In Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, Linda Zerilli issues an invitation to reconceptualize feminism by way of challenging the sufficiency and political implications of its current theoretical preoccupations. The persistent failure to sustain a satisfactory account of the feminist subject, for example, or to settle questions of its agency are symptomatic, she argues, of a deficient theoretical frame and an inadequate comprehension of democratic practice. Zerilli represents these insufficiencies as crucial failures of imagination, and thus her aim is not to revise but to revision feminism as a project centered on freedom. Reading with and on occasion against Hannah Arendt, she elaborates a feminism whose potential resides in world-transformative practices, specifically, in inaugurating, promising, and judging. The three chapters that introduce these practices both facilitate and illustrate a shift in perspective from which we take our political bearings from the abysmal—without foundation or guarantee—quality of freedom. The result is an insistently anti-epistemological and resolutely political account of feminism that allows us, in Arendt's phrase, to “think what we are doing” in new and provocative ways.

Zerilli's point of departure is feminism's twinned preoccupations with what she calls “the social question” and “the subject question.” The former refers to the predominance of human welfare and social reproduction issues—e.g., poverty, housing, wages—in political claims-making. She acknowledges problems in Arendt's account of a “rise of the social,” but emphasizes its insight that an expansion of instrumentalist or means-ends thinking constricts the radical possibilities of democratic action. From this perspective, feminist politics' historical preoccupation with social justice issues entangles it in a language and logic of social utility that risks reducing freedom to a means to some (other) end. Likewise, Zerilli contends that feminist dilemmas of identity and agency remain circumscribed by the frame of “the subject question” in which freedom remains the precarious property of less-than-sovereign selves. She suggests that this frame accounts for the contortions of much third-wave theory—e.g., how to contend with differences among women, how to speak and act without reiterating the terms of subordination. On both fronts—an orientation toward the political world fed by persistent concerns about social reproduction and an orientation toward political action dependent on more or less coherent and autonomous selves—feminism remains constrained in how it imagines freedom. I will return later to what might be an unintended consequence of Zerilli's diagnostic frame; for now, I mean to underscore how it points to feminism's preoccupation with matters of justification, legitimation, and recognition whose unresolvability is the stuff of much recent theory.

To paraphrase an old New Yorker cartoon, people today are always talking about contingency, ambiguity, instability, and the like, but nobody is doing anything about it. Among this book's many pleasures is what Zerilli does with the increasingly conventional conclusions of post-foundational philosophical inquiry. Truth claims that cannot be secured, subjects that are not sovereign, universals that are not one: for Zerilli these intellectual impasses comprise the very conditions of possibility for freedom. So rather than, for example, attempting to construct a post-identity subject—a hybrid, a nomad, a self always in some sense “under erasure,” she aims to shift our angle of vision such that political action becomes the form rather than the effect of individuality, and plurality becomes definitive of politics rather than a challenge to its coherence. She begins by retracing the process of critical reflection found in Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, together with received interpretations of it, to show how feminism's political claims are bound up with truth claims. Zerilli is not interested in adjudicating the success with which Gender Trouble exposes the “false” or “illusory” character of gender; rather, she is interested in how Butler's deployment of the strange—i.e., drag—presumes its ability to disrupt certainty. Drawing on Wittgenstein, Zerilli explores how our convictions concerning sex and sex difference remain strikingly invulnerable to the challenges posed by exceptions. Likewise, to the extent Butler's account connects social transformation to moments of extra-ordinary or non-normative seeing and understanding, it presumes both a perpetual interpretive vigilance and the periodic breakdowns of signifying systems.

Zerilli presents the difficulties with Butler's mode of critical reflection in terms of radical skepticism, the subsumption of particulars under universals, and other epistemological postures and procedures; they might also be glossed as the interpretive and political dead-ends of a structure/act dichotomy. She proposes instead that we approach Butler's use of drag as an example of what Cornelius Castoriadis calls “figures (or models) of the thinkable:” representations that perforce arise from existing concepts and categories but which cause us to see those concepts and categories anew. As products of radical imagination, such figurations do not depend on determinations of true and false or on exploiting exceptions: they initiate a change in perspective—a new way of thinking—from which our settled significations (including how we determine questions of truth) no longer appear sufficient.

