Feminist thought and the totalitarian interloper: on rhetoric and the fear of ‘dangerous thinking’

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Feminist thought and thetotalitarian interloper: onrhetoric and the fear of‘dangerous thinking’Vikki Bell aa Goldsmiths College, University of LondonPublished online: 04 Jun 2010.

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Feminist thought and thetotalitarian interloper: onrhetoric and the fear of‘dangerous thinking’

Vikki Bell

Abstract

Starting from the premise that thinking in itself cannot be dangerous, but that thepresentation of thought as public communication can be an occasion to debate thepotentialities of an intervention, this article addresses feminist theoretical disputes asrhetorical exchange. The focus is the now well-known critique that Martha Nussbaummade of Judith Butler’s work, a critique to which some have responded by question-ing in turn Nussbaum’s certainties regarding what feminism is and should be. Thisarticle addresses the highly inflammatory terms and frames of reference of theseexchanges. It asks: how is that those who are understood as leading feminist theoristscan be read as dangerous collaborators with evil and those who defend normativetheories of social justice can be read as fascistic? The article explores these questionsby relating them to the ‘dangerous’ accusation that has been levied elsewhere (that is,in relation to the utilization of post-structuralist theory) and notices as crucial theterms of reference and versions of historical memory that are evoked, in particularthose that evoke the history of totalitarianism and the figure of the fascist. The articleargues that there are many routes by which to ‘explain’ the appearance of thesecontexts and figures but advocates a genealogical approach to understand how thesecontexts, fears and forms of rhetoric emerged. Concluding, the article suggests –rhetorically – that there is little comfort or gain to be had through a pretence that evilwill attach itself to a particular theoretical style as if to a magnet, and little credibilityto be given to one who claims the ability to see, to foresee and to comprehend the con-stitution of all the battles that face feminists and women, let alone democratic norms.

Keywords: rhetoric; feminist theory; argumentation; Hannah Arendt; Judith Butler;Martha Nussbaum.

Copyright © 2002 Taylor & Francis LtdISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 onlineDOI: 10.1080/0308514022000020706

Economy and Society Volume 31 Number 4 November 2002: 573–587

Vikki Bell, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross,London SE14 6NW. E-mail: [email protected]

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What we commonly call nihilism – and are tempted to date historically, decrypolitically, and ascribe to thinkers who allegedly dared to think ‘dangerousthoughts’ – is actually a danger inherent in the thinking activity itself. Thereare no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous, but nihilism is not itsproduct.

(Arendt 1984: 26)

With Arendt, one might reasonably argue that nihilism is not the result ofthinking in a certain way, but it is a necessary part of the process of thinking inthe sense that, whenever one is truly thinking, one is involved in the suspensionof certainties in order to lessen the hold that concepts, norms and morals haveover one’s thought habits and patterns. Understood as such, thinking cannot bejudged dangerous nor can it be legislated for or against. At the moment whenthoughts are communicated in whatever form – through action, depiction,written or spoken word, however, it is more clear that one can begin to speak ofthe consequences and causes of thoughts or ways of thinking, and to argue anddebate as to whether these communicated thoughts have the potential to doharm. In other words, it is only when thoughts become heard, and especiallywhen they become ‘public’, and have the potential to circulate, that talk ofdangerousness makes any sense.

In the move from thought-experiment to public statement, one has movedfrom internal assessment concerning one’s own appreciation of a way ofthinking, to making truth claims in one or more specific spaces and where others’reception of them will depend not just upon their persuasiveness but also otherfactors, including their perceived relationship to the contexts (historical,cultural, political) in which they appear. When thought experiments appear inthe world in order to convince, as propositions or theories, and when the hearersattempt to affirm or refute a public statement, we are in the realm of debatewhere it is no longer simply the appreciation of the possibility of thought thatis at issue. In other words, where thought becomes communication, it is an inter-vention into a world where it will be received by hearers who are situated. Thisis not to say that we are no longer in the realm of truth, but to recognize that weare also inevitably dealing with the modes of presentation of thought and thecontexts in which they are placed by those listening and engaging with them: arhetorical realm.

What then, of ‘feminist thought’? We tend to think of feminist thought ashaving to have a relation to the world, and to feminist political ends in particu-lar. But there is no general agreement as to how the process of thought is relatedto something called ‘politics’. Now this is due partly to the fact that the termsthemselves are highly contested – what counts as theory, what as politics – andpartly because the causality is a matter of dispute in the sense of decidingwhether theory flows from politics or politics from theory. Nevertheless, thenotion that some ways of thinking are dangerous will be familiar to readers ofEuro-American feminist theoretical debates. Entering this issue through theabove elaboration on the quotation from Arendt highlights the sense in which

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the status of individual thought made public (delivered, published, marketed,read, taught) as feminist moves from a domain of ‘private’ thought into publiccirculation in which it will be received and debated not merely for its ‘truth’.Any intervention will be received and debated by situated hearers withinsituated contexts. In this rhetorical realm, feminist interventions involve effortsto persuade, strategies of appeal, even seduction, that aim to convince anaudience if not of their truth then of their importance.

