Sep. 12: ‘Biden’ Stares Down ‘Putin’

IDF raids in Syria; Did Trump get Loomered?; China's VC bust

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The Big Story

The New York Times reported Thursday that U.S. President Joe Biden is “wavering” in his prior decision not to allow Ukraine to launch U.S.-supplied missiles deep into Russian territory. For the first two years of the war, the United States denied Ukraine the ability to strike inside Russia at all. That changed in May, when Biden began allowing the Ukrainians to hit Russian targets within around 60 miles of the Ukrainian-Russian border. Now, we’re told, he’s considering removing those restrictions altogether.

According to the Times story, that is, Biden—the man forced by his own party to step down as presidential nominee due to his manifest mental incapacity—is now on the verge of allowing a potentially major escalation with Russia due to lobbying from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the urgings of “senior American military planners.” No hard commitments are to be found anywhere in the article, of course. One U.S. official cautioned that “no imminent change in the restrictions was expected.” 

So what are we looking at with this story? The war is grinding toward a seemingly inevitable conclusion: some sort of negotiated partition in which Russia is left in de jure or de facto control of Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, with borders likely to be drawn roughly along current battle lines. Zelenskyy’s recent cabinet reshufflings and the much-hyped Kursk counteroffensive aside, Ukraine faces insurmountable shortages of manpower and key munitions, especially 155 mm artillery shells, that the United States and Europe lack the manufacturing capacity to resupply. These problems will only grow more acute as the war grinds on. Military aid from Europe is dwindling, and in key allies such as Germany, the political will to continue financially backing the war is dwindling along with it. The Biden administration, which has not only sought to respect Russia’s “red lines” in Ukraine in order to secure Moscow’s cooperation on Iran but also openly admitted to wanting to preserve Russian oil and gas production to keep prices down at the pump, needs stable oil prices until at least November. Russian energy infrastructure would, of course, be a natural target for the Ukrainians to attack. 

Put that all together and the Times story is laughable on its face. Why, if you’re “Biden,” would you now start allowing Ukraine to strike deep into Russian territory and risk a catastrophe before the election, after denying Kyiv that authority for more than two years? You wouldn’t. But you do, for the time being, need to appear to be the anti-Putin party, and so you keep teasing the Ukrainians and their boosters in D.C. that you’re about to maybe almost nearly let them start bombing Moscow.

Or, to put a finer point on it: For years now, the Biden administration has been playing a double game with Russia and its leader. As Tony Badran explained in 2022:

For the Biden administration, unlike for Obama, there are necessarily two Putins. There’s Vladimir Putin, the realist head of state. He’s a stone-cold killer, to be sure, but he gets the job done in rough spots like Syria, where he helped keep America out of another Middle Eastern war while holding in check the U.S. allies and their domestic neocon lobbyists who wanted to drag us into that conflict and spoil the Iran deal. He’s a thug, yes. But it takes a thug to ruthlessly pound Islamist terrorists like ISIS and keep the Israeli Air Force grounded.

Then there’s “Putin,” the devious monster who hacked our elections to install a puppet in the White House in an all-out assault on American democracy that even some Republicans deplore. Clearly, no compromise is possible with that kind of hell spawn.

So don’t expect the White House to do anything that might really upset Vladimir Putin, like allow Kyiv to blow up his pipelines (note, in this respect, the adamant public denials from the administration that it had any role whatsoever in the bombing of Nord Stream, which it has pinned entirely on the Ukrainians). But do expect a lot high dudgeon about the need to stand up to “Putin,” the Trump-Hitler hybrid and international avatar of the Republican Party, for his nefarious threats to “our democracy.” 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Blake Smith on the many transformations of gender queen Judith Butler

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The Rest

→Earlier this week, Israeli jets struck targets in Masyaf, Syria, reportedly including a “scientific center” used by the Syrian regime and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to produce chemical weapons and surface-to-surface ballistic missiles. New reports, which circulated widely in the Israeli press on Wednesday, indicate the IDF special forces also operated on the ground in Syria. Per a summary of the reports in The Times of Israel, Syria TV, an opposition network, reported that the IDF captured four Iranians in the raid. Separately, Middle East researcher Eva Koulouriotis claimed in a Wednesday X thread that the IDF entered the scientific compound, “removed equipment and documents,” and then destroyed the facility. The IDF, which does not comment on operations in Syria, has neither confirmed nor denied the reports. 

