Retrieving Experience

by Kruks, Sonia

• ISBN13: 9780801484179
• ISBN10: 0801484170
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-02-01
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

In Subjectivity, Identity, Difference, 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 discuss

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Abbreviations	xiii
Introduction	1	(26)
Part 1 Simone de Beauvoir in ``Her'' World and ``Ours''
Freedoms That Matter: Subjectivity and Situation in the Work of Beauvoir, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty	27	(25)
Panopticism and Shame: Foucault, Beauvoir, and Feminism	52	(27)
Part 2 Recognition, Knowledge, and Identity
The Politics of Recognition: Sartre, Fanon, and Identity Politics	79	(28)
Identity Politics and Dialectical Reason: Beyond an Epistemology of Provenance	107	(24)
Part 3 Experience and the Phenomenology of Difference
Going Beyond Discourse: Feminism, Phenomenology, and ``Women's Experience''	131	(22)
Phenomenology and Difference: On the Possibility of Feminist ``World-Travelling''	153	(24)
Bibliography	177	(14)
Index	191