The point is twofold: first, that, although talk of ‘dangerous thought’ is strictly(Arendtianly) speaking tautology, it is perfectly acceptable and even necessaryfor the question of ‘dangerousness’ to be posed at the point at which thoughtbecomes communication, for example, in public speeches or published works.But, and second, the ‘dangerousness’ of that communication cannot be under-stood to issue from its internal logic. Dangerousness is to be approached as anaccusation whose levelling points to the necessity of attention to the rhetoricalrealm where speakers and hearers are understood as situated participants in adrama of persuasion.

I have foregrounded these arguments because I want to enter the followingdiscussion on their terms. That is, I want to consider an occasion on which‘feminist thought’ has been responded to, and by another feminist writer, as‘dangerous’. I do so not only as a route by which to elaborate the argument thatfeminist theoretical debates can be understood as rhetorical, but because onceunderstood in this way, I will argue, one approaches the accusation of ‘danger-ousness’ anew, not as inherent in particular ‘thoughts’ but as an effect that isproduced through their reception.

I

The specific occasion I have in mind is Martha Nussbaum’s now notorious essaywhich reviewed Judith Butler’s books and which was published in February 1999in The New Republic. In her review of four of Butler’s books, Nussbaum makesa number of charges against Butler’s work: first, that is lofty, with an absence ofany focus on women’s lives or proposals as to how to bring about social change;second, that her writing is exasperating to the extent that it verges on mystifi-cation; third, that her arguments are not especially new, but rather ‘shopworn’notions clothed in an obscure style that makes them seem important, and as suchthe work is not truly philosophy but closer to the ‘manipulative methods’ ofsophistry and rhetoric; fourthly, that, since Butler gives few explanations anddefinitions of the philosophers she draws upon, but deals with abstract theoryrather than material solutions, she can only be imagining her audience as a groupof young and docile feminist scholars who ask no questions. Fifth, Nussbaummakes some critiques of Butler’s arguments, questioning for example some ofthe detail of her use of Austin and her allegiance to the Nietzschean perspectivewhere ‘there is no doer behind the deed’; she is also unconvinced that sex differ-ence can be completely ‘written off as culture’. But above all it is the implications

Vikki Bell: Feminist thought and the totalitarian interloper 575

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for resistance that rile Nussbaum. She argues that, if, as Butler implies, gendercan be resisted by subversive and parodic acts, one has to have a means to under-stand which subversive acts are good and which are not; that is, one needs anormative theory of social justice.

It is this last point that moves Nussbaum to argue that Butler’s work is danger-ous. She writes:

there is a void, then, at the heart of Butler’s notion of politics. This void canlook liberating, because the reader fills it implicitly with a normative theoryof human equality or dignity. But let there be no mistake: for Butler, as forFoucault, subversion is subversion and it can in principle go in any direction.Indeed Butler’s naively empty politics is especially dangerous for the verycauses she holds dear. For every friend of Butler, eager to engage in subver-sive performances that proclaim the repressiveness of heterosexual gendernorms, there are dozens who would like to engage in subversive performancesthat flout the norms of tax compliance, of non-discrimination, of decent treat-ment of one’s fellow students. To such people we should say, you cannotmerely resist as you please, for there are norms of fairness, decency, dignitythat entail that this is bad behaviour. We have to articulate those norms – andthis Butler refuses to do.

(Nussbaum 1999)

Moreover, for a woman who dislikes rhetoric, Martha Nussbaum ends hercritique of Judith Butler with a stinging rhetorical flourish:6 ‘Judith Butler’s hipquietism is a comprehensible response to the difficulty of realising justice inAmerica. But it is a bad response. It collaborates with evil. Feminism deservesmore and women deserve better’ (1999).

Some time after reading Nussbaum’s essay, I received an article to review that,turning the tables on Nussbaum, compared her mode of argumentation withJorg Haider of Austria’s far-right Freedom party. In this (anonymous) author’shands, it was she, with her certainties about what feminism should look like, whowas cast as the dangerous thinker, compared point by point with the contem-porary political programme of the Freedom party that is widely understood asfascistic. This manoeuvre illustrated just how differently one can position thetarget of one’s critique, just how dependent the judgement of those receiving ison the contexts against which it is read, so much so that those who are under-stood as leading feminist theorists can be read as dangerous collaborators withevil and those who defend normative theories of social justice can be read asfascistic.

