PEMINISM AND THE ABYSS OF FREEDOM LINDA M G ZERILLI '/'he Un iv ers it y of Chic ago Press I Chic ago and London LINDA ZERILU is professor of political science at Northwestern University. She is the author of Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos it1 Rousseau, Burke, and Mill. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2005by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2005 Printed in the United States of America 14 131 21 1 100 90 8 07 06 05 1 2 3 4 5 ISBN: 0-226-981(3clo3th-)9 ISBN: 0-226-9813(4pa-pe7r ) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zerilli, Linda M. G. (Linda Marie-Gelsomina), 1956- Feminism and the abyss of freedom I Linda M. G. Zerilli. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-226-981(3ha3rd-c9ov er: alk. paper)­ ISBN 0-226-9813(4pb-k7. : alk. paper) 1.F eminism. 2.F eminist theory. I. Title. HQ1154.Z43250 05 305.42'01-dc22 2004028618 8 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum require­ ments of the American National Standard for Information Sciences­ Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. FOR GREGOR We start something. We weave our strand into a network of relations. What comes of it we never know. We've all been taught to say: Lord forgive them, for they know not what they do. That is true of all action. Quite simply and concretely true, because one cannot know. That is what is meant by a venture. -HANNAH ARENDT CONTENTS l11d.1n� ix i\1 k nowledgments xiii INIRODUCTION Why 1:eminism and Freedom Both Begin with the Letter F 1 I 1rt·dom as a Social Question l·1t·nlom as a Subject Question hl•t•Jom as a World Question h·minism's "Lost Treasure" CHAPTER ONE Feminists Know Not What They Do: Judith Butler's Gender Trouble .md the Limits of Epistemology 33 Theory-The Craving for Generality? A Wittgensteinian Reading of the Feminist Foundations Debate I >oing Gender, Following a Rule Radical Imagination and Figures of the Newly Thinkable Toward a Freedom-Centered Feminist Theory CHAPTER TWO Feminists Are Beginners: Monique Wittig's Les gumlleres and the "Problem of the New" 67 The Limits of Doubt Language as a "War Machine" Renversement No-More and Not-Yet Elles-A Fantastic Universal CHAPTER THREE Feminists Make Promises: The Milan Collective's Sexual Difference and the Project of World-Building 93 Tearing Up the Social Contract The Desire for Reparation The Problem with Equality Discovering Disparity A Political Practice of Sexual Difference Refiguring Rights CHAPTER FOUR Feminists Make Judgments: Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy and the Afafirm tion of Freedom 125 Judgment and the "Problem of the New" The Old Problem of Objectivity Judging without a Concept One Concept of Validity A Political Concept of Validity From World-Disclosure to World-Opening "Being and thinking in my own identity where actualyl I am not" Imagination and Freedom Sensus Communis and the Practice of Freedom CONCLUSION Reframing the Freedom Question in Feminism 165 Feminism's Paradox of Founding What a Political Claim Is Feminism Is a World-Building Practice Recovering Feminism's "Lost Treasure" Notes 183 Index 231 PREFACE � o R A Lo NG time I thought about this book as an attempt to find my w.1y back to what once brought me to feminism: the radical demand for ' womens political freedom, the right to be a participant in public affairs. Ah hough feminism is composed of a wide range of practices-aesthetic, ,.,l·ial, economic, and cultural-the feminist challenge to the androcen­ lno;m of the public sphere and the constitution of alternative spaces of I 1'l'l0dom is what captured and held my interest. Increasingly, however, I Ii nmd myself both fascinated by but also ambivalent about developments 111 second-and third-wave feminism, especially the centrality accorded by hoth waves to questions of identity and subjectivity. However important 1l wse questions seemed-and still seem-to me, I worried about the Ira mework in which they were posed. I could not find in this framework 1l1c feminist demand for political freedom that so inspired me. Instead of insistently claiming political freedom, it seemed, feminism was now d"voted to overcoming the cultural constraints of normative masculinity .ind femininity. As important as such a struggle is, I had trouble seeing how it could possibly occur in the absence of the demand for freedom as I understood it. Concerned as I was about this reframing of freedom as freedom from the constraints of subjectification, I also resisted the nostalgic longing for early second-wave feminism that began to take hold in the 1990s in the wake of the debates around identity politics. I strongly agreed with third­ wave critics who questioned the coherence of the category of women as rhe subject of feminism, though I remained uneasy about the conse­ quences of such questioning for politics. Not least, I worried about acer­ tain tendency toward a renewed dogmatism on the part of feminists for whom critiques of the category of women turned into a politically x I PREFACE destructive skepticism. At a certain point, it seemed that feminists were talking past one another, quarreling about something that was in any case an