Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom

LINDA ZERILLI is professor of political science at Northwestern University. She is the author of Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2005 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2005

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN: 0-226-98133-9 (cloth)

ISBN: 0-226-98134-7 (paper)

ISBN: 978-0-226-81405-6 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zerilli, Linda M. G. (Linda Marie-Gelsomina), 1956– Feminism and the abyss of freedom / Linda M. G. Zerilli.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-226-98133-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-226-98134-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Feminism. 2. Feminist theory. I. Title.

HQ1154.Z435 2005

305.42'01—dc22

2004028618

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

FEMINISM AND THE ABYSS OF FREEDOM

LINDA M.G. ZERILLI

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

FOR GREGOR

We start something. We weave our strand into a network of relations. What comes of it we never know. We’ve all been taught to say: Lord forgive them, for they know not what they do. That is true of all action. Quite simply and concretely true, because one cannot know. That is what is meant by a venture.

—HANNAH ARENDT

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION: Why Feminism and Freedom Both Begin with the Letter F

Freedom as a Social Question

Freedom as a Subject Question

Freedom as a World Question

Feminism’s Lost Treasure

CHAPTER ONE: Feminists Know Not What They Do: Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and the Limits of Epistemology

Theory—The Craving for Generality?

A Wittgensteinian Reading of the Feminist Foundations Debate

Doing Gender, Following a Rule

Radical Imagination and Figures of the Newly Thinkable

Toward a Freedom-Centered Feminist Theory

CHAPTER TWO: Feminists Are Beginners: Monique Wittig’s Les guérillères and the Problem of the New

The Limits of Doubt

Language as a War Machine

Renversement

No-More and Not-Yet

Elles—A Fantastic Universal

CHAPTER THREE: Feminists Make Promises: The Milan Collective’s Sexual Difference and the Project of World-Building

Tearing Up the Social Contract

The Desire for Reparation

The Problem with Equality

Discovering Disparity

A Political Practice of Sexual Difference

Refiguring Rights

CHAPTER FOUR: Feminists Make Judgments: Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy and the Affirmation of Freedom

Judgment and the Problem of the New

The Old Problem of Objectivity

Judging without a Concept

One Concept of Validity

A Political Concept of Validity

From World-Disclosure to World-Opening

Being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not

Imagination and Freedom

Sensus Communis and the Practice of Freedom

CONCLUSION: Reframing the Freedom Question in Feminism

Feminism’s Paradox of Founding

What a Political Claim Is

Feminism Is a World-Building Practice

Recovering Feminism’s Lost Treasure

Notes

Index

PREFACE

FOR A LONG time I thought about this book as an attempt to find my way back to what once brought me to feminism: the radical demand for women’s political freedom, the right to be a participant in public affairs. Although feminism is composed of a wide range of practices—aesthetic, social, economic, and cultural—the feminist challenge to the androcentrism of the public sphere and the constitution of alternative spaces of freedom is what captured and held my interest. Increasingly, however, I found myself both fascinated by but also ambivalent about developments in second- and third-wave feminism, especially the centrality accorded by both waves to questions of identity and subjectivity. However important these questions seemed—and still seem—to me, I worried about the framework in which they were posed. I could not find in this framework the feminist demand for political freedom that so inspired me. Instead of insistently claiming political freedom, it seemed, feminism was now devoted to overcoming the cultural constraints of normative masculinity and femininity. As important as such a struggle is, I had trouble seeing how it could possibly occur in the absence of the demand for freedom as I understood it.

Concerned as I was about this reframing of freedom as freedom from the constraints of subjectification, I also resisted the nostalgic longing for early second-wave feminism that began to take hold in the 1990s in the wake of the debates around identity politics. I strongly agreed with third-wave critics who questioned the coherence of the category of women as the subject of feminism, though I remained uneasy about the consequences of such questioning for politics. Not least, I worried about a certain tendency toward a renewed dogmatism on the part of feminists for whom critiques of the category of women turned into a politically destructive skepticism. At a certain point, it seemed that feminists were talking past one another, quarreling about something that was in any case an accomplished fact and hardly the result of anyone’s deliberate choice. The view that the collapse of women as a unified category was the fault of poststructuralist feminist theorists and to a lesser extent women of color struck me as an attempt to kill the message by killing the messenger. It also seemed like a troubling displacement of feminist politics itself.

