Response Zerlli and Cornell

Drucilla Cornell’s and Linda Zerlli’s works are very compatible and complementary.  Identify and discuss at least two ways in which the themes and discussions of the two readings intersect, e.g. Zerilli on freedom and Cornell on autonomy. Also, are there any significant differences in their approaches?

Hande Lara Sever

Cornell concentrates on the concept of dignity and desire within feminist theory while Zerlli explains the subject of universal citizenship and feminism. They both explore the tension between openness and closure. Cornell explains closure through the big Other. She states that our existence is defined through the big other, hence our freedom is social and relational. She exemplifies this situation with the relationship of a mother and daughter. “An unfree mother, cut off from her own desire and from the knowledge of her responsibility for her own life can not pass on the value of freedom to her daughter.”(Cornell) Through this example she explains that we, humans, can not separate our conscious actions from our unconscious actions. Thus we are never independent of the unconscious, as a result feminism is not free from the unconscious as well and faces a certain closure. Zerlli elaborates on closure’s affect on feminism through political existence. She stresses the paradox between politics of democracy and its commitment to the people’s self rule. “In a democracy, political freedom means that women or the people have no ground prior to their own constitution, hence they can only come into political existence through some kind of closure.” Both authors draw attention to how identity is constructed and can not be freed from social norms because it is acted according to a standard of correctness that exists outside them.

Both of the author’s also criticize feminism’s imposing nature. Cornell elaborates on this by saying  “Someone should act or be a certain way in order to be a feminist. To make such impositions undermines the power of feminism as an ego ideal.” Both of them refuse this structure and conclude their article’s by saying that feminism is in flux and better explored through experimentation. Zerlli states that “Feminists demanded freedom and offered figures of the newly thinkable as well as themselves in the form of examples that if we would rightly attend to them might well facilitate the shared practice of recovering our lost treasure of political freedom: that which can not be proved like a truth or possessed like a substance but only practiced or enacted by present and future generations of feminists.”(Zerilli) Cornell also states that feminism should not conceive concepts, in Cornell’s case desire, as a thing made out of stone. She states that “If, as a person, she is placed at the level of the ego and the Imaginary, then she will always be re-inventing and transforming what it means for her to claim her desire…There is no bright line between good desires and bad desires because the whole point here is to emphasize the importance of women claiming their desiring subjectivity. In the name of dignity and its translation into the ideal of the person, we should keep the psychic space open for women to begin to act out their desires, see how it would change.”(Cornell) I think both of the authors agree that feminism is about transformation, hence it should be based on practice and experience rather than concrete ideas or ideologies to subscribe blindly.

Side note: Cornell explains the big Other very well but does not question whether the big Other who controls our agency really exists. I think the Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek very well explains the phenomena in his movie A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. Towards the end of this movie, Zizek deconstructs the big Other through the experience of Bosnian women during the Balkan war. It is a grave truth that Serbian’s under the command of Milosevic used rape as a weapon against Bosnians during the Balkan War and constructed rape camps targeting Bosnian women. Zizek’s argument about the big Other and the Balkan War is stated below:

“In order to fully exist, we need the fiction of a big other. There must be an agency which registers our predicament, an agency where the truth of ourselves will be inscribed and accepted… but what if there is no such agency. This was the utmost despair of many women raped during the Balkan War in Bosnia during the early 90’s. They survived their terrible predicament and what kept them alive was the idea that I must survive to tell the truth. If they survived they made a terrible discovery. There is no one to really listen to them… They discovered the truth of what Jacques Lacan claims there is no big other.”