→Quote of the Day:

We have lost at least 50% of our fighters between those who are martyred and wounded, and now we are left with 25%. The last 25% of our people have reached a situation where the people do not tolerate them anymore, broken on a mental or physical level.

That’s a letter from former Hamas Khan Younis brigade commander Rafa’a Salameh, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in July, to Yahya Sinwar and Salameh’s brother Muhammed, describing the “difficult situation” in which Hamas had found itself. The document, which also detailed losses of between 90% and 95% of the terror group’s rocket capacity and 60% of its personal weapons, was shared by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Wednesday. 

→National Security Communications Advisor and Scroll regular John Kirby accidentally told Fox News Wednesday that there was “no use” responding to veterans critical of the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal. Fox asked Kirby for comment on a story featuring quotes from four veterans criticizing the White House’s handling of the 2021 withdrawal, including Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL). Kirby mistakenly responded to Fox with the comments that were intended only for White House staffers. “Obviously no use responding,” Kirby wrote. “A ‘handful’ of vets indeed and all of one stripe.” 

→Donald Trump had a special guest at the Sept. 11 memorial ceremony in New York City yesterday: right-wing provocateur and general lunatic Laura Loomer. Loomer is a self-described “investigative journalist” most notable for her ugly baiting of Muslims, ecumenical conspiracism, and public mental health breakdowns, as well as for having been banned from most social media platforms and payment processing services during Trump’s first term. So what is she doing with the former president? Here, we’ll turn to something Scroll founder Jake Siegel wrote at the time of the last Trump-Loomer controversy, in 2020:

Why would Trump publicly support someone like Loomer except to stick it in the eye of liberals and the notions of decency toward which they occasionally gesture? The president gains nothing from Loomer. He already has the anti-Muslim kook vote locked down. Loomer may represent a small part of the voting base but she has an outsize significance as a symbol of state-sanctioned counterradicalism.

As usual with Trump, the impulse to give the middle finger to the honorable men and women of the establishment is simultaneously his best and worst quality. 

→On Thursday, the International Court of Justice rejected South Africa’s request to postpone the deadline to submit evidence of Israel’s alleged genocide in Gaza. South Africa filed the complaint in December and is required to submit evidence by Oct. 28. But it had been seeking an extension, presumably in the hope that some evidence might materialize by then. In May, an international group of lawyers affiliated with the Israel Law Center charged South Africa with bringing the case in exchange for bribes from Iran, citing the South African foreign minister’s visit to Iran in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7 and the sudden, unexplained stabilization of South Africa’s finances after launching the complaint. No evidence of a quid pro quo has been unearthed—it wouldn’t be, with the ruling African National Congress being one of the most corrupt governing parties in the world—but South Africa has long acted as a de facto proxy of Iran on the international stage. A 2019 report from the Council on Foreign Relations noted that the country was a “cornerstone” of Iran’s efforts to cultivate the Global South, and an important Iranian defense partner that has allowed the Iranian navy to operate in its territorial waters. 

→The conservative lawyer and activist Leonard Leo is launching a $1 billion crusade to “crush liberal dominance” in the news and entertainment sector, the Financial Times reports. Leo is the former head of the Federalist Society, an organization that promotes textualism and originalism among law students and faculty, and the man widely seen as the architect of the Supreme Court’s current 6-3 conservative majority. More recently, he has launched Marble, a dark-money organization endowed with $1.6 billion that he says is intended to function as a counterweight to dark money on the left. Since its founding in 2021, Marble has backed campaigns against corporate DEI and ESG initiatives, as well as the push to ban TikTok. Leo now plans to “direct resources to build talent and capital formation pipelines in the areas of news and entertainment, where leftwing extremism is most evident,” he told the FT in an interview. He also plans to invest in a “U.S. local media company in the next 12 months, although he has not decided which.” 

