Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom
- Contents
- Review Quotes

Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
Why Feminism and Freedom Both Begin with the Letter F
Freedom as a Social Question
Freedom as a Subject Question
Freedom as a World Question
Feminism’s "Lost Treasure"
CHAPTER ONE
Feminists Know Not What They Do: Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble
and the Limits of Epistemology
Theory—The Craving for Generality?
A Wittgensteinian Reading of the Feminist Foundations Debate
Doing Gender, Following a Rule
Radical Imagination and Figures of the Newly Thinkable
Toward a Freedom-Centered Feminist Theory
CHAPTER TWO
Feminists Are Beginners: Monique Wittig’s Les guérillères
and the "Problem of the New"
The Limits of Doubt
Language as a "War Machine"
Renversement
No-More and Not-Yet
Elles—A Fantastic Universal
CHAPTER THREE
Feminists Make Promises: The Milan Collective’s Sexual Difference
and the Project of World-Building
Tearing Up the Social Contract
The Desire for Reparation
The Problem with Equality
Discovering Disparity
A Political Practice of Sexual Difference
Refiguring Rights
CHAPTER FOUR
Feminists Make Judgments: Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s
Political Philosophy and the Affirmation of Freedom
Judgment and the "Problem of the New"
The Old Problem of Objectivity
Judging without a Concept
One Concept of Validity
A Political Concept of Validity
From World-Disclosure to World-Opening
"Being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not"
Imagination and Freedom
Sensus Communis and the Practice of Freedom
CONCLUSION
Reframing the Freedom Question in Feminism
Feminism’s Paradox of Founding
What a Political Claim Is
Feminism Is a World-Building Practice
Recovering Feminism’s "Lost Treasure"
Notes
Index
History: History of Ideas
Philosophy: Philosophy of Society
Political Science: Political and Social Theory
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