Symposium on Linda Zerillis Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom

Linda M. G. Zerilli. 2005. Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Linda Zerillis Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom seeks to restore feminisms lost
treasure: the foundational and radical claim to political freedom. Zerilli proceeds
from a vision of political actors that allows for the shaping power of their individual
and collective imagination. People, she argues, can create forms or figures that are
not already present in sensible experience or existing conceptual languages. They
can interrupt or alter the system of representation, in judgment and debate, and
as feminists, they can do so in the creative and conflictual heat of world-building.
Zerilli explores the implications of this shift of vision through generous readings
of other thinkers and political activists, including Hannah Arendt, Monique Wittig,
Judith Butler, and the Milan Womens Bookstore Collective, as well as an address
to the contemporary feminist movement.
Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom is a work of political theory, written primarily
with an audience of fellow theorists and academic feminists in mind. Yet, the book
should be of great interest to sociologists. Zerilli is responding to two problems,
or characteristic reductions, that have also troubled our discipline: the persistent
assumption that political identity and action follow from and can be read off of
demographic characteristics, and the rendering of the political as the mere realization
of social determinants or the instantiation of state institutions. Sociologists are often
inclined, by disciplinary reflex, toward enumerating pre- and nonpolitical causes
that they then take to explain political actions or outcomes. When carried to the
extreme, this tendency eradicates the place of politics itself. Zerillis is one text that
can help us develop better ways to think about politics as practices of world-building
that are not exhaustively determined in advance. We should welcome the potential
applications to social science and history as well as to political theory and politics
itself.
That does not mean, of course, that sociologists do not have extensions, criticisms,
and alternatives to offer. This symposium is an expanded version of an Author Meets
Critics panel organized by Ann Shola Orloff for an annual conference of the American Sociological Association. In it, three sociologistsMyra Marx Ferree, Andreas
Glaeser, and George Steinmetzsummarize, assess, and react to Zerillis text, and
their very different responses are followed by the authors rejoinder. Feminism and
the Abyss of Freedom is many things, including a startling break with both socially
determined notions of gender politics and the more recent tradition of feminist identity politics, but we foreground it here as a productive challenge toand dialogue
withsociological theory.
The Editors

Sociological Theory 27:1 March 2009


C American Sociological Association. 1430 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20005

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Feminist Practice Meets Feminist Theory

MYRA MARX FERREE
University of WisconsinMadison
It is always welcome to have a smart, committed feminist engage seriously with
big questions of social and political theory, all the more so when her work takes
the variety of writings considered radical feminist theory seriously enough to
make them a central part of her project without simultaneously limiting herself
only to those works. Zerillis Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom puts thinkers as
different from one another as Hannah Arendt and the Milan Womens Bookstore
Collective, Emmanuel Kant and Monique Wittig into the same paragraphs, if not
the same sentences. Moreover, her argument also offers a Eurocentric impulse to
push American feminists past the stale equalitydifference debate and the anxiety
about collective action by women that seems to accompany it here. As a person
who works on European feminism, I especially appreciate this attention to feminist
writings about collective action that have not received the attention in the United
States that they merit. Finally, Zerilli deserves a third round of applause for taking
the rhetorical work of claims-making as the serious political action that I also think
it is. Rather than taking political arguments as merely theory, she considers them
as efficacious in their own terms, as means of making political subjects and actions
real-izable by opening up new spaces in which struggles can and do occur.
To meaningfully grant her those three kudos, this essay outlines the sense of her
argument for those who have not yet read the book, as well as evaluates some of
her claims. To do so, I take up each of these three praiseworthy contributions in
more detail. I then turn to ask a few questions about the limits of her arguments,
particularly as they might apply to creating the actual spaces for action that she
expects political claims to do.
The first thing to note about the work of feminist theoretical reflection that Zerilli
offers is the scope of the previous work that she draws into her frame of reference.
What Zerilli actually means by the abyss of freedom is the radical uncertainty
about the outcomes of their actions that challenges all actors who seek to make a
difference in the world. But a second abyss addressed by Zerilli is the gulf usually
seen between the philosophical concerns and approaches with which she deals. On the
one side, she anchors herself in two of the classic authors of nonfeminist political
philosophy, Emmanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt. On the other side, she builds
directly upon two classics of contemporary European feminist theoryMonique
Wittigs Les Guerilli`eres (1969/1985) and the Milan Womens Bookstore Collectives
manifesto (1987). This latter book was actually translated into English under the
title of Sexual Difference (1990), but as Zerilli points out, would more properly
have been called Whats Wrong with Rights. Stretching herself across the vast gulf
between the classic thinkers on politics and second-wave feminists who attempt to
theorize from their political practices, Zerilli attempts to provide a bridge strong
enough to support liberatory feminist political claims. To construct such a structure
Address correspondence to: Myra Marx Ferree, 17 Sauk Creek Circle, Madison WI 53717. Tel.:
608-263-5204; Fax: 608-265-9541; E-mail: mferree@ssc.wisc.edu

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across the chasm of theory created by the different political concerns of each of the
authors she examines, Zerilli spins a strong but flexible web of argument.
Her technique is to pull out a number of discrete threads from each source
and gradually weave them into a single, more or less smooth fabric. This makes
it sometimes hard to see the jarringly different tones and textures of each of her
four central sources. Certainly, the central arguments the authors advance explicitly
in each of these texts are dramatically different. And it far exceeds my capacities
as a critic to unweave the fabric of the argument, examine the various threads,
and evaluate whether the uses to which they are put are sufficiently consistent with
their original contexts to be considered philosophically legitimate. Moreover, for
sociological theory, I presume that the interest that this book holds lies less in
the detailed texture of the threads than in the pattern of the political argument
that results. Although focusing next on this pattern itself, I would do Zerilli a
disservice if I did not first acknowledge the remarkable achievement she has created
by imaginatively bridging this gulf of thought with her skillful weave of ideas.
The common pattern that she weaves across this theoretical chasm uses as its warp
threads the claim that most feminist theories have become too subject centered
in trying to place identity rather than action at their core. Basing her argument
on Arendts notion of politics as a struggle among persons who choose the aims
that they represent, she challenges both subjective and objective notions of identity
as a ground for politics. She asserts that neither how one subjectively experiences
or does ones gender oneself nor the social category of identity or oppression in
which one is seen by others as appropriately placed will ever adequately define a
political actor, whether individual or collective, because both operate out of a present
experience rather than a vision of the possible. The woof threads of the argument
come particularly from Wittigs fantasy of collective female freedom in which elles
or the collective female subject displace ils as the taken-for-granted general case,
and thus produce imaginatively something wholly new that, once imagined, could
potentially be brought into existence by political action.
The pattern of the book thus formed by these key ideas is one in which action
and indeterminacy figure centrally and where risk-taking is an essential feature of all
politics. Her own risky strategy is to rely on non-U.S. feminist theorists who are
relatively early and underappreciated in the United States. While this is itself a second
special pleasure for those of us engaged with the European feminist movements that
found these authors so very important for their own development, Zerillis choice of
the Milan Womens Bookstore Collective and Monique Wittig as two of her most
central authors is also a form of subtle resistance to the ongoing Butler boom in
feminist theorizing. Zerilli does not ignore or undervalue Judith Butlers ideas, but
she does place them in a profoundly different context. Indeed, she succeeds in even
making Butler seem less deeply radical because her claims are more about individual
identities and less centrally concerned with what she considers the essence of the
political, the space between people as actors, the common ground of a relationship
in which both the self and the other are taken as free. Ones political actions are
thus not taken in relationship to a reified structural condition like heteronormativity
but in real interrelationship with other women and men who contest these actions
with their own; either affirmation or refusal is possible in such relational spaces.
This foregrounds the third virtue of Zerillis work, its focus on political claimsmaking as being a self-efficacious form of political action, not mere rhetoric.
Although distancing herself from their projects, Zerilli appears to me to be offering
more of a refinement than a repudiation of the insights offered by American feminist theorists Judith Butler and Joan Scott. In my view, they have earned the great

