From Schein to Skein: Feminist Criticism After Shell-Shocked

In the subfield of political theory, or in the hallways of its disciplinary home department political science, one does not speak of “the political critic” in the ways in which one speaks of literary critics or aesthetic criticism as professional research activities. Political science course offerings do not include “political criticism” as a topic, and newly graduated PhDs would likely not consider (or be advised to not consider) listing “political criticism” as an area of research expertise in their job applications. More notably, “criticism” is not part of the canon of concepts of theWestern tradition of political theory, essentially contested or otherwise. In the various handbooks and encyclopedia of political thought one has on hand one finds a compendium of topics qualified with the adjective “critical” (as in critical theory, or critical race theory, or critical realism) but not criticism or political criticism. Thankfully, Bonnie Honig is a different type of political theorist. Building on her scholarship in agonistic politics and radical democratic theory (one should say her “innovation” or “invention” of this field of research, as it hadn’t really concretized prior to her publishing Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics), Honig has in recent years given sustained attention to aesthetic questions that weigh upon issues of political theory, and more specifically still on the practices, activities, and media of political criticism. She is a political critic; more precisely she is a feminist political critic. She leans on ancient Greek women, on the modern (gothic) novel, and on contemporary cinema and television, to innovate practices of feminist political criticism that are not reducible to the gaslighting cant of the law of non-contradiction. Honig’s scholarship offers (among many things) a canon of feminist political criticism rooted in the conceit that political agonism pluralizes not just our politics, but our critical sensibilities such that an appeal to the presumed infallibility of non-contradiction as an apriori of critical thinking will always feel politically and aesthetically inadequate. Honig’s own critical dispositif, that I wish to unravel in these pages, is one of her major contributions – in her work more generally, but especially in Shell Shocked – because it offers an important insight about the relationship between women, politics, criticism, and authority: the epistemological privilege of the law of non-contradiction can’t work for feminist political criticism because women are a contradiction in a patriarchal world where gender is “an apparatus of power.”