Zerilli provides examples of how the insufficiencies of sex/gender categories can be generated through acts of radical imagination in close readings of Monique Wittig's Les guérillères, the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective writings on sexual difference, and Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy. In each instance Zerilli parses how the writers' rhetorical, political, and critical reflective practices demonstrate a world-(re)constituting freedom. Wittig's pronominal reconfigurations, for example (i.e., her use of elles—not, as the misleading English translation would have it, women—to signify a “fantastic universal” [87]) allow for “radical creation in the ordinary” (90), while the Milan Collective's notion of “entrustment” understands sexual difference as a symbolic and material practice embodied in lived relations between women. A final chapter takes up Arendt's Lectures to elaborate an account of political claims-making modeled on aesthetic judgment in which the terms of “validity” shift, from what can be justified epistemologically to what can be sustained from multiple standpoints: “What we affirm in a political judgment is experienced not as a cognitive commitment to a set of rationally-agreed-upon precepts … [b]ut as pleasure, as shared sensibility” (163). Zerilli shows how in each case, practice confirms freedom's abysmal quality: political judgment is not authorized by certainties but can only propose versions of them, promising is itself a world-(re)making action rather than the precondition for such action (as a social contract model would have it), and inauguration moves through signifying systems rather than upending them.

Zerilli's interpretive engagements throughout are skillful, demanding, and impossible to do justice to in a review of this length. They also largely succeed in fleshing out the perspectival shift on which her proposed reconceptualization of feminism depends. From that angle, one sees known texts anew and, in the process, “figures of the newly thinkable” proliferate. How these figures illuminate the “newly practice-able,” however, is a more muddled matter. Inasmuch as the generative practices that preoccupy Zerilli pertain to thinking—i.e., acts of radical imagination over and against acts of radical doubt, her critical (re)configurations remain trained on states of mind. The worldly forms a feminist politics might take thus remain ancillary concerns. No doubt it is entirely consistent with Zerilli's theoretical insights to leave the shape of a freedom-centered politics minimally articulated. And to be sure, there are significantly worldly dimensions to the practices she anatomizes: writing and reading Les guérillères can alter lived reality, as can the creation of a “new social contract” (119) through reciprocal relations of “entrustment.” But it matters that, in developing an account of freedom rooted in modes of understanding, she remains focused on the internal postures of actors and not on the world they would remake.

This focus is not a shortcoming of Zerilli's book. I propose (taking a page from that book) that it be understood as an aesthetic position: a propositional judgment whose certainties must be assessed from multiple standpoints. To the extent I share her aesthetic, I find the intelligence, creativity, and agility of Zerilli's critical and generative performances both persuasive and beautiful. How they will move readers more exasperated by third-wave feminism's inconstant attention to social justice than by its preoccupations with epistemology is unclear. From that perspective, where conditions of economic and physical insecurity appear to undermine freedom more surely than do cravings for truth, freedom as a political practice might remain unimaginable when persistently counterpoised to (bodily) necessity. This dubious (or perhaps, unattractive) judgment—that a politics focused on redistribution is unable to realize freedom—risks validation within a frame that subordinates analyses of the world to analyses of thought.

And yet: creating new modes of thinking and living within actually existing representative systems (ideologies), sustaining contingent relations (coalitions) through new symbols rather than identities, and working to persuade and refocus rather than to prove and justify aptly characterize what many feminists engaged in anti-poverty, anti-globalization, and reproductive rights movements are doing. So I would conclude that these two perspectives—one that looks out on a world whose abysmal conditions cry for remaking and one that looks in on actors grappling with the abysmal quality of freedom—need not be seen as incommensurable. But as Zerilli insists, the certainty of this judgment depends on a plurality of readers and to some extent, on their aesthetic sensibilities.