Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

I wrote a few months ago about a lecture by Jurgen Habermas’ that I attended. What struck me the most about the event was how peripheral anything Habermas had to actually say was to the event itself. Habermas is probably the most significant social theorist of the second half of the 20th century and, even in his old age, is a revered figure in the academic world. Despite the fact that his intellectual production has greatly slowed since 1992, when Between Fact and Norms was published, he has comfortably slid into the position of European Public Intellectual and all around wiseman. So, when he came to Northwestern, people were there to see Habermas, not the old German guy who was reading a paper in an impossibly thick German accent.

Earlier this week, I saw another academic megastar speak at N.U., Judith Butler. There is probably no academic on earth whose occasionally inaccessibility of her prose so contrasted with the fervor of her public reception. Ever since Gender Trouble, Butler has been just that, the social theorist who writes dense books interweaving just about every major Continental thinker along with a few Analytic ones, who managed to create an entire field of study, and become a figure that just about everyone has to deal with at one time or another. Sure, she is reviled by the crowd that loves to deride any academic work that involves more than there French names and sentences that go beyond four lines (and by Martha Nussbaum), but the scale of her influence is undeniable.

And so, when she came to Northwestern to present a paper she wrote on Arendt and Eichmann called “Keeping Company With Oneself,” there was an entire lecture hall of graduate students, faculty members and assorted gawkers wanting to hear what the Judith Butler had to say.

But the Judith Butler of Gender Trouble, of Bodies That Matter and Excitable Speech wasn’t there. The daring, innovative, even fun gender theorist who so delightfully raises the hackles of Camille Paglia, all the while throwing the occasional sentence that even her PhD readers couldn’t really understand was replaced by this calm, closely reasoned and serious political theorist.

This is the late Butler, the public intellectual, the one who is concerned with those topics that conservative, moderate and liberal critics of the academy always tell us that intellectuals should be concerned with. Here she is, performing a very close reading of a popular text that most politically minded intellectuals adore and wish they could ever write (all the while calling for intellectuals to do so), Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Sure, the sentences were dense, and she moved quickly (both physically and intellectually) from idea to idea, point to point, argument to argument. It’s no wonder that she’s stick thin, every reference to Kant and back to Arendt was accompanied by the requisite movements and flurries of her hands and arms.

And so the crowd, with eagerly laughed along with the utterly enamored graduate student who introduced Butler with his obviously prepared quip: “ladies and gentleman, and everyone else, Judith Butler,” was treated to three hours of back and forth on the question of who was reading Arendt correctly. And literally, reading Arendt correctly. One of the main points of contention, as best as I could tell, was two paragraphs where Arendt delivers her condemnation of Eichmann to death. Was she invoking state sovereignty in doing so, or was she calling on some sort of extra-sovereign, extra-legal authority to condemn Eichmann for his crime of “refusing to think.”?

And while these are interesting questions that will probably excite political and legal theorists for decades, they were not what the audience came for. They came for the Judith Butler show. So one can imagine the shock, even the icreduilty, when one of four respondents to Butler’s paper, Sussannah Gottlieb, spent ten minutes ripping into Butler, matching her for intensity, quickness and self assuredness.

Gottlieb, who oh-so-politely prefaced her remarks with “I only have ten minutes, so I have to be direct” reminded me of myself in a debate round. She had combined the competitor’s maxim of “I must win” with a dash of barely-revealed snarkiness, “can she really be serious?”

Another one of the respondents mixed in sharp, focused criticism with a little bit of personal offense. And you couldn’t blame them. Here was Judith Butler, an academic celebrity who is only taken seriously for her work on Arendt and political theory because of the fame she accrued in her work on gender. The other four respondents, on the other hand, were political theorists or literary scholars who had devoted the better part of their scholarship and careers to Arendt and yet were invited to play ensemble roles in the Judith Butler show. It’s hardly surprising that a touch of bitterness crept in.

So, how are we to evaluate these academic celebrities? Is it good that even people who are as supposedly high minded as graduate students and professors respond to someone at the peak of their field the same way music fans respond to Lil Wayne? (Oh my god, he’s playing guitar. Amazing!)

And although celebrity culture is hardly alien to our minds, the academic celebrity culture is still pretty weird. Butler’s lecture was held in the Technical Institute at N.U., which is cavernous, labyrinthine building that is the temporary home for Engineering students and premeds. The Indian graduate students who would peek in every few minutes, only to see a hall full of androgynously dressed 20 somethings listen to slight gray haired woman go on and on about “plurality” and “sovereignty,” were rightfully confused.

While it’s easy to be cynical about the reaction of the intellectual class to someone like Judith Butler, there are the simple facts of the situation. Because of just her name — her name and nothing else — some 300 listened to five intellectuals discuss an incredibly important thinker’s approach to an incredibly important question. If the survival of intellectual culture means indulging in our deep-seeded love of celebrity culture, then so be it.