The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary

Critical Theory (review)

Colin Koopman
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Volume 21, Number
4, 2007, pp. 332-335 (Article)
Published by Penn State University Press
DOI: 10.1353/jsp.0.0012
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Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 21, No. 4, 2007.
Copyright 2008 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
I have two reservations regarding Fosters book. First, it is one thing to
argue that McDowells naturalism of second nature is incomplete but quite
another to argue that it fails; Foster does not adequately distinguish between these
options. Second, Foster neglects thinkers who should be compared with Adornos
recovery of experience. What of the later Wittgenstein, Derrida, or Cavellor
for that matter, a richer comparison of Adorno with Dewey? This would require
a different or longer book, but by not doing so, Foster does not show us what is
distinctive about Adornos version of spiritual experience. This aside, Fosters
book is a rigorous and careful interpretation of an unfortunately neglected aspect
of Adornos critique of epistemology, and it situates itself in, and compares
favorably with, recent analytic Adorno criticism (Bernstein 2001; OConnor
2004). It also contributes to the analyticContinental conversation through the
comparisons of Adorno with the early Wittgenstein, Dewey, and McDowell and
will be of signicant appeal to scholars working in Continental philosophy and
pragmatism.
Carl B. Sachs
University of North Texas
Works Ciled
Bernstein, J. M. 2001. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
OConnor, Brian. 2004. Adornos Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical
Rationality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Criti-
cal Theory. Amy Allen. New Directions in Critical Theory. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2008. Pp. xi + 230. $34.50 h.c. 0231136226.
In this ambitious book Amy Allen proposes nothing less than the integration
of two traditions of social-political theory that have generally been taken to be
straightforwardly opposed. Foucauldian genealogy and Habermasian critical
theory have been at the center of political philosophy and social critique for the
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past few decades. The story of their incompatibility is by now so well rehearsed
that it is nearly exhausted, in the sense of almost being taken for granted. This
speaks to the admirable ambition of Allens attempt to develop a frame into
which both Foucauldian and Habermasian theory can be t. What strikes me as
important about this book is not, however, its ambition, though I certainly nd
this impressive (especially within our contemporary climate of professionalized
and obligatory overspecialization). What is important about this book, rather, is its
successes in realizing its ambitions. This is not to claim that the book is without its
argumentative weaknesses and expository gaps. But the successes are what really
stand out and impress the reader here (note how rare this is in our contemporary
atmosphere of professionalized and obligatory hyperskepticism).
The central aim of The Politics of Our Selves is to overcome the difculty
that we have in thinking through power and autonomy simultaneously (21). Allen
takes on this task by engaging two related disputes at the center of contemporary
critical theory: the FoucaultHabermas debates and the debates in feminist theory
between Judith Butler and Seyla Benhabib.
Allens contribution to feminist theory builds admirably on her earlier The
Power of Feminist Theory (Westview, 1999) in which she seeks to invest feminism
with a rigorous conception of power. In the present book, Allen furthers a critical
feminism that is not undone by the old dilemmas between structure and agency,
power and autonomy. For these purposes Allen follows Nancy Frasers argument
that feminists can draw on both Butler and Benhabib without contradiction. Yet
she goes further than Fraser in showing just how we might reconstruct Butlers
and Benhabibs work so that they may be better taken up in tandem: The overall
aim of this book is an attempt to accomplish the ambitious task suggested but
left undone by Fraser: to envision subjects as both culturally constructed in and
through relations of power and yet capable of critique (21).
Here Allens feminist interventions intersect with her contributions to criti-
cal theory more broadly. Allen shows how power and autonomy can be comple-
mentary in both Foucault and Habermas. In Foucault, this involves showing that
he afrms a concept of autonomy that can be integrated with his well-known work
on power; in Habermas, this requires showing how sensitivity to the workings of
power can help inform his robust conception of autonomy.
Allen offers an impressive reinterpretation of Foucault by focusing on his
productive relationship to Kant. Foucault, she says, develops a critique of critique
itself, a continuation-through-transformation of that project (24). Foucault is a
Kantian but not in Batrice Han-Piles sense of a thinker wrestling with the philo-
sophical relation between transcendentality and empiricity. Foucault is a Kantian
in that he is engaged in an immanent critique, in Kants special sense of that word,
of our modernity. This rereading of Foucault is both timely and convincing. Yet
some readers will worry that Allen goes too far in extending the comparison to
Foucaults and Kants conceptions of autonomy. One can accept Allens point
that autonomy is central to Foucaults conception of critique (64), but a worry
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remains that her description of Foucaults autonomy resuscitates questions about
the Kantian transcendental subject that she (unlike Han-Pile) rightly does not
want to see Foucault as posing.
Allen takes autonomy in Foucault to consist in two capacities, for criti-
cal reection and for deliberate self-transformation (2). I agree that Foucault
understands freedom in terms of critical reection and self-transformation, but
I have always understood these as practices rather than capacities. If freedom is
conceived as a capacity, then this capacity must inhere in something; this invites
the transcendental subject in through the back door. Conceptualizing freedom
as what we do rather than as what we are helps shut out transcendental critique
and opens vistas of immanent critique. I suspect that Allens argument could be
revised to accommodate this concern without sacricing the connections between
Foucault and Habermas that she seeks. She stages these connections primarily
in terms of an account of how both theorists radicalize Kantian critique in a way
that invites a mutual theorization of power and autonomy. For such a project it
makes sense to conceive of power and autonomy as modalities of practice rather
than as qualities of being. This could help us see how power and autonomy
dynamically work together in action even if we can analytically cleave them as
separable static properties.
To motivate the other side of her proposed connection Allen rereads
Habermasian critical theory through the lens of contextualism. In doing so,
she draws from North American critical theorists like Thomas McCarthy who
have similarly reinterpreted Habermass project. Though Habermas himself
may not accept such a reinterpretation, Allens move seems fair, in that she
draws on what is most alive in critical theory today and in so doing takes
that tradition at its current best. The upshot of this reinterpretation is that of
enabling the critical theorist to afrm the context-bound effects of power on
the context-transcending impulses of autonomy, what Allen calls the entangle-
ment of power and validity (125). The result is a more principled version
of contextualism (143) that I nd difcult to distinguish from pragmatist
versions of contextualism.
This brings me to a throwaway observation that may nevertheless be intrigu-
ing for those convinced by Allens arguments. At numerous points Allens book
provokes the thought that the conversation between Kantian contextualists like
Habermas and Kantian historicists like Foucault may be most protably staged
through the intermediary of another tradition whose primary impetus has also
been a criticism of criticisms, namely, pragmatism. For does not pragmatism
already feature an early attempt to theorize that seamless combination of power
and autonomy so carefully carved out by Allen?
Even without an intermediary such as pragmatism, Allen shows how we
can strike a connection between the two greatest contributions to critical theory
of the past fty years. In doing so she enables critical theorists to condently
proceed with a more capacious conception of the many tools and strategies that
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can be coherently deployed for the purposes of social-political critique. Perhaps
Allen makes possible a new direction for the next wave of critical theory: one
that reaches beyond the theoretical impasses of the previous wave and toward the
critical advances of the next.
Colin Koopman
University of California, Santa Cruz