Arendt and Spivak PDF
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DDeePPaauull UUnniivveerrssiittyy VViiaa SSaappiieennttiiaaee College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations 7-2015 AArreennddtt aanndd SSppiivvaakk:: aa ffeemmiinniisstt aapppprrooaacchh ttoo ppoolliittiiccaall wwoorrllddiinngg aanndd aappppeeaarriinngg Rosalie Siemon Lochner DePaul University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd RReeccoommmmeennddeedd CCiittaattiioonn Lochner, Rosalie Siemon, "Arendt and Spivak: a feminist approach to political worlding and appearing" (2015). College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 182. https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd/182 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Via Sapientiae. It has been accepted for inclusion in College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Via Sapientiae. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ARENDT AND SPIVAK: A FEMINIST APPROACH TO POLITICAL WORLDING AND APPEARING A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy November, 2014 By Rosalie Siemon Lochner Department of Philosophy College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences DePaul University Chicago, Illinois Copyright © 2014 by Rosalie Siemon Lochner ALL RIGHTS RESERVED AcTo To my family Each utterance is its own occasion and as such is firmly anchored in the worldy context in which it is applied. Edward Said, “The Text, the World and the Critic” ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The seeds of this project began to flourish while attending Peg Birmingham’s seminars on Hannah Arendt and political philosophy and Namita Goswami’s seminars on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and postcolonial theory. However, these seeds were planted a few years earlier in Jasbir Puar’s “Feminist Genealogies” seminar at Rutger’s University and while writing a thesis for a Master’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies. I am therefore indebted to the faculty at Rutgers and would like to thank Jasbir Puar, Mary Gossy, and Harriet Davidson for setting me on this particular path. While the ideas for this project began to form at Rutgers and developed and flourished at DePaul, my love of philosophy and my determination to work in the field is in large part due to the support of David Roochnik, Donna Giancola, and P.J. Ivanhoe. I am indebted to these three and cannot even begin to express my gratitude for their attention and support. I am particularly grateful to David Roochnik. His encouragement and support allowed me to develop my interest in feminist philosophy while an undergraduate at Boston University. I am, of course, indebted to DePaul University and I owe the most to my committee. I was very lucky to have the support of Peg Birmingham, who chaired my committee. Her willingness to allow me to take intellectual risks in uncharted territory, her generosity with my ideas, and her thoughtful engagement with my work was something I depended on as I built and clarified my argument. Tina Chanter’s support was also invaluable, without her willingness to push me on the feminist stakes of my argument this project would not have developed as it did. Finally, I would like to thank v Elizabeth Rottenberg for her help. Her expertise in comparative literature was stimulating and invaluable. In addition to my committee, I would like to thank a few other faculty members at DePaul who have contributed a great deal to my success: Sean Kirkland, Darrell Moore, and Franklin Perkins. I am fortunate to have had them to rely on. Beyond their academic support, I am also indebted to them for their help as I completed this project from afar. They enabled me to work in Los Angeles while being a student in Chicago. Finally, I would like to thank the staff at DePaul, Mary Amico and Jennifer Burke. Without their patient support I would be truly lost. I am also indebted to the faculty at Loyola Marymount University for seeing my potential and offering me a space to tryout my ideas. I would particularly like to thank Brad Elliot Stone who believed in me and provided a sounding board and moral support. I would also like to thank Brian Treanor and Dan Speak for their support. Finally, I would have been at a loss without the constant support of Alexis Dolan who helped me feel at home at LMU. The next group of people I would like to thank is made up of the colleagues and friends with whom I shared the daily grind. These are the people whom I thought and worked alongside of. They are dear to both my heart and my work. Thank you to my blog and writing partner: Marie Draz, my coffee and cooking partner: James Manos, and my running partner: Andrew Dilts, and a special thanks to Perry Zurn, Sina Kramer, and Rick Elmore. I wish to thank my father, James Siemon, who always was willing to listen to my de Manian ravings and answer my editing questions, to thank my mother Alexandra vi Siemon for helping me to keep afloat in times of doubt, and to thank my sisters for keeping things from getting too serious. Finally, thank you to Erich for having the patience to see me through. Your kindness and love, and your support and good humor have made all of this possible. Lastly, thank you to Henry, for pushing me to finish so that we could start something new. vii Abstract “Arendt and Spivak: A Feminist Approach to Political Worlding and Appearing” offers the first systematic and comparative reading of Hannah Arendt and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Beginning with their mutual interests in political speech and appearance (the ability for individuals to represent themselves as individuals and not be reduced to their social identity) this dissertation argues two points. First, considering the political in terms of worlding (the fact that humans are both conditioned and conditioning beings) means taking a two-handed approach to the political: addressing the seemingly contradictory need for both political equality and an understanding of the impossibility of escaping those privileges that undercut equality. Second, framing political appearance in terms of Arendtian and Spivakian temporality offers a feminist model of political appearance that challenges the connection between politics and patronymic inheritance. The dissertation begins by arguing that a feminist model of political equality must engage with “worlding,” a term adapted from Martin Heidegger. Engaging with worlding through a feminist lens requires engaging with the ways in which intersectional privileges (race, gender, class, etc.) shape models of political equality and mediate each individual’s access to the political. Gaining access to the political helps facilitate an individual’s ability (or inability) to appear and be heard as a unique political being. Furthermore, awareness of such intersectional conditioning facilitates a theorist’s own account of privilege, political access, and worlding itself. As a result, I argue that any account of political equality must continually engage with the impossibility of equal political appearance. viii In order to challenge the problem of the transparency of the political philosopher—as opposed to generally marking the limitations of philosophy—and in order to locate philosophy within the world, the second and third chapters of this dissertation examine Arendt’s and Spivak’s respective understandings of the determining and determined effects of patronymic political inheritance and the temporality of thought. I argue that their understanding of the worlding of patronymic inheritance demonstrates the limitations of current models of political appearance and that their models of temporality offer a new feminist approach to theorizing political appearance. They challenge linear, patronymic models of political history and political theory, and their work can shift the way that we relate to the past, present, and future by emphasizing the tension and productive relationship between theory and world. Their models reframe political appearance and equality, challenging an additive model based on linear progress where failures are seen as passing obstacles and successes are seen as endemic to the political. For instance, an additive model of equal rights assumes that the United States has becomes more equal and that the inequalities of legal segregation, and restricted voting were temporary problems overcome as the United States has made linear progress toward its already inherent perfection. By contrast, the models of temporality developed by Arendt and Spivak, require continual redirection and self-critique while challenging political inequality. In the final chapter, I argue that bringing together Arendtian plurality and the Spivakian double bind may yield a feminist model of political appearance. According to Arendt, plurality serves as the foundation for political appearance and is grounded in its twofold nature of equality and distinction. According to Spivak, double binds offer a ix
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