I have been intrigued for some time by these moments when such provoca-tive vocabulary and startingly frames of reference are evoked within the contextof feminist debate; certainly Nussbaum’s critque of Butler is not isolated in thisrespect. The rhetorical twists and turns continue in the responses that appearedon the letters pages of The New Republic in its subsequent issue (19 March 1999),where other prominent feminist writers wrote in to the journal, mostly toexpress dismay at the tone and logic of Nussbaum’s review. Gayatri Chakravorty


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Spivak fires the accusation of collaboration back at Nussbaum, accusing thelatter of a ‘matronising’ and imperial attitude towards women in the globalSouth; it is Nussbaum herself who, Spivak argues, is the collaborator, for withher acceptance of US benevolence towards ‘other women’, she collaborates with‘exploitation’. Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, in their jointletter, question Nussbaum’s ‘adulation’ of Catherine MacKinnon and AndreaDworkin who, in their view, have ‘authoritarian strains’. Drucilla Cornell andSara Murphy argue that there is more common ground than Nussbaum wouldconcede between MacKinnon and Dworkin and Judith Butler, insofar as allagree that representation, broadly construed, is a crucial site of feminist agita-tion; Cornell and Murphy, like the anonymous author mentioned above, arguethat Nussbaum has forgotten to take the spirit of Hume that she admires intoher own work. He was not afraid to ‘expose his own certainty’. Finally, Joan Scottsets her fears around Nussbaum’s imposition of a notion of ‘good feminism’,which entails a particular understanding of the relationship between theory andpolitics:

Historically, though, one thing is sure: when the gap between theory andpolitics is closed in the name of virtue, when Robespierre or the Ayatollahs orKen Starr seek to impose their vision of the good on the rest of society, reignsof terror follow and democratic politics are undermined. These are situationsin which, to reverse Martha Nussbaum’s reasoning, too much ‘good’ ends upas ‘evil’, and feminism, along with all other emancipatory movements, losesits public voice.

(The New Republic 19 March 1999)

These disagreements enter the terms of the debate, as one would expect, onthe terms set up by Nussbaum’s review and its intellectual contexts. But a moreoblique and to my mind much more interesting line of questioning would startelsewhere, and would approach the debate as I have indicated, that is, as amoment in which contexts of reception and rhetorical manoeuvres are allimportant. To a large extent the debate is already ‘about’ rhetoric, for, despiteher distaste for it, Nussbaum is just as concerned that Butler is not a good enoughrhetorician as she is that she is merely a rhetorician insofar as many of hercharges amount to the fact that Butler is not a good communicator, that her useof language is too obscure and abstract to be of use in furthering the feministcause because it will not aid in the formation of ‘unironic, organised publicaction’. She is concerned furthermore about the mode of reception of Butler’sarguments since they could be deployed as justifications for non-egalitarianpractices as much as egalitarian.

My interest in rhetoric is more specifically focused on the few terms and argu-ments that to my mind raise the temperature of the debate by placing it withina specific historical context with specific political and cultural aspirations atstake. What does the use of these highly inflammatory terms – evil, fascistic, col-laborator – suggest about the imagined political context within which thesefeminist theorists place their disagreements? Why does the strongest possible


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manoeuvre one can make in forming an argument against another feministcurrently seem to be to place her thought in proximity with fascism, eitherexplicitly or else by casting her thinking as dangerous in such a way that it ispositioned as implicitly leaving the door open to extreme anti-democratic andnon-egalitarian politics, in other words, to totalitarianism? Moreover, whatintrigues me is the way that these questions are haunted in turn by a rhetoricalfigure: the evil or totalitarian interloper.

Now the contention that some post-structuralist refashionings of the projectof feminist theory are dangerous has become a familiar line of argument, focusingespecially on the reservation of judgement that results from the ‘normlessness’of post-structuralism. The worry is that feminist theory is left rudderless if itdoes not allow itself an appeal to foundations or to norms combines with amelancholic attitude that regrets and seeks to rectify the fissile nature of con-temporary feminist thought. Similar to those debates that linked Nietzsche’squestioning of morality to National Socialism’s selective appeal to his thought,this argument suggests that to think with him of good and evil as having a history,of morality as a ‘symptom’ (1967: 20), or of gender as a fragile and repeated‘fiction’, takes away a foundation from which to argue or a normative good toboth appeal to and protect. How, the question runs, can we follow feminist aspir-ations when our feminist philosophers are producing texts that refuse to statewhat we want to see instated the world over, even in the most basic terms suchas freedom and equality? The very terms of Nussbaum’s critique in whichButler’s strategy of subversion could go in ‘any direction’, where the latter istaken to task for being naïve and her theories as dangerous, are remarkable,addressed as they are to the work of a woman whom the writer knows to ‘holddear’ the same egalitarian values as she does herself. But the argument that post-structuralist theory is dangerous is by now familiar and frequently repeats thisline of argument; it is, furthermore, often concerned with what an author doesnot say, with the absence of either clear foundational beliefs, norms or manifesto-like demands and aspirations that might shore up theory and insulate it from animagined interloper. And it is exactly this fear that certain modes of argumen-tation may not be able to protect the argument from the counter claims of anundesirable figure or movement that so quickly seems to usher in the spectre oftotalitarianism, or, more especially, fascism. It is by highlighting this figure ofthe fascist interloper that I want to shift the focus away from the ‘rights andwrongs’ of Butler or of post-structuralism and concentrate instead on noticingthese processes of rhetorical contextualization, by which I mean those practiceswhereby, in the course of making an argument, certain figures, stories and his-torico-political moments are recalled and deployed as contexts that act as fuelfor persuasion.

