Hypatia

In Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, Linda M. G. Zerilli sets out to "find my way back to what once brought me to feminism: the radical demand for women's political freedom, the right to be a participant in public affairs" (ix). This stirring reminder of a political impetus to feminism could, however, mislead the book's [End Page 203] readers for the very reasons Zerilli needs to make it. There are longstanding problems in the dominant Western tradition with thinking about action as well as acting for freedom. Feminists—who perforce work within as well as against dominant meaning systems—have often been tangled in the very problems we also challenge.

Having realized just how profound and widespread some basic conceptual muddles in political theorizing are, Zerilli distances herself from what she calls nostalgia for second-wave feminist politics, but also questions its critics. Of Nancy Cott and Joan Scott, Zerilli writes, for example, that they both "try to reframe modern feminism as constituted by paradox, by the need both to accept and refuse sexual difference," but thereby stop short of the deeper question of "whether the tenacity of the impossible choice framework of equality or difference that they would expose can be properly understood, let alone overcome, without attending to the larger frame in which feminist struggles for political rights have been posed: the frame of the social question and its means-ends conception of politics" (5).

Zerilli's examination of the action-centered thinking of the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective is intended to help break theorists out of their stuck places—such as that we just encountered, reducing politics to a technical matter of fixing social problems. Most acute and valuable is that she does so in the company of philosophers. In particular, Arendt and Wittgenstein, generally apologized for as non- if not antifeminist, and Wittig, sometimes written out of third-wave feminism for her purported "humanism," turn out, in Zerilli's wonderfully intelligent and nuanced reading of them, to offer feminists ways out of our various impasses. Centrally, they help Zerilli make her complex, effective case for action and the freedom it realizes in the world without recourse to any prior or final justifications beyond the "abyss of freedom" itself.

In good Wittgensteinian style, and with his crucial assistance, Zerilli succeeds in offering us a way out of the epistemological fly bottle in which those who believe a political movement must have a singular subject whose lot needs to be improved (for example woman) remain fruitlessly pitted against those who see the nonsense and contradictions in positing essentialized identities. Among the latter, Zerilli questions Judith Butler. Butler, Zerilli says, does distance herself from epistemological "problems of grounding knowledge claims" to focus on "relations of power and their naturalization," but nevertheless fails to break free of a "paradoxical entrapment in the very skeptical problematic" she set out to challenge (47).

Zerilli avoids that entrapment by recalling that among Wittgenstein's liberating "genuine insights" is the realization that we can and should "call into question the whole problematic of justification in which philosophical accounts of following a rule have been thought" (45). Having thus remembered the need to ask why anyone feels the need for a unified concept, principle, or rule in the first place, Zerilli opens space to rethink political, moral, and aesthetic theorizing. [End Page 204]

The obvious issue of judgment is significant throughout Zerilli's book. She does a superb job of showing how Arendt's understanding of judgment—in close conversation with Kant's reflective or indeterminate judgment as developed in his third Critique—allows us to renounce an epistemic quest for grounds of justification without thereby necessarily falling into skepticism. We are not, after all, paralyzed, unable to make choices or take stands or evaluate action if we cannot make deductive judgments, or in some way find a way around following a rule. In political and aesthetic judgments, the issue, as Kant, Arendt, and Cavell (whom Zerilli also usefully brings in here) tell...