Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics

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Cornell University Press, 2001 - Philosophy - 200 pages

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.

 

Contents

Freedoms That Matter Subjectivity and Situation in the Work of Beauvoir Sartre and MerleauPonty
27
Panopticism and Shame Foucault Beauvoir and Feminism
52
The Politics of Recognition Sartre Fanon and Identity Politics
79
Identity Politics and Dialectical Reason Beyond an Epistemology of Provenance
107
Going Beyond Discourse Feminism Phenomenology and Womens Experience
131
Phenomenology and Difference On the Possibility of Feminist WorldTravelling
153
Bibliography
177
Index
191
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About the author (2001)

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.

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