accomplished fact and hardly the result of anyone's deliberate choice. The view that the collapse of women as a unified category was the fault of "poststructuralist" feminist theorists and to a lesser extent "women of color" struck me as an attempt to kill the message by killing the messen­ ger. It also seemed like a troubling displacement of feminist politics itself. If we no longer speak unthinkingly of women as a group with com­ mon interests based on a common identity, surely that is not attributable solely nor even primarily to the considerable critical energies of third­ wave thinkers like Judith Butler, Chantal Mouffe, or Joan Scott. The eco­ nomic and social developments of late capitalism (for example, the breakup of the labor movement, globalization, and the homework econ­ omy) have resulted in exceedingly complex stratifications among women nationally and internationally which cannot be grasped solely in terms of gender relations. More to the point, the breakup of women as a coherent group is attributable to feminism itself: feminism is a political movement that has striven to unite women in a struggle for freedom largely by refut­ ing the naturalized femininity on which the illusion of a given, common identity of women is based. Rather than willfully destroy the category of women, then, thinkers like Butler, Mouffe, and Scott tried to clarify-in deeply critical and non-nostalgic terms-the political consequences of its historical loss for the future of feminism. Trying to understand the pathos of the category of women debates, I began to think it might be symptomatic of the epistemological framework within which most second- and even third-wave feminisms were articu­ lated. As strange as it seemed to blame poststructuralists for the loss of something that-insofar as we can speak of a loss-was more the prod­ uct of history and politics than of nihilistic scholarship, it seemed even stranger to think that the future of feminism, as a political movement, could possibly hang on the status of an analytic category of feminist the­ ory. Apart from the fact that few feminist activists understand theory as a guide for praxis-save in some very loose sense-it seemed important to move out of the details of "the subject of feminism" debates and ques­ tion their underlying assumption: What could be made of the idea that any claim to speak in the name of women must function like a rule under which to subsume particulars, lest it have no political significance at all? Was there not perhaps some guidance to be had for feminism in this moment from nonfeminists who had thought about the relation of poli­ tics and freedom to rules and their application? PREFACE I xi These thoughts and questions led me back to the thought of Hannah 1\rl·ndt, who had nothing to say about feminism, but a lot to say about 1 lw loss of traditional categories of thought for making sense of political 11·.1lity-the very sort of loss, it seemed to me, represented by the crisis of 1 Ill' category of women, a loss bemoaned by second-wave feminists and 11ltt·n scripted as a theft for which third wavers were made responsible. In A rl·ndt's view, the break in tradition, already begun with the scientific rev- 11l 11tion in the seventeenth century, culminated with the political catas- 1 rophes of the twentieth. It is not only pointless but dangerous to try to tl'rnver categories of thought that no longer resonate within our current p11litical and historical context, Arendt held. Unfortunately, as she also n·rngnized, just because a tradition has come to an end, traditional coo­ l 1·pts have not lost their power over us. On the contrary, they can become l'ven more tyrannical, for a confused moral and political orientation can ,,·cm more appealing than no orientation at all. As I reflected on the loss of women as a category of traditional polit­ Ka I theory and feminist political thought, Arendt's remarks on the break 111 tradition took on special significance. Writing this preface in 2004, I a rn struck by the strange compromise we feminists have reached on mat­ t crs that once called forth a fairly militant articulation of oppositional political stakes. The pathos is no longer there, but neither is any clear sense of how to theorize or act politically without the inherited categories of feminist thought. We nod to the importance of acknowledging differ­ l'rtCe among women, yet we persistently return to the idea that feminism demands a unified subject. Alternatively, we vigorously refuse such a sub­ ject, but are at a loss about how to say or claim anything beyond the par­ ticular case. This book cannot resolve all the puzzles it describes. But perhaps it can help us think them through by clarifying how we got where we are and how we might think differently about political freedom, political claims, and the political role of feminist theory. "Our inheritance was left to us by no testament," says Arendt, citing Rene Char. What if we took that opaque aphorism as a challenge to welcome, rather than bemoan, the irreversible break in tradition that characterizes politics in late modernity, including feminism? In that spirit of possibility, I present my reflections.