Why Feminism and Freedom 

Both Begin with the Letter F 

The raison ďetre of politics is freedom,
and its field of experience is action.
-HANNAH ARENDT
JU D GIN G FR o M THE spate of publications declaring the "end of feminism,"
it would seem that feminism, as a social and political movement,
has more or less reached its limit.i For some critics, this end is given in
supposedly incontrovertible fact that the discrimination feminism set out
to challenge is more or less a thing of the past. In their view, gender equality
is a legal fact awaiting its full social realization, which, in accordance
with the logic of historical progress, is imminent. For other critics, this is
clearly not the case. Changes in law do not automatically result in social
changes but require the vigilance of an ongoing political movement. If
these same critics declare the end of feminism, then, it is more with a sense
of loss than triumph. And perhaps they are right: it is increasingly hard
to identify the "movement" in the feminist movement; for feminism,
when it is not safely ensconced in the formal institutions of the liberal 1/
democratic state, can incleellQ;;k like a dispersed collection of diverse
grassroots struggles that have lost the orientatÍon once provided by its
collective subject: "women."
Critics who long for the clear sense of direction that they identify as
sine qua non of feminist politics like to charge third-wave feminism,
especially its poststructuralist variant, with the destruction of the collective
subject "women," but their accusation flies in the face of political
history. Anyone even slightly acquainted with the history of first- and II
second-wave American feminism will immediately recognize that the ori-l\
entation provided by this putatively collective subject was illusory at
best. Femin~sn:tA!!§J!bYay.s.been,shnuhrough wit~A~eeil1_t_e!E:~!_~2_nfli~2
about the subject in whose name its equally conflict-ridden social and
poHtical aspÍľätions werei:o bé,-äčhiev~d:2:"Tliebtéäthľeis-pacewrth
which"meritbers-o(the-e~~liest second-wave feminist groups split off to
FEMINISM AND FREEDOM BEGIN WITH F I 3
2 I INTRODUCTION
found other groups, only to find members of the new group splitting off
to found yet other groups, indicates what we might call a retroactive fantasy
about the wholeness of political origins, a fantasy that is by no
means unique to feminism.3 Far from united at origin, feminism, like all
modern democratic political movements (including the American and
French revolutions), was divided from the start, wracked by differences
over the causes or form of oppression, disputes over the meaning of liberation,
and competing understandings of what democratic ideaIs like
freedom and equality and the public realm in which they were to find
expression should look like.
4
,
Such differences and even deep divisions, visible at particular
moments in history, appear se1f-defeating only if we assume that the raison
d'hre of a democratic political movement like feminism is foremost
the social advancement of the group, that such advancement can only be
attained if it is in someone's name, and that this name must be known in
advance of the political struggle itself. The most trenchant critics of identity
polítics, such as Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe,
have strongly argued that politics (including not only a post-Marxist
notion of radicai democracy but the more traditional forms of social
democratic politics) is indeed possible without such a unified and pregiven
subject. Although these criticisms are well taken-especially insofar
as they disclose the troubling exclusions that a collective subject like
"women" or "workers" given in advance of politics carries with itwhat
they do not squarely address is the fraught question of whether the
raison d'etre of politics, feminist or any form of democratic politics, is
indeed the social advancement of the group in whose name members of
a political movement claim to speak.
Freedom as a Social Question
If it is difficult to imagine the raison d'etre of politics as anything other
than the social advancement of a group and its members, that may be
because ~te!l.4!oJhiIlkgiRgJitic-sjnterms oJwJ1at Hanl1a!t A:t:~E~!9:l!~"the
social question." The social question arises wherever it is assumed
th;t-a~šsic-š~CiafweIfare problems such as hunger, inequality of wealth,
housing, a living wage, and so on are problems that can be solved by
political means.5 For Arendt, the social question-already fatefully
her view) posed in the French Revolution---comes to be definitíve ofwhat
polítics is with the rise of "the social" in the nineteenth century. Although
Arendt is not clear in her definition, the social is a ~nd of enlarged
"housekeep!!!g,~ whereby the public/private distinction is dissolved and
citizens are situated in a relatively passive relation to the bureaucratic
apparatus ofthe welfare state, which becomes the sole addressee ofpolitical
claims and responsible for the distribution of goods and the maintenance
of life. The assimilation of the political to the social restriets /WM!AAr) .
--.--- -------_.---- ---.-------.-------.------__~_ _ _ . - - _ jJ..t{.(/.,<.)
political action to an instrumental, means-ends activity that entäIlš·the- '" .
micro-and macro-managementors·ocial r~l'!tiQ!!.s. Since "societyaTwäys
demaridsofltsmem6e~s1:hat·-they~~t;~ if they were members of one
enormous family which has only one opinion and one interest," writes
Arendt, the rise of the social is identicai with the rise of conformism and
"behaviar," and with the consequent reduction of the possibility of spontaneous
action (HC, 39).6
Arendťs account of social conformity and the rise of the social resonates
with critiques of modern disciplinary society (such as Michel
Foucaulťs), which have strongly influenced the shape of recent feminist
theory.7 But Arendt's tendency to define all issues related to the body as
dangerous forms of necessity that are best kept private if not hidden and
her antipathy toward the "administrative housekeeping" of the modern
welfare state have made her a controversial figure both on the progressive
Left and in contemporary feminism. Notwithstanding a recent shift
in feminist attitudes toward Arendt, which reflect a willingness to consider
the potential value of her work for a postidentity politics, :w..h~t
stubhomly rem-Eln.UH thLeD-_d._ QtJh('!g~y_i.S.hť!L~ppgrent refqs<llto
include social issues among the concerns ofpolitics.8 An ungenerous but
not entlre1Yínäcciirate·~eading o·fÄ~endton the~-~cial question (found
in the secondary literature) accuses her of eliminating from politics anything
that we could possibly recognize as political,9 If issues of housing,
poverty, fair wages, and child care are by definition social, not political,
what on earth would people talk about when they come together politically?
Why would they come together politically at all? __
Amore generous reading of Arendt would respond to these legitimate l/f/Ja'/ ,:~, "
questions by suggesting that she does not in fact exclude social concerns it~t~::Hli
from politics but warns ag~in~~_!he intro~ucti~_~ili~ insrr.l1.m_~!!t<lli~! I'Nv;;,l/fč
attitll~~ that such concerns often carry with them. Insofar as ~x~ecgen~yJ
is he1d to be the highest criterion, the instrumentalist atJitude treats democratic
politics as a means to an end, which almost inevitably leads citÍzens
to allaw the actions and judgments of~xpert& to substitute for their"", ./
own. But if Arendťs point is that expediencyif an attitude we tend to
take toward social issues, it is also one we could not take. Thus one could
well speak politically about something such as fair wages while&u~rdagainst
what Bonnie Honig, deepening a point originally made
4 I INTRODUCTION
Hanna Pitkin, calls "the laboring sensibility," that is, "a sensibility that is 

taken to be characteristic oflaboring as an activity [for example, a process­

and necessity-driven attitude] but which mayor may not be characteristic 

I\ of the thinking of any particular laborer."10 There is neither a determinate II

I group of persons nor a determinate class of objects that is by definition I 

\ social, not political. Instead, there is a tendency to develop an antipolitical 

sensibility, which arises whenever we seek political solutions to social
problems, against which we need to be on our guard.
Although this more generous reading of Arendt is a valuable corrective
to dismissíve critiques of her work, it is not meant to be a definitíve
[iQoste to what many readers find to be the most difficult aspect of her
political thought. Arendt's unqualified claim that the social question has
displaced and, indeed, led to the virtual ruín of democratic politics stands
there-if only we will let it-as a bold challenge to "think what we are
doing," as she once unceremoniously put the task of political theorizing
(HC, 5). A difficult but valuable partner in feminist dialogue, the nonfeminist
Arendt presses us to ask, how does the frame of the social question
blind us to whatever does not fit inslde the frame? How is feminism,
Sin particular, limited in its vision by its perceived identification with the
;.; social question? Are there other political visions and practices with
';;.which feminism might instead be partnered?
<: Of the many topics through which we might engage these questions,
none is more urgent than freedom. It is a commonplace to state that feminism
has been the struggle for women's freedom. For the most part,
. however, Western feminists on both sides of the Atlantic have tended to
Gustify !h.~51~~_!~_~r_~~~()tn_i~_!~r:rn_s o(t~e_~oci.<l} 9ue~~i~n, social jus\tice,
or social utility. When Mary Wollstonecraft famously argued for
'the rights of women, for example, she demanded freedom as the unqualified
right to participate in government based on the criterion of all
republican citizenship, which, in her view (as in that of other radical
republicans, such as Thomas Paine), was the faculty of reason. But she
also felt the need to qualify that radicai demand: "Contending for the
rights of women, my main argument is built on this simple principIe,
that if she [woman] be not prepared by education to become the companion
of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue."l1
And besides, women were the virtuous sex that had so much td contribute
to the moral advancement of society. Writing over a half a century
later, John Stuart Mill strongly argued for women's unqualified
claim to political freedom, warning that, should women not be given
their rights, British civilízation was doomed.12
And besides, society was
FEMINISM AND FREEDOM BEGIN WITH F I IS
wasting half its brainpower and talent, in particular women's facility in
'all social matters that required moral virtue and delicate sensibility.
Likewise, in the early nineteenth-century United States, the suffragist
Carrie Chapman Catt asserted, in the irrefutable logic of the syllogism,
democracy is rule by the people, women are people, ergo women have
the right to participate in government. And besides, women would bring
to public life the special virtues of femininity, especially "in areas where
mothers' skills were needed, such as schooling, caring for criminals, or
dealing with unemployment."13
According to Nancy Cott, the demand for women's freedom in the
writings of most late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century feminists
exhibits an uneasy but ultimately successful combination of equal-rights
arguments and expediency arguments, sameness arguments and difference
arguments. Whereas the first set of arguments turns mostly on the
idea of social justice, the second set turns on what Arendt called the social
question. Cott captures this combination in the struggle for the vote.
[I]t was an equal rights goal that enabled women to make special contributions;
it sought to give women the same capacity as men so they
could express their differences; it was a just end in itself, but it was also
an expedient means to other ends. "Sameness" and "difference" arguments,
"equal rights" and "special contributions" arguments, "justice"
and "expediency" argu,ments existed side by side.14
Cotťs broader intellectual agenda here, líke that of Joan Scott in her
work on the struggle for rights in French feminism, is to break the deadlock
of the sameness-difference debate that has plagued American feminist
historiography and theory.15 Both Cott and Scott try to reframe
modern feminism as constituted by paradox, by the need both to accept
and refuse sexual difference. The question, however, is whether the
tenacity of the impossible choice framework of equality or difference
that they would expose can be properly understood, let aIone overcome,
without attending to the Iarger frame in which feminist struggIes for
political rights have been posed: the frame of the social question and
means-ends conception of politics. .
Attending to the social question and how it has framed what can be
hcard as a political claim, I am more troubled than Cou by the ways in
which feminists have tried to justify the demand for women's freedom.
The two arguments she describes, though logically distinct, came, in the
course of their articulation in concrete political contexts, to be deeply
6 I INTRODUCTION
,,:,:,,:~1",,1!l ,of. the. problems
vyQm
entangled in each other-entangled such that a claim to freedom could 

