Sonia Kruks

This book, first published in 1987, is an extended examination of Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy. It describes and critically elucidates the main political themes to be found in his writings, and shows how his political ideas are related to his general phenomenological philosophy.

A Study of the Political Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty

Marilyn Blatt Young

Rayna Rapp

Revolutionary socialist movements have held out the promise, in both theory and practice, that women can achieve liberation through their participation in the revolutionary process. But many women in post-revolutionary societies have watched in frustration as this promise has been pushed into the future or dropped from the agenda altogether. The essays in Promissory Notes renew the debate about the connections between feminism and socialism by examining the position of women in socialist thought from the time of Marx to the present. The book looks at the central theoretical formulations of the Woman Question in classical Marxist thought, then explores their applications first in the Soviet Union and China, then in a series of third world regimes and contemporary Eastern European countries. The volume ends with a roundtable debate in which a number of scholars and activists take up the central theoretical issues raised throughout the book. Contributors include Joan B. Landes, Elizabeth Waters, Wendy Zeva Goldman, Christina Gilmartin, Muriel Nazzari, Maxine D. Molyneux, Sonia Kurks and Ben Wisner, Christine Pelzer White, Amrita Basu, Marilyn B. Young, Mary Buckley, Barbara Einhorn, Martha Lampland, Lourdes Beneria, Zillah Eisenstein, Delia D. Aguilar, Delia Davin, Kumari Jayawardena, and Rayna Rapp.

Promissory Notes

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.

Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics

Retrieving Experience

Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity is the first full-length study of Beauvoir's political thinking. Best known as the author of The Second Sex, Beauvoir also wrote an array of other political and philosophical texts that together, constitute an original contribution to political theory and philosophy. Sonia Kruks here locates Beauvoir in her own intellectual and political context and demonstrates her continuing significance. Beauvoir still speaks, in a unique voice, to many pressing questions concerning politics: the values and dangers of liberal humanism; how oppressed groups become complicit in their own oppression; how social identities are perpetuated; the limits to rationalism; and the place of emotions, such as the desire for revenge, in politics. In discussing such matters Kruks puts Beauvoir's ideas into conversation with those of many contemporary thinkers, including feminist and race theorists, as well as with historical figures in the liberal, Hegelian, and Marxist traditions. Beauvoir's political thinking emerges from her fundamental insights into the ambiguity of human existence. Combining phenomenological descriptions with structural analyses, she focuses on the tensions of human action as both free and constrained. To be human is to be a paradoxical being, at once capable of free choice and yet, because embodied, vulnerable to injury from others. Politics is thus a domain of complexly interwoven, multiple, human interactions that is rife with ambiguity, and where freedom and violence too often closely intertwine. Beauvoir accordingly argues that failure is a necessary part of political action. However, she also insists that, while acknowledging this, we should assume responsibility for the outcomes of what we do.

Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity

A study of Simone de Beauvoir's (1908-1986) political thinking. The author locates de Beauvoir in her own intellectual and political context and demonstrates her continuing significance.

This, the first full-length study of Simone de Beauvoir's political thinking, both examines Beauvoir in her own politico-intellectual context and demonstrates her originality and continuing significance. Insisting upon the ambiguity of all human action, Beauvoir presents an affirmation of human freedom and also a somber warning about the inevitability of failures in politics.

Sonia Kruks

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