Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom

Linda M. G. Zerilli

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226814056
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

In contemporary feminist theory, the problem of feminine subjectivity persistently appears and reappears as the site that grounds all discussion of feminism. In Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, Linda M. G. Zerilli argues that the persistence of this subject-centered frame severely limits feminists' capacity to think imaginatively about the central problem of feminist theory and practice: a politics concerned with freedom.Offering both a discussion of feminism in its postmodern context and a critique of contemporary theory, Zerilli here challenges feminists to move away from a theory-based approach, which focuses on securing or contesting "women" as an analytic category of feminism, to one rooted in political action and judgment. She revisits the democratic problem of exclusion from participation in common affairs and elaborates a freedom-centered feminism as the political practice of beginning anew, world-building, and judging. In a series of case studies, Zerilli draws on the political thought of Hannah Arendt to articulate a nonsovereign conception of political freedom and to explore a variety of feminist understandings of freedom in the twentieth century, including ones proposed by Judith Butler, Monique Wittig, and the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective. In so doing, Zerilli hopes to retrieve what Arendt called feminism's lost treasure: the original and radical claim to political freedom.

CHAPTER ONE

Feminists Know Not What They Do: Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and the Limits of Epistemology

Theory in itself is a doing, the always uncertain attempt to realize the project of clarifying the world.

—CORNELIUS CASTORIADIS

A CELEBRITY FEMINIST theorist of the postmodern variety goes to a conference on identity in New York City. After presenting a paper charting the demise of women as a unified category, she is confronted by a hostile member of the audience who accuses her of betraying feminism. Feminism, the practice, needs a subject called women, declares the irate spectator; a subject that feminism, the theory, has dissolved in its skeptical flight from the ordinary. In a voice pitched well above the ordinary, this spectator emphatically asserts her confidence in the existence of “real women” (like herself) and concludes by asking the speaker, “How would you know that there are women right here in this room?” To this agitated rhetorical query the weary postmodern feminist replies rather matter-of-factly, “Probably the same way you do.”¹

With debates concerning the so-called category of women mercifully behind us, such scenes would appear to have little continuing significance, save as illustrations of the peculiar pathos of that particular episode in the development of American feminist theory.² To say that these debates are over, however, is by no means to declare them settled. True, the dramatic escalation of the stakes of theorizing in the 1990s has yielded to a bland consensus about “the differences among women.” But what does that consensus really mean? What kinds of shared assumptions and deep divisions does it conceal?

Although the call to attend to difference helped unmask a false homogeneity in the fundamental categories of feminism, it has in turn masked the discontents of feminist theorizing itself. It is as if the concept of difference were a magical substance that could not only eviscerate the legacy of exclusion in feminism but also settle fundamental questions about what theory is and how it relates to praxis. Both second- and third-wave feminists have been deeply concerned with the relation between the theoretical and the practical—agreeing implicitly or explicitly with the Marxist dictum that the point is to change the world, not merely interpret it—but they have not really clarified the relationship between interpretation and change. Proclaiming that theory ought to relate to praxis, feminists have for the most part either left the exact nature of the relation obscure or, worse, tended to define it (albeit often unwittingly) as unidirectional, with theory comprising the universal concepts that are applied in rule-like fashion to the particulars of politics. Should that one-sided relation be deemed untenable, as many feminists of the third wave hold, it seems as if our only recourse is to abandon theory and settle on mere description. But then it appears as if the price for refusing the universalizing impulse of theory is the inability to say something beyond the particular case.

If feminist critique entails “the transfiguration of the commonplace,” to borrow Arthur Danto’s phrase, then mere description—leaving aside the whole question of whether any description is not always theory-laden—does nothing to bring particulars into an unexpected, critical relation with each other such that we can see any particular object, not to mention our own activity, anew.³ Likewise, if feminist critique entails taking account of the inaugural character of what Arendt calls action, then a theoretical enterprise centered on formulating hypotheses, concepts, or models that can explain and predict the regularities of sex/gender relations fails to comprehend its own subject matter and leads us to misunderstand what is at stake in our own political praxis. We need a freedom-centered mode of feminist critique that would resist the temptation to reach beyond the common to transfigure the commonplace, that is, a place outside our practices from which to form universal concepts under which to subsume particulars in the name of predicting and achieving social change. If that be the task of this chapter, it should be understood in therapeutic rather than prescriptive terms. Rather than offer yet another feminist theory of sex/gender that could function as a rule to be applied to the contingencies of politics, we want to understand at once the nature of the demand for, and rejection of, such a theory.

Theory—The Craving for Generality?

