Book Reviews. Justice and Judgment. ByAlessandro Ferrara. (London and Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications,

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1 Book Reviews Justice and Judgment. ByAlessandro Ferrara. (London and Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1999). In the last decade and a half, political philosophy of all persuasions has descended with varying degrees of reluctance from the high road of universalizing theory to incorporate much greater sensitivity to the cultural and historical contexts within which particular normative justifications of given social and political arrangements make sense. In Justice and Judgment, Alessandro Ferrara charts this descent among some of the great hedgehogs of liberal democratic theory, scrutinizing five theories of justice the theories of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Ronald Dworkin, Bruce Ackerman, and Frank Michelman for their increasing reliance on what he calls a judgment model of justice. The rise of the judgment model, according to Ferrara, reflects a shift in the nature of normative justification in political philosophy during the past decade. The precise dimensions of this shift are the subject of Ferrara s important new book. The cognitive operation of judgment and the kind of validity it can achieve is notoriously difficult to define. In his own exploration of the crucial but frequently underestimated role of judgment in moral reasoning, Charles Larmore writes, for example, that the inability of Aristotle, Smith, and Gadamer to give a general account of what the exercise of moral judgment consists in is not lamentable, but exemplary. 1 The very nature of the activity of judgment lies in our inability to provide reconstructible rules for the way in which a particular result has been achieved, or, to put it somewhat more positively, the nature of judgment lies in its ability to deliberate without the benefit of pre-given rules. Drawing on Immanuel Kant s critical theory of judgment, Ferrara distinguishes between reflective and subsumptive (or determinate) judgment. The latter is the capacity for applying a general rule by subsuming particular instances under it it is less consequential for Ferrara s purposes, but serves to underpin the strict separation between a principle and its application characteristic of generalizing universalist approaches. Reflective judgment, on the other hand, is a kind of reasoning in which only the particular is given and the universal has to be found for it This latter type of low-altitude reasoning, which proceeds by example rather than by rules, which can never achieve demonstrable universal validity but is nevertheless not arbitrary, which remains bound to particular social contexts and intersubjective construals of experience but nevertheless can achieve trans-contextual, nonparochial significance, is, according to Ferrara, increasingly accorded a foundational role in recent political theory. What we can see emerging from contemporary political philosophy, he suggests, and I think correctly, is perhaps the beginning of a third resurrection of Kant s philosophy, linked this time with a critical re-appropriation of themes and figures of thought drawn from the third Critique (2). The first part of Justice and Judgment brings the rise of the judgment model into relief in the internal development of the thought of Rawls, Habermas, Dworkin, et al. in five tightly argued chapters (one devoted to each thinker). Ferrara shows that the increasing role accorded to the judgment model of normative justification is discernible especially in the more recent works of these theorists, but also that none of them have gone far enough in espousing it systematically. The second part of the book then turns from critical textual analysis to a systematic argument for Ferrara s own judgment view of justice a conception he ultimately grounds in a postmodern sense of identity or normative standpoint he calls reflective authenticity. Constellations Volume 9, No 1, Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

2 Book Reviews 155 We can approach Ferrara s argument most easily by comparing it to Dworkin s. By reflective authenticity, Ferrara understands a normative perspective that shares much with the interpretive stance of integrity in the generation of legal norms which Ronald Dworkin develops in Law s Empire. Ferrara s judgment view of justice does not begin with Dworkin s insights, nor does he end up in the same place, but there are considerable parallels. Recall how Dworkin describes constitutional legal adjudication as a creative interpretive activity that requires reflection upon the identity of a political community, its history, and the shape of its practices. A judge who believes that abstract justice requires economic equality, writes Dworkin, cannot interpret the equal protection clause as making equality of wealth, or collective ownership of productive resources, a constitutional requirement, because that interpretation simply does not fit American history or practice, or the rest of the Constitution (76). To judge of this sort of rightness of fit is, according to Dworkin (and Ferrara), analogous to interpreting a work of art, that is, to engaging in aesthetic judgments. Dworkin illustrates this claim with his famous chain novel analogy. He compares the practice of adjudication with the work of a group of novelists charged with the project of writing a single serial novel, each novelist adding only one chapter, picking up where the previous one left off, each having the job of writing his chapter so as to make the novel being constructed the best it can be. 3 In so doing, the serial novelist must take up some view about the novel in progress, some working theory about its characters, plot, genre, theme, and point, in order to decide what counts as continuing it and not as beginning anew. 4 In other words, his creative interpretation must impose meaning on the text, while the text at the same time constrains and acts as a check on possible interpretations. There is no point in trying to establish the original novelist s intention, since the chain novel is an ongoing creative project, shaped through accretion, and admitting of no correct answer. Nevertheless the different intentions of the successive novelists fuse to the extent that they are all participants in a practice. Each novelist s ascription of purpose or meaning to the plot, the characters, the style of the text before him, will draw on the values associated with the practice of writing and reading novels. Ferrara emphasizes how, in Dworkin s view, determinations of the justice of a given situation, like the chain novelist s aesthetic judgments, exhibit a blend of several types of judgment that act to check one another. Such judgments, Ferrara agrees, are neither merely subjective, nor can they be described as deductive, or objective and disinterested. Dworkin s interpretive practice of Constitutional adjudication, like the chain novelist s work, is guided by the immanent standard of the integrity or self-congruence of the project as a whole: of the past and ongoing identity of the political community in the case of the Supreme Court Justice, and of the coherence and unity of the novel in the case of the serial novelist. So too, Ferrara holds it to be central to the judgment view... that the meaning of justice cannot be understood apart from the meaning of the self-realization of a collective identity (180). Ferrara argues that Dworkin s model of integrity finally elaborates a broad, judgment-based normative approach that is not confined to the law, but is ultimately equivalent to the notion of authenticity or of making the most of one s life (79). I here leave aside how Ferrara substantiates this claim. Ferrara s judgment model of justice, however, explicitly takes the modernist bull by the horns and makes the notion of authenticity or more precisely, reflective authenticity central to normative justification, both at the level of individual ethical-existential choice, as well as at the level of collective political choice. As Ferrara puts it, the ordering function of justice conceived along judgment lines vis-à-vis conflicting claims is exerted via a reflective judgment concerning how a given solution to a practical problem at hand will affect the overall chance of the political project institutionalized in the political community to lead the identity of the political community to a fully fledged fulfillment (192). The many implications of this move are both powerful and potentially controversial. First, if Ferrara s argument goes through, justice or right cannot be as radically different from the pursuit of

3 156 Constellations Volume 9, Number 1, 2002 the [common] good... as the deontological conceptions of Kantian descent [such as Rawls and Habermas s] would invite us to think (180). This mistake on the part of deontological liberals is intimately tied to a second, more general one. The rationalistic deductive models of justice which are now on the defensive have typically conceived of the problem of justice as arising in circumstances where conflicting parties with differing conceptions of the good life are competing for limited resources. This vision of justice as the application of some impartial principle, arrived at in advance and independently of the particular terms of the controversy, raises a fundamental motivational question. Right somehow levitates at the very top of the iceberg in these accounts, failing, by the very separateness of the proposed principle from the parties desires and conceptions of the good, to account for the motivational force that justice can and frequently does hold for us. By viewing justice in terms of its contribution to the fulfilled life, Ferrara can give a much more plausible account of why justice matters to us. Individual parties to a conflict are already meaningfully invested in the conflicts in which they participate to the extent that the superordinate identity formed at the intersection of the contending identities contributes to the constitution of the identity of the actor, for example, via the actor s self-constitution through