In her book, Linda Zerilli sets out to accomplish three very important and difficult tasks. The first is to persuade contemporary feminist theorists to leave behind their methodological concern with the category woman and to pursue political freedom understood as the practice of “beginning anew.” The second is to articulate and defend such an understanding of political freedom in light of other ways of thinking about the topic. The third is to show how political freedom so understood might be used to develop a feminist project of political freedom that empowers women as a group without imposing false universals on them.

Zerilli's arguments about the depoliticization of contemporary feminist theory are both timely and important. So, too, is her critique of those feminist theories that place the coherence of the category “woman” at the center of feminist politics. According to Zerilli, “[i]t is strange to think that the future of feminism could possibly hang on the status of an analytic category of feminist theory” (p. x). For while the category in Western feminist theory is indeed less universal than it is made out to be, “few feminist activists understand theory as a guide for practice,” and even if they did, the endless parsing of differences required by the debunking of false universals would most likely lead to a “politically destructive cynicism” (ibid.).

Zerilli's concern to move beyond the methodological debates of third-wave feminism is largely practical. The author wants to revive a feminist practice of freedom. But her critique of these debates is itself theoretical rather than practical. Indeed, it is based on an important insight, that those feminist theorists who now treat the category as key to feminist politics make two problematic assumptions: (1) that in order to be politically significant, claims to speak in the name of women must function like a rule under which to subsume particulars; and (2) that in order to be legitimate, these claims must employ a general category, called woman, that can be used to describe all women and their activities.

As Zerilli notes, such assumptions are both conservative and epistemologically (and politically) unnecessary. Why turn to political freedom in this context? According to the author, political freedom avoids the constraining logic of universal/particular. And it allows for continuous re-creation and control over a collective identity that is possible only when individuals leave the prevailing rules of recognition behind and together—in the public realm—invent new ways of understanding themselves and their world.

Zerilli's view of political freedom replaces the “I will” associated with notions of individual sovereignty with the “I can” of Arendtian world building. Political freedom in Hannah Arendt's writings is “the freedom to call something into being, which did not exist before, which was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination” (p. 24). This kind of political freedom can, according to Zerilli, be extended to the formation of the “we” of feminism: “Thinking about women as a political collectivity, rather than as a sociological group or social subject, means thinking the ‘we’ of feminism anew as the fragile achievement of practices of freedom” (ibid.).

How might political freedom understood as such become part of feminist practice? Zerilli answers this question by turning not to contemporary feminist projects but to Monique Wittig's Les Guerilleres (1985) and the Milan Collective's Sexual Difference (1990) for what she calls expressions of feminist political freedom. Wittig famously begins her revolutionary utopia by asking “What if women were to rule themselves?” and then proceeds to spin the tale of a group of women warriors who develop a new form of social interaction that is itself based on the creation of a space in which women can move in word and deed among equals. The Milan Collective, in a similar vein, takes as its major purpose in Sexual Difference the creation of a feminist community in which women are able to achieve freedom through the exercise of personal and political accountability to other women.

According to Zerilli, we can see in all of Wittig's efforts, including her efforts to break with norms of heterosexuality and to imagine what women would be like if they governed themselves, a kind of political freedom that “takes leave of the false security of epistemology and ventures out into the world of action” (p. 69) and that allows women to create both themselves and their own reality. Likewise with the Milan Collective, we can see in its efforts to develop women's bookstores new kinds of social relationships, as well as the “replacement of traditional images of women's wretchedness with the radical figure of feminist freedom” (p. 125), a kind of freedom that is both constitutive of new identities and truly political by virtue of its association with a (reconstructed) public sphere.

Zerilli's analysis of these texts is fascinating, and it contributes to the development of a conception of freedom that is genuinely political. But her reading of this notion of political freedom as distinctly Arendtian faces three challenges. The first is that feminists do not have world-historical events such as the French and American Revolutions to point to as examples of world building. “The problem of ‘founding,’” Zerilli admits, “continues to haunt feminists” (p. 168). She suggests that we might substitute for an actual world-historical event or revolution in this context the “revolutionary spirit that animates such events” (p. 25). But such a spirit is not itself the kind of founding associated with world building. Instead, it is one of its conditions.

Second, the relationships that feminists have “founded” over the years—and the ones that Zerilli herself points to in the case of both Wittig and the Milan Collective—have generally been social, not political. The social realm is of course very important to democratic polities in general and to feminists who view the personal as political. But it is not something generally favored by Arendt, who was very skeptical about the social as a basis of politics in general. Hence, while the social relationships that feminists have founded over the years may be very important to feminism, they do not appear to be compatible with Arendt's own political theory.

Zerilli does not ignore or distort Arendt's own words as a way of getting around this dilemma. (Indeed, she demonstrates great integrity by underscoring the dilemma herself.) Instead, she attempts to reconcile her focus on social relationships with Arendt's theorizing by arguing that Arendt's major concern is not with its social content but rather with the means–ends rationality associated with it. Further, she claims, “Thinking about women as a collectivity rather than as a sociological group or social subject, means thinking the ‘we’ of feminism anew: as the fragile achievement of practices of freedom” (p. 24). Zerilli's interpretation of Arendt may be correct. But even if one can assume that women constitute a collectivity, one cannot assume automatically that women are, as members of this collectivity, political actors or that their sphere of action is public. Instead, one has to make explicit in what respect their collectivity is political and what it is about their sphere of action that is public. In other words, one has to define—redefine?—the terms “political” and “the public” in this context.

Third, the kind of political freedom that Zerilli advocates may simply be impossible since it requires individuals to leave the realm of determinism behind, if only temporarily, to build new worlds together. She does not, to her credit, posit a transcendental notion of free will. Instead, like Arendt, she embraces contingency. “What would it mean,” she asks, “to think about feminism as an ‘infinite improbability’? What would come of rethinking the ‘we’ of feminism as something utterly contingent, that is, as something that could just as well be left undone, as something highly fragile that could be driven out of the world?” (p. 24).

This view of contingency undoubtedly has appeal. But if those who view human agency as partly or wholly socially determined are correct—and they have some strong arguments—then human beings cannot “start anew” in Zerilli's sense. She does not, of course, have to accept these arguments. But she does have to take them seriously. Instead of invoking Arendt as an authority, she has to convince us that human beings are in fact capable of leaving behind existing webs of meaning and creating their own reality.

Zerilli has done an admirable job of presenting, as distinct from fully defending, her notion of political freedom on the basis of a very compelling and beautifully written interpretation of Arendt's political theory. Likewise, through her creative reading of the works of both Monique Wittig and the Milan Collective, she has succeeded admirably in showing how this notion of freedom might be realized in feminist practice. Hence, even though questions remain, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom stands as a very important contribution to both political theory and feminist politics.