Linda Zerilli Research Articles

‘Hitting at the heart of a massive problem’: articulating a democratic education through feminist practices of freedom and urban farm movements in Buenos Aires, Argentina

ABSTRACT This ethnographic paper navigates the intersections of feminism, urban farm movements, and democratic education at La Granja Puerta del Sol, a small farm near Buenos Aires, Argentina. Under the stewardship of Dani Ramirez, the farm resonates with the ethos of urban agriculture, while actively contesting gender norms and patriarchal structures. In parallel, it functions as a dynamic educational hub and platform for activist causes in their community. Utilising the theoretical perspectives of Michel Foucault's politics of freedom and Linda Zerilli's feminist practices of freedom, I analyze the farm's strategies in fostering sustainability, care work ethics, and collective decision-making. This exploration unveils how La Granja embodies feminist democratic education, underscoring the farm's potential to influence and reshape broader democratic education practices.

Confounded Dwelling: Architectures of Association in W. G. Sebald’sAusterlitz

Confounded Dwelling: Architectures of Association in W. G. Sebald’s<i>Austerlitz</i>

IsLiberalismBad for Women? Reclaiming Susan Okin’s Democratic Feminist Thesis

This article excavates a democratic feminist thesis from Susan Okin’s provocative essay, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” by revealing, beneath a conspicuous and troubling “othering” language, an imperative to treat “culture” as a political—as opposed to private—matter and to privilege the voices of women within minority cultures. It thereby locates in Okin’s controversial essay a position against treating liberal principles as trumps over the voices of the most vulnerable, exposing her democratic—as opposed to liberal—leanings and urging contemporary political theorists in a direction that contrasts sharply with Linda Zerilli’s recent calls to outsider liberal judgment. Ultimately, this project invites contemporary political theorists to reconsider the extent to which certain brands of liberalism may be bad for women, and to align instead with 1980s women of color feminism in its emphasis on insider democratic dialogue as a necessary prerequisite to all forms of political judgment.

‘Reflections on Little Rock’ and Reflective Judgment

Reflections on Little Rock (RLR) is one of Hannah Arendt’s most controversial writings. Read from the perspective of the political philosopher, it appears even more contentious than her famous remarks in Eichmann in Jerusalem. In the last two decades, a number of critical contributions have been published addressing this essay, highlighting how it casts serious doubts on the correctness of Arendt’s dealing with the racial question and, more generally, on the tenability of central elements of her political thought – e.g., her distinction between the political and the social. However, only occasional – and, as I will try to demonstrate, quite imprecise – analyses of the implications of RLR for an understanding of Arendt’s view of judgment have been produced. The aim of the present article is to reread what both Arendt’s position on judgment and its main contemporary reformulation, advanced by Linda Zerilli, imply for the making of political choices in pluralistic societies. Special attention will be also paid to the relation between the particular and the universal in Arendtian thought. In the first section I will reconstruct the main (factual and argumentative) weaknesses of RLR, while in the second a detailed assessment of the criticisms relating RLR and Arendt’s view of judgment will be provided. Finally, in the last section I will discuss at length Zerilli’s conception of feminist judgment.

Idealising 'the political'

