specifically feminist method yet to be decided, outside of Marxist, anarchist, or liberal methodologies. Its origins are often supposed to be Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex. Post-Marxist radical feminism is usually considered "true" radical feminism, or even just feminism, proper (MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, pg. 117).
Cultural feminists, who assert "man" and "woman" compose two competing cultures, and (more importantly) "feminism" as women's culture. Under this view, there can be no end to feminism because women cannot achieve equality, only the dominance of female culture. Men cannot be feminists because feminism is not a political position. Cultural feminists are ambivalent about their positioning on a left or right which are both seen as "male culture." Cultural feminists often call for a return to "the natural order," and approve of "biologism," the belief that one's cultural categorization is and should be derived from biology. Their purpose is to preserve women as feminists rather than achieve the radical goal which is the abolition of all classes. See Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology; Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto; Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born. Not all cultural feminists claim to be radical (or cultural); see écriture féminine.

On cultural feminism, radical feminist historian Alice Echols noted in The Taming of the Id (1984):

I believe that what we have come to identify as radical feminism represents such a fundamental departure from its radical feminist roots that it requires renaming.

Brooke Williams's Redstocking's piece The Retreat to Cultural Feminism (1975) begins:

Many women feel that the women’s movement is currently at an impasse. This paper takes the position that this is due to a deradicalizing and distortion of feminism which has resulted in, among other things,"cultural feminism.”

Inasmuch as cultural feminism asserts "man" and "woman" as essential and non-relative social categories in need of preservation, queer theory can have no truck with radical feminism, because radical feminism maintains a cultural institution which is usually seen as a major genesis of queer oppression.
However, insofar as radical feminism is post-Marxist, it is often deeply aligned with queer theory. Queer theory is also usually post-Marxist, as postmodernism was developed partly in response to the failures of Marxism. Queer advocacy often adopts radical feminist methodology, particularly consciousness raising. Many radical feminists effectively advocate queerness, in what Andrea Dworkin calls a "political, ideological, and strategic confrontation with the sex-class system," as a necessary part of feminism. Please consider what radical feminists and queer advocates have historically said about the following topics common to both:

Family Reform:
RadFem: "So paternal right replaces maternal right: transmission of property is from father to son and no longer from woman to her clan. This is the advent of the patriarchal family founded on private property. In such a family woman is oppressed." (De Beauvoir, Second Sex) "Patching up with band-aids the casualties of the aborted feminist revolution, it [Freudianism] succeeded in quieting the immense social unrest and role confusion that followed in the wake of the first attack on the rigid patriarchal family." (Shulamith Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, pg. 70).
Queer: "The family has become the locus of retention and resonance of all the social determinations. It falls to the reactionary investment of the capitalist field to apply all the social images to the simulcra of the restricted family, with the result that, wherever one turns, one no longer finds anything but father-mother - this Oedipal filth that sticks to our skin." (Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pg. 269)
Pansexuality:
RadFem: "[Through feminist revolution] A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality - Freud's 'polymorphous perversity' - would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality." (Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, pg. 11)
Queer: "When queerness began to mean little more than 'pansexual activist', Bash Back! became a liberal social scene rather than a space from which to attack, which i think had been the whole point of bashing back all along." (Interview with Not Yr Cister Press, Queer Ultraviolence: Bash Back! Anthology, pg. 385)
Degendered Gestation:
RadFem: "Scientific advances which threaten to further weaken or sever altogether the connection between sex and reproduction have scarcely been realized culturally. That the scientific revolution has had virtually no effect on feminism only illustrates the political nature of the problem: the goals of feminism can never be achieved through evolution, but only through revolution." (Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, pg. 31)
Queer: "The gender of gestating is ambiguous. I am not talking about pregnancy’s deepening of one’s voice, its carpeting of one’s legs in bristly hair, or even about the ancient Greek belief that it was an analogue of men’s duty to die in battle if called upon. I am not even thinking of the heterogeneity of those who gestate. Rather, in a context where political economists are talking constantly of “the feminization of labor,” it seems to me that the economic gendering of the work itself—gestating is work, as Merve Emre says—is not as clear-cut as it would appear." (Sophie Lewis, All Reproduction is Assisted)
Institutional Debinarization:
RadFem: "[A]ll forms of sexual interaction which are directly rooted in the multisexual nature of people must be part of the fabric of human life, accepted into the lexicon of human possibility, integrated into the forms of human community. By redefining human sexuality, or by defining it correctly, we can transform human relationship and the institutions which seek to control that relationship. Sex as the power dynamic between men and women, its primary form sadomasochism, is what we know now. Sex as community between humans, our shared humanity, is the world we must build." (Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating, pg. 183)
Queer: "'Boy' and 'girl' do not tell the genital truth that Zippora knows. Quite the opposite: instead of describing her baby’s sex, these words socially enact the sex they name... Intersexuality robs 'boy' and 'girl' of referents, but it is unclear how far this intersexed scenario differs from any other gendered encounter... I suggest the claim that sex is performative must operate constatively in order to be politically effective. One has to say that performativity is the real, scientic truth of sex in order to argue that intersex surgery, which claims to treat sex as a constative, is futile constructivism." (Iain Morland, Is Intersexuality Real?)

I hope these few quotations are enough to demonstrate that queer theory and radical feminist theory are deeply interwoven, and the former is in many ways a continuation of the latter.
I have noticed debate here seems quite one-sided, but I think that I could contribute something to fix what I see as a pretty egregious misrepresentation issue. I know this primer wasn't exactly structured for debate, but I can try to answer any questions below. If you read this all, thanks!