In Feminist Imagination (1999) one of my responses to these kinds of rhetor-ical moments was to suggest that they were in a sense unremarkable, and thatthey appear in the Euro-American feminist texts ‘simply’ because feministvisions emerge against the backdrop of this century in which fascism loomslarge. While the theoretical development of feminist theory, especially its


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relationship to versions of post-structuralist thought, has been subject to intensedebate, the ways that the political events of the twentieth century altered theimaginative landscape of feminist politics have somewhat escaped attention. Itis something of this history and its impact that are evoked by these rhetoricalfigures (the interloper, the collaborator with evil) and I believe they indicate thesense in which, within the many complexities of the twentieth century, its specificity as an age of fascisms has left its mark on any attempt to formulate andcelebrate democratic visions. Indeed, Kristeva (1986) has remarked, it is for thisspecificity, as well as for its being a ‘century of women’, that the twentiethcentury will be known.

Perhaps I should say immediately that this is not to say that there were notother events, political movements, regimes and atrocities that were important tofeminist movements and to women’s lives around the globe in the last century.But there is something about how fascism is evoked within Euro-Americanfeminist texts that gives pause. First, I think this history is remembered wherethere is the fear articulated that worthy political frameworks can be usurped.The temporary supplanting of democracy at its ‘original point’, in Europe, isrecalled in the characterization of arguments as so weakly formulated that ifattacked they would offer no defence, as well as when people are criticized forbeing too certain of themselves, too unforgiving of their dissenters, too intoler-ant. Second, I think it is the knowledge of fascisms’ mobilizations of racethinking, more than, say, the politics of expansionism or the aesthetic dimen-sions of fascism, that runs through these invocations of fascism within feministtheory and that, within what might otherwise have appeared to be a rather minorplayground politics of name-calling, animates the issue of racism that hasbecome central to feminist theoretical concerns. Of course race thinking has alonger history and a wider reach than the twentieth-century fascisms to whichit was integral, but it is so deeply combined with the figure of the fascist, that inNussbaum’s invocation of ‘collaborators with evil’ who deny human dignity, forexample, I believe she summons up an image that draws part of its rhetoricalforce from an association with both fascism and racism.1

Michael Bérubé recalls a similar moment in his public debate with Alan Sokal,in which a member of the audience ‘went so far as to insist to me, in thequestion/answer session after Sokal and I had made our remarks that the leftmust entertain the possibility that there are moral imperatives the content ofwhich we do not yet know, for to believe anything else is to open the door tofascism’ (2000: 149). Wherever a feminist argument or intervention ends withthe charge ‘that’s dangerous, collaborative, evil, fascistic’, of which there havebeen many instances in print, some of which I discuss in Feminist Imagination(and no doubt there have been many more off the page), there may be a failureto take this implicit frame of reference seriously enough. In particular, it seemsto me that there might be some profound lessons to be drawn from pressing thispoint somewhat further, that is, in thinking about feminist theory in light of thechanging political horizons that were the twentieth century. For, while it is notnews that feminist theory has been obliged to revise its faith in the practice of


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democracy, and nor is it news that feminist theorists might have to speak aboutracism as they entwine with inequalities of gender, it seems to me that there isstill space for thinking about the these arguments as incumbent upon feministsbecause feminism itself flourished within the twentieth century and is, in thatsense, of the twentieth century, with all its freedoms and all its horrors.

I want to be clear that I suggest this as a response to the sense in which theseissues are, if sometimes only implicitly, already part of the feminist political land-scape, and are referenced by the very concepts and modes of argument thatfeminists employ. Above all, they are silently referenced in the fears of feminists,as I have been arguing thus far.

