Linda M. G. Zerilli

In contemporary feminist theory, the problem of feminine subjectivity persistently appears and reappears as the site that grounds all discussion of feminism. In Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, Linda M. G. Zerilli argues that the persistence of this subject-centered frame severely limits feminists’ capacity to think imaginatively about the central problem of feminist theory and practice: a politics concerned with freedom. Offering both a discussion of feminism in its postmodern context and a critique of contemporary theory, Zerilli here challenges feminists to move away from a theory-based approach, which focuses on securing or contesting "women" as an analytic category of feminism, to one rooted in political action and judgment. She revisits the democratic problem of exclusion from participation in common affairs and elaborates a freedom-centered feminism as the political practice of beginning anew, world-building, and judging. In a series of case studies, Zerilli draws on the political thought of Hannah Arendt to articulate a nonsovereign conception of political freedom and to explore a variety of feminist understandings of freedom in the twentieth century, including ones proposed by Judith Butler, Monique Wittig, and the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective. In so doing, Zerilli hopes to retrieve what Arendt called feminism’s lost treasure: the original and radical claim to political freedom.

Woman has been defined in classic political theory as elusive yet dangerous, by her nature fundamentally destructive to public life. In the view of Linda M.G. Zerilli, however, gender relations shape the very grammar of citizenship. In deeply textured interpretations of Rousseau, Burke, and Mill, Zerilli recasts our understanding of woman as the agent of social chaos and makes a major advance for feminist political theory. Zerilli draws on the work of Julia Kristeva to help explain woman's traditionally ambiguous position, as a frontier figure neither inside nor outside political space. She discusses Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (as representatives of republican, conservative, and liberal thought) and traces how each author uses woman rhetorically as he sets forth a distinct political vision in response to the social conflicts of his time. These writers invoke "woman" to articulate not only the disruptive forces of sexuality but also those of class conflict and its resolution. Menacing the stability of meaning itself, woman symbolizes the looming social, economic, and political forces of civilization (for Rousseau), of revolution (for Burke), of capitalism (for Mill) - that threaten conventional distinctions of gender and class.

In this sweeping look at political and philosophical history, Linda M. G. Zerilli unpacks the tightly woven core of Hannah Arendt's unfinished work on a tenacious modern problem: how to judge critically in the wake of the collapse of inherited criteria of judgment. Engaging a remarkable breadth of thinkers, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Leo Strauss, Immanuel Kant, Frederick Douglas, John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, Martha Nussbaum, and many others, Zerilli clears a hopeful path between an untenable universalism and a cultural relativism that forever defers the possibility of judging at all. Zerilli deftly outlines the limitations of existing debates, both those that concern themselves with the impossibility of judging across cultures and those that try to find transcendental, rational values to anchor judgement. Looking at Kant through the lens of Arendt, Zerilli develops the notion of a public conception of truth, and from there she explores relativism, historicism, and universalism as they shape feminist approaches to judgment. 0Following Arendt even further, Zerilli arrives at a hopeful new pathway seeing the collapse of philosophical criteria for judgment not as a problem but a way to practice judgment anew as a world-building activity of democratic citizens. The result is an astonishing theoretical argument that travels through and goes beyond some of the most important political thought of the modern period.