In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 17.2 (2003) 144-147



[Access article in PDF]
Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship. Noelle McAfee. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 219. $39.95 h.c. 0-8014-3706-7; $17.95 pbk. 0-8014-8670-X.

Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship musters philosophical resources to further thinking about democratic citizenship and the public sphere. It endeavors to bridge the impasse between the discourses of modernity and postmodernity in political theory by making a poststructuralist conception of subjectivity the basis of an account of deliberative democracy. McAfee's reflections stem from the insight that one's theory of political association depends on one's theory of subjectivity [End Page 144] (1-7). For McAfee, political life is about participating in political communities, and she maintains that political agency is not a capacity of rational, autonomous individuals, but is enacted through engagement with others in civil society. Communitarians also hold this view, but McAfee thinks that they have not done enough to rethink subjectivity (7), which is necessary for developing an account of community that is cooperative rather than adversarial. Further, her concern with plurality and difference, largely informed by feminist theory, leads her to reject the claim that community forms around a common conception of the good that serves as the basis of political life (189-90), and motivates the turn to poststructuralist thinking about subjectivity.

The book is structured in three parts: the first explores Habermas's and Kristeva's accounts of subjectivity; the second discusses each thinker's view of political life; and the third presents McAfee's view of deliberative democracy, in which a pluralistic community develops through the complementary agency of relational subjects. Two primary concerns guide her thinking: to develop a conception of political association as cooperation and to develop a conception of subjectivity sufficient to underwrite such an association (7).

McAfee holds that Habermas's discourse ethics contributes significantly to thinking about deliberative democracy, but it remains too committed to modernity's substantive account of the subject (17, 41). Although Habermas maintains that political agency is enacted and realized in the public sphere through political deliberation, it is still characterized as rational and autonomous, and originates with the spontaneous activity of an ego that desires autonomy (33-36). The positing of such a "protosubject" betrays a metaphysical bias, leading McAfee to conclude that Habermas's attempt at postmetaphysical thinking about the subject has not succeeded (27, 47, 49-51).

Kristeva's notion of the subject-in-process, argues McAfee, holds more promise (17). Drawing on Lacan, Kristeva maintains that subjectivity consists in the negotiation between the semiotic, in which the drives and desires of the unconscious are expressed, and conscious life in the symbolic order (68). Desires expressed in the semiotic are deferred in the symbolic, and thus are never actually satisfied. They can subsequently resurface to disrupt the subject and the order in which it is situated, thereby functioning as an "other within." Subjectivity is constituted through a process of differentiation from this other (69). 1 McAfee characterizes the subject-in-process as open to and in relation with the other or others (71, 107, 116). For Kristeva, the health of the relation to the "other within" influences one's relations to social others (103-4, 124-25). Repression and exclusion of the other is a sign of neurosis; the healthy subject should desire and welcome the other as the difference in relation to which it can be a subject at all.

Since the subject-in-process is born out of difference, Kristeva avoids the problem that Habermas did not, namely that of positing a protosubject as the seed from which the subject eventually develops (68-70). While Kristeva's subjectivity seems [End Page 145] promising for grounding an account of cooperative political community (77), McAfee thinks that her work has not realized this potential (19, 107-8).

To address the deficiencies of both Habermas's and Kristeva's positions, McAfee develops her own account. Subjects, she claims, are constituted in relation to others, particularly through discursive practices. They come to know who they...

pdf