Retrieving Experience

Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics

Sonia Kruks author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Cornell University Press

Published:23rd Jan '01

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Retrieving Experience cover

In Retrieving Experience, 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 discussion of whether embodied experiences may sometimes facilitate solidarity among groups of different women.

Overall Retrieving Experience makes an outstanding political contribution to post-postmodern understandings of the subject that move significantly beyond the current impasse of the Enlightenment/postmodern nexus. Kruks retelling of a tale... offers insights that should well invigorate international mainstream discussions of the subject as well as feminist political engagements into the new millennium.

-- Mary Walsh, University of Canberra * Australian Feminist Studi

ISBN: 9780801484179

Dimensions: 235mm x 155mm x 14mm

Weight: 454g

224 pages