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Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. By Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser. New York: Routledge, 1995. 176p. $45.00 cloth, $14.95 paper.
This volume is the most lively and penetrating introduction I know to the debate on postmodernism in feminist theory. Its bite is interactive, as four contending theorists directly address one another's positions, then return to the fray after absorbing the others' thoughts and criticisms.
The volume begins with Seyla Benhabib's posing feminism and postmodernism as allies in the "struggle against the grand narratives of Western Enlightenment and modernity," which have forced history into a Procrustian bed of unity, homogeneity, and linearity; but in its sweeping condemnation, postmodernism has swept too much into the ash can. She welcomes the "weak versions" of the major postmodern claims and rejects their "strong versions." The weak versions reject hegemonical claims to interpretation and embrace situated selves, while the strong versions reject agency (through the "death of the subject"), a future interest in emancipation (through the "death of history"), and legitimation (through the "death of metaphysics").
Benhabib would keep "the traditional attributes of the subject of the West, like self-reflexivity, the capacity for acting upon principles, rational accountability for one's actions and the ability to project a life-plan into the future" (p. 20), while reformulating these to take account of "the radical situatedness of the subject." In contrast, she charges Judith Butler, among others, with bidding farewell to the "self as the subject of a life-narrative."
Judith Butler then enters her statement. All these strictures against postmodernism, she writes, warn against an impending nihilism and in response try to "establish in advance that any theory of politics requires a subject" (p. 35). But to require the subject (i.e., a "stable subject") means "to foreclose the domain of the political" (i.e., the domain of struggle) and to silence summarily any political contest over the status of that subject.
In a critique of Habermas and...