not be articulated or heard unless it was utter~-;cláiffitosocial jús­

tice;whiChln-t~r~ co~ld~nly beheardlntheTdiom 'onIiešúciirques­

rion. Women's claim to freedom, in other words, was a claim to social 

justice, which would allow for a more just solution to the social question.
In this way, issues of social justice and the social question became
almost synonymous, and the feminist claim to freedom more often than'
not took the form of a rather complex set of justifications. These justifications,
which almost always referred to something unique in femininity
(be it a certain sensibility or simply a practicai skill associated with the
social role of women), turned, in the last instance, not on freedom as the
very practice of democratic politics or as the reason we engage in such
Instead, became a means to some other end: an attenassociated
social'questlon:-The
"besides" that often qualifi~d-feministClälms to soc{afjU:síice-- usually
the form of a long list of all the special contributions women would
make if only they were participators in government-came to look like
the very reason for women's freedom itself: the betterment of society.
Thus, we might well wonder whether the claim to political freedom is
perhaps being not enabled, but rather displaced, by the social question.
In her brief but perspicuous tracking of changes in the meaning of
"women" from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, Denise Riley
observes that the social "was constructed so as to dislocate the
cal."16 Although this dislocation, which Arendt bemoaned, was in no
II way restricted to women's political demands, th~ em~rgi~~~h~~Lth5!17
ÍI:'V)'(s.<">9~,l}n!h~yJp.:~!~~Il!h_~~!1.tl!ry_!l~s deeply feminized. By the early- to
mid-twentieth century, Riley writes, "the-'very word 'women' was
imbued in all politicallanguages with domesticity in a broad sense, with
a limiting notion of sociality."18 Tracking this development, she argues
that the inherited idea of a naturalized femininity in the early- to midnineteenth
century was redeployed, by advocates and opponents of
women's rights alike, in relation to the emerging idea of the social.
redeployment, Riley observes, resulted in a "bland redistribution and
dilution of the sexual onto the familial," as well as a dispersal of the
"irresistibly sexualized elements of 'women' onto new categories of
immiseration and delinquency-which then became sociological problems
[that women, in their sociologically defined capacity as citizens,
were called upon to solve)."19 Doubly positioned as "both agents and
objects of reform in unprecedented ways with the ascent of the social,"
came to be seen more as a sociological,g_r~~p__~~~_~_p:a!.ti.cu~aren
I (i U'
FEMINISM ANO FREEDOM BEGIN WITH F I 7
social agenda than as an emer~LIlKPQJ!!.!f.!!LC:,Q.lle~tivl!L'Yith un9.~a!i~:~ J~.eIIlQcr..a!i\:,_cJ.~IIl~_t:l:~:tS.,20 Claims to the political status of citizen increasingly
had to be made as claims to a certain sociological status; the claim
to political freedom was heard as the claim to participate in the public
"social housekeeping" that Arendt so disdained.
The entanglement of women and the social, then, has deeply influenced
what can be heard as a political demand for freedom. Whatever its
problems, the term social feminism-coined by the historian William
O'Neil1 to describe the women who were municipal civic reformers,
members, settlement house residents, and labor activists-captures the
new idiom in which the struggle for American women's political rights
after 1900 came to be fought.21 Social feminism, I hasten to qualify the
accepted narrative, developed as ~than-a claim to sexual difference,
the difference women'woulamäke-Ironly'they--weregränted~~p-Qi!!k~l
rights.Wl1äT feri:iiiiistS-fácea'wás nórfiistconveIltioiläľ co;~eptions of----'1"- ,.,-,---",
femIninity that had ro be strategically redeployed for political purposes,
but a ~igntfk~_I]td#pJ~fS!Il!e.!1:t_()UheJ;?Qlinc:;a,IJ?.Yili~J!ocia1. Within the
increasingly all-encompassing framework of the social question, the ear!ier
claims to women's full political membership as a good in itself, made
by feminists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were
seen as selfish and narrow. Indeed, these feminists and their unqualified
demand for the right to be participators in ,public affairs came to be seen
as "hard-core." For social feminists and, indeed, for anyone who made
the case for women's rights on the basis of social utility, be it in terms of
difference or equality, the ballotwas not an end in itself but a means to
an end: the betterment of society.22
In some sense, the dispJa.c.~Il!.eJ1.iEithe political bľ_~~ social is intrinsie
to the history oTdemocratic politicsmore-generally. Far from unique
to femillism~theartlcurätíôn-oIpoliticarďemaiiasiii the language of the
social is a rhetorical strategy that has been, and continues to be, taken up
by many disenfranchised groups (for example, the struggle for the gradex.tension
of "manhood suffrage" in nineteenth-century England, for
rights of African Americans in the United States, for workers' rights
in capitalist economies, and for women's human rights in a global conI'cxt),
whose advocates, eager to convince those in power of the rightness
of their cause, framed it in the language of social utilitý: Although rhetorkal
strategy-whether conscious or not to those involved in making politkal
claims-is surely a crucial component in any struggle for political
fl'cedom, rhetoric is often treated by historians and political theorists, to
Nlly nothing of philosophers, as if it were the mere form in which an
_, "'1 aj INTRODUCTION
,{,Ij{.til'(htrt
,,' , independent argument is made. In that case, one could, as it were, packtt!1{jf..,ff!tý
age an argument for freedom in the rhetoric of expediency or the social
question and then, after freedom has been "attained," shed the packaging
like a snake sheds its skin. But things are not so simple.
Apart from Riley's account of modern feminism, which suggests that
rhetoric does not mere1y reproduce but also constitutes the conditions of
political visibility, it is also the case that rhetorical strategies have unintended
meanings and effects. Indeed, in feminism, arguments for freedom
were not always advanced but rather crippled by their entanglement
in social justice arguments and expediency arguments. The point here is
not to issue some sort of political complaint or directive (asserting, say,
that feminists ought to have made, or ought now to make, arguments for
freedom free of social justice claims or expediency claims, or that they
should make social justice arguments for freedom free of any trace of
rutility). The rise of the social, as described by Arendt, and the entangle,[
ment of women in it, as portrayed by Riley, is an established fact; it is the
politically problematic inheritance ofcontemporary feminism. Ifthe task
is to try to understand more fully the consequences of that inheritance
for feminist democratic politics today, then we need to think carefully
and critically about how the social question (and the economy of utility
in which it dwells) has framed both our conception of what freedom is
(for example, a means to an end: the betterment of society) and what an
argument for freedom must look like ifit is to be heard as such (for example,
point to something beyond the practice of freedom). Most important,
it is to become critically aware of the costs of the social question to
freedom itse1f.
The history of first- and second-wave feminism shows that to enter
into the language game of justifications, be it in the name of social justice
or the social question, was more often than not to find onese1f in the losing
position, and this is true even if specific goals such as women's suffrage
were won. To speak with Arendt on Women's Liberation, "The real
question to ask is, what will we lose if we win?,,23 With every attempt to
answer their critics in terms of social justice, which was really an argument
about expediency, feminists found themselves only falling deeper
into the logic of social utility or function that has historically governed
every iteration of the "woman question": what is a woman for?24
Feminists have challenged truncated conceptions of what woman is for,
usually by questioning the naturalized femininity that supposedly determines
her social function. What has been harder to challenge is the logic
of social utility itself. This logic keeps women's radicai demand for freer'