→Chart of the Day:

That’s from a Thursday story in the Financial Times on the “throttling” of China’s venture capital sector. At the height of the VC boom, in 2018, 51,302 start-ups were founded in China; last year, that number fell to 1,202 and is expected to fall even lower this year. Experts quoted in the article cited structural factors—China’s protracted COVID-19 lockdowns and the bursting of the country’s real-estate bubble—but also political decisions taken by President Xi Jinping, including an “anti-corruption” crusade and a crackdown on companies not “aligned with Communist Party values,” to bring private-sector entrepreneurs under the control of China’s party-state. Former real estate mogul Desmond Shum tells the FT, “Successful entrepreneurs … can expect to be closely monitored, unable to transfer money offshore and their transactions and public statements scrutinized. Their money is the country’s money.”

→On crime trutherism: We’ve noticed several conservative X accounts claiming that one of ABC’s Trump fact-checks from the debate Tuesday night—correcting the president’s claim that violent crime was up under Biden with FBI data showing that it has begun to decline—was fake. The theory, laid out in a viral post from X user @amuse, is that the FBI established a new “woke” crime-reporting system in 2021, which allegedly doesn’t cover about one-quarter of the U.S. population and thus systematically underreports crime.

 There’s plenty to criticize about ABC’s moderation—never pressing Harris, who has done only one softball interview since becoming the nominee, to answer even basic questions about her plans—but this one wasn’t a problem. As one of our most trusted crime experts, the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Lehman, explains in a Thursday X thread, the crime truther theory is false on every count. There is a new FBI system, but after a brief blip in 2021, it now covers about 94% of the U.S. population. Aggregate crime statistics are reported by local police, not woke Soros prosecutors. And individual city data tracks the aggregate trends shown in the FBI’s national data—i.e., violent crime peaked in 2022 and has declined since, but still remains elevated over the pre-2020 norm. 

Lehman notes that these facts are perfectly consistent with a conservative or tough-on-crime perspective. Widespread anti-police protests in 2020, stoked by activist media and billionaire-funded NGOs, led to increased crime, reduced policing, and greater political scrutiny on the policing that did occur. As the protests died down and police were allowed to do their jobs again, crime went back down. In other words, policing reduces crime, which is what everyone knew before forgetting it in the collective hysteria of 2020. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Israelis Remember Their Dead—With Stickers, by Hillel Kuttler

In train stations and bus shelters, on lamp posts and walls of buildings and nearly any public space, personalized memorials proliferate

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Judith Butler vs. Judy!

How the queer theorist went from celebrating ironic distance and deconstructing drag shows to straight-faced gender totalitarianism

by Blake Smith

Warning in a 1992 interview against a “bad reading” of her landmark Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler insisted, “I decide what gender I want to be today” was not what she had meant. Such an understanding, by which gender would be something changeable, determined by one’s personal desire and acts of self-declaration, entailed the “commodification of gender … consumerism.” She noted, likewise, her discomfort with an apparently opposite notion of gender, according to which there are “essential, core gender identities” for the sake of which people living in the "wrong" body for their gender should seek medical procedures to align themselves with their unchosen gender identity.

Gender voluntarism, as we might call the first position, presupposes that identity is a matter of will, and perhaps of social recognition, but at any rate not grounded in some reality (biological, psychological, or otherwise) beyond the power of personal choice. Gender essentialism, as we might call the second position, presupposes that there is somewhere in us a fact of “gender identity” that could be discovered (located in chromosomes, genes, in persistent feelings, etc.) by others, making it something other than a questionable personal story.

Neither of these positions, Butler held, represent the complexity of her thinking, or of our real experience. But the ideas that Butler tried to resist are now all around us, and have finally caught up with Butler herself. Her most recent book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? ought to have as it subtitle: Me!

