The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

p.474

On Arendt’s Theory of Narrative and Action

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

Dilemmas of Feminist Aesthetics

The relation between gender and aesthetics is central to any formulation of feminist aesthetics, and yet the meanings of these terms are continually contested and revised. Both gender and aesthetics carry diverse, interdisciplinary significations, which are shaped by complex histories of disagreements. When the term “aesthetic” was first introduced in the eighteenth century by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, it did not refer to artistic production but rather to the mode of knowledge gained through the senses. Aesthetics today can have at least three different meanings: (1) a general theory of artistic practices; (2) a theory of reception, focused upon how we appreciate or judge natural beauty and artworks; and (3) a theory of sensibility shaping our experience, practice, and knowledge. In this last sense aesthetics does not have to refer to art at all, but is rather concerned with the role of different senses, such as touch, sight, taste, smell, or with different affects: pleasure, pain, or disgust (Korsmeyer 2012). One could make an argument that the affective turn in feminist and queer theory today is also implicitly informed by this third historical meaning of aesthetics, even if theorists themselves do not engage aesthetics directly (Ahmed 2004; Berlant 2011). Gender is also a contested category in feminist philosophy and theory (Chanter 2007); in general it refers to social and political determinations and regulations of biological sex and sexual practices, but there is no consensus on the relationship of gender to power, the body, sexuality, or sensibility. Following feminist theories of intersectionality, introduced by black feminists (Crenshaw 1991), I assume in this chapter that the category of gender is relational, political, and historical; that is, that its significance and its relation to embodiment are shaped by desire and power relations, which also determine the meaning of class, race, labor, environment, and other political phenomena.

As Korsmeyer argues, different traditions of aesthetics and different methodologies of gender lend different meanings to feminist aesthetics (Korsmeyer 2012). Although in this chapter I will primarily focus on aesthetics as a feminist theory of artistic practice, I also want to stress that one of the most significant feminist interventions is a critique of the gendered and racialized lexicon of aesthetics, such as genius, taste, form/matter distinctions, originality, and the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment (Battersby 1989; Felski 1989; Korsmeyer 2004, 2012; Ziarek 2013). Equally important is the contestation of the gendered and racialized divisions between high art, on the one hand, and decorative arts, fashion, and popular art, on the other (Hanson 1993; Korsmeyer 2012; Worth 2001). Feminist theorists of aesthetic sensibility have contested what counts as the aesthetic cultivation of the senses and have expanded the field to include eroticism, bodily feelings, and such non-aesthetic phenomena as appreciation of food (Korsmeyer 2004: 84–103). For example, Elizabeth Grosz (2012) sees art as an enhancement of bodily sensations, intensities, and sexual attractions.

p.475

Despite the fact that art and aesthetics, implicitly or explicitly, have been a rich resource for feminist thinking about gender, sexuality, and politics, the project of feminist aesthetics has also suffered from a double marginalization. Feminist aesthetics is marginalized not only in continental philosophy, included in various collections at the very end as a gesture of tokenism, but also within feminist philosophy and cultural theory where it is subordinated to the more urgent issues of feminist politics (Musgrave 2014). Although Luce Irigaray (1993) has argued that the new politics and ethics of sexual difference are inseparable from a new feminist poetics, this argument has received more attention from feminist artists than from feminist philosophers or theorists. The effects of this subordination of aesthetics to the more pressing issues of gender politics are insufficient attention to the liberating potential of aesthetics in feminist antiracist struggles (hooks 1995) and skepticism about the feasibility of gendered aesthetics (Felski 1989).

However, the fact that gender is an eminently political category can also invite feminist re-articulations of the long-standing philosophical debate about aesthetics and politics (Adorno 1997; Benjamin 1968; and Rancière 2006). What has been most frequently and rigorously criticized by numerous feminist theorists in this respect is the idea of art’s autonomy, that is, its independence from politics. This critique of autonomy often leads to formulations of the political function of art. However, the autonomy of art can have different meanings: it can mean art for art’s sake or, on the contrary, it can emphasize the capacity of art to resist market ideology and its instrumentality (Adorno 1997). If most feminist critics reject the first meaning of autonomy, understood as the aesthetic transcendence of politics, desires, and market driven instrumentality, the second meaning of autonomy as the contestation of the status quo is presupposed by any argument about the transformative effects of feminist artistic practices, which can resist gender, racist, and imperialist domination. Without the assumption that art can intervene in dominant power relations, the artistic practices of such diverse women writers and artists as Lyn Hejinian, Kara Walker, Mary Kelly, Adrian Piper—to name only a few—would simply be limited to the reproduction of the status quo, and the role of feminist criticism would be reduced to the critique of power shaping these artists’ work, or to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) calls paranoid reading.

