Here’s to you, Judith Butler! Study finds writers who use too much jargon might be trying to disguise their insecurities.

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[–]uwushallnotpass 9 insightful - 4 fun9 insightful - 3 fun10 insightful - 4 fun -  (0 children)

Judith Butler actually writes deliberate word salad, because coherence and readability are normative and not queer, yes really.

The second link is interesting, because it shows really well how helpless and infantile and unrebellious this whole postmodern nonsense is.

“In other words: I cannot escape the humiliating structures without ceasing to be, so the best I can do is mock, and use the language of subordination stingingly. In Butler, resistance is always imagined as personal, more or less private, involving no unironic, organized public action for legal or institutional change.”

It’s pretty much the exact definition of codependence – being angry at the arbitrary power that’s wielded over you, but also being dependent on it for a sense of self and self-worth, and unable to imagine a life that isn’t saturated with the ideas of dominance and submission.

[–]MarkTwainiac 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

So glad that a massive study has come to the same conclusion many of us arrived at decades ago. All this pretentious jargon in academia was a principal reason I decided not to pursue a PhD and instead went into journalism and independent scholarship. Not the only reason, but a main reason nonetheless.

[–]vodka_gimli 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Academia used to be such a vaunted profession and now it feels like no one with a scrap of common sense would dare go into it. Which is a really a shame, because common sense is direly needed these days.

[–]Carthimundia 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

I just read recently that Derrida, one of the founding fathers of this kind of nonsense babble, felt like a fraud his entire life. Apparently his dissertation committee were torn between failing him outright or passing his thesis with highest honours - they couldn't decide if it was bullshit or genius. The idea that he had imposter syndrome his entire life pleases me greatly and its probably the reason he wrote in the way he did.

[–]MarkTwainiac 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Dunno if famed French psychoanalyst and fellow author of impenetrable prose Jacques Lacan (born a generation earlier than Derrida) also suffered from imposter syndrome. But Lacan actually was a fraud for real.

Long hailed as a genius by many in intellectual circles, Lacan stole the basic ideas that he became most famous for - "mirror theory" - from his own teacher, a mentally-ill man who posited that in order to have a sense of self human beings must be able to see our images in modern-day looking glasses. But as it so happened, Lacan's teacher had a condition that caused him to go blind. When he'd lost nearly all his eyesight, he sat himself in front of a glass mirror and blew his brains out - and Lacan then stole his ideas and presented "mirror theory" to the world as his own.

[–]BEB[S] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Really interesting -thanks. I am fascinated with how these ideas took hold.

[–]BEB[S] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Thanks for that.

[–]blackrainbow 3 insightful - 4 fun3 insightful - 3 fun4 insightful - 4 fun -  (0 children)

Using a simple language is for plebs