seeing herself through the eyes of the generalized other (188). Parties who ignore what justice requires which is the same as what the superordinate identity formed at the intersection of the contending identities requires in order to attain its own fulfillment (188) do so at their own peril. An obvious challenge to Ferrara s identification of justice with the fulfillment of the identity of the political community is that such a formulation of what justice requires appears to license a totalitarian politics. This challenge goes to the very heart of the question whether it is possible to find alternatives to the traditional liberal model of abstracting from conceptions of the good and leaving behind thick accounts of what matters to us when we enter the liberal political arena to settle our conflicts. Ferrara does not abandon the ideals of impartiality, of equal respect, or of the pursuit of our own conception of the well-lived life. How these are intricately reformulated by the justice view of judgment, however, cannot be addressed in the space of this review. In both approach and substance, Ferrara s trenchant analysis of contemporary theories of justice, and his own Kantian construction of a normative point of view from within praxis, combine the virtues of both Analytic and Continental traditions of philosophy in a manner deeply rewarding for the reader. In order to appreciate the depth and complexity of the author s theory of justice, it is important to remind the reader that the epistemological foundation for Ferrara s normative approach is further developed in Ferrara s Reflective Authenticity. 5 There he develops, among other things, the ethical-existential dimensions of his normative approach, the significance of Kant s concept of aesthetic reflective judgment for our understanding of normative validity, and also the psychoanalytic sources of his concept of authenticity. Together, the two books make a substantial contribution to contemporary moral and political philosophy. Michael Halberstam NOTES 1. Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), intro. IV. 3. Ronald Dworkin, Law s Empire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1986), Ibid., (New York: Routledge, 1998).

4 Book Reviews 157 Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere. By María Pía Lara. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Moral Textures is an ambitious book with two principal aims. It is a corrective to the communicative theory of public action that aims to remedy Habermas failure to provide cultural grounding for his theory by using the women s movement to exemplify how cultural politics advances political struggles for freedom (169 70). To achieve this first aim, it must undertake a second, proposing a new understanding of the women s movement, one that focuses not on the struggle for the vote or other such conventionally political advances, but rather on the analytical significance of women s narratives (13). Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Lara conceives of narrative as a bridge between the universal and the particular. She claims that by narrating their own lives and the lives of others, women not only won self-knowledge that fostered their self-actualization but also transformed public conceptions of justice and democracy. Stories, whether deployed through fiction, biography, history, or film, engage public opinion affectively, thereby laying the groundwork for new normative claims. Lara contends that to appreciate the analytical significance of narrative to the women s movement is to illuminate the cultural moment of communicative action (170). It is to recognize the political significance of cultural politics, and thereby to challenge the analytical separation of cognition and affect, culture and politics within communicative action theory. Feminism demonstrates, in short, how struggles for recognition can at once be struggles for inclusion and efforts toward major cultural transformation (169, 165). Critical theorists such as Craig Calhoun, Jean Cohen, and Andrew Arato have also insisted that communicative action theory acknowledge the political significance of cultural movements. What makes Lara distinct is her emphasis on feminism and narrative. With this emphasis, Moral Textures joins the dialogue, initiated by the works of scholars such as Seyla Benhabib, Jodi Dean, Nancy Fraser, Joan Landes, and Iris Marion Young, who seek to define what it would mean to speak of an explicitly feminist public sphere. This literature aims both to capture the distinctive utopian possibilities that feminist movements created by their discursive practices, their forms of organizing, and their demands for justice, and to bring feminist notions of justice and democracy to bear on contemporary political life. Lara proposes to find the utopian possibilities of feminism by concentrating not only on [the women s movement s] public role as a participatory democratic movement but by focusing on the discursive level women s narratives and their significance for the theory of communicative action (1). Feminist scholars have