Retreating from her earlier hostility to both the voluntarist and the essentialist models, Butler now accepts their hegemonic conflation. She herself has transitioned into a nonbinary identity. The otherwise unstable logic of the double belief that gender can be changed upon one’s saying so, and is a crucial fact about oneself is held together in her new book by the intensity of animus against gender’s supposed opponents: a team of conservatives, nationalists, climate change denialists, and misguided feminists who have the bad taste to doubt what Butler herself had once doubted: that we do justice to others by accepting as authoritative their own unstable interpretations of themselves.

Butler’s work from the 1990s is full of searing moments in which she expressed not just skepticism about the two dominant, mutually contradictory logics of transitioning, but an at times disturbing smugness about the fantasies on which trans desire depends (see her discussion of the film Boys Don’t Cry in Undoing Gender) or the violence that befalls trans women (see her discussion of the death of trans drag queen Venus Xtravaganza in Bodies that Matter). There is much in her earlier work that today’s TERFS might read with nodding agreement, although Butler, even then, was careful (unlike some feminists then and now) to eschew political alliances of any kind with social conservatives who defined women in terms of biology or a reactionary view of women’s proper roles. Her writing about gender in the ’80s and early ’90s, indeed, took a difficult middle path between the false extremes of positing either that categories like “woman” can be freely redefined, or that someone—be it a doctor, a priest, a feminist scholar or trans activist—can be said to know with authority once and for all time who should count as a woman.

She was concerned above all to keep categories, and not only the categories of gender, flexible and open to discussion (without thereby abolishing them), in line with the tradition of philosophy in which she had been educated—a tradition grounded in an antitotalitarian appropriation of modern German thought. Yet now Butler finds herself ironically at the head of a global political campaign that asserts control over the very sort of definitions and categories she had once fought to pry open and expose to philosophical questioning.

To understand this shift in her thinking, and to understand how gender, with all its contradictions, became our culture’s most ubiquitous, energetically affirmed and seethingly resented mode of making sense of the entanglement of social roles and individual identity, we need to go back to the beginning of Butler’s intellectual career, to her time as a student of philosophy and young lesbian feminist writer. Previously, critics of Butler’s, from the fatuous and superficial Martha Nussbaum in the 1990s to right-wingers and gender-critical feminists today, have avoided the sort of serious engagement with the philosophical background and antitotalitarian politics that lies behind her ideas about gender. Only after apprehending that background, however, can we appreciate the appeal and the inadequacy of her thinking—although readers uninterested in philosophy but curious about smut may want to scroll all the way down to the final section and its discussion of Butler’s mysteriously problematic sex life, which holds a likely clue, within the terms of her own philosophy, to what has gone astray in her thinking—and ours.

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In 1979, after her undergraduate years at Bennington and Yale, Butler studied in Germany on a Fulbright scholarship under the supervision of the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), who had been immersed in the development of a “hermeneutic” account of the philosophy of Hegel. For many previous commentators, “Hegelianism” had been the name of a comprehensive system that explained the structure of thought and the trajectory of history, showing how both culminated in the “Absolute Knowledge” offered in Hegel’s own writings (and instantiated, depending on the political leanings of the commentator, in the conservative modernist Prussian state, or in a not-yet-fully-realized egalitarian project identified either with progressive liberalism or Marxism). In Gadamer’s essays on Hegel, however (gathered in the book Hegel’s Dialectic, published in English in 1976), the thinking of the latter appeared quite differently—fluid, digressive and resistant to any fixation in a ‘system,’ let alone a political ideology.

Hegel, as Gadamer explained him, provided a way to make sense of the inevitable and endless slippage between the dynamism of life, on the one hand, and, on the other, our relatively static ideas. We cannot live as thinking beings, Gadamer observed, without ideas, i.e., concepts, categories, and classifications that allow us to group phenomena together as being the same kind of thing—and, in a further step, as behaving according to the “laws” that govern the behavior of such kinds of things. The world is for us, insofar as we think about it, a world of names (“that’s a tree … that’s a rock …”) and norms (“trees lose their leaves in fall … rocks don’t move unless pushed …”). But, of course, the world is also, and really, a world of individual, specific things that are always not quite in alignment with their categories and are constantly changing, becoming something else.

