Retrieving Experience

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

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

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Retrieving Experience

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Table of Contents

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