I DEALISING 'THE POLITICAL' Lois McNay, The Misguided Search for the Political: Social Weightlessness in Radical Democratic Theory, Cambridge, UK. Polity, 2014, E-book edition, 247pp; £16.14 e-book.References to ontology have increased across the social sciences and humanities in the last twenty years. Much like researchers in the 1980s might have been dutifully expected to clarify their epistemology or subject position, it has become a more common expectation - at least in some contexts - that people have something to say about 'their ontology'. This tendency has been notable in the field of critical political theory. The concept of ontology has acquired a set of expansive meanings that go beyond its traditional usage in philosophy as a prompt for inventory-style answers to the question of 'what is being?'.1 The reimagining of ontology as a category for talking about the political constitution of society has been a source of productive theoretical inquiry, and generated an intellectual excitement that marked my own introduction to the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Their insistence that politics needed to be conceptualised in ontological terms imbued a sense that grappling with ontological questions was a mark of my own theoretical seriousness, in contrast to those who cannot see beyond the common sense assumptions of everyday political discourse. At the same time, with no training in philosophy (or, for that matter, political theory), I sometimes wondered if I knew what I was talking about when I talked about ontology, a feeling that can still be triggered today when I encounter an abstruse, knowing, or simply waffly use of the term.The influence of the so-called 'ontological turn' (p18) informs Lois McNay's rich critical assessment of a strand of poststructuralist radical democratic theory that has privileged abstract interpretations of politics. Mouffe is one of her targets, though she extends the argument to Wendy Brown, Linda Zerilli and William Connolly, and even Jacques Ranciere and James Tully despite their shared disavowal of the discourse of ontology. McNay argues that the preoccupation with developing an abstract philosophical account of the political cultivates a 'one-sided' (p21) mode of theorising, which becomes detached from an analysis of the social conditions that impede the emergence of a radical leftpolitics. This 'transcendental mode of reflection' (p11) is schematised in conceptual distinctions that replicate Heidegger's demarcation of the ontological and the ontic. The ontological-level category of 'the political' is consecrated as the site of theoretical distinction, while the ontic-level horizon of the given social order is situated as a largely dull realm of 'inert positivity' (p22). McNay cautions that her argument is 'not an argument against abstraction per se' (p11); she recognises that 'to some degree or another, ontological reflection is an unavoidable aspect of political thinking' (p19). Nor is she dismissive of a theoretical approach to thinking about politics that has 'breathed new life into democratic theory' (p11). However, she questions whether the 'turn to ontology is the most conducive way of thinking about transformative agency and change' (p11), because of the concept's tendency to assume a particular understanding of the political that elides the heterogeneity of existing political practices. Accordingly, despite their aversion to the 'ideal theory' (p12) of Rawls and others, she criticises radical democrats for producing their own version of an idealised theory that fails to satisfactorily bridge the gap between the ontological and empirical.McNay draws primarily on Bourdieu to interrogate what she characterises as the 'social weightlessness' (p11) of radical democratic theory, and prescribes a form of immanent and disclosive critique that emerges out of the work of Axel Honneth. The use of Bourdieu as a theoretical counter allows her to highlight the arid view of sociology presupposed in the work she critiques, emblematic of a scholastic tendency that finds general theoretical expression 'in a persistent downgrading of social experience as the merely empirical' (p29). …

Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism by Madhavi Menon

Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism by Madhavi Menon Ali-Reza Mirsajadi Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism. By Madhavi Menon. U of Minnesota P, 2015. Cloth $87.50, Paper $25.00. 142 Pages. Madhavi Menon's latest book is as an illuminating critique on the problematic ideology of identitarian politics and theory. Although Indifference to Difference deals most intimately with the ongoing debates within queer theory and LGBTQ rights, Menon's radical argument translates effortlessly to any identity-based field of inquiry. The crux of this book centers on the philosophical debate between particularism and universalism and its application within our contemporary discourse on identity. Especially in the arena of sexuality politics, which has historically insisted on explicating sexual identities and subsequently including each freshly-minted one within the acronymic alphabet soup (LGBTQ+), the power and perils of "naming" have been deeply felt. As Menon powerfully argues in her introduction, "Identity is the demand made by power—tell us who you are so we can tell you what you can do. And by complying with that demand, by parsing endlessly the particulars that make our identity different from one another's, we are slotting into a power structure, not dismantling it" (2). Although Menon's interventions within identity theory and politics are not entirely novel, Indifference to Difference artfully deconstructs identitarian labels through the lens of queer desire in a way that feels fresh and exciting. Menon begins dismantling this flawed system in her introduction, which labors in parsing the dense philosophical jargon of critical literary theory. Building off the identity theories of Ernesto Laclau, Eric Lott, Linda Zerilli, Karl Marx, G.W.F. Hegel, and most importantly, Alain Badiou, Menon argues for a theory of universalism that is loaded with particularity and identity, and most importantly, is indifferent to difference. She terms this "queer universalism," since queerness as [End Page 138] a marker not only expresses that desire which defies identitarian limits, but as she explains, "Everything is queer because no-thing—peoples, events, desires—can achieve ontological wholeness" (19). Menon's "queer universalism," then, would be defined as "indifferent to ontology—it does not give us particular identities, considering instead all identities as not fully determined, or knowable, in short, as queer" (20). While the introduction has the fiery determination of a manifesto, a rallying cry for true intersectionality in scholarship and activism, her three body chapters are less consistently successful in explaining the utility of this new theoretical framework, especially as it applies to theatre and the performing body. In chapter 1, "Out of Africa: Yinka Shonibare's Museum of Desire," Menon explores the art installations and paintings of Yinka Shonibare MBE, whose work challenges audiences' expectations and identitarian limits through infusing scenes of antiquated Western sophistication with bodies of color, sexual gratuity, and postcolonial critiques. Menon uses Shonibare's work to brilliantly dismantle the ideal of multiculturalism, arguing that this obsession with difference and bodily legibility is in fact rooted in institutions of power and the lingering oppression of colonialism. Chapter 2, "Disembodying the Cause: Shakespeare's Dramatic Elisions," positions Menon's reading of queer universalism within her particular area of specialty, Shakespeare and sexuality. This chapter hones in on the idea of desire, or in Menon's word, "that which in every instance hollows out ontology" (16), and its relation to identity categories. Primarily focusing on the Indian boy in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Desdemona's murder in Othello, Menon presents desire as an ineffable phenomenon which depends on its own immateriality, absence, and lack of finite origin to exist. Although the chapter is compellingly written, it does not contribute as fruitfully to Menon's thesis on queer universalism as do the other chapters, which unfortunately disrupts the flow of the book. With chapter 3, "Lesbians without Borders: The Story of Dastangoi," Menon ventures into the realm of theatrical performance and reception studies. Menon uses "Shahzadeh Chouboli Boli," a modern play based on a centuries-old storytelling tradition in Delhi, as a case study to explore how queer universalism can be used in practice, both by artists and audiences. This section beautifully chronicles the history of dastangoi and its relationship with theatre...

On the notion of the political in feminist theory

Abstract The turn of the 1990s saw the emergence of “the political” in feminist theory. Despite there being a number of publications devoted to the theme, the concept itself has remained rather undertheorized. Instead of producing a thoroughly developed concept, it served to create an epistemic community devoted to the (supposedly dead, modernist) political aim of women’s emancipation. In the article, I argue that it would be beneficent for feminist theory to adopt an affirmative stance towards the contingency of politics. This of course poses a challenge to feminist politics, which still operates mainly within the framework of the politics of representation. Nevertheless, Linda Zerilli’s approach, which interprets contingency in an Arendtian vein as the condition of the world-creating and world-building power of feminism as a practice of freedom may prove to be a productive way of approaching the challenging issue of contingency in feminist theory

The Turn to Affect and the Problem of Judgment

Linda Zerilli explores what the historian of science Ruth Leys has decried as the “nonintentionalism” of affect theory and its implications for critical feminist practices of judgment. To insist, as Leys does, on intentionalism as concept possession, argues Zerilli, does not adequately account for the fascination with nonconceptualism. Such fascination must be understood in relation to a wholly intellectualist view of conceptual rationality, according to which knowing how to do something involves a highly abstract and disembodied form of rule-following. Far from unique to affect theory, this view is shared by certain phenomenological philosophers and postfoundational feminist theorists, who have been eager to recover the idea of human practice as a form of nonrational and nonconceptual embodied coping. Zerilli draws on ordinary language philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle, Stanley Cavell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein to uncover the misunderstandings that animate the turn to nonconceptualism as the only alternative to intellectualism.

