Philosophy in Review/Comptes Rendus Philosophiques
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	SONIA KRUKS, Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). $________ (Cloth: ISBN 0-8014-3387-8); $________ (Paper: ISBN 0-8014-8417-0). In Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics, Sonia Kruks attempts to recover and apply a neglected tradition of existential thought in order to break the grip of the “Enlightenment versus postmodernism” debates in feminist theory. In a series of thematically linked essays, Kruks returns repeatedly to the work of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, and—most significantly—Beauvoir. Thus perhaps the book’s most valuable contribution is to remind feminist philosophers of these thinkers’ arguments, and to show how their insights might relate to contemporary discussions of subjectivity, agency, and freedom. Kruks seizes on key questions in contemporary political philosophy, such as the possibility of individual freedom in the midst of oppression, and brings her own experience to bear in trying to push these questions beyond commonly assumed limits. The book’s greatest weaknesses are the brevity of some arguments, which are often more derivative than original (although both qualities might be a boon for teaching purposes), and Kruks’ tendency to set up straw persons in feminist philosophy, who can then be easily knocked down by her crusading existentialists. In the first two chapters, Kruks explicitly sets out to recuperate Beauvoir as a thinker of greater originality and political insight than her male contemporaries, whose work might illuminate current impasses in feminist philosophy. In “Freedoms That Matter: Subjectivity and Situation in the Work of Beauvoir, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty,” Kruks reads The Second Sex “with and against the early ideas of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty” [28] and argues that Beauvoir arrived at an embodied account of human existence as structured by both freedom and constraint, which moves between the realms of consciousness and materiality (superseding the erasure of material oppression with which critics have often charged Sartre). This longer essay contains much historical background and interweaving of exposition and critique, making it very useful reading for courses in existentialism, phenomenology, or any of the philosophers it treats. In “Panopticism and Shame: Foucault, Beauvoir, and Feminism,” Kruks reads Michel Foucault in conjunction with Judith Butler, again suggesting that in Beauvoir’s work we find a necessary existential ethical dimension suppressed by both later thinkers. This is a slightly disjointed chapter that covers a lot of ground: of necessity, Kruks’ readings of Foucault and Butler are selective and abbreviated, and she doesn’t incorporate these authors’ own responses to the problems of resistance and freedom their work raises. She moves between these critiques and another recuperation of Beauvoir—this time, an account of shame that might provide the phenomenological element missing from Foucauldian accounts of panoptic power, as well as an account of agency beyond the immanence Kruks thinks they imply. This is an engaging reading of ideas already familiar from the work of Sandra Bartky and Susan Bordo (among others) using Beauvoirian language. “The Politics of Recognition: Sartre, Fanon, and Identity Politics” begins with a rehash of the pros and cons of identity politics in feminism that is extremely well worn ground. Starting from the claim that contemporary demands for recognition are based on “the very grounds on which recognition has been denied” [85], Kruks tentatively argues for the limits of such affirmations. She isn’t always fair to the authors she mentions, and tends to set up straw persons here. For example, her claim that identity politics “tends toward an epistemological and ethical relativism” “grounded in claims about the group specificity of experiences and the exclusive capacity of particular identity groups to evaluate those experiences” [85] needs more evidence (who defends this position in an interesting way? Brief quotes from June Jordan and the Combahee River Collective taken out of context don’t really make the point.) She worries that identity politics has become overly aesthetic and experiential (Gloria Anzaldœa is the alleged culprit here), echoing Nancy Fraser’s claim that the politics of recognition elides more traditional political demands for redistribution. There’s nothing new here, and it’s a relief when Kruks returns to the existential tradition to show how Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew prefigure tensions in contemporary identity politics. Careful treatment of these texts leads to the conclusion that they too “lack tools with which to theorize the interconnections between the realm of existential experience, in which the dynamics of non-recognition and self-affirmation are played out, and the broader world of processes and structures, in which the particular dynamics each describes are embedded” [104]. In chapter four Kruks returns to her dubious target, the “epistemology of provenance.” To avoid the obvious epistemic and political dangers of making experience meaningful only to its subjects, Kruks argues that while Nancy Hartsock and Donna Haraway both provide useful feminist starting-points, they fail to offer “a sufficient account of situated selves” or “of how it is that the world mediates among them” [116]. Unsurprisingly, existentialism again proves key, and Kruks offers a selective and intriguing exposition and application of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason to this lacuna. Kruks’ Sartre makes a sophisticated case that our shared practices are necessarily linked in ways that permit (indeed, require) understanding of the different practices of others. The book’s final section departs from Kruks’ earlier explicit reliance on existentialist texts and ventures into less well-charted feminist territory. “Going Beyond Discourse: Feminism, Phenomenology, and ‘Women’s Experience’” examines exemplary texts by Richard Rorty and Joan Scott, to argue that their attempts to account for experience solely as a product of discourse erase the embodied self and agency. Kruks argues that Rorty expels “non-linguistic bodily experience into the realm of nature,” perpetuating a series of dualisms that sideline certain experiences more typical of women. Similarly, she claims that Scott presents us with a false dichotomy between using experience as the foundation of explanation and its object, likewise reducing “experiencing selves, or subjects, to discursive effects” [140]. In a more constructive vein, Kruks suggests that feminists incorporate a phenomenology of embodied and affective experience as a new basis for solidarity among women. This important theme continues into the final chapter, where Kruks takes up the question of how solidarity that emerges from generosity (rather than only shared identity or interests) might be fostered among women. She articulates the grounds from which “respectful recognition” might emerge: that is, “a relationship in which one is deeply and actively concerned about others, but neither appropriates them as an object of one’s own experience or interests nor dissolves oneself in a vicarious experience of identification with them” [155]. In this most personal and speculative of her essays, Kruks argues for attention to feeling-with through the body, coupled with the choice to make this a politicized sympathy. For a book on feminist politics published in 2001 I might have wished for Retrieving Experience to be more cognizant of relevant literature (for example Elizabeth Spelman’s 1997 Fruits of Sorrow, the essays in Toril Moi’s 2000 What is a Woman?, or, most problematically, critical race feminism that cannot be dismissed as espousing an epistemology of provenance or over-emphasis on affirmation of identity—such as Patricia Williams’ work). Nonetheless, this excellent book usefully supplements feminist interpretations of existentialist authors and adds to the rekindling of existential phenomenology within feminist political theory. Cressida Heyes University of Alberta
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Department of Philosophy, University of Victoria, Canada