On gender and Kafka - Parul Sehgalin The New Yorker:

‘In January, the American philosopher Judith Butler and the South African artist William Kentridge took part in a public conversation in Paris about atrocity and its representations. Before an audience at the École Normale Supérieure, they spoke for nearly two hours, in lulling abstraction and murmured mutual regard: Can we give the image the benefit of the doubt? What is the role of the object in thinking? After the event, a woman—a philosopher herself—approached Butler. Tight with tension, she gripped Butler by the arm.
“Vous menacez mes enfants,” she said, in Butler’s recounting. “You are threatening my children.” Butler has regularly required personal security. In 2012, the city of Frankfurt awarded them the Theodor W. Adorno Prize for their contributions to philosophy. (Butler recently adopted they/them pronouns but doesn’t “police it.”) The general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany decried the decision to give the award, named for a philosopher of Jewish descent who fled the Nazis, to a “well-known hater of Israel.” A demonstration was organized. Butler, a prominent critic of Zionism, responded by citing their education in a Jewish ethical tradition, which compelled them to speak in the face of injustice.’

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‘Butler is soft-spoken and gallant, often sheathed in a trim black blazer or a leather jacket, but, given the slightest encouragement, they turn goofy and sly, almost gratefully. When they were twelve years old, they identified two plausible professional paths: philosopher or clown. In ordinary life, Butler incorporates both.’

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‘As Butler understands it now, from a story passed along by their mother, Butler’s grandparents took their teen-age son Harold to Vienna, for a consultation with sexologists there. It was a matter, Butler thinks, of some anomalous sexual development. “They subjected him to countless doctors,” they said. “He had to drop his pants and allow his genitals to be examined, talked about, and analyzed.” It was too late, the doctors said. He needed to have been seen before puberty; there was nothing to be done now.
Back in Cleveland, Harold began acting out, as if traumatically repeating what he had endured. “Maybe he was searching for a way to tell that story,” Butler said. “Or to express his anger against my grandparents. This was so shameful for my grandmother, who thought she was going to overcome poverty and antisemitism by being Helen Hayes, that she and Max had Harold shipped away to the Menninger Foundation, in Kansas.” One of Butler’s cousins grew up with a very different impression: Harold was simply said to be mentally “not right”—maybe he had autism? Butler recalls being informed as a child that Uncle Harold was a vegetable. Whatever the truth was, Harold ended up in a home for people with developmental disabilities. “I was told that we couldn’t visit him,” Butler said. “We couldn’t know him.”’

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‘Joan Scott, as a historian, situates “Gender Trouble” historically: “The seventies and eighties are the start of the critical exploration of gender identity. Feminism starts out with consciousness-raising and asking, What are women? The whole enterprise of critical work is to refuse the singular identity of women, men, gender, race, whatever. All of that, the book is looking to complexify.” Butler has called identity politics a “terrible American conceit” that proceeds “as if becoming visible, becoming sayable, is the end of politics.” This critique didn’t necessarily register. “I wrote a whole book calling into question identity politics, only then to be constituted as a token of lesbian identity,” Butler told Artforum. “Either people didn’t really read the book or the commodification of identity politics is so strong that whatever you write, even when it’s explicitly opposed to that politics, gets taken up by that machinery.”’

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‘They were awarded first prize in a Bad Writing Contest held by the journal Philosophy and Literature, which cited such turns of phrase as “The insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony.” In a 1999 review in The New Republic, Martha Nussbaum wrote, “It is difficult to come to grips with Butler’s ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are.”’

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‘They talked about the Kafka book they’d put off to write “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” Kafka, they’ve explained, has this idea of a figure—“a fugitive figure, eluding capture”—who vanishes into pure line and motion.
“I snuck eight pages in the other day,” Butler said. “I was in it and nowhere else. No voices were coming in to tell me it was good or bad. I was just following the thought.”’

Read the article here.

It’s hard not to sympathize with Butler after reading this article.

The machinery of the identity politics is so powerful, apparently, that even if you argue against it, the machinery of identity politics closes in on you.

Her style is as diverse as this mostly fictional thing that we call identity.

Probably, it’s sometimes necessary to obscure your own ideas in the same way as it is often necessary to obscure your identity.