Women in Philosophy: Philosophy’s Excluded Within

by Sina Kramer

I was invited to speak to my current book, which Jane Anna Gordon reviewed in the “Black Issues in Philosophy” series here at the blog. But the invitation to speak to the audience of philosophers through the APA has put me in mind of another project, one I’ve been thinking about for a long time. This other project would be a book modeled after the incredible collection of essays under the title Singing in the Fire edited by Linda Alcoff. Singing in the Fire collects reflections by women philosophers on their careers in philosophy, both the obstacles they’ve overcome and the communities they’ve built to sustain their lives. This book would instead be a collection of essays by those who left philosophy. In particular, those women and people of color (and both) who trained in philosophy, but found work elsewhere; those who started training, but left to study in another discipline; those who left the academy entirely.

I remain haunted by these stories. And I wonder about those who left. 

Many of the philosophers whose work I admired most – especially Judith Butler and Iris Marion Young – made their careers outside of departments of philosophy (Butler offered some of her own reflections along these lines in “Can the ‘Other’ of Philosophy Speak?” in Undoing Gender) .

Obviously this did not mean losing their work – nor, importantly, did it mean losing their work as philosophy. But, first as a graduate student in philosophy and then as a contingent teacher of philosophy at multiple universities, the examples of Young and Butler (and so many others) was unsettling. “Philosophy won’t be rid of me so easy,” I said to myself a little pugnaciously, a lot defensively, knowing nothing about the paths that led them to these positions, and nothing whatsoever about my own path. And yet, here I am today, as professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, rather than a professor of philosophy, invited to reflect on my book, published in a series dedicated to political theory.

I know that we leave for many disparate and idiosyncratic reasons – that peculiar combination of the bent of my work and circumstance marks my own career path – but I wonder about it. How disparate are these reasons, exactly? To what degree is the discipline of philosophy shaped by not understanding these reasons as something more than disparate or idiosyncratic? How is philosophy as a discipline and a practice structured by those who are no longer with us, not because their work in philosophy is now done, but because their work is done elsewhere, or not at all? has lost shaped my own work? What do we owe to those we lost, but never knew we lost?

My book, Excluded Within: The (Un)Intelligibility of Radical Political Actors, is driven by the unsettling wonder at who we become by means of exclusions of which we are largely unaware. More specifically, the book asks the question of how our selves as political subjects are formed through exclusions that are hidden from us. I ask: what makes some claims unintelligible as political claims, and what makes some people unintelligible as political agents? I develop the concept of constitutive exclusion to answer this question. Constitutive exclusion occurs when a political body or a system of thought defines itself by excluding some difference intolerable to it; this difference, however, remains within that system or body, continuing to do that constituting work, but in an epistemological blind spot. This internally excluded element is ignored, disavowed, or repressed. The terms of intelligibility are also drawn by these borders; those who are excluded shore up that intelligibility but are themselves unintelligible as political agents. When those who are excluded contest their exclusion, they are read as threatening, criminal, wild, or mad, rather than as political agents making a claim on a political body to which they belong.

The movement of constitutive exclusion as I articulate it is twofold: first, a philosophical system or a political body constitutes itself by producing an excluded element or figure that nevertheless remains within it; second, this remaindered element is covered over, repressed, or disavowed. This constitutively excluded figure is therefore both the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of that constitution. The exclusion of the figure makes the constitution of these philosophical systems and political bodies possible, but the fact that the figure remains within that space makes these constitutions impossible, in that the exclusion is never ultimately successful. Such figures are excluded in order to draw the borders of intelligible political agency, but these figures and exclusions remain inside, marking differences that threaten those borders, as well as marking modes of resistance to and paths of flight out of or beyond the delimited space drawn through their exclusion.

Constitutive exclusion acts by rendering a contingent difference – such as race, gender, or class – a necessary one, making it the basis of exclusion from the philosophical system or political body. The excluded difference is pushed outside the boundaries of politics, to an extra, pre, or apolitical foundation on which to construct a philosophical system or a political body. But this process of making a contingent difference the necessary basis for exclusion, as well as the continued inclusion of this supposedly excluded difference, are covered over, making it seem as though it was necessary to exclude this particular difference all along.

Constitutive exclusion thus cuts through ontological, epistemological, and political levels, often marking the border between these levels. This is because the maintenance of the fantasy of a bordered, delimited, and intelligible political agency depends upon casting these excluded figures into an a-, extra-, or pre-political space, despite (or perhaps because of) their persistence within those borders. Because their exclusion secures the fantasy of a fully intelligible political agency on the “inside,” if those who are excluded within contest their exclusion, their claims are unintelligible as political claims and instead appear as diffuse and threatening: as wildness, as madness, or as criminality. Translating the claims that come from these quarters into intelligible political agency is difficult; frequently this translation is managed through mere inclusion, in the form of a forced or coerced assimilation to already-established terms. To do justice to the excluded, to render those claims intelligible as political claims, instead requires the reconstitution of the political body on new terms.