The Second Amendment as Demanding Subject: Figuring the Marginalized Subject in Demands for an Unbridled Second Amendment

n American politics, we often equate rights, particularly constitutional rights, with freedom. It is as if we can discern how free we are by how well our constitutional rights are preserved. Political theorist Linda Zerilli cautions against such thinking: When rights become institutionalized, we tend to forget their origin in a radical, ungrounded claim to freedom, to non-domination and to equal participation in public affairs. We tend to become invested in securing them as such, rather than in maintaining our investment in the sometimes less stable practices that created them in the first place. 1

Beyond the walls–potentiality aborted. The politics of intersubjective universalism in Herman Melville’s Clarel

This dissertation argues that Herman Melville’s Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) is a universalist poem which analyzes the necessity, political potentiality, and challenges of intersubjectivity to the creation of more democratic human relationships beyond the walls of individualism and of traditional communities such as those organized around the notions of nation-state, ‘race’, culture, religious affiliation, or sexual identities. My argument is that, in Clarel, Melville conceives what I have termed ‘intersubjective universalism’ as an ethicopolitical process subjected to the potentialities and limitations of those who may either develop or neutralize it: human beings conditioned by their fears, egocentric behaviors, and ultimately, by their imperfect, limited, human nature. In this respect, Clarel, I claim, gives continuity to Melville’s recurrent exploration of the dangers, beauties, and interlacing of the (im)possibilities of intersubjectivity, universalism, and democracy, always torn between the democratizing potentiality the author located in interpersonal relationships and the bleak realization that human beings might never materialize such democratic project. My dissertation is divided into two chapters, which correspond to the two principal axes of my study: the defense and articulation of the intersubjective universalism I conceive in Melville’s Clarel from a theoretical perspective, on the one hand, and my interpretation of Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land as a universalist poem, representative of Herman Melville’s political literary project, on the other. In order to justify my defense of Clarel as a universalist poem, my dissertation incorporates the points of view of contemporary theorists such as Hannah Arendt, Etienne Balibar, Zygmunt Bauman, Martin Buber, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, Martha Nussbaum, and Linda Zerilli, among others, whose analyses on community, intersubjectivity, interpersonal relationships, global ethics, and universalism, from the perspectives of poststructuralism, sociology, philosophy, or politics, have been enabling to my own work.

Claiming Care Rights as a Performative Act

This paper investigates how a performative understanding of a woman’s right to care can become part of a feminist politics which is able to transcend the well-worn dichotomies we find both within and without feminist literature, such as difference versus equality, difference versus repronormativity, and rights as freedom versus rights as domination. Drawing on my own research, I argue that claiming the right to care does not simply push women more deeply into motherhood resulting in even more control and regulation of their lives, but that claiming care rights enables women to speak for themselves. Following the work of Linda Zerilli this paper argues that claiming women’s rights should, above all, be viewed as performative activities which contribute to democratic practices.

Politics, historicity, and persuasion: A feminist materialist engagement with Linda Zerilli's politics of freedom

Following in Joan Scott's anti-foundationalist footsteps, Linda Zerilli argues for a theory of feminist political judgement not framed in terms of epistemological certainty but assimilated to aesthetic judgement. Tani Barlow criticises Zerilli for not taking adequate account of history in her theory. I analyse the implications of Zerilli's ‘abyssal’ approach to political judgement and Barlow's critique of it. Despite their shared concerns, Zerilli's, Barlow's, and Scott's abyssal approaches struggle to effectively ground the validity of historical analysis and political judgement within a context of plurality and historical difference. All three thinkers focus extensively on discursive and imaginative potential for change while marginalising the role of materiality in the creation of new horizons for women. Incorporating a dynamic account of the materiality of human life into their work would allow them to tie politics and history to an explanation of the role material life plays in constituting plurality, factuality, and historicity.

Mundo común, feminismo y mitología

Since the 1970s feminism has signified one of the most productive critical reconsiderations of modern political thought legacy. This article examines the questioning of modern notions of political freedom and political community that Linda Zerilli has undertaken in her reading of Hannah Arendt and Ludwig Wittgenstein. On this basis and on criticism of sexual dimorphism, the article shows the need to rethink the relationship between theory and praxis beyond its modern conception, a feature present in much of contemporary feminist theory.

