LAUSR

This book is concerned with that most fundamental aspect of political thought: the subject. Claudia Leeb argues, quite persuasively, that the way a lot of thinkers, including a lot of feminist theorists, have occupied battling sides of false dichotomies leads to a situation in which neither side succeeds in giving us a workable model of the subject who can resist. Leeb carefully lays out the problem by delineating a series of tensions inherent in contemporary theories of the subject, all of which perpetuate rather than resolve the question of political, and especially feminist, agency. The first tension is between the subject as being free or subjected, a matter of the question of agency itself. The unproblematically free subject of liberalism ignores and hides the many ways that subjects are formed in response to hierarchy and naturalized categories, even as the thoroughly “subjected” subject does not seem capable of acting at all. The second tension is over how the subject is considered as a form of identity. Should we do away with the subject altogether or treat her as a “constantly shifting identity” (p. 5), or should we, on the other hand, accept her as a fully formed entity? Neither of these views, Leeb suggests, offers a workable subject insofar as the former is too ephemeral and the latter too solidified to act. The third tension is between theory and practice in terms of which offers a better angle to understand the subject as capable of transforming society. Here, too, Leeb suggests that favoring either term over the other misses something critical. Other tensions, such as the mind/body distinction as well as the difference between a subject and object, are all part of the way in which theory, for the author, has failed to explain how and why transformation is possible. Leeb’s answer to all of these issues is the “subject-inoutline” (p. 5). This notion, based largely on Jacques Lacan’s idea of the real and Theodor Adorno’s idea of nonidentity, offers a mediation of these various tensions that provides enough solidity to make the subject coherent and capable without reducing her to being wholly determined by her signification as such. As Leeb notes, to attach a signifier to a subject (like “woman” or “working class woman”) does not totalize that subject because the signifier itself is not whole. Accordingly, there can be no absoluteness of identity, nor can there be a subject who is incapable of agency, because the subject-in-outline coexists with—indeed is constituted by—the “holes” or gaps that mark her delineations. In what I think is one of her most important and original arguments, Leeb argues that the limits placed upon the subject neither fence her off from the outside nor determine her. Rather they serve as the site where she encounters herself as such. This embrace of limits (or the moment of the encounter with the limit) allows the subject-in-outline to emerge in her own right, untethered from predetermined forms of domination. As she puts it, “the subject-in-outline is a counter to the violence of identity that aims at wholeness” (p. 163). In the first part of Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism Leeb works out this theory, seeking to answer the various tensions and showing how the subject-inoutline resolves these issues. The second half is where this construction comes down to the level of actual politics (it is called “Applications”). Perhaps the most important chapter of all is Chapter 6, which is a critique of Judith Butler’s own considerations of the subject and her agency. This is really the place where the rubber meets the road in terms of Leeb’s analysis. In this chapter, much of what she discusses earlier comes into clear distinction by contrast with Butler’s positions. Butler’s claim is that the weakness of the ego (because it is a foreign entity imported into the self) requires endless repetition on the part of the subject. In the failure of the repetition, we get a basis for radically undermining normativity (her famous example is drag queens performing gender and thereby exposing how gender is performed by everyone else as well). For Leeb, the problem with Butler’s claim is that repetition does not challenge but actually reproduces normativity. She claims that Butler ignores the concept of the real and thereby misses the way in which the subject is inherently resistant (where resistance comes from within the subject herself, not from the subject’s failure to perfectly reiterate her performance of self). Most important of all for Leeb, Butler remains caught up in a language of recognition and misrecognition. For