Constitutive exclusion helps us think about race class, gender, and sexuality all together. It can help us better understand how these identity categories constitute each other and how they are reinscribed over time. In this sense, constitutive exclusion is closely related to intersectionality. My analysis of constitutive exclusion emphasizes the dimension of time, articulating the historical sedimentation of these identities. It can show us how the histories of multiple exclusions and strategic choices build upon each other, layer by layer, shaping the “ground” of politics on which we presently “stand,” but of which we are usually ignorant. And it can help us to become sensate to those epistemological blind spots without assimilating or appropriating their critique in advance, and in the hopes of a constitution that no longer relies upon these disavowed exclusions.

In the third part of the book, I examine the insurgent possibilities hidden in the contestation of constitutive exclusion. The first belongs to Antigone, the heroine of the ancient Greek tragedy of the same name, who buried her dead brother against the edict of the king, Creon, and defended her right to do so. I argue that Antigone was constitutively excluded from the political body of ancient Thebes, and her contestation of her exclusion troubled the boundaries drawn between family and state, and between masculine and feminine, that secure that political body. I then turn to an examination of the choice of Rosa Parks over Claudette Colvin as the figurehead around whom to organize the Montgomery bus boycott. While both Colvin and Parks are constitutively excluded, their contestation of that exclusion is framed differently in each case: while Parks leveraged other identity categories to translate her contestation into (more or less) intelligible terms, these were unavailable to Colvin. And while Colvin remains somewhat unintelligible, Parks was reified, rendered less a political subject than a political object. Lastly, I treat the contestation of constitutive exclusion in the 1992 Los Angeles Riots/Rebellion. There I examine the way antiblackness operated to frame the Riots as criminality, occluding the multiraciality of the riots, as well as the complex operation of gender in them, as they were also in part a response to the 1991 murder of black teenager Latasha Harlins.

In each of these cases, I ask how these constitutive exclusions have shaped the political agency of those “included,” and what potentialities for subversion, for reconstitution, for redefinition of political bodies and agency remain in those contestations of exclusion. The task of the critique of constitutive exclusion is to unearth the memory that it could have been otherwise. The temporality that constitutive exclusion constructs is that of the teleological arc of history, in which what has happened must have happened and has led us to a homogenous present, determined by a fully present past. The critique of constitutive exclusion as calls this temporality into question, pointing out that the past is not finished, and the present is not entirely present to us. Insofar as the past is constructed through constitutive exclusion, its critique calls us to see that it could have been otherwise, and insofar as the present is constructed through constitutive exclusion, it calls us to demand that it be otherwise.

This insight is why the critique of constitutive exclusion is allied with a materialist history. This is history as counter-memory, or history as genealogy. It is in this sense the radical history of the present.

All of which brings me back to the question of who we are as philosophers by the means of the exclusion of those who left – or who were pushed out. My career has been marked by a long and productive relationship with political science and political theory. This book wouldn’t have been possible, both in form and substance, without this friendship with political theory. In one sense, this is as it should be: the work is no less a work of philosophy by appearing on a list of works in political theory, by a professor of women’s and gender studies, and it is a part of a longer conversation with those colleagues. Moreover, I believe that it is better as philosophy by tarrying with the world, through careful attention to the specific textures of what Adorno called “the wrong state of things.” But I know that I would have had a much harder time convincing philosophy editors at major imprints, given my interests and my training in a continental philosophy program (though, given the recent imprint at Oxford in the history of philosophy, this is beginning to change).

We are still, in many ways, fighting what Alcoff named in her 2012 Presidential Address to the APA named philosophy’s “civil wars” – despite the fact that, as Alcoff noted, and as many of those who work in feminist philosophy or critical philosophies of race can attest, work done in these areas is deeply informed by work in both the so-called “analytic” and the so-called “continental” traditions. While much work has been done to ameliorate this cold war, the divide persists. Rather than conceive of this as a sociological distinction, however, I would tend to view it as a political distinction. It is not merely sociological that philosophers trained in some programs, regardless of what they work on, are shut out from some jobs in philosophy departments. It is not merely sociological that some philosophers, those who work on feminism or race or (dis)ability or sexuality or trans* identities, are not considered to be working on the not considered to be working on the “universal” or “essential” or “fundamental” problems with which philosophy supposedly concerns itself.

What do the stories of those who have left have to teach us about what philosophy could be? What is philosophy – who are we as philosophers – by means of these exclusions? And what could philosophy be, who could philosophers be, otherwise?

Sina Kramer is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Loyola Marymount University. Her book, Excluded Within: The (Un)Intelligibility of Radical Political Actors (Oxford, 2017) received the American Political Science Association 2018 Foundations of Political Thought First Book Award.