Theory after “Theory.” (review)

Reviewed by: Theory after “Theory.” Nicholas Birns Theory after “Theory.” Derek Attridge and Jane Elliot, eds. London: Routledge, 2011. Pp. xxiv + 321. $145.00 (cloth); $39.95 (paper). It is an amusing gesture to have me write a review of this book, since I am the author of a book called Theory After Theory (without the quotation marks). The difference is perhaps in the word “after,” which can be both spatial and temporal. My book, which tried to combine a sense of iterability in the Derridean sense with the traditional continuity of intellectual history, used “after” in the more serial sense; this collection uses the word more in the successive way. Thus one might find here, as expected, a focus on theorists who reemerged in the English-speaking world after 1990: Agamben, Žižek, Badiou, Rancière. Of these only Žižek is really of a generation subsequent to Derrida and Foucault’s; Agamben, Badiou, and Rancière were all born only a few years after Derrida, and indeed Badiou was born earlier than figures such as Kristeva and Todorov, who were given full membership in the first wave of theory. Indeed, Rancière and Badiou are mentioned as younger but comparable colleagues in Louis Althusser’s memoir The Future Lasts Forever.1 Their Anglophone currency, however, came later. Of the new big names only Quentin Meillassoux, born in 1967, is a veritable baby as far as European high theorists go. This sort of late theoretical eminence has even been achieved by some of the contributors to the book: namely, Bernard Stiegler, Adriana Cavarero, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Brian Massumi. In their introduction, though, Elliot and Attridge make clear that this will not be simply “Theory”: The Next Generation. Although all these thinkers, especially Agamben and Meillassoux, figure prominently in the arguments of several of the contributors, Attridge and Elliot assert that their volume will not “draw obsessively on the work of certain oracular figures,” and that if certain famous names come up with regularity, they are likelier to be “far from new” (3). In this regard, the editors mention Amanda Anderson’s citations of Lionel Trilling, Rey Chow’s mention of Brecht (and for that matter Benjamin), and Adriana Cavarero and Linda Zerilli’s citations of Hannah Arendt. To this could be added Laurent Dubreuil’s discussion of the poetry of D. H. Lawrence, Henry Staten’s and Stiegler’s respectful evocation [End Page 831] of the aesthetics of Paul Valéry, and even Staten’s unlikely revival of Leon Trotsky as providing, intriguingly, “the best brief statement of the relative claims of formalism and history” (235). Indeed, the book’s primary effect is to make the twentieth century the backdrop to contemporary theory. True, writers such as Borges and Proust had prominent roles in, say, the work of Paul de Man. But romanticism and the long nineteenth century were at the core of the emphases of the Yale school and the work of Edward W. Said and Fredric R. Jameson. The thinkers anthologized by Attridge and Elliot, though, privilege the short twentieth century, its ethical gaps and formal challenges—it is this period that offers the theoretical imperative. As Peter Hallward’s essay perceptively asserts, this is a gesture of hope, not of resigned despair to the permanence of post-1980 global capitalism. Arendt’s work is central to this, bridging what Zerilli called the “generative power of imagination” (127) and what she, in late-Wittgensteinian mode, calls “the mutual attunement of language” (130). Subjectivity, personhood is reasserted, though not naively, as Roberto Esposito’s brilliant treatment of the latter concept shows. With this Arendtian turn comes a revised sense of the political. In the 1980s, what sufficed as “the political” was a vague Marxism combined with a rebuke of formalism (disappointingly, this vagueness recurs towards the end of Staten’s essay, which until then provides an exhilarating discussion of how the idea of techne can widen the romantic base of neo-aestheticism). J. Hillis Miller and a few others tried to counter this tendency with a sense of the ethical that was both rhetorically aware and which contained an incipient political pluralism. The Soviet collapse and the delegitimizing...

