The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

Hannah Arendt argued that the social question, the question of “what” humans are, can never “condition us absolutely.”¹ More importantly, the very pursuit of this social question has displaced the importance of revolutionary beginnings in political philosophy. Such beginnings are available to questions of the political and are never available to questions of the social. For Linda M. G. Zerilli, the social question together with what she calls the “subject question” have similarly prevented feminist political philosophy from asking how feminism might become a practice of freedom, the “boundlessness and unpredictability of action” (10). For Zerilli, the subject question in feminist political philosophy is the Arendtian [End Page 76] question of the “what,” the question of political identity such as “women,” and its ethereal agency. This question has only led to “bland consensus” (33), the calcifying of feminist debate in view of the ethical and political impossibility of a unified feminist subject. For Zerilli, this outcome is due to feminism’s own interest in debunking “the naturalized femininity on which the illusion of a given, common identity of women is based” (x). And yet such a fossilization of feminist political philosophy is not necessary. Feminism can correct its mistake of framing its concerns exclusively in terms of these social and subject-centered questions. In Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, Zerilli asks “what it would mean to frame them anew” (23). What if feminism were, in the tradition of Hannah Arendt, to understand freedom not as a question of the social or the subject but as a “question of the world” (14)? What would it be to think political freedom not as the agency of a subject but as a quality of political action that creates public space?

In Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill, Zerilli’s aim had been to contest “feminist readings of woman as the perennial outsider” through readings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, and John Stuart Mill in which woman plays an irreducible role in a variety of articulations of the political.² Woman is “both culture and chaos—one can never be sure which,”³ but at any rate the symbolic power of woman, its conventionality as well as instability, was shown to inform in a profound way the work of these political theorists and their feminist critics alike. In Signifying Woman, woman is the abyss, the site of a failure of political meaning that nevertheless aids the expression of the political visions of Rousseau, Burke, and Mill.

In Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, available in Spanish and soon in German translation, the abyss takes on an entirely new significance.⁴ Here the abyss is that of the Arendtian image: “the abyss of freedom” (25), from which the social question and, in Zerilli’s view, the feminist subject question recoil.⁵ Whereas the social question and the subject question aim to establish the agency of the “what” (in the Arendtian sense discussed above) as the subject of freedom, the world question forwards the “who,” a nonsovereign in a world characterized by the “‘frightening arbitrariness’ of action” (25). Zerilli’s political “who” seeks not to disclose itself but, instead, to disturb naturalized institutions through world-creating political action.

A feminism that can be a practice of freedom needs “disturbing examples of feminist practices of political freedom” (27). Zerilli presents three such disturbances, which are moments of feminist theory and practice that have been misunderstood because they have been read only in the frame of the subject question. The author rereads Butler’s account of drag as subversive, Wittig’s poetic principle of renversement as an “active principle of becoming” (89), and the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective’s political act of promising as mutual entrustment. Finally, Zerilli turns to Arendt and Lyotard on political judging in the absence of a concept in Kant’s Critique of Judgment in order to give an account of...