ABSTRACT
Ostensibly, Seyla Benhabib's and Judith Butler's papers dispute the relationship of feminism to postmodernism.1 However, in the course of their exchange, a debate about "modernity" versus "postmodernity" is transmuted into a debate over the relative merits of Critical Theory and poststructuralism. Benhabib defends a feminism rooted in Critical Theory and premised on concepts of autonomy, critique, and utopia. Butler's feminism, in contrast, rests on poststructuralist conceptions of subjectivity, identity, and human agency that are at odds with Benhabib's. Benhabib claims that post modernist and poststructuralist views of subjectivity are incompatible with feminist politics, moreover, while Butler claims that views like Benhabib's imply an authoritarian foundationalism antithetical to the feminist project. Finally, to complicate matters still further, the two writers disagree about to how to characterize their disagreement. For Benhabib, the issue that divides them is whether postmodernist proclamations of "the death of man," "the death of history," and "the death of metaphysics" can support a feminist politics. For Butler, the question is whether postmodernism really exists except in the paranoid fantasies of those seeking secure foundations for feminist politics in unproblematized metaphysical notions.
