A couple of years ago the Guardian published an article of Jessica Valenti’s of memorably annoying vacuity - I distinctly recollect muttering “oh, for fuck’s sake” to myself whilst reading it, the way I used to with everything of Tanya Gold’s until she unexpectedly turned quite good. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Trust me on this one - when you’re a feminist, day-to-day life is better. You make better decisions. You have better sex. I have a job that I love that I owe to feminism (as a writer and one of the founders of feministing.com). I have an amazing group of women friends who spend their days speaking out against sexist idiocy - and who also happily dance their asses off with me when we’re out clubbing. Where criticisms about my loud, opinionated ways might bother me if I wasn’t a feminist, the fact that I am means that I know that there’s nothing wrong with me, but only with a world that doesn’t want women to speak their minds. And I have better relationships. In fact, as I was getting ready for the photoshoot for this article, the guy I’m dating (who also calls himself a feminist) tidied up for me so the photographer wouldn’t see what a tip my apartment is at the weekends. Would my pre-feminist boyfriends have done that? I don’t think so.

I find it difficult to imagine ever being friends with anyone who didn’t find this unbearable. Much of the difficulty comes from not knowing how I could ever explain why I myself found it unbearable to someone who didn’t just automatically get it. The passage above is so demoralisingly PR-perky as to sap almost all the energy required to make the transition from sub-vocalised impatience to coruscating retort.

Fortunately, IT thought it worth the (heroic) necessary effort; and her One-Dimensional Woman does a fine job of reading Valenti’s fatuous advertising copy as an ideological symptom, a sign of the times. Valenti’s response demonstrates perfectly the hostility to thought, the pre-emptive smothering of imagination, that shields the reality-system with which her putative feminism seeks to accommodate itself. Accusations of “elitism” are not only the last but also, invariably, the immediate resort of those who have accepted the capitalist injunction to “live without ideas” (as Badiou puts it). No further argument will ever be produced.

“Elitists” are those whose thought is abstract because it is concerned with the deadly abstractions which dominate our lives, and because it aims at a future incompatible with our dominated present. In point of fact, Nina’s writing is far more urgently and hectically involved with the “bodies and languages” of our common world than the most lavishly anecdotal self-help book; but it also, as Natalie Hanman rightly identifies, turns the intense focus of the “theoretical lens” on that world, in order to burn a hole through its apparent self-evidence and inevitability. This is the task of an “elite” from which everyone is equally excluded by the demand that we remain without ideas: an “elite” that already includes all of us insofar as we are capable of participating in thought.