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influence they are having globally in shaping feminist political theorizing by dislodging easy categorizations of gender and feminism. Butler and Scott have offered important interventions into political feminism that I think are somewhat mischaracterized by Zerilli. Her critiques of identity politics present them as offering a distinctive
third-wave feminist perspective on gender politics that could be repaired by a return to a more overtly political second-wave agenda of the liberation of women
rather than transformation of gender relations.
Because I see the focus on both aspects of social change as simultaneously important, I think Zerillis false opposition between second-wave and third-wave
views not only underplays the extent to which both perspectives were actually developing fairly simultaneously in the mid 1980s and early 1990s but also leaves the
practical work of claims-making underspecified. Both the interactional level, which
Butler emphasizes, and the institutional level, which Scott examines more closely,
are also arenas for politics that could be more integrated into Zerillis view of collective self-organization of women as a practice of politics. Still, Zerilli is doing a
great theoretical service by putting human relationships and the profoundly human
potential of speech and choice on the table, reclaiming some of the radical potential
that Butler and Scott attributed to speech acts.
Zerilli resists the tendency to reduce such speech to either identity work or abstract
choice, just as she resists framing political choice to their liberal versions of either
economic rationality or contract theory, in both of which she uses Kant and Arendt
quite nicely to counter. Claims-making is for her a profoundly political work of
self-articulation in relationship with others. What the Milan Womens Bookstore
Collective of Italian feminists and Monique Wittig, as a French imaginative writer,
add to the picture is their ability actually to imagine women in the actual process of
emerging as collective subjects, not as purely individual ones.
Like Ute Gerhard (1990), an interdisciplinary German feminist social scientist
(whom Zerilli cites approvingly but does not further pursue), Wittig and the Milanese
find grounds to reject egalitarianism as an approach to rights that is too formal and
too male-defined. They seek instead to imagine an alternative collective claimsmaking process by women on behalf of women that does not collapse into the
categoricalism that Scott (1996), Butler (1990), Connell (1987), Hill Collins (1990),
and others werealso in this same periodshowing to be untenable.
Working with European texts as she does makes Zerillis book an important
counter to the rights-centered stream of American feminist thought that is quick
to dismiss Wittig and the Milan Womens Bookstore Collective as difference feminism and thus as incompatible with either social diversity among women or gaining
rights as a political project suited for feminists. One of Zerillis goals seems to be to
rescue the radical democratic aims of these theorists from the knee-jerk categorical
interpretations of their thinking. By interpreting these two radical feminist texts as
instead allowing a collective subject to emerge in the political process of democratic claims-making, of producing women as a political act itself, and one of
uncertain consequences, Zerilli offers a way to think about making claims for rights
that does not privilege an individual, contractual, legalistic, and not coincidentally
male-centered version of feminist politics. Insofar as both European and American
feminists have come to rely more and more on state-centered policy making as a
means of political action and have looked to feminist expertise to make their case,
the attention Zerilli pays to a collective project that is interactional and relational
from the grassroots up offers a radical reorienting perspective.
But given the continuing European emphasis on helping and supporting women as
a group, and on turning the collective political subject women into the aggregate

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policy object woman, the chief function of Zerillis rethinking will be very different
for them than for Americans. The American resistance to collective subjects and
objects is not only a feature of our liberal gender politics but is a pervasive aspect
of American exceptionalism overall. Thus the taint of difference thinking has an
element of rhetorical discredit in the American context that it lacks in Europe,
which may account for the absence of attention to the Milan Womens Bookstore
Collective here in the United States, even though it provided a core text for debate
in most European countries in the late 1980s. While difference theorists in the
United States, such as Carol Gilligan (1982) and Deborah Tannen (1990), have
found considerable resonance among popular readers, American feminists interested
in politics and policy making vigorously resist their blandishments.
The fear that special policy for women is the necessary outcome of seeing women
act collectively as women is what Zerilli seems at special pains to rebut, and this
appears also to be part of the appeal to her that Arendts distinction between the
social and the political can offer. Yet, even though this is a direction in which many
European feminists working on policy issues seem to have taken in their versions of
difference feminism, it does not seem to be as generally a feature of women doing
politics, as her concerns with it suggest. The American feminist application of her
theoretical work lies in a quite different direction.
It is a shame that this book is so densely written as a classic philosophical tome,
since Zerillis arguments might help nudge American feminists away from seeing
equal rights as the defining feature of what feminism is about, without trying to
redeem difference as some categorical property that women have or conceding any
epistemological privilege to any configuration of categorical oppression. Zerilli offers
a dense but eloquent condemnation of the victim discourse into which such claims
for privilege leads. As she says, real women are not able to see themselves in the
one-dimensional figure of the oppressed victim. Cognitive acceptance of womens
sorry state as a social fact and emotional rejection of oppressed victim as a livable
identity can certainly lead to the three-sex theory that I have encountered among students: theres men, theres women and theres me. The actual embrace of feminism,
however, has never seemed to me to involve such an identity anymore than it would
call for some dichotomous choice of men or women as objects of identification,
affection, and struggle that Zerilli still seems to take more or less for granted.
Overall, Zerillis stated objective is to return feminism to being what she calls
a theory of freedom rather than a theory concerned with either equal rights or
gender differences. Her focus on womens liberationa theory of freedomattempts
to recapture the 1970s sense that women had to achieve their own liberation as
women, rather than joining a male movement that would eventually extend rights
and benefits to women as a reward for their support. Of course, the idea of women
as a category acting on their own behalf proved both theoretically and politically
insupportable over the following decades, and Zerilli locates the collapse of womens
liberation as political project in the crisis of the subject category women. If this
categorization is not more true than all its competitors, on what can its political
claims rest? In the loss of women as a political subject, Zerilli fears a return to
seeing women instrumentally, that is, to viewing womens rights and political power
as means to other ends, be it the victory of small-d democracy or that of the
capital-D Democratic Party.
While these are for Zerillias for mesocial goods devoutly to be desired, she
doesand in my opinion correctlyfollow Arendt in making a sharp distinction
between the social and the political as values. In her possibly controversial reading
of Arendt, the social is defined as the goods that institutions like markets, families,

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and states can distribute or redistribute and the relationships governed by producing,
sharing, and consuming these goods. The political can and does affect the social, but
should never be reduced to it; it is a higher realm of self-realization. The struggles
to express ones self and achieve recognition by others are where Zerilli locates the
political. For her, the political actions of making claims, the rhetorical opportunity
to discover new words and thereby think genuinely new thoughts, and the political
decision to affirm or refuse community and affiliation are the heart of the feminist
project.
Like Arendt, she assigns to this realm of the political, with all its indeterminate
and inherently unending struggles, the ultimate meaning of freedom. This freedom to
be a political actor is for her the essence of democracy, and the freedom to act (and
be recognized or not as a meaningful political actor) is one that she argues belongs
just as much to self-asserting collectives as to self-asserting individuals, in both cases
resting on no firmer foundation than the claim and, crucially, its recognition by
others.
Acting in and for freedom risks nonrecognition, the abyss of uncertainty caused
by any noncompelled action having nondeterminate outcomes, and thus may inspire
fear. In the argument that Zerilli weaves, it is this fear of freedom that inspires historically determinist theories of social change, socially determinist theories of categorical
politics, politically determinist theories of rights and contracts as self-enforcing, and
psychologically determinist theories of identity and meaning. Political action itself
and speech as a crucial form of political actionis the core element making society.
Because such actions are free, we are responsible for themwhether we act or think
that we are not acting, which is itself an action. And this responsibility is ours,
both individually and collectively, in the communities of action we create by what
we affirm or refuse. Even when we cannot know the outcome of standing with any
particular women (or men) in any particular struggle, it is this free action that makes
feminist politics both feminist and political.
Now for some final, more critical notes. While I think it would be an oversimplification of Zerillis argument to reduce the social to what Nancy Fraser (1989) called
redistribution and see the political as just another name for what Fraser termed
recognition politics, there certainly is some affinity between Fraser and Zerilli,
even if only in their bracketing of arguments about redistribution as a narrow and
misleading model of politics. I appreciate the critical stance that Zerilli takes toward
instrumentalized gender politics, where the issue of what womens empowerment
should be thought of as good for dominates, as it does in much economic and
social development discourse today. I concur that instrumentalizing womens rights
as signs of modernity, democracy, progress, or any other social good implies losing
sight of womens freedom as a good in its own right. But I doubt Zerillis diagnosis
of this instrumentalization as being at its heart the same problem as those that are
roiling the U.S. and European feminist movements and that makes it difficult in
practice to stand for women.
Indeed, the issues that are most difficult for practical feminist politics are not the
same in any meaningful sense even in the European Union (EU) and the United
States, let alone for feminists and womens movements worldwide. On the one hand,
the recognition struggles over immigration, EU citizenship, and the intersection of
gender politics with diversity politics in issues like wearing a headscarf or genderbased electoral quotas are deeply unsettling to feminists in Europe. On the other
hand, U.S. feminists who can easily shrug off the importance of headscarves and have
no party structures in which quotas would be meaningful are struggling instead to
confront the redistribution crisis ushered in by Americas new Gilded Age. How one