I know Judith Butler has been criticized for having both a voluntaristic and deterministic understanding of the subject (which seems to mean something along the lines of a recognizable person). While I understand how her theory can be interpreted as deterministic, I'm having a hard time understanding how it can be considered voluntaristic? The critique I've seen that's about her theory being voluntaristic, seems to be based on neglecting to recognize that there is a difference between "performance" (which could mean a singular act) and "performativity" (a stylized repetition of acts).
Are there any good reads that argue that her view is voluntaristic? And I'm especially wondering if there are any interesting interpretations of Butler that regards her theory of the subject as compatible with free will?
Even though she doesn't regard autonomy as something that's within the individual alone, there seems to be some sort of free will at work, in regards to how we can change norms by repeatedly breaking them. You can reject an interpellation, you can do your gender differently etc.. But is any part of doing things differently based on an intentional choice you make? Or is the change we're experiencing more so based on something similar to genetic mutations in evolution theory? And by this I mean, if it's really just based on how people's actions and societal norms are different, and therefore unable to perfectly align with each other, leading to change?
Please let me know if you have any ideas as to what I could read to get a bit less confused, as I'd really like a better comprehension of this.
And if this isn't the right forum to ask, I'm sorry. I've just been having a really hard time getting in touch with someone with some more knowledge of Judith Butler and her theories, and since I've seen people posting about her here, I thought it might be worth a shot. (I've also posted this in u/askphilosopy, but I haven't gotten any responses there yet, although it's too early to tell if I'll get any or not).

There are lots of philosophers that argue that we are fundamentally dependent on others to live and realize ourselves as individuals, and reject an understanding of humans as independent and self-sufficient beings. As I’m personally in favor of this approach to understand subject formation, and agree with the idea that we are fundamentally dependent on each other, I’ve ended up reading my fair share of critics of individualism. However, a lot of these critiques seems to be based more on a general understanding of our society as being too individualistic, a general critique of liberalism, without ever defining which understanding of liberalism we’re talking about, or rejecting the ideas of older theories, rather than more current, articulated, philosophical theories.
For example, I did find Judith Butler to be rather funny when she critiqued Hobbes in The Force of Nonviolence (2020), by saying that: “One rather remarkable feature of this state of nature fantasy, which is regularly invoked as a “foundation,” is that, in the beginning, apparently, there is a man and he as an adult and he is on his own, self-sufficient.” (ibid, p. 36). However, I do find myself questioning who these people who currently invoke this as the foundation of human beings, actually are. An answer to which, Butler doesn’t seem to give.
As a result of this being a repeated issue in a lot of the critiques I've been reading, my knowledge of current individualistic approaches to subject formation, is seriously lacking. This is why I’m wondering: which individualistic approaches to subject formation are people currently in favor of, today? Who currently defends the idea that human beings are independent and self-sufficient?

I know Judith Butler has been criticized for having both a voluntaristic and deterministic understanding of the subject (which seems to mean something along the lines of a recognizable person). While I understand how her theory can be interpreted as deterministic, I'm having a hard time understanding how it can be considered voluntaristic? The critique I've seen that's about her theory being voluntaristic, seems to be based on neglecting to recognize that there is a difference between "performance" (which could mean a singular act) and "performativity" (a stylized repetition of acts).
Are there any good reads that argue that her view is voluntaristic? And I'm especially wondering if there are any interesting interpretations of Butler that regards her theory of the subject as compatible with free will?
Even though she doesn't regard autonomy as something that's within the individual alone, there seems to be some sort of free will at work, in regards to how we can change norms by repeatedly breaking them. You can reject an interpellation, you can do your gender differently etc.. But is any part of doing things differently based on an intentional choice you make? Or is the change we're experiencing more so based on something similar to genetic mutations in evolution theory? And by this I mean, if it's really just based on how people's actions and societal norms are different, and therefore unable to perfectly align with each other, leading to change?
Please let me know if you have any ideas as to what I could read to get a bit less confused, as I'd really like a better comprehension of this.

The advent of third-wave feminism during the 1990s served as a catalyst for transgender rights, of which several authors and activists were instrumental:
Judith Butler, a lesbian feminist theorist and philosopher, published "Gender Trouble" in 1990, a groundbreaking book on the performative nature of gender that served as the cornerstone to queer theory and is still essential reading in gender studies courses. In her followup book, "Bodies that Matter" she futher expands on her critique of gender and sexuality as reinforced through socialization, serving to perpetuate male domination of women and the intersectional oppression of LGBTQ people.
Holly Boswell, a genderqueer spiritual leader, first proposed the word "transgender" in her 1991 article "The Transgender Alternative", arguing that transgender is a term that "encompasses the whole spectrum" of gender diversity, that lumps together rather than splits apart the many subgroups. She also insisted that sex-reassignment surgery is not a prerequisite to being transgender. Holly designed the transgender symbol in 1993, a composite of Mars and Venus to symbolize gender diversity.
Leslie Feinberg, a butch lesbian, was a chief architect of the modern transgender rights movement. In the spirit of Holly Bowswell, she declared "transgender" to be a broadly inclusive umbrella for drag performers, crossdressers, femmes, butches, and transsexuals in her 1992 manifesto, "Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time has Come". Leslie also coined the initialism "GLBT" for use in advocacy around this time, as organizations and media outlets were using the phrase "gay and lesbian".
Riki Anne Wilchins, a genderqueer civil rights activist and gender theorist, created the first national transgender lobbying group, GenderPAC in 1995. That same year she coined the word "GenderQueer" to describe people that socially or politically subvert the traditional binary concepts of gender, whether in identity or expression. She also conducted the first U.S. survey of anti-transgender bias. And she authored the book "Read My Lips", calling for an end to society's harmful attitudes of gender.
Throughout the 1990s, countless other trailblazers like Monica Helms and Kate Bornstein latched onto the novel term "transgender" as a catchall descriptor for any and all people that "transcended" traditional notions of gender in mainstream society, whether part time or full time, through identity or presentation or surgery.
Of course, we can go further back to spotlight those that laid the groundwork for trans activism:
Lee Brewster, a drag queen and civil rights activist founded the nation's first transgender advocacy organization in 1970, Queens Liberation Front. The organization, which successfully overturned NYC's ban on crossdressing, was represented by Lee Brewster, Bunny Eisenhower (a heterosexual transvestite), Barbarella (a transsexual woman), and Kaye Gibbons (a homosexual crossdresser).
Sylvia Rivera, an agender sex worker and civil rights activist founded the nation's second transgender advocacy organization in 1971, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, and hosted a communal shelter for New York City's homeless street queens. Sylvia regularly fought for equal representation of drag queens, sex workers, butches, and femmes within broader gay and lesbian activism.
Marsha P Johnson, a gay transvestite, drag queen and sex worker, co-founded STAR with Sylvia Rivera in 1971. She chose her drag name to signify the masculine-and-feminine components of her persona with "P" meaning "pay it no mind". While working the streets of NYC, she became known as a drag mother, for her mentoring of other crossdressers and street queens including Sylvia Rivera.
Lou Sullivan, a gay transsexual man and civil rights activist served as a volunteer counselor for gender questioning AFAB people. In 1986 he co-founded the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society and created the first support agency for trans men, FTM. He also published "Information for the FTM transsexual and crossdresser" which became the definitive resource for trans men of the era.

