In some ways, the idea that identities are constitutively dependent on the exclusion and disavowal of “Others” is already a familiar one in many corners of political theory. Yet, as Sina Kramer argues in her excellent book, Excluded Within: The (Un)Intelligibility of Radical Political Actors, despite its circulation within critical theory, feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory, and radical democratic theory, the concept of “constitutive exclusion” has never been fully or explicitly theorized in all its ontological, epistemological, and political complexity. This is the task Kramer takes up—carefully, methodically, and insightfully—in her work by exploring the logic of constitutive exclusions (and their contestation) in philosophical systems, as well as in political bodies.

Opening the book with three “scenes” of internal but inaudible political insurrection—centered on the figure of Antigone, the paired figures of Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin, and the collective figure of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots/Rebellion—Kramer turns to a critical rereading of G. W. F. Hegel and Jacques Derrida to diagnose the problem of constitutive exclusion and develops a methodology for its critique via Theodor Adorno. Thus, although much of the book engages in detailed, abstract philosophical analysis, Kramer’s purposes are expressly concrete and political, and the figures of Antigone, Parks/Colvin, and the Riots/Rebellion are never far from view (or beyond audibility). Kramer is motivated by the question of how excluded political actors can contest the conditions of their exclusion and, just as importantly, how those “inside” can learn to hear these contestations as serious political claims, rather than dismissing them as threatening, criminal, or monstrous: “How do those who have been rendered politically unintelligible make their claims intelligible to the political body that has defined itself on the basis of that very unintelligibility?” (p. 90). This is, in sum, a work in the best tradition of critical theory: toggling between the registers of universal and particular, theory and praxis, and oriented toward the recovery of the radical possibilities immanent in the present—a political future that might still be otherwise.

As Kramer defines it, constitutive exclusion occurs “when a system of thought or political body defines itself by excluding some difference which is intolerable to it” (p. 5). Yet the exclusion is not and cannot be complete or total. The excluded remain “within” the system that defines itself through their exclusion; their continued presence, the example of their difference, remains necessary for establishing and maintaining “the coherence of the borders of politics and the intelligibility of political agency on the ‘inside’” (p. 18). The operation of constitutive exclusion thus clarifies and troubles the distinction between ontology and epistemology, between being and knowing: contingent differences (race, class, gender, sexuality, and so on) are made the basis of inclusion/exclusion, setting the terms of what (and who) is intelligible and unintelligible; these differences are then naturalized retroactively as necessary and self-evident —as linearly proceeding from a grounding “difference that makes a difference” (p. 58). This is what Kramer calls constitutive exclusion’s “retroactive temporality,” illuminating exclusion’s reliance on ongoing practices of dismissal, denial, and disavowal—on an epistemology of ignorance—but also pointing the way toward a method of critique and contestation.

Excluded Within develops this account in three parts, moving from abstract to concrete via negative dialectics, and from ontology to politics via epistemology. In part I (“Diagnosis”), Kramer unpacks the structure and logic of constitutive exclusion by demonstrating how it operates within the Hegelian system. Through her original reading of Hegel’s Science of Logic and Derrida’s Glas, Kramer outlines constitutive exclusion’s core dynamics: a multiplicity of negativities that resist ultimate resolution and that operate as the “quasi-transcendental” of the philosophical system, simultaneously a condition of possibility and impossibility that both secures and threatens the integrity of the system and that therefore requires retroactive management and disavowal. Turning to Adorno in part II (“Critique”), Kramer develops a method for seeing what constitutive exclusion attempts to erase: the reality that the present is the contingent product of a multiplicity of past exclusions—a “sedimented history” that retains the fragments of what has been repressed and therefore the “shards of its own redemption” (p. 153). Part III (“Contestation”) shows us this methodology in action, as Kramer returns to her three figures, demonstrating the multiple, contextually specific operations of constitutive exclusion at work and the variety of strategies and frames that render these figures more (or less) intelligible as political agents— from Antigone’s risky attempts to translate her claims into the language of sovereignty, to the “strategic straightness” that invisibilizes Colvin and reifies Parks as a “political object,” to the frame of anti-Blackness that figures the Riot/Rebellion as criminal rather than political while denying the multiplicity of actors (and exclusions) at work.

Kramer’s project is oriented toward the hope of a politics without constitutive exclusion and of a remedy beyond assimilation or inclusion. This raises an important question, however: Is a radically reconstituted political body—one that does not merely shift the axes along which exclusion functions but that does without exclusion entirely—even possible? Or is exclusion not merely constitutive of this or that political body, at this or that time and place, but of political bodies as such? At times, Kramer signals ambivalence on this question: as she states in a few places in the text, although her “critique operates in service of a future without constitutive exclusions,” it may be the case that “some exclusions are necessary”—in which case, they ought to be “determined democratically rather than by means of a disavowal that props up an epistemology of ignorance” (p. 85; see also pp. 33, 113). I confess to feeling a bit dismayed when I read those lines, because they seem to undercut some of the book’s most powerful claims. Given Kramer’s careful, persuasive account of the contingency of exclusions—the blurred and ultimately political space between ontology and epistemology—what might it mean to find exclusion “necessary” after all? Necessary in what sense? And what might it mean to approach exclusion “democratically”? How would the “democratic” offer an alternative to or a process outside the operation of constitutive exclusion? The idea of democratically authorized exclusions as a meaningful alternative seems to let democracy off the hook, shielding “democracy” (whatever we may mean by that) from contestation and disavowing its own constitutive remainders in precisely the way Kramer elsewhere diagnoses. Democracy, in other words, is not innocent and does not obviously operate outside of constitutive exclusion and its epistemology of ignorance. In a moment in which powerful political actors effectively wield the language of democracy in the service of white nationalism, it seems particularly important to remain attuned to democracy’s ongoing entanglements with practices of exclusion.

A more promising alternative is offered in Kramer’s postscript, in the form of pluralist political ontology. There, as she briefly engages with Audre Lorde, María Lugones, and the political theory and practice of Black Lives Matter (BLM), she finds additional resources for “flesh[ing] out a mode of listening for what one is constituted not to hear” and for “thinking both the hegemonic form of politics and the excluded resources for subverting it, at the same time” (p. 186). Yet it remains unclear how these three plural ontologies relate to each other or to the diagnosis and critical method developed by Kramer, via Hegel and Adorno. Do Lorde, Lugones, or BLM deploy something akin to Kramer’s “radical history of the present” in arriving at their pluralist ontologies? Or do they come by them by other means, centering different political practices and adopting different temporalities? If the latter, what can we say about the multiplicity of modes of radical reconstitution and their relationship to each other?

Thus, I finished Kramer’s book wishing she had provided a more thoroughgoing account of what reconstitution requires, beyond the work of rereading the past. However, I realize that this is, in some ways, not a fully fair critique: it is not the work of critical theory to project the concrete lines of a future that is not yet and that can only be made through the necessarily ungovernable and unpredictable work of political action— including, most crucially, those forms of contestation we have not yet learned to hear as properly and urgently political. Indeed, this is a point that Kramer’s superb book equips us to recognize and appreciate anew.