Judith Butler and the Metaphysics of Nonsense “I identify, therefore I am”
Butler is a reactionary figure. Her attack on reason, science, the universality of language, and conceptual clarity is not a progressive liberation, but a surrender to cognitive tribalism. Her philosophy is not an extension of the Enlightenment but a premodern regression.
Few figures have achieved the feat of elevating confusion to the level of dogma with the mastery of Judith Butler. While ancient philosophers struggled to discover the meaning of being, she, with a stoicism worthy of a better cause, has dedicated herself to demonstrating that there is no such being, but only an endless choreography of "performativities" whose sole function seems to be to torment those who still dare to think with their heads and not with a poststructuralist dictionary.
Of course, in her benevolence, Butler has freed us from the tyranny of biology, logic, and common sense, because, as we well know, reality is nothing more than an oppression constructed by the perfidious agents of heteropatriarchy. It no longer matters that the categories of man and woman have been used with a certain consistency by humanity since time immemorial; Now, thanks to the magic of “discourse,” we can free ourselves from those oppressive chains and, with enough conviction and a confusing thesis, self-define as anything from a houseplant to a non-binary divine being.
Butler's great feat, however, is not her skillful use of academic gibberish or her ability to write sentences more indecipherable than a moldy medieval manuscript or a text written in my handwriting. No. Her crowning achievement has been to turn incoherence into a political weapon. Her doctrine has not only given activists the pleasure of denouncing oppression on every street corner—without anyone telling them anything—but it has also allowed an entire generation of “thinkers” to avoid the danger of thinking. Why be precise when you can deconstruct? Why seek the truth when you can claim that truth is just another form of domination?
If Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am," Butlerology offers us something much more sophisticated: "I identify, therefore I am." And if anyone has the bad taste not to accept this premise, they can be accused of "epistemological violence," "cognitive fascism," or any other verbal sin that gender theory sees fit to invent that day. Because, in the world of Butler and Torquemada, debates are not won with arguments but with anathemas.
The most ironic thing of all is that this supposed revolutionary of thought is not actually a transgressor, but a conservative in disguise. Yes, I said it. Butler is, at heart, a reactionary figure. Her attack on reason, on science, on the universality of language and conceptual clarity is not a progressive liberation, but a surrender to cognitive tribalism. His philosophy is not an extension of the Enlightenment but a pre-modern regression in which logos is replaced by myth, evidence by narrative, and argumentation by emotion.
Butlerian postmodernism presents itself as disruptive, but what it breaks with is not the real structures of oppression, but rather the very foundations that allow us to identify them: critical reason, verifiability, internal coherence. What it proposes is not emancipation but a new obscurantism, a paralyzing relativism in which everything is fluid except the dogma it imposes. In the name of liberating the subject, it dissolves it; in the name of the struggle against power, it hands over to each pressure group its own version of the truth, creating a fragmented and unmanageable world where rational communication becomes impossible. And if anyone needs further confirmation of its reactionism, what better than its love for Hamas and the violent and autocratic pre-modern Islamic world?
Butler doesn't open doors, she closes them. She doesn't clarify, she obscures. She doesn't liberate, she disperses. And she does so with the arrogance of someone who knows she can go unpunished, protected by an academy that no longer rewards lucidity but opacity disguised as depth, intolerance disguised as activism. Hers is a philosophy without anchors, without truth, without a world. A philosophy that doesn't say: "this is" or "this should be" but simply: "everything is construction," even the very phrase that affirms it. And when everything is construction, nothing is an argument: everything is reduced to performing anguish, pain, and offense.
We can only thank this illustrious revolutionary of nonsense for having transformed academia into a battlefield where the greatest act of resistance is not intelligence, but absolute and devout surrender to the fog of postmodernism. Because if Judith has taught us anything, it's that clear thinking is an arbitrary construct of power... and the only answer to that is to write more books in which no one understands anything, but everyone is afraid to dissent.
https://revistareplicante.com/judith-butler-y-la-metafisica-del-desproposito/
(Google translate so may have some errors. But posting because I enjoyed reading it and some others on FWR might also.)