My partner and I started dating just over half a year ago, and it's been very great & exciting & I'm in love. Before him, I was dating somebody who didn't read at all. Big deal, as I'm a librarian and when we started dating he lied and said he loved it and read a lot. Anyways. My new partner is an English lit PhD, hurray! We both really care about reading and that's great!
Except I feel like he's a huge elitist. He doesn't like any books I bring up (although he doesn't read them, and kind of shuts me down when I try to talk about them), but gets kind of childish about it if I read or (try) reading something he's reading for school and critique it. This came to a head because I read some Judith Butler and said her ideas were good but her writing was murky and repetitive and I did not enjoy it. I then was talking about a book, which includes a story line that touches on the AIDS crisis in 1986. He immediately said the entire thing was overintellectualized sensationalization of the gay experience, etc etc, and then kept poking about how I "don't like" Judith Butler (I liked her ideas, just not her writing!).
I got really upset and basically said he doesn't like anything I like, and it doesn't stop at books (we've been trying to share music too and he doesn't like ANYTHING I've tried to share but he's making a playlist with entire ALBUMS for me to listen to; I'm a casual music listener but have been trying to get more into it so I can talk about it with him as he's very into music) . He said he was upset because I'm mad at him, and I told him that he should just seek solace with Judith Butler, said they have the same haircut, and said at least he could be sure all the books in her house are probably impeccable and devoid of anything that might offend his critical sensibilities. I ALSO said that he only likes books his PhD supervisor has probably masturbated to, which was probably out of line but usually when we fight we exaggerate to make it funny.
Anyways, he's mad now that I've accused him of being an elitist and is saying that I'm the elitist because I only read new lit for "social reasons" (ie. so I can help people find books at work...) and that he reads so he can deeply investigate all the aspects. But I feel like how he framed that means he looks down on how & why I read compared to him! So I said I guess reading maybe can't be something that we share in the way we've been trying to, and he got upset at that.
AITA for wanting him to at least pretend occasionally that the things I like are valid and worth liking?! I'm not saying he has to love Bleachers and Phoebe Bridgers or surf The Millions' upcoming book lists, but I feel like I try his music and literature with a pretty open mind and an eagerness to share with him and like the opposite isn't being extended to me.