emphasized how the women s movement emancipated men and women alike from the traditionally gendered distinction between public and private. Lara calls attention to the analytic payoff of this political transformation for discourse theory, which consists in its building a bridge between the moral and aesthetic validity spheres (3). It is worth noting that Lara s own intervention into Frankfurt School critical theory coincides neatly with the achievement she credits to women s movements more broadly: hers is an argument not simply for including the women s movement in public sphere theory but for recognizing its radical transformation of the conceptual apparatus of communicative action. Insofar as that framework separates the moral and aesthetic spheres, holding questions regarding self-determination apart from those regarding self-realization, it can recognize neither the women s movement s historically unprecedented contributions to late modernity, nor the emancipatory force of contemporary social movements (1). What do contemporary theorists of democracy lose when they overlook the feminist public? Lara contends that the women s movement offers a distinctive approach to the problem of recognition in multicultural communities. She argues that such theorists of multiculturalism as Charles Taylor, Axel Honneth, and Paul Ricoeur fail to provide a compelling account of recognition because they attempt to secure it by modes of reciprocity and affiliation (such as mutual respect and friendship) that cannot be presupposed in complex heterogeneous modern societies. Taking feminism as

5 158 Constellations Volume 9, Number 1, 2002 [her] empirical reference point, Lara argues that the contest between the feminism of equality and the feminism of difference (whose emergence she dates to the 1960s) opened up new, nonassimilationist ways of thinking about cultural pluralism (120, 149). She writes: feminist narratives have contributed to the understanding that not all differences were bad; they have therefore introduced a different perspective from liberalism on the possibility of thematizing about differences as publicly accepted features of human beings ( ). Lara suggests that the fruits of the women s movement are to be reaped in resolving problems of multiculturalism. In that context, feminist narratives provide a model of public discourse to which storytelling is as central as argumentation, for it is [subjects ] descriptions of what is missing in their lives that make their [recognition] claims meaningful and understandable to others (151). They also demonstrate just how crucial it is that cultural forms of expression find channels to public institutions, for as long as groups needing to be heard or accepted do not first conquer channels of communication to call attention to the way they have been treated, nothing will be solved (151). What does Lara mean by feminist narratives (or women s narratives which she uses as an alternate formulation)? This term is a catchall, encompassing autobiography, biography, historiography, and works of scholarship. Moreover, its political effects are unclear. Although Lara maintains that narrative connects the moral and aesthetic spheres, she offers conflicting accounts of that connection. When Lara draws on Hannah Arendt, she emphasizes the simultaneity of the normative/cognitive and expressive/affective moments: narratives reorder past injustices and envision the possibility of a new start through the powers of judgment (36). When Lara applies this insight to history, the connection seems more sequential than simultaneous. She contends that women first had to focus on the works of art that narrated their lives, their biographies, in order to envision the need for political discourses or political narratives that allowed them to adopt the viewpoint of moral subjects challenging a narrow conception of justice (59). These questions regarding the meaning of narrative and its political force could be clarified were Lara to make an indepth study of a particular narrative work that bears out her claims. Despite the centrality of narrative to her argument, it is works of theory that command her sustained attention in this book. How will feminist readers in the United States respond to Moral Textures? Many will surely applaud Lara for according feminist theory and politics a place of prominence within the theory of communicative action, one that transforms its conceptual apparatus. This is an exciting project but also a dangerous one, for the risk in attempting to bridge two extensive, independent literatures is that one of the two will set and, thereby, limit the terms in which the other can be understood. In Moral Textures, it is unquestionably communicative action theory that takes the upper hand. This is evident in her terminology, which those not well versed in Frankfurt School critical theory will find tough going at times. It is also evident in the very framing of the project, where Lara proposes to take feminism as an empirical reference for her model of recognition (68). One problem here is that some of Lara s claims defy