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does redistribution politics is also profoundly about standing with and for certain
people, but it is not so clearly distinct from the social and instrumental ideas of
politics that Zerilliwith Arendtcritiques.
Nor is it as obvious as Zerilli would have it that either of these struggles can
be resolved by a commitment to take political risks in imagining a collective empowerment of women as a self-liberating act. Her skepticism toward the increasing
feminist march through the institutions of conventional politics is not matched
with a critical consideration of how collective efforts at the grassroots level, such
as the Milan Womens Bookstore Collective, worked out in actual political practice.
Although their book frames their struggle as a successful claim to speak and be
recognized as women in relation to other women, a fair picture of the contested and
uncertain nature of politics that Zerilli affirms should also lead her to look at those
who rejected this approach, the unanticipated outcomes (both good and bad) that
grew out of these practices, and the continued efforts by members of the collective
to practice freedom outside this very particular context.
In this sense, Zerillis effort to resolve an allegedly general feminist crisis of theory
may not be as useful to actual feminist movements as she thinks it should be. Even
if feminist activists were inclined to wade through this sort of work of feminist
theory, which despite Butlers roaring success, I tend to doubt, Zerillis defense of
a collective feminist subject who can risk making claims and is constituted in the
action of making such a claim does not help to guide feminists confronted with
concrete problems of claims-making or coalition-building, which are indeed always
contextual, contingent, and uncertain. But that is also what Zerilli herself would say,
and not knowing what outcome her intervention into feminist debates would have,
she still took the risk of making it and having it refused. I applaud these efforts and
hope that others will also appreciate her rhetorical intervention as the contribution
to womens liberation that she has made here.

REFERENCES
Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Connell, R. W. 1987. Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Fraser, N. 1989. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Gerhard, U. 1990. Gleichheit ohne Angleichung: Frauen im Recht. Munich: Beck (translated from the
German by A. Brown and B. Cooper as Debating Womens Equality: Toward a Feminist Theory of Law
from a European Perspective, 2001, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press).
Gilligan, C. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Womens Development. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Hill Collins, P. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment.
Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman.
Milan Womens Bookstore Collective. 1987. Non Credere di Avere dei Diritti. Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier.
(English title, Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice, 1990, Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press).
Scott, J. W. 1996. Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Tannen, D. 1990. You Just Dont Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: Morrow.

Wittig, M. 1969. Les Guerilli`eres. Paris: Editions

de Minuit (translated from the French by D. LeVay,
1971, London: P. Owen; U.S. reprint, 1985, Boston, MA: Beacon Press).

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The Institutional Foundations of Free Action

ANDREAS GLAESER
University of Chicago
Although the very first word in the title of Linda Zerillis book is feminism, one
does not have to read it as a contribution to feminist literature. The reason is given
in the last word of the title, which is freedom. For the books central concern is
the defense of an Arendtian anti-sovereign, pro-relational understanding of political
action as freedom, which is as relevant for general political theory, in fact for general
politics, as it is for feminism. So I will offer a reading here, which for the most part
takes Zerillis book as a general exercise in political theory building. That is to
say that I will completely refrain from wrestling with the question of what kind of
intervention it aspires to make in ongoing feminist discourses. This said, I would
misunderstand the author profoundly if I did not at least also read the book as a
political act. After all, it is a performance in a wider genre, which might be called
in analogy to litterature engagee a theorie engagee, that is, a writing practice with
a political agenda. In effect, then, the book offers a theory of political action as
freedom while at the same time performing such an act. This offers us readers an
opportunity to see how well the theory does in self-application. My point in playing
this old trick of criticism is not to call attention to a possible performative selfcontradiction of the text for the sake of judging its value in terms of the seemingly
transcendental value. Instead, my intention in using this ruse is to reveal, in a
somewhat single-minded fashion, especially one significant substantive blindspot of
Zerillis conceptual apparatus, the question of the institutional foundations of political
action as freedom. Moreover, I will show that this blindspot derives especially from
an overreliance on Arendts notion of freedom, while suggesting that there are other
conceptions of freedom that might have served Zerillis critical purpose just as well,
while directing our attention precisely to the enabling conditions of institutional
arrangements. Finally, we shall see at the end how my somewhat theatrically wielded
sword of criticism is in part blunted by Zerillis own theoretization of the particular
quality of the claims she is making as akin to aesthetic judgments rather than to
truth-capable constatives.
Throughout the book, Hannah Arendt is not only Zerillis main source of inspiration but she is in fact Zerillis authorizing spiritand we shall see in a minute
what this means. It is from the author of the Human Condition (1998) and related
essays (especially 1977) that she derives her notion of freedom as action. According
to Arendt, freedom is not a matter of choice, not a property of the will, but instead
a property of action. She captures the difference between what she calls freedom as
sovereignty and her own model of freedom in action with the distinction between
the formulas I-will and I-can (Arendt 1977:157ff). As a matter of fact, I think,
Arendt would have been better off referring to her own model in terms of I-do,
since she greatly emphasizes that freedom is strictly in actu not in posse. In all admirable brevity, Arendt (1977:151) says: for to be free and to act are the same. In
that vein, she also emphasizes that free action has nothing to do with intellect, or
with any kind of symbolically facilitated understanding. And yet, she admits that to
realize a goal, action needs both intellect and will. But then, for Arendt, free action
is not action for something else: it is based neither on a because nor on an in
(1932)
order to. Thus, it is not meaningful action in the sense that Alfred Schutz