Primer, Introduction, Theorem 1 (part 1), Theorem 1 (Part 2), Corollary 1, Scholium 1.1/2/3, Theorem II (Part 1), Theorem II (Part 2), Theorem II (Parts 3 & 4), Corollary 2, Scholium 2.1/2/3/4, Judgment Derp, Theorem III (Part’s 1,2,3), Theorem III (Part’s 4,5,6), Corollary 3, Scholium 3, Theorem IV, Corollary 4:, Scholium 4, End of Reading Groups Synopsis
u/chauchat_mme’s post this week I found exceptionally clear and shows a good understanding of the topic, you would do well to read it carefully if you want to understand this vertebrae in the backbone of Žižek and Lacan. It is a difficult area to really understand and many throw the terms of sexuation around without having insights into the deeper implications. Make sure you include u/chauchat_mme’s name in your comment if you want to ask them a question.
I was going to tag the next section of the book on the end, but decided this week’s post should stand alone as it is important area. Next week I’ll be posting Sexual Parallax and Knowledge and will try and cover The Sexed Subject too, if I have time. Any offers from anyone to write up a section or two? If you’re a student especially, summarising helps you understand the topic.
Please comment again so we can keep a rollcall of attendance and know folks are still reading!
Before we jump in, here's a great synopsis of what's been covered so far, very kindly put together by u/Achipinthearmor:
To begin again from the beginning—
Theorem I elaborates Zizek’s crucial philosophical axiom: reality is incomplete, non-All, traversed by an ontological crack perpetually thwarting any efforts at complete conceptual capture; the ontic and the transcendental can be neither synthesized nor isolated but must be perceived in parallax as bound by the very gap that appears to separate them.
Corollary I examines Kant’s postulation of the “intellectus archetypus” as basically the mind of God in which thought and actuality would be united and indistinguishable; an impossible Ding-an-sich, this ultimate instance of the noumenon must nevertheless appear within the phenomenal horizon of the “intellectus ectypus” as its own ideal type. Between Kant’s insistence that it was thinkable yet impossible yet still sufficient only in being thought, and Hegel’s rejection of it as an unnecessary eidolon of the Understanding, the efforts of other emissaries of German Idealism to claim the notion as their own actuality under the banner of “intuition”—truly the apotheosis of subjective Idealism—are criticized and found wanting.
If the actuality of intellectual intuition qua subjective omnipotence is dubious, Scholium 1.1 takes up influential attempts from the West and the East to perform precisely the reverse procedure and “”“bracket””” the perceiving subject as a laughably contingent yet loathsomely necessary sensorium in the Husserlian phenomenological epoche, on the one hand, and the Buddhist reduction of the subject to a hapless spectator in the dream of life, on the other. Although both attempts are philosophically myopic and frankly wrong, they nonetheless provide a useful counterpoint to the delusions of intuition detailed in the Corollary and thus represent a vital impulse or moment within the dialectical movement of thought.
Scholium 1.2 historically concretizes the notion of parallax by specifying the interlocked lodestars of Hegel’s hot and heady Phenomenology and the coldly cerebral Greater Logic as the unsurpassed masterpieces whose problematic parameters remain the horizon for genuine philosophy today.
Scholium 1.3 provides a sharp contemporary conclusion to this long excursion through the muddled relations of subject and object by taking seriously the puerile shrieks of the “death of truth” coming from religious and political fundamentalisms, internet echo chambers of conspiranoia, and the bemusing flexibility of postmodern relativism according to which everything is subjective yet objective facts are out there. In every case, fear of error reveals itself as rather the fear of truth.
Over to u/chauchat_mme
Theorem II: Sex as our brush with the Absolute (Part 1): Antinomies of Pure Sexuation
In 1994, Joan Copjec published Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. The last chapter, Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason, brings us back to Kant. He uses the expression euthanasia of reason to designate a possible reaction to the antinomies that he has worked out in his Critique of Pure Reason: the deliberate induction of death to reason, the submission to desperate skepticism. Copjec starts with the strong claim that Judith Butler's answer to the challenges for theorization that the field of sexuality poses, is an example of this euthanasia - even though it appears as “skepticism's sunny slipside – a confident voluntarism”. Starting from this promising claim she unfolds her diligent criticism of and counter-draft to prevailing critical gender theories. In her short text, Copjec undertakes a waterproof demonstration that Judith Butler's theory is untenable from a Lacanian perspective – in theoretical respect as well as in respect to the political goals that Butler has in mind (the latter is a figure that we can frequently find in Zizek as well when he charges that authors or emancipatory movements don't go far enough, get stuck half way, or thwart the good intentions). Kant's antinomies of pure reason aren't used by Copjec as a purely rhetorical analogy for a similar deadlock in sexuality but she meticulously identifies the antinomies with Lacan's formulas of sexuation.
In passing, Copjec answers an important question: why is a binary distinction between male and female – from the viewpoint of the theories Copjec criticizes – automatically accompanied by a support for heteronormativity? How can hetero be derived from binary? Copjec explains

this argument makes no sense unless we state its hidden assumption that two have a tendency to one, to couple. But from where does this assumption spring? From the conception of the binary terms, masculinity and femininity, as complementary.

If this implicit assumption is unfounded though, a major objection against a psychoanalytic theory of sexuation implodes: the charge of promoting and supporting heteronormativity. This also foreshadows the Lacanian insight that there is no sexual relationship. She then poses the crucial question “what is sex?“. If it is, as Freud already put succinctly, not "anatomy or convention“, i.e. neither pre-discursive nor discursive sense, what else is it? She provides the reader with a sort of working definition:

We have no intention of denying that human sexuality is a product of signification, but we intend, rather, to redefine this position by arguing that sex is produced by the internal limit, the failure of signification. It is only there where discursive practices falter – and not at all where they succeed in producing meaning – that sex comes to be.

This definition requires further elaboration. An obvious question that can be asked is the question how it is possible to derive two sexes from one internal limit/deadlock. Copjec explains that here again an unfounded implicit assumption is made which she dispels: “failure is assumed to be singular. If this were true, if language – or reason – had only one mode of misfire, then the subject would in fact be neuter. But this is not the case; language and reason may fail in one of two different ways“. And here enters Kant.
I will only very briefly summarize the internal failures of pure reason and their solutions as a short reminder, and then read Lacan's formulas of sexuation through them:
The four antinomies of pure reason refer to the World (the totality of synthesis)
The two mathematical antinomies refer to the quantitative dimension of the World: extension outward, and divisibility inward:
(I) reality is infinitely divisible vs reality is composed of indivisible, finite parts;
(II) reality is finite vs reality is infinite.
Solution: Both propositions, rather than formulating an antinomy, form contraries and therefore they can both be false – that's what Kant argues for: They are are contraries not condratictions and they are both wrong because the assumption "the World is“ that is implicit in these propositions is too much, an unwarranted “plus”, and must be negated.
The two dynamical antinomies refer to the qualitative totality of the World:
(III) The World is only fully determined by the causality of natural laws vs there is another form of causality, spontaneity;
(IV) There is an absolutely necessary being, either as cause or as part of the world vs an absolutely necessary being exists nowhere in the world.
Solution: Both propositions are held to be true by Kant despite their logical incompatibility because (brutally simplified) appearances must have causes that are themselves not determined by appearances, this “minus” is covered by a free causality.
The Lacanian formulas of sexuation, as presented in Seminar XX: Encore, formalize the two modes of failure of language and show the same formal structure as the antinomies of pure reason.
The equivalent to the dynamical antinomies is the masculine version of the deadlock of language: There is (at least) one x which is not submitted to the phallic function Φx, one that is not castrated and has access to full enjoyment (think of Freud's primordial father, or of the Other of man: the Woman). By excluding this One, by making it an exception, a negative reference point, everything else can appear as everything else. All x are submitted to Φx. Alenka Zupancic puts this in memorable terms: “The exception (the 'killing') of the One frames the renunciation common to all“
The equivalent of the mathematical antinomies is the feminine version of the deadlock of language, to which Copjec assigns priority because it articulates are more fundamental impasse. The possible exception is negated: There is no x which is not submitted to the phallic function Φx. Why is there no possible exception? If Woman is the Other to man (see above), then there can't be an Other to this Other, and then there is no guarantee to consistency – it is included in this Other, or in Copjec's words she “is limitlessly inscribed within the symbolic“, no universalization is possible, and hence, not all are submitted to the symbolic function.
Zizek adds an extra layer to the connection between the Kantian antinomies and the formulas of sexuation by rendering the connection through Kant's concept of the Sublime. Zizek claims that “it is easy to see why this move from antinomies of pure reason to the topic of the Sublime makes the link between antinomies and sex (sexual difference) palpable“. One can argue whether this is really “easy to see“ without further inquiries into the critique of judgement or into the sublime object of ideology (where he explains the link in detail), so I will provide material from both sources to clarify his move.
Zizek mentions Kant's own attempts to link the Sublime to sexual difference: in a pre-critical essay he identifies the sublime with masculinity and the beautiful with femininity (Kant cannot generally be praised for his great entertainment value, but this essay is an enjoyable read). Zizek corrects Kant's own classification though and locates sexual difference in the interior of the Sublime itself.
The Sublime is an aesthetic judgement that can best be understood through its various oppositions to the Beautiful:

The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in (the object's) being bounded. But the sublime can also be found in a formless object, insofar as we present unboundedness, either as in the object or because the object prompts us to present it, while yet we add to this unboundedness the thought of its totality. So it seems that we regard the beautiful as the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of the understanding, and the sublime as the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of reason. Hence in the case of the beautiful our liking is connected with the presentation of quality, but in the case of the sublime with the presentation of quantity“.

The beautiful calms and comforts, invites for contemplation, while the sublime agitates, moves. The beautiful is characterized by an immediate harmony between the sensuous matter and the powers of the mind, and thus can be said to follow the pleasure principle. The specific pleasure found in the sublime is mediated through unpleasure because:

[...] this liking is incompatible with charms, and, since the mind is not just attracted by the object but is alternately always repelled as well, the liking for the sublime contains not so much a positive pleasure as rather admiration and respect, and so should be called a negative pleasure.

The latter are the main features of the Sublime that Zizek highlights in The Sublime Object of Ideology: "The Sublime is 'beyond the pleasure principle' […] this means at the same time that that the relation of Beauty to Sublimity coincides with the relation of immediacy to mediation". In short: the Sublime is not a feature of the object but of the idea. It is evoked by the confrontation with a formless and boundless object. The immediate reaction is displeasure because of the impotence of the power of imagination to match the object with the ideas of understanding. This unpleasure shifts into pleasure when one notices that the capacity of reason is up to the challenge.
What is most important for understanding Žižek’s turn to the Sublime is the prominent role of failure for the experience: it is the very failure of the power of imagination, the failure of representation that

provides a view, in the negative way, of the dimension of what is unrepresentable. It is a unique point in Kant's system, a point at which the fissure, the gap between the phenomenon and Thing-in-itself, is abolished in a negative way, because in it the phenomenon's very inability to represent the Thing adequately is inscribed in the phenomenon itself

- and indeed, this is not a Lacanian reading forced onto Kant's text because it suits Zizek's parallax ontology, but something that Kant says very clearly in various formulations. If the Sublime therefore provides a view of the dimension of what is unrepresentable, then we have also found the bridge from the Sublime to sublimation, this is why Zizek can move without much further ado from the Sublime to sublimation.
But let's take a closer look first at the relation of the Sublime with the formulas of sexuation, the two modes of failure. Just like the antinomies of pure reason, the experience of the Sublime comes in the two modes of the dynamical and the mathematical. Instead of paraphrasing Zizek, I provide the Kant quotes here again (if only because I was so amazed how clearly he expresses that which Zizek is after):
It's an instant of the mathematical sublime when the experience is effected by a large, formless object:

We call sublime what is absolutely (schlechthin) large [...] in every respect (beyond all comparison) [...] in that case, we do not permit a standard adequate to it to be sought outside it, but only within it. It is a magnitude that is equal only to itself. […] our imagination strives to progress toward infinity, while our reason demands absolute totality as a real idea, and so (the imagination,) our power of estimating the magnitude of things in the world of sense, is inadequate to that idea. Yet this inadequacy itself is the arousal in us of the feeling that we have within us a supersensible power […] Hence what is to be called sublime is not the object, but the attunement that the intellect [gets] through a certain presentation that occupies reflective judgment [...]. Sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense.

The dynamical sublime deals with the experience that is occasioned by a powerful natural force:

If we are to judge nature as sublime dynamically, we must present it as arousing fear. […] We can, however, consider an object fearful without being afraid of it, namely, if we judge it in such a way that we merely think of the case where we might possibly want to put up resistance against it, and that any resistance would in that case be utterly futile […] consider bold, overhanging and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling up in the sky and moving about accompanied by lightning and thunderclaps, volcanoes with all their destructive power, hurricanes with all the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean heaved up, the high waterfall of a mighty river, and so on. […] the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place. And we like to call these objects sublime because they raise the soul's fortitude above its usual middle range and allow us to discover in ourselves an ability to resist which is of a quite different kind, and which gives us the courage (to believe) that we could be a match for nature's seeming omnipotence […] In the same way, though the irresistibility of nature's might makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical impotence, it reveals in us at the same time an ability to judge ourselves independent of nature, and reveals in us a superiority over nature that is the basis of a self-preservation quite different in kind from the one that can be assailed and endangered by nature outside us.