f 

I
,~,
FEMINISM AND FREEDOM BEGIN WITH F I o
dom, for unqualified participation in common affairs, bound to an_econ,omy
of llse that deeply restricts their emergence as a political colfectIvity
(iiiJIess, ofcourse, we define politics itse1fin terms ofthat same economy).
Feminist efforts to substitute the idea of women as a social group
(gender) for women as a natural group (sex) may question the substantive
social tasks assigned on the basis of sex differences, but without in
any way disrupting the logic that tightly binds political life to social utility.
The problem with this binding is not only the entanglement of
women's citizenship with the social functions of femininity but also the
tendency for the value of expediency to trump claims to freedom. If we I
.va!:t~_~~I?:~~~Jr~<:~()I!l_j:l~<:?u~ejt_~st.ls~f!!ljll,~()l:ill!LC,ť!E!.~i!!:_~~!~l~11
lems, we may not value freedom when it int~tJ~r.!2§'Yi..th~oc!f!~ utility or il
when moreexpeČlient ways of reaching the same social resu[t~--~-a~'l)e- il
shown~'FreedOm'distlirbsthe use of politics as a means to an end; itis' \
always "out of order."
There is a way to counter the demand that freedom be a means to an 

end, but it requires that we pose the question of freedom anew and try 

to find examples of the demand for political freedom that are not easily 

folded into the social question (or any economy ofutility and means-ends 

thinking whatsoever). Before we can do that, however, we need to con­

sider another problematic framing of freedom, namely, in terms of the 

subject question.
Freedom as a Subject Question
"Since the whole problem of freedom arises for us in the horizon of f!dt/cl
Christian tradition on one hand, and ofan originally anti-political phil0- / Iť( I'CI 

sophic tradition on the other," writes Arendt, "we find it difficult to real-. 

ize that there may exist a freedom which is not an attribute of the will in,. (
but an accessory of doing and acting."25 At once commonsensical and ". 

deeply strange, Arendt's account of freedom as political action is highly i t/' 

critical of the notion of freed()!ILas a phenomenon of.thewiJl, which we, 

feminist and democratic thi~kers alike;..have inherited from the Western 

philosophical and political tradition26 Based on Man in the singular, 

freedom of the will-clearly crucial to but hardly exhausted by the liberal
concept offreedom that is domin~nt in most Western democracies-

is entangled in a dangerous fantasy of sovereignty, writes Arendt, 
I
according to which "perfect liberty isiincompatible with the existence of
society."27 Further, genuine freedom/is defined as the freedom not only
I
L
FEMINISM ANO FREEDOM BEGIN WITH F I 11
10 l INTRODUCTION
from the interference of others, or what we calI "negative liberty," but
-/; from politics itself.
28
Like the displacement of the political by the social, the identification
of freedom with the free will of a sovereign subject is the problematic
inheritance of democratic and feminist politicS.
29
Although second- (and
to a lesser extent first-) wave feminism criticized the masculinist fantasy
of sovereignty that-argued Beauvoir long ago-turns on women's submission,
it nonetheless inclined toward a conception of freedom that
either sets the individual woman against "all her sex" (that is, the exceptional
woman who escapes or denies the social condition of her gender)
or requires a woman's full identification with "her sex" (that is, an
antipolitical kinship relation in the form of an all-powerful sisterhood
that obliterates particularity and with it plurality).3o In both cases, freedom
is articulated as sovereignty, be it an "I" against all the others or an
" multiplied and extended into an omnipotent "we."
The entanglement of feminism in the ideal of sovereignty is symptoatic
of a tendency to think about freedom in terms of what I will calI the
" ubject question." This question centers prirnarily on the subjecťs very
~
L
forrnation and on the external and internal forces that hinder its freedom.
The subject question is the larger frame within which a fantasy of sover~
Gignty has been presupposed, but such a fantasy is in no way exhaustive
of the frame. What defines the frame is not a certain theory of the subject
I (autonomous, dependent, or interdependent) but the fact that !~~ubject
I(be it as a philosophical, linguistic, or psychoanalytic category) i~.-!~l
J::oi!l!.~ro~~~jliCh_~Y..~tY-l1QJjj:i<;:<lLque~j:jQIl-Qfh:~ed9m_g~~U?.9~d. The
-subject question is not meant to stand as the other to the social question
in the way that, say, the "demand for recognition [of identity]" is meant
:: ťô~opposed to the "demand f9r redistribution [of social goods]" in
f'/~i7~(..It:ťJ/é1'iNancy Fraser's well-known essay;,3i~By contrast with "the redistributionrecognition
dilemma," the subject question and the social question are
part of the same frame, namely, an instrumental and adjudicative conception
of politics that minimizes the possibility of freedom as action.
In its second-wave iteration, freedom as a subject question was
famously posed in The Second Sex.32 Raised to remain within the social
confines of proper femininity, argues Beauvoir, woman is subject to
strong exteJ;'nal constraints on her freedom, but she also hinders herself:
rather than take the risk of freedom, woman is complicit in her own subjection.
On the one hand, Beauvoir's account of asocially constituted
femininity-"one is not born, but becomes, rather, a woman"-is a bold
attempt to rethink "the woman question" in terms of the inner and outer
constraints on the subject as they have been described in the Western
philosophical tradition and, more specifically, in the existentialist ethics
of Sartre. On the other hand, Beauvoir departs from philosophy and gestures
toward the specificity of politics when-as if refusing to substitute
"Woman in the singular" for the tradition's "Man"-she suggests that
freedom can never be strictly a subject question, for freedom is only possible
in political community. Contra Sartre, for whom freedom is a subjective
inner state that persists even under the most oppressive social
conditions (for example, torture), Beauvoir holds that to be free is to be
able.t.9d.o. The woman in a harem is n~t-fre~:m~i~taI;:;-s·B~~~:;~ir againSt
Sartre;I()r freedom requires not only an "I-will" but an "I-can," to borrow
Arendťs concise formulation.33 "I-can" points to the worldly conditions
that enable one tó do what one wills. Thus the problem of
freedom for women-initially formulated as a subject question and in
terms of the free will of Woman in the singular-turns out to be a problem
of transforming the conditions of the common world, hence as a
problem of political action: women must learn to act in concert, to say
"we," concludes Beauvoir.34
The problem of freedom that inspired Beauvoir's account of femininity
was both reiterated and occluded in later interpretations of her
work, which mostly focused on the identity thematic (that is, gender is
made, not given) and tended to lose sight of freedom as a political problem
of the I-can. More precisely, freedom comes to be formulated, in the
so-called category of women debates of the late 1980s and the 1990s,
strictly as a subject question, while subject formation comes increasingly
to be interpreted in terms of radicai subjection to agencies outside the self
that Beauvoir did not see. In this spirit, Judith Butler famously takes up
Ueauvoir's insight, "one 'becomes' a woman, but always under a cultural
compulsion to become one," to argue that the subject is deeply
constrained to reiterate the very social norms that constitute it as subjcct/ed.35
Absent such reiteration, holds Butler, the subject would suffer
rhe fate of the most radical skeptic: it would have no sense of its own
I'calness, no sense of social existence at all. Following Michel Foucaulťs
uccount of assu;etissement (subjectivation), Butler disputes the very idea
of "an agent, a cogito," taken for granted in Beauvoir's account of gendcl'
construction, that underwrites the "conventional philosophical
polarity between free will and determinism."36 In Butler's third-wave
view, the question for feminism becomes, "Is there a way to affirm comj
plicity as the basis of political agency, yet insist that political agency may
do more than reiterate the conditions of subordination?"37
Idiscuss Butler's answer to this question at length in chapter 1. For now
i\' is important only to note the centrality and persistence of the problem
12 I INTRODUCTION
of agency in the very mode of feminist critique (that is, poststructuralist)
that is typically associated with the demise of the "subject." Could it be
that this critique marks a move not out of the subject-centered frame
(which governed identity politics) but into its negative space? When Butler
" .' and others suggest that the subject can express its freedom by reiteration
'!Zdf/,_. of the very norms and categories that constitute it as subjectled, have we
not so much left the space of the subject as entered into one of it;-deepest
d!3.Il1as? The negiitIvé·-s:pace in which this drama unfolddsvisíble in
Butler's troubled recognition that the subject is something feminists cannot,
but must, do without, something that is both the condition and the
limit of feminist politics.38 But then it seems as if the paradox of subject
formation is installed as a vicious cirele of agency at the heart of politics.
In that case itwould be hard to see how politics could ever be a truly transformative
practice that might create something new, forms of life that
would be more freedom enabling.
39
Like the social question, questions of identity and, more recently, subjectification
frame our thinking about politics in ways that limit our
vision and contain our aspirations more to the problem of the I-will than
the I-can. True, thinkers like Butler aspire to a grander politics of freedom
than the focus on subjectification and its discontents suggests.
Arnbivalently beholden to the terms of the subject question, however,
they remain tied to a conception of politics that makes agency the condidon
of any political existence whatsoever. Accordingly, the political
formation of the "we" in afeminist practice of freedom seems wholly
contingent upon the subject's capacity for agency, thus forever returning
the subject to the vicious cirele in which it plays out the drama of its subjection.40
Rather than rush to solve the problem of agency, however, let
Z us pause and ask :whY'!!.e..!.h!!l:~~t.l!~t agency.is the paramount problem
, .for f~I!!iIlisIl1Jlfl~r,idenJ:it)l:..R9Ji!i~~..: Perhaps what ~;eneed Is'a eléarer
~sense of how agency is a requirement of that subject-centered frame, even
~:when the frame itself constitutes a negative space.
What if instead we, together with Arendt, were ta shift the problem
of freedom outside its current subject-centered frame? Such a shift might
prove to be a valuable alternative to our current entanglement in the
paradoxes of subject formation and the vicious cirele of agency.41 Once
we understand what is at stake in thinking about politics as a mode of J
human action in our Arendtian way, ~t'ôyyilL~ee_why_agen_<;:y,.<,!~jt has
been th9.l!gbtwi!hjnJhesubject-centered frame;! is not only not the premier
problem ofc!~mQ~!?.tIé_~xi~j~ini~istP~liti~b~t-~lw'ádeeply;;is­~n
fea-cfinii;rohlem that inelines us to mis~nderstancfwhäi we dôwhéIí-weact-politic~lly.The~equirement
of agency is entangléctíri arii3eritifičlition
..... "'.,.fl"":
FEMINISM,AND FREEDOM BEGIN WITH" I 1.
of freedom with sovereignty and an instrurnental conception of politics
which deny the very condition of democratic and feminist politics,
namely, plurality.
t!1uralitY~~J.h~<::'QItdjtiQ!1QLR()Jitic;s:;-the fact that "men, not Man, ftt,f/l,{ll/':
live on earth and inhabit the world"-means that one acts into an
"already existing web ofhuman relationships, with its innumerable, conflicting
wills and intentions, [and consequently that] action almost never
achieves its purpose [that is, realizes a goal, an end)," writes Arendt (HC,
7,184). Plurality means that the actor no more controls the effects of her
action than she does its meaning, that is, what action reveals about
"who" she is. Who someone is, by contrast with what she is (for example,
a white middle-elass American woman, qualities she necessarily
shares with others like her) is the unique disclosure of human action in
Arendťs view (HC, 184). This "who" is no substance that can be cognized
or in any way known; it can only show itself through "manifest
signs" (HC, 182). Although any attempt to capture the "who" in language
always risks reducing it to a "what," the "who" lives on from the
stories, narratives, and other human artifacts which speak of it and without
which it would vanish without a trace (HC, 184).42 Most important,
says Arendt, the impossibility of saying definitively "who" someone is
"excludes in principIe our ever being able to handle these [human] affairs
as we handle things whose nature is at our disposal because we can name
them"-it exeludes, in other words, the kind of masteryover action that
is assumed in the means-ends thinking that defines most theories of politics,
including feminist ones (HC, 181-82).
Insofar as Arendťs account of the "who" concerns human action
broadly speaking, it is not restricted to the realm of politics. ButlqJ~lk
about t~e r~alm()f l'0liticsis, in her vi.evv,always totaik aboutaction and f
thus the "who."43 However it might appear as if talk of the "who" is just
lmother way of raising the problem of agency, the Arendtian notion of
the "who" is fundamentally different from the subject that haunted the
category ofwomen debates. Whereas feminists have focused on the question
of whether political agency is possible in the absence of the "what"
(for example, an identity such as "women"), Arendt insists that politics
is not about the "what" and agency, but always about the "who" and
lIonsovereignty. By contrast with the feminist sense of crisis that emerged
in relation to the critique of the subject, Arendt holds that Qolitics, the
I'calm ~taf!iol!,_.~~..Qossible only on the condition that there is ~~-.igent
who can begin a prm:~S:s___~rl<f~o~~9r]~f).!l=~QiiiiQnt~ 'Qii~oľQ~-=llseamcans
toward an end. Refuting claims to mastery, Arendt argues not (as
Hl1dú folrc;wi~g Ni~tzsche did) that "there is no doer behind the deed"
14 	\ INTRODUCTION 44
but that the deed, once done, has effects beyond the doer's contro1.
"Whoever begins to act must know that he has started something whose
end he can never foretell, if only because his own deed has already
changed everything and made it even more unpredictable," asserts
Arendt.45
Foregrounded in Arendt's account of action is something less about
the subject (for example, its stability/instability or its capacity/noncapacity
f~r agency) :ha~ abo~t th~ world (for ex~mple, i~s c~ntin~rlJY)4
which the subJect IS arbltranly thrown and mto which It acts: As
I hope to show in the following chapters, this is not a small but crucially
important difference: it turns our attention from the question of the subject-which,
notwithstanding critical iterations of its social constitution
and intrinsically paradoxical formation, almost inevitably restates the
solipsism if not will-driven character of the subject-centered frame-to
the question of the world. What Arendt caUs the "world" is not nature
or the earth as such but "is related, rather, to the human artifact, the fabrication
of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those
who inhabit the man-made world together" (HC, 52). The world is the
c~.I:1~!!!.~"PJ>j~s:~l~_~~SU~fJly-~~~"~p.~f~"!n."."Vhi<;hthiI1.~SJ~~fQ!.it~.P~PlI~"· 

