Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics. By Sonia Kruks. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. 200p. $35.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.

Extract

Just over 50 years ago, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, an essay on the situation of women written from the point of view of an existentialist ethic. Her essay had an enormous impact and spawned influential descendants, most of which rode roughshod over the essay's existentialist and phenomenological background. De Beauvoir's great success in The Second Sex was to have described the experience of becoming a woman in such a way as to allow many women to theorize their situation, and she spurred a generation to attempt to change it. Effectively, however, her insights became absorbed into the liberal feminist tradition, and with the rise of poststructuralism, have been criticized for their abstract individualism, commitment to a discredited Enlightenment notion of the subject, and participation in a logocentric philosophy of the Same. Sonia Kruks attempts, in this series of linked essays, to defend de Beauvoir and the tradition to which she belonged from being so quickly dismissed. She sets out the perspective of existential phenomenology and argues for its superiority to the poststructuralist philosophy that has become influential during the last 30 years.