Foundations for a Feminist Sublime

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter takes up the notion of vulnerability in the face of alterity that is the foundation for Freeman's “feminine sublime.” It traces similar notions in Butler's book of post-9/11 essays, Precarious Life, and in Eva Kittay's ground-breaking book in feminist care ethics, Love's Labor. It is argued that the dependence these authors find at the very heart of our intersubjective relationships is also at the heart of our relationship to the natural world — and that these relations of dependence are the irrevocable aspect of the human condition that both lends itself to and is disclosed in sublime experience. The ethical and political implications of this vulnerability to others can be temporarily denied or thwarted by the subject who flees dependence, but they must ultimately be affirmed if we are to live these relations in aesthetically, ethically, and politically sustainable ways.