The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (review)

A key issue confronting feminist and other normative critical theorists over the past twenty-five years has been the question whether Foucault’s critical project (and postmodernism’s more generally) is compatible with emancipatory thought. Insofar as Foucault linked Enlightenment humanism and its philosophy of the subject with new forms of social control and described processes through which subjects are constituted by normalizing discursive regimes of power-knowledge, he appeared to some to have left no room for agency. Furthermore, if subjects are caught within the very systems they are diagnosing, questions arise concerning the possibility of any grounding for social and political critique. Yet Foucault’s later writings on governmentality and ethics focus not only on the points at which subjects are integrated into technologies of domination, but also those in which individuals are able to transform themselves through techniques of self-government. Thus, he remarked, one of the central political problems of our time is “the politics of our selves” (quoted in Allen, 1). Some commentators have argued that this ethical turn is incompatible with Foucault’s earlier accounts of subjection (asujetissement) and normalization. He cannot have it both ways, they suggest; either we are subjected by power, or we are autonomous agents. This line of thinking has fueled the Foucault-Habermas debates among critical theorists and feminists.

In a pathbreaking and elegantly argued book, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, feminist critical theorist Amy Allen moves us beyond this theoretical impasse by clearing a middle ground between both camps in the debate. Her central aim is to shed light on the idea of a politics of the self by analyzing the ways in which power grips us at the level of our desires, motivations, and identifications, and offering an account of autonomy as a capacity for both critical reflection on power and deliberate self-transformation. She accomplishes this ambitious task by offering a pragmatic revision of Habermasian communicative ethics that embraces the historicity of validity claims, developing a reading of Foucault that reconciles the middle and late writings, and supplementing Foucaultian accounts of subjection with theoretical accounts that suggest possibilities for how we might and do overcome our subordinating attachments. Her lucid interpretive and analytic work is guided by her desire to identify important contributions to the project of developing critical theory, not to defend either Foucault or Habermas, but to synthesize their respective contributions into a more satisfactory theory.

Allen sets the stage for her analysis and revision by revisiting the feminist incarnation of the Foucault-Habermas debate, the confrontation between Judith Butler, Seyla Benhabib, and Nancy Fraser in the early ’90s. A central strand of contention between Butler and Benhabib concerns what Allen refers to as “the entanglement of power and validity” (4) that threatens any effort to develop a normative critique that can transcend power relations. In this debate it is Fraser who attempts to chart the middle ground between the opposing camps. Fraser argues, contra Benhabib, that the subject is not merely situated within but constituted by power-knowledge regimes. Butler’s position, she suggests, is not that we are incapable of agency or critique, but that our capacities for agency and critique are themselves socially constructed. Contra Butler, Fraser argues that her reliance upon resignification and performativity as principle forms of agency is impoverished insofar as it avoids the question of how to evaluate the changes effected through such performances. Hence, she argues, both positions are one-sided. Feminist critical theory needs an analysis that can do both—offer normative critique without neglecting the fact that subjects are constituted within the very power-knowledge regimes that they are criticizing.

Allen is in sympathy with Fraser’s effort to reconcile this false antithesis between poststructuralists and Habermasians. Yet she maintains that Fraser’s attempt underestimates the challenges that Butler’s (and Foucault’s) account of subjection creates for Habermasian concepts of autonomy...