Another way to approach the relationship between feminist art and the politics of gender is to recognize the mutual interdependence and difference between artistic and political practices (Ziarek 2012). This position rejects both the anti-aesthetic determination of women’s artistic practices by political power and the apparent separation (autonomy) of women’s art from politics. However, this approach also contests the autonomy of politics, that is, its separation from all aspects of aesthetics. Such a feminist analysis of the interdependence between art and gender politics is partially indebted to Adorno’s theory of the heteronomous autonomy of modern art. Heteronomous autonomy means that art is both determined by and independent of its socio-political material conditions. This contradictory and ambivalent relation of art to its material conditions calls for both a feminist analysis of the emancipatory possibilities of women’s art and for a critique of art’s complicity with power.

p.476

The greatest limitation of Adorno’s aesthetic theory is his failure not only to analyze different forms of racist and gender oppression but also, more importantly, to provide a theory of transformative political action. In contrast to Adorno, I argue that both feminist artworks and gender politics can be forms of transformative practice (Ziarek 2012: 1–15). Furthermore, their relative inter-dependence means that there are enabling aesthetic elements in politics, such as creativity, experimentation, sensible experience, and novelty, just as there are political aspects of artistic practices—such as contestations of gendered modes of being and language, or experimentation with alternative possibilities of living and signification. This interaction between aesthetics and politics does not mean that feminism aspires to some imaginary aesthetic unity of the political collectivity modeled on the harmonious structure of a great artwork, as Walter Benjamin worries. Nor does it mean that art is merely a means for women to accumulate more cultural capital and gain social status (Bourdieu 2013), though of course it can partially serve this purpose as well; or that women’s artworks should help to achieve feminist political goals. Rather the interaction means that both aesthetic and political practices lose their complete separation from each other and from other aspects of our collective lives, without losing their relative specificity. For example, we can tell apart political manifestations and protests—which can incorporate many creative elements—from theatrical performances, poetry readings, or public artistic installations.

Between Politics and Aesthetics: Action, Narrative, and Gender Intersectionality

To explore the interdependence between political and aesthetic practices in the context of gender intersectionality, I want to focus on the mutual relation between political action and narrative in Arendt’s work and to reinterpret this relation in the context of feminist aesthetics. In contrast to Adorno’s political pessimism, Arendt defends the possibilities of transformative political action as the only weapon we have against totalitarianism, biopolitics, and the destruction of the planet, even though she recognizes the fragility and limitations of action. Although she is not consistent, Arendt reflects on the similarities and differences between aesthetics and politics. On the one hand, she famously bases political judgments of action on Kant’s judgments of beauty and she argues that what both political and aesthetic judgments share is the evaluation of the particular—this event, this work of art—without subordinating them to general concepts (Arendt 1982). She also stresses the crucial role of imagination not only in art but also in politics and testimony. On the other hand, she argues that there is a difference between political action and artistic practice in so far as the latter does not always require direct involvement of other people, and especially not of non-artists (although contemporary artists and numerous artistic practices would contest this claim).

p.477

Although Arendt’s own reflections on artistic practice are limited, several of her critics have debated the aesthetic elements of Arendt’s theory of political action (Curtis 1999; Kateb 1983: 30–35; Sjöholm 2015; Villa 1995: 81–92). Curtis even goes so far as to argue that Arendt’s philosophy as a whole takes “an aesthetic turn” (1999: 10–13). We have to stress that these aesthetic elements are irreducible to what Benjamin calls an aesthetic unity of politics because Arendt rejects any notion of action and narrative based on the model of fabrication, understood as the realization of one central idea, and she argues instead that politics requires a plurality of participants, conflicting perspectives, and acknowledgment of unpredictability. What her critics identify as “aesthetic” elements of politics is, therefore, not the aesthetic unity of the people, but, on the contrary, multiplicity of the sensible appearances of actors and artworks in the public space (Sjöholm 2015), the expression of the uniqueness of political agents (Curtis 1999: 23–66), and the creation of a new beginning in political life (Ziarek 2012: 10–26).

