Sometimes. Perhaps because she writes too much, some of her stuff isn't up to her usual standards in terms of prose. I'm finding that out the hard way, as I assigned Frontiers of Justice this semester on the assumption that it'd be fairly readable for the students. It contains some brutal writing. I expect if she'd spent another month or so with that manuscript, focusing on revising the prose, it would have been a substantially improved book.

Doesn't surprise me Nussbaum would mess that up, actually. Not only is the Butler passage an incredibly bad piece of writing, but Nussbaum has a different yet equally glaring vice: she writes beautifully, but way too much and far too quickly.

Adding to the problem, Nussbaum is a genius at getting tonnes of mileage out of other peoples' ideas. Similar to Butler in that respect, although at least Nussbaum credits them clearly and liberally. Still, she's like a scholarly mutant fusion of Malcolm Gladwell, Oprah Winfrey, and ... well, someone who writes real good.

Read it? Good. If you are a theorist, and can read, you should have noticed this: Nussbaum wildly misunderstands--inverts--Butler's point. B. charts a move beyond standard Althusserian Marxism, while Nussbaum takes her to be advocating a move from classical Marxism to (an unreconstructed version of) Althusser. Is Butler's passage poorly written? Certainly. Is her position persuasive? I am, for a variety of reasons, critical. But for the present purposes, my interest is rather in this question: is her point ascertainable by someone with competence in contemporary continental theory? Yes. My upper-level undergraduates could parse Butler pretty accurately. Indeed--I have put this to the empirical test--they can read Nussbaum and, on their own, identify where and how she fundamentally misreads Butler. If you can't, I hope you won't be applying for a job in my department any time soon.

Actually, simmel, plenty of folks in the humanities who are nowhere near pomo write like this. Really, I'm surprised you don't know this.