system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Martha Nussbaum on the profesor of parody

Martha Nussbaum writes a criticism of Judith Butler works, and more importantly her "way" of arguing and theorizing.

> Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness

Is there a name or influence that we could group those types of works together? a umbrella where they more or less fit? 

She claims

> These developments owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought. Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual
does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action. Many have also derived from the writings of Michel Foucault ...

and cites Focault as one example. However I keep seeing here people deying that Focault was a postmodernist or that we can use the word postmodernism to describe this particular kind of work. In fact, for the way that is argued in this sub, I started thinking that the label of postmodernism had no possible application whatsoever to anyone. 

Regardless if you disagree with Nussbaum she is clearly no hack or bad philosopher, so can someone tell me what characteristics shares those works that she is criticizing? what do they seem to offer that other kind of analytic and rigorous, less based on personal experiences, work lacks?
gpt
> Regardless if you disagree with Nussbaum she is clearly no hack or bad philosopher, so can someone tell me what characteristics shares those works that she is criticizing? what do they seem to offer that other kind of analytic and rigorous, less based on personal experiences, work lacks?

Both Nussbaum and the philosophers she is criticizing put a high priority on clear and precise use of language. This is fundamental of philosophy in general, so claims by Nussbaum that you cite above basically just miss the point and is a symptom of how different traditions approach clarity and precision of language. 

Nussbaum comes out of a tradition of philosophy, analytic philosophy, that was born out of a movement against German Idealism of the time and put a high priority in common sense, by way of G.E. Moore, and precise language and logic, by way of Bertrand Russell. Part of this inception of analytic philosophy is in the combined work of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, which has since been called "ideal language philosophy." The goal of ideal language philosophy, as it's said, was to create a logically perfect language that was absolutely free of the ambiguities of ordinary language. While the goal of ideal language philosophy was never reached, it's influence was profound on thought in general, not just within analytic philosophy but in logic in general as well as computer science. The computer in which you are reading this is written in programming language can be traced in part to Frege's work. 

In reaction to this, still within analytic philosophy, was ordinary language philosophy, which drew greater influence from G.E. Moore, and argued that philosophical problems did not arise from the lack of an logically precise ideal language but rather from misunderstanding and confusing different ways of speaking within ordinary language. Once we understand why ordinary language is used the way it is in various circumstances, then we can dissolve whatever philosophical problem that has arisen. 

Both of these traditions within analytic philosophy influence the way Nussbaum approaches philosophical language, in one way precise and another common sensual. 

The tradition of philosophy that she finds in Butler, and by extension Michel Foucault, is no less concerned with precision and clarity of language in philosophy. In fact the since-named "linguistic turn" in analytic philosophy in no small way also played out in so-called continental philosophy through the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. However, whereas analytic philosophy approached language either by building anew from logical principles or observing how language is used in various forms of life, continental philosophical approaches viewed language as an entire system of relations which give meaning through things like binary oppositions, sign and signified, etc., by way of Saussure's structural linguistics, or by scrutinizing the historical development of language, by way of Nietzsche and Heidegger. In a sense, continental philosophy is closer to ideal language philosophy in that it more or less considers ordinary language to obscure matters but, to use the analogy, the solution is to untie or at least expose the larger Gordian knot instead of either cutting right through or letting it be within a language-game.

So Nussbaum might see a term like "human rights" and might consider it within the logical structure of the proposition it's used and/or how it's used in the context in which it is used. However, for someone like Butler or Foucault, "human rights" already entails a relation to its opposite and the overall structure of meaning that it's used within and/or its historical relations and the baggage of meaning that carries with it. 

If there's any solution, it's recognizing the implicit views one has of philosophy of language, either organically or learned, and recognizing other ways of speaking clearly and precisely about philosophy.