an empirical perspective on feminism. For example, she frequently generalizes about the women s movement, and shifts between the terms women s and feminist as if they were interchangeable. In so doing, she effaces decades of feminist historiography and comparative political analysis that has emphasized the plurality of women s movements, and skims over extensive debates about the necessity and possibility of taking women as the subject of feminism. A second objection that some will raise is that by using feminism as a corrective to Habermas s critical theory, one that demonstrates empirically the linkages between autonomy and authenticity, Lara presumes that both autonomy and authenticity are feminist goals. Whereas some even many feminist theorists and feminist movements would endorse these goals, others have sought to propose models of political agency that do not presuppose the individual as their enabling condition. That said, Moral Textures accords feminist theory and politics their due in the

6 history and theory of the bourgeois public sphere; for that it deserves an attentive readership among critical theorists of all kinds. Lisa Disch Book Reviews 159 Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporal. By Vicki Kirby. (New York: Routledge, 1997). Vicki Kirby s Telling Flesh is a challenging book. This epithet can be taken in two senses. Firstly, it refers to an intense and passionate style, which engages with the work of key figures in feminist postmodern circles. Secondly, it denotes a summons to push their ideas further, not out of hostility, but from a persistence to keep things honest. Kirby is adamant in rejecting an easy anti-essentialism which reiterates, in its own investment in a term such as arbitrary, a further instance of a binary posture. Thus while Kirby is sympathetic to postmodern interrogations of any claims to conceptual control her specific reference in this particular work is to natural claims concerning body and matter she is equally suspicious that the resultant installation of an alternate modality, such as culture, falls prey to the same restrictive tendencies. Kirby s formative influences are deconstructive. Both Derrida s observation There is no outside the text, together with his acknowledgment that there is no escape from metaphysics, underlie her explorations. But Kirby pursues the radicality of these insights so that the nature/culture opposition in particular cannot be facilely resolved in a way that privileges either entity no matter how sophisticated the theoretical stratagems. Nor can the moral high ground be occupied in an unequivocal way. Kirby provides the basic formal indicators of her approach in the opening chapter, which is a detailed analysis of founding father Saussure s key points. As she carefully dissects his dense and complex theory of semiology, Kirby demonstrates Saussure s inability to extricate himself conclusively from the law of contradiction and its binary formations. What becomes evident is Saussure s own appeal to an ideal of a linguistic system extraneous to the differential displacements of its constituent signifying elements. Thus: Just as Saussure argued against the essentialism of the sign in nomenclaturism,... he nevertheless remained caught in its cloying vocabulary, returning to a conceptual regime he seemed to reject (39 40). For Kirby, this is not grounds to reject the project or to try to salvage Saussure s anti-essentialist impetus, but is rather the basis for a detailed examination of the inevitable complicity of essentialism and anti-essentialism as correlative terms. This inside/outside interdependency has particular consequences for Kirby s examination of the largely unexamined premise of postmodern practice whereby the unity of the social, or the cultural, secures its particular identity against an outside, namely, the natural order. The solution for Kirby is not crude anti-essentialist diatribes; they are all too obvious. Her concern is that even in sophisticated analyses, anti-essentialist positions are too often automatic in their reflex action and thus often introduce a problematic counter-position, rather than further exploring the anomalies involved. By exposing these tendencies, Kirby specifically hopes to correct the somatophobia that she believes haunts not just the traditional mind/body opposition, but also other binary oppositions, especially in recent manifestations of the culture/nature debate. Kirby bases her own analyses on an appreciation of difference as indicative of an interval or in betweenness rather than distance or absence. Her whole undertaking is dedicated to exploring the dynamics of this space so that the two terms involved in deconstructive engagements work not just to reframe mutual exclusions, but to reconstitute the terms of reference in innovative ways. In particular, Kirby is concerned to demonstrate how the body/nature/matter relations can be reconfigured in key ways that are not framed according to essentialist modes of cultural representations that either reify and/or ignore the body s material vibrancy. This endeavor is not simply dependent on a radical reaffirmation of Derrida s key insights. Kirby