One way of responding to this (only somewhat self-imposed) injunction tothink harder about feminist theory’s relationship to fascism and race thinking isto think genealogically, and this was the way I came to characterize my approachin Feminist Imagination. I am of course taking some liberties with the notion ofgenealogy when I use it here. Starting with an affirmation of feminism, the workwas intended to be an investigation into certain tributaries in the story that mightbe told of twentieth-century feminist theory. If I had to choose, I think theapproach I adopted somewhat closer to Nietzsche’s genealogical impulses thanFoucault’s, perhaps simply because they are less systematic than Foucault’srather more restrained and scholarly approach would allow. The standard Fou-cauldian argument is that the point of doing genealogies is to question what istaken-for-granted by illustrating its histories and disparate contingencies. TheNietzschean is more wayward, and more obviously purposeful. Genealogies arenot carried out completely innocently; and the routes one can follow are many.In Feminist Imagination I am following traces to those places that illustrate mypoint that contemporary feminist thought is intimately attached to the historyof thinking about racism and anti-semitism in the twentieth century, that thathistory informs the fears, attachments and the horizons within which contem-porary feminist debates imagine themselves.

Following key debates and concepts within contemporary feminist theoryleads one to issues, debates and concepts in the history of racism and anti-semitism. Again, this is unsurprising, perhaps, and could be figured as the linkbetween issues of abolitionism and feminism in the nineteenth century realign-ing themselves into a link between issues of racism and sexism in the twentiethcentury inevitably linked through a notion of humanism or democratic values.But this is not the argument. Instead, the argument is that feminist theoreticalwriting suggests that there is a political frame of reference beyond any strictfocus on ‘womanhood’ that makes issues of racism and the politics of fascismcontextually important for understanding the way that much feminist argumenthas been and is presented. The debate around essentialism and ‘the body’, forexample, entered into feminist debate with an explicit connection to the politicsof racism, as was clear in the feminist work of Diana Fuss or Elizabeth Spelman.The question of how to think the process of embodiment in non-essentialistways, with due attention to its historical conditions of formation, entwinesfeminist thought with anti-colonial project of Frantz Fanon as well as, I would


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argue, Levinas’ attempts to understand the appeal of National Socialism.Further, it is in the way that arguments are put together, the rich concepts thatfeminist theorists employ which, once recognized as such, cannot help butevoke, with their usage, the historical conditions that prompted those who formcontemporary feminist theory’s intellectual heritage to write about such things.Hannah Arendt, for example, has been discussed and used convincingly byBonnie Honig within the development of her feminist theories: a writer whoseentanglements with Heidegger, whose attention to the analysis of NationalSocialism and whose commentary on the racial politics of Little Rock in 1957trail her conception of agonistic politics and her key concept of appearance. Or,to take another example I pursue, is it not relevant that Judith Butler uses theconcept of mimesis in her development of a philosophy of gender, the conceptcentral to Adorno and Horkheimer’s discussion of anti-semitism in Dialectic ofEnlightenment and also employed, more importantly for Butler’s heritage, bySartre in Anti-Semite and the Jew?

To argue that fascism as well as ‘race’ and racism reside within the feministpolitical imagination, therefore, is to point to really quite obvious connections.But, while these connections have not been hidden, they have not been rehearsednor gathered together. Through a series of interrelated genealogies, as a ‘un-covering’ of a past easily traced but rarely presented, they can be seen to beentwined with the history of feminist thought. Somehow these connectionsseem to be left off frame within discussions of so-called feminist thought, so thatdebates between feminism and racism continually reinvent the connectiondespite the complexity of the connections that have animated many a feministintervention. Hence the surprise of them when they come into focus again, asin Nussbaum’s invention, where they are evoked in heated exchange.

II

To return to Nussbaum’s critique of Butler, then, one could focus on howcertain fears shape the arguments that she makes in the same way that Dana Villahas argued recently in relation to the work of Hannah Arendt, and especially inrelation to her image of the public realm as that which has to be preserved as thespace of true freedom. While such a faith in the public realm might appear‘hopelessly romantic’, Villa argues that it is important to recognize that Arendt’spolitical thought was not built upon a nostalgic defence of democracy in theimage of the Greek polis. Instead, she was reacting to the experience of terrorunder totalitarianism: ‘Arendt’s virtually life-long focus on the public sphere andthe life of action grew out of her encounter with this radical negation of publicreality and human freedom’ (Villa 1999: 201). Reading Arendt then, it helps tokeep in mind that of which she was fearful, and what she was attempting topreserve and develop has to be considered against the backdrop of her analysisof totalitarianism.

