A poster-woman for moral narcissism

More on Judith Butler and her controversial Adorno Prize award, from Richard Landes:

And Germany. What on earth are they up to? They have a prize dedicated, in Adorno's memory to promote "the liberal and enlightening spirit" Adorno so decisively and exactingly labored to encourage by stripping away false consciousness. They choose, already well into the second decade of the new and deeply troubled century, to continue to hold up as an example of "cutting edge" intellectual achievement, a poster-woman for moral narcissism who, in abiding (willful) ignorance of the forces opposed to that spirit, has systematically encouraged its worst enemies. It's of a piece with a European intellectual elite so addicted to their anti-Americanism that they, in utter contempt for their own exceptional intellectual traditions, consider Noam Chomsky the leading American intellectual.

But read the whole thing.

Previously - and see Richard P's quotation from Minima Moralia in the comments, where Adorno skewers exactly the kind of fashionably progressive intellectual that Butler represents.

Update: the long version of Landes' piece is here.

Comments

[Noga]

The in-your-face nature and date of awarding the prize to Butler does raise legitimate perplexity on the part of thoughtful people. What can be the meaning of it? It seems so inappropriate and misguided as to be almost clownish.