7 160 Constellations Volume 9, Number 1, 2002 enriches Derrida s notion that The outside bears with the inside a relationship that is, as usual, anything but simple exteriority. The meaning of the outside was always present within the inside, imprisoned outside the outside, and vice versa (66). She does this by incorporating a hologrammatic modality of difference whereby the absent element stays in a mutually transformative relation with the present element throughout the ensuing displacements. The surprise, however, is that when Kirby begins to apply her theory to problematic current expressions of the nature/culture divide, the figures that she chooses to engage with are Jane Gallop, Drucilla Cornell, and Judith Butler. This is not in order to attribute any simplistic essentialist position to their work, but to investigate further the matter of the body as it is depicted in their diverse approaches. While Kirby supports Gallop s nuanced (and non-reductive) reading of Irigaray, she is troubled by her interpretation of morphology, which reenacts a binary in its contrast of poetic with real modalities of the body. For Gallop, Irigaray s body is an imaginative or textual creation juxtaposed to, and not to be mistaken for, reality. But this presupposes the exclusion of the biological body which is exempted from the interplay of absence/presence that constitutes for Kirby a creative corporeography. For Kirby, the implications of Gallop s reading reinforce the female body as a passive medium that is inscribed rather than an active element in a transformative production. In contrast, for Kirby becoming woman is written in the spacing of a corporeography from which nothing is exempted (80). Actual anatomy is thus not to be shunned because it is redolent of biologism or essentialism. For Kirby, who appreciates Irigaray s multifaceted approach which brings all connotations of the body to bear on her negotiations, the very texture and meanings of body can thus be reconfigured from the multiple possibilities of signification. This reclamation of essentialism and anti-essentialism as inevitable co-participants rather than adversaries allows for a recognition not only of the internal strictures that have hindered the understanding of women, but of the infinite other differences, i.e., race, class, ethnicity, that constitute women. Ultimately, it also discloses, by its insistence on women s plurality, the means of contesting the confinement of women, by means of phallogocentrism s logic of the same, to the modalities of otherness or difference however that is defined. With regard to the work of Drucilla Cornell, Kirby is again supportive, though she has a different understanding of the philosophy of the limit. While she is in accord with Cornell s reading of the metaphysics of presence as involving a logic that is sexualized and racialized through and through, conceived and reproduced by a separation of presence from absence, ideality from materiality, mind from body, identity from lack, and so on (92), she disagrees with Cornell s particular strategy to subvert traditional binaries and their attendant essentialisms. For Cornell posits a materiality, an otherness, beyond the limit of knowledge. The problem for Kirby is that this maneuver relegates difference and thus materiality, corporeality, the body beyond representation. As a result, Cornell can only configure her deconstructive politics of the limit by a utopian scenario that actually reinforces a notion of the ungraspable difference of woman. Kirby s own strategy, in contrast, would not restrict radical otherness to any set position, utopian or otherwise. Materiality the body and its forms of otherness needs to be intimately involved in the constant interfacing of the binary terms in ways that subvert the essentialist notions of identity and difference they sustain, specifically with reference to the body. Kirby s points of difference with Judith Butler are more complex. This chapter, ingeniously titled Substance Abuse, takes issue not with Butler s intention to refigure materiality, specifically its relation to language, but with her way of so doing. Basically, while accepting a constructivist position, Butler is not willing to settle for a simplistic version that neatly realigns matter with culture. For Butler, materiality, especially that of bodies, cannot be reduced to a linguistic effect. There is always a gap between the materiality of language and that which it endeavors to signify in the world, i.e., between signified and referent. Thus, any referent, such as the body, cannot be finally determined and is, as a result, inherently unstable. It is this depiction of this instability of