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interprets Max Webers central category. The point for Arendt is precisely that free
action has neither origin nor destiny: it is sui generis, creatio ex nihilo. It marks
human beings capacity to begin something new, something that has not been in the
world before, something that qualifies human beings as creators. Without stretching
Arendt, one could also say that the capacity to act is the divine in us; it turns
mere mortals into everyday performers of miracles, or in the theological imaginary
of Arendts beloved ancient Greece: into unmoved movers.
Zerilli argues quite rightly that this notion of freedom brushes much of the Western
tradition against its dominant grain. And nowhere more so than in the social sciences, for Arendts conception of freedom implies that there is in the traditional sense
neither explanation nor explication of action qua action. Evidently, action cannot be
subsumed under an external law; nor can it be subsumed under an institutionally or
motivationally grounded rule. As such, action is outside the purview of the social
sciences altogether, including their hermeneutic branches. Importantly, however, her
notion of action introduces a radical, irreducible element of contingency into human
history. Thanks to the creativity of action, everything could have always been otherwise. For Zerilli, this is precisely the good news that Arendt brings. It is a way
of thinking that she credits with the possibility to unstick feminist thought, perhaps
even feminist politics. And I hasten to add again: political theory and politics more
generally.
At this point, it is important to remember that freedom as action for Arendt
and Zerilli is thoroughly nonindividual, and not only because it has to make its
appearance in public. It is nonindividual or political, first, because it is guided
by what Arendt (1977:151) calls principles such as honor or glory [or] love of
equality and, second, because it is a world-building practice that has to rely on
the collaboration of others. To illuminate what Arendt means here, Zerilli moves
us to a discussion of Monique Wittigs writing, especially her novel Les guerilli`eres
(1985), as well as the Milan Womens Bookstore Collectives manifesto Sexual Difference (1990), in which the women running the shop critically reflect on their
own political practices. In the Italian original, this manifesto is entitled Non
Credere di Avere dei Diritti, which means literally translated not to believe to
have rights. The Italian titlequalified through the double infinitive as a principle
in Arendts sensebrings to the fore what Zerilli has in mind with her plea for
the concept of freedom as action: the attempt to be neither positively nor negatively determined by what there was; to act therefore in a way that has as little
room for resentment as for a theoretically inspired grand strategy formulated in
the service of a utopia. Rather, the point is first and foremost community formation, the core of which is the mutual entrustment with authority in the here and
now.
On the basis of my own work on oppositional movements in former East Germany,
I fully concur with Zerilli that forming a new network of authority is perhaps the
act par excellence, or better perhaps, it is its condition sine qua non. Of course,
this is anything but an unconditioned act, even thoughand again I agree with
Zerilliit is usually anything but a consciously enacted plan. Yet, it does rely on
layers of institutions for it to succeed: it presupposes tried organizational forms (e.g.,
the alternative bookstore is an old means of focalizing a movement), it assumes a
repertoire of practices (e.g., forms of commensality, meeting, and discussion routines),
and it builds on ideologies of togetherness (e.g., in the English translation, the women
advertise themselves as collective). I would surmise that the entrustment of the
Milanese booksellers is inconceivable without experiences of working together and

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laboring togetherto make use of the other Arendtian concepts of doing (Arendt
1998). Moreover, it is inconceivable without a web of affective relationships beginning
to entangle the women. No doubt they are creative, no doubt something new is in
the making here, and again I am struck with their attention to authorization, which
I think is extremely apt. Yet, this newness is built on the old without which it is
inconceivable to have taken the particular form that it has. In fact, as much as
institutions can be constraining, the innovative use of the existing institutional fabric
in which they maneuver is the very condition for the possibility of their freedom.
Moreover, to further their ability to act politically, the women take recourse to long
discussions about their own practice, the sedimentation of which is the manifesto
that Zerilli is reading with so much empathy. In other words, what seems to enable
a practice of freedom is a certain dialectic between practice and its discursification.
So even in this dimension, and quite contrary to Arendts and Zerillis claims, a
particular form of knowledge emerges as a condition for an ongoing practice of
freedom.
If we look at Zerillis book as a political act, a similar picture emerges. She, too,
maneuvers between various institutions and institutional orders. She juxtaposes, negotiates, mobilizes American, French, Italian as well as first-wave, second-wave, and
third-wave feminists, as well as Kantian, Arentian, and poststructuralist philosophical discourses. Moreover, she relies on an institutional order to broadcast her call,
her invitation for others to join her in her efforts for a renewed feminism. There
is the book as a cultural and industrial form, written in a particular genre, there
is this very meeting (i.e., the American Sociological Association Meeting in New
York, 2007) in which we are all participating. Had I chosen to read Zerilli for her
intervention in feminist discourses, I could have made a related point by donning
a Leninist goatee, arguing against Zerilli in the role of Rosa Luxemburg. That is
to say that even the central set-up of the argument spontaneity versus organization, practice versus planning, follows a well-established plot in the history of social
movements. So we have here the performative self-contradiction that I talked about
at the beginning of my talk. Or so it seems.
My main point is simple. The Arendt/Zerilli theory of freedom as political action
has a significant blindspot. Through the celebration of radical newness, its account
of creativity is preempting a deeper reflection on the institutional sources of creative
action. One could think about this in the following way. Theories of freedom can be
seen as falling into two major categories. There are first theories of indeterminacy.
The choice model is perhaps the predominant variety of it, which emphasizes the
will as arbiter between alternatives. Arendts own theory is in many ways a radical
model of indeterminacy, where the point is not choice but a new beginning, a stab
into the dark (hence the word abyss in Zerillis title). Second, there are theories
of overdetermination. One such model is Georg Simmels (1908) account on how
individuality and freedom emerge in what he calls the intersection of social circles.
His basic idea is that human beings are embedded in so many institutional spheres
at the same time that they cannot possibly honor the demands of all of them. Instead, they can play off one demand against another; they can enter with others into
negotiations about these demands thus gaining degrees of freedom not only from
their constraints, but with the help of an appeal to the legitimacy of their constraints
against them. Another such theory is formed by the interrelated Bakhtinian notions
of dialogue, heteroglossia, and polyphony which together emphasize that linguistic
utterances are often characterized by the tension between several internal perspectives or voices, which in their tension and ambiguity open spaces for a creative

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imagination (e.g., tropological accounts of creativity, e.g., Blumenberg 1975; Hallyn

1990), depicting it as a transposition of understandings from one domain of practice
or knowledge into another by eliciting the good offices of analogies, metaphors, allegories, etc. And so does the new rhetoric emphasizing the negotiation of a diverse
set of perspectives to find a common ground to stand on (e.g., Burke 1969).
It is no accident that, unlike Arendt, models of overdetermination emphasize the
linguistic and forms of knowledge as the enabling condition for freedom. This has
much to do with the fact that the symbolic opens a specific kind of temporality
for human beings. It not only connects an actual past with an expected future in a
flat horizon of time, but by providing a subjunctive mode, language unfolds a dome
of potentialities which enables human beings to acquire imagination in playing with
counterfactuals, alternative worlds, pure fiction.
What unites all of these theories of overdetermination is their emphasis on a competing plurality of perspectives, voices, authorities, norms, ideas, practices, ways of
doing, etc. as the enabling condition for freedom and creativity. Since this plurality, whatever it is, must become available to us as a serious contender, they direct
our attention to the institutionalization of these pluralities as well as to the institutional arrangements through which they can be negotiated, adjudicated, and judged.
In other words, they direct our attention to the institutionalization of publics and
counterpublics, modes of performance and argumentative conduct, spaces for experimentation and symbolic production, etc.
Interestingly, and most significantly, it is here that Zerilli makesagain in reference
to Arendt and her reading of Kants third critiquea very valuable contribution.
She urges us to understand political claims on the model of Kants theory of aesthetic judgment. Her point is that political claims should not be primarily seen as
propositions about the world that could be either true or false according to some
objective criterion; nor should they be understood as merely subjective statements
about preferences, as, for example, rational choice theorists would have it. Instead,
they should be interpreted as invitations to join in to respond to them in an effort of making a better world together. In the legalese of civic law contract theory,
they should be understood as an invitatio ad offerendum, with the potential to build
new institutions in common negotiation. And thus, Zerilli manages to perform a
Bakhtinian feat: she sets Arendt in dialogue with herself to begin the formulation of
a new beginning. And if I may continue this thought movement, which may be called
not a de-construction in the service of debunking some unjustly assumed authority
but a re-construction of possibilities from within the interstices of heteroglossia.
Arendt speaks of action and its creativity in a language employed two decades after
her by practice theorists such as Bourdieu (1977) and de Certeau (1984). Of course,
they have insisted that the arts of doing do not only have a history and that they
need to be cultivated but also that they operate from within an existing institutional
fabric. Creativity feeds on location, if you like.
Since Zerillis theoretical claims are in fact political claims and thus judgments of
the kind just described, that is, not propositions about the world but invitations for a
common world-building that begin in the subjunctive what if we assumed that to be
redeemed, altered, and negotiated in our response, the performative self-contradiction
disappears in the sense that the appeal is geared toward an institution that might
lie in the future, rather than one that was presupposed. What does not disappear
is in my opinion the undertheoretization of the institutional basis for a politics of
freedom in action. But of course, that is what we are here for to negotiate, in an

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exchange of acts of freedom in the institutional lapof all placesthe American

Sociological Association.