Ideas can only deal with what Gadamer called in a significant passage “types” and “genera”—the Latin term from which our word gender derives. We think in terms of abstractions, labels imposed on “different individuals.” However, “what is real is the individual,” the particular, concrete thing before me, and not the label that I use to name it, or the laws that I think apply to things thus named. Every real thing is different from every other real thing, including every other real thing in what we say is “its category.” And everything is, slowly or quickly, becoming different from itself (the acorn is becoming a tree, the tree is becoming a rotted log, etc.).

Gadamer put it thus in a rhetorical flourish: “The real world as it exists in opposition to the ‘truth’ of the law is thus perverted. Things do not occur in it in a way that would correspond to the ideas of an abstract mathematician or a moralist. Indeed, the live reality of it consists precisely in its perversion.” Everything that exists is, in his evocative language, a “pervert,” going against the supposed rules of its genus or gender. Perversion, that unexpected but inevitable nonconformity to labels and expectations, is just what living is.

The fact that everything—and everyone—is, in Gadamer’s terms, a pervert, does not mean that labels and laws, names and norms, should be seen as irrelevant or pernicious. The task of philosophy is to help us bear the tension introduced by our becoming self-conscious of the gap between our limited, static, flattening concepts (without which we cannot think) and the wild diversity and continual change in which all the world’s beings participate.

Many followers of Hegel have been tempted to endorse various flavors of totalitarianism, believing that they possess, through their mastery of Hegel’s system, the “Absolute Knowledge” in light of which the world should be administered. Gadamer’s reading of Hegel, in contrast, would seem to block any such political crusades. Instead, we are invited to contemplate the unbridgeable distance between our ideas and the world, and our unending but never wholly successful attempts to reduce that distance, in an attitude of ironic tolerance.

For Gadamer—who had been at one time a disciple of the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, and had lived through the catastrophe of the Third Reich—finding an approach to philosophy (and an interpretation of modern German philosophy in particular) that could protect philosophers from dangerous political temptations had obvious and important stakes. If philosophy were animated by the attempt to articulate a comprehensive logical system, it could become the faith of potentially oppressive political activists. If philosophy, however, were seen as a way of life by which individuals learn to play with ideas in a skeptical, nondogmatic, open-ended manner, it could curb political zealotry.

This sounds, perhaps, like the background for what we might call a queer liberalism, one that accepts a range of variation in personal belief and self-expression as the natural epistemic and ethical consequences of our perverse existence. Butler, in her work throughout the ’80s, seemed to wish to be such a queer liberal. Her academic research added a new layer to Gadamer’s reading of Hegel, drawing on a set of French thinkers to consider what a nontotalizing philosophy might require to become not only an abstract ideal but a compelling way of life.

Meanwhile, in her writings addressed to lesbian feminists within and outside academia, she chided activists who embraced simplistic, polemical stances that pitted all women against all men, and who decried pornography, BDSM, and other sexual practices as necessarily demeaning to women. Resisting censorship, moralism and facile identity politics—while also skeptical of libertarian cliches that simply celebrated personal freedom—Butler linked her philosophy to the nuanced and thoughtful questioning of desires, identities, and slogans. Her role, however reluctant, as chief ideologue of today’s gender wars turns Gadamer’s defense of apolitical philosophical perversity inside out.

***

After her Fulbright study with Gadamer, Butler returned to Yale to write a dissertation deeply shaped by his influence. It was ostensibly a work of historical scholarship, tracing the impact of Hegel’s thought in 20th-century France. The early ’80s were an exciting time to be working on such a topic. What was coming to be called “French theory” or postmodernism—the thought of figures like Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva and others—was arriving in American humanities departments, stoking controversies and transforming intellectual life. “French theory,” or “Theory,” itself was the product of a cultural exchange (some would say, a misunderstanding), as a set of German thinkers, such as Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, were taken up in new ways by French readers.

