Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

WOMEN Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, by Saba Mahmood Princeton, NJ and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press, 2004 xvi + 199 pages Gloss, to p 203 Refs to p 223 Index to p 233 $55 cloth; $1795 paper This book explores "the conceptual challenges that women's involvement in the Islamist movement poses to feminist theory in particular and to secular-liberal thought in general through an ethnographic account of the urban women's mosque movement that is part of the Islamic Revival in Cairo, Egypt" (p 2) However, Saba Mahmood promises more than an ethnography based on two years of fieldwork (1995-1997) She embarks on an intellectual journey of selfreflection in which she has come "to believe that a certain amount of self-scrutiny and skepticism is essential regarding the certainty of my own political commitments, when trying to understand the lives of others who do not necessarily share these commitments" (p xi) By refusing to take her own political stance as the necessary lens through which the analysis proceeds, the author opens up the possibility that "my analysis may come to complicate the vision of human flourishing that I hold most dear and which has provided the bedrock of my personal existence" (p xii) It is necessary, the author cautions as she embarks upon her inquiry, not to assume that the political position we uphold will necessarily be vindicated or provide the ground for our theoretical analysis As readers, we are invited to join her in "parochializing our assumptions, about the constitutive relationship between action and embodiment, resistance and agency, self and authority - that inform most feminist judgments from across a broad range of the political spectrum about non-liberal movements such as the women's mosque movement" (p 38) It is within that spirit that I have critiqued this book The five chapters are a running argument with and against key analytic concepts in liberal thought as these concepts have come to inform various strands of feminist theory through which non-liberal movements, such as the women's mosque movement, are analyzed Through each chapter Mahmood makes her ethnographic talk back to the normative liberal assumptions about human nature against which such a movement is held accountable "The Subject of Freedom" illustrates the different ways in which the activism of the mosque movement challenges the liberal conception of politics Mahmood analyzes the conception of self, moral agency, and politics that undergird the practices of this non-liberal movement in order to come to an understanding of the historical projects that animate it The pious subjects of the mosque movement occupy an uncomfortable place in feminist scholarship because they pursue practices and ideals embedded in a tradition that has historically accorded women a subordinate status "Topography of the Piety Movement" provides a brief sketch of the historical development against which the contemporary mosque movement has emerged and critically engages with themes within scholarship of Islamic modernism regarding such movements We sense the broad-based character of the women's mosque movement through the author's description and analysis of three of six mosques where she concentrated her fieldwork Despite the differences among the mosque groups - ranging from the poorest to the upper-middle income neighborhoods of Cairo - they all shared a concern for the increased secularization of Egyptian society and illustrate the increasing respect accorded to the da 'iya preacher/religious teacher (who undertakes da'waliterally call, summons or appeal that in the 20th century came to be associated with proselytization activity) "Women and the Da'wa" (pp 64-72) is particularly insightful, as the author juxtaposes the emergence of secular liberalism with the da'wa movement and concludes that "the modernist project of the regulation of religious sensibilities, undertaken by a range of postcolonial states (and not simply Muslim states), has elicited in its wake a variety of resistances, responses and challenges …

Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

My aim in this article is to propose that an insightful way of articulating the feminist concept of epistemic injustice can be provided by paying significant attention to recognition theory The ar

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Epistemic injustice: A role for recognition?

A sweeping examination of the core issues of sexual politics, bell hook's new book Feminist Theory: from margin to center argues that the contemporary feminist movement must establish a new direction for the 1980s. Continuing the debates surrounding her controversial first book, Ain't I A Woman, bell hooks suggests that feminists have not succeeded in creating a mass movem A sweeping examination of the core issues of sexual politics, bell hook's new book Feminist Theory: from margin to center argues that the contemporary feminist movement must establish a new direction for the 1980s. Continuing the debates surrounding her controversial first book, Ain't I A Woman, bell hooks suggests that feminists have not succeeded in creating a mass movement against sexist oppression because the very foundation of women's liberation has, until now, not accounted for the complexity and diversity of female experience.

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Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

A critique of postcolonial reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present

The author argues for bringing the work of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt into dialogue with respect to the links between power, subjectivity, and agency.Although one might assume that Foucault and Arendt come from such radically different philosophical starting points that such a dialogue would be impossible, the author argues that there is actually a good deal of common ground to be found between these two thinkers. Moreover, the author suggests that Foucault's and Arendt's divergent views about the role that power plays in the constitution of subjectivity and agency should be seen as complementary rather than opposed.

Power, subjectivity, and agency: Between Arendt and Foucault

Introduction Feminist Conceptions of Power: A Critical Assessment The Genealogy of Power: Michel Foucault Power Trouble: Judith Butlers Feminist Genealogy of Power The Power of Solidarity: Hannah Arendt A Feminist Conception of Power.

The power of feminist theory

Drawing on Adorno’s aphoristic claim in Negative Dialectics that “Progress begins where it comes to an end,” Amy Allen’s The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory is a critique of the concept of progress in critical theory, for the sake of critical theory’s decolonization. It is a clear, forceful and convincing argument that calls us to question what critical theory is, and perhaps more pressingly, for whom. While Allen aims both to decolonize critical theory and to criticalize postand decolonial theory, she thoroughly succeeds at the first but only really invites the latter. While she relies on some postcolonial theorists and feminist and critical race philosophers (Spivak, Saïd, Chakrabarty, Alcoff), Allen’s target and audience are members of the second, third, and fourth generations of critical theory and those inspired by their thought. She employs the method Adorno described as “critique and rescue”: she gives an immanent critique of the concept of progress implicit but largely unacknowledged in the work of Habermas, Honneth, and Forst. And she rescues a version of progress and a method of critical theorizing more friendly to decolonial aims (by means of the work of Adorno and Foucault). book reviews

The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory

This chapter focuses on Jurgen Habermas’ most complex, sophisticated, and ambitious attempt to confront the tension between reason and power, an attempt found in his magnum opus of legal and political theory, Between Facts and Norms (BFN). It offers the conceptual framework of BFN, the core of which is the internal tension between facticity and validity, between power and reason. Habermas claims that the tension between facticity and validity is fundamental to the theory of communicative action. The core of Habermas’ distinctive account of power in BFN is his distinction between communicative and administrative power, with positive law functioning as the mediator and translator between the two. Following Max Weber, however, Habermas argues that modern, complex social orders cannot be based solely on this intrapsychic mechanism of internalized norms. The social integration that Habermas views as necessary for stability in complex, postconventional societies depends upon a double repression.

The Unforced Force of the Better Argument: Reason and Power in Habermas’ Political Theory

Through an email conversation between Allen, Forst and Haugaard, this article explores the relationship between the dyads power and reason, justice and domination. In much of the literature reason is considered either a mode of emancipation from power (Lukes) or, conversely, a subtle ruse of domination (Foucault). Here it is argued that reasoning is intrinsic to political power, with both the potential for power as justice (Arendt), and for power as domination (Foucault and Lukes). With power and reason as normatively neutral, with both/either normatively desirable and undesirable potentials, this raises the fundamental question of how to distinguish between justice and domination. These issues are explored, taking account of processes of subject formation and systems of thought.

Amy Allen

Papers

Power, subjectivity, and agency: Between Arendt and Foucault

The power of feminist theory

The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory

The Unforced Force of the Better Argument: Reason and Power in Habermas’ Political Theory

Power and reason, justice and domination: a conversation