the space in which, when we act politically, we encounter others who,
too, act and take up the effects of our action in ways that we can nev~r
predict or control with certainty.47
If it is hard to shift our focus from the question of the subject to that
of the world, the space in which things become public, that is because
feminist politics has been centered on the "what" (for example,
"women" as a coherent identity) and its transformation. This "what"
has so captivated our attention that it seems hard to imagine why politics-just
as it obviously concerns agency within the subject-centered
frame-would not obviously concern the transformation of sociaUy
ascribed forms of subjectivity such as gender difference. The obviousness
of this political task was as clear for second-wave feminists such as Ti"j
Grace Atkinson (who claimed, "those individuals who are today defined
~~;;eIl\l'~s women must eradicate their own definition," in effect "commit sui"I(l'­
cide" in order to give birth to themselves as "individuals") as it is for
C.': third-wave feminists such as Wendy Brown (who albeit far more cautiously
and with an entirely different notion of subjectivity cali for the
transformation of "women" from "wounded subjects" into subjects of
freedom).48
In light of such caUs for subject transformation as the very work of
political freedom, Arendt's claim that "at the center of politics stands not
concern/care for people, but concernlcare for the world" rings as at once
FEMIN/SM ANO FREEDOM BEGIN WITH FI'.
commonsensical (the world clearly matters) and strange (psychic attach·
ments to unfreedom matter toO).49 In Arendťs view, the exclusive con~cern
with the self is an expression of the "world-alienation" that
characterizes modernity.5o A politics that questions that alienation, sh
argues, is not-not in the first place-centered on the subject or the
transformation of subjectivity; it is centered on the world and engaged
in worldliness, that is, the creation of the space in which things become
public. Like her rejection of the social question, Arendťs refusal to count
the subject question among the concerns of politics seems perplexing..
Leaving aside the social engineering she criticizes and with which hardly
afeminist would disagree, how could apolitics concerned with freedom j
not presuppose the transformation of subjectivity?
Let's turn the question around: ~hat i~ presupposed bL~QE!i~~ of
freedom that centers on the seIf and its transformation? Consider in this
regard·Fouca~It;~· welf:knowi;"claim""thät;pra:-~'tke ";;{ freedom is "an
exercise of the self on the self by which one attempts to develop and
transform oneself, and to attain to a certain mode of being."51 But this
idea of freedom as a practice centered on the relation of the self to itself
(what Foucault caUs rapport il soi), lest it remain an I-will in the absence
of an I-can, surely has its worldly conditions.52 If it is hard to see how
such conditions could obtain in Foucaulťs account of freedom, that is
because Foucault-like any theorist working from within the frame of
the subject question, albeit in its negative space-takes for granted the
idea that freedom would begin with changes in subjedivity that then
bring about changes in the world, while begging the question of how one
changes subjectivity, save in the guise of a highly individualized conception
of work on the self.53
The point here is neither to exclude creative work on the self as potentially
relevant for political freedom-as Arendt herself might-nor to
decide what comes first: changes in the structure of subjectivity or
changes in the social structures that constitute subjectivity. It is to think
nbout how the subject question and the (ethical) idea of freedom as the
self's relation to itself (even in the deeply critical iteration given it by
Foucault) might extend, rather than contest, the Western tradition's
philosophical conception of freedom and thus the disp!acement of political
freedom as a relation to the world and to others.54 Although
Foucau1t, like Arendt, clearly refutes the idea of free will and sees that
freedom is a practice, not a property of the subject, he does not distin- í'1./i"ŕ'ti(f
~uish acleql1~t.e1Y-_b_ehYf~rLth~_phiIQ~()R.hic?LkindQfft:~"ed~~th~m{iht or (t<ť"~"h
bc relevant to solitary individuals and the political kind that is certainly
!'c!evant to people"wholiveÍilcommunitie"s: Consequently, hi~otherwiše" ~--. _.
16 I INTRODUCTION
valuable assertion that freedom is a practice, something "that must be
exercised," risks remaining at the individuallevel without ever founding
the new institutions and forms of life that clearly and deeply concerned
him.55 political freedom in this sense of world-building cannot simply be
rapport asoi (or its extension) but must involve, from the start, relations
with a plurality of other people in a public space created by action, that
is, by the very practice and experience of freedom itself.
Freedom as a World Question
"Men are free-as distinguished from their possessing the gift for freedom-as
long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to
act are the same," declares Arendt.56 Like Foucault, Arendt understands
freedom to be an activity or practice, but one that takes place in the
sphere of human plurality and that therefore has a distinctive, if mostly
lQrZ-Q!!~E--,.J:9~nea~~gy. "We first become awareOIIreeclom or its
opposíte in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves,"
she writes. In agenealogical attempt to recover a political conception
of freedom from the occidental tradition, Arendt, like Foucault,
returns to the ancients. For her, however, this return does not recover the
Greek idea of care of the self (epimeleia heautou) or the notion of freedom
as self-rule, as it does for Foucault, but shows that an idea of freedom
that begins with the self (rapport ct soi) occludes its origins in
freedom "as a worldly tangible reality."s7 This worldly freedom is political:
it requires not only an I-will but an I-can; it requires community.
Arendt asserts, "Only where the I-will and the I-can coincide does free§!om
come to pass."" And furth", "If men wi,h to bc rree, it is prcci"ly
,<sovereignty they must renounce."S9
. Rethinking freedom in terms of nonsovereignty is called for once we
take account of plurality. Equating freedom with sovereignty, the
Western tradition since PIato, argues Arendt, has held plurality to be a
"weakness," at best an indication of our unfortunatedependence on others,
which we should strive to overcome. Consequently, "If we look upon
freedom with the eyes of the tradition, identifying freedom with sovereignty,
the sirnultaneous presence of freedom and non-sovereignty, of
being able to begin something new and of not being able to control or
even foretell its consequences, seems almost to force us to the conclusion
that human existence is absurd" (HC, 235). Bemoaning thei:dea that "no
man can be sovereign" (HC, 234), the tradition, beholden to the impossible
fantasy of sovereignty, has tended "to turn away with despair from
FEMINISM AND FREEDOM BEGIN WITH FI' 'I
the realm of human affairs and to hold in contempt the human capacity
for freedom," Arendt observes (HC, 233). In fact, when freedom i~
cquated with sovereignty, it seems as if the only way to preserve both is
by not acting or entering the public realm at all, for to enter is to be subject
to forces beyond one's control.
"If it were true that sovereignty and freedom are the same, then
indeed no man could be free, because sovereignty, the ideal of uncomprornising
self-sufficiency and mastership, is contradictory to the very
condition of plurality," Arendt remarks (HC, 234). The question of
whether freedom and nonsovereignty are indeed mutually exclusive, as
the tradition has held, is important for feminists who are concerned to
take account of plurality. Although feminist theorists of the third wave
have been deeply critical of the fantasy of sovereignty (be it in the form~
of Woman in the singular or women as a unified group), they could not
I'eally think plurality without occasioning a crisis of agency. I said earlie
that age~ isa false problem that leads us to misunderstand what we do
whe~w~ actp~liticaliY. B{itthe problem is false bs:cauae.itisPQ~.<i.':Y!~hin_
II subj~~!~c~n.:!~~4J!i!.I!!.~' That frame occludes a way ofresponding to the
crisis of agency that would not require a denial of plurality. This is where
\'hird-wave feminism arrives at an impasse: how to take account of pluI'ality
(differences among women) without relinquishing the capacity to
net politically. For surely action in concert, afeminist might object, must
involve some sense of agency. If we had no sense of agency when we act
politically, why would we so act?
Recognizing the dilemma posed by the tradition, Arendťs answer is
Ilcither to resurrect its idea of agency as sovereignty nor to discount what
IIhe calls "the disabilities of non-sovereignty" (that is, that we cannot
\,~()ntrol or foreteU with certainty the consequences of action). It is to ask
whetheraction does not harbor within itself capacities that might attenliate
these disabilities. Arendt remarks,
LI ft.<,
The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility-of 