In both instances of the Sublime, the experience consists in the recognition of the superiority of the powers of reason that we have within us, powers that allow us to transcend the natural boundaries, powers that testify to a radical disconnectedness from nature. When Kant calls it a self preservation quite different in kind one can hear a backward echo of Freud, who also assigned a nature of a different kind to the drive, a nature that cuts it off from any origin (remember: the sublime is not a subjective reflection of objective properties of the natural objects).
Zizek particularly stresses the ethical overtones Kant assigns to the experience of the dynamical sublime as a "resource for heroism“ - rational disinterestedness as the basis for ethical action. As u/wrapped_in_clingfilm has already pointed out before, an ethical act should not be equated with a morally good act though – the discomforting message of Lacan (conveyed in Seminar VII as well as in Kant with Sade) was to explain in how far Sade is the truth of Kant by pointing out “the ultimate consequences and disavowed premises of the Kantian ethical revolution“ (Zizek). Lacan makes the paradoxical move of showing that not ceding on one's desire is the ultimate disinterested ethical act in the Kantian sense.
The example Lacan chooses to demonstrate his point is Kant's famous example of a man who will be hung on a gallows the next morning if he spends a night with a beautiful lady. Lacan not only wittily remarks that from the clinical experience a gallows-like threat is a necessary prerequisite for many people to be able to enjoy the night at all. But he gives it a more universal twist by quoting Juvenal and his emancipatory call: Et non propter vitam vivendi perdere causas - 'do not forsake the reasons for living in the interest of staying alive', and argues why desire, as paradoxical as that may sound, is the non-pathological driving force. Alenka Zupančič explains this in the real of an illusion:

If one follows Kant's suggestion and renounces the night of love, then one decides for the pleasure principle as the final principle of one's action. If one decides, however, to spend the night with the coveted lady anyway, then this does not prove an inability to renounce the desire, but it proves the opposite. So one decides for the night of love not out of pleasure, but, as they say, on principle or even duty.

As an aside: Zupančič also puts forward an another aspect in Kant that links it to Sade via perversion: the role Kant assigns to a proper and safe distance from the natural phenomena or objects that must be maintained in order to experience the sublime; she links this to masochism and a fantasm of passivity, in so far as “Kant introduces a dimension of the spectator […] we have to be able to observe our impotence calmly […] the second movement of the sublime […] depends on the same window frame […] thereby the law becomes a power that scares the subject instead of being that which awakens the powers of the subject […] now it is powerful, omnipotent, it observes and speaks“.
Back to the text:
For Kant, our faculty of desiring is pathological, a pathological driving force, while for Lacan desire can be said to meet exactly the criteria for a disinterested act (he even claims that compared to the moral law “desire can claim it more legitimately”), it is a “pure faculty of desire“. This is why, Zizek argues, Kant identifies the non pathological with reason and moral law – and therefore privileges the dynamical, male sublime.
The mathematical sublime supplies a different kind of experience: not that of a higher faculty, an exception to the order of the sensuous. What one experiences is an immanent tension within the sensuous which cannot totalize itself although (or rather because of) there is no exception from it. In Kant's words: “Now the proper unchangeable basic measure of nature is the absolute whole of nature, which, in the case of nature as appearance, is infinity comprehended. This basic measure, however, is a self-contradictory concept (because an absolute totality of an endless progression is impossible)”
Sex is the point at which the break with natural life takes place, it is not anchored in nature but cut off from it. The tension that is at work in the Sublime is the tension that is also at work in sexuality. The immanent and repeated failure of sexuality produces negative pleasure, and “sex in-itself” can only be evoked by a perpetual failure that circles around it as a virtual attractor. This of course, leads us again to the definition of sublimation that Lacan gives: the object raised to the dignity of the Thing. Sublimation is not, as superficial Freud interpretations would have it, an exchange of sex for social recognition, but sublimation is equivalent to sexuality. The elevated object (which can also be an act) takes the place of the Thing, that which “by definition falls outside the field of signifiers, but around which, as the 'extimate centre', everything rallies” (de Kesel). Sublimation is not the substitute for sexual passion but that which makes it possible in the first place. The thing can only “transpire“ through the object, as Zizek puts it, or, as Mari Ruti expresses it, we can only hear the "echo of the Thing“ in the object, under very fragile and brittle circumstances: sexual passion is always one small step away from desublimation or from the comical or ridiculous.
Zizek concludes the subchapter with two aspects that I have mentioned in the beginning of this text: He gives sexual difference a formal twist that he has also applied to the field of political positions (left vs right) before, a formal twist that reinforces the insistence on the non-relationship, the non-complementary: sexual difference, he posits, “is its own meta-difference“: From inside the masculine perspective, there is male universality, and the feminine exception, from inside the feminine perspective the difference presents itself in a different way: it is the difference between feminine non-all and masculine no-exception. So the difference splits sex from within – which brings Zizek back to Kant: the Kantian transcendental is also split from within, and recognizing this internal inconsistency, Kant concludes, reason might either cling stubbornly to its dogmatic assumptions or fall into the despair: the “euthanasia of Reason“. The very attempts of reason to guarantee its consistency and to guarantee unity to knowledge produce the unique kind of error that Kant calls “transcendental illusion“. Hypostatizing the “I” of apperception to a substantial object, the soul, is according to Kant, a paralogism, which here means: a fallacy that illegitimately applies the concept of substance to a non empirical entity, the “I“.

