Daily Inspiration Quote by Catharine MacKinnon

A lawyer-activist’s question masquerading as a theory seminar, MacKinnon’s line is really a warning shot: when everything becomes “discourse,” power slips out of the dock. The verb “hold” does heavy lifting. It isn’t asking whether postmodernism can describe atrocity, or even illuminate it; it’s asking whether a framework built to destabilize truth-claims can still sustain the blunt moral grammar that prosecution requires: intent, harm, responsibility.

MacKinnon is writing in a tradition that’s impatient with intellectual fashion when it starts functioning like an alibi. Postmodernism’s skepticism toward grand narratives can be liberating when it punctures nationalism, racism, or the state’s self-mythology. But in courtrooms and human rights campaigns, the same skepticism can curdle into procedural fog: if truth is contingent, if identity is endlessly constructed, if power is everywhere and therefore nowhere in particular, who exactly did what to whom?

The subtext is feminist and legal at once. MacKinnon spent decades arguing that “neutral” systems routinely fail women because they treat domination as mere difference. Here she extends that critique: a culture that relativizes meaning risks relativizing violence, especially violence that depends on bureaucratic denial and euphemism. Genocide is uniquely parasitic on narrative control; perpetrators already insist it didn’t happen, or didn’t mean what survivors say it meant.

So the question isn’t anti-intellectual. It’s a demand that critique cash out in consequence. If theory can’t name perpetrators without flinching, it may end up repeating the oldest trick of power: making accountability feel unsophisticated.