The most explicit intersection between Arendt’s theories of political and artistic practices is a mutually constitutive relationship between action and narrative. Arendt famously argues that action “‘produces’ stories” the way other activities, such as work, produce objects (Arendt 1958: 184). Why is this relationship important for feminist aesthetics? First of all, both political acts and narrative acts have transformative potential even though they occur in the midst of historical domination. That is why Adriana Cavarero and Shari Stone-Mediatore deploy Arendt’s concept of narrative for a feminist analysis of storytelling as a means of the political expression of marginalized subjectivities. Second, in Arendt’s work both political and aesthetic acts are mutually related: transformative political practice produces stories while narrative supplements action by making it memorable (Kristeva 2001), by retrospectively shaping its meaning. Focusing on this intersection between action and narrative allows us, therefore, to analyze both the political elements of women’s art and the aesthetic elements of intersectional gender politics. And finally, the consideration of feminist aesthetics through the prism of narrative reveals not only the necessary aesthetic supplement of the political act but also the heterogeneity of aesthetic practices (or in Adorno’s terms—theirs heteronomous autonomy). Narrative not only pertains to multiple arts—there are narrative elements in fiction, poetry, paintings, songs, film, theater, installations—but storytelling is irreducible to artistic practice alone. It is also a ubiquitous practice of everyday life and an established methodology of the human sciences (Mitchell 1981: ix–x), including history, anthropology, sociology, critical race studies, law, disability studies, and queer transgender studies. Consequently, although narrative alone cannot express the specificity of diverse artistic practices, it is an important example as it subverts numerous distinctions that are contested by feminist critiques of aesthetics, such as the hierarchies between high and low art or artistic practices and everyday life.

Since narrative is both produced by and supplements action, let us begin with Arendt’s theory of action, which, though not explicitly connected with gender, is useful for feminist politics because it does not presuppose a common collective identity or shared experience of oppression, presuppositions that have been contested by feminists since the 1980s, and yet Arendt provides a robust theory of agency, based on the mutual commitment to act together. Second, Arendt’s model reverses the agent/action relation: it is not subjective agency—identity, initiative, capacity to act—that explains action, but rather acting together that creates inter-subjective agency. The urgency of action is especially acute in response to political and economic injustices, such as the resurgence of anti-black racism and police brutality in the US. It is this political urgency that has led to the new wave of activism—from rallies and die-ins, to the formation of the #BlackLifeMatters and #SayHerName movements.

p.478

In the context of feminist debates about aesthetics and politics, the main intervention that Arendt allows us to make is that political action is irreducible to means-ends rationality. This claim subverts the usual opposition between a narrow view of politics driven by pragmatic interests and goals and the creative artistic practice that exceeds such instrumentalism. According to Arendt, not only artistic practice but also political action has to be considered in non-instrumental terms. Action is an end in itself because what is at stake in every political act is the struggle for freedom. Of course, every action is mobilized by specific goals and strategies, but these are not determined in advance by existing power/knowledge relations because they are also generated by conflicting alliances among actors. That is why the material objective “interests” of action, such as struggles against gender discrimination, poverty, and racism, disclose not only patterns of domination, but also an objective “inter-esse” (Arendt 1958: 182), or in-betweenness, by which the participants of action are inter-related, separated, or excluded from each other. More importantly, in the course of the struggle with these objective patterns of domination, political actors perform among themselves the second level of in-betweenness. In so far as they act together, the participants of action create together mutual equality and intersubjective freedom, if only for the duration of the event. Acting together for the sake of intersubjective freedom is an end in itself, and this is ultimately what distinguishes political action from what feminist sociologist Margaret Somers criticizes as the instrumental category of “behavior . . . [measured by] rational preferences” (1994: 615).

