http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/5087/features/adorno-butler-and-the-death-of-irony/
Irony cannot exist in isolation; something is ironic only in relation to a larger pattern of events or behavior. Every three years, on the birthday of the German Jewish philosopher Theodore Adorno, September 11, the city of Frankfurt awards its Adorno Prize to honor scholarly achievement in philosophy, music, film, and theater, all areas in which Adorno worked. This year, Frankfurt gave the prize to Judith Butler. Adorno famously stated that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Giving the prize to Butler, a Jewish American feminist philosopher and Israel boycott advocate, raises the question of whether irony, like poetry, still exists.
Butler, a leading figure in “Queer Studies,” is better known as an “engaged academic.” The Adorno Prize, supposedly given for scholarship, has gone to an academic who has erased the line between intellectual endeavor and political advocacy. Her views on Israel are well known. She supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. She has described Hezbollah and Hamas as “social movements that are progressive” and “part of a global Left.” She refuses to lecture in Israel, preferring universities in the West Bank.
Butler has called for a Judaism that is “not associated with state violence.” She complains that “precisely because . . . as a Jew, one is under obligation to criticize excessive state violence and state racism, . . . one is told that one is either self-hating as a Jew or engaging anti-Semitism.” Her recent book Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism is an elaborate anti-Zionist statement, explicitly animated by the spirits of Hannah Arendt and Edward Said, a kind of secular diasporic Jewish theology that calls Palestinian “dispossession” an affront which can be rectified only by the “dismantling of the structure of Jewish sovereignty and demographic advantage”—i.e., a binational Israel.
