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-in-outline” (p. 5). This notion, based largely on Jacques Lacan’s idea of the real and Theodor Adorno’s idea of non-identity, 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-in-outline 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 Leeb, this is a mistake because such a view serves to externalize the source of agency and resistance in a way that reduces both. Butler relies in part on the early Lacan where he reiterates the need for recognition. For Leeb, it is better to embrace the late Lacan who abandons this position in favor of a theory of subjectivity as it relates to the real. Later in his career, Lacan argued that the subject emerges precisely at that moment when the other fails to recognize her. Not getting the recognition that she initially is promised, the subject must contend with her own nonwholeness. For Leeb, this is when the subject-as-outline comes into being, an identity that accepts its lack as part of its inherent constitution.
An important subcurrent of this book has to do with the unconscious, which for Leeb (via Lacan) is the site where the encounter with the real happens. Indeed, it could be argued that the subject-in-outline is in some sense the unconscious, insofar as the latter is the interface between the subject and the real (or put differently, the unconscious is what provides the porosity of the outline for the subject, which otherwise would just be what she is signified to be).
As a great and important book, Power and Feminist Agency is going to get a lot of arguments in response to it, and here are mine: I think Leeb is completely right that recognition is a road to nowhere. There is, in fact, nothing true or enduring about us to recognize. She is also correct, I think, when she argues that Frantz Fanon’s famous moment of being hailed with “Look, a Negro!” constitutes a failed attempt to freeze him in signification. The same is true for her excellent readings of signification about working-class women.
Even so, I think there is more wiggle room in recognition than Leeb does. Turning to her critique of Butler, it seems to me that Leeb is overly quick to say that Butler just wants to do away with the subject completely. Maybe she would like to do so, but I think Butler acknowledges that we are effectively stuck with our subjectivity. In this way, subjectivity may be shifting, but it is not utterly ephemeral; it has a tenacity that forces us to contend with it, for good or ill (mostly ill). So when Leeb argues that drag queens are mainly displaying “an anxiety to fail the gender norm” (p. 162) and therefore reinforce rather than undermine gender, I wonder why they cannot be doing both at the same time. That is, why can't drag queens be subverting at the very moment that they are reaffirming gender?
I do not think—nor do I think Leeb thinks—that there is any such thing as a pure rejection of signification; it is what we have to work with, and so there will only ever be partial and ambiguous forms of subversion of subjectivity even as they still play a role in normativization. But that does not mean that we cannot use the rules of signification and recognition in ways that are at odds with their normative purposes.
I think the model for this way of thinking may lie with Leeb’s complicated engagement with Adorno. On the one hand, Adorno emerges as one of her key theorists in his idea that nothing is ever exactly identical to itself. Yet Leeb rightly critiques the way that he returns to patriarchalism when he considers the role of women (bourgeois and proletariat both) in terms of his critique of the culture industry. Leeb does not condemn him personally for this but argues that his views reflect larger patterns of gendering the mind/body split in Western society. The fact that Adorno could be guilty of producing gendered stereotypes even as he also threatens those stereotypes through his theory of non-identity suggests a useful working model. It might help explain the possibility not only that even within regimes of recognition there is space for transformation, but also that even those mechanisms that form part of recognition might nonetheless help to make that transformation possible.
For all of this, Leeb’s notion of the subject-in-outline is a superb way to think about the subject and about the ways that she both is and is not constituted. One of her main arguments is that feminist theory has turned its back on psychoanalytical theory (especially the Lacanian variant) at its peril. Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism is certainly evidence that the turn to psychoanalysis is capable of producing remarkable clarity when it comes to questions of what underlies and constructs the actors in political life, as well as the unseen forces that connect and complicate their actions.
