What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way. Nick Cohen

theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

      To ask what Butler means is to miss the point, said Dutton. ‘This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it.’

      The response of the theorists was instructive. Instead of accepting that they were going badly wrong, they produced books in defence of bad writing. The authors of Critical Terms for Literary Study turned on opponents who claimed their ‘artificially difficult style,’ hid the truth that the theorists had ‘nothing to say’. The fault was in our readers not in ourselves, the authors replied. ‘The project of theory is unsettling’ because ‘it brings assumptions into question’. They admitted that some theorists could be self-indulgent on occasion, but said that the writing of others was difficult for ‘compelling reasons’. They went into dangerous territories and questioned the preconceptions of the thoughtless. Conservative readers were ‘frightened off’ and ‘dismissed’ theory with a defensive horror because they couldn’t handle the red-raw radicalism on the page.

      Such supercilious self-regard led Ophelia Benson of The Philosophers’ Magazine to remark acidly:

      Ah – so that’s it. It’s not that the writing is bad, it’s that the readers who think it’s bad are 98-pound weaklings who turn pale and sick at unsettling projects. They are ‘frightened off’, the poor cowardly things, by the ‘difficulty’ of theory – not the ineptitude, mind you, or the slavish imitativeness, or the endless formulaic repetition of repetition – no, the difficulty. So as a result they ‘can dismiss’ theory – not laugh at, not hold up to scorn and derision, or set fire to or thrust firmly into the bin or take back to the shop and loudly demand a refund – no, dismiss. And dismiss ‘as an effort to cover up in an artificially difficult style the fact that it has nothing to say’. Well – yes, that’s right, as a matter of fact. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.