being able to undo what one has done though one did n;.tJ~I1d..COuld
..
not, have known what he was doing-is the faculty o(for~lvi~he ',.

remedy for unpredictabilitr, for the chaotic uncertajnty-of ili~f;rture, 

is contained In the faculty tôm~k:ť:!;:tJl,d_kéep próii1i§e.ŠJ... Without > 

being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, 

our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed 

from which we could never recover.... Without being bound to the 

fulfillment of prornises, we would never be able to keep our identities 

(who we are].... (Keeping them is possible only in] the public realm 

18 I INTRODUCTION
through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the
one who promises and the one who fulfills.... Both faculties, therefore,
depend on plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no
one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound by a prornise made
only to himself. (HC, 237)
Although the importance of forgiveness in human affairs arose in a
religious context, says Arendt, it is by no means irrelevant to secular
\ communities (HC, 238-39). Forgiveness sounds strange as a political
\"\ concept in part because we think about action in terms of sovereign indi,Alf)\'viduals
who use a means to an end, know what they do, and are to be 

,aJt~\0/) held accountable for their actions. Arendt does not question accounta-

S// bility (though her understanding of it is complex), but she refutes the 

,/ assumption of sovereignty. Her concern is that human beings will, in the
(~pirit of the tradition, turn away from the public realm for fear that, in
\this realm, "they know not what they do," they cannot possibly control
Ithe effects of their actions (HC, 239). Likewise, prornising soundsI
\~trange as a political concept (though it is surely the basis of any idea of
the social contract), for we think about the agreements that constitute
political community as guaranteed by law. ~~e..!1d! does not question the
role of law in sustaining community, but she refutesthe idea that community
originatesin law or can be so guarant~e9. What holds aé~mm~~ity
together is, arnong other things in her view, the capacity to make
and keep prornises, which is an exercise of freedom. This capacity erects,
as she puts it, "isolated islands of certainty in an ocean of uncertainty,"
namely, the unpredictability that belongs to human action (HC, 244).
Those who are mutually bound by promises gain what Arendt calls a
"limited sovereignty," not the spurious sovereignty claimed by an individual
setting himself apart from all others, but a certain release from the
incalculable future that accompanies human action.
Finding resources in action to counteract the defining features of
action, Arendt does not claim to have discovered perfect safeguards that
will protect us from action's boundlessness and unpredictability. Being
themselves forms of action, promising and forgiving could hardly play
such a role. Her point, rather, is to emphasize that we might live human
plurality in ways (for example, through promising and forgiving) that
attenuate the problems associated with plurality as the condition of
action. That we act into a context characterized by multiple wills and
intentions; that others take up our actions in ways we can neither predict
nor control, Arendt suggests, is the irreducible condition of human
FEMlfIIlSM AND FREEDOM BEGIN WITH fi I ,.
action tout court. Rather than seek solace in an impossible fantasy O~ 

sovereignty, declare a crisis of agency, or turn away from the public real 

to preserve sovereignty or avoid crisis, we might take leave of the tradi 

tion and affirm freedom as nonsovereignty. 

Nonsovereignty is the condition of democratic. politiq;,th~condition 

of the-t~~nsf~~mati~'~f ~~-í~wm i~to an I-c~n and thus freedo~:Thi~iš 

a simple point,'b'ut~l~o o~~~e ~re forever in dauger of forgetting (which 

is why Arendt never tired of repeating it). Political freedom requires oth­

ers and is spatially limited by their presence. No subjective relation of the 

self to itself, freedom requires a certain kind of relation to others in the 

space defined by plurality that Arendt caUs the "common world." 

TjlJ:!_<::Q!llmon world is another..'Y!!y'.QfJ:alking..abQuuhe. n.!lJJlr_~ of
democratic-'-afld:-Iargu~',-feminist--:-:-politic.al space. "It is the sp~ce í7&.!{);::kl:l:••
between them that unites them, rather than some quality inside each of -- ---­
them," to cite Margaret Canovan's succinct phrasing of the Arendtian
difference between a community based on "what" someone is (that is,
on identity) and one based on "who" someone is (that is, on worldbuilding).60
If identities come to have political significance for us, it is
because the "what" has been rearticulated as the "who" in the inbetween
space of the common world. In this space, plurality is not merely
rt numericai matter of the many identities of people who inhabit the earth
or a particular geographical territory, nor is it an empiricaI question of
the wide variety of groups to which they belong (that is, what people
are). A political rather than ontologicai relation based on the ongoing
eonstitution of the world as a public space, plurality marks the way in
which subjects as members of political communities, as citizens, stand to
one another.61 Wbflt. is crucially important for democratic and feminist
politics, butmo~tlY_Qccluded. bY-.the_s!Jm~!:.tqll~štion, is that citizéiis bé
Asituated in a relation of distance andproximity, ;~íation a~ď~~paration~X
"To live together i~the-;~~iJ ~~~s ~š~~;:;:ti~lry-that a world of thingsis
between those who have it in common, as a table is located between
I'hose who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and sepIll'ates
men at the same time," wrítes Arendt (HC, 52). Relates and sepnrates:
the common world "gathers us together and yet prevents our
fnlling over each other, so to speak" (ibid.). Politics requires and takes
place in this in-between space. •
In mass societies such as our own, comments Arendt, the world has
lost its power to relate and separate us. It is aS if the table had suddenly
disappeared from our midst, she wrítes, such that "two persons sitting
opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely
20 ! INTRODUCTION
unrelated to each other by anything tangible" (HC, 53). Couldn't that
also be interpreted as the state of contemporary feminism, in which the
price for attending to differences, what separates us, appears to be the
absence of anything that relates us? The point is not to assert, in the nostalgic
tone attribu'ted-falsely in my view-to Arendt, the loss of something
we (feminists) supposedly once had. It is, rather, to see what it
would mean to affirm, in a democratic political sense, freedom__~~_.a
world-building; pra,ctice based on plurality and nonsovereignty. To
_ . _•• _ .........." •• , _____