REFERENCES
Arendt, H. 1977. What is Freedom. In Between Past and Future. London: Penguin.
. 1998. The Human Condition, 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Blumenberg, H. 1975. Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Burke, K. 1969. The Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
de Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Hallyn, F. 1990. The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler. New York: Zone.
Milan Womens Bookstore Collective. 1990. Sexual Difference. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Schutz,
A. 1932. Der Sinnhafte Aufbau der Sozialen Welt. Wien: Springer.
Simmel, G. 1908. Soziologie. Leipzig: Duncker&Humblot.
Wittig, M. 1985. Les Guerill`eres. Boston, MA: Beacon.

The New Aesthetic-Political Avant-Garde: Linda Zerillis Feminism and

the Abyss of Freedom
GEORGE STEINMETZ
University of Michigan
This is an incredibly stimulating and brilliant book, a pleasure to read, and an
erudite challenge to feminist and other theories of politics. My comments should be
read in light of my overall enthusiasm for Linda Zerrillis Feminism and the Abyss of
Freedom.
My first set of comments has to do with theory as inaugurating a new beginning, to use the authors own words. Linda Zerilli discusses this with respect to
the second and third waves of feminist theory. Marxism has also had this quality
of new beginnings, of self-renovation, first in the era of Marx himself, then again
during the 1920s and 1930s (with Lukacs, Horkheimer, and others), and for a third
time in the 1960s (with Althusser and the various neo-Marxisms he spawned). But
there is something specific about these feminism discussions, which is their greater
resonance beyond their own subfield, their importance for other ongoing theoretical programs, including Marxist ones. Zerillis book itself has this peculiar quality,
in that one often forgets that one is reading a book centered on feminist theory.
The implications of her book for democratic politics and for social and political
theory more generally are sweeping. And the previous waves of feminist thinking
she discusses had similar radiating effects. Second-wave feminism broke Marxisms
unitary, totalizing explanatory stance. Dual systems theory, as it was called, affected
Marxism more profoundly than earlier efforts to remind Marxists of the independent
causal importance of power politics or cultural systems, for example, in the work
of Max Weber (1930, 1978), or of the autonomous role of racism and racialization,
for example, in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois (1915, 1950). Feminist standpoint
theory, despite Zerillis valid critiques of it, invigorated other discussions of standpoint epistemology, moving the discussion beyond where it had been with Lukacs

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(1968). Similarly, third-wave feminism and gender, sexuality, and queer studies were
able to make neo-Marxists take seriously the idea of the construction and deconstruction of social categories. Michel Foucault, whom I would include in this third
wave, convinced neo-Marxists to reexamine what both Freud and Lacan had already
said about the inability of biology to explain sexual difference and identification.
Judith Butlers writing on performativity directed Marxists and sociologists toward
Wittgenstein and Austen. Feminism in this period led Bourdieu to revisit his Algerian fieldwork, drawing out more fully its implications for understanding masculine
domination (compare Bourdieu 1958, 1964 and Bourdieu 2001).
This is not to say that feminism is interesting mainly because it is relevant to
nonfeminists. On the contrary, the mechanisms of masculine domination, gendered
identification, and sexuality are interesting in their own light and need to be theorized
as processes in their own right. But this is true of all causal mechanisms in the human
sciences. Gender, like any other process, needs to be conceptualized separately even if
it is almost always expressed in conjunction with other mechanisms (Bhaskar 1975,
1979, 1986; Collier 1994; Steinmetz 1998; Archer, Bhaskar, Collier, Lawson, and
Norrie 1998). Nonetheless, social scientists have long been beguiled by the chimerical
goal of general theory, that is, the quest for a single-mechanism explanation of
the social (Steinmetz 2005). Theorists of gender have been best able to disrupt the
plausibility of such monocausal accounts of the social-real (even if some feminists
have mimicked the positivists in promoting gender as the long sought after general
explanatory category, e.g., Firestone 1970).
Linda Zerillis book is an example of the sort of inaugural force she discusses,
part of a fourth wave of feminist thinking, this time focused on democratic theory.
Zerilli emphasizes the contingent inauguration and maintenance of new worlds by
collectivities acting not as sovereign rational subjects exercising their free, skeptical
will, but in ways that resemble the capacity for making aesthetic judgments as analyzed by Hannah Arendt. Politics in this sense does not resemble the logic Kant
calls determinant judgment, which assimilates a new object to an existing category.
Politics does not subsume a particular under a universal, explaining it as the continuation of an existing series. Instead, politics more closely resembles Kants aesthetic or
reflective judgment, which recognizes a particular as beautiful immediately, without
subsuming it under a concept, before searching for a universal. Politics is also about
unprecedented, unexpected new beginnings, practices that do not yet have a name or
a rule. Aesthetic judgments, like political ones, are involved in streiten (quarreling),
not disputerien (disputing): agreement cannot be reached through proof. Aesthetic
agreement results from a common sense that preexists each act of aesthetic judgment.
It is a creative, not just a reproductive force: Darstellung as opposed to Vorstellung
(Zerilli, p. 153).
How then are we to imagine political agreement? How can radically novel practices
be given a concept? This is necessary according to Zerilli if these radical inaugurations are not to vanish into thin air. Politics needs to be given a concept, but without
transforming and renarrating its contingent novelty in ways that make the act of political inauguration appear to have been always already necessary or inevitable. Zerilli
argues with Wittgenstein and Cavell that there is necessarily something nonrational
and nonconceptual prior to the act of giving a concept to political praxis. Without
this prerational aspect, we could not make sense of the so-called paradox of feminist founding, which directly parallels the classical problem in political theory of
the necessarily nondemocratic, decisionistic character of the founding of democratic
politics.

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My first set of questions revolves around this use of Kant. Sociologists have
always been skeptical of Kants critique of judgment because of its notion of the
disinterested judgment (see especially Bourdieu 1984). The word interest crops up
late in Zerillis book (pp. 14749) and it does so in the context of Arendts denial of
the interestedness of truly political acts, that is, of political judgments. It is somewhat
unclear whether Zerilli is endorsing or merely summarizing Kant and Arendt here,
however. It is also the case that Arendt is equating interest with narrowly utilitarian
interests, whereas Bourdieu proposes a more paradoxical but also more compelling
notion of disinterested interest. This is one place where the social forces its way back
into the analysis despite Arendts (1958) best efforts to keep it at bay.
A second question concerns the question of individual versus collective categories
of analysis and practice. Zerilli is quite clear that politics involves collective inaugurations. This emerges clearly in Chapter 3 on the Milan Collective and in Chapter
2 on Monique Wittig. Zerilli argues that the initial reception of Wittig as having
prevented readers from understanding her contribution. This raises the question of
individual versus collective creativity: Is the inaugural act the creation of the poetic
work (which is an individual act) or its later reception (which is collective)?
The author also insists on acts of inauguration as free of causality and determination. There is a powerful, almost incantatory insistence throughout Feminism
and the Abyss of Freedom that undetermined beginnings are possible. This insistence
resonates with other contemporary thinkers such as Alain Badiou (1999, 2001, 2005)
and the left-Schmittian decisionists (Mouffe 1999; Kalyvas 1998, 2004, 2008). This is
the language of the left avant-garde, which also has always been involved in blurring
the boundaries between aesthetics and politics. The left has always been instinctively
opposed to thinkers who seem to banish the idea of completely new beginnings.
But does this make sense theoretically? To return to Bourdieu (1996), he discusses
Flaubert as creating an entirely new field of literature in the 19th century. Flauberts
action is not the result of a completely conscious strategic rationality, nor is it foreordained by his background or social structural properties. But his creative project,
like that of artistic innovators in general, is a meeting point and an adjustment
between determinism and a determination (1971:185). What is gained by arguing
that a form of action is completely undetermined? Hasnt this discourse been rather
disastrous for revolutionary movements in the past? And on a slightly different but
related point, hasnt this argument been used as much by the right as the left (e.g.,
Freyer 1933)?
A related question concerns Castoriadiss concept of the imaginary (1987). We
know that Castoriadis was reacting at least in part to Lacan and his notion of
the imaginary (Ziarek 1998; Stavrakakis 2002). For Lacan, the imaginary is both
determined and determining, created and creative. Could the desire for a structurebreaking event that inaugurates a new series itself be related to imaginary fantasies (of new beginnings, autogenesis, or a sort of family romance on a collective scale)? And can something that is a psychic fantasy be willed in a decisionist
manner?
zek,
Zerillis book resonates with the recent work of Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Zi
Chantal Mouffe, and Alain Badiou. The latter is perhaps most relevant here, since
he theorizes the event as a pure invention or discovery beyond the mere transmission of recognized knowledge that is not of the historical order and does
not belong to any existing set, but is an opening of an epoch, a change in the
relations between the possible and the impossible (Badiou 1999:49, 2005; Radical
Politics 2006; Aeschimann 2007). Like Zerillis theory, Badious operates in areas

