Book Review: A Feminist Theory of Refusal, by Bonnie Honig

• Author: Karen Bassi
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221077140
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

980 Political Theory 50(6)

the fact that this series involved the revisitation of its documentary subjects at

seven-year intervals—that “Unlike a map, which renders a physical landscape

as a physical replica, there is really no danger that film will ever perfectly rep-

resent its object—at least not when its object is a subject—for the subjectivity

of persons, although a phenomenon of duration like film, is not a phenomenon

of the same nature” (121).

The imperfection of cinematic representation is not, as Dienstag makes

clear, an occasion for special concern, merely pessimism—but only insofar

as pessimism implies that in film, just as in representative democracies, we

do not always get what we want. Or when we get what we want, we have to

give up a little of something else that might matter to us so that others can

have something, but not all, of what they want or need, too. And if what we

give up, ultimately, is the narcissistic satisfaction that follows from, or com-

pels, a belief that what appears, appears just for us, what, exactly, will we be

missing out on?

A Feminist Theory of Refusal, by Bonnie Honig. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 2021, 208 pp.

Reviewed by: Karen Bassi, Research Professor Emerita, Literature Department,

University of California at Santa Cruz

DOI: 10.1177/00905917221077140

Bonnie Honig’s A Feminist Theory of Refusal offers a new and deeply com-

pelling interpretation of Euripides’s Bacchae. How is this possible? The

scholarship on this ancient Greek tragedy is enormous. Honig’s approach,

delivered as the Mary Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College, is distin-

guished by its two related methodological premises. First, unlike most classi-

cal scholarship on tragedy, her reading of the Bacchae is not presented as a

window into ancient Athenian society and culture. Her approach is horizontal

rather than vertical. As the title of the book makes clear, Euripides’s tragedy

is a touchstone for contemporary feminist thought, broadly understood as

putting up a resistance to patriarchy. Second, her approach is guided by recent

theoretical discussions of refusal as a political concept.

As in her earlier work, this book is also interested in the political and ethi-

cal promises of the sororal relation. In the Bacchae, this relation is literalized

by the four daughters of Cadmus: Agave, Autonoe, Ino, and Semele. The plot

of the tragedy is initiated by the refusal of the first three to believe that Zeus