Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Quoted: Janet Halley on intellectuals and identity politics

[...] the proliferation on the left of minoritizing identity-based vocabularies in which high-priority political and moral claims can be made only by the "marginalized" and the "silenced," the subordination-theoretical assumptions that power is always bad; the fact that so many intellectuals and politically productive contributors to this politics work in humanities departments, and that these departments are in deep crisis, experienced as powerless about their place in the university; the seeming inability of most participants in these politics to move beyond a certain sentimental and moralistic view of law and legal action in which nothing short of a complete and total vindication by the Supreme Court is legal power. -- Janet Halley from Split Decisions: How and Why To Take a Break from Feminism.