Women’s Liberation and the Sublime: Feminism, Postmodernism Environment (review)

Women’s Liberation and the Sublime is a passionate, thought-provoking, and original book that sets out to develop “an aesthetic theory of the sublime that is and should be at the very center of feminist philosophy” (150). Bonnie Mann seeks to contest the framework of much contemporary theorization of the “postmodern sublime” by reading it against and alongside a set of concerns about place, temporality, freedom, and nature that have emerged from her experience as an activist in the “Women’s Liberation” movement. At its best Mann’s book does not only describe but also exemplifies the aesthetic of the sublime, which “disrupts and defies the conceptual, the juridical, in feminist thinking” (150). Indeed, her “liberatory sublime” involves “the aesthetic experience of the opening of worlds” so that “the claims of one woman on another, of one person on another, can be heard and lived” (158).

The book is, however, uneven, with flaws that are likely to deter some readers from following Mann’s argument through to the end. This would be a pity since the real merits of the book become clear in the three final chapters (7, 8, and 9). Many of the weaknesses stem from the fact that Mann uses the topic of the sublime as an excuse to attack a number of opponents and positions that are quite distinct, but which she groups together under the headings of “postmodernism” and “feminist postmodernism.” Mann seems to know how risky this is—and how irritating it will be for a number of her readers. Thus commenting on the use of the term women’s liberation in the title of her book, Mann remarks that it is “too nostalgic and naive a term to be mentioned without a good deal of embarrassment, but I have chosen to use it anyway. I find that it grates significantly enough against the grain of contemporary feminist linguistic conventions to be annoying, and my hope is that it will itself serve the purpose of disruption” (8).

Mann registers how “controversial” is her own use of the term “postmodern” (3n), but claims she will establish the adequacy of what might seem “a kind of fiction” in chapter 4, which seeks to show a coincidence between the extradiscursive “excess” that figures in Judith Butler’s early work and that of Jean-François Lyotard’s “postmodern sublime.” The problem, for this reader at least, was that this aspect of Mann’s argument did not work. Butler does not discuss the sublime, although Freud’s theory of sublimation does feature. Lyotard approaches the sublime via Kant, and is critical of psychoanalysis. As a consequence, in chapter 4 (which seeks to establish the similarity between Lyotard and Butler) and chapter 6 (on Butler as a discourse theorist), I found myself foundering.

Butler’s early position is blended into that of Lyotard and also—puzzlingly—into an epistemology that concerns itself with “an abyss of absence” (78, 118). Even more confusingly, Lyotard’s account of the richness and diversity of the “postmodern condition”—which involves an irruptive moment in modernism, rather than a temporal stage that is successive to modernism—is also gradually displaced by that of Frederic Jameson, for whom “the postmodern is fundamentally a repudiation of depth” and in which “deep surfaces have given way to the smooth flatness of a shopping-mall planet” (140). There is further slippage between two key terms—postmodernism and poststructuralism—that I found not only baffling but also profoundly misleading (77–79, 113–14). Chapter 5, entitled “An Interlude: Postmodern Goods” also did not help. Barely mentioning the sublime at all, it comprises a fierce criticism of texts by two propornography feminist writers: Laura Kipnis and Linda Williams. Mann never establishes, however, the links between their positions and those of Butler and Lyotard or, indeed, the connection to the aesthetics of the sublime.

Mann argues that, for Kant, the experience of the sublime “threw the subject into a kind of out-of-time and beyond...