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I feel the most interesting part of today's discussion began when we were faced with Johnson's claim that "There is politics precisely because there is undecidability."

Firstly, I found it strange that so many of my classmates seemed to believe that literary analysis and politics differed from each other. The idea that the interpretation of the law is any more or less subjective than the interpretation of a poem completely boggles my mind, especially since we seemed to be citing Roe v. Wade as an example. If Roe v. Wade isn't an example of creating interpretations of the law with little to no textual support, I'm sure I can't think of one.

Secondly, while I was not a big fan of the Johnson reading overall (though I feel it was for different reasons than the majority of my classmates), this was one statement I could actually agree with. Perhaps this is because it immediately reminded me of Judith Butler, who, in light of the responses to my web paper, I should admit has already been a heavy influence on the way I think and identify. The idea of politics as reliant on an undecidability seems to me to be easily compared to the politics of identity and the problem with the instability of identity categories, especially those based on notions of "sex", "gender", or "sexuality".

Thirdly, I would like to pose a question (or a string of questions) in response to the debate over this statement. Much of the debate seemed to center around the idea that law was clear and decided. However, law is the written word, and, like all words, it requires constant defining and redefining based on a number of different factors. Is there anything problematic about this perpetual redefinition? Do words, and, therefore, strings of words, or "phrases", need to have definitions which are "decided"? Why does a lack of stability in definition, and thus, in legal interpretation, make people so uncomfortable?