ABSTRACT
THE QUEST I O N I ADDRESS in this essay is by now a familiar one-the question of whether antifoundationalist theoretical commitments undermine progressive politics. Until recently, antifoundationalist progressives found this question fairly easy to answer; we woke up each morning, asked the mirror on the wall whether the world contained people like ourselves, and then, having confirmed our existence, walked the earth contentedly the rest of the day. In the past few years, however, it has become increasingly common to hear voices on the left calling for an end to counterproductive poststructuralist theorizing and for a return to the values and certainties of the Enlightenment, such that your local neighborhood antifoundationalist progressive is now required, at minimum, to establish the possibility of her existence-and the plausibility of her politics-by reference to something other than the household mirror. The most immediate and important audience to whom the antifoundationalist progressive has to appeal, I submit, is the broad constituency of left intellectuals, journalists, and activists that has been so alarmed and threatened by varieties of poststructuralism currently circulating among varieties of the academic left; it is primarily for this constituency that I write, in the hopes of establishing more productive terms of debate between the so-called “two
lefts” of U.S. politics, and a clearer understanding of what kind of “grounding” a left politics does and does not need.
