So, Judith Butler's writing style. I started in graduate work on the side of Butler's critics: I decided to do an MA in philosophy before going on in English because it seemed to me that literary theory was simply philosophy done poorly, pretentiously, and incomprehensibly. /1

To me it was obvious that literary critics often deal with philosophical questions, and that it's better to admit that and engage philosophers openly than pretend literary theory is a uniquely qualified discipline for addressing them, unaccountable to non-theorists. /2

I found that confirmed in early graduate school reading of the debate between Paul de Man and Raymond Geuss about how to interpret Hegel, where de Man has to fall back on this charade that his obviously implausible account is okay because it's a "literary" reading. /3

But at UWM I also had the good fortune to be able to take classes with Jane Gallop, and in particular a class in which we close read Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick. That class made charitable reading easy, and so I ended up writing sympathetically a few times on Butler. /4

One topic I wrote on was Butler's use of the question-series as a form of argument (something Nussbaum criticizes her for). And when you spend time with those series, Butler's argument really does seem unnecessarily opaque: she's circling an idea instead of stating it. /5

Here's Nussbaum on the point:

My own response circa 2005 was gentler: you can kind of say, huh, this is a thing she's doing, here's how it works. And what I know now is that there is a reader for whom this combination of style and thought is enormously powerful—mystic, yes, but liberatingly so. /6

So, three takeaways. First, there is a line of thought—originating perhaps with Hegel, certainly with Heidegger—that truly groundbreaking philosophy has to be opaque, because it has to break with our ordinary language.

This is nonsense. /7

Second, Butler herself basically agrees with this: her works have been gradually getting clearer. I read Subjects of Desire, the book Butler based on her dissertation, and remember nothing other than that I forgot to erase my annotations. But Psychic Life of Power is great. /8

And by the time Precarious Life comes out in 2004 Butler's work is more or less as comprehensible as anybody's.

But third, it's important not to let the observation of this mistake about philosophical writing style get conflated with a broader fact: reading is hard. /9

Specifically, it is easy to underestimate, esp. for people unfamiliar with regional universities, how hard reading prose is for most college students. Most of the people complaining on Twitter about reading Butler *definitely* complained about their economics reading too. /10

But that isn't the fault of the authors in question. It's more an indictment of current educational models, which to my mind are fairly good at teaching students to read complex fiction and absolute nonsense at teaching students to read complex nonfiction. /11

Fixing that is what I most like about the Great Books tradition: approaching a work humbly, with the basic attitude that most books have something to offer if you put in the effort, is a prerequisite to most learning. That's as true about Butler as it is about Aristotle. /end

I did not expect this to get much traction! If you'd like to read more/hopefully non-pretentious philosophy of literature, I have a book:

(if you'd like to read it but you don't have institutional support for purchasing get in touch, we'll figure it out)

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-reading-ideas-in-victorian-literature.html