Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics, and: Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (review)

At first glance, these two very different books seem to share little in common. Kruks's volume is rooted in a careful explication of French existentialist writings of mid-century in order to provide an adequate philosophical grounding for contemporary accounts of the subject. Ackerly's book starts from her experiences working with Bangladeshi women's groups to devise a useful contemporary theory of social criticism. By the end, though, it is clear that both authors direct their writing to the common purpose of revitalizing feminism as a basis for political critique and action. In seeing the points of connection between these two very different volumes, we may be able to reach some broader judgments about current feminist political thinking.

Sonia Kruks, well known for her writings on Simone de Beauvoir, wishes to counter the notion that the only possible feminist use for twentieth-century French thought is to convince us of the wisdom of post-modernism. Kruks argues that, on the contrary, French postmodernist thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault have distorted their own intellectual history in order to make their contributions seem more daring, more novel, and more singular than they are. Kruks argues that such postmodernists have led feminists to ignore some of the inspiring results that can emerge for feminists from a careful study of de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Kruks's purpose is to show that the existentialist thinkers addressed the problems of subjectivity in a more complex and dialectical manner than is usually presupposed. Along the way, she offers convincing critiques of the writings of Judith Butler (whose gender performativity, she demonstrates, presumes some form of subject's interiority), Richard Rorty, and Joan Scott (whose accounts of experience cannot provide an adequate basis for agency). In place of the acid bath of postmodernist dissolution of the self, Kruks offers more careful readings of French existentialists whose dialectical account of the relationship between self and circumstance can help to solve the dilemmas of difference that have divided feminists.

Brooke Ackerly attempts to bring contemporary third-world feminist practices to bear on contemporary democratic theory. She is somewhat impatient with much of contemporary political theory because it does not necessarily achieve the broader aims of feminist social criticism. She examines at length the nature of feminist social criticism, and compares it with the demands of contemporary democratic theory. Ackerly discovers that the two idioms for intellectual discussion have much in common, but that third-world feminist social criticism is more complete in including mechanisms for self-criticism and inclusiveness within the very method itself. Ackerly describes a way in which, drawing upon the experiences of third-world women's working groups, it is possible to prescribe some ways to do political theorizing in a more honest and democratic way.

As a theorist, one of the points that Ackerly sees clearly is the paradox of theorists who would prescribe democratic political institutions. Saying that deliberation is an important part of politics is no way, by itself, to create the conditions by which all voices are heard in a deliberative process. There is something contradictory about trying to tell people how their democratic process can be best accomplished, instead of allowing them to engage in these processes. As a result of this insight, Ackerly tries instead to offer an account of third-world feminist social criticism as an alternative framework from which to raise critical analysis and engage in a political process for change.

Largely working within the framework of deliberative democratic theory, Ackerly is highly critical of political theorists who do not recognize the seriousness of marginalization within communities and its effect in silencing some...