Positioning herself as an expert both on the history of German philosophy and its contemporary French reception, able to explain their ongoing hybridization to an American audience thrilled and confused by “Theory,” Butler started her career with promise. The danger was, however, that she had to keep up with a rapidly evolving field—and jealous rivals. Finishing her dissertation in 1984, she rushed to publish it as a book in 1987, adding sections on the recently deceased Foucault, whose work she had only begun to understand (many of the lectures and essays necessary for a sober evaluation of Foucault’s thought have only become available, even in French, in recent years).

The book, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France, was savaged in a review by Robert Buford Pippin, then about to complete his own magisterial (albeit barely readable) Hegel’s Idealism, which would cement his own status as America’s chief Hegel explainer. Pippin, heir to a different lineage of German scholarship, was critical of Gadamer’s interpretation of Hegel (which, he implied, reduced Hegel’s holistic philosophy to pre-Hegelian truisms) and even more critical of the French reception of Hegel. Pippin’s negative review of Butler’s book, in which he exercised on a junior scholar his rage at broader intellectual trends, hampered her chances of a career in the field of philosophy, and doubtless contributed to her shift soon after to the new pastures of gender (if only he could have foreseen the consequences!).

Subjects of Desire is, it must be said, not the finest scholarship. Butler’s treatment of the French thinkers she discussed is hurried and partial. Overlooking these flaws, it deserves to be read as an intriguing attempt to draw on Hegel to give an account of what Butler called the “philosophical life”—a way of living founded on the sort of open-ended quest for truth Gadamer had seen in Hegel—and its relationship to “desire.”

Desire—particularly desire for another person, to be recognized by another person, to be the kind of person who would be, in turn, desired by that other person—has throughout the ages struck defenders of a more rational, orderly and systematic conception of philosophy as a threat to their enterprise. Kant condemning masturbation and Socrates (supposedly) refusing Alcibiades’ advances are philosophy’s equivalent of the desert monks who fled the world to perfect their contemplation of higher things. But if, like Butler, we take philosophy to be less the search for an ideal system than a kind of epistemic and ethical exercise for improving our ability to apprehend the world in its multiplicity and mutability, then desire can appear to be a friend of philosophy. What, after all, opens us up, wrests us from our routines and mental ruts, more powerfully than love—and what reveals more clearly that within categories like "human beings," "men," "women," etc., there are remarkably singular individuals whose difference from all other members of their type is as precious as it is unaccountable?

If the philosophical life, purged of potentially totalitarian aspirations for absolute truth, is a life of desire, then it is also, obviously, a life of risk. Desire—as every reader surely has experienced—can be disappointing, and even delusional. Butler seems to signal this danger by beginning Subjects of Desire with a discussion of Blanche DuBois, who took the streetcar named Desire to a bad end. Passing herself off, unsuccessfully, as a kind of person she was not, the faded Southern belle acted on her own desires and was victimized by those of others, and finally lost her sanity and freedom. Butler thus cautioned readers from the outset that a desirous, adventuresome philosophy might destroy us, if not tempered by a moderating capacity for self-awareness, which she linked to comic irony.

Throughout the book, and with special emphasis in her concluding paragraph, she urged readers to cultivate an ability to “make fun of ourselves” as we try to live philosophically and erotically. Self-mockery resembles desire in its ability to disrupt our old certainties and the stories we tell about ourselves. But unlike desire, which opens us up by attaching us to someone or something else, this self-reflexive sort of comedy does not fixate us elsewhere. Rather, it temporarily and provisionally locates us in the perspective of an imagined observer, from whose vantage we can see, and even enjoy, how silly we must look. With a “laugh of recognition,” we acquire a clearer idea of ourselves—and thus a greater degree of power to become different from who we had, without realizing it, been until now. To be a life, philosophy needs desire; to be decently livable, both need irony.