Emotions in Translation: Helen Maria Williams and “Beauties Peculiar to the English Language”

Emotions in Translation: Helen Maria Williams and “Beauties Peculiar to the English Language” Louise Joy (bio) Louise Joy Homerton College, Cambridge, UK Louise Joy Louise Joy is Lecturer in English at Homerton College, University of Cambridge. Her essays have appeared in The European Romantic Review and The History of European Ideas. She is co-editor of Poetry and Childhood (2010). Footnotes 1. Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, The Indian Cottage, or, a Search after Truth (Workington, 1797), 108. 2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. 1 of Eloisa, or a Series of Original Letters, trans. William Kenrick, rev. ed., 4 vols. (London, 1803), viii. 3. In 1773, Kenrick published a revised edition of Eloisa in which he changed the heroine’s name to an anglicized version of Rousseau’s original. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julia: or, The New Eloisa, trans. William Kenrick, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1773). But this revised edition never captured the popular imagination in the same way, and it was the earlier Eloisa text that continued to be reprinted. For an account of how the novel Rousseau entitled Julie became known as La Nouvelle Héloïse to the French and as Eloisa to the British, see Philip Stewart, “Half-Title: or Julie Beheaded,” Romantic Review 86 (1995): 30–44. 4. Alexander Pope, “Eloisa to Abelard,” in Miscellaneous Poems and Translations, by Several Hands (London, 1722). For example, in his Essays: On Music and Poetry, James Beattie quotes from the Pope epistle, identifying his source as “Pope’s Eloisa.” James Beattie, Essays: on Poetry and Music, as they Affect the Mind; on Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition; on the Usefulness of Classical Learning, 3rd ed. (London, 1779), 53. 5. For a more detailed discussion of the moral character of British readers in the eighteenth century, see Samuel Pickering, The Moral Tradition in English Fiction, 1785–1850 (Hanover, NH: University of New England, 1976). A useful account of the issues involved in the translation of French novels into English during the period is provided by Josephine Grieder, Translations of French Sentimental Prose Fiction in Late Eighteenth-Century England: The History of a Literary Vogue (Durham: Duke University Press, 1975). 6. Much has been written about the representation of women in Rousseau’s work. For a useful window on these discussions, see Linda Zerilli, Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). For a discussion of how Helen Maria Williams is recurrently drawn to represent the figure of Julie (or “Eloisa”) in her prose works, see Nicola Watson, “Novel Eloisas: Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary Narratives in Helen Maria Williams,” The Wordsworth Circle 23 (1992): 18–23. 7. The theologian and moral philosopher, Thomas Cogan, characterizes the difference between these two categories of the emotions: “the term passion...may with strict propriety, be used, and used exclusively, to represent the first feelings, the percussion as it were, of which the mind is conscious from some impulsive cause....The...term affection...supposes a more deliberate predilection and aversion.” Thomas Cogan, A Philosophical Treatise on the Passions, 2nd ed. (London, 1802), 6–9. 8. See Helen Maria Williams, Poems, 2 vols. (London, 1786). 9. See also Mary Hays, vol. 1 of Memoirs of Emma Courtney, 2 vols. (London, 1796), 41 and Thomas Holcroft, vol. 4 of Anna St. lves: A Novel, 7 vols. (London, 1792), 151. For a sustained analysis of the role Rousseau’s novel plays in eighteenth-century debates about the emotions, see Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Rousseau, trans. Peter Gay (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). 10. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, vol. 2 of Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 4 vols. (London, 1798), 42. 11. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London: Allen Lane, 1984), 242–43. 12. Edmund Burke, A Letter from Mr. Burke to a Member of the National Assembly; in Answer to Some Objections to his Book on French Affairs (Paris, 1791), 32–33. 13. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, &c. &c. in a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris, rev. ed...

