Claudia Leeb

The feminist subject, which refers to the category "woman" as a shared identity for all women, has excluded women who do not fit neatly into its boundaries. In response, Judith Butler suggested that feminists must give up theorizing the feminist subject or invoke it as a pragmatic strategy only. Since Butler's solution is a dead-end for feminist politics, I propose the idea of a feminist subject-in-outline for emancipatory feminist politics. The feminist subject-in-outline emerges in what Jacques Lacan has termed the moment of the real, which refers to the gap in the signifier "woman." In this gap, all those women who have been rendered invisible and without a proper place in the feminist community can become subjects and transform its boundaries.

In this book, I develop the novel concept of embodied reflective judgment, which outlines the interconnection between feeling and thinking in judgment. I explain that defense mechanisms to repress feelings of guilt can effectively shut down critical judgment. Finally, I analyze post-war trial cases of Austrian Nazi perpetrators and contemporary debates about Austria’s involvement in Nazi crimes to expose the mechanisms used by individuals and nations to fend off individual and political guilt. Only by confronting guilt can individuals and nations take responsibility for past crimes, show solidarity with the victims of crimes and their descendants, and ensure that such crimes are not repeated. I also develop two concepts to break the cycle of negative consequences resulting from repressed guilt about a nation’s violent past: Embodied reflective spaces, which allow us to reflect on our guilt feelings, and subjects-in-outline, which means that we abstain from wholly identifying with a nation to counter defensive mechanisms when confronting guilt. I ground my analysis in critical theory (Arendt and Adorno) and psychoanalytic theory.

In this chapter, I challenge existing definitions of social class and rethink the class concept from a post-structuralist perspective. I draw on Michel Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary power to outline the subtle ways in which the control and subjugation of the raced and gendered working classes happen inside and outside academia. I also draw on Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of “non-identity” to theorize those moments when the raced and gendered working classes resist disciplinary power and redefine what it means to be “working-class.”

Feminist thinkers have appropriated the central concepts of the early Frankfurt School thinker Theodor W. Adorno, such as his concept of the non-identical, and pointed at his problematic depictions of the feminine. However, despite the growing literature on the latter, there is so far no scholarship that shows how the feminine interacts with class in Adorno’s works. Working-class women appear in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and his later works in the three figurations of the phallic, castrating, and castrated woman. I draw on the theoretical framework of the French psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan to grasp the deeper desires and fears that implicate Adorno in the very same instrumental rationality he aims to counter with his critical theory.

In this original book, I use a poststructuralist perspective to chart explicit and tacit assumptions about the working class in general and the working-class woman, specifically in the classical texts of prominent political philosophers and social critics, including Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Rousseau, Marx, Weber, and Bourdieu. Drawing on Michel Foucault, I argue that philosophical discourses that construct these categories as the Other function as disciplinary practices that aim at keeping working-class women either out of or at the margins of academic institutions. I analyze interviews with women from various ethnic origins in New York City’s elite academic institutions, who identified their backgrounds as working class. My analysis foregrounds how these women resist gender, class, and ethnic disciplinary practices in academia. The book contributes to political-theory literature on social injustice and marginalization in academia and challenges and reconfigures the meanings of women and the working class.

This book exposes the female/non-aggressive and male/aggressive binary salient in contemporary traditional and feminist aggression research. To challenge such binary, I develop "direct female aggression" as a positive concept. The book also comprises a study where women's groups from different social group contexts view movies that display women's aggressive behavior and then discuss their own aggressive behavior. I use psychoanalytic textual interpretation (after Leithhäuser and Volmerg) to analyze the group discussions. The analysis demonstrates that aggression is more determined by social groups' contexts than by gender. The analysis also exposes the unconscious fears, desires, and fantasies concerning direct female aggression. This book is of central interest to scholars in all academic disciplines who study human aggression.

How can we radically change the inhuman conditions existing in the world today? In this paper, I answer this question by explaining the how, when, and who of radical socio-political transformation. We need both critical theorizing and transformative practice to explain how we can change the world. We must theorize the moment of the limit in the objective domain of power to answer when the transformative agency becomes possible. I introduce the idea of the “political subject-in-outline” that moves within the tension of minimal closure and permanent openness to theorize a who, which remains inclusive and has the strength to transform the status quo. Marx’s and Adorno’s thought remains central to theorize socio-political transformation today.

This chapter shows that Fraser's redistribution-recognition justice model fails to provide us with a radical political imaginary to transform neoliberal capitalism into a better society. First, her principle of 'parity of participation' aims to include oppressed social groups into capitalism rather than transforming capitalism itself. Second, her idea of a 'constantly shifting identity' is implicated in the spirit of neoliberal capitalism. Third, her account of socialism implies a reformative socialist imaginary that merely attenuates the ills of neoliberal capitalism. Fourth, her attempt to do away with the proletariat as a political subject does not allow us to theorize an agent of transformative change. To envision transformative change, feminists need a clear break with the language of recognition and the idea of the 'constantly shifting identity.' Furthermore, we need to bring back the radical imaginary of Rosa Luxemburg, who opted for a proletarian revolution instead of reforms within capitalism. Finally, I offer my idea of the proletariat as a subject-in-outline to further theorize the agent who incites a revolution.

Modern capitalist societies are plagued by a series of oppositions, such as the subject/object, theory/practice, and the mind/body opposition. The problem with these oppositions is that they appear in an absolute opposition and hierarchical relation, making the negative pole (the object, practice, and the body) appear inferior to the positive pole (the subject, theory, and the mind). Furthermore, the “inferior” pole is often unconsciously linked to women, racial minorities, and working-class people, reinforcing injustices towards them. In this chapter, I read Theodor W. Adorno with Jacques Lacan to explain how these oppositions are connected and different from one another, and what we can do to challenge them, and the injustices they engender.

In this paper, I argue that Marx's central concern, consistent throughout his works, is to challenge and overcome hierarchical oppositions, which he considers as the core of modern, capitalist societies and the cause of alienation. The young Marx critiques the hierarchical idealism/materialism opposition. In this opposition, idealism abstracts from and reduces all material elements to the mind (or spirit), and materialism abstracts from and reduces all mental abstractions to the body (or matter). The mature Marx sophisticates this critique with his theory of the commodity fetish. The commodity fetish abstracts the exchange-value (the mind) from the commodity's use-value (the body). Although Marx aims to challenge capitalism by abolishing the hierarchical relation among binary oppositions, I show that in his early and later writings on the working-class woman, he reinforces hierarchical binaries, pointing at the gendered unconscious structure of capitalism.

Most literature in contemporary critical, feminist, and psychoanalytic thought reads Antigone as a figure of resistance and revolutionary change. In this chapter, I challenge such a reading. I discuss Sophocles’ Antigone as a paradigmatic example of what the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben identified as homo sacer, who is banned from society and deprived of rights and, thus, may subsequently be killed with impunity. Antigone dwells at the zone of indistinction between the public and the private, the included and the excluded, life and death, the animal and the human. She exposes that it is particularly woman and the feminine that stands for bare life that is exposed to an unconditioned capacity to be killed.