If we no longer speak unthinkingly of women as a group with common interests based on a common identity, surely that is not attributable solely nor even primarily to the considerable critical energies of third-wave thinkers like Judith Butler, Chantal Mouffe, or Joan Scott. The economic and social developments of late capitalism (for example, the breakup of the labor movement, globalization, and the homework economy) have resulted in exceedingly complex stratifications among women nationally and internationally which cannot be grasped solely in terms of gender relations. More to the point, the breakup of women as a coherent group is attributable to feminism itself: feminism is a political movement that has striven to unite women in a struggle for freedom largely by refuting the naturalized femininity on which the illusion of a given, common identity of women is based. Rather than willfully destroy the category of women, then, thinkers like Butler, Mouffe, and Scott tried to clarify—in deeply critical and non-nostalgic terms—the political consequences of its historical loss for the future of feminism.

Trying to understand the pathos of the category of women debates, I began to think it might be symptomatic of the epistemological framework within which most second- and even third-wave feminisms were articulated. As strange as it seemed to blame poststructuralists for the loss of something that—insofar as we can speak of a loss—was more the product of history and politics than of nihilistic scholarship, it seemed even stranger to think that the future of feminism, as a political movement, could possibly hang on the status of an analytic category of feminist theory. Apart from the fact that few feminist activists understand theory as a guide for praxis—save in some very loose sense—it seemed important to move out of the details of the subject of feminism debates and question their underlying assumption: What could be made of the idea that any claim to speak in the name of women must function like a rule under which to subsume particulars, lest it have no political significance at all? Was there not perhaps some guidance to be had for feminism in this moment from nonfeminists who had thought about the relation of politics and freedom to rules and their application?

These thoughts and questions led me back to the thought of Hannah Arendt, who had nothing to say about feminism, but a lot to say about the loss of traditional categories of thought for making sense of political reality—the very sort of loss, it seemed to me, represented by the crisis of the category of women, a loss bemoaned by second-wave feminists and often scripted as a theft for which third wavers were made responsible. In Arendt’s view, the break in tradition, already begun with the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, culminated with the political catastrophes of the twentieth. It is not only pointless but dangerous to try to recover categories of thought that no longer resonate within our current political and historical context, Arendt held. Unfortunately, as she also recognized, just because a tradition has come to an end, traditional concepts have not lost their power over us. On the contrary, they can become even more tyrannical, for a confused moral and political orientation can seem more appealing than no orientation at all.

As I reflected on the loss of women as a category of traditional political theory and feminist political thought, Arendt’s remarks on the break in tradition took on special significance. Writing this preface in 2004, I am struck by the strange compromise we feminists have reached on matters that once called forth a fairly militant articulation of oppositional political stakes. The pathos is no longer there, but neither is any clear sense of how to theorize or act politically without the inherited categories of feminist thought. We nod to the importance of acknowledging difference among women, yet we persistently return to the idea that feminism demands a unified subject. Alternatively, we vigorously refuse such a subject, but are at a loss about how to say or claim anything beyond the particular case.

This book cannot resolve all the puzzles it describes. But perhaps it can help us think them through by clarifying how we got where we are and how we might think differently about political freedom, political claims, and the political role of feminist theory. Our inheritance was left to us by no testament, says Arendt, citing René Char. What if we took that opaque aphorism as a challenge to welcome, rather than bemoan, the irreversible break in tradition that characterizes politics in late modernity, including feminism? In that spirit of possibility, I present my reflections.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MANY PEOPLE HAVE contributed their time and energy to this project. Thanks first to Benjamin Barber, Susan Carroll, Cynthia Daniels, Samantha Frost, and Marcia Ian, friends and former colleagues at Rutgers University, who inspired me to begin work on the project. At Northwestern I have found an intellectual community that has likewise been highly supportive of my work. Sara Monoson, Miguel Vatter, Peter Fenves, and Robert Gooding-Williams have provided me with very helpful comments. Special thanks to my friends in the Gender Studies Program, in particular former directors Tessie Liu and Alex Owen, for affording me the opportunity to lead a faculty seminar on issues related to this book. I thank as well Ann Orloff, who provided insightful criticisms on earlier versions of the chapters and reminded me of what really matters; Michael Hanchard, who saw the blind spots in the work and, with his strong friendship, helped me endure; Richard Flathman, who commented on various chapters and whose work on Wittgenstein is an inspiration to me; Christine Froula, who gave very thoughtful criticisms of chapter 4; Kirstie McClure, who inspired my reading of the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective; and Peter Meyers, whose creative scholarship on the rhetorical tradition and deep appreciation of Arendt’s political thought stimulated my own thinking. Mary Dietz and Ernesto Laclau read the manuscript for the University of Chicago Press and gave me enormously useful comments. For his generosity and critical reading of the entire manuscript I thank George Shulman, who remains my model of intellectual curiosity and generosity. I have benefited from conversations with Chantal Mouffe, Sonia Kruks, William Connolly, and Patchen Markell. Zillah Eisenstein, teacher and friend, provided insight and encouragement in the earliest stages of the project. Thanks to the students in my graduate seminars at Northwestern, who challenged me, among other things, to think clearly about why Hannah Arendt might be relevant for feminists.