By rejecting the instrumentality of politics, Arendt also contests any ideological uses of the aesthetic to suggest the fictitious unity of the people. On the contrary, if we can speak of the aesthetic dimensions of political action in Arendt’s work, these would include: (a) the creation of a new beginning, and thus the initiation of unpredictable difference in public lives; and (b) the negotiation between the plurality and uniqueness of political actors. The new beginning in public lives and the singularity of actors can be called the aesthetic dimensions of the political because their particularities exceed the available general political, philosophical, and linguistic meanings. Evocative of the modernist artistic slogan, “make it new,” the new beginning in action, whether it occurs on a miniscule local or a revolutionary collective scale, initiates something unexpected, “infinitely improbable” (Arendt 1958: 178): it interrupts historical continuity and the re-production of the relations of power/knowledge in which it is situated. Action can initiate a new beginning precisely because it creates intersubjective agency and new forms of political power. Arendt distinguishes power generated through action, which depends upon human plurality and alliances, from the violence that destroys such plurality, and from the already constituted, systemic, or structural relations of power/knowledge—the complex patterns of racism, capital, anti-Semitism, homophobia, gender discrimination, and biopolitics—in the context of which action occurs. We can point to many contemporary examples of such unpredictable new beginnings, for instance, political protests in Istanbul’s Gezi Park in 2013, which began as a protest against the destruction of the park and grew into the demand to change the government. Although this unpredictable novelty is what action shares with experimental artistic practice, at the same time it contests the traditional aesthetic notion of the originality of the isolated artist or genius. And since the new beginning in politics is intertwined with a transformation of both inter-human relations and human relations to the world, such transformation is fundamentally different from the production and consumption of the ever-same “novelty” of commodities.

p.479

The second aesthetic element of action consists in the disclosure of the uniqueness of political agents in the context of human plurality. Being unique means being unrepeatable, unreplaceable, but it is not the same as having individual identity in isolation from other people. On the contrary, from birth we appear first to others then to ourselves; our singularity depends, therefore, on being with others. Since there is no speaker without the speech act, no agent without the act, uniqueness can be glimpsed only retrospectively, in the aftermath of speaking and acting with others. Why is this relation between human plurality and uniqueness an aesthetic as well as a political problem? In the history of aesthetics, it was Kant in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment who first posed the question about the communication of the particular—in his case, the communication of judgments about the beautiful and the sublime—and the idea of community. In The Human Condition, Arendt reformulates the Kantian aesthetic problematic as the political relation between the uniqueness and the plurality of political actors. At the end of her life she directly returns to Kant and rereads the Critique of Judgment as his most political work (Arendt 1982: 14–22).

Arendt calls the unrepeatable singularity of the agent “who” and distinguishes it from “what,” or the general meaning of individual or collective identities. The whatness of identity is composed of the attributes and qualities that we share with others and of the differences that set us apart. In feminist interpretation (although not in Arendt’s) these differences and attributes include race, gender, class, profession, ethnicity, age, nationality, occupation, religion, as well as all kinds of affiliations, and so forth. Only the whatness of racialized gendered subjects can be defined—and, as feminist scholars have argued, this definition occurs in the context of the political relations of power/knowledge and therefore is intertwined with discipline, normalization, and domination. However, what a feminist interpretation of Arendt’s work can add to feminist theory is the claim that political struggles not only transform the power relations of race, gender, and class, but also disclose the uniqueness of every participant. In the world increasingly defined by big data and statistical analysis, in which we figure as exchangeable numbers, both uniqueness and action are threatened by being converted into predictable, calculable behavior.

The final disclosure of a who in the web of relations of gender, class, and race occurs in the form of a life story. This narrative disclosure of uniqueness is most debated among feminist theorists (Butler 2005; Cavarero 2000; Kristeva 2001), though not always in the context of feminist aesthetics. In her response to Cavarero’s interpretation of Arendt’s conception of narrative, Butler (2005: 15) argues that uniqueness emerging from the address to the other provides an alternative to Nietzsche’s punitive account of morality and to Hegel’s reciprocity of recognition. However, according to Butler (2005: 36), any narrative account of singularity is interrupted by the indifference of discursive norms, which make us recognizable to others but also “substitutable” (2005: 37–39). Second, narrative fails to account for those relations to others that precede our memory. Ultimately, norms, relations to others, and disconnection of narrative from lived bodily experience reveal not only uniqueness but my “opacity to myself.”

However, these tensions between uniqueness and generality of norms, or what Arendt calls “who” and “what,” do not undermine irreplaceable singularity but precisely characterize its political/aesthetic mode of disclosure in language and narrative. According to Kristeva, such disclosure is characterized by the uncanny interplay between disalienation and estrangement (2001: 86, 83). Arendt stresses the constitutive relationship between the disclosure of uniqueness and the obscurity of agents to themselves (Arendt 1958: 179). Since the uniqueness of a “who” exceeds any political category of classification and normalization as well as the philosophical or cultural attributes of identity, it cannot be defined but only posed in the form of a question, “who are you?” Any answer to such a question in the form of self-definition—I am an immigrant white feminist—is necessarily general, shared by other white feminist immigrants, and therefore slides into a “what.” As Arendt underscores, “The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is” (1958: 181). That is why uniqueness seems to push the generality of language to the limits of expression: “The manifestation of who the speaker and doer unexchangeably is . . . retains a curious intangibility that confounds all efforts toward unequivocal verbal expression” (Arendt 1958: 181). Could we say that this challenge posed to political, ordinary, and philosophical languages calls for their expansion towards the literary or the aesthetic manner of expression, which, in the post-Kantian tradition, seems to be better suited toward the negotiation between generality and singularity?