All of this seems as far as can be from Butler’s present-day thinking about gender. Now, neither the concepts and norms that organize society, nor the ways we and other people understand ourselves, appear to be open for healthy-minded, half-serious questioning, motivated by a passionate quest for wisdom tempered by a comic appreciation of how easily we delude ourselves. Instead, concepts and norms appear as an invariably grim and oppressive matrix within which we vainly but valiantly struggle, while the stories that people tell about themselves must be accepted as unquestionable.

To doubt others’ “self-identification,” Butler now claims, is to attack their dignity and freedom; to accept, even with ironic and skeptical provisos, traditional categories is to support oppression. Butler has managed to find, within the tolerant, liberal, antitotalitarian Hegelianism of Gadamer, the means to wage a polemical—and self-contradictory—campaign for and against gender, a term, after all, that names both the norms (gender as a cultural system) she abhors and the self-interpretations (gender as personal identity) that she defends.

***

Butler’s understanding of what she eventually came to call “gender” was shaped profoundly by Maurice Natanson (1924-96), an American Jewish philosopher who is today obscure. Natanson, Butler’s dissertation adviser when she returned to Yale, was an expert on mid-20th-century European philosophies of existentialism and phenomenology. His most important work for understanding Butler is The Journeying Self: A Study in Philosophy and Social Role (1970).

The Journeying Self combines philosophical concern for personal authenticity with a sociological understanding that role-playing characterizes every aspect of our lives. What is perhaps unique to Natanson is his sense that these two facets of his work are not in a tortured, agonizing friction, such as often had seemed to characterize the writing of earlier existentialists. In his account, our life is best understood as a “journey” through which we come, again and again, to new ways of making sense of ourselves, others, and our common world, by means of the masks that we wear, put aside, sometimes contemplate. “Social roles,” Natanson argued, “are the necessary condition for the emergence of the identity of the ego and remain essential to its expression as a being in the world.”

Previous thinkers who combined philosophy with an awareness of society and history (foremost among them, Hegel), to be sure, had called attention to the social dimension of the “categories” through which we think. I do not see, for example, a unique, unprecedented, confusing object (or flux of sensations) in front of me—or I do not merely see that; I also, and perhaps most fundamentally, see (it to be) a table, a member of the category "table," a category that exists for me only because I have been given it by other members of my linguistic community.

Refining this insight, Natanson further argued that thinking is always social because it not only uses “categories” but a more particular kind of concept he called “types,” in a process he called “typification.” Although most of the time we are no more conscious of this fact than we are of the fact our perception of this table involves the use of the category "table" (which is social in origin), our thinking depends on our having a continual sense of ourselves as “performing” the actions appropriate to a specific kind of person, a member of a group larger than our individual self but smaller than the whole of humanity. When we philosophize, for example, we imagine ourselves to be doing an activity of a philosophical type, the sort of thing that the human type "The Philosopher" does. We are acting out a role, wearing a mask, playing a part, even when we are thinking by ourselves.

Natanson’s teaching suggests that we have neither a core, unchanging self to be contrasted with the multiple guises that we adopt in our dealings with others, nor a capacity to be pushed by the force of thinking out of such role-playing. To be sure, moments in which we experience relative isolation from others, disgust with the roles that we have thought ourselves required to play, or the bracing challenge of thinking that upends our sense of who we are and what society is, are part of our lives—and we may try to organize our lives, as it were, philosophically, either in light of what we take to be the consequences of such moments, or in order to have more of them. Natanson held, however, that these moments do not reveal some basic structure of human existence that is somehow truer than or prior to our ordinary, commonplace experience of being able to use categories, types, roles, etc., with a great deal of ease and sureness. At bottom, he argued, there is a “solidarity of consciousness and world,” meaning that who we are and what we think is, however things might appear to us in moments of alienation, inseparable from (indeed an emanation of) nature and society, which we, in turn, live within and think by “typifying” the things and people around us, as well as ourselves. We are fundamentally typed and typing beings.