8 Book Reviews 161 the referent, of the inadequacy of language as a form of loss or absence, that Kirby contests. As Kirby interprets Butler, she deems her indebted to a Lacanian reading of language as a substitution for an originary loss, but with its interminable attempts to address the limits of representation. This posits an exteriority to language. Yet though Kirby will concede that Butler s argument about materiality and corporeality resonates with a very similar understanding [to Saussure s], insisting that identity does not precede the differential process of its emergence, she then asserts that he clearly struggled to articulate a differential whose energy is the systematicity within which the gravity of identity emerges (111 12). The implication is that Butler cannot, by her own terms of reference, undertake a similar problematization, in line with a Derridean strategy, because for her, difference is posited as (insufficient) compensation. Kirby attributes this to a (mis)reading of Derrida s notion of supplément as confined solely to the social/cultural domain, whereas for Kirby Derrida s term entails the mutual involvement of matter and culture, of the corporeal and its representations with no division that would posit one term as exterior. Word and flesh are utterly implicated (126). This does not mean that the sign is not subjected to investigation, but the entity of the word, the identity of a sign, the system of language and the domain of culture are all viewed as emergent within a force-field of differentiations. This radical deconstructive procedure will not let the matter of the body be aligned with culture, or its signifying effects, in opposition to nature. Instead, by an examination of the incorporation of the sign Kirby attempts to bring to the reader s attention the panoply of meanings that can attach to matter even beyond its present forms in nature and culture. In Reality Bytes, Kirby addresses a further anomaly of this problem of bodily materiality with reference to cyberspace. She examines how several authors either celebrate or lament the alleged discontinuity of the virtual body from its material consolidation. The general assumption seems to be that the brave new world of cyberspace introduces new ethical dilemmas regarding the separation of mind and body. Kirby discerns here a repetition of the simplistic Cartesian dichotomy which aligned a superior mind as distinct from a mechanistic, material body, shared by human and animal. The lure of freedom from bodily constraints reinstates an inescapable dualism, as does any naïve obverse advocacy of a re-emphasis on the body. Again, Kirby insists on an examination of the interface itself, of its mutual involvement rather than a fetishization of either of its constituent parts. But most importantly, the issue of matter, in its multidimensional interactions its infinite differentiations needs careful attention. In the final chapter, Kirby draws together these various threads looking at the subject of matter, but also the matter of the subject. Reiterating her own position regarding the human condition as being one of constant mediation, she thus remains concerned about any politics of inclusion, specifically a feminist one, that would reinstate a version of full humanity, once the predominant masculinist position has been modified. This has two worrisome implications for Kirby. One is that matter still remains a substrate, the unacknowledged basis on which an anthropomorphic unity is constructed. Also, the actual substance of a subject remains unquestioned. As a result, biology is devalued and regarded as simply cultural representation, rather than also incorporating the material body. Thus, the resultant politics of representation and subjectivity do not acknowledge their own exclusive and essentializing claims. Even strategic essentialism is not a satisfactory solution for, as Kirby demonstrates, with specific reference to Spivak (to whom she is especially sympathetic, but whom she regards as in need of further qualification), neither politics nor theory are self-contained systems, nor are they mutually exclusive. In a sense, there is no strategic position that is not subject to its own différential displacements. And it is the neologism corporeography that Kirby promotes, precisely with reference to a material notion of the body, as a solution. Corporeography does not introduce a reactive position but plays itself out as a disruption of any universal/specific binary with reference to the body. According to Kirby, this vital interchange opens the closed politics of location to another (political) orientation. The exact dimensions of this politics, with application to a wider

9 162 Constellations Volume 9, Number 1, 2002 frame of reference (i.e., not just body politics) dependent as they are on Derrida, remains the openended question of Kirby s investigations and her rigorous dismantling of any pretensions to provide a definitive answer. This is because there has always been a problem in translating Derrida s deconstuctive strategies into a political program. Perhaps politics, as ever, remains the art of the impossible but any claims for it to be otherwise will be all the more obvious in their deceptiveness. However, for Kirby this would never seem to imply an apolitical disenchantment or an apathy that refuses to engage with the exigencies of existence in the quest for a transformative politics. Morny Joy