Abstract

Feminist theory, in its alliance with postmodernism and flight from essentialism, has capitulated to a condition of world alienation, what Arendt called "a two-fold flight from the Earth into the universe and from the world into the self." That is to say, this alliance has lead to an uncritical celebration of our dis-placement from the realm of the political and the abjection of the natural world. This celebration takes the form, in Lyotard's postmodernism, of a fascination with sublime experience. In feminist postmodernism, sublime experience becomes an implicit "good," under the guise of an almost delirious anti-essentialism. In this, postmodernism unwittingly carries over a central conceit of Kantian modernism that sees the role of constituting consciousness as primary, and abjects the material realm of necessity, i.e. postmodernism mimics modernist idealism. The relationship between freedom and necessity must be radically revisioned if feminism is to recuperate the political and philosophical resources that would make it relevant, again, to the lived lives of women, and to the urgent conditions of ecological devastation and political regression we face. In the work of Judith Butler, even as she uncritically abjects the extra-discursive realm of necessity, and misunderstands the relationship between freedom and necessity as a relation within discourse, we find some of the work of revisioning this relation has already been done. Butler understands the relationship between necessity and freedom to be productive. When "necessity" is understood to name what Arendt called the "quintessence of the human condition," i.e. the irrevocable and absolute dependence of persons on place, and when this dependence is understood in its proper priority vis a vis the discursive, freedom is no longer opposed to necessity, but lived in vibrant and immediate relation to it. A recuperated sublime experience, rather than "resolving" the relation between freedom and necessity in favor of freedom, as the Kantian sublime did, is central to our understanding of the permanent relation between necessity and freedom. This experience is discovered both in the realm of necessity, as the natural sublime, and in the realm of freedom, as the liberatory sublime