H
~
~
a-s~~-~e, as manýfirst~a~ď~~cond-';a~ef~IIliIlistsdid, thät ashared gender
identity-is what relates women p~li!!~!1l1y)sfl.ayved not only because,
as thTrd:w:ä;e'feminists cläimed,'differences amoIlg.,women matter and
the very category of identity itself is suspect. It is fla~edbecauseit does
not answer to the question of what possible relevaI1c~identii:ý'can:~~Y~
forfeminist politics absent a space in whichto articulate it as a political
relatIOn. Third-wave critiques, too, are mostly sil~nt on how to con'stl'tute
the political space in which the transformation of social relations,
including gendered forms of subjectivity, is to occur.
The common world as the space of freedom is not exhausted by existing
institutions or the citizen as the subject of law, but "comes into being
whenever men are together in the manner o{speech:a~'~'~s!i<Lň? that is,
wnenever-ili.efcome'iOgeth'er politically. Such a "space of appearance,"
says Arendt, "predates and precedes all formal constitution of the pubrealm
and the various forms of government" (HC, 199). Not restricted
to a set of institutions or to a specific location, this space is highly
fragile and must be continually renewed by action. In Arendt's view, the
space of appearance "can find its proper location almost any time and
anywhere" (HC, 198). If we think about the coffeehouses, living rooms,
kitchens, and street corners that served as the meeting places for early
second-wave feminism, for example, we can begin to appreciate the
value of an action-centered conception of politics. We can see how any
physical space can be transformed into a political one and, indeed, how
it is that things become public. The peculiarity of such a space of appearance
is that it exists only so long as people are engaged in speech and
action. The formal public realm itself (that is, that which is protected by
law) is "a potential space of appearance," but only a potential one. There
is nothing in its institutionalized character that guarantees it as a site of
political action or practice of freedom.
What keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance, in
existence is power. Power, not as a relation of rule operating from above
and forcing the submission of otherwise autonomous subjects (which is
FEMINISM AND FREEDOM BEGIN WITH F I 21
how the Western political tradition and most first-, second-, and some
third-wave feminists have tended to see it); power, not as a relation of
rule understood as a productive force that drculates throughout the
entire social body, constituting subjects as subject/ed and generating relations
of resistance (which is how Foucault and many third-wave feminists
have understood it); butq5()'YJ;r:rí\sJhgtV\Tl1~c.h "springs up between
men "Yh~n thJ'!YJ:lct19~.!11~F~Iléri!lJl,i§.h~§-,~h.errlheY:4~s.p~rie,"~š'Arendt
puts it (HC, 200). Alťhôú.gb the relations of domination we call power
clearly exist in Arendťs view, her idiosyncratic use of the term is an invitation
to think about politics as involving something other than relations
of rule. "The commonplace notion ... that every political community
consists of those who rule and those who are ruled" (including the idea
of democracy as rule of the many), she argues, is once again an "escape
from the frailty of human affairs into the solidity of quiet and order"
(HC, 222).62 It is an escape from the unpredictability and boundlessness
of action and the disturbances of plurality and nonsovereignty.
Understood as a relation of no-rule that depends on the presence of
others, politics involves power, only power as that which is "generated
when people gather together and 'act in concert,' [and] which disappears
the moment they depart" (HC, 244). The political space created by
action, says Arendt, is both an objective and subjective "in-between,"
which at once gathers individuals together and separates them. Far from
denying that objective worldly interests (for example, $e interests at
stake in iterations of the social question) are what bring p~ople together
politically in the first place-as her critics accuse and as her own critique
of the social could be taken to imply-Arendt redefines the very meaniug
of interests by shifting the frame in which they appear. She writes,
[Reducible to neither the social nor the subject question, such] interests
constitute, in the worďs most literal significance, something which
inter-est, which lies between people and therefore can relate and bind
them together. Most action and speech is concerned with this inbetween,
which varies with each group of people, so that most words
and deeds are about some wor1dly objective reality in addition to being
a disclosure of the acting and speaking agent ["who" she is]. Since this
disclosure of the subject is an integral part of all, even the most "objective"
intercourse, the physical, worldly in-between along with its interests
is over1aid and, as it were, overgrown with an altogether different
in-between which consists of deeds and words and owes its origin
exclusively to men's acting and speaking directly to one another. This
22 I INTRODUCTION
second, subjective in-between is not tangible, since there are no tangible
objects into which it could solidify; the process of acting and speaking
can leave behind no such results and end products. But for all its
intangibility, this in-between is no less real than the world of things we
visibly have in common. We calI this reality the "web" of human relationships.
(HC, 182-83)
Foregrounded in Arendťs account iS-I~Qlitics neither as a subject question
nor as a social question but as a world question or, more precisely,
~.? WOd9:\:J!!.M.!nK activity, for which the pursuit of interests may be
enabfing or-corrU:ptingb~tls, either way, certainly secondary to the practice
of freedom. In contrast with the idea, central to liberalism and to
most forms of fe~sm, ~h<lLtheJ~n~tiQnQtpolit!~~is to pursue individual(lnd
group interests (that is, people come to the table with certain
i~t~r~sts~lr~~-dy i~ h~;;:d-~'which then need to be articulated as claims and
adjudicated in terms of their validity), we have the idea that interests
serve as the occasion, a catalyst of sorts, to engage in politics. The instrumentalist
or adjudicative approach to politks sees the pursuit of interests
not only as the motor but also the raison ďetre of politics itself, for
which speech and action are a means (preferably minimizable ifnot fully
eliminable in the interests of expediency). Arendt, by contrast, holds that
speech and action can themselves be political, regardless of the interests
we may pursue or the ends we may realize when we come together politically.
In a very specific sense, then,. politics may invDh:'.etheartÚ:;.ulation
ofinterests \:Jut is not driven by questio~s ofexpediency; it is not a means
toward an end. PoliticaCare not the interests as such but the worldbuilding
practice of pubIicly articulating matters of common concern..
Feminists familiar with the "endless meeting" will immediately understand
why this alternative conception of politics is at once crucially
important and exceedingly difficult to affirm. The moment we think
about politics in terms of interests and as a means to an end, it is hard to
ISee why we should not hand certain matters over to "those who know"
land go home early for a change. Were we to hand over speaking and acting
to those who know, however, we would no longer be engaged in the
world-building that is surely crucial for feminist and democratic politics,
nor experiencing freedom as the right to be a participator in common
affairs, but merely registering our claim to a certain distribution ofgoods
and services. Surely we can imagine far less democratic and even antidemocratic
organizations and societies that would be far more efficient.
Arendťs idea of politics as a world-building practice of freedom is
unintelligible if we think about politics as something that is everywhere
FEMJNJSM ANO FREEDOM BEGIN WITH F I 23
PI that has always existed and will always exist. The feminist claim "the
~ersonal is political," when it identifies power with politics, risks effac\IÍing
the very special character of democratic politics and also underestiImating
the possibility that it could be driven out of the world. Mi~ll~
.here isnQUmlytheJQgiq~lprgQ}e!I! ~<l~1Jt~Yf!xthiJ:!g iSJ?Q!l1:!c;:.a..~_~I!ot,h::
ing .i~'. b_llt.als.ť) the .difficul!yof~~ein~.that~~~~.i~j~ pol!t~<:.~U~_i~~~lf; )-r 

for politic~tr:e:la!iQns, I argue in the followiiig~éliapters, are externaJto 

thei~ term~: they are not given in objects themselves, but ~re.c~u;r~~t~n. 

Politics, as Jacques Ranciere puts it, "consists in building a relationship 

between things that have none. "63 There is nothing intrinsically political 

about, say, housework, any more than there is something intrinsically
political about the factory or for that matter the government: th~..~<?E~ PC'né
P.. olitical signifies. a relation between things., .11.\':)t...<1 ,~Jl.,l:>st;an,fe:jtL."!11.Y... - .., ""-"''''"'--- -_.,--••.•.._....................... .........." -- .... ' . . f'{'.é't?Nl11 

thing.
64
Housework becomes political when two things that are not log- r..· · ,
ically related, say, the principIe of equality and the sexual division of 'i:~~~?-"
labor, are brought into a relationship as the object of a dispute, that is,
as the occasion for the speech and action with which people create the
common world, the space in which things become public, and create it
anew.
The same could be said about the practices associated with subject­

constitution that are discussed in both Butler's and Foucault's work. 

Once again, the point is not to exclude as politically irrelevant those 

issues that have been framed by the subject question, but to understand 

what it would mean to frame them anew. Arengt herself did not really 

consider the possibility of such reframing. Shelcanp~f~~~as rejecting 

not only thefran:te$Qf bothth~_subject and the social questio~s~b~t'äfs"o 

the concerns that are assocíated with e~~h-~fth~~~ fr;-rnes:'She seems not 

only to re)ectthe possibility that slľčh questlons'couflbe relevant to pol­

itics but also to see them as destructive of democratic politics, regardless 

of how they are articulated. Rather than exdude these concerns, femi?? 