I'll try and write these summaries within as short a time as possible after having had the lecture, in order to work with fresh and hopefully accurate information. I make no guarantees when it comes to quality, but will strive to make it as high as possible, as I intend to revisit these notes come the exam period. I'll also attempt to present the information presented in the course and the material, and leave out opposing information I believe I have access to, if I did not share it with the rest of the course.
First, quick information about the course. It is explicitly made with a Nordic perspective, and carries clear influence of this. Additionally, it is meant to be a critical course, with an understanding of academic work as intent on influencing society. Finally, it focuses on a sociocultural approach, taking primary inspiration from the social sciences and the humanities.
As an opening to the course, this lecture focused mostly on the historical development of the perspectives on sex and gender, and a brief introduction to most perspectives. While it did not define any lens that is the right one, it was helpful in deciding on one that is wrong. We proceed to biological determinism
First, the lecturer did grant that biological sex is a thing, and that it causes certain differences between men and women. Among these differences were: Genitals, different on a rather essential level, serving different functions and the like; differences in anatomy, physiology, and hormones, which are relatively small and nearly all biologists agree about that. Furthermore, the small sex differences in biology are not big enough to offer a valid explanation of societal differences between the genders.
Biological determinism was seen to rise out of the inception of the two-sex model. This segment takes Thomas Laqueur's book "Making Sex" as the primary source. In it, a history of views on sex is detailed. Put briefly, for a while it followed the logic of a one-sex model, where men were men, and women were incomplete men, where the differences between men and women were in degree. On the other hand, coming around with biology and anatomy research, a dichotomy of the sexes as different in essence came around. This difference was seen as an absolute, and separated the sexes with little to no acknowledgement of overlap. This information was used to discriminate based on sex, fueling such arguments as different voting rights, or different pay.
When asked whether the fault in this lay with the underlying facts, or the reasoning that accompanied them, the lecturer called it a good question. It was extrapolated upon that the reasoning was not necessarily wrong, different lengths in parental leave being brought up as a reasonable way to discriminate based on biological facts. On the other hand, it was acknowledged that it depends on whether one were to identify as a "liberal" or a "radical" on the matter of equality, where the former would be more prone to want equal treatment, and the latter more likely to condone differential treatment.
Then we asked the question of what defines sex. What counts, who decides, and when/where is biological sex important? Intersex examples were offered to outline the blurring of the line, the ethics of sex conforming surgeries on intersex infants was questioned. Hormones and chromosomes were offered as possible measurements of what biological sex is. As for when it is important, reproduction was a clear example, while sports was mentioned, and the lecturer offered that one might find some other metrics than genitalia to sort people in categories that might be just as fair for the competitors. Affirmative action was also mentioned, where a counter that it regards social gender, was offered.
The matter of gendering items was also discussed, where the students were prompted to find different items that were gendered, and discuss how they were gendered, and why. This takes inspiration from this research, featuring a broad set of household items, and how they have been gendered. The example I will bring up is an electric screwdriver versus an electric whisk. Where the purpose of both is to make things spin, they tend to be different in design. More rounded lines, lighter colors, less accessibility to dismantle, and ease of operation were things described to be associated with gendering an item as feminine. Social commentary about how we in turn treat these items was offered. In this sense, designers were presented as ignorant as to what gender their product was getting, and unconscious bias was briefly mentioned, but not elaborated upon. I don't completely understand the offered perspective, but will try and dive deeper into it if anyone is interested in discussing the gender of things.
The matter of social gender was next up. With the defined areas being gender role, gender identity, gender relations, gender in relation to society, and gendered language. The main argument seemed to be that sex and/or gender inform all of these, who in turn affect gender.
After this primer, the course proceeded to extrapolate on how the different understandings of gender were created. We have the biological-medical perspective, which has been extrapolated on, and will not be very relevant going forward. Then we have sociocultural perspectives, and critical perspectives, forming the main categories that will be brought forward into the course.
Margaret Mead, an anthropologist and the author of "Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive societies" (1935) was used as an example of a sociocultural perspective, representing anthropological and ethnographic studies of gender which challenged biological understandings. The research is an example of criticism against understandings of gender based on white, western culture. Outlining three societies living on a single island, with widely different gender expressions, it was used as activist research, prompting the quote: "if the characteristics we consider as feminine can easily be considered as masculine in other cultures, there is no ground for linking these characteristics to the biological sex." On this note, the book does briefly acknowledge that her research has been criticized for being overly simplistic, stating she did it to clarify her arguments in relation to the American society. It (the book, not the lecture) concludes that even though her overarching points underline cultural organization of gender, and are correct, her handling of details in research shows that the relationship between activism and science at times can be strained.
Simone de Beauvoir, with her book "the second sex" (1949), forms a representation of gender seen from the humanities. And Toril Moi, with her interpretations and critique of Beauvoir was brought up in the same category. In this case, it was described that Simone described society as she saw it, with gender roles put on women, and being something that was learned. While transcendence was something she considered tied to the masculine, she argued that the immanence of women was a necessary contrast in the dominant system. Transcendence in this sense refers to a certain accessibility of the future, and freedom of action, while immanence is the lack of awareness of free choice brought on due to oppression.
Our ending note is on Judith Butler with Gender Trouble (1990), whose attributed view is that sex is as much a product of social construction as gender. A central theory is centered around performance. Where one performs gender in ones daily life, and thereby reproduce the social norms connected to that gender. An additional note is that she doesn't consider gender to be something one is, but rather something you do, act like, and look like. Her view of gender comes across more as if it was a tradition, where stepping too far outside ones gender causes social sanctions, and seemingly arguing that "misquoting" ones performance of gender serves as a way to change gender. Strikes me as very "be the change you want to see in the world."
Next week, we will look at feminism and gender studies, the former being another category of lenses to view gender through. I have noticed that I haven't been able to get everything down, but this was a four hour course, and a couple more hours of comparing notes, literature, and the slides. I'll try and see if I can produce a more accurate transcript to work with next time. I'll also, happily accept comments on the format. Could be that I should use bullet-points, and extrapolate on the most interesting bits in the comments upon request.

So I tried watching Thought Slime's latest video, the one on Lobsterdaddy Peterson, but I can't get over the whole bad faith arguments. ans it'll actually end up being my first unwatched video of his.
Just to give two examples, he first says he didn't read Peterson's book and relies on some online summary. And he gives an example of how convoluted JP's writing style is:

[The] “partially implicit” mythic stories or fantasies that guide our adaption, in general, appear to describe or portray or embody three permanent constituent elements of human experience: the unknown, or unexplored territory; the known, or explored territory; and the process - the knower - that mediates between them. These three elements constitute the cosmos - that is, the world of experience - from the narrative or mythological perspective.”

