Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (review)

In an attempt to overcome the binary logic governing much of contemporary feminist theory—opposing Postmodernism to the Enlightenment, and the death of the subject to the Cartesian knowing subject—Sonia Kruks argues for an alternative feminism, one which is, surprisingly, firmly grounded in existential phenomenology. Going against the grain, Kruks formulates her feminist politics through a selective use of the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Frantz Fanon, and Simone de Beauvoir.

At the center of her study lies the contested notion of “lived experience.” Kruks contends that our understanding of “lived experience” has been distorted by what she calls the “postmodern tale,” an oft-told story about the dissolution of the subject, conceived here as an autonomous, transhistorical rational knower. We are told, however, that this authoritative story is at best partial and at worst deceptive, since it unjustifiably suppresses a significant moment in the history of the subject of Western philosophy: namely, the early twentieth-century critique of the unitary Cartesian cogito at the hands of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir.

What emerges in their works, according to Kruks, is a sustained problematization of the traditional subject of modernity, yet without the simultaneous eradication of human agency. Existential thought, primarily in its affirmation that the subject is an embodied self whose experiences and freedom are situated and thus never unmediated or absolute, offers feminists a viable alternative to what the author perceives as the disempowering rhetoric of postmodernism, witnessed, for instance, in its celebration of a subjectless philosophy. Her (re)turn to existential philosophy serves many functions: it is an intervention in current feminist debates, an attempt to rethink the status of the subject, and an effort to elucidate how gendered and raced identities are shaped through experience and knowledge. And, perhaps what is most original in Retrieving Experience, Kruks also inquires into the possibility of grounding a (limited) female solidarity—a solidarity that is (needs to be) respectful of the differences among women—in women’s embodied experiences.

The volume is divided into three parts (each composed of two chapters) entitled “Simone de Beauvoir in ‘Her’ World and ‘Ours’”; “Recognition, Knowledge, and Identity”; and “Experience and the Phenomenology of Difference.” In the first part, Kurks illustrates the importance and uniqueness (if not the superiority) of Beauvoir’s insights into the gendering of subjectivity not only in contrast to her contemporaries (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) but also in relation to postmodern feminists (especially those influenced by the works of Michel Foucault, e.g., Judith Butler). The author submits that gender for Beauvoir is both socially produced and individually assumed (chapter 1), and that the primacy of discursivity needs to be counterbalanced by a study of the creative role of interiority if resistance is to be conceived as a genuine possibility (chapter 2).

In the second part, Kruks reflects on the status or place of identity politics within feminism. Drawing from the works of Sartre and Fanon on experiences of otherness (their phenomenologies of oppression), she argues for a qualified need to sustain identity politics, the benefits of which are clear: it provides a form for self-expression, ultimately compelling the recognition of differences. But she also points out that an overemphasis on difference risks obliterating any basis for solidarity, and that it may hamper efforts at material redistribution (a “politics of recognition” rather than a “politics of redistribution” runs the risk of perpetuating unfavorable economic arrangements) (chapter 3). Kruks also focuses on the epistemological dimension of identity politics, exploring how the knowledge of a given group can be said to be both situated (partial and perspectival) and objective (shareable and communicable) (chapter 4).

In the third part, Kruks advocates further curtailing the paralyzing postmodern obsession with discursivity in favor of a feminist politics grounded in an interest in feminine embodiment. Contrary to critics like Richard Rorty and Joan Scott, Kruks privileges the domain of the affective over that of the discursive (chapter 5). Some generalities of female embodiment, it is argued...