While many other philosophers have presented the most authentic, real, or important aspect of our life and thinking as the rare sort of wrenching experience by which we separate ourselves from society’s common sense or our own old self to encounter a dazzling new truth or at least a more honest ignorance, Natanson has a different ideal, which he names “transcendence.” This is a lifelong process by which we learn how to act out the roles available to us in ways that we can recognize as fulfilling our own freedom and potential, through a “continuing spiral of decision through which the concrete individual establishes his stance in mundane life.” Natanson presented the task of philosophy as one of helping (in league with art and religion) individuals to understand that acting out their social identities in the world is not antithetical to ethical authenticity or true thinking but is precisely what authenticity and thinking are properly about.

Butler rarely cites Natanson in her work, and the relationship between them might not appear obvious at first glance. Two shifts, at least, mark the difference between his thinking and hers. First, the connection between individual and social life that Natanson analyzes through a vocabulary of role, type, etc., is analyzed by Butler, from the late 1980s on, through the vocabulary of gender. Second, Natanson’s relative hopefulness about the possibility of “transcendence” through role-playing—his sense that by taking on new roles and acting out our old roles differently we are increasing our power to relate freely to our socially imposed identities—is replaced in Butler’s work by a series of alternative affects that she associates with the most potent mode of intellectual freedom, each decreasingly joyous in tone: in Subjects of Desire, comic self-knowledge, in Gender Trouble, subversive “parody,” and, in her later work, by “melancholy”—concepts on a downward slope away from the idea that playing a role can be a fulfilling experience.

Butler’s first significant scholarly invocation of “gender”—a term just then being popularized in the American social sciences, as a replacement for the terminology of “sex role” or “sex-based role,” referring to the ways men and women, on the basis of biological difference, are socially coerced into playing different ranges of social types—came in a 1986 article, “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex.” The title already made what would become a characteristic sort of mistake. There is, speaking literally, no such thing as “sex and gender” in The Second Sex (1949), the critical text of midcentury existentialist feminism.

There is, of course, as the title indicates, sex, and there are sexes that divide humanity in two. We have sexed bodies, with penises or vaginas (and in rare cases some third intermediary, combinatory, or other alternative), and experience those bodies, along with our psyches, as having attributes of masculinity and femininity through what Beauvoir called “myths” about how men and women are and should be. Crucially, these myths are not simply binary (there are men and there are women) but multiple, expansive, and historically shifting—we think individual women, and universal womanhood, through archetypes like the mother, the girl, the vamp, the lesbian, etc. Nor, indeed, is The Second Sex, a call for the abolition of the biological category of woman. The idea of separating nature and culture as “sex” and “gender” would appear suspect within the horizon of Beauvoir’s thought, which assumes that we never encounter facts (which are, nevertheless, real) of any kind, or our own bodies, except through our continually active imaginations and interpretations of them. We are, fundamentally, self-interpreting beings, even in our apparently most unmediated experiences of our flesh—and, because the facts we are always interpreting are also real, we can be wrong about them and misinterpret ourselves. Authenticity, in Beauvoir’s account, names the proper way of accepting our constitutive mix of determination (by our bodies, and by our cultures) and freedom, as we try to avoid being deceived either by the lures of our culture (which solicits us to identify with illusory figures that promise impossible happiness) and our own fantasies of transcending our disappointingly limited—and sometimes frustratingly real—bodies and histories.

This excursus on Beauvoir reminds us that earlier generations of feminists were by no means unaware that the social roles available to women were masks, personae, imposed on them. Women, in their oppressed situation, had fewer and worse masks available to them than men, and less capacity to play enjoyably with their roles. Feminism could be understood, from within this conception, as the positive task of increasing the roles and freedom of role-playing for women—not as the negative one of abolishing role-playing as such, or abolishing "woman" as a category. It certainly could not be understood as an imperative to accept the roles that other people play, and their manner of playing those roles, as necessarily worthy of acceptance and affirmation. Neither “gender abolition” nor the logic of “self-identification” make sense if human existence is understood as essentially related to the taking up and acting out of what Natanson called roles and Beauvoir called myths.

Read the rest of Blake’s essay here.