Let us begin by clarifying the two distinct but related views of theory mentioned above: (1) theory is the critical practice of forming universal concepts that can be applied in rule-like fashion to the particulars of lived experience; (2) universal theory as such is fully bankrupt and must be replaced with the art of description which refuses to say anything beyond the particular case at hand. The tendencies are related because, as we shall see below, they both assume that the critical theoretical enterprise itself consists in a universalizing function that illuminates particulars by subsuming them under concepts to produce a total critique. One of the reasons for the use and abuse of postcolonial feminist writings, for instance, may well be that feminists look to those writings to attenuate what appears to be the necessary consequences of this kind of enterprise, what Wittgenstein calls the “craving for generality” and with it “the contemptuous attitude towards the particular case.”⁴ This craving is a product of centuries of philosophical and political thinking; it is a disposition to generalize against which feminists, working with and against that inheritance, are by no means invulnerable. What drove some feminists to produce unified categories that did not attend to the particular case was in part this craving for generality, a craving that animated the hegemonic strand of the feminist theoretical enterprise through the 1980s and into the 1990s and that continues to haunt it even today, if only in the form of its nemesis, the refusal of theory, be that skepticism or radical particularism.

Barely concealed in the category of women debates is the unspoken wish that feminist theory can, and ought to, give an exhaustive account of gender relations and provide a kind of “super-idealized guidance” on how to change them.⁵ We might think of this wish as a desire for solace, a desire that would be satisfied by, and thus incessantly searches out, the perfect theory. The phenomenal influence of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in American feminist circles of the third wave speaks not only to the author’s polemical brilliance but also to our desire for such a theory (even when, as in Butler’s case, the theorist herself calls into question our desire for solace).⁶ Is this desire unreasonable? Hasn’t second-wave American feminist theory itself incited our desire for solace by generating a long chain of causal explanations of women’s oppression which, if rightly understood, could be rightly remedied? Few American feminist theorists writing today would speak of the origin or cause of (all) women’s suffering. But has the desire for solace, that is, for a total theory and a maxim that would tell us how to act politically, disappeared? In light of what we have learned from the category of women debates, surely it is not a matter of creating once and for all a theory that would be so encompassing of the diversity of lived experience, so accurate in its account of cause and effect, so final in its articulation of normative commitments, that it could in fact tell us how so to act.

Driving the tenacious but impossible idea of such a theory is a conception of politics as an instrumental, means-ends activity centered on the pursuit of group interests. This pursuit requires a coherent group (for example, women) with shared concerns. It requires as well the production of knowledge in the form of concepts that function as rules under which to make sense of and order the particulars of women’s lives, knowledge that can be used to articulate political claims and authorize them in the coinage of modern scientific rationality and its practices of justification. In light of many feminists’ more or less uncritical acceptance of this conception of politics, it is not surprising that the critique of a total theory, as it was expressed in the call to attend to differences, precipitated a sense of total political crisis. The source of that crisis, in other words, lies not in the loss of women as the subject of feminism, but in a means-ends view of politics that requires such a coherent, pregiven subject. The possibility of a total theory that this understanding of politics implies treats people themselves as means to an end, as the “passive objects of its theoretical truth,” writes Cornelius Castoriadis, and the world itself as a static object: the last thing it can account for is their political activity, whatever cannot be assimilated to a closed system, namely the new.⁷

Following Castoriadis’s critical account of the crisis of orthodox Marxism, we might say that the exposure of this total theory as a feminist pipe dream led, in the course of the category of women debates, to two different but related responses, which we might now think of as contemporary (and therefore attenuated) versions of the old philosophical battle between dogmatism and skepticism: (1) the critique of the alleged certainties of second-wave feminist theory might well be right, but we have to shut our eyes and blindly affirm them nonetheless in the interests of radical politics (for example, “strategic essentialism”), for such politics cannot get off the ground without foundational knowledge claims and the theory that articulates them; (2) since a total (feminist) theory cannot exist, we are led to abandon the theoretical enterprise if not the feminist project itself, for the latter, to speak with Castoriadis, is now “posited as . . . the blind will to transform at any price something one does not know into something one knows even less” (IIS, 71–72). The responses are related because, though the second is the position rejected by the first, both share the view that without a total theory there can be no conscious action whatsoever, no sense of a common project whose ideals we at once debate and fight for in someone’s name. Absent the rational knowledge that allows us to think present and future social organizations as totalities and gives us at the same time a criterion permitting us to judge them, there is no feminist politics save a decisionistic one (that is, a politics devoid of any particular ideals or normative commitments). In that case, we might as well declare “the end of feminism,” for there is little to differentiate a feminist project from other political projects, including nonfeminist and even antifeminist ones.

