Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics - Softcover

Kruks, Sonia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801484170 ISBN 13: 9780801484179

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:

"Overall Retrieving Experience makes an outstanding political contribution to post-postmodern understandings of the subject that move significantly beyond the current impasse of the Enlightenment/postmodern nexus. Kruks retelling of a tale... offers insights that should well invigorate international mainstream discussions of the subject as well as feminist political engagements into the new millennium."

(Mary Walsh, University of Canberra Australian Feminist Studies)

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0801484170
• ISBN 13: 9780801484179
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224