!lists need to redescribe them in ways that are less likely to lead to the1 

displacement of pOliti.caI..fre.e.dom.b.y...th.e.. v.e.. ry..fram.es of the social and the
sllbject in which freedomhas been thought.. ._
Ifwe adopt a ~orl~:.~l!~.~~~<?~"::~~!lt.~!~~Jr~m~ we will open a space
for thinking about feminism as a practice of freedom that is creative or
inaugural. Although the capacity to start something new has been central
to feminism as a political movement, feminist theory, caught within
frames of the social question and the subject question, has tended to
Jose sight of it. We have lost sight of the possibility that counterpractices
political association need not reproduce subjected identities as the
condition of having anything political to say, but might create public
FEMINISM AND FREEDOM BEGIN WITH" I II
24 I INTRODUCTION
but it has been hard to see it as the condition of the world-creating andspaces in which something is said that changes what can be heard as a
world~building poweroHeminism as a pract:ice'offr'ee30m.Ratliér, inpolitical claim and also alters the context in which identities themselves
contingency weotten see the threat th~t -depriv';;"s femÍIíism of the all­are presently constituted as subjectled. This possibility is related to the
important political ability to speak authoritatively in someone's name.inaugural power of speech and action. Our ability to project a word such
Yet Arendt tens us that the "frightening arbitrariness" of action (that is,as women into new and unforeseen contexts is connected to the power
our sheer capacity to start something that is neither the effect of a pastof political association to create new (more freedom-affirming) attachcause
nor the predictable cause of a future effect) is "the price of free­ments to the world and to others. How else could we understand or care
dom.»67 It is a price that feminists-like the "men of action" that figureabout feminism if we did not keep our eyes on the prize: the worldin
Arendťs account of revolutionary movements-are reluctant to pay.
transforming power of political association and speech?
When understood as the power of beginning, freedom has an abyssal orIn the chapters that follow I tryto think about Q2!iti~li~.t:.~~OI1J, and
aporetic character that we tend to deny or cover over. What authorizeS)assoc~tioltin_J;_erJ.T!s__()f:,tliePowér··ofDegiiilIl_ij~'the freedom to calI
'beginning? What legitimates, say, this form of political association, this \son;~thing into being, which did not exist before, which was not given, (constitution of community, this practice of freedom, this "we"? Jnot even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which therefore,
I discuss the various ways in which feminists have answered thesestrictly speaking, could not be known," as Arendt puts it.6s
This includes
questions in the chapters that follow. For now it is useful to note thatthe formation of the "we" of feminism. Thinking about women as a
llttempts to authorize feminist politics by seeking grounds for inauguralpolitical collectivity, rather than a sociological group or social subject,
forms of political action have entangled feminists in epistemology, inmeans thinking the "we" of feminism anew: as the fragile achievement
claims to truth or normative rightness. Ifwe want to understand the epis­of practices of freedom. The achievement is fragile because action's
temological turn in feminism (for example" sta..1'!.....d..P9il1~,tE-~~!y), which"tremendous capacity for establishing relationships," Arendt reminds 

us, is inseparable from its "inherent unpredictability" and "boundless­
 nnimated the divisive and all-consumin.g fe.m.i..n.ist. '.'.ú~nda.tiOn.s de.b...ate".
of the 1990s, we might consider it oneproblem~tJsL[e~PQ!-!.s~_!9"_'Y.ha_tness" (HC, 191). The "we" may be pursued as willful purpose, but is
Arendt calls_':.!h_~__§l.P..Y~Lfr~edom. "68 Once again, it is as if women'srarely if ever achieved as such. Its formation remains irreducibly contindai.mtofre'edom
demands justifičation, in this case the supposedly truergent. When we reflect on the history of feminism, however, we tend to
nccount of the world that belongs to them as an oppressed group.lose sight of this contingency. Tel1~l1g~_S.!Qrr~c;co_rgiI!g..to whLch fre~qom
Although an attempt to authorize the claims of feminism in this way is
isi~~nt!(;a.lwith~l:t.~_~t!.u_ggle fot:Uberation.. fromoppres~iQI}.;!Je.r:n:!l1is!s ar..e.
nn understandable, and far from unique, response to the boundlessnessinclined to narrate the formation of the "we" a; if it 'Y~!.t:..somehQ...w !..l:t.e '
and unpredictability of action, Arendt invites us to ask, what are thenecessary outcome of a. historical process, the necessa~x,!~~p()l!.s.t:., <;>f
political costs of this particular recoil from the abyss?women to their centuries-lollg_sllbjection. And not only neceSS;;l.ry but 

fustified ÚlO. For it appears once agaInthat freedom must point beyond 

the demand or practice of freedom itseH, be it to social justice or social 

I
Feminism's "Lost Treasure" 

\ / and subject questions-miss what is most important: the creation of 

iÍ.ltility. We find ourselves entangled in justifications that-like the social
One risk associated with the tendency to recoil from the abyss of free­\' something new, something that could not have been foretold, that was
dom is visible in the stories we teU-or fail to teU-ourselves about the/\ no result of some logical or historical development but rather an "infi­
66 revolutionary origins of feminism. Although modern feminism did not
i \ nite improbability," to borrow Arendt's poetk phrasing.
originate in a world-historical event like the American Revolution, it par­What would it mean to think about feminism as an "infinite improbtook
of the revolutionary spirit that animates such events, namely whatability"? What would come of rethinking the "we" of feminism as someArendt
caUs "the exhilarating awareness of the human capacíty of begin­thing utterly contingent, that is, something that could just as well have
ning."69 Akin to the failure of postrevolutionary thought to rememberbeen left undone, something highly fragile that could be driven out of the
the simple fact that, writes Arendt, "a revolution gave birth to the Unitedworld? Contingency is a familiarwordin contemporaryieminisr tl1eory,_
26 I INTRODUCTION
States and that the republic was brought about by no historical necessity
and no organic development," contemp~!..~L!~!!!i.l!.~.m-,-t09~ee!llS t~
_ha,,~J2§!!;ightQLi!§g,Wl}J2Jig!llÚpjllii:~yQ).ytiQnal:'L.s,picit.and the CQntingency
of action. The first two waves of feminism denied the abyssal
cli.ru:ac;ter7p~i&al freedom by framing freedom as a social question or
"~,subject question or by scripting the claim to freedom as a necessary historical
development that flowed directly out of women's liberation from 

t ifo')p~ression. Feminism of the third wave, for its part, seems to be so thor­

\ / ou~hly caught in the problems associated with these two frames as to 

1\ have lost sight of what Arendt poignantly called the "lost treasure" of 

L~tl}~ American Revolution-political freedom itself. 