In an attempt to redirect the energy indicated by the vitriol of a feminist


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debate premised on an accusation of ‘dangerous thought’, one might adoptVilla’s stance and consider the fears that animate the arguments presented. Inthis case, as in others like it, one can say that the fears are apocalyptic in thesense that they fear ‘the future end’ (principally of feminist achievements andof democracy). But they cannot be dismissed because of their apocalyptic tone,since they are fears that have an historical basis, and in that sense have a ration-ality based on lessons of the past. Moreover, these fears are excessive in thesense that, although they are ostensibly focused on the internal concerns oftheoretical argument, they simultaneously relate to and evoke external figuresand markers. In arguments of this sort, then, some one or something externalis suggested – the imagined interloper, for example, who is always off-frame,waiting in the wings – and often historical examples are evoked if only dimly,used as veiled warnings. It is their excessive quality that makes it misguided toattempt to judge their validity from within the logic of the intervention itself.In making comment on them, one is not really debating the coherence of thearguments presented on the page, but engaging with the wider and murkierterritory of the political, cultural and historical contexts that are indicated bythe remarks.

As such my argument is, like Villa’s, that how we fear effects how we argue.Just as the argument over which route presents the best route forward, politi-cally speaking, is prompted by the sense of the alternatives that are therebyavoided, so solidarity is formed and held in place, affectively speaking, by fear.The feared alternatives form the constitutive outsides of the argument. ‘Exces-sive’ and ‘external’ contexts impact upon the rhetoric and therefore the logic ofthe arguments that are presented as if they were simply concerned with therights and wrongs of how to develop the best kind of feminist theory. So, whileit may be a subtle shift, it is instructive to ask of these debates not simply ‘whatis this feminist writer seeking to achieve and how?’ but also ‘what is this feministwriter seeking to avoid?’ Which interloper, which threat, which horror (or,indeed, which continuity) is our feminism to guard us against? Butler’s princi-pal focus suggests we need to guard against the repetitions of the present hetero-sexual matrix and its attendant patterning of social and asymmetrical relationsthat sets us into its patterns of identification. While Nussbaum does not disagreeentirely with this fear, her argument alludes to a greater fear because, accordingto her, there is an evil which will take advantage of a feminism too reserved inits judgements, too clever for the straight-talking reality of the world, and thatposes a threat so elusive that we need also to challenge those who may seem tospeak in the name of feminism, when in fact they unravel its defences; a threat-ening image that she shares to a certain degree with her anonymous critic whonames this fear explicitly, if by analogy, as fascism.

Hopefully this characterization does not sound too glib, since what I mean tosuggest is that we look into these fears not in order to reject them as ‘external’or ‘unfounded’ but, quite the contrary, to see how, as signs of certain animatingfeatures within debates in feminist theory, they need to be taken seriously. ThusNussbaum places Butler’s arguments according to the contexts of her


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understanding, where one can (indeed must) link an argument about the for-mation of gendered subjectivity to the defence of democracy and democraticvalues against its enemies. In order to make her critique of Butler, she performsrhetorical manoeuvres that attempt to persuade her readers that Butler’s workis not just wrong and esoteric, but actually dangerous. She does so by placingButler within a certain historical and cultural context and by summoning up thethreatening image of the anti-democratic usurper as she simultaneously castsButler herself as the collaborator.

The stance adopted by Nussbaum here of course reflects divisions withintwentieth-century philosophy, a sectarianism that is (often spuriously) under-stood as Anglo-American versus continental philosophy. The charges of obscu-rantism2 and political impotency are especially reflective of this debate, and arepredictable consequences of the different allegiances that Nussbaum and Butlerwould have within it. Butler’s philosophical interventions are in a (Husserlian)tradition that understands the philosopher’s role as promoting crisis in the slowaccumulation and sedimentation of tradition. The intention is emancipatory butthe direction in which the crisis moves one is not always explicated. Butler’s debtto this tradition is deep, and Nussbaum’s frustration shared by those who havecast that tradition as tending, to lesser or greater extent, towards obscurantistirresponsibility. Nussbaum and others fear the popularity of Butler’s workbecause they see it as suffering from an obscurantism that will dampen feministsolidarity and activism. Nussbaum is dismissive of the critical phenomenologicaltradition that Butler’s work espouses with its intended prompting of a new lookat the world. She believes such a tradition slides into thinking about questionsof causality and subject-effects rather than thinking about how to go aboutchanging the world.

However, these debates are not ones that are settled, and are certainly not wonby logic. At present, they remain debates that are necessarily conducted at thelevel of rhetoric, with interventions frequently couched, as here, in terms ofdangers. As I have suggested above, to call feminist theoretical debates rhetori-cal does not mean they are untrue but it implies that there are always issues ofpersuasion at work since feminist debate entails, as does any debate, attempts topersuade and convince an audience. (Indeed, Nussbaum’s review essay is itselfhighly rhetorical; in one paragraph she repeats ‘before Butler’ six times in orderto reinforce her point that many of Butler’s arguments are ‘not especially new’.)In a recent critique of deliberative democracy, Iris Marion Young argues thatrhetoric is unavoidable in the public realm. Indeed, she argues that in her pre-ferred model of democracy – communicative democracy – one must perforceinclude an understanding of that rhetoric (which she discusses alongside alongwith story-telling and ‘greeting’). She makes the point that, where Habermasattempts to distinguish between illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts,and deliberative democratic theorists attempt to remove the passion of rhetoricthrough a focus on rational speech, one should not forget that democratic speechrequires listeners as well as speakers. But, Young suggests, rhetorical speech isnot distinguishable from rational speech. In Plato’s Gorgias Socrates suggests