p.480

In the context of narrative, whether it is a fictional or a true story, what maintains this tension between singularity and exposure to otherness, between irreplaceable uniqueness and the shared generality of language, is a specific interplay between narrators, characters, and open-ended plot. Despite obscurity, the exposure of agents to others through speech and action prior to their relation to themselves also positions those others—whether they are actors or spectators—as potential narrators. Because of the multiplicity of inter-human relations in which these potential narrators are situated, such a narrative point of view, invariably gendered and racialized, can never aspire to the impersonal or omniscient narrator, because it always represents a partial, contingent perspective. Since life is narratable thanks to others in their role as potential narrators, the crucial implication of this indebtedness of narration to others does not lie in my dispossession from my own story as Butler argues. More fundamentally, it lies in the reframing of any autobiography as always already a biography: “Who somebody . . . was we can know only by knowing . . . his biography” (Arendt 1958: 186). The reason why the primary genre of any life story is biography rather than autobiography is because every auto/biography takes place within the parameters of stories told or withheld by others. It is especially the case with the beginning and the end of life—birth and death—which, if narratable at all, are always told by others.

The second narrative element that makes the disclosure of uniqueness possible is the construction of a plot. In Aristotle’s Poetics, plot or mythos constitutes the primary feature of narratives imitating, or more precisely, re-enacting, action (Aristotle 1989: 13–14). For Aristotle as for Arendt action enables stories because the events it initiates create the possibility of a plot; however, by re-enacting action, narrative becomes a new performative act in its own right. For both Arendt and Aristotle, plot, which establishes a temporal sequence among the selected events, cannot be explained by the psychological or moral makeup of the characters. Despite these similarities, Arendt’s and Aristotle’s understandings of the plot or mythos differ. In contrast to the Aristotelian definition of mythos, the Arendtian notions of action and plot do not have a clear sense of an ending, or narrative closure, because Arendt focuses primarily on the way action creates a new beginning, which in turn calls for a new story. Without a new beginning, there is neither need nor desire for a new story. Paradoxically, it is this open-endedness of action, its lack of a predictable telos, which generates storytelling, which reveals the meaning of action retrospectively through the act of narrative recollection. Furthermore, such a retrospective disclosure of the meaning of action through the narrative act is itself incomplete; it engenders further, often conflicting, plots and the interpretations of these narratives.

p.481

It is thanks to the contingent plot and partial, plural narrative points of view that the uniqueness and plurality of agents can be expressed in narrative. As Arendt suggests, the disclosure of uniqueness in the web of conflicting relationships “eventually emerges as the unique life story of the newcomer, affecting uniquely the life stories of all those with whom he comes into contact” (Arendt 1958: 184). What political action discloses as the uniqueness of agents in relation to others, the narrative act transforms into a distinct character in a life story. However, this transformation is by no means self-evident or based on realist assumptions. In addition to the construction of plot and multiple points of view, it involves, as Kristeva suggests, the complex negotiations among individual and public memories, contestations of the available narrative norms, modes of storytelling, discourses (Kristeva 2001: 75–76), as well as a confrontation with the politics of culture. One of the effects of these multiple negotiations is Arendt’s rejection of authorship, before such rejection became a hallmark of postmodernism. As she puts it, “Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story” (Arendt 1958: 184). If there is an “author” of a life story at all then perhaps it is an interplay of political and narrative acts, which, according to Arendt, create stories the way other activities produce objects. My emphasis on the performativity of the narrative act contests not only the autonomy of the political subject but also the originality of the author, so frequently criticized by postmodern as well as feminist theorists and artists.