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like love and art as well as politics. There is widespread avant-gardism across the
political-philosophical spectrum and in ongoing nonparliamentary politics, perhaps
especially in Europe. Anyone interested in reading the most philosophically sophisticated statement of this avant-garde political program should read Feminism and the
Abyss of Freedom.

REFERENCES
2007. Mao en chaire. Liberation January 10:3031.
Aeschimann, E.
Archer, M., R. Bhaskar, A. Collier, T. Lawson, and A. Norrie, eds. 1998. Critical Realism, Essential
Readings. London: Routledge.
Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Badiou, A. 1999. Saint Paul: La fondation de luniversalisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
. 2001. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London: Verso.
. 2005. Being and Event. London: Continuum.
Bhaskar, R. [1975] 1978. A Realist Theory of Science. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Press.
. 1986. Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation. London: Verso.
. 1979. The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences.
New York: Humanities Press.
Bourdieu, P. 1958. Sociologie de lAlgerie, 1st ed. Paris: PUF.
. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
. 2001. Masculine Domination. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

. 1964. Le Deracinement. Paris: Editions

de Minuit.
. 1996. The Rules of Art. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Castoriadis, C. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Collier, A. 1994. Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskars Philosophy. New York and London:
Verso.
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1915. The African Roots of War. Atlantic Monthly 115(May):70714.
. [1950] 1978. The Problem of the Twentieth Century is the Problem of the Color Line. Pp.
28189 in W. E. B. Du Bois on Sociology and the Black Community, edited by D. S. Green and E. D.
Driver. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Firestone, S. 1970. The Dialectic of Sex; The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: Morrow.
Freyer, H. 1933. Herrschaft und Planung. Hamburg, Germany: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt.
Kalyvas, A. 1998. The Radical Instituting Power and Democratic Theory. Journal of the Hellenic
Diaspora 24(1):929.
. 2004. From the Act to the Decision: Hannah Arendt and the Question of Decisionism. Political
Theory 32(4):32046.
. 2008. Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah
Arendt. Cambridge: CUP.
Lukacs, G. 1968. Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat. Pp. 83222 in History and Class
Consciousness, edited by Georg Lukacs. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mouffe, C., ed. 1999. The Challenge of Carl Schmitt. London: Verso.
Radical Politics. 2006. After the Event: Rationality and the Politics of Invention. An Interview with
Alain Badiou. Prelom (English edition) 8:18094.
Stavrakakis, Y. 2002. Creativity and its Limits: Encounters with Social Constructionism and the Political
in Castoriadis and Lacan. Constellations 9(4):52236.
Steinmetz, G. 1998. Critical Realism and Historical Sociology. Comparative Studies in Society and
History 39(4):17086.
. 2005. Positivism and its Others in the Social Sciences. Pp. 156 in The Politics of Method in
the Human Sciences: Positivism and its Epistemological Others, edited by G. Steinmetz. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Weber, M. 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by T. Parsons. New York:
Scribner.
. 1978. Economy and Society. 2 vols. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Ziarek, E. P. 1998. Toward a Radical Female Imaginary: Temporality and Embodiment in Irigarays
Ethics. Diacritics 28(1):5975.

Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom: Rejoinder to Ferree, Glaeser,

and Steinmetz
LINDA ZERILLI
Northwestern University
Let me first express thanks to Myra Marx Ferree, Andreas Glaeser, and George
Steinmetz for reading and commenting on my book, as well as to Ann Shola Orloff
and Julia Adams for their participation in the American Sociological Association
panel at which this discussion began. It is an honor and a privilege for me, a
feminist political theorist, to have my work discussed by such renowned sociologists.
In what follows, I will first try to summarize the central concerns of the book and
then turn to the individual responses.
Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom has its origins in my own entanglement in the
so-called category of women debates that dominated American feminism in the
late 1980s and the 1990s. These debates were initially inspired by critiques brought
by women of color (e.g., bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Cherrie Moraga) and
developed in related but different ways by feminists working under the sign of poststructuralism (e.g., Judith Butler, Joan Scott, and Chantal Mouffe). They called into
question the idea of women as a coherent identity group in order to expose the raced,
classed, and sexed character of the subject of feminism. I applauded this moment in
the development of feminist theory. But like other feminists of my generation, I also
worried about the political consequences of such questioning. If we could no longer
speak of women as a coherent group, in whose name was feminism to be fought?
With the postmodern scare mercifully behind us, the sense of crisis that emerged
in American feminist circles in the 1990s, especially after the publication of Gender
Trouble, can barely be grasped today. Butler in particular was accused of destroying
feminism by calling into question the category of women. I found the vilification of
Butler and of postmodern feminism generally not only absurd but somehow beside
the point. For one thing, it seemed strange to think that the future of feminism
could possibly hang on the status of an analytic category of feminist theory. For
another, the situation that Butler and others critically described is not one that they
created but one that they found: feminism, as a political movement, did not rely and
never did rely, right from its very origins, on a unitary subject. Rather, feminism was
and always has been the site of deep disagreements about who counts as a feminist
and what the goals of feminism should be. To hold one individual or one group
of thinkers responsible for the end of feminism was to blind oneself to ones own
history.
That said, I was nonetheless concerned with the consequences of such critical
questioning for feminism. Apart from the nostalgic turn toward the supposedly
unified movement of second-wave feminism, the desire to reground feminism in a
unitary subject called women led to some strange solutions, one of which was
strategic essentialism: we know that women as a unified group does not exist

