Abstract
In her recent work, Seyla Benhabib has appropriated Jacques Derrida's notion of iterability—or iteration in Benhabib's terminology—whereby repetition always implies alteration. This gives her a dynamic conception of democracy and citizenship that is sensitive to otherwise excluded constituencies. Nevertheless, I take issue with the ways in which Benhabib limits the effects of iterability. She does so by separating the transformative effects of iterability from, first, the content of universal constitutional principles and, second, the subject understood as narrative ability. This gives rise to some theoretical difficulties, but it also has practical implications, which I illustrate in the context of the debates about the hijab, which Benhabib also discusses at length. I argue that Benhabib depoliticizes the universals and takes the agency of the subject as given when these should be in question.
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Notes
Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 179f (hereafter referred to as RO); Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, ed. Robert Post (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 47–48, 159–62 (hereafter AC); and Seyla Benhabib, “Democratic Exclusions and Democratic Iterations: Dilemmas of ‘Just Membership’ and Prospects of Cosmopolitan Federalism,” European Journal of Political Theory 6 (October 2007): 445–62 at 454–56.
The literature on the hijab and agency is vast, but see Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Nancy J. Hirschmann, “Eastern Veiling, Western Freedom,” The Review of Politics 59 (1997): 461–88; Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988). Benhabib uses the term “iteration” even when she is referring to Derrida. In the following, I shall use “iteration” whenever referring to Benhabib's conception of iteration/iterability and “iterability” when referring to the Derridean concept. On iterability and deconstruction, see Lasse Thomassen, “Deconstruction as Method in Political Theory,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 39 (2010): 41–53. For an example of the use of iterability, which I will return to below, see Judith Butler, “For a Careful Reading,” in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, ed. Linda Nicholson (London: Routledge, 1995), 127–43.
In this way, the original is what “will have been” the original, as Derrida shows in his deconstruction of the American Declaration of Independence. Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” New Political Science 15 (Summer 1986): 7–15.
Ibid.
Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (London: Routledge, 1992). See also Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), chapter 8.
Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 13–15 (hereafter referred to as CC).
RO 198; AC 61; and Benhabib, “Democratic Exclusions and Democratic Iterations,” 456.
Seyla Benhabib, “Democracy and Difference: Reflections on the Metapolitics of Lyotard and Derrida,” in The Derrida-Habermas Reader, ed. Lasse Thomassen (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 128–56 at 138.
In addition to the ones mentioned in the following, she also employs the notion of iteration in the context of her most recent work on cosmopolitanism and human rights. See AC; Seyla Benhabib, “Another Universalism: On the Unity and Diversity of Human Rights,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 81 (2007): 7–32; Seyla Benhabib, “Twilight of Sovereignty or the Emergence of Cosmopolitan Norms? Rethinking Citizenship in Volatile Times,” Citizenship Studies 11 (February 2007): 19–36; Seyla Benhabib, “The Legitimacy of Human Rights,” Daedalus 137 (Summer 2008): 94–104; and Seyla Benhabib, “Claiming Rights Across Borders: International Human Rights and Democratic Sovereignty,” American Political Science Review 103 (November 2009): 691–704.
Benhabib, “Democracy and Difference,” 136–38.
Her other cases are the Turkish headscarf debates (AC 79 n36; Seyla Benhabib, “Turkey's Constitutional Zigzags,” Dissent 56 [Winter 2009]: 25–28), a German headscarf case (RO 198–202); the rights of foreigners living in Germany and German citizenship legislation (RO 202–12; AC 62–7); and the rights of foreigners within the European Union more generally (RO, chapter 4).
Benhabib, “Another Universalism,” 13.
Ibid., 9–10, 18–19.
Ibid., 20–21.
Benhabib, “The Legitimacy of Human Rights,” 99.
Benhabib, “Claiming Rights across Borders,” 699.
Ibid., 698–99.
Benhabib, “Another Universalism,” 19.
Ibid.
Benhabib, “Democracy and Difference,” 136.
Benhabib, “The Legitimacy of Human Rights,” 99 n19. Is it a coincidence that Benhabib uses the word “accretion,” signifying increase? Could this be because she thinks of democratic iterations almost exclusively in terms of progress and tends to exclude the potential risks that come with iterability?
Ibid.; see also Benhabib, “Another Universalism,” 31 n39.
Benhabib, “Democracy and Difference,” 140, emphasis added.
Ibid., 136–38.
RO 19f, 180f; AC 48–50; Benhabib, “Democratic Exclusions and Democratic Iterations,” 456; and Benhabib, “Claiming Rights across Borders,” 696. Robert M. Cover, “Foreword: Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review 97 (1983): 4–68. Benhabib appropriates the concept of jurisgenerativity through Michelman's use of it, and she is closer to Michelman's use of jurisgenerativity than to Cover's. Frank Michelman, “Law's Republic,” Yale Law Journal 97 (July 1988): 1493–1537.
Compare Benhabib, “Claiming Rights across Borders,” 696 n25: “jurisgenerativity is not a process of law making but one of law interpreting”.
Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” 40, 53.
Benhabib, “Democratic Exclusions and Democratic Iterations,” 456 (“sources of meaning-generation may dry up and the law may stifle rather than stimulate contentious dialogue and the circulation of meaning. … they fail to live up to the normative structures of deliberative legitimacy”); AC 50, 61. For Benhabib, the jurispathic risk does not arise from “the circulation of meaning” in the iterations, but from the failure of this, although the circulation is limited to the circulation of meanings that do not break with the content of the universal.