../ Recent attempts to reclaim feminism as a practice of freedom include
narrative accounts of early second-wave feminism that recreatetb.e-exhil:
~.ra~!~g.Y~~l!~~-,9i b~p:pjgg~.~ne~_!~~t animated the individ;;äiilln4.
_grOUP!; il!"prx~.cf.·But théše äccoíints;gé-neťitfy-Wrrtten oyi:Iie1C;-ffiícist
poIític~l actors themselves, are often characterized by a tone of incredulity
and defensiveness, as if third-generation feminists were, when not
downright ungrateful, dangerously ignorant of their own political past.
Guided by the familiar motto of didactic political historiography-that
is, "those who forget the past are destined to repeat it"-many of these
accounts treat the past as if it dictates-or ought to dictate-what the
future can be.70 ~J~~~4om-centť!red fem.ini~.~ needs not more rallying
cries to carry on the cause of past generations-weU, it can use this toobut
dis!~.1!K.~~~:tI1Jcl~~oLfeministpractis:~.Lof.PQUriC:;llJr.ee4QI!l: disturbing-if
we will only pause and let them disturb us-because t~
resist being incorporated into the social- and subject-centered frames )
iha·t- shape riiósfstóiiešoffemiiiism, frames-lii·whidifreeaomas·action
has mostly disappeared.
In the following chapters I offer examples of such disturbance in the
form of recuperative readings of familiar and unfamiliar, celebrated and
castigated, feminist texts that both foreground freedom as a practice and
imagine the various practices that freedom can take: freedom as a 112nrule-governe,g
theQ!;~t.ic:!'!lpractice (chapter 1); freedom as an inaugural
practice of action (chapter 2); freedom as a world-buildingpi.a~tice of
promising (chapter 3); and freedom as a critical practic~ofjl1(iging
(chapter 4). Although I consider classic claims to political freedom (for
example, "Seneca Falls"), the chapters focus on less likely examples: a
founding third-wave feminist theory text that is entangled in the ideal of
critical reflection it also powerfully contests (Butler's Gender Trouble); a
work of literature that relates the world-historical event of a global
FEMINISM AND FREEDDM BEGIN WITH F I 27
fcminist revolution organized around the political principIe of freedom
(Monique Wittig's Les guérilleres); a collectively authored account of the
founding of freedom in an Italian feminist community (the Milan
Women's Bookstore Collective's Sexual Difference); and an unfinished
project to develop the faculty of judgment on which any capacity to
nffirm human freedom depends (Arendťs Lectures on Kanťs Political
Philosophy).
My choice of Wittig and the Milan Collective as disturbing examples
of afeminist practice of freedom may strike some readers as curious.
Have their flaws not already been identified (for example, Wittig is a
"humanist," the Milan women are "essentialists")? What significanee
can they have in the larger scheme of feminist political thought now? It
is part of my intention, however, to showhg~gur l:"~c.eiy~d_f[~!!!e~.Q.tth~
!loci::tJ.í:l.n(:L~_~~iect...9.ue~ion,~_j1.E-.Y.Lcfuj:9rt~gJ~ID1Jli$1.rS!adingS.Qi.1hese__
llut4QQ;, blinding us to their concern with freedom and its creation of
alternative forms of political association. I reread Wittig and the Milan
Collective not only to uncover their rich imagination of political freedom
in its various forms, but also to show, in so doing, how it is that we fail
to apprehend freedom even when it is instantiated right before our eyes.
In the more familiar case of Butler, I examine the critical reception of her
early writings on gender, in particular the charge of voluntarism.
Although I read (early) Butler as being entangled in a (skeptical) critical
enterprise that supports this charge, I also see something else in her project:
a contribution to an imaginative, non-rule-governed conception of
feminist theory and a nonsovereign practice of freedom.
My attempt to read against the grain of feminist interpretation should
be understood as an ~x~n:iseinthe.(reflective).judgment that (in chapters
3 and 4) I argue is cr~dali:~ recognizing and affirming freedom and
thus to feminism. My choice of authors and texts is guided by a concern
to develop the multifaceted idea of political freedom, for each thinker
offers a different angle from which to see it. Although it is important to
cmphasize the inaugural character of such freedom, the power to begin
nnew, we cannot stop there, for freedom so conceived simply turns in cm
itself-or at least it risks doing so. An account of political freedoml
involves more than spontaneity; it must keep sight of freedom as prac- {,
tices of world~bu.ilding (such a~ founding, promising, a~d judging~. The!
power of beg10mng a new senes would have no meamng for us 10 the)·
absence of our capacity to create and sustain a worldly space in which to.
net and judge objeets and events in their freedom. For that reason, I take
issue with thinkers who cast freedom strictly in terms of constituent
28 I INTRODUCTION
power, setting it at odds with the (non-freedom-centered alternative of)
constituted power of law, institutions, and the state. As I show in relartion
to the question of constitutionally guaranteed rights for women in
\chapter 3, that is a false choice: the point is not to reject but to reclaim
\legal artifacts such as rights as part of a practice of freedom in its multi\ple
dimensions.
\ The tendency to construe false choices infeminism. (for example, con-I "c.c::,---cc· c-c• •....• - 0-·.·.. ...-- - .
stituent versus constitutedpower; equality versus difference; recognition
versu;'-redIstribuÚon) is largely, in my view, an effect of the frames of the
social and subject questions that have guided the development of feminist
theory. In chapter 1, I show how the epistemological debates of the
1990s, which centered on the problem of justification, inflected these
choices with a sense of crisis, namely, the collapse of "women" as the
subject of feminism. The crisis, I argue, was precipitated by a means-ends
conception of politics, according to which the ability to make a political
\I laim relies on the application of categories as rules to particulars, and
by an understanding of feminist theory as the activity of constituting universal
rules. Thus the loss of women as a coherent category in theory was
~the loss of a rule that could be so applied. As theory gives the rule to
praxis on this view, in the absence of such a category, we have only"differences,"
no political movement in the name of "women." Or so the
story goes.
At the heart of these debates was Butler's performative theory of gender.
What concerns me in chapter 1 is why Gender Trouble was interpreted
in the epistemic terms of a (politically) devastating form of
skepticai doubt (for example, "There are no women"), whereas Butler's
whole point was to question these same terms. Reading Butler's antirealist
account of gender with Wittgenstein's notion of following a rule, I
interrogate her paradoxicai entanglement in the skeptical problematic
she rejects in favor of a genealogicai approach. Butler's alternative to the
epistemic concern with concept application, I argue, emerges with her
mostly maligned account of drago Contesting received interpretations, I .
see in Butler's discussion of drag{a "figureofthe newly thinkabl~.,J' to
borrow Corne1ius Castoriadis's pIir~se: Such figures, given by radicai
imagination, are the very condition of critical thought. Whatever doubts
we may raise about an "established truth" such as gender always begin
with a productive moment of figuration, not (as skepticism would have
it) by revealing the ungrounded nature of belief. If we arrive at the
insight that a particular belief is ungrounded (as Butler does about a
realist idea of gender), that is because we have created a new way of
FEMINISM AND FREEDOM 8EGIN WITH F I 29
sceing that enables us to recognize the contingency of a particular social
nrrangement. Feminist_.f.ritiq.1!J;!_..lJ;QllcbI.-d~_mus!.~!~§.IHlye thl~J2!9ductive
moment~f figuration as its condition. It does not rely-and
neednótrefy=oň-~ľ1orm-;;fd~'ub1:-th~t is-i~possible because it is radicaI
and totalizing.
Having indicated the potential role of imagination for negotiating the
impasses associated with the epistemological turn in feminism, I go on in
chapter 2 to develop a nonepistemic, action-centered conception of politics
and the idea of freedom as the power of beginning. Vividly exhibited
in the revolutionary poetics of Monique Wittig, feminism is an
inaugural practice: the capacity to bring into existence that which could
have been neither predicted nor caused, partly because it exceeds the catt:gory
of sex. Like Butler's project, Wittig's work is often taken to be
likeptical, as if the category of sex were something we could doubt in its
entirety. By contrast with that view, I argue that Wittig fuHy recognizes
the limits of doubt for contesting sex as central to our form of life. Her
critical approach is not skeptical but productive and creative. Wittig,
1'00, offers a figure of the newly thinkable: les guérilleres, the beginners
who break the series of normative heterosexuality and fight for the sole
principIe of freedom.
But Wittig is less successful in showing the need for and creation of a
worldly in-between, that is, the relations that both unite and separate
people engaged in a political practice of freedom. For that, I turn to the
Milan Women's Bookstore Collective, which conceives freedom as
action, but is also concerned with world-building. By contrast with
Wittig, the Italians insist that feminist world-building requires the social
inscription of~exual differenc:e, not as a form of subjectiv~ty ~ut~s a resolutelyJ?oli~ical
p~~(;ticec.:{ď~f.!~~!~la!iol1~.JI:.rp(?_l!S women." These relations
involve the articulation of a new social cont:;:;'cr-organized around
not female identity (be it natural or social) but w~_wi1lingn(!sst()make
;udgments an4p!p..mis~s._.with. other women_in...3.- pU~,SP!:ls;e... Wholly
hased on such practices, female freedom requires no other justification
(for example, the betterment of society). Its only raison d'etre is itself.
Demonstrating the importance of a worldly in-between, the Milan
Collective foregrounds the importance of judgment fqr feminism, but
stops short of giving any theoretical account of such a practice. And so,
taking up the collective's insight that feminist community ought to be
founded not on identity but on a critical practice of making shared judgments,
I turn, in chapter 4, to Arendťs idiosyncratic reading of Kanťs
third Crítique. In its reflective mode, judgment is the faculty that allows
30 I INTRODUCTION
US to apprehend and affirm objects and events in their freedom, to take
pleasure in the otherwise frightening arbitrariness of action, and to create
feminism as critical community. Emphasizing !Il1~gin~tion, rather
than understanding and reason, as cruci~ito-~~cli judgnÍent and as the
poHiicáTfačliIiypar-exceHence-;-Arendt helps us understand why the collapse
of the category of women need by no means spell the end of
feminism, for a freedom-centered feminism never relied on concept
application in the first place. Political claims rely on the ability to exercise
imagination, to think from the standpoint of others, and in this way
to posit universality and thus community. The~ive.!.~<!!ity of such
( claims depends on their being not epistemological~y justified, as most .
feminists have tended to assume, but taken up by ~thers, in ways that
we can neither predict nor control, in a pubIIčSp;~~.This space called
the world is an ever-changing one in which, positing the agreement that
mayor may not materialize, feminists discover-daily-the nature and
limits of community.
In the conclusion I argue that the project of a freedom-centered feminism
cannot be developed apart from an understanding of some of the
well-known paradoxes and tensions much studied by democratic theorists.
By bringing feminism into a critical dialogue with democratic theory,
I try to develop further a resolutely political way of working through
the problems associated with the subject question and the social question.
This dialogue, already initiated in the preceding chapters through·
an engagement with Arendt, can open a space for thinking anew some of
the most tenacious problems in feminist theory. The difficulties associated
with constituting a political community that remains open to critical
questioning are hardly unique to feminism. The same might be sai~
of the problem of founding a free people where the institutions and spirit
of freedom are minimal or do not yet exist. These are dilemmas that
belong to the theory and praxis ofdemocracy. Feminists have rightly criticized
canonicai political theory for its inscription of gender hierarchy
into the very grammar of politics. Perhaps it is now possible to return to
some ofthe classic thinkers and see what they have to offer us as we negotiate
our way through the impasses that have arisen in recent years and
that have led to a sense of exhaustion or crisis.
Working within the tradition of democratic theory, Arendt will aid us
in restarting the critical dialogue between it and feminism. Although she
never had a (good) word to say about feminism, her fierce commitment to
a fully conventional, artificial or non-natural understanding of the political
realm as the space of a nonsovereign freedom, I hope to show in this
book, offers feminists a valuable alternative to the impasses associated
FEMINISM AND FREEDOM BEGIN WITH FI 31
with both the subject question and the social question. Admittedly, other
dilemmas, paradoxes, and tensions will arise once we turn our attention
to democratie thinkers like Arendt, but perhaps we will be better able to
see and accept them as belonging to the difficult and unruly work of feminist
and democratic poHties, rather than despair at our failure to solve
them once and for aU. As Joan Scott and others have pointed out, feminism
is full ofparadoxes. Thus it should be unsurprising that together with
the feminist authors discussed in the following chapters, the nonfeminist
Arendt will help us refuse the "end of feminism" and take up the project
of affirming feminism anew.