The Crisis of the Social and Feminist Identity Politics: Linda Zerilli’s Proposal

이 글의 목적은 ‘사회적인 것’의 위기의 창발현상적 성격에 주목하면서 그 원인과 성격, 그리고 몇 가지 대안을 간략하게 살펴보고 그 위기가 페미니스트 정체성의 정치학에, 특히 린다 제릴리의 정치적 자유론에 함의 하는 바를 검토하는 것이다. 이 글의 논지는 다음 세 가지로 요약된다. 첫째, 로즈, 라투르, 긴티스의 진단에 근거하여, 위기의 주요 원인이 점점 더 복잡해지는 다양한 사회구조의 작동 양식 때문이라는 것과, 향후 사회학 적 연구의 방향은 미시적인 수준에서 사회 개념, 제도, 조직 등등의 발생, 유지, 변형 그리고 소멸의 과정을 면밀히 조사하는 것으로 재조정되어야 한다는 것을 푸코의 통치성 이론 등을 그 예로 하여 보여준다.<BR> 둘째, 페미니스트 본질론 논쟁과 페미니스트 정체성의 정치를 ‘사회적인 것’의 위기 논의의 맥락에 위치시킴으로써, 정치적 자유에 대한 제릴리의 연구와 그녀가 페미니즘을 세계-구축의 실천으로 보는 것이 함의하는 바를 검토한다. 제릴리의 정치적 자유론은 푸코의 자기 배려로의 윤리 문제와 아렌트의 정치적 판단론과 수렴한다. 이러한 논의를 통해 이 글은 지난 수십 년간 페미니스트들이 획득한 통찰이 ‘사회적인 것’의 위기 문제를 새롭게 조명할 수 있다는 사실을 강조한다. 페미니스트들은 페미니즘의 위기에 직면해서 창의적인 해결책을 찾아낸 것으로 보이며, 제릴리의 작업 은 그중에서도 가장 전망이 밝은 대안들 중의 하나다.<BR> 셋째, 이 글에서 다룬 여러 이론가의 이론들이 조셉 루스가 최근에 더욱 정교하게 다듬은 실천 이론의 분석틀로 수렴될 수 있다는 점을 보이고, 이들 이론들에 대해 자주 제기되는 상대주의라는 비난에 대한 간략한 논의를 덧붙인다.

The Origin and Character of Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Judgment

Hannah Arendt’s theory of judgment has been the object of considerable interest in the last three decades. Political theorists in particular have hoped to find in her theory of judgment a viable account of how diverse modern societies can sustain a commitment to dialogue in the absence of shared basic principles. A number of scholars, however, have critiqued Arendt’s account of judgment in various ways. This article examines criticisms from Richard Bernstein, Ronald Beiner, George Kateb, Jürgen Habermas, and Linda Zerilli. On the basis of early sources from Arendt’s manuscripts and Denktagebuch that have not been used in these debates, this article contends that Arendt’s position on judgment can be defended against these critics and that her account warrants further exploration.

Symposium on Linda Zerilli's Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom

Symposium on Linda Zerilli's <i>Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom</i>

The New Aesthetic-Political Avant-Garde: Linda Zerilli's Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom

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 Women’s 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 Guerilleres. Boston, MA: Beacon.

The Institutional Foundations of Free Action

Although the very first word the title of Linda Zerilli's book is feminism, one does not have to read it as a contribution to feminist literature. The reason is given the last word of the title, which is For the book's central concern is the defense of an Arendtian anti-sovereign, pro-relational understanding of political action as freedom, which is as relevant general political theory, fact general politics, as it is feminism. So I will offer a reading here, which the most part takes Zerilli's book as a general exercise 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 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 a wider genre, which might be called 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 self-application. My point playing this old trick of criticism is not to call attention to a possible performative selfcontradiction of the text the sake of judging its value terms of the seemingly transcendental value. Instead, my intention using this ruse is to reveal, a somewhat single-minded fashion, especially one significant substantive blindspot of Zerilli's 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 Arendt's notion of freedom, while suggesting that there are other conceptions of freedom that might have served Zerilli's 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 part blunted by Zerilli's 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 Zerilli's main source of inspiration but she is fact Zerilli's authorizing spirit and we shall see 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 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 terms of I-do, since she greatly emphasizes that freedom is strictly actu not 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, Arendt, free action is not action something else: it is based neither on a because nor on an in order to. Thus, it is not meaningful action the sense that Alfred Schiitz (1932)