Abstract
This paper operates on the premise that a systematic formulation of ‘radicality’ is a worthwhile and potentially productive exercise within political theory. However, I argue that one continues to find a latent ‘purism’ within contemporary understandings of ‘radicality’, primarily in relation to feminism, but also elsewhere. This manifests itself in the tendency to think ‘radicality’ as a function of the inherent properties of particular types of political spaces and political practices. Within feminism, for example, I argue that the ‘radicality’ of a feminist politics is thought in terms of the extent to which it adheres to a specifically ‘1970s’ feminist model of autonomous mobilization. This perspective suffers from a number of conceptual problems, necessitating a formulation of a more dynamic view of radicality with which to evaluate contemporary political practices. To this end, I seek to cast radicality as a function of equivalence (drawn from Ernesto Laclau) and (especially) imagination drawn from Linda Zerilli's Arendtian-inflected feminist theory. Thinking radicality in these terms, I argue, avoids the latent purism of many existing approaches while enabling a critical engagement sensitive to the context of the practice under investigation.
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Notes
As a random example of this, Wendy Brown's critique of Laclau and Mouffe's ‘radical democracy’ asks the question of ‘precisely where the radicalism lies’ (Brown, 1995, 11), implicitly casting herself as ‘more radical’ than Laclau and Mouffe, while also implicitly linking ‘radicalism’ to anti-capitalism.
In some senses, therefore, the discussion remains framed within an implicitly leftist/critical theory framework. I thus acknowledge the existence of uses of the signifier radical to describe a range of centrist or indeed right-wing and reactionary forms of politics, such as New Labour's promulgation of the ‘radical’ centre or describing PFI as a ‘radical’ solution to funding and management problems in the NHS (see also Giddens, 2000).
See also Richard Day's Gramsci is Dead, in which he draws attention, both empirically and theoretically, on how contemporary ‘radical’ social movements are radical in the sense that they are ‘less concerned with affecting the content of current forms of domination and exploitation’ than they are with ‘creating alternatives to the forms themselves’ (Day, 2005, 19). Here, radicality is again thought as a property of particular modes and sites of political engagement, such that its performative, critical and evaluative dimensions are somewhat lost sight of.
According to a classic Radical Feminist text by the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, patriarchy is ‘the fundamental oppression ’(Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, 1982, 64; see also Bryson, 1992; Allwood and Wadia, 2001, 163). To some extent, therefore, the strategy of ‘lesbian separatism’ could be seen as a logical, if extreme, adherence to a feminist purism.
The basic thrust of Kantola's work is in many ways similar to the perspective advanced in this paper: through articulating together insights from Nordic feminism and poststructuralist political theory, to problematize the tendency within feminist discourse to view engagement with the state as a dichotomous choice between going ‘inside’ the state and risking co-optation or remaining ‘outside’ and remaining radical yet ineffectual (Kantola, 2006). For a further example of a ‘pro-statist’ Nordic feminist position, see Jónasdóttir and van der Fehr (1998)
Through, for example, engagement with local authority women's committees, trade unions, the Equal Opportunities' Commission, involvement in the Labour Party, the overseeing of sex equality legislation, helping the local state deliver services to women or working with pro-feminist MPs.
Examples here might include ‘Solidarnosc’ in Polish politics, ‘the personal is political’ in feminism, and ‘New Labour’. All of these signifiers came to assume the function of condensing a diversity of issues into a relatively cohesive political agenda.
A case could be made that, in relation to these issues, Zerilli's appropriation of Arendt may present some difficulties. For instance, Arendt's admiration for this particular mode of politics is such that perhaps the emphasis on plurality is undermined by Arendt's appeal to the ‘One’ of the nation-state or city-state. I think this criticism is justified in relation to Arendt, although Zerilli's appropriation — which I wish to foreground here — overcomes this by (implicitly) emphasizing the contingent character of the construction of political spaces, without hypostatiszng a codified political unit such as the nation-state. See also Honig (1992).
Possible instances of feminisms complicit with the ‘social question’ include the tendency in some strands of American liberal feminism to regard the institutionalization of rights as sufficient to augur substantive freedom (Zerilli, 2005a, 120), calls for gay marriage that might risk further marginalizing non-monogamous sexual practices (Butler, 2000, 176–177; Brown, 2005, 3; Zerilli, 2005a, 157), and Catherine MacKinnon's efforts to inscribe in law anti-pornography legislation (MacKinnon, 1989, 195–214; Brown, 1995, 90).
Furthermore, the overdetermination of feminism by the ‘wave’ metaphor with its fixation on the issue of generations of feminism is further evidence of the tendency to think in terms of who or what we, as feminists, are, prior to political action.
For an account by Zerilli of the concepts of imagination and judgement, but less explicitly linked to the question of feminism, see Zerilli (2005b).
Examples of ‘figures of the newly thinkable’ include, according to Zerilli, Judith Butler's much maligned drag artist (in its capacity as a demonstration of the hyperbolic instantiation of gender norms), and also the Milan Women's foregrounding of the figure of the ‘symbolic mother’ (as an imagined figure capable of fostering free relations between women).
The conception of ‘radicality’ advanced here is therefore opposed to more ‘grandiose’ conceptions of radical politics that rely on dramatic moments of political rupture that radically reconfigure the social order. Such an approach — which one arguably finds in the work of a range of authors on the Lacanian Left — is imbued with what Simon Critchley has called (referring to Badiou) a ‘heroism of the decision’, whereby there is an excessively strong affective investment in dramatic moments of radical discontinuity with the status quo (Critchley, 2000, 13).
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Dean, J. Feminist Purism and the Question of ‘Radicality’ in Contemporary Political Theory. Contemp Polit Theory 7, 280–301 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2008.13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2008.13