The thing is... as far as academic writing is concerned, it isn't? Let's take a counterexample of Judith Butler's "Gender Trouble", chosen totally at random: first paragraph on page 161: ^⁽¹⁶¹ ^{^geddit?)}

Note as well that the category of sex and the naturalized institution of heterosexuality are constructs, socially instituted and socially regulated fantasies or “fetishes,” not natural categories, but political ones (categories that prove that recourse to the “natural” in such contexts is always political). Hence, the body which is torn apart, the wars waged among women, are textual violences, the deconstruction of constructs that are always already a kind of violence against the body’s possibilities.

I mean, of course, Butler is dense. But I can clearly see people like Thunderfoot or Sargon reading this quote exactly the same way TS does with JP's. Because without context it doesn't make sense.
The same thing goes for JP's charts he's making fun of later on. I mean, I'm no Jung/religious studies scholar, I've only watched the Joseph Campbell interview series and read like half of an Eliade's book and... I still kinda get what Peterson's going for?
But isn't reading without context the domain of the alt-right? Apparently not, because there's a 1000 comments (why I chose to post here than there), and even bigger names like Mexie, Non-compete and The Serfs are going full validation gang. I've scrolled a bit, and couldn't find a single critical one.
Does that mean that since JP is an enemy and everything is allowed? Or that we can pull the "it's not real science" that the alt-right, again, loves to use?
To me, still the best critique of Peterson remains Angie's one, because she alone seems to have actually go out of her way to explain JP on JP's terms. But then she's kind of a Jungist herself.
And that's the thing, I'm not defending JP's ideas (not even sure what they are, some pop-Jungism probably), but if we want to interact with them, we should act like the intellectual left that we claim to be, and not imitate anti-intellectual reactionaries.

Basically, Amherst Colleges is offering a feminist-themed dance class next semester, and it will feature reading from the likes of Judith Butler (one of the main people behind Queer Theory), Michel Foucault, Susan Bordo, bell hooks, Brenda Dixon Gottschild ("American cultural historian, performer, choreographer, and anti-racist cultural worker"), Laura Mulvey (British feminist film theorist), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (yay, another Queer Theorist), and Michael Warner.
The class, called “Introduction to Dance Studies: Dance Performance and Theory” will be taught by Dante R. Brown, a visiting professor of Dance and Theater, and is planned to help students to learn about dance performance through feminist and queer theory lens.

This course will focus on dance performance as it reflects theories of gender, sexuality, critical race, crip (disability), and queer studies. We will look at these theories to gain an introductory understanding of their origins, perspectives, and frameworks, specifically around the physical body and performance. Through readings, discussions, viewing of recordings of contemporary choreographic work, analytic writings, movement experiences, and attendance at live dance events, we will use these theoretical frameworks to deconstruct dance performance to determine how dance is a cultural art practice that is constantly theorizing and subverting the implications of the body through performance.

The article notes that dance can be a target of critique for feminist scholars, and says:

Dancers themselves are often expected to physically embody societal standards while dancing, such as exaggerated femininity or heterosexual masculinity. Some scholars have critiqued this expectation—suggesting that mainstream demands upon dancers constrain them within gendered and racial norms—and thus, that invoking queer theory and an intersectional approach can allow for new opportunities for dancers.

It also adds that "Dance Performance and Theory" can be taken by any students in the 5 College Consortium, and some of the other classes that are offered by the consortium next semester include “Conversations with the Ghost of Karl Marx,” exploring “wages for housework,” and “Healthy Guys or Healthy Guise.”
The "Healthy Guys or Healthy Guise" will use a feminist critique of masculinity, and explore "how constructions and performances of masculinity impact individual and collective health outcomes, with a particular focus on intersections of masculinity with race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and culture."
According to College Reform, which links to Amherst College estimations, full cost of attendance for a typical student during the 2018-2019 school year will be between $75,954 and $78,404.
Source: https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10934

Criticisms | Resources on Judith Butler

judith butler critique

judith butler critique - win

One massive toolkit for discussion on all the various "tools" of literary and social criticism.

Against Performativity (a Marxist Transfeminist critique of Judith Butler)

Martha Nussbaum's critique of Judith Butler and postmodernism

Looking fro academic critique of Judith Butler "Gender Trouble" you know any good sources?

Judith Butler, “Legal Violence: An Ethical and Political Critique”

Seyla Benhabib: Ethics without Normativity and Politics without Historicity: On Judith Butler's Parting Ways, Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism.

Judith Butler ("Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism") on willing the impossible

/r/news [removed] In attempting to make a case for a specifically Jewish critique of Israeli state violence, Berkeley professor Judith Butler argues that even at its most liberal, Zionism is profoundly un-Jewish.

In attempting to make a case for a specifically Jewish critique of Israeli state violence, Berkeley professor Judith Butler argues that even at its most liberal, Zionism is profoundly un-Jewish.

Chomsky and Hegel.

Looking for help understanding this video. This video was made to explain critical theory to skeptical people who aren't sure if critical theory is useful/logical/substantive.

Does most (continental) political / cultural theory/philosophy completely reject Evolutionary Cultural Theory ? (ie 'survival') and on what basis?

beep boop beep boop

Queer Theory: A Primer

What Is Queer Theory?

Queer Theory & Language

Queer Theory & Gender Identity

Queer Theory & Radical Feminism

Is Judith Butler's theory about the subject compatible with free will?

Does anyone have any individualistic philosophical theories to recommend?

Is Judith Butler's theory about the subject compatible with free will?

A brief history of trans activism in the United States

AITA for being upset that my boyfriend doesn't like ANYTHING I like?

Sex & The Failed Absolute — Reading Group: Theorem II: Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute (Part 1): Antinomies of Pure Sexuation

Week one: A song of Sex and Gender.

On TS's latest video: c'mon BreadTube, we can do better

[SocJus] Course teaches about 'gender,' 'queer studies' through dance

judith butler critique video

judith butler critique top

Judith Butler: Your Behavior Creates Your Gender Big ...