Claudia Leeb

In this article, I draw on Adorno's concept of the non-identical in conjunction with Lacan's concept of the Real to propose a "theoretical outline of the subject" as central for feminist political theorizing. A theoretical outline of the subject recognizes the limits of theorizing, the moment where meaning fails, and we are confronted with the impossibility of grasping the subject entirely. At the same time, it insists on the importance of a coherent subject to effect transformations in the sociopolitical sphere. Since the non-identical is more grounded in the material world than the Real, and the Real allows us more than the non-identical to grasp the anxieties and desires that lead to totalizing theories, a complementary Adornian-Lacanian theoretical framework holds a central promise for feminist political theorizing.

For the past decade and a half, social and political thinkers have appropriated the Hegelian trope of a "struggle for recognition" to generate theories that lead to a democratic politics of inclusion. The different strands within the "politics of recognition" debate share the conviction that "recognition" is a central human good and the precondition for justice in pluralist societies. However, in this article, I show that recognition theorists, instead of creating a democratic politics of inclusion, have perpetuated exclusions. I share Jacques Lacan's suspicion of democratic politics based on recognition or its counterpart—misrecognition. What parades as a pluralist society where subjects supposedly "equally recognize each other in their diversity" often leads to excluding women, sexual and racial minorities, and the poor. Although the influence of the politics of recognition is fading, perhaps because other thinkers have also realized its inherent problems, it remains a dominant strand in contemporary political theorizing.

In this chapter, I draw on Michel Foucault to explain the mechanisms of marginalization of women from working-class origins in academic institutions in the context of the U.S.A. Next, I explain how the discursive construction of the working classes as “the Other” in academic knowledge production is part of a disciplinary power that functions to keep women from working-class origins either out or at the margins of academic institutions. In academic institutions, disciplinary power aims to discipline the bodies and minds of working-class women into the norm of bourgeois and male subjectivity. Finally, I suggest strategies that counter gender and class disciplining in academia.

The color of the book’s cover alludes to the time and context in which this critical volume originated: the 3rd Interdisciplinary Conference Celebrating International Women’s Day at the New School for Social Research in New York City. At that time, ‘orange alerts’ were issued by the United States to create a climate of fear and thereby stifle any critical debate of its foreign and domestic policy. The feminist thinkers presented in this volume are alert that such a critique is needed. They draw on the various languages of their fields to address wide-ranging topics and key questions in feminist politics, theory, and philosophy. They confront the state of the urgency of women in all classes of society and all research fields. This unique collection ranges across disciplines; as such, the four major topics – aesthetics and female representation, love and psychoanalysis, care and ethics, the different understandings of ‘women’ – represent current topics of cross-disciplinary interest for Women’s and Gender Studies, Philosophy, and Political Science.

According to postmodern scholars, subjects are defined only through their relationship to power. However, if we are only political subjects insofar as we are subjected to existing power relations, there is little hope of political transformation. To instigate change, we need to draw on collective power, but appealing to a particular type of subject, whether "working class," "black," or "women," will always be exclusionary. Recent work in political and feminist thought has suggested that we can get around these paradoxes by eliminating the idea of political subjects entirely or else thinking of political identities as constantly shifting. In this book, I argue that these are both failed ideas. Instead, I suggest a novel idea of a subject in outline as the agent of socio-political change. This subject moves within the tension of coherence necessary for an agency (the subject) and permanent openness necessary to counter the exclusionary character of a political collectivity based on identity (the outline). I also develop the idea of the moment of the limit, which refers to those moments when power structures fail to subject us, and transformative agency becomes a possibility. While I reject the idea of political autonomy, I show that there is always a moment in which subjects can contest the power relations that define them. Throughout the book, I ground these concepts in work by Adorno, Lacan, and Marx - the very theorists who are often seen as denying the subject's agency.

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.