Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics - Hardcover

Kruks, Sonia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801433878 ISBN 13: 9780801433870

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2001

Synopsis

In Retrieving Experience, Sonia Kruks engages critically with the postmodern turn in feminist and social theory. She contends that, although postmodern analyses yield important insights about the place of discourse in constituting subjectivity, they lack the ability to examine how experience often exceeds the limits of discourse. To address this lack and explain why it matters for feminist politics, Kruks retrieves and employs aspects of postwar French existential theory―a tradition that, she argues, postmodernism has obscured by militantly rejecting its own genealogy.

Kruks seeks to refocus our attention on the importance for feminism of embodied and "lived" experiences. Through her original readings of Simone de Beauvoir and other existential thinkers―including Sartre, Fanon, and Merleau-Ponty―and her own analyses inspired by their work, Kruks sheds new light on central problems in feminist theory and politics. These include debates about subjectivity and individual agency; questions about recognition and identity politics; and discussion of whether embodied experiences may sometimes facilitate solidarity among groups of different women.

About this title

About the Author:

Sonia Kruks is Robert S. Danforth Professor of Politics and has served as the Director of the Women's Studies Program at Oberlin College. She is the author of The Political Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Situation and Human Existence: Freedom, Subjectivity and Society and coeditor of Promissory Notes: Women in the Transition to Socialism.

Review:

"This important book recommends that existential phenomenology be recovered for feminist theory, and that enthusiasm for postmodernism be tempered. Very few other philosophers are making this claim and Sonia Kruks makes it with insistency and knowledge. Retrieving Experience is a major contribution from a distinctive voice in feminist theory."

(Iris Marion Young, University of Chicago)

"Sonia Kruks' book brilliantly retrieves, not only lived experience as a basis for theorizing about the social world, but also the often forgotten historical and ideological linkage between progressive, liberatory gender (and race) politics and the great mid-century existentialist philosophers. Through deft and creative textual interpretation Kruks offers her readers new ways to understand and negotiate the successive waves of modern feminist thought and practice."

(William McBride, Purdue University)

"By thinking politically about the forgotten traditions of existentialism and phenomenology, Sonia Kruks leads us out of the impasses of current feminist theory. Retrieving Experience develops nothing less than a new genealogy for feminism."

(Linda Zerilli, Northwestern University)

"Sonia Kruks draws on the work of Beauvoir, Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre to show us how attending to the affects of lived embodiment can provide the grounding of a feminist politics that recognizes both the differences among women and their shared concerns. For showing how existential accounts of situated freedom can account for the powers of discursive realities without forfeiting the possibilities of agency and for proposing a feminism grounded in respectful solidarity and embodied subjectivity, Kruks deserves our attention."

(Debra Bergoffen, George Mason University)

"This splendid book may well become a landmark in the development of feminist theory. Drawing on the work of both postmodern and earlier existentialist writers, Kruks offers new solutions to the problems that have recently impeded theoretical and practical attempts to improve womens' situations."

(Hazel E. Barnes, University of Colorado at Boulder)

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0801433878
• ISBN 13: 9780801433870
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224