Despite Arendt’s, Butler’s, and Cavarero’s disregard of textuality, consideration of the political and aesthetic aspects of the narrative act brings back the question of form, or the manner of storytelling. We can recall at this point Adorno’s claim that formal aspects of literary works, and in fact of all artworks, are implicated in political antagonisms, which the artworks both reproduce and contest (Adorno 1997: 6). Although Arendt does not develop the politics and aesthetics of form, it is clear that not every story performs a disclosure of uniqueness or safeguards a new beginning. In fact, quite the opposite is the case. The politics of narration has both normalizing and subversive functions, which manifest themselves on the level of narrative form. For example, the familiar gender, class, and race master plots in Western culture—the Oedipal plot, the Orpheus plot, the Medusa plot, the terrorist plot, the from rags to riches plot, the alien invasion plots (ranging from science fiction to immigration policy), the war and marriage plot—all perform disciplinary and normalizing functions. It is the relationship between narrative and power that determines the choice of the actors as characters (for example, the rulers and generals rather than workers) or the selection of significant events (Barthes 1989; White 1981). These “master plots,” selected from the vast repertoire of possible stories, become foundational for a given society, a political group, or a state. Consequently, for a story to disclose uniqueness and to open a new beginning, it has to contest these recurrent plots in the public imaginary and invent new ways of storytelling. And vice versa, feminist storytelling has to be attentive to many marks of erasure, silencing, and invisibility in the politics of narration. By acknowledging these erasures, feminist politics and the aesthetic of experimental narrative form challenge the way storytelling is entangled in the network of gendered power/knowledge, which makes some narrative forms more readily disseminated and others more easily silenced. What I call here briefly a political function of narrative form, and of aesthetic experimentation more generally, is an ongoing formal struggle against normalization and exclusion in order to keep the possibility of a new beginning viable within language and culture.

p.482

Life and Narrative

A different politics of narration is suggested by Kristeva, according to whom narrative produces political forms of life, understood as bios (that is, as politically significant) rather than zōē (biological). The interpretation of political bios in terms of narratability is also suggested by Arendt’s own claim that life without action and speech is dead to the world, that is, it stops being bios and becomes superfluous, or to use Agamben’s term (1998), is reduced to bare life. This interpretation of the political bios in terms of narrativity is a crucial supplement to citizenship and human rights. And, vice versa, the notion of narrative bios effects a shift in narrative studies, away from structural analysis or epistemic problems (focused on the relation between narrative and knowledge). The shift is instead to narrative’s ontological functions—to the way narratives change the political status of collective and singular lives. In particular, the narrative formation of the political bios undermines the sovereign power of the state to devalue the symbolic significance of dominated groups—refugees, racial minorities, or immigrants—by suspending or limiting their rights. Although the rights of citizens can be curtailed by sovereign power in a state of emergency (Agamben 1998), sovereignty alone cannot altogether destroy inter-human relations and narratives, which constitute the political meanings of bios. One could even claim that sovereign decision alone cannot silence storytelling, which continues to circulate, protest against justice, and thus preserve the web of human relations.

Although narratives cannot be suspended by sovereign decision, the paradox of the narrative bios lies in the simultaneous ubiquity and fragility of life stories. The narratability of life, its status as a bios, does not guarantee that every life will have a narrated story, because the telling or writing of such a story depends not only on the recollections of others and their willingness to narrate a story, but also on multiple, often invisible, power relations determining whose life stories are “worthy” of narration and memorialization in the public sphere. In the context of the ever-growing circles of superfluous humanity, value judgments about whose stories are told are eminently political, implicated in the race, gender, capitalist, and imperialist institutions and networks of power. It is precisely because of the ontological status of narrative, of its capacity to constitute bios, that subjugated groups deprived of narration are even further denigrated and dispossessed (Somers 1994: 63). According to Cavarero, “what is intolerable” is not only the life of poverty and exclusion but also the fact “that the life-story that results from it remains without narration” (2000: 57). By contrast, as Stone-Mediatore argues, narration and counter histories, which challenge the dominant assumptions, values, and boundaries of the political, become powerful political weapons of dispossessed groups (2003: 5–10).

Conclusion

In this chapter I have argued that the most productive way to approach the relation between feminist aesthetics and gender politics is to treat both of them as hybrid and mutually dependent areas of human activity. This means that we should explore not only the political, gendered elements of artistic practices but also the enabling aesthetic elements of political activism. One possible model of such mutual interdependence can be found in Arendt’s theory of action and narrative. By reinterpreting her work in the context of gender intersectionality, I have argued that both narrative—which at first glance belongs to literature—and action—which is preeminently political—are in fact heterogeneous practices, through which gender politics and aesthetics ceaselessly confront each other in order to expand or to shrink their limits.

p.483