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that rhetoricians aim to please rather than to convince through hard truths, butPlato shows:

in Socrates’ person that there is an important erotic dimension in communi-cation that aims to reach understanding, that persuasion is partly seduction.One function of rhetoric is to get and keep attention. The most elegant andtruthful arguments may fail to evoke assent if they are boring. Humour, word-play, images and figures of speech embody and colour the arguments, makingthe discussion pull on thought through desire.

(Young 1996: 30–1)

As such, rhetoric appeals to the situatedness of the communication and con-structs the speaker’s relation to the audience. It would be a mistake to believethat the rhetoric of an intervention that accuses another of collaboration with anunnamed, but clearly undemocratic and non-egalitarian, evil is an interventionthat makes assumptions about its audience any less than one who does not soname her fears. I put the emphasis this way around because Nussbaum accusesButler of making assumptions about her audience – as liberal egalitarian sorts.Nussbaum assumes that people share her fears and her understanding that theycan be ‘collaborated with’ by an unsuspecting feminist philosopher, and sheassumes further that she herself will not appear as the very threat she wishes toprotect ‘us’ from, and she does so wrongly, as the anonymous author’s essaydemonstrates.

The point is not that feminists are deploying mendacious tactics, but that theyare seeking to be heard and to be persuasive. Figures of fear are routinelydeployed in the course of making such arguments. Now, although my ownposition is that Nussbaum may be deploying a version of innocence with respectto her own positioning, I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of her fears.Furthermore, while I have wanted to argue that the terms and imagery sheevokes indicate the rhetorical nature of her critique, she can neither be castigatedfor being rhetorical, for reaching for images that express her historically basedfears in order to make her case forceful, nor can she even be said to be wrongabout the link between a theory such as Butler’s and a danger of ‘evil’, since thereare no criteria by which one might sensibly test that link. But, while Nussbaumis not insincere, merely rhetorical nor wrong, whoever believes that her fears canbe made relevant only on her ‘side’ of the debate is mistaken.

Feminist rhetoric in Nussbaum’s mode attempts to suggest that it is possibleto convince anti-egalitarian sorts of the errors of their ways by appeals to sharednorms of equality, fairness, decency, dignity. But is it not also the case that thosein conflict similarly appeal to those norms, but conclude their dispute differ-ently? So it may be that Nussbaum is correct, and that Butler’s arguments couldfeasibly be used by someone towards the extreme right of the political spectrum,to legitimize their actions. On the other hand, they may legitimize their actionsthrough appeals to norms. Thus, for example, members of the Orange Order inNorthern Ireland might yet reveal a copy of Gender Trouble – or worse my editedbook Performativity and Belonging! – from under their jackets and sashes as they


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make their claim to perform their cultural identities by parading along certainnationalist routes for fear of their identities being lost. Often their language doescome close to these anti-foundationalist positions. But, equally, their claims arebased on dignity and respect that should be accorded their traditions, languagethat is closer to a normative stance such as Nussbaum implies.

Thus in approaching debates about ‘dangerous thinking’, I would argue thatone needs to consider the contexts within which the interventions place them-selves and their opponents as rhetorical strategies, not in order to dismiss theterms of the debate but to enable one to address the issue of dangerousness as acontingently formulated trope. In considering Nussbaum’s reaction to Butler’swork, one wonders about the relative lack of discussion in feminist theoryaround how imagined enemies are rhetorically drawn and incorporated into therepeated and heated debates around subject formation, resistance, agency, ethicsand so on. For example, who is to say that the one against whom ‘we feminists’need to prepare our argument is one who responds to normative statementsbetter than arguments based on the radical contingency of the constitution oftruths and identities? Is this always the language that will persuade our imaginedpolitical enemies? Are we at risk of being archaic, even nostalgic, for such anopponent against whom our only task is to clarify the force of a feminist socialconstructionism? Moreover, it is remarkable how quick theorists are to charac-terize anti-foundationalist positions as necessarily less rhetorically effective andmore dangerous, when it is questionable, as Bérubé points out, whether thepower of arguments that do not cite norms or foundations and that speak insteadin terms of contingencies have really been put to the test in political debate.Perhaps it is this lack of debate about how theories relate to anticipated feministfears, as much as how to depict feminist norms or aspirations, that creates dis-agreement among theorists.