Derrida links iterability to the “to-come” through the concept and practice of invention in “Inventions of the Other,” in Psyche: Inventions of the Other. Vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 1–47 at 6, 39, 45–46. The concept of invention—with its constative and performative dimensions—would be another lens through which to view the idea of democratic iterations. Benhabib (“Claiming Rights across Borders,” 696) appropriates the term “to-come,” but, as will become clear, she does not understand it in the same way as Derrida.
Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” in Feminist Contentions, ed. Nicholson, 35–57 at 41. See also Butler, “For a Careful Reading,” 128–32.
For similar critiques, see Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 119, 123; Nikolas Kompridis, “Normativizing Hybridity/Neutralizing Culture,” Political Theory 33 (June 2005): 318–43 at 330; Nikolas Kompridis, “The Unsettled and Unsettling Claims of Culture: A Reply to Seyla Benhabib,” Political Theory 34 (June 2006): 389–96 at 39–40; and Angelia Means, “The Rights of Others,” European Journal of Political Theory 6 (2007): 406–23.
Seyla Benhabib, “Sexual Difference and Collective Identities: The New Global Constellation,” Signs 24 (1999): 335–61 at 353–54, n13. Nikolas Kompridis criticizes Benhabib for a voluntarist conception of culture where one can change one's cultural identity at will and where cultural group identities are plastic. However, as Benhabib argues, he overlooks the narrative and iterative constitution of identity, which means that identities are constituted through reiterations of existing values, norms and institutions. Kompridis, “Normativizing Hybridity/Neutralizing Culture.” For Benhabib's response, see Seyla Benhabib, “The ‘Claims’ of Culture Properly Interpreted: Response to Nikolas Kompridis,” Political Theory 34 (June 2006): 383–88 at 384; and for Kompridis's reply, see Kompridis, “The Unsettled and Unsettling Claims of Culture,” 391.
Benhabib, “Sexual Difference and Collective Identities,” 346–47. Although those stories must “make sense:” “the identity of the self in time … in terms of an ability to make sense, to render coherent, meaningful, and viable for oneself one's shifting commitments as well as changing attachments.” Benhabib, “Sexual Difference and Collective Identities,” 347, but see the qualifications of the criterion of coherence (347–48).
For example, Benhabib, Situating the Self, 216.
Benhabib, “Sexual Difference and Collective Identities,” 339. See also Benhabib, Situating the Self, 214–16.
Here one must also mention the distinction between the generalized and the concrete other. See Benhabib, Situating the Self, chapter 5. These distinctions are linked to a distinction Benhabib makes between unconditional (universal and moral) hospitality and conditional (particular and juridico-political) hospitality (AC 155–59). Her account of hospitality suggests that we can think, if not actually realize, unconditional hospitality independently of conditional hospitality. Thus, it becomes a matter of approximating conditional, juridico-political hospitality to universal, unconditional hospitality, which can in turn function as a critical and independent yardstick vis-à-vis which to measure the juridico-political instantiations of hospitality. For a different view of conditional and unconditional hospitality, see Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” trans. Barry Stocker and Forbes Morlock, in The Derrida-Habermas Reader, ed. Lasse Thomassen (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 208–30; and Honig, Emergency Politics, 115–20.
See also her critique of Kohlberg and Rawls for their inability to explain how selves are individuated. Benhabib, Situating the Self, 161–62.
Benhabib, Situating the Self, 198; see also 214.
Seyla Benhabib, “In Defense of Universalism—Yet Again! A Response to Critics of Situating the Self,” New German Critique 62 (Spring 1994): 173–89 at 174. It should be noted that Benhabib inscribes this within a developmental view of personhood, thereby rowing back on the contingency just acknowledged. Benhabib, “In Defense of Universalism,” 174.
As Benhabib also acknowledges in Situating the Self, 216.
Butler, “For a Careful Reading,” 134, emphasis removed.
Ibid., 133–37. “The critique of the subject is not a negation or repudiation of the subject, but, rather, a way of interrogating its construction as a pre-given or foundationalist premise.” Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” 42. In her critique of Butler, Benhabib confuses constitution and determination. Seyla Benhabib, “Subjectivity, Historiography, and Politics,” in Feminist Contentions, ed. Nicholson (London: Routledge, 1995), 107–25 at 110. On the debate between Benhabib and Butler, see Amanda Anderson, “Debatable Performances: Restaging Contentious Feminisms,” Social Text 54 (1998): 1–24.
Butler, “For a Careful Reading,” 135. Note the quote marks around “agency” to signify that agency is effect of discourse and not something prior to discourse, that is, an effect of iterability rather than the source of it. This is not to suggest that agency necessarily equals subversion of existing norms, which—as Saba Mahmood points out—sometimes seems to be the way Butler thinks of agency. Mahmood, The Politics of Piety, 20–22.
Butler, “Contingent Foundation,” 47.
Compare AC 57 and Honig, Emergency Politics, 128–29.
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The author thanks Camil Ungereanu, Casiano Hacker-Cordón, Andrew J. Polsky, and the anonymous referees at Polity for their comments on earlier drafts of the article. I presented earlier versions of the paper at the García Pelayo Research Seminar at Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, Madrid; The Ninth International Conference on Women’s Studies, Universidad Complutense de Madrid; and The Fourteenth International Culture and Power Conference, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha.
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Thomassen, L. The Politics of Iterability: Benhabib, the Hijab, and Democratic Iterations. Polity 43, 128–149 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2010.18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2010.18