I have been very fortunate to have had superb research assistants, both at Rutgers and Northwestern. Crina Archer, Lida Maxwell, Ella Myers, Laurie Naranch, and Torrey Shanks have all been involved at various stages of this project, tracking down articles, checking citations, and keeping me focused in the midst of the many piles of paper. Thanks especially to Lida Maxwell and Crina Archer for their help with the preparation of the final manuscript. My colleague and dear friend, Bonnie Honig, has read more versions of this manuscript than either of us care to remember. Her creative energy, intellectual focus, and good judgment have been invaluable to me. It is not possible to put into words how much I owe her. I wish also to acknowledge my incalculable debt to my teacher, Michael Rogin, whose example of intellectual vitality and personal integrity will survive his untimely death.

I am once again grateful to my family—Marie A. Zerilli, Armand F. Zerilli, Amanda Zerilli, and Jeffrey Zerilli—for their love and support. Finally, I want to thank my companion, Gregor Gnädig, for his affirming spirit and unerring belief in me. To him I dedicate this work.

This project was supported by generous research leaves from both Rutgers and Northwestern University. Thanks also to the Institute for Advanced Study and especially Joan Scott for providing a hospitable environment at the earliest stage of this project. Chapter 2 was published in On Monique Wittig: Theoretical, Political and Literary Essays (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005). Chapter 3 was published in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Criticism 15, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 54–90. Portions of chapter 4 were published in Political Theory 20, no. 10 (April 2005): 158–88.

INTRODUCTION

Why Feminism and Freedom Both Begin with the Letter F

The raison d’être of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action.

—HANNAH ARENDT

JUDGING FROM 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.¹ For some critics, this end is given in the 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 democratic state, can indeed look like a dispersed collection of diverse grassroots struggles that have lost the orientation once provided by its collective subject: women.

Critics who long for the clear sense of direction that they identify as the 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 second-wave American feminism will immediately recognize that the orientation provided by this putatively collective subject was illusory at best. Feminism has always been shot through with deep internal conflicts about the subject in whose name its equally conflict-ridden social and political aspirations were to be achieved.² The breathless pace with which members of the earliest second-wave feminist groups split off to 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 ideals 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 self-defeating only if we assume that the raison d’être 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 politics, such as Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe, have strongly argued that politics (including not only a post-Marxist notion of radical 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 it—what they do not squarely address is the fraught question of whether the raison d’être 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’être of politics as anything other than the social advancement of a group and its members, that may be because we tend to think of politics in terms of what Hannah Arendt calls the social question. The social question arises wherever it is assumed that classic social welfare 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 (in her view) posed in the French Revolution—comes to be definitive of what politics is with the rise of the social in the nineteenth century. Although Arendt is not clear in her definition, the social is a kind of enlarged housekeeping, whereby the public/private distinction is dissolved and citizens are situated in a relatively passive relation to the bureaucratic apparatus of the welfare state, which becomes the sole addressee of political claims and responsible for the distribution of goods and the maintenance of life. The assimilation of the political to the social restricts political action to an instrumental, means-ends activity that entails the micro- and macro-management of social relations. Since society always demands of its members that they act as if they were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion and one interest, writes Arendt, the rise of the social is identical with the rise of conformism and behavior, and with the consequent reduction of the possibility of spontaneous action (HC, 39).⁶

Arendt’s account of social conformity and the rise of the social resonates with critiques of modern disciplinary society (such as Michel Foucault’s), 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, what stubbornly remains at the end of the day is her apparent refusal to include social issues among the concerns of politics.⁸ An ungenerous but not entirely inaccurate reading of Arendt on the social 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?

