Books as objects of attraction? Is that what brought Butler and Gucci together? I don’t mean the commodification of Bodies That Matter, for there is nothing surprising there. After all, Gucci is a capitalist enterprise driven by the desire to maximise profit. Just like any other player of market games, it is inherently predatory, programmed to detect anything that sells. In today’s world, identity sells. There was something else, though, something new — the elevation of identity into an object of desire, the eroticization of knowledge, indeed of the books themselves.
This anti-neoliberal stance also lies at the core of Butler’s more recent crusade against what they call the “new fascism” and its “war on gender”. Neoliberalism is depriving people of basic social services, they say in a lecture they gave at The University of Cambridge in April 2023, pointing to the many lives decimated by corporate extractivism and the destruction of the planet. Do they know that most of the embroidery work of Gucci’s exuberant collections — “emblazoned with tigers and butterflies” — is produced in Mumbai by workers with no employment benefits or protections? Or that five employees of one of Gucci’s flagship stores in Shenzhen, China, wrote an open letter on the internet about their exploitation and ill-treatment which led to a miscarriage of one of the women employees?
There is nothing revolutionary or progressive about this individual empowerment-driven, narcissistic pastime activism, though. In fact, it’s very much part of the problem. As we’ve seen, the stylish Left not only commodifies but fetishizes identity, turning the self into a political project, often at the expense of the collective. It also reconfigures this new commodity — “the-self-as-political-project” — as an object of desire, imbuing the whole process with an aura of moral righteousness. “Words transfigure into an amorous lexicon” and “wisdom offers itself as an erotic body to know and smell”. At this point, the author ceases to be a figure to be engaged with, instead becoming an idol to be worshipped and obeyed. This is the death of intellectualism and critical thinking that Butler and the broader movement they represent project onto the reactionary Right. It’s of course true that we are faced with an extremist backlash, a new form of fascism bent on destroying the values we hold dear. Yet the identitarian Left isn’t immune to the relations of production that nurture the backlash. It’s part of the neoliberal ecosystem, blithely mimicking the ways of the Right, in particular its disdain for dissent and its totalizing mentality (which leads Butler to lump, say, gender critical feminists together with the likes of Putin, Meloni and Pope Francis).
From a longer article at https://thecritic.co.uk/luxury-politics-and-the-left/
Just to add that none of the article made sense to me, but was taken aback at what it appeared to be talking about, even if it is only in relation to a small rich elite group.