Let me be rhetorical, since I have cleared a space for such a performance.Could we not equally ask whether a contingent and non-foundational approachto normativity is any more risky than having cherished norms and foundations,manifestos perhaps and stable truths? Could one not place the fear of the end offeminist aspirations, of totalitarianism and of racism, say, into the mouths ofthose who critique normative approaches to social justice? What I have sug-gested here is that one has to answer affirmatively to both these questions. And,if that argument has been (rhetorically) forceful enough, I would suggest furtherthat, to my mind, the dangers inherent in living in a contingent world will notbe avoided by seeking a positivity of good that does not entail an awareness ofthe fragility of constructing norms as rallying points. I am reminded of Jean LucNancy’s statement that:

If there is a hope of thinking, without which we would not even think, it doesnot consist in the hope of a total liberation of freedom that was to occur as thetotal mastery of freedom. . . . Today the threat of a devastation of existencealone has any positivity.

(Nancy 1993: 147)


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Good, would that it did, does not share that positivity, and this is perhaps whatfuels the fears that haunt these debates as well as what makes them, lamentably,rational. As Bérubé replies to his questioner, the threat of fascism will beremoved only when there are no longer people who believe it a credible project.As long as there are such people, one is rational to fear and right to attempt toanalyse ethnic absolutisms and race thinking in their various contemporary andhistorical forms. But there is little comfort or gain to be had through a pretencethat evil will attach itself to a particular theoretical style as if to a magnet, andlittle credibility to be given to one who claims the ability to see, to foresee andto comprehend the constitution of all the battles that face feminists and women,let alone democratic norms. Given the complexity and contingency of the world,I remain unconvinced that any feminist theorist, of any ilk (neither the publicarchitect of activism nor the philosophical guide), would be able to emerge witha fully convincing analysis of how best to articulate, achieve and protect feministaspirations across all situations and for all times. But I am also acutely aware that,given the fragility of the world, my potential for theoretical conviction may havelittle to do with it.

Notes

1 One of the anonymous reviewers for Economy and Society pointed out that bothNussbaum and Butler are Jewish, and that this might be an important enunciativeposition and relation for Nussbaum. This is no doubt true, for the term ‘collaborator’ isgiven a particular sting because of this, although I believe that the terms of the debatepervade feminist argument beyond the religious affiliations of particular feministtheorists. More important perhaps is that both are US citizens and therefore the invoca-tion of the fear of totalitarianism has a legacy within the history of US rhetoric. For aninteresting essay that attempts to make Butler’s ‘Judaism’ relevant to her arguments, seeBoyarin (1995).2 Obscuranticism is ‘the rejection of causal explanations offered by natural science byreferring them to an alternative causal story, somehow of a higher order, but essentiallyoccult . . . a counterscientific, mysterious but still causal explanation’ (Critchley 2001:118).

References


Arendt, Hannah (1984) ‘Thinking andmoral considerations’, Social Research 51:1–2 (Spring/Summer).Bell, Vikki (1999) Feminist Imagination:Genealogies in Feminist Theory, London:Sage.Bérubé, Michael (2000) ‘The return ofrealism and the future of contingency’, inJ. Butler, J. Guillory and K. Thomas (eds)What’s Left of Theory? New Work on the

Politics of Literary Theory, New York:Routledge, pp. 137–56.Boyarin, Jonathon (1995) ‘Before thelaw there stands a woman: in Re: Taylor v.Butler (with court appointed Yiddishtranslator)’, Cardozo Law Review 16.Butler, Judith (1990) Gender Trouble:Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,New York: Routledge.Critchley, Simon (2001) Continental

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Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction,Oxford: Oxford University Press.Kristeva, Julia (1986) [1979] ‘Women’stime’, in Toril Moi (ed.) The KristevaReader, New York: Columbia UniversityPress.Nancy, Jean-Luc (1993) The Experienceof Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald,Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.The New Republic (1999) ‘Martha C.Nussbaum and her critics: an exchange’,19 April,http://www.tnr.com/archive/0499/041999/nussbaum041999.htmlNietzsche, Friedrich (1967) [1887] TheGenealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo,trans. Walter Kautmann, New York:Vintage.

Nussbaum, Martha (1999) ‘Theprofessor of parody’, The New Republic 22February, available at <http:www.tnr.com/archive>Villa, Dana (1999) Hannah Arendt:Politics, Philosophy, Terror, Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press.Young, Iris Marion (1996)‘Communication and the other: beyonddeliberative democracy’, in S. Benhabib(ed.) Democracy and Difference: Contestingthe Boundaries of the Political, Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press pp. 120–35.


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Documents

Feminist thought and the totalitarian interloper: on rhetoric and the fear of ‘dangerous thinking’