A more generous reading of Arendt would respond to these legitimate questions by suggesting that she does not in fact exclude social concerns from politics but warns against the introduction of the instrumentalist attitude that such concerns often carry with them. Insofar as expediency is held to be the highest criterion, the instrumentalist attitude treats democratic politics as a means to an end, which almost inevitably leads citizens to allow the actions and judgments of experts to substitute for their own. But if Arendt’s point is that expediency is 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 guarding against what Bonnie Honig, deepening a point originally made by Hanna Pitkin, calls the laboring sensibility, that is, a sensibility that is taken to be characteristic of laboring as an activity [for example, a process-and necessity-driven attitude] but which may or may not be characteristic of the thinking of any particular laborer.¹⁰ There is neither a determinate group of persons nor a determinate class of objects that is by definition 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 dismissive critiques of her work, it is not meant to be a definitive riposte 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 ruin 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 inside the frame? How is feminism, in 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 justify the claim to freedom in terms of the social question, social justice, 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 radical demand: Contending for the rights of women, my main argument is built on this simple principle, that if she [woman] be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue.¹¹ And besides, women were the virtuous sex that had so much to 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 civilization was doomed.¹² And besides, society was 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 arguments existed side by side.¹⁴

Cott’s broader intellectual agenda here, like 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 alone overcome, without attending to the larger frame in which feminist struggles for political rights have been posed: the frame of the social question and its means-ends conception of politics.

Attending to the social question and how it has framed what can be heard as a political claim, I am more troubled than Cott 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 entangled in each other—entangled such that a claim to freedom could not be articulated or heard unless it was uttered as a claim to social justice, which in turn could only be heard in the idiom of the social question. 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 practical 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 politics. Instead, freedom became a means to some other end: an attenuation of the problems associated with the social question. The besides that often qualified feminist claims to social justice—usually in 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 political.¹⁶ Although this dislocation, which Arendt bemoaned, was in no way restricted to women’s political demands, the emerging sphere of the social in the nineteenth century was deeply feminized.¹⁷ By the early- to mid-twentieth century, Riley writes, the very word ‘women’ was imbued in all political languages 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 mid-nineteenth century was redeployed, by advocates and opponents of women’s rights alike, in relation to the emerging idea of the social. This 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, women came to be seen more as a sociological group with a particular social agenda than as an emerging political collectivity with unqualified democratic demands.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’Neill to describe the women who were municipal civic reformers, club 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 more than a claim to sexual difference, the difference women would make if only they were granted political rights. What feminists faced was not just conventional conceptions of femininity that had to be strategically redeployed for political purposes, but a significant displacement of the political by the social. Within the increasingly all-encompassing framework of the social question, the earlier 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 ballot was not an end in itself but a means to an end: the betterment of society.²²

In some sense, the displacement of the political by the social is intrinsic to the history of democratic politics more generally. Far from unique to feminism, the articulation of political demands in 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 gradual extension of manhood suffrage in nineteenth-century England, for the rights of African Americans in the United States, for workers’ rights in capitalist economies, and for women’s human rights in a global context), whose advocates, eager to convince those in power of the rightness of their cause, framed it in the language of social utility. Although rhetorical strategy—whether conscious or not to those involved in making political claims—is surely a crucial component in any struggle for political freedom, rhetoric is often treated by historians and political theorists, to say nothing of philosophers, as if it were the mere form in which an independent argument is made. In that case, one could, as it were, package 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 merely 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 utility). The rise of the social, as described by Arendt, and the entanglement of women in it, as portrayed by Riley, is an established fact; it is the politically problematic inheritance of contemporary feminism. If the 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 if it 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 itself.

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 oneself 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 radical demand for freedom, for unqualified participation in common affairs, bound to an economy of use that deeply restricts their emergence as a political collectivity (unless, of course, we define politics itself in terms of that 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