To demand that a revolutionary project (such as feminism) “be founded on a complete theory,” writes Castoriadis, “is . . . to assimilate politics to a technique, and to posit its sphere of action—history—as the possible object of a finished and exhaustive knowledge. To invert this reasoning and conclude on the basis of the impossibility of this sort of knowledge that all lucid [that is, theoretically, critically informed], revolutionary politics is impossible amounts, finally, to a wholesale rejection of all human activity and history as unsatisfactory according to a fictitious standard” (IIS, 75). Beholden to an instrumentalist conception of politics, feminists, though most see that such knowledge is neither possible nor desirable, have a harder time seeing how feminism could possibly continue without it or, more precisely, something that approximates it in the sense of providing objective criteria according to which political claims could be defined, articulated, and justified. Feminists therefore find themselves tempted by dogmatism and skepticism, either affirming what they may well know is not the case (for example, “women” is a coherent group) or denying that one can affirm anything political that one does not know (for example, speak in the name of women). And this same logic, carried to its absurd conclusion, hinges the future of feminism on our ability to make a cognitive judgment along the lines of “There are women in the room.”

Castoriadis’s critique of the tendency to assimilate politics to a technique recalls Hannah Arendt’s account of the tendency to think about politics as a form of fabrication or making. To think about politics in this way, Arendt argues, is to imagine “[t]he construction of the public space in the image of a fabricated object,” that is, as an object that exists first as a model in thought, as a set of rules that guide the realization of the model in praxis.⁸ Countering this instrumentalist conception of politics with an action-centered view, Arendt claims that political actors “know not what they do.”⁹ She does not accept here the (Platonic) separation of doing and knowing and the hierarchical distinction between those who know (the philosophers or rulers) and those who do (the demos or ruled).¹⁰ Rather, she questions the very idea that politics as action is a rule-governed activity, prefigured by theory in the form of a model, which has outcomes that can be known in advance of the actual activity itself. Political actors know not what they do, then, not because there are others (the theorists or the philosophers) who do so know, but because, when we act, we cannot know (predict or foresee) what the consequences of our action will be.

This inability to predict the outcome of political action (Arendt) or praxis (Castoriadis) is a problem only according to the requirements of a means-end conception of politics and its fictitious standard of knowledge. Both Castoriadis and Arendt question the idea that politics, as a register of human doing, requires its participants to supply, or be able to supply, a complete theory of their activity. Neither thinker associates this lack of total knowledge with the failure to think critically, with nonreflexive activities, or with the mindless compulsion of habit. Like Wittgenstein, they affirm that our rule-governed practices are underdetermined, that is, that they are neither justified all the way down nor in need of such justification to count as part of a creative and critical relation to the world. More specifically, both Arendt and Castoriadis reject the idea that politics is a means-ends activity based on practices of knowing, that is, of adducing evidence, establishing truth or falsity, providing justification or nonjustification. If politics were “a ‘purely rational’ activity,” writes Castoriadis, “based on an exhaustive, or practically exhaustive, knowledge of its domain,” then “any question relevant for practice and arising out of this domain would be decidable”—decidable, that is, in theory and quite apart from actual praxis—and “confined to positing in reality the means to reach the ends it aims at, and establishing the causes that would lead to the intended results” (IIS, 72).

A Wittigensteinian Reading of the Feminist Foundations Debate

That hardly a feminist would claim politics to be a purely rational activity in no way alters the tendency to cast politics as if it ought to approximate a technique with adequate epistemic tools for establishing the truth or falsity of feminist claims. Some feminists are knowledge producers, working to transform, in the broadest sense, what we know and how we come to know it, as well as the relationship between knower and known. That work is valuable, but the work of feminism as a political movement is not first and foremost epistemic.¹¹ The idea that political claims must be redeemed as claims to knowledge and truth leads feminism away from politics as a practice of freedom (that is, as a contingent, world-building activity, rooted in action and situated in the realm of the probable) and in the direction of either strong or weak versions of both dogmatism and skepticism. As we shall see m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Why Feminism and Freedom Both Begin with the Letter F
• Chapter One: Feminists Know Not What They Do: Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and the Limits of Epistemology
• Chapter Two: Feminists Are Beginners: Monique Wittig’s Les guérillères and the “Problem of the New”
• Chapter Three: Feminists Make Promises: The Milan Collective’s Sexual Difference and the Project of World-Building
• Chapter Four: Feminists Make Judgments: Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy and the Affirmation of Freedom
• Conclusion: Reframing the Freedom Question in Feminism
• Notes
• Index