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but, for the purposes of politics, we shall act as if such a group exists. This reminded
me of David Humes famous answer to skepticism, which held that skeptical doubts
in the study about the existence of worldly things do not trouble us the moment
we move out of the study and into the world, in other words, the moment we
stop thinking and start acting. However true that may be as far as our skeptical
temptations go, it seemed like an insufficient response to the problems raised by
third-wave feminist critics. What could be made of the idea that any claim to speak
in the name of women must function like a rule lest it have no political significance
at all? And why would taking account of plurality among women destroy the very
possibility of speaking in the name of women?
These questions led me back to the work of Hannah Arendt, who was not a
feminist but who had a lot to say about the collapse of inherited categories for
politics. If women could be understood as a category that had either collapsed
under the weight of (post)modernity or, in terms of the history of modern feminism,
had never really existed as a unified category at all, why did it still have such a
hold on us? In Arendts view, just because a certain tradition of thinking no longer
speaks to our political reality doesnt mean that it has lost its hold on us; in fact,
it can become even more tyrannical, for a confused moral and political orientation
can seem more appealing than no orientation at all. This helped me make sense
of the nostalgic tendencies in third-wave feminism, which I described earlier, and it
also helped me to see that I needed to interrogate the idea of politics that made the
unity of women as the subject of feminism somehow necessary to the very existence
of feminism. If plurality is a problem for your understanding of politics, I thought,
perhaps your understanding of politics is the problem.
For what understanding of politics is the plurality of women a problem? This
question allowed me to stop thinking in terms of how to mitigate the supposedly
dangerous political effects of a discovered plurality and to treat it instead as the irreducible condition of feminist politics. Strategic essentialism and other such strategies
for at once recognizing plurality and containing its effects no longer seemed appealing. Apart from the problems I raised earlier, they just seemed to be negotiating the
so-called crisis of feminism in the wrong way, for they could not shake the idea that
politics demands agency, and that agency is impossible without a sovereign subject,
the very subject they put into question. In my view, the problem was not the loss
of a unified subject for politics but a conception of politics that required such a
subject.
This conception of politics, as Arendt argues, is an instrumentalist one. According
to this logic, politics does indeed require a subject and a sovereign subject at that,
one that uses politics as a means to achieve an end. Implicit in this means-ends
political logic is the idea that we can not only act according to a plan thought out
in advance (a theory) but also control or predict the outcome of our actions. By
contrast with this conventional way of thinking about political action, Arendt holds
action to be essentially unpredictable and boundless, not because we do not have
certain motivations or ends when we act, but because we simply cannot predict or
control how others will take up our actions, that is, how our actions will travel once
they are part of the infinitely complex texture of worldly reality.
The instrumentalist conception of politics that Arendt would have us question is
deeply linked to the subordination of feminism to issues concerning subjectivity, on
the one hand, and social welfare, on the other. According to the mean-ends logic of
the social question and the subject question, as I call the twin preoccupations
of all three waves of feminism, womens political claims to full citizenship have had

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to answer to the demand of utility, to show, in other words, that if met, they will
produce a certain outcome, make things better, so to speak. This has led to the
occlusion of feminisms raison detre: namely, the radical and unqualified claim to
political freedom, the right to be a participator in public affairs. This claim, which
(with Arendt) I strongly distinguish from the liberal idea of negative freedom, is
what I seek to recover and defend in the book.
The freedom I have in mind is not a property of the subject; it is not the freedom
of the will whose goal is sovereignty. Rather, freedom is based on being with others
and acting in the public space. It is not I-will but I-can, and this I-can requires
others with whom one can realize what one may will. The exercise of political
freedom is first and foremost a practice of world-building, for which the presence of
other persons is not a hindrance or obstacle but freedoms very condition. Reframing
the freedom question in feminism in terms of this I-can always pulls us back to the
question of political community and its constitution. To this question I would now
like to turn.
As I have already suggested, third-wave critiques of the category of women led to
a sense of crisis about the future of feminism as a political community. In my book, I
try to understand how such a crisis could emerge in order to recover another way of
talking about women as the subject of feminism in an effort to move the debate from
the philosophical problem of a category and its coherence to a political problem
of making public claims or speaking in someones name. I call this speaking the
predicative moment of politics in order to mark its constitutive character: speaking
in womens name constitutes women as the subject of feminism. Understood as a
political subject and not a sociological, let alone natural, category, women do not
exist prior to that speaking.
Women as the political subject of feminism, I argue, come into existence through
the practice of making political claims in that name. This involves rethinking what
a political claim is. Second-wave feminism tended to think about political claims as
truth claims (that is, as claims that need to be and can be justified in the epistemic
sense of giving proofs). Third-wave feminism refused the idea that political claims
can be so justified, but it never really explained why the failure to justify them
would not lead to political crisis. Against both of these positions, I show that the
specific nature of political claims emerges only once we take leave of the register of
epistemology and begin to think about such claims as fundamentally anticipatory
rather than antecedent (e.g., justificatory) in structure. Political claims solicit the
agreement of all, but they cannot compel it in the manner of proofs. I call this the
predicative moment of feminist politics.
The predicative moment of politics involves the ability to claim commonality. There
is no guarantee that the claim will succeed or for that matter not succeed. When one
speaks politically, one speaks not only for oneself but also for othersand those
others may well speak back, that is, say whether they find themselves spoken for.
The condition of democratic politics is at once the positing of commonalities and the
speaking back. Only then is positing commonality a form of world-building based
on the exchange of opinions through which we gauge our agreement in judgments.
The idea that speaking for others (in the name of women) necessarily generates
exclusions and refusals and therefore should be avoided is to miss the whole point of
democratic politics. Such politics consists precisely in the making of universal claims
(speaking for), hence also in closure, and in their acceptance or refusal (speaking
back), hence also in openness. Fundamentally anticipatory in character, speaking
politically is about testing the limits to every claim to community, about testing

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the limits and nature of agreement, and about discovering what happens when the
agreement breaks down or never materializes in the way we thought in the first
place, that is, when we spoke politically (in other words, claimed to be speaking for
others).
In Chapter 4 of the book, I draw on Hannah Arendts idiosyncratic reading
of Kants third Critique to develop this understanding of what it means to make
a political claim. Like the aesthetic judgment of beauty that is Kants concern,
political claims or judgments are neither objective, based on truth criteria, nor merely
subjective, expressions of personal or cultural preference. Rather, such claims posit
or, better, anticipate the agreement of all, though they cannot compel it by the giving
of proofs, as an objective truth claim might. To say, this war is unjust is not to
say it is unjust to me, anymore than, as Kant, argues, the claim this painting is
beautiful means it is beautiful for me. The claim aspires to universality; whether
others do in fact agree is another matter and part of the practice of politics itself. In
any case, the agreement, if it does materialize, is not guaranteed by the correctness
of concept application.
To recognize the anticipatory structure of political claims is to see why it is indeed
still possible to speak in the name of women without giving hostage to the idea of
women as a coherent and unified subject that precedes and grounds all claims to
speak in its name. In short, third-wave critiques were justified, but they need not lead
to the end of feminism, for feminism is not foremost a practice of justification; it is a
practice of making claims in this nonepistemic sense. Thus I seek to return feminist
theory, as a second-order discourse, to this distinctly political understanding of claim
making, which has, after all, guided the first-order practice of feminist politics all
along.
Following Arendts account of political judgment as a practice in which we posit
the agreement of others, I argue that feminist communityrather than being given
in shared experience or identity or being impossible due to the lack of anything
sharedcan be created, and created anew, through such a practice. To assume, as
some third-wave feminists have, that the collapse of women as a coherent category
translates into the collapse of feminism as a political movement is to neglect both the
predicative moment of politics and the community-constituting moment of political
judgment. It is as if the category itself secured, or failed to secure, the ability to
make political claims.
What if we thought of women not as a category to be applied like a rule in a
determinate judgment, but as a claim to speak in someones name and to be spoken
for? If such a claim can only be anticipatory, then it is always in need of agreement
and consent. This agreement is posited (for example, others, too, ought to agree with
my judgment about who women are and what they demand), which means the
agreement is not there from the start, given, say, in the very logic of concept
application. Rather, the agreement is what we at once take for granted and hope
to achieve whenever we take the riskand let us not forget that it is a riskof
speaking politically.
To emphasize the predicative moment of politics is to call attention to the constitutive character of making claims. What makes a claim political is not something
that inheres in the object or the practice that the claim is about. Thus, as I say in
the introduction, the second-wave slogan, the person is political, has often been
interpreted as an effort to reveal the intrinsically political character of the gendered
division of labor. I think we do better to interpret that slogan as productive of the
political character of the gendered division of labor. There is nothing intrinsically

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political about housework, sexuality, or reproduction. It is the activity of making

public claims that creates relations among things that have nonefor example, the
principle of equality and the gendered division of laborwhich transforms something
considered either private or merely subjective into something of common concern.
Whether these claims generate agreement or a form of speaking back is the practice
of politics itself.
To recognize the fundamentally anticipatory structure of political claims is to understand why feminism cannot avoid the universal. I associate the activity of making
political claims with the difficult, conflict-ridden, and risky business of articulating
universality. There are, of course, ways of constituting the universal that are not at
all anticipatory or world-opening but merely the filling or completion of a prior determination, where universal is that which unfolds logically or socially according to
a pregiven logic. This way of thinking about universality has unfortunately inflected
many discussions of rights, where rights are held to expand in ever larger circles
to groups based on a logic that is given in the nature of rights themselves. The
universal, when it is understood in a political rather than a philosophical idiom, is
not a process of subsuming particulars under rules but a practice of making political
claims in a public space, that is, of transforming what is merely subjective into something others recognize as common. A political claim aspires to universal agreement,
then, but what it produces is something else. The idea that there could be a political
claim that did not produce exclusions seems to me to be mistaken and for the most
part generated by thinking about political claims in epistemological terms. Thought
of in such terms, a political claim can appear to be something whose chances of
success can be decided at the level of theory. The idea that there could be a claim
that would not exclude and that would therefore be accepted by all is based on the
notion that feminism is somehow about getting the right definition or concept, the
one that would fully represent all women. If this were possible then theory might
indeed provide not only the guide for practice but its guarantee. I have a lot to say
about this idea of theory in the first chapter of my book.
Let me now turn to the very interesting comments on the book, starting with
those of Myra Marx Ferree. I appreciate Professor Ferrees remarks, and am especially grateful that she addressed the question of European feminism versus American feminism. In this country, second- and third-wave feminism has been excessively
concerned with the principle of equality and skeptical of arguments about sexual
difference. In Europe, by contrast, difference arguments have been seen as necessary
for creating meaningful social and political equality between men and women. Although there certainly are dangers in difference arguments, it is also the case that
arguments for equality have tended to leave women unable to give voice to the
reality of the socially structurally and enforced practices of gender difference that
shape, and are reproduced in the practice of, daily life. These structures of difference
deeply circumscribe womens ability to take advantage of any equal opportunities
that come their way. Clearly, as I argue in the book, equality or difference presents
feminists with an impossible choice. This choice cannot be properly understood, let
alone overcome, unless we first grasp that it arises within the framework of the social
question. Here, womens claims to equality cannot be heard as political claims unless
they are uttered in the language of the social, that is, the betterment of society. As
I hope to have shown in the book, this language takes for granted that it is women
qua women (e.g., their femininity) who, if admitted to the full rights of citizenship,
will make society better. Difference thus turns out to be the condition of womens
claims to equality. Yet claims to equality always sit uneasy with claims to difference.

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And so it is that feminists find themselves caught within the logic of the impossible
choice.
Professor Ferree also rightly reminds us that it is crucial for feminists to recall
the origins of their movement in grassroots politics. The excessively state-centered
American feminism that focuses almost exclusively on individual rights does not
properly recognize that rights are meaningless unless people are in a position to
exercise them. As I argue in the book, rights need to be part of a practice of freedom.
Freedom is not reducible to possession of constitutionally guaranteed rights. Rights
must be claimed, and the act of claiming them is a form of world-building: it
produces horizontal political relations among the people who claim rights, relations
that go beyond the mere fact of having gained a right itself. These relations go
beyond the outcome of any struggle for rights, the fact of having gained or not
gained a right itself. We lose track of this world-building when we think about
politics in instrumental (means-ends) terms.
Let me now turn to Andreas Glaesers comments. I appreciate Professor Glaesers
reading of my book, especially his understanding of it as a form of theorie engage.
This form of writing is enabled by the many feminist theorists who came before
me and who set out the conditions of my own theoretical practice. They did so
in a way that was enabling, not determining. I say this as way of approaching
Professor Glaesers central critical concern, namely, how the books celebration of
radical new-ness, its account of creativity is preempting a deeper reflection on the
institutional sources of creative action.
I can see how one might read my book as making an argument for spontaneity, but
celebrating radical newness as such was not my concern. For one thing, spontaneity
is not necessarily politicalone can be spontaneous all by oneselfand that is
why Arendt emphasized that political freedom, though it involves the capacity to
begin anew, is not synonymous with spontaneity. For another thing, newness is not
a good in itself. Totalitarianism was new, but hardly something to celebrate. My
concern, then, was not to extol the value of the new but to question the meansends conception of politics, according to which whatever new things do come into
the world can be predicted in advance of action. Tied to the idea of theory as
the guide to praxis, this way of thinking about the new denies the unbounded and
unpredictable character of action, that is, as I said above, that we simply cannot
foretell or control the consequences of our action. This does not mean we have no
responsibility, or that we can never say with some probability the effects of certain
actions. It just means that once we act politically, we are no longer in control of
how our actions will be taken up by others. Hence, Arendt, who is often misread
as herself celebrating action at the expense of everything else, recognized that action
can be dangerous and unpredictable.
I think Glaeser is right to say that I do not focus much on the institutional
bases of freedom as action. That may be because my central concern was with the
ways in which action itself creates those institutional bases. This is what I called
world-building, though I would resist reducing world-building to the creation of
institutions as they are commonly understood. In the book I discuss the practice
of freedom as the creation of an objective and subjective worldly in-between, to
borrow Arendts phrase, which comes into existence through action. And though
action certainly does create networks of relations that are objective and that we
might want to count as institutional in the conventional sense, action also creates
an intangible web of human relationships that is no less real than the things we
visibly have in common, as Arendt observes.

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Following Arendt, I call feminists attention to this intangible element of worldbuilding because I want us to start thinking not only about action but also institutions in noninstrumentalist terms, that is, terms that foreground the radical claim to
freedom and the ability to begin anew. The institutionalization of freedom, for example, is clearly at stake in revolutionary action as Arendt understands it. But since
freedom is a practice rather than a substance or something that can be encoded
in law, the preservation of such institutions themselves depends on action and thus
in some very important sense on their continual reinvention through such action.
To emphasize the new is not to underestimate the importance of institutions, but
to place action and the practice of freedom at the very heart of their creation and
maintenance. Of course institutions, like rights, can exist in the absence of citizen
action, but then they are more appropriately described as bureaucracy or the rule of
no one.
George Steinmetz, too, reads my book as celebrating spontaneity as a good in
itself and thereby losing track of its conditions. What is gained by defining a form
of action that is completely undetermined? he asks, wondering whether this does
not lead me down the perilous road of decisionism. Once again, my response is not
to protest exactlyif two of your readers pick out the same problem, then perhaps
there is a problembut to take this opportunity to clarify my position.
Clearly, Steinmetz is not advocating a deterministic conception of action, for that
would obliterate human freedom. The question, then, becomes how to talk about
the novelty of action without becoming entangled in the endless discussions of free
will versus determinism that have dominated the understanding of action in the
Western tradition. In The Human Condition, Arendt argued that human beings are
conditioned beings, but being conditioned is very different from being determined.
They are conditioned because everything they come into contact with becomes a
condition of their existence. The point, then, is not to talk about human action as
if it had no conditions, but only to insist that those conditions do not determine it.
To suggest that only actions that are wholly unconditioned are free is at the heart
of the idea of freedom as sovereignty, refuted by Arendt and myself, according to
which worldly things and other people themselves are a hindrance to ones freedom.
Because I am in no way arguing that action is wholly undetermined in the sense
of a pure act of free will, I would not want to find myself in the company of
decisionists or the left avant-garde, which is where Steinmetz suggests I might be
placed. Decisionism advances the idea that action is based on an ungrounded act of
will. Although I agree that action cannot be rationally groundedas Wittgenstein
argued, at a certain point our reasons run out, this is what we doI strongly disagree
with the notion of will that underwrites decisionism. I see myself as developing, in
the spirit of Arendt, an account of action that breaks with the philosophy of the
will, which has more or less dominated modern political and feminist theory. There
is no way to move from the idea of the will as free (which is to say, sovereign) to
the idea of membership in a democratic community. For the freedom of the will, as
Nietzsche recognized, is irreducibly bound to the logic of obedience and command:
What is called freedom of the will is essentially a passionate superiority toward
someone who must obey. I am free; he must obeythe consciousness of this is
the very willing. The will, in short, is bound up with an understanding of politics
as rule over others.
I want to thank Professors Ferree, Glaeser, and Steinmetz for their critical
remarks.