A Critical Feminist Exchange: Symposium on Claudia Leeb, Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism: Toward a New Theory of the Political Subject, Oxford University Press, 2017
| Author | Laurie E. Naranch,Mary Caputi,Claudia Leeb |
| Published date | 01 August 2019 |
| Date | 01 August 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718767818 |
| Subject Matter | Review Symposia |
research-article2018
Review Symposium
Political Theory
2019, Vol. 47(4) 559 –580
A Critical Feminist
© The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
Exchange: Symposium
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718767818
DOI: 10.1177/0090591718767818
journals.sagepub.com/home/ptx
on Claudia Leeb, Power
and Feminist Agency
in Capitalism: Toward
a New Theory of the
Political Subject, Oxford
University Press, 2017
What Does It Mean to Rebel?: Feminist Critical
Theory, Agency, and Working-Class Women
Laurie E. Naranch
Political Science, Siena College
As Claudia Leeb says in her rigorous and thoughtful new book, “For the
feminist movement to invite different women (and men) in, which is necessary
to strengthen itself, we must opt for a politics beyond identification” (165).
Leeb argues that neither a fantasy of agentic wholeness nor a poststructural
view of a fluid self can adequately provide a conceptual ground for social
transformation of a feminist, intersectional, and materialist nature. However,
Leeb suggests that “political and feminist theorists cannot give up theorizing
the political subject, because without a political subject there is no agent of
sociopolitical transformation” (72).
In Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism, Leeb reanimates the rela-
tionship among psychoanalysis, critical theory, and feminist theory. She
moves readily among thinkers such as Jacques Lacan, Theodor Adorno, Karl
Marx, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, and others. Leeb’s work is rightly charac-
terized as feminist critical theory and one that is attuned to the debates within
feminism and intersectionality theory.
Leeb characterizes two dominant threads of feminist criticism in this way:
on the one hand are thinkers who reject the idea that the task of feminist theo-
rizing is to get the subject of feminism right to address the exclusionary char-
acteristics of much of feminist theory and practice. On the other hand are
560
Political Theory 47(4)
those who see critiques of the subject of feminism, that is, women, as a hin-
drance to political activism that they argue needs an agentic view of political
actors. Leeb suggests that her concept of the “political subject-in-outline” is
a response to the problems inherent in both camps (5). As Leeb puts it, “my
idea of the political subject-in-outline deals with the inherent tension in the
political subject—its exclusionary character and its necessity for agency by
theorizing a mediated relation between subject and object, universal and par-
ticular, as well as mind and body” (64). The “political” modifier of this phrase
signals Leeb’s goal of social and political transformation by critiquing and
acting against the conditions that create suffering—primarily the conditions
of capitalist exploitation of workers, but also the suffering caused by gen-
dered, raced, classed, and able-bodied inequalities as well (10–11, 70–71,
125). Leeb’s goal is an abolitionist one in terms of the transformation of capi-
talism and gendered violence.
The “subject-in-outline” is an intriguing concept. As one would expect, it
does a lot of work in Leeb’s book, most of it persuasive on the ground of
thinking philosophically about a subject that moves in tension between coher-
ence and permanent openness (5). I’m sympathetic to Leeb’s sense that in
theorizing the subject, it’s necessary to stake out a place politically to say “I”
and “we” in terms of political action. I also agree that it’s important to take
account of the exclusions, misfires, and other ways in which the enunciation
of a political claim in the name of a group or against a particular form of suf-
fering can never fully encompass or end those claims. In this sense, I agree
with another leftist psychoanalytically informed political thinker, Cornelius
Castoraidis, who says we can’t remain a question mark when we make politi-
cal claims given that we have to stand somewhere and say something.1 Or, as
an agonistic reading of Hannah Arendt would lead us to say, when you are
attacked in terms of a social and political identity, you respond on those
grounds. As Arendt says to the command “Step closer Jew!” if you respond,
but I am a human being, this for Arendt misses the point of how one is tar-
geted and rendered less than a citizen, person, and human. That is, in the
world, identity is political and must be articulated politically. This echoes
Leeb’s use of Franz Fanon when he hears “Look, a Negro,” reading this as a
sign of how dispossession, or in Leeb’s language, suffering, occurs in a space
of racist, colonial power and privilege.
I set this up because in my comments I want to focus on a particular chal-
lenge with a subject-centered theory—even one as smart, complex, and atten-
tive to mediation as Leeb’s theory is—namely, that a persistent challenge
remains, how to mediate or translate the subject-in-outline with the historical
social and political subject. That is, I am interested in the issue of praxis under-
stood as what connects a theory of politics to the action of political transfor-
mation of a liberatory sort, and vice versa that is part and parcel of critical
A Critical Feminist Exchange
561
theory and feminist traditions. Or, what is it that makes us rebel? I think Leeb
offers a rich language of a political subject-in-outline that attunes us to the fact
that there is never a full philosophical account of the subject to ground poli-
tics. Nor is there a representative claim that would capture once and for all “all
women” or “gender equality” in feminist politics. However, for the sake of
conversation, I want to push into the dilemma of how recognizing the political
subject-in-outline based on the limit concepts of the Lacanian real and
Adorno’s idea of non-identity could translate into sociopolitical transforma-
tion. For example, Leeb notes in the chapter “What Makes Us Rebel” that
“translated into the political domain, it is the pain and suffering that drawing
near the holes (the moment of non-identity and the real), which point to the
traumatic elements that one could not integrate into one’s history, which allow
for the subject to realign for sociopolitical transformation” (134). Further in
the text Leeb asks, “Can we theorize the feminist subject who is in a position
to not only resist but transform power structures?” (147).
As a subject-in-outline, the idea is that the limit point, the holes in any
system of subordination, can be noticed when we have the conceptual tools
to see these limits (the unconscious, the real, non-identity). This “non-whole-
ness” of power is an essential point. Certainly the concept of the subject-in-
outline can attune critics and perhaps political actors to how it should be “a
fruitful moment because it allows all those excluded to enter (or exit) the
political collectivity and transform its boundaries” (59, emphasis in original).
But the accounting for exclusions can’t be done only philosophically at the
level of the concept, but must be done politically in the space and time of
action. I don’t think Leeb would disagree. However, my worry is that without
more attention to the contingency of political figurations we might too read-
ily think that the philosophical elaboration could secure the political critique,
and from there that the mediation between theory and practice is enough to
secure an ongoing, critical, creative/destructive process in politics.
One could say Leeb responds to this concern by turning to the figure of the
working-class woman. This is a figure who first appears in chapter 1 with an
example from Sandra Cisnero’s novel, The House on Mango Street. In a sec-
tion Leeb quotes, a nun passes by a working-class girl’s home, the house on
Mango Street. The nun’s disapproval of the house sets up the girl as working-
class (25–26). Leeb notes that the label “working-class girl” petrifies her but
at the same time allows her to speak as such. “In this example, a subordinated
subject, her being able to speak or function does not imply that what she says
will lead to resistance or socio-symbolic transformation . . . it is precisely her
bodily pain, which can generate a different outcome, where the girl resists her
subordination” (26–27). For Cisneros, this is an artistic intervention which
relies on an audience who receives this work. But how is that resistance, that
rebellion, to be without a political, shared collective figure of resistance?
562
Political Theory 47(4)
How does individual pain become translated into political critique? How
does the working class girl become resignified through her pain? What allows
for rebellion?
In chapter 4 Leeb returns to Marx and persuasively makes the case that for
revolutionary activity to succeed theory is needed (84, 86, 88). Like other
critical theorists and activists on the left, Leeb shows that “class” is about
your place in capitalist production and consciousness. Moreover, she further
insists that the proletariat must be rethought (107). But how so? Leeb rejects
as inadequate the more recent concept of the precariat. Leeb references David
Harvey and Saskia Sassen, but Guy Standing’s work also explicitly pays
attention to gender among other structures of power and privilege to think
about a more fluid worker in the time of neoliberalism, what he calls the pre-
cariat as well.2